The writers of the school of ‘Abduh saw themselves as a middle group, steering a careful course between extremes: on one side the traditionalists, on the other the secularists. Their object was to accept and encourage the institutions and ideas of the modern age but link them to the principles of Islam, in which they saw the only valid basis of social thought, the ‘political law accepted by all’ of which Bakhit spoke. In the process they were led ever nearer to the second of the two extremes, simply because it was this and not the first which presented the real danger. Rigid conservatism would in due course show its incapacity to understand and therefore to control the modern world, and in the end might just wither away. But the ideas of the modern world, precisely because they were irresistible, had the power both to destroy and to remake Islamic society—to destroy it if left unchecked, to remake it if harnessed to the eternal purposes of Islam—; and in the attempt to harness them, more and more concessions were made to them.

This was seen clearly in the attitude of the modernists towards the idea of nationalism, the most potent form in which the modern idea of secular society expressed itself.