Through Muslim Eyes: M. Rashid Rida and the West

When Western influences began to pervade the Muslim world over a century ago, intense and rapid changes occurred in almost every sphere of Muslim life. The encounter with the West profoundly influenced Arab and Muslim intellectuals and led them to compare their stagnant condition with that of the more dynamic West. Questions arose: What were the secrets behind the West’s ascendancy and the reasons for the East’s decline? How could the East be revived? Could it reconcile the prevailing values in the East with those of the West? In spite of its brevity, this book offers the reader a fascinating study of how one of the century’s most important Muslim thinkers dealt with the ideas and institutions of the West. While Rida’s intellectual odyssey ran from guarded admiration of the West to contempt for its hypocrisy and even to calls for open rebellion, what is important to note is that his foremost concern was with values and ideas, in the tradition of the hadith which states that wisdom is like the believer’s lost camel, it is his to mount regardless of where he may find it. Thus, while Rida could hardly have endorsed the colonial policies of a Bismarck, for example, he nonetheless admired the man’s thinking in regard to education. Through the efforts of Muhammad Rashid Rida an entire generation of Muslim intellectuals was brought face to face with the thought of several of the West’s most important writers and social philosophers. Finally, though the inhumanity of the battlefield may have convinced Rida that Western politics were about the cynical exercise of power, the humanity of the West’s thinkers remained the standard by which he judged the West in general.