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Islam and the cognitive study of colonialism: The case of religious and educational reform at Egypt’s al-Azhar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2021

Aria Nakissa
Aria Nakissa*
Affiliation:
Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, Washington University in Saint Louis, Saint Louis, MO63130-4899, USA
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: arianakissa@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article argues that the emerging Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) provides a valuable new perspective on colonialism. CSR argues that humans are innately inclined towards certain types of religious belief (e.g., belief in spirit beings, belief in immortal souls) and certain types of non-utilitarian morality (e.g., belief in an obligation to care for kin, belief in an obligation to avoid ‘disgusting’ substances or behaviours). These innate inclinations underlie many religious and cultural traditions transformed by colonialism, including Islam. The article suggests that colonial power operates not only by suppressing traditional non-Western institutions but also by suppressing the natural inclinations underlying non-Western traditions. This claim is developed through a study of colonial efforts to transform Egypt’s al-Azhar, the world’s most influential institution of Islamic learning and scholarship. These efforts made al-Azhar into the centre of a global Islamic reform movement, which sought to integrate Islam with a colonial scientific-utilitarian worldview.

Keywords

Islamcognitive sciencecolonialismEgypteducationreligion
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , November 2022 , pp. 394 - 417
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Notable thinkers who contributed ideas to this discourse include Claude Adrien Helvétius, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Cesare Beccaria, the Marquis de Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Henri de Saint-Simon, François Guizot, Auguste Comte, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Henry Maine, Herbert Spencer, Henry Sidgwick and Edward Burnett Tylor.

2 Many studies take up this discourse and its relationship to colonialism. These studies include Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis, eds., Utilitarianism and Empire (Lanham: Lexington, 2005); Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011); Matthew Fitzpatrick, ed., Liberal Imperialism in Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Notable studies which analyse this discourse in relationship to the Muslim world include Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1978]); Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

3 Although all societies move in the same direction, they do not necessarily reach the same level of progress. The most capable societies reach the highest levels but can help raise up less capable societies. For discussions of the trajectory of civilisational progress see Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati, eds., Condorcet: Political Writings (New York: Cambridge, 2012), 1–147; E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1920), vol.1: 1–69. Leslie Sklair, The Sociology of Progress (New York: Routledge, 1970), 17–56; Mehta, Liberalism, 77–114; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1–46; Richard Wolin,‘“Modernity”: The Peregrinations of a Contested Historiographical Concept,’ The American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 741–51.

4 See Sklair, Progress, 17–56.

5 Lukes and Urbinati, Condorcet, 3–10, 118–9; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 5th ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1896), vol.2: 272–3; John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive; Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 8 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1974), 926–7; Wolin, Modernity.

6 Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation, trans. R. Hildreth (London: Trubner & Co.); John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Parker, Son, and Bourne, 1863), esp. 21–2; Mill, Principles of Political Economy, vol. 2, 271–7; Stokes, Utilitarians and India; Mehta, Liberalism, 77–114; Schultz and Varouxakis, Utilitarianism and Empire; Scott Kugle, ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,’ Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 257–313.

7 See e.g., Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Kugle, Framed, Blamed and Renamed; Pessah Shinar, ‘A Major Link between France’s Berber Policy in Morocco and Its “Policy of Races” in French West Africa: Commandant Paul Marty (1882–1938),’ Islamic Law and Society 13, no. 1 (2006): 33–62; Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); David Motadel, ed., Islam and The European Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Alexander Morrison, ‘Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917,’ The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 3 (2015): 387–417; Muhamad Ali, Islam and Colonialism: Becoming Modern in Indonesia and Malaya (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Iza Hussin, The Politics of Islamic Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

8 See Mehta, Liberalism, 77–114; Anghie, Imperialism, esp. 1–12, 32–195; Wolin, Modernity.

9 E.g., ‘homo economicus’ or ‘rational actor’ models.

10 Also see Eric Stokes, Utilitarians and India; Kristen Renwick Monroe and Kristen Hill Maher, ‘Psychology and Rational Actor Theory,’ Political Psychology 16, no. 1 (1995): 1–21.

11 E.g., William Muir, Lord Cromer.

12 E.g., Orientalist opposition to Anglicists in India.

13 See e.g., Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), esp. 109–33; Michel Foucault, ‘Introduction,’ in The Normal and the Pathological, ed. Georges Canguilhem (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

14 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1978]); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

15 See e.g., Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Louis Brenner, Controlling Knowledge (London: Hurst & Company, 2000).

16 I.e., These traits are ‘maturationally natural’. See Justin Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2011), 21–39; Robert McCauley, Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

17 See e.g., Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Barrett, Cognitive Science; Jesse Bering, The Belief Instinct (New York: W.W. North & Co., 2011); Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Dominic Johnson, God is Watching Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

18 See e.g., Ellen Goldberg, ‘Cognitive Science and Hinduism,’ in Studying Hinduism, eds. Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby (New York: Routledge, 2007), 59–73. Iikka Pyysiainen, Supernatural Agents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Teehan, In the Name of God (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

19 Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy (New York: HarperCollins, 2010); Jonas Svensson, ‘God’s Rage: Muslim Representations of HIV/AIDS as a Divine Punishment from the Perspective of the Cognitive Science of Religion,’ Numen 61, no. 5–6 (2014): 569–93; Aria Nakissa, ‘The Cognitive Science of Religion and Islamic Theology: An Analysis based on the works of al-Ghazālī,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 4 (2020): 1087–120; Aria Nakissa, ‘Cognitive Science of Religion and the Study of Islam: Rethinking Islamic Theology, Law, Education, and Mysticism Using the Works of al-Ghazālī,’ Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 32, no. 3 (2020): 205–32.

20 Later on, differences between modernisation and colonialism will be addressed in more depth.

21 E.g., Whitehouse, Arguments.

22 E.g., Suppressing/replacing Sharīʿa courts, traditional religious schools. See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt; Brinkley Messick, Calligraphic State; Brenner, Controlling Knowledge.

23 See e.g., Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007 [1983]); Francine Costet-Tardieu, Un réformiste à l’université al-Azhar (Cairo: CEDEJ, 2005); Mark Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009); Indira Falk Gesink, Islamic Reform and Conservatism (New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2010); Aria Nakissa, The Anthropology of Islamic Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Messick, Calligraphic State; Brenner, Controlling Knowledge.

24 Boyer, Religion Explained, 137–67; Justin Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004), 31–60.

25 Barrett, Why, 75–93; Deborah Kelemen, ‘“Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists?”: Reasoning about Purpose and Design in Nature,’ Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2004): 295–301; Olivera Petrovich, Natural-Theological Understanding from Childhood to Adulthood (New York: Routledge, 2019).

26 Bering, Belief Instinct, 111–30; Johnson, God is Watching, 121–2.

27 Johnson, God is Watching, 138–73.

28 See Nakissa, Cognitive Science of Religion and Islamic Theology.

29 For general overviews of (Sunni) Islamic theology, see Tim Winter, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Al-Ghazālī, al-Iqtiṣād fī al-Iʿtiqād (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004).

30 See Boyer, Religion Explained, 169–202; Teehan, In the Name of God; Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012); Norenzayan, Big Gods.

31 Nakissa, Anthropology, 91–122. For an argument that Sharīʿa is less linked to akhlāq than is commonly thought see Marion Holmes Katz, ‘Shame (ḥayāʾ) as an Affective Disposition in Islamic Legal Thought,’ Journal of Law, Religion, and State 3, no. 2 (2014): 139–69.

32 See e.g., Haidt, Righteous Mind; Wilhelm Hoffman, Daniel Wisneski, Mark Brandt, and Linda Skitka, ‘Morality in everyday life,’ Science 345, no. 6202 (2014): 1340–3; Oliver Scott Curry, Matthew Jones Chesters, and Caspar Van Lissa, ‘Mapping Morality with a Compass: Testing the Theory of ‘Morality-as-Cooperation’ with a New Questionnaire,’ Journal of Research in Personality 78 (2019): 106–24.

33 See Curry et al., Mapping; Teehan, In the Name of God, 9–42; Robert Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, eds., The Psychology of Gratitude (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Robert Roberts and Daniel Telech, eds., The Moral Psychology of Gratitude (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019), esp. 1–12, 197–216.

34 I.e., as a form of ‘social exchange’.

35 See Boyer, Religion Explained, 200–02; Emma Cohen, The Mind Possessed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 166–72.

36 For general accounts of Islamic worship see Wael Hallaq, Sharī’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 225–38; Marion Katz, Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Ibn Rushd, Bidāya al-Mujtahid wa Nihāya al-Muqtaṣid, 6th ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1982), vol. 1, 88–380.

37 See A. Kevin Reinhart, Before Revelation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 107–20; Marion Katz, Prayer, 78, 101–02; Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, 1422–6.

38 See Teehan, In the Name of God, 9–42; Curry et al., Mapping.

39 See Hallaq, Sharī’a, 271–95; Ibn Rushd, Bidāya, vol. 2, 338–66.

40 See Atran, Talking to the Enemy, 295–317; Haidt, Righteous Mind, 138–41; Pascal Boyer, Minds make Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 33–65.

41 Hallaq, Sharī’a, 324–41; Atran, Talking to the Enemy; Ibn Rushd, Bidāya, vol. 1: 380–407.

42 See Joshua Tybur, Debra Lieberman, and Vladas Griskevicius, ‘Microbes, Mating, and Morality: Individual Differences in Three Functional Domains of Disgust,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 1 (2009): 103–22; Valerie Curtis, Micheal De Barra, and Robert Aunger, ‘Disgust as an Adaptive System for Disease Avoidance Behavior,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1563 (2011): 389–401; Haidt, Righteous Mind, 146–53; Paul Rozin and Peter Todd, ‘The Evolutionary Psychology of Food Intake and Choice,’ in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David Buss, 2nd ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 183–205.

43 See Marion Katz, Body of Text (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002); Ibn Rushd, Bidāya, vol. 1, 7–88, 428–76.

44 I.e., ‘social learning’ mechanisms. See Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Joseph Henrich, The Secret of our Success (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

45 Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 52, 159–60.

46 Susan Hurley, ‘The Shared Circuits Model (SCM): How Control, Mirroring, and Simulation can Enable Imitation, Deliberation, and Mindreading,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31, no. 1 (2008): 5; Henrich, Secret, 18–20.

47 Hurley, Shared Circuits, 5.

48 See Richerson and Boyd, Genes, 5–6, 62–3; Mesoudi, Evolution, 2011: 2–3.

49 Richerson and Boyd, Genes, 120–6; Mesoudi, Evolution, 71–6, Henrich, Secret, 34–53.

50 See e.g., Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020), 36–8.

51 Will Gervais, Aiyana Willard, Ara Norenzayan, and Joseph Henrich, ‘The Cultural Transmission of Faith: Why Innate Intuitions are Necessary, but Insufficient, to Explain Religious Belief,’ Religion 41, no. 3 (2011): 389–410; Henrich, WEIRDest People, 68.

52 See e.g., Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath, ‘Synchrony and Cooperation,’ Psychological Science 20, no. 1 (2009): 1–5; Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello, ‘Joint Music Making Promotes Prosocial Behavior in 4-Year-Old Children,’ Evolution and Human Behavior 31, no. 5 (2010), 354–64.

53 Carsten De Dreu and Mariska Kret, ‘Oxytocin Conditions Intergroup Relations Through Upregulated In-Group Empathy, Cooperation, Conformity, and Defense,’ Biological Psychiatry 79, no. 3 (2016): 165–73; Franny Spengler, Dirk Scheele, Nina Marsh, et al., ‘Oxytocin Facilitates Reciprocity in Social Communication,’ Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12, no. 8 (2017): 1325–33.

54 See e.g., Iain Morley, The Prehistory of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11–31; Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 36–61.

55 See e.g., Joel Mlecko, ‘The guru in Hindu tradition,’ Numen 29, Fasc. 1 (1982): 33–61; Jeffrey Samuels, ‘Toward an Action-Oriented Pedagogy: Buddhist Texts and Monastic Education in Contemporary Sri Lanka,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 4 (2004): 955–71; Ronald Begley and Joseph Koterski, eds. Medieval Education (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 20–49.

56 For general accounts of premodern Islamic education see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Daphna Ephrat, A Learned Society in a Period of Transition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000).

57 Starrett, Islam, 34–9.

58 Gesink, Islamic Reform, 41.

59 Nakissa, Anthropology, 123–78.

60 Berkey, Transmission, 26–30; Daphna Ephrat, Learned Society, 68–9.

61 Makdisi, Colleges, 99–102; Messick, Calligraphic State, 21–30.

62 Messick, Calligraphic State, 17–30; Hallaq, Sharī’a, 138.

63 See Berkey, Transmission, 21–43; Hallaq, Sharī’a, 137–8; Nakissa, Anthropology, 123–48.

64 Nakissa, Anthropology, 91–178.

65 See J. Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1968), 41–67.

66 See e.g., Asad, Formations; Mahmood, Politics of Piety.

67 See e.g., Asad, Formations; Mahmood, Politics of Piety.

68 See e.g., Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995).

69 Other terms used include: ‘intuitive and reflective’, ‘System 1 and System 2’.

70 See Jonathan Evans and Keith Frankish, eds., In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jonathan Evans and Keith Stanovich, ‘Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate,’ Perspectives on Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (2013): 223–41; Barrett, Cognitive Science, 44–53; McCauley, Religion is Natural; Norenzayan, Big Gods, 180–5.

71 See studies listed below.

72 See Evans and Stanovich, Dual-process theories, 229; Norenzayan, Big Gods, 180–85.

73 See Norenzayan, Big Gods, 52–4, 180–5; Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33(2010), esp. 120.

74 See Norenzayan, Big Gods, 180–5; Hasan Bahçekapili and Onurcan Yilmaz, ‘The Relation Between Different Types of Religiosity and Analytic Cognitive Style,’ Personality and Individual Differences 117 (2017): 267–72; Michael Stagnaro, Robert Ross, Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand, ‘Cross-Cultural Support for Link Between Analytic Thinking and Disbelief in God: Evidence from India and the United Kingdom,’ Judgment & Decision Making 14, no. 2 (2019): 179–86.

75 See Joshua Greene, Leigh Nystrom, Andrew Engell, John Darley, and Jonathan Cohen, ‘The Neural Bases of Cognitive Conflict and Control in Moral Judgment,’ Neuron 44, no. 2 (2004): 389–400; Joseph Paxton, Leo Ungar, and Joshua Greene, ‘Reflection and Reasoning in Moral Judgment,’ Cognitive Science 36, no. 1 (2012): 163–77; Indrajeet Patil, Micaela Maria Zucchelli, et al. Wouter Kool, ‘Reasoning Supports Utilitarian Resolutions to Moral Dilemmas Across Diverse Measures,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2020).

76 See e.g., Starrett, Islam, 23–86.

77 See Norenzayan, Big Gods, 52–4, 180–5; Henrich et al., Weirdest People; Henrich, WEIRDest People, 36–8, 198–204; Haidt, Righteous Mind; Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Shalom Schwartz, ‘A Theory of Cultural Value Orientations: Explication and Applications,’ Comparative Sociology 5 (2006): 137–82.

78 Premodern Muslim texts on Sufism and philosophy do address ‘ilhām’ (intuition) as a source of knowledge. See e.g., Nakissa, Anthropology, 116–9. The concept of ilhām overlaps with the concept of ‘intuitive thought’ in cognitive science. However, the relation between these two concepts is complex, especially because ilhām is often viewed as a product of divine inspiration.

79 See e.g., Reinhart, Before Revelation, 38–61; Ayman Shihadeh, ‘Theories of Ethical Value in Kalām: A New Interpretation,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, ed. Sabine Schmidtke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. p. 395.

80 Nakissa, Cognitive Science of Religion and Islamic Theology.

81 See Reinhart, Before Revelation, 38–61, 107–20; Shihadeh, Theories, esp. p. 395; Ulrich Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī and the Development of Sunnī Theology in Samarqand (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 296–300.

82 See Curry et al., Mapping; Hoffman et al., Morality.

83 See Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

84 See e.g., Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 144–75.

85 See e.g., George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Ahmad Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

86 E.g., debates between the Muʿtazilites, Ashʿarites, Māturīdites, and Ahl al-Ḥadīth.

87 E.g., debates between the ḥanafīs, Mālikīs, Shāfiʿīs, and Ḥanbalīs.

88 E.g, logic, proofs of God.

89 Heyworth-Dunne, Education, 41–67.

90 See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt; Mona Russell, ‘Competing, Overlapping, and Contradictory Agendas: Egyptian Education under British Occupation, 1882–1922,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 21, no. 1 (2001): 50–60.

91 See Russell, Education; Starrett, Islam, 23–86.

92 See e.g., Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt (New York: MacMillan 1916), vol. 2, 228–9.

93 See Gesink, Islamic Reform, 89–109, 165–96.

94 See Starrett, Islam, 23–61.

95 See David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Rainer Brunner, ‘Education, Politics, and the Struggle for Intellectual Leadership: al-Azhar between 1927 and 1945,’ in Guardians of the Faith in Modern Times, ed. Meir Hatina (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 109–40; Aria Nakissa, ‘Reconceptualizing the Global Transformation of Islam in the Colonial Period: Early Islamic Reform in British-ruled India and Egypt,’ Arabica (In press); Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Future of Islam (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882), esp. 132–73; Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, 180–1.

96 Nakissa, Global Transformation.

97 Lelyveld, Aligarh; Nakissa, Global Transformation.

98 See Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, 180–1, including footnote 1. Blunt, Islam, esp. 132–73; Brunner, Education; Nakissa, Global Transformation.

99 For general accounts of al-Azhar’s reformation see Gesink, Islamic Reform; Nakissa, Anthropology.

100 See Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, 180–1; Gesink, Islamic Reform, 171–2; Brunner, Education; Nakissa, Anthropology, 72–3.

101 Abdul-Hādī Hāʾirī, ‘Afghānī on the Decline of Islam,’ Die Welt des Islams, New Series, 13, no. 1/2 (1971), 121–5.

102 For general analyses of al-Afghānī’s thought see Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din ‘al-Afghani’ (Berkeley: University of California, 1972); Margaret Kohn, ‘Afghānī on Empire, Islam, and Civilization,’ Political Theory 37, no. 3 (2009): 398–422.

103 Rashīd Riḍā, Tārīkh al-Ustādh al-Imām al-Shaykh Muḥammad ʿAbduh (Cairo: Dār al-Faḍīla, 2006), vol. 2, 415–51; Nakissa, Global Transformation.

104 Riḏā, Tārīkh, vol. 2, 415–51; Nakissa, Global Transformation.

105 See Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, 180.

106 Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions, esp. 144–75.

107 For discussions of ʿAbduh’s ideas see Kerr, Islamic Reform; Hourani, Arabic Thought, 130–60; Sedgwick, Abduh.

108 I.e., excepting ḍarūra.

109 Nakissa, Anthropology, 210–7.

110 Orthodox theologians utilize a similar principle, but in a more conservative manner than the philosophers. See Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 111–22.

111 Muḥammad ʿAbduh, ‘Al-Radd ʿalā Faraḥ Anṭūn,’ in Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmila li-l-Imām al-Shaykh Muḥammad ʿAbduh, ed., Muḥammad ʿImāra (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 2006), vol. 3, 303.

112 Muḥammad ʿAbduh, ‘Risāla al-Tawḥīd,’ in Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmila li-l-Imām al-Shaykh Muḥammad ʿAbduh, ed. Muḥammad ʿImāra (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 2006), vol. 3, 414.

113 Riḍā, Tārīkh, vol. 1, 11.

114 Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Ḥakīm, 3rd ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Manār, 1367h), vol. 3, 96.

115 Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Tafsīr Juzʾ ʿAmm. 3rd. ed. (Maṭbaʿa Miṣr, 1341h), 157–8.

116 ʿAbduh, Risāla, vol. 3, 417–18.

117 ʿAbduh, Risāla, vol. 3, 416.

118 For discussions of Riḍā’s thought see Kerr, Islamic Reform; Hourani, Arabic Thought, 222–44; Wael Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 214–20.

119 Rashīd Riḍā, ‘Madaniyya al-Qawānīn,’ Al-Manār 23 (1922): 548.

120 See Riḍā, Madaniyya; Rashīd Riḍā, Yusr al-Islām wa-Uṣūl al-Tashrīʿ al-ʿĀmm (Minneapolis: Dar Almanar, 2007).

121 Rashīd Riḍā, ‘Istiftāʾ ʿan al-Kashf al-Ṭibbī,’ Al-Manār 10 (1907): 358–9; Rashīd Riḍā, ‘Al-Kashf al-Ṭibbī ʿala al-Mawtā wa Taʾkhīr al-Dafn,’ Al-Manār 13 (1910): 100–2.

122 Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Ḥakīm, 2nd ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Manār, 1368h), vol. 10, 68–71.

123 E.g., in the theory of Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa, in the principles of istiṣlāḥ and istiḥsān.

124 See e.g., Mohammad Fadel, ‘The Social Logic of taqlīd and the Rise of the Mukhataṣar,’ Islamic Law and Society 3, no. 2 (1996): 193–233; Sherman Jackson, Islamic Law and the State (Leiden: Brill, 1996), esp. 69–112. Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim, Pragmatism in Islamic Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015).

125 Discussions of Marāghī can be found in Costet-Tardieu, Réformiste; Brunner, Education, 109–40.

126 Riḍā, Tārīkh al-Ustādh, vol. 1, 871–4.

127 See Lukes and Urbinati, Condorcet; Mill, Utilitarianism; Stokes, Utilitarians and India.

128 David Washbrook, ‘From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the pre-history of modernity,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40, no. 4 (1997): 411; Philip Gorski, ‘The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism,’ American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 5 (2000): 1428–68; Huri Islamoglu and Peter Perdue, ‘Introduction,’ in Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire, ed. Huri Islamoglu and Peter Perdue (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1–20.

129 Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, ‘Modernity: The Sphinx and the Historian,’ The American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 638–52.

130 Washbrook, Comparative Sociology; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7–8; Benite, Modernity.

131 Washbrook, Comparative Sociology; Islamoglu and Perdue, Introduction; Benite, Modernity. Also see Gorski, Mosaic Moment.

132 Washbrook, Comparative Sociology; Islamoglu and Perdue, Introduction; Wolin, Modernity; James McDougall, ‘Modernity in ‘Antique Lands’: Perspectives from the Western Mediterranean,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60, no. 1–2 (2017): 1–17.

133 S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities,’ Daedalus 129 (2000): 1–29; Washbrook, Comparative Sociology, 411–2; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Benite, Modernity; Wolin, Modernity; also see Peter van der Veer, ‘The Global History of Modernity’,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998): 285–94; On-cho Ng, ‘The Epochal Concept of ‘Early Modernity’ and the Intellectual History of Late Imperial China,’ Journal of World History 14, no. 1 (2003), 37–61.

134 See e.g., Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 25–79; Rachel McCleary and Robert Barro, ‘Religion and Political Economy in an International Panel,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45, no. 2 (2006): 149–75; Schwartz, Value Orientations; Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich, ‘The Church, Intensive kinship, and Global Psychological Variation,’ Science 366, no. 6466 (2019); Henrich, WEIRDest People.

135 See Richerson and Boyd, Genes; Henrich, Secret; Duman Bahrami-Rad, Anke Becker, and Joseph Henrich, ‘Tabulated nonsense? Testing the validity of the Ethnographic Atlas,’ Economics Letters 204 (2021): 109880.

136 Schulz et al., Church; Henrich, WEIRDest People.

137 See e.g., Pew Research Center, ‘The Changing Global Religious Landscape,’ 2017, https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/04/FULL-REPORT-WITH-APPENDIXES-A-AND-B-APRIL-3.pdf. Downloaded May 2, 2021; Ronald Inglehart, ‘Giving up on God: The Global Decline of Religion,’ Foreign Affairs 99 (2020): 110–8.

138 Henrich, WEIRDest People, 484–9.

139 See Henrich, WEIRDest People, 484–9.

140 See Henrich et al., Weirdest People; Henrich, WEIRDest People; Haidt, Righteous Mind; Norenzayan, Big Gods, 52–4, 180–5; Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization; Schwartz, Value Orientations.

141 See Henrich et al., Weirdest People; Henrich, WEIRDest People; Haidt, Righteous Mind; Norenzayan, Big Gods, 52–4, 180–85; Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization; Schwartz, Value Orientations.