By drawing upon an impressive array of sources from the medieval to the modern period, Leor Halevi (Reference Halevi2019, 8) Modern Things on Trial is a truly global history of how Muslims all over the world consumed “many strange and wonderful things” such as toilet paper, gramophone records, lottery tickets, tailored trousers, paper money, and brimmed hats that emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This examination is in line with recent scholarship on the Islamic world by scholars such as Nile Green (Reference Green2011) that no longer pits Muslims against Western technology, in accordance with actual historical realties that do not conform to technologically deterministic presumption that European goods operate as agents of Westernization or modernization, which is a tired trope by now. From a legal perspective, Halevi’s book also aligns with recent works on Islamic law that look at the fusion of Islamic law and colonial law in several languages based on materials in different archives simultaneously by Julia Stephens (Reference Stephens2018), Iza Hussin (Reference Hussin2016), and myself (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020).
Halevi’s work demonstrates how widespread European colonialism led to a rethinking of the relationship between trade, money, and industry in the Muslim world, which began to encounter an astonishing array of novelties fabricated overseas. Avid consumption of modern goods could be perceived as begrudging acceptance of the superiority of Westerners in industry and science at the time, but Halevi’s book shows that, at any one time, there were multiple factors at hand that affected Muslim choices. To fully highlight their rich complexity, Halevi Reference Halevidraws copiously from popular culture through songs and advertisements, newspaper reports, government papers and correspondence, photographs, and conventional Islamic legal sources in the form of glosses, compendiums, the Quran and Hadith from all over the world to demonstrate that Muslims had space to make their own lives.
The book comprises micro-historical investigations of particular religious and legal questions examined within their local contexts by relating them to broader global patterns. Halevi (Reference Halevi2019, 9) looks primarily at Rashid Rida, the famous and influential Syrian Muslim reformer based in Cairo, whose ideology Halevi labels “laissez-faire Salafism” because his liberalizing rulings were justified by a method of legal interpretation that privileged scriptural precedents (Quran and the Hadith) as well as paragons from the first generation of Muslims known as the Salaf. Rida’s lifetime from 1865 to 1935 form the temporal context of the book. Mainly, hs fatwas (legal opinions) and fatwa requests to him published by the periodical Al-Manar, which had a long run from 1898 to 1935, propel the narrative of this book. Since 1903, the periodical had a section dedicated to fatwas. By placing these fatwas at the center of his book, Halevi effectively argues counterintuitively against the idea of the retreat of the sharia in the era of European dominance or growing secularism because these fatwas actually reflected the shari’a’s advances into new areas of religious interest in the early twentieth century. Rida was hardworking and prolific, issuing about 170 fatwas in his lifetime. His fame and charm coincided with the rise of Arabic learning and a new generation of Muslim leaders who cared deeply about educational reform and agitated for political change, seeking national liberation.
For most of Rida’s life, Egypt was a British colony— “a quasi-European state” with “exotic institutions,” according to Halevi (Reference Halevi2019, 85). His ascendance coincided with the rise of Salafism throughout the world, which directly led to a series of historical questions posed to Rida and other muftis (those qualified to pass fatwas) about the effects of the spirit of capitalism upon the emerging Salafist ethic—hence, the intense proliferation of fatwas—which tell us about the economic orientation of Salafism. There is, of course, no shortage of works on Rida, but Halevi’s book examines his economic proclivities specifically. Unlike his mentor—Egypt’s Grand Mufti Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), whose practice had been to write very brief fatwas (no longer than a sentence or two), which is actually the convention for most muftis—Rida furnished proofs in his printed fatwas providing “the spice of authenticity.” In this way, Rida was very oriented toward his audience and ends up providing historians with much material on his intellectual trajectory and legal strategies.
Both the strength and novelty of Halevi’s book lie in his choice of debates that leads to an unflinching analysis of Rida—his intellectual prowess mostly but also his media savviness, his enthusiastic fondness for technology, and sometimes his tentativeness in fatwas, which might have been calculating or serving to accommodate various parties—the European colonialists, Muslim ulama (religious elite) and ordinary Muslims worldwide.
Crucially, even as he focuses on Rida, Halevi writes the book from the perspective of the vast network of fatwa seekers, including Rida’s own learned peers and ordinary people from all over the world. As a history from below, Halevi (Reference Halevi2019, 21) shows how ordinary Muslims were active participants in the making of Rida’s ideology. Halevi even goes as far as to say that Rida made arguments for freer trade and technological adoption on the basis of the Quran, the Hadith, and the Salaf because fatwa seekers pushed him to do so. In other words, his religious philosophy was shaped by ordinary Muslims’ queries and expectations over several decades. Yet Rida certainly grasped the argument that the struggle for independence from European imperialism depended on the degree to which Islamic law could be reformed to support the liberalization of trade (87). Halevi relentlessly replicates the effort of his protagonist in triangulating each fatwa and mustafti (person requesting the fatwa) by considering multiple angles for each fatwa on consumer products that Rida wrote about.
Without a doubt, Rida consistently looked favorably upon new technology of any kind and tended toward approval. For example, he was a huge fan of photography, extolling its advantages even when he was not explicitly asked to do so, and he even used the medium of the fatwa to legalize multiple uses of the camera, including the employment of photography by law enforcement agencies in Egypt. He even condoned following the legal codes of the state one is in rather than the sharia. A qadi (Muslim judge) could always “strengthen the rules of Islam to the best of his ability” (Halevi Reference Halevi2019, 185). He also urged Russian Muslims to “become normal subjects and enjoy in peace the benefits of paying taxes” (229). In this light, his embrace of scientific technology can be framed as an extension of all things European, but this would be an oversimplification, which Halevi cautions us against as he contextualizes each and every fatwa on its own historical terms according to the locale of the mustafti. This is a challenge since Rida was a dutiful mufti who did not shirk his responsibility when questions were posed to him from members of the public near and afar.
We discern in Chapter 7 that Rida’s ultimate rubric was actually utility as he seemed irritated with questions about clothes, which Halevi explores. Compared to other objects and forms of technology in Halevi’s book, Rida did not have much of an opinion about fashion due to its superficiality, although his lack of strong views means that we are able to see how his fatwas on the issue changed over time—first, by accommodating foreign dominance but, later, shifting toward national independence in sartorial culture, although this was the age before the rise of mass-produced fashion so the national economy was not yet the main factor. Over time, his fatwas increasingly point toward an economics of an anti-imperialist awakening against the consumption of trendy pantalons and cravats, especially after the First World War, which hastened the demise of the major Muslim power of the day, the Ottomans, but readers cannot help but make space for the possibility that Rida was just not into the evolution of the cut of European fashion that tended toward sharper and more defined silhouettes. It might just be a matter of aesthetic tastes in this instance.
As an intellectual figure, Rida distanced himself from binaries by exploring the full complexity of Muslim thought, which he saw as unbounded. By this time, in Siam and China, as in European colonies, modern developments made it difficult to identify states as simply belonging to one or the other side of the ideological boundary between the abode of war and the abode of Islam. Not everything was a gateway to the “evil West.” Neither was the West the fount of materialistic culture. The first debate that Halevi focuses on was the issue of toilet paper, a timely one since the world currently turns on the pandemic that led to a shortage of necessities in some places. By cultural conventions or legal norms, the circle of Muslims that debated paper wipes in 1909, already an indispensable hygienic product in Britain at this time, knew that the combination of water and stones was preferable. The issue of toilet paper remained fraught for a long time because European colonialists were preoccupied with hygiene worldwide, and the British in Egypt and Sudan already contrasted new hygienic practices against “native rites” mired in a primitive, superstitious view of the world, as Halevi Reference Halevi2019, 37) writes. But the crew of Muslim ships found toilet paper useful, as did Sudanese soldiers who posed the question to Rida.
One of Halevi’s major contributions was to show how religious elite worldwide struggled to maintain their autonomy under colonial rule often by accommodating colonial ideology, something that does not sit comfortably with some Muslims today who prefer to imagine that their religious pillar—the ulama’—continued to pursue independent intellectual thought, which was actually difficult to achieve even under Muslim rule. In his fourth chapter, “Paper Money and Consummate Men,” Halevi (Reference Halevi2019, 104) describes how, while Rida’s mentor Abduh resented imperial capitalism, he did shift toward not only economic, but also social, liberalism in a fatwa in response to a fascinating question about Lady Nafisa Hamdi’s shares in the Suez Canal Company in 1903. Lady Hamdi wished to act on Islamic law rather than French law based on the Napoleonic Code in the Mixed Court of Egypt because the former gave her more latitude to own, manage, and freely dispose of her own property as opposed to French law, which prevented wives from managing their own property. Abduh was compelled to explicate upon the full capacity of a Muslim engaging in a joint-stock company—a type of incorporation that had no basis in the sharia, which emphasized transactions among legal persons. Halevi’s book provides a window into a world before the field of Islamic economics became an established domain as a third alternative to capitalism and communism. We are able to see in Halevi’s book how muftis incorporated elements from contradictory ideologies in real time before their fatwas provided a toolbox for later jurists in the coming decades.
One of Rida’s most important fatwas concerns the use of paper money, a new form of currency in the world in the early twentieth century, and here, in his analysis of Rida’s fatwa, we delve deeply into the specific historical context of Rida’s life, a mark of Halevi’s work. The economic crisis known as Panic of 1907 wasReference Halevi what made Egyptian nationalists realize that the National Bank of Egypt was, despite its name, too foreign an institution without Egyptian interests at heart because Egypt was ultimately not liquid enough. Two months before Rida published his fatwa, an editorial by the country’s daily newspaper, Al-Ahrami, complained that this bank had invested a million pounds in London rather than in the nation, deepening the crisis of liquidity. Not only that, Rida’s reach became trans-imperial as Muslims in Calcutta in British India asked him for his opinion about Muslims entrusting their money to European Christian banks. From this point onwards in the book, Halevi truly goes global beyond the Middle East.
The gramophone, which is the focus of Chapter 5, offered the possibility of modernizing a religious practice through the adoption of a new device, and enthusiastic adopters argued that gramophones conveyed the sound of the Arabic letters, the language of divine revelation, in high fidelity and could therefore be considered a lawful instrument that enabled Muslims outside of the Middle East to grasp “melodious Arabic intonations” and “marvelous voices,” but those who opposed it could not help but view the gramophone as a frivolous instrument originally meant for entertainment and therefore unsuitable for Quranic recitation (Halevi Reference Halevi2019, 140). Over time, the gramophone likely contributed to the blurring of theoretical distinction between Quranic recitation and musical performance. Ritual action such as synchronic prostrations associated with recitation was lost however without the presence of a live human reciter. Additionally, some Muslims in Southeast Asia puzzled over whether the recording of the recitation should be treated with the same respect as the Quran, uncomfortable as they were with the irreligious commerce in the sacred good (sale of recordings became popular). Was the Quran on a disc analogous to the Quran on a page in relation to the laws of purity? Halevi’s book does not seek to clarify or flatten the debate, so while Rida’s fatwas inevitably provide a tone of finality, readers are not lulled into a sense of resolution about the tensions with which Rida grappled.
Most insightfully, Halevi treats Al-Manar as an Arab-Islamic commodity as it was mass-produced by a Cairo publisher for local consumers and abroad. Indeed, Al-Manar was a publication with an extremely wide readership with a truly global reach from “Canton, Ohio to Canton, China,” catapulting Rida to the status of “global mufti,” a precursor to the twenty-first-century Egyptian mufti Yusuf al-Qaradawi who has been effectively harnessing the power of mass media with global outreach Halevi (Reference Halevi2019, 45). Halevi identifies the First World War as the definitive turning point in Rida’s intellectual shift and that it was “material advances” that drove this change (160), especially the telegraph, the focus of Chapter 6, which directly impacted his medium of choice—his periodical Al-Manar. The laying of telegraph cables is a truly trans-imperial endeavor, deemed unproblematic compared to other objects examined, although the dependability of the medium for Islamic ritual, unlike the gramophone, was not widely accepted, and its reliability in legal communications remained an issue because of the hierarchy of evidence in Islamic law which prioritizes direct in-person testimonies.
In British India, this hierarchy was further complicated by British lawmakers who deliberately shaped their evidentiary standards in opposition to their construction of Muslim and Hindu judicial procedures due to beliefs of indigenous witnesses—an alleged mendacity that led colonialists to rely more on telegraphic communications than on direct testimony of colonial subjects, as if technology was infallible and more authentic. The main thrust of Al-Manar was that Muslims could enjoy quite freely the world of goods and had the right to take advantage of modern technologies and commodities. The only exception is the Haramayn—the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina—which Rida thought should be as free from European influence as much as possible. In the aftermath of the Arab Revolt, spurred by British forces in the First World War, this was an unlikely prospect. In fact, considering the imperial rush that swept over the Middle East during the interwar period, it is with pathos that one of the reasons for Rida’s constantly accommodating British norms was his hope for “free trade to the Arabs” (Halevi Reference Halevi2019, 249).
Of course, most things were not put on trial, and when questions were asked concerning each object and technology, only a few people asked them. Indeed, while colonial subjects living under a whole range of colonial arrangements—from protectorate to Crown colony—constantly faced a choice between resignation and reconciliation. The influx of modern commodities, foreign technologies, and new commercial opportunities, especially from Europe and America due to asymmetrical economic relations at this point, either provoked multiple questions or none at all, which means that things were either controversial or not. Most people were not so thoughtful when confronted with a modern tool so as to parse Islamic law to see whether they could use it. First, religious ethics was just one of the many ethical guides in people’s lives. Second, expedience tends to win out because, generally, if something is not expressly forbidden, it is acceptable. Line 3:104 of the Quran states: “Let there be one community of you, calling to good, and commanding right and forbidding wrong those are the prosperers.” This injunction is repeated in seven other lines (Q3:110, Q3:114, Q7:157, Q9:71, Q9:112, Q22:41, Q31:17) and influenced Rida’s laissez-faire Salafism, which cast Islam as a religion of ease and very much one that is comfortable with prosperity. It is less remarkable that, instead of railing against foreign capitalism, Rida ruled that Muslims were not religiously barred from trusting European banks. He showed his true hand here by hinting that anything that is not expressly forbidden was allowed, according to Islamic law. It is perhaps too simplistic to state that the arc of Rida’s fatwas bent toward reconciliation with imperial powers, although, undeniably, Rida’s fatwas indicated a desire to maintain the status quo.
In writing about the high colonial period, it is easy to be swept up in power. Halevi shows how deep contextualization is necessary for each of Rida’s fatwas because the pull of the status quo—be it the dominant strands of Islamic law or European colonial rule—cannot be taken for granted at any given moment. For Rida, “[t]he basic status with regard to things is legitimacy,” (Halevi, 150). The book demonstrates with great erudition how this was achieved in complicated ways. Halevi’s book charts the way for other scholars of law and history to write history grounded in an eclectic mix of materials in several languages from various archives around the world.
