In September 1913, a reader submitted the following query to the fatāwā (responsa) section of the journal al-Manār:
1. It has become widely known that an atheist professor, who was educated at the Teachers' College, completed his studies in the schools of Europe, and was appointed as a professor in the School of Commerce in Cairo, has denied the existence of the Creator – relying on natural science, in which the nature of the universe and the phenomena of existence are studied – saying in front of the students: “belief in the existence of God is a delusion unsupported by scientific evidence or empirical proof”.
2. A reader has inquired of al-Muqtaṭaf, how did some of the Greek philosophers believe in polytheism, despite the establishment of rational proof for pure monotheism? Al-Muqtaṭaf answered that rational proof neither refutes nor proves monotheism, which is only proven by divine inspiration. The questioner repeated the question, and al-Muqtaṭaf repeated the answer with no significant difference from the preceding. Kindly answer with rational, scientific, philosophical, and historical evidence, in the contemporary fashion…Footnote 1
As the above istiftā' (request for a fatwā, or responsum) suggests, the existence of God was a topic of debate in early twentieth-century Cairo, one that implicated multiple epistemic traditions and crossed the boundaries of particular religious communities. The mustaftī (seeker of the responsum), Aḥmad Muḥammad al-Alfī of Fāqūs,Footnote 2 was apparently a believing Muslim. Aside from the tone of his reference to the atheist professor (ustādh mulḥid), he left as evidence of his religious convictions another istiftā' in the pages of al-Manār, in which he questioned the journal's criticism of the Sufi practice of dhikr by giving extensive sources for the practice's legitimacy.Footnote 3 But his istiftā' here showed no interest in mystical affirmations of the divine. Rather, he asked for proof specifically of the kind that he heard being used against the existence of God: “scientific evidence” (dalīl ʿilmī) of the “contemporary fashion” (ʿalā al-ṭarīqa al-ʿaṣriyya). A significant part of his inquiry followed from his reading of al-Muqtaṭaf, the leading journal in which European science appeared in the Arabic-speaking world in this period.Footnote 4 He was himself a person of significant scientific education, as evinced by his long publishing career in the same al-Muqtaṭaf, mainly on agricultural issues.Footnote 5
At the same time, al-Alfī's inquiry was more complex than a request for scientific proof of God's existence. In its reference to Greek philosophy, and the concluding request for “rational” (ʿaqlī) in addition to “scientific” (ʿilmī) proof, the istiftā' showed a continued awareness of classical ways of debating the existence of God, even as it confronted (especially in question one) the modern sciences. Meanwhile, the reference to Al-Muqtaṭaf, whose Christian editors had a long history of debating such controversial ideas with their readers and contributors, suggested the confessionally porous boundaries of Islamic discourse. To such an epistemically and confessionally textured knot of questions, Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, editor and publisher of al-Manār, was asked to give an authoritative answer.Footnote 6
In this article, I try to understand the exchange between Riḍā and al-Alfī, along with several related fatwās in al-Manār from the same period, as part of a broad debate in Arabic at the turn of the century on the meaning and validity of scientific materialism. I begin with the iconoclastic doctor and polemicist Shiblī Shumayyil, who more than anyone else introduced the materialist doctrine into the Arabic language in the 1880s, spurring the publication of major critiques by two of Rashīd Riḍā's most important intellectual influences, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Ḥusayn al-Jisr. From the polemics of such great intellectuals in the 1880s, I turn to the debates over materialism as they continued in the pages of the Arabic press through the 1890s and early 1900s. Editors, contributors and readers of periodicals both Christian and Muslim were eager for information about the new doctrine. They debated its meaning and its consistency with religious belief and, in so doing, they shaped and reshaped the idea itself. These public debates are the backdrop against which we can read the exchanges in al-Manār. Drawing on these debates and fatwās, I suggest that controversy over materialism arose not only because of the work of individuals such as Shumayyil, but also because of new educational institutions that were refashioning the intellectual world of Cairo.
Riḍā's entrance into these debates and his approach to the theological challenges of modern scienceFootnote 7 illuminate his understanding of the role of mufti, and specifically the changing nature of the authority he drew upon in constructing responsa. Given this focus on Riḍā's work as a mufti, this article draws on the other genres within which Riḍā wrote only where they are particularly relevant; for the most part, the discussion of his work centres on the fatwās. The substance of his fatwās on materialism was, we will see, generally conservative. Riḍā defended traditional doctrines of corporeal resurrection and the createdness of the universe, for example. His method, however, was usually – though not always – to engage directly with the scientific knowledge in question, to accept its basic validity and, framing it in the traditions of kalām and natural theology, to show its consistency with Islamic belief. Such a method, I will argue, entailed a dynamic in which the assertion of religious authority rested on the mustering of a certain degree of scientific authority – which in turn, for Riḍā, meant relying on the work of contemporaries outside the bounds of Islamic jurisprudence, or even outside of Islam. If the result was authoritative, it bore a reconfigured notion of authority, one that moved the mufti closer to being something like a public intellectual.
Shumayyil and his critics: introducing Māddiyya
The notion of “scientific materialism”, at least as it came to be debated in Arabic, developed largely in mid-nineteenth-century Germany among a radical group of intellectuals and medical doctors. Building on the work of Ludwig Feuerbach in particular, they argued that the universe is essentially material: even the human mind and consciousness are mere functions of the material body; a non-material entity (such as God) is a contradiction in terms.Footnote 8 Not God but the unity of matter and energy is the cause of all phenomena, and empirical evidence the only standard of knowledge. The German doctor Ludwig Büchner was among the most widely-read materialists in Europe, and it was principally through his work that scientific materialism entered Arabic discourse in the 1880s. Büchner focused particularly on developing Darwin's work towards an explicitly materialist, atheistic position.Footnote 9 In addition to his provocative espousal of atheism in Kraft und Stoff (Matter and Force, 1855) and in his commentary on Darwin's theory of evolution (1868), Büchner was also associated with political ideas bordering on socialism.Footnote 10
It was apparently the combination of Darwinism and socialism that the Syrian doctor Shiblī Shumayyil found most appealing.Footnote 11 Shumayyil, born to a Catholic family in present-day Lebanon, attended the medical school of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, lived in France for two years (c. 1875),Footnote 12 and eventually settled as a doctor and author in Egypt.Footnote 13 At the Syrian Protestant College he entered a milieu in which a number of people were interested in the theory of evolution; some went on to become key popularizers of the idea in Arabic.Footnote 14 However, while Shumayyil encountered and probably even accepted the idea of evolution in Beirut, it was in Europe that he came to give this idea the radical interpretation of scientific materialism. Colleagues, including Rashīd Riḍā, later wrote that Shumayyil was a believing Christian until his experiences in France. One of them specifically attributed Shumayyil's radicalization to his acceptance of proofs for the theory of spontaneous generation he saw there.Footnote 15 Thus in 1884 we find Shumayyil translating into Arabic and publishing Büchner's Commentary on Darwin (Sharḥ Bukhnar ʿalā madhhab Dārwin).Footnote 16 A controversial text, it was but the beginning of a storied career in which Shumayyil advocated a unique mix of materialism, Darwinism, and socialist ideology that was as much his own as Büchner's.Footnote 17 Until his death in 1916, Shumayyil published widely in defence of these controversial views on science and society, provoking a heated response in a variety of periodicals and treatises.
Several attributes of this early period in the debate are noteworthy. The idea of “scientific materialism” entered Arabic discourse with a particular set of associations. It was associated scientifically with Darwinism, itself a topic of lively conversation at the time among Arab intellectuals, who were interested in its social and theological implications.Footnote 18 And it was associated to some extent with a political ideology, namely socialism, as articulated by Shumayyil. These contexts are important to keep in mind, as it may be seen that reactions to the scientific “kernel” of the idea – the claim that the universe is fundamentally material – varied according to the perceived danger of other ideas associated with it.Footnote 19
It must also be said that “scientific materialism” was introduced to Arab readers not only by Shumayyil himself, but more directly, in fact, by his critics – two of whom were especially important for Rashīd Riḍā's intellectual formation.Footnote 20 Most famously, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, mentor to Riḍā's mentor Muḥammad ʿAbduh,Footnote 21 published his Refutation of the Materialists (Al-Radd ʿalā al-dahriyyin) in 1886.Footnote 22 In its origins, the Refutation was not a response to Shumayyil at all, but to Sayyid Ahmad Khan in India, where al-Afghānī lived from 1880 to 1882.Footnote 23 In the wake of Shumayyil's translation of Büchner, Muḥammad ʿAbduh thought to translate the Refutation (from its original Persian) while he and al-Afghānī were living in Beirut. While the result first appeared in 1886, such was its popularity that at least five subsequent editions were printed in Cairo by 1914.Footnote 24
In al-Afghānī's view, Shumayyil – even Darwin – brought little new to ancient ways of attacking belief in God and explaining the universe atheistically. The Refutation placed materialism in a long tradition going back to Democritus and atomism.Footnote 25 Al-Afghānī's terminology illustrates the approach: he interchangeably used nayshariyya (naturalism), dahriyya (materialism, but from dahr, meaning “time” or “eternity”, and a reference to the medieval debate between those who held by the createdness of the world and those who held by its eternity), and māddiyya (from mādda, matter), the term employed by Shumayyil and many of his critics alike.Footnote 26 Having placed his adversaries in this lineage, al-Afghānī was able to show that Darwinian materialism was but the latest, fundamentally absurd, variation on the rather tired theme of trying to explain how the universe could come to exist without a divine creator.
Here it might be useful to pause and consider precisely what resonances scientific materialism had in the Arab–Islamic heritage. One of the most famous debates in Islamic history revolved around the question of the createdness of the universe. Culminating in the eleventh century ad, this debate matched the Aristotelian falāsifa, who thought that the universe was eternal and God a “necessary cause” thereof, against the theologians (mutakallimūn), who thought that the universe was created and God its “voluntary cause”, which is to say He decided to make it, and at a certain point in time.Footnote 27 In the standard historical narrative, al-Ghazālī's (d. 1111) Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) destroyed the credibility of the falsafa position in the Islamic world (west of Persia) until the nineteenth century.Footnote 28 This account is a bit of a caricature, as major figures in Islamic thought continued to participate in the Aristotelian tradition,Footnote 29 but it remains fair to say that the notion of an eternally existing, uncreated universe fell into serious and lasting disrepute.Footnote 30
Debating creation thus had long roots in Islamic heritage, on which al-Afghānī and others could draw when confronting the materialists.Footnote 31 Absent from the Refutation, however, is much engagement with what might have been different about the materialism of the late nineteenth century. For example, the issue of creation in a medieval context was not exactly a debate on the existence of God; it was a debate over what “God” should mean as an object of proof.Footnote 32 Moreover, the “opposite” of proving God in the medieval context was not to disprove his existence, but to hold the more traditional position that human reason is insufficient for the taskFootnote 33 – a profoundly theistic view, in contrast to the atheism that al-Afghānī confronted.
Certainly Shumayyil felt that al-Afghānī was confused. He wondered that al-Afghānī, a “philosopher of old”, should attempt to argue on matters of modern science, and he dismissed the Refutation as a classical argument, irrelevant to the world of empirically-based discourse in which he made his claims.Footnote 34 The point here is threefold. First, scientific materialism was widely disseminated to Arabic readership through a refutation that treated it principally as a part of the classical tradition of arguing over God and the createdness of the world. Second, the refutation was penned by one, and translated by another, of Rashīd Riḍā and al-Manār's critical influences: al-Afghānī and ʿAbduh. Third, we should note the appearance already of a certain epistemic entanglement, the confluence of apparently similar ideas that may in fact carry substantially different ways of thinking about reality, and the consequential disagreement over the correct mode of argumentation.
The second refutation of importance, penned by another of Riḍā's teachers, was Al-Risāla al-ḥamīdiyya fī ḥaqīqat al-diyāna al-islāmiyya wa-ḥaqqiyyat al-sharīʿa al-muḥammadiyya (The Hamidian Epistle on the Reality of the Islamic Religion and the Truth of the Muhammadan Way) of Ḥusayn al-Jisr.Footnote 35 Al-Jisr (b. 1854) was Riḍā's teacher, and the pupil's later interests resemble his teacher's experiments in combining traditional and modern education – although al-Jisr disapproved of al-Manār in some respects.Footnote 36 The Hamidian Epistle, first published in 1888, provided a full exposition of a strategy on which Riḍā would later call when addressing materialism: natural theology. Like al-Afghānī, al-Jisr argued in a traditional mode. Instead of rendering scientific materialism into a school of ancient philosophy, however, he turned to a venerable theme of natural theology: the proof of God from the design of nature. Most striking, for example, is the appearance of the famous watchmaker analogy, along with similar arguments that so complex and well-ordered a system as nature must be the product of conscious design.Footnote 37
Al-Jisr's refutation differed from al-Afghānī's in other respects too, and specifically in ways that make al-Jisr's approach a more immediate precedent for the strategies that Riḍā later employed. First, al-Jisr's writing evinces a more substantial engagement with the scientific knowledge in question. He gives a far more detailed presentation of materialist thought than does al-Afghānī, and repeatedly attempts to point out its internal contradictions.Footnote 38 And second, at the same time that al-Jisr is concerned with refuting materialism, he is equally concerned with presenting the “correct” Islam. This dual focus makes the Hamidian Epistle a kind of “link between ʿAbduh's Risālat al-tawḥīd and al-Afghānī's al-Radd ʿalā al-dahriyyin”, as Johannes Ebert has argued.Footnote 39 I will suggest below that this dual concern, the need to refute materialism coupled with the effort to present a “correct” Islam that is essentially in harmony with modern science, explains certain aspects of Riḍā's work as well.
Al-Risāla al-ḥamīdiyya is relevant to our understanding of Riḍā in at least one other way. As Marwa Elshakry has argued, the continued vitality of natural theology in works such as al-Jisr's illustrates the special predicament of the late Ottoman ʿālim. Facing educational reforms and related political pressure, on top of intellectual challenges such as materialism, the traditional Muslim scholar sought to maintain his intellectual relevance by demonstrating facility with the new sciences – while maintaining enough authority over their interpretation and boundaries to guard against the extreme represented by Shumayyil.Footnote 40 This dilemma, the need to be relevant in a world of new sciences while protecting the integrity of the old, would bear directly on Riḍā's attempt to formulate authoritative responses to materialism.
Debating materialism: questions and answers
Al-Jisr's polemic, like al-Afghānī's, was widely distributed and read. Sultan Abdülhamid II (the epistle's eponym) awarded the author an annual income, and 20,000 copies were printed in Istanbul.Footnote 41 Given the popularity of such critiques, and the stature of their authors, it is safe to say that a great many Arabic readers – including, perhaps, Rashīd Riḍā – first encountered scientific materialism as an object of refutation. This is not to say, however, that the idea remained static, defined only by the work of famous intellectuals. On the contrary, readers, correspondents and editors of Arabic periodicals debated and reconstructed the notion of al-māddiyya, and its relationship to faith, through the 1890s and into the twentieth century. These exchanges were the immediate backdrop to the exchanges in al-Manār.
Al-Muqtaṭaf and its editors, Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf and Fāris Nimr, were among those who had originally introduced scientific materialism by way of criticism. Unlike al-Afghānī and al-Jisr, they gave space to Shumayyil's own words, publishing his work from the early days of the journal until Shumayyil's death. In the early days, these articles were accompanied by disclaimers and sometimes harsh criticism; an 1884 review famously called Shumayyil's work “pure unbelief” (kufr maḥḍ).Footnote 42 But this initial treatment, on which most histories of al-Muqtaṭaf have focused, does not reflect the breadth of the journal's engagement with scientific materialism – or perhaps we should say “materialisms”.
The precise theological claims and implications of materialism became a topic of ongoing negotiation between al-Muqtaṭaf and its readers.Footnote 43 One wrote in 1909 to enquire: “What are among the strongest scientific proofs (al-barāhīn al-ʿilmiyya) to convince materialists who deny the existence of God”? The editors answered that no such scientific proofs exist, for if they did, the materialists (who, after all, champion empirical evidence) would accept them. Moreover, the editors added, materialists do not deny God, they only deny that reason can demonstrate his existence.Footnote 44 In response to further queries, the editors held to the principles of this answer, expounding the main tenets of materialism – the primacy of empirical evidence and the unity of matter and energy – and insisting that materialism was reasonable in so far as it did not deny God, but pointed out the absence of a certain kind of evidence for his existence.Footnote 45 In answers such as these, a kind of agnostic materialism began to take shape. In fact, the resemblance between this kind of materialism and agnosticism was a topic of further confusion among readers, one of whom enquired in 1912: “What is the difference between the materialists and the agnostics (al-māddiyyīn wa'l-lā-adriyyīn)”?Footnote 46 The Muqtaṭaf's answer focused on the relationship between matter and energy, neglecting to mention explicitly the question of God's existence, on which the most famous materialists were surely not agnostic. This omission reflected the ambiguity of the emergent position, wherein materialism was defended as a matter of epistemology, while restrained – indeed, turned against itself – in order to protect a certain realm of the spiritual that was precisely the target of materialism's more radical advocates.
One should not imagine that such conversations were the province only of Christian periodicals. First, although the editors of al-Muqtaṭaf were Christian, there is little reason to suppose that their interlocutors were too: the journal regularly published Muslim contributors – including, as previously noted, our mustaftī Aḥmad al-Alfī. As for the readers whose enquiries appeared in the “Question and answer” section, there is insufficient information to say much about them beyond what they included in their letters.Footnote 47 Second, similar exchanges appeared in the Islamic journals of Cairo at around the same time, indeed earlier than some of the exchanges in al-Muqtaṭaf.
One such exchange appeared in the monthly journal al-Mawsūʿāt in 1901. Over the first two months of that year, a certain “M.M.” wrote a serialized essay discussing “the eternity of matter” (qidam al-mādda), “the unity of matter and energy” (ittiḥād al-mādda bi'l-quwwa), and the impossibility of permanence (baqā' al-ḥāl muḥāl).Footnote 48 The author's claims included:
1. The universe has existed for ever. The author demonstrated the point with a detailed description of an experiment meant to show the conservation of mass, concluding: “this is a matter that has been settled decisively, one which chemical experiments have established and other sciences have confirmed, which is what intelligent people should follow. As for the notion of existence from nothing, it is materially impossible”.Footnote 49 This first point, on the eternity of the material universe and the impossibility of ex nihilo creation, became especially controversial.
2. Second, matter which used to belong to human beings decomposes after death and rejoins other parts of nature. Thus, “When the dead body is stripped of the elements of its life, which rise as gas in the air or (return) to a liquid, and its matter dissolves and breaks apart, all of it gathers and comes together in other, new, living bodies”. This point was not particularly debated in al-Mawsūʿāt, but will return in the fatwās from al-Manār.
The month following publication of the final part of M.M.'s essay, a certain “Rafīq” rebuked the editor for its publication, writing:
An esteemed gentleman, M.M., has taken to writing in your journal fragments of Darwin's doctrine … claiming the pre-existence of the world. Better the writer had limited himself to examining the origin of species, for that is a lofty and useful subject, and had not gone past it to speak of the pre-existence of the world and plunge into a subject that was the downfall of the presumption of many philosophers of old and of late. This is among the subjects that cannot rightfully be published in a widely-circulated Islamic journal such as al-Mawsū‘āt, not all of whose readers are aware of the scientific evidence that refutes the basis of the claim for the pre-existence of the world, and nullifies all its tenuous premises.Footnote 50
“Rafīq”, like al-Afghānī twenty years earlier, understood that the claims of materialism implicated long-standing philosophical controversy. Specifically, he understood M.M. to be attacking the doctrine of the createdness of the world.Footnote 51 Indeed, it is hard not to think that this is precisely what M.M. intended with references to the “illusion” of “existence from nothing” having prevailed for “countless generations”. But the debate in al-Mawsūʿāt was not, of course, medieval. Rather than opposing the arguments for the createdness of the world with the counter-arguments of Ibn Sīnā or Ibn Rushd, for example, M.M. had introduced a modern chemistry experiment. And the objections of “Rafīq” are just as modern. In some ways like al-Jisr, he accepted the legitimacy of a Darwinian discussion of species, but rejected the extension of such enquiry into the origin of the universe. The publication of such ideas was offensive to “Rafīq”, however, not because they were wrong or heretical per se, but because they appeared in a “widely-circulated Islamic journal” [my emphasis], whose readership might not possess the requisite knowledge to resist such ideas.
The debate in al-Mawsūʿāt continued. The editors defended their publication of the essay mainly on the terms on which it had been attacked: that is, by appealing to other parts of the Islamic philosophical tradition (specifically to Ibn Rushd and al-Fārābī), which held by the eternity of the universe, rather than with reference to the natural-scientific argument with which M.M. had begun.Footnote 52 Further readers' objections appeared in the following issue.Footnote 53
These exchanges provide a great deal of light in which to consider the fatwās of al-Manār that follow. By the turn of the century, materialism and its associated notions were the subject of ongoing debate in Arabic, across confessional boundaries. These debates took place not only on the level of polemics but among everyday readers of popular journals. The emergence of such a discourse provides a broader context of “questioning and answering” in which to consider the fatwās. These questions and answers reflected the unstable nature of “the idea” of materialism itself, an ongoing public negotiation over its meaning and theological implications. Such negotiation and debate drew on diverse epistemic traditions, mixing classical argument from philosophy with modern science. Even where classical thought was cited, it was brought explicitly into a modern context – as in the problem of “wide circulation”.
Materialism and the Islamic creed: the fatwās of al-Manār
Such ongoing debates form the background to a set of exchanges that appeared between 1904 and 1913 in al-Manār, a journal that was very much a part of the intellectual world inhabited by materialism's other interlocutors, from al-Afghānī to al-Muqtaṭaf. As Umar Ryad elucidates in Islamic Reformism and Christianity, Riḍā had a collegial relationship with the al-Muqtaṭaf editors, whom he saw as sharing his vision of the harmony between science and religion.Footnote 54 Riḍā would draw on his reading of al-Muqtaṭaf when responding to questions about materialism.
The first istiftā' related closely to these debates appeared in 1904 and concerned the notion of resurrection. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Effendi Muḥammad al-Qanawī al-Ḥusaynī, a student at the Law School,Footnote 55 wrote to al-Manār describing a conversation with a friend of his, who claimed that the resurrection cannot occur through our earthly bodies. According to what this friend had studied in the natural sciences, the body's elements separate after death, decompose, and join new bodies. Thus, there is a finite amount of matter in the world, which has been reused through the generations. Corporeal resurrection (al-baʿth al-juthmānī) is impossible, because there won't be enough matter to go around! Al-Ḥusaynī forwarded his friend's challenges to Riḍā, asking the mufti “to remove, by virtue of your knowledge, any doubt pertaining to the matter”.Footnote 56
Riḍā's fatwā, several pages long, greatly illuminates his thinking about the role of modern science in contemplating matters of religious doctrine. He began by noting the astounding progress of chemistry such that it can even approach the question of resurrection scientifically. Very quickly, however, he warned that matters of eschatology (umūr al-ākhira) are unverifiable truths (min ʿālam al-ghayb) to which we must acquiesce without trying to understand how they work (al-kayfiyya), so long as they are not logically impossible. Whether he followed this principle is unclear, though, for he proceeded to use modern science's understanding of the materiality of human beings to ridicule certain eschatological doctrines – and to affirm that the resurrection will, in fact, involve our earthly bodies.
The objections of your interlocutor, said Riḍā, fall upon those ʿulamā' who have argued that resurrection must occur in our earthly bodies so that God might punish or reward the very body that sinned or was righteous. What would these scholars say, Riḍā wondered, were they to consider what science has lately established, that the material of a person's body completely changes every few years? If someone's body is no longer composed of the same material it comprised when he sinned, is he not liable for punishment? Thus far, Riḍā could have been launching a materialist critique of a certain Islamic doctrine. But his point was not to disprove the notion of resurrection and punishment. Rather, he said, the essence of the physical body itself is not the material it comprises, but the soul (al-rūḥ). It is the soul that gives life to matter and maintains the unique characteristics of the individual human. While the resurrection cannot be through the material we occupy in our present lives, Riḍā wrote, it does not follow that the resurrection will not occur corporeally. The problem of sufficient mass is no problem at all, because the resurrection will occur – as several Quranic verses attest – not on earth, but after a cosmic disturbance involving the collision and reordering of the heavenly bodies.Footnote 57 Thus the resurrection will occur “in a star, or a world larger than this world, and the eternal souls will take from it their material. People will be just the same (hum hum), just as a person's body is recomposed (yatabaddal) in the mortal world several times and he remains just the same in his beliefs, morals, and customs”.
This fatwā is remarkable in several ways. First, the context of the istiftā' strikingly relates a conversation between friends, more evidence that these topics were widely debated. The attendance of the mustaftī at the Law School further suggests (in conjunction with the al-Alfī istiftā' from the School of Commerce) that new faculties of higher education were the particular breeding grounds of such debate. The specificity of the istiftā' is also striking. Whereas al-Alfī would relay a very broad challenge to belief (modern science contradicts the existence of the creator), al-Ḥusaynī related a more narrowly constructed problem: how to explain the physical plausibility of an Islamic eschatological event, the resurrection of all humanity to face judgement, in light of what science (as in the article from al-Mawsūʿāt) has revealed about the finite materiality of human beings and the world. The two queries share, however, this quality of a scientific challenge to faith from a third party. Riḍā appears not exactly as a legal authority, but as an especially competent resource – “by virtue of [his] knowledge” – for helping readers respond to new intellectual challenges.
What was the nature of this knowledge? A clue can be taken from Riḍā's choice to answer partly in a language resembling materialist polemic itself. His critique of the notion of “just recompense” as demanding the resurrection of the material body was not responsive, after all, to the question at hand – but it did afford him the opportunity to demonstrate his own facility with modern scientific knowledge. Even his defence of corporeal resurrection involved a good deal more naturalization of the idea than was necessary, or even consistent with his avowed methodology. Having started with the principle that such claims should not be subject to scientific inquiry, so long as they do not contradict reason, he could easily have concluded the point without so precise a discussion of the way in which the material of resurrection will be supplied by astronomical events. That he did so, I suggest, reflects a sense that in order to assert authority over the doctrinal question of whether resurrection will be corporeal, he needed also to assert authority – or at least let us say “competence” – in the scientific discourse that confronted his readers so pressingly.
Such a dynamic is apparent in Riḍā's response to another 1904 istiftā', in fact a question that built on this very fatwā. Muṣṭafā Rushdī al-Mawarlī, of Zagazig,Footnote 58 was puzzled by Riḍā's understanding of the ephemerality of the human body: how can it be that the body's material changes, when a tattoo will remain visible throughout a person's life? In response, Riḍā explained that every time a cell dies, another cell, in many respects identical, takes its place. Thus, “a tattoo is among the qualities that moves from dead cells to living cells, for it is not a dye on the surface of the skin, but rather part of what the blood and nerves are affected by – like a natural colour. So too, surgical scars on the stomach are permanent, for the living cells that are left by the dead ones at the site of the scar, take their form, and by this you may analogize”.
This is a difficult exchange to categorize as iftā'. To begin with, it is only in a world of print and the “public” fatwā that such a back-and-forth can even occur.Footnote 59 Note, too, that while the ultimate object of the question remained eschatology, the specific point of dispute on which it turned was a phenomenon of biology. And it is emphatically in the language of biology that Riḍā answered the challenge. The result was a fatwā that was substantially a piece of scientific exposition. The mufti had become a biology tutor.
One context in which to understand this development is the similar exchanges happening in al-Mawsūʿāt and al-Muqtaṭaf at around the same time. Riḍā's readership had access to multiple sources of information on these ideas, including multiple sources that were happy to answer questions. All of them – at least to judge by the three we have looked at, including Riḍā thus far – were interested in negotiating a space in which one could accept certain methods and claims of natural science, without giving up on basic religious tenets. All of these attempts were the subject of a certain resistance or questioning from readers. Granted, there was a significant difference between the specific positions articulated – Riḍā thus far appears more conservative, to put it bluntly, than the Muqtaṭaf editors or al-Mawsūʿāt – but that level of substance is not the only point of comparison. As emergent forms of public questioning and answering, some of the materialism exchanges in al-Muqtaṭaf's “Masā'il” (questions) section do not look all that different from this exchange in the “Fatāwā” of al-Manār. It is worth noting, in fact, that the early volumes of al-Manār do not contain a “Fatāwā” section, but rather a section of as'ila dīniyya (religious questions, e.g. in volume four), or a Bāb al-as'ila waʾl-ajwiba (question and answer section, e.g. in volume five).
Riḍā differed critically from the Muqtaṭaf or Mawsūʿāt editors in that he positioned himself as a mufti, an Islamic authority. His decision to rename the relevant section Bāb al-su'āl waʾl-fatwā (the question and responsum section) in volume seven, and Fatāwā al-Manār (the responsa of al-Manār) from volume ten onwards, underscores this distinction. At the same time, the way in which Riḍā positioned himself as an Islamic authority can only be understood in the broader context of a public, printed discourse on the very questions he was called upon to address. In this context, in a world of rapidly expanding, widely circulated knowledge, we can make some sense of an iftā' in which the mufti's authority to pronounce on matters putatively beyond comprehension (min ʿālam al-ghayb) turns out to rest on his ability to explain cell reproduction.
If in these 1904 fatwās Riḍā engaged with such questions largely on the modern-scientific terms in which they were posed, at other times he responded in the Islamic-philosophical vein favoured by al-Afghānī and, for example, the angry readers of al-Mawsūʿāt. In 1912, Abu Hāshim Qurayṭ wrote from al-SharqiyyaFootnote 60 to enquire about a certain material account of the human soul. “What is your opinion”, he asked, “regarding what Ibrāhīm Effendi ʿAlī has claimed in his book, Secrets of the Islamic Sharīʿa – that Sunni scholars have said that the soul weighs an ounce (uqiyya)?”Footnote 61
Ibrāhīm Efendi ʿAlī was a graduate of the Dār al-ʿUlūm Footnote 62 and an instructor at the Khedivial College – thus, another example of the way in which these conversations seemed to flourish in the new educational institutions of colonial Cairo. But Ibrāhīm Effendi was no “atheist professor” like his colleague at the School of Commerce. His 1910 (1328 ah) book, to which the istiftā' refers, was a lengthy exposition of Islamic creed and jurisprudence, from belief in the Prophet's message to the details of inheritance law. The book's front matter boasted a taqrīẓ, a brief review and note of approval, from the Shaykh al-Azhar Salīm al-Bishrī.Footnote 63 The author sometimes went beyond traditional accounts, however, to include modern scientific evidence that supported the positions he wished to vindicate. Thus, in a discussion of varying doctrines on the definition of the soul, Ibrāhīm Effendi wrote: “The American Doctor MacDougall and his colleagues have affirmed that the soul weighs approximately an ounce, according to a test they performed on many bodies at the time of death … If correct, this supports the Sunni position (madhhab ahl al-sunna)”.Footnote 64 This kind of argument, demonstrating the consistency of recent empirical discoveries with traditional doctrine, resembles Riḍā's own response to the 1904 questions.
This time, however, Riḍā disdained such an approach. In his relatively brief response he wrote:
I have not come upon a text in the Qur'ān (al-Kitāb) or the tradition (al-sunna) establishing the weight of the soul … Scholars have many opinions that contradict each other [on this matter], as you can see in The Book of the Soul (Kitāb al-rūḥ) by Ibn al-Qayyim. Some of what is attributed from these positions to some of the Ashʿarī Imams – were a Muslim today to say it, the mass of scholars of al-Azhar and others would consider him an unbeliever (kāfir): for example, the saying of al-Qādī Abu Bakr al-Bāqillānī, “the spirit is a manifestation of the body”, which is precisely what the materialists say today and of yore. You should not pay attention to opinions that are unconnected to any proof supporting them, regardless of their advocate.
Whereas the 1904 fatwās dealt directly with the empirical science of the questions presented, here Riḍā was more elliptical. Like al-Afghānī before him, he placed materialism, and specifically a way of talking about the materiality of the soul, in the context of a certain philosophical heritage. What he thinks of this heritage, however, is ambiguous. Is his observation that the theology of al-BāqillānīFootnote 65 would today be considered unbelief a critique of the medieval theologian, or of the contemporary scholars of al-Azhar?
Riḍā had a complex relationship with both medieval kalām and the contemporary al-Azhar. According to Hourani, Riḍā's understanding of the salaf was more exclusive than ʿAbduh's, which had included such early theologians as al-Bāqillānī.Footnote 66 Based on this fatwā, as well as the following one I analyse, a more complex assessment seems warranted. Kalām remained, if not a major source for Riḍā's agenda, at least a significant resource on which he drew when necessary. And an approving reference to al-Bāqillānī is perhaps not so surprising given Ibn Taymiyya's favourable opinion of the theologian, which would place him (along with Ibn al-Qayyim) safely within the bounds of Salafī sources.Footnote 67
As for al-Azhar, Riḍā had a famously critical view of the contemporary ʿulamā'. Their blind traditionalism, he felt, was a major obstacle to the revitalization of the Muslim community. The opposition of certain scholars to teaching modern science at al-Azhar was among the aspects of their intransigence that he singled out for criticism as early as the first issue of al-Manār.Footnote 68 In fact, recent scholarship has argued that Riḍā and like-minded ideologues of the early twentieth century were so forceful in these criticisms that they helped to create something of a myth of long-standing Azhari opposition to educational reform, when in fact such opposition – to the extent that it existed – was more concerned with protecting the autonomy of the institution than with rejecting useful knowledge.Footnote 69 Whether or not such an interpretation fully captures the reality of the late-nineteenth-century al-Azhar, it underscores quite well the fact that, in the early twentieth century, a debate over the value of different kinds of knowledge lay at the centre of a very public feud between Riḍā and certain of his ʿulamā' contemporaries. Riḍā's critical view of the traditional centre of learning is another reason to think that the ambiguous reference to al-Bāqillānī was meant to be at the expense of the “scholars of al-Azhar”.
Another puzzling feature of Riḍā's answer here is his dismissive treatment of a scientific point that appears to confirm an orthodox tenet, whereas in the 1904 fatwās he had been happy to take a scientific doctrine putatively opposed to a creedal point, and show how the two were in fact consistent. One possible reason for Riḍā's shift in approach is that he felt comfortable using modern scientific justifications of religion himself, but thought it dangerous when others took to playing around with the same strategy. Malcolm Kerr has argued that Riḍā, in his later years, often rejected liberal conclusions that other thinkers reached using legal methodology that resembled his own. According to Kerr, this inconsistency makes sense in light of the “great gulf in educational background and cultural exposure” between Riḍā and major figures of the 1920s such as ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq. Riḍā would sooner contradict his earlier views than see them abused by those unqualified to interpret them properly.Footnote 70 Perhaps a similar phenomenon can explain the inconsistency we face in Riḍā's willingness, or unwillingness, to use modern science as an element of theological reasoning. In his own hands, such a strategy might be useful; in the wrong hands, it might be dangerous.
Since this article focuses on Riḍā's fatwās, I have not generally incoporated the rich body of his writing in the Quranic commentary called Tafsīr al-Manār.Footnote 71 However, a short digression into Riḍā's exegetical thoughts may shed more light on the tension he felt between, on the one hand, the harmony of Islam with modern science and, on the other, the potential for modern scientific thinking to encroach on religious territory. In his commentary on Sūrat Yūnus, Riḍā discusses the issue of miracles (muʿjizāt) and the scepticism of the materialists (māddiyyīn). He opens the discussion by casting it as part of his effort towards the “reform of Islam” (iṣlāḥ al-islām), which requires that people reach “the highest level of faith, befitting the human species' rational sense”.Footnote 72 In this spirit, Riḍā says that God gave the prophets two kinds of signs of his power and will. The first type of sign works according to the usual order of nature, whereas in the second kind of muʿjiza, God violates the normal rules. In Riḍā's view, the first type of sign – the natural miracle, as it were – is not only the more common type, but also the more demonstrative of God's power, because “the order of creation” (niẓām al-khalq) illustrates God's wisdom and mastery.Footnote 73
Yet, Riḍā insists, God has reason to violate this order from time to time. To maintain otherwise, Riḍā argues, is to reduce the world to a machine. The materialists, who adopt this mechanical view:
make themselves invent causes for everything that they see as violating the customary rules of nature (al-sunan), and call these exceptions “wonders of nature”, and analogize that of which the cause has not appeared to them with that whose cause they are convinced of, even if there is no certain proof for it.Footnote 74
This criticism of materialism calls to mind the earlier position of the Muqtaṭaf editors, who pointed out that a dogmatic insistence on the natural causality of all phenomena can actually violate the standards of evidence by which materialists supposedly hold. For Riḍā, however, it seems that the mechanical worldview is not only unproven, but a priori unacceptable. It does not make sense to him to conceive of God as unable to violate the rules of his own creation.
At the same time, Riḍā's critique of materialism in the Tafsīr al-Manār is framed within the discussion of a greater danger. Having defended the existence of supernatural miracles against the scepticism of materialists, he immediately remarks that the great majority of such supposed miracles are “superficial” and “artificial” phenomena, performed by the skill of humans, and credited as miracles due to the ignorance of the “masses” (ʿawwām).Footnote 75 This point launches him into an attack on popular practices of saint veneration and the like. Thus, Riḍā has embedded his critique of materialism within the following context: the “highest level of faith” is the one befitting humanity's “rational sense”; the greatest proof of God is the ordinary functioning of nature; most of history's supposed supernatural miracles can be explained by the ignorance of the masses. Riḍā may have disliked materialism, but he saw something like its antithesis – superstitious credulity – as a more common problem in the Muslim community, and a greater obstacle to the “reform” he advocated. This balancing of concerns, reminiscent of the dual focus that Eber has noted in al-Jisr's Hamidian Epistle (see above), may also help explain why Riḍā appears to have been generally comfortable drawing on modern science in his fatwās (as in the 1904 answers to ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Ḥusaynī), yet occasionally pushed science away from the theological sphere, as in the 1912 answer to Abu Hāshim Qurayṭ.
How, then, would Riḍā choose to address the questions of Aḥmad al-Alfī in 1913? First was the question of the ustādh mulḥid, the atheist professor who was telling his students that natural science disproved the existence of a creator. Second, and in the same vein, was the question of al-Muqtaṭaf's assertion that only divine inspiration, and not scientific evidence, could prove God's existence and unity. Riḍā responded to each question separately, weaving together the strands of classical philosophy, traditional natural theology, and contemporary scientific knowledge that we have seen in his previous fatwās and the debates of his peers.
The professor, said Riḍā, is ignorant on two levels, knowing neither theology (al-ʿilm al-ilāhī) nor natural science (al-ʿilm al-ṭabīʿī). No thinking person – scholar or scientistFootnote 76 – has claimed that science disproves the existence of the creator. Only a few confused people have claimed that natural science neither proves nor disproves the existence of the creator. The great majority of scholars have affirmed the creator with rational proofs (al-barāhīn al-ʿaqliyya) and scientific evidence (al-ḥujaj al-ʿilmiyya). Before detailing the nature of such proofs, then, Riḍā began by casting the atheist professor's views as bizarre and extreme, far outside the bounds even of the scientific discourse which he claimed to advocate. Of course, the claim that science disproves the existence of the creator had been made explicitly, seriously enough for Riḍā's former teacher, al-Jisr, as well as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, to write major refutations. And the notion of an agnostic science had emerged repeatedly in venues such as al-Muqtaṭaf. If Riḍā was not being entirely faithful to the diversity of his contemporaries' views, however, he was making a reasonable generalization about the relative popularity of the atheistic, agnostic and theistic camps. More importantly, he was underlining his own view – as expressed in the 1904 fatwās – that scientific knowledge posed no threat to traditional belief.
From this initial characterization of the debate, Riḍā proceeded to outline the kinds of proofs available to refute the professor's claim. First, he referred the mustaftī to the books of theology (kutub al-kalām), in which can be found many “rational proofs” (al-adilla al-ʿaqliyya) for the existence of the creator. Next, he brought in the Quran and its “rational proofs and scientific, natural proofs” (al-adilla al-ʿaqliyya waʾl-adilla al-ʿilmiyya al-kawniyya). To explain what he meant by the latter, Riḍā referred his mustaftī to a certain article al-Manār had published in 1910: “the editor of al-Muqtaṭaf wrote an article … in which he explained the rational and natural evidence for the existence of the creator, which we published in Dhū al-Ḥijja of 1328 [December 1910]”. Riḍā unfolded his understanding of these proofs in more detail in his response to the second part of the istiftā' (on the unity of God), leaving the first fatwā more concise. This first response is still quite illuminating, however, in so far as it reveals his own classification of the sources of authority to which he appealed: rational, speculative theology (kalām), and natural theology (proofs from nature). Still more revealing is Riḍā's explanation of the latter – even as he characterized it as the method of the Quran – by reference to an article in al-Muqtaṭaf. In a sense, the reference invokes a third category of authority, namely the cultural authority of the premier Arabic journal of modern science, to buttress the appeal to reason and nature.Footnote 77
The reprinted article to which the fatwā refers is worth examining, as it reveals much about the confessionally and epistemically porous context in which Riḍā and his contemporaries debated God and science. The article appeared originally as the lead essay in the December 1910 issue of al-Muqtaṭaf, under the banner “His signs in His creation”.Footnote 78Al-Manār reprinted it the same month, with Riḍā penning an introduction entitled “Religion, atheism, and socialism: al-Muqtaṭaf's vindication of faith over scepticism”.Footnote 79 In the introduction, Riḍā referred to a popular belief that the proprietors of al-Muqtaṭaf were atheists, and confessed that he himself was once under the same impression. A few years ago, however, he happened to have a debate with Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf, in which Riḍā argued that all existence must have been created. As proof, he cited the amazing system of the universe, which can hardly be a coincidence (the natural theology argument, similar to al-Jisr). We do not know the reality of its source, but we call it God, said Riḍā, and if the materialists acknowledge the truth of this position but call the source “matter”, then the disagreement is merely semantic.
To Riḍā's surprise, Ṣarrūf agreed. “I wondered that day”, wrote Riḍā, “is Dr. Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf really a materialist?” Riḍā found an answer to this question in al-Muqtaṭaf's lead essay that month, wherein the editor refuted one of the “socialist unbelievers” (al-muʿaṭṭilīn al-ishtirākiyyīn),Footnote 80 taking evidence for the creator from His signs in creation, “in the manner of the Quran, not in the theoretical manner of the theologians” (ʿalā ṭarīqat al-Qur'ān, lā ʿalā ṭarīqat al-mutakallimīn al-naẓariyya). Here Riḍā did reveal a preference for natural theology, proving God from observation of nature, over the rationalist approach of kalām. He also showed a certain pleasure, it would seem, in taking a powerful example of natural proof for God from the pen of a Christian – reputedly sceptical – widely recognized authority on modern science.
By referring the reader to the article from al-Muqtaṭaf, Riḍā also avoided constructing his own proof of God's existence. In his response to al-Alfī's second question (on the unity, as opposed to the existence, of the creator), however, Riḍā shed more light on how he himself would go about such a proof. He reminded al-Alfī – whom he recognized as a “knowledgeable person” (min ahl al-ʿilm) who would not need more than a reminderFootnote 81 – of some of the rational and natural proofs for God's unity. He began with the rational, setting out the classical proof of the “uncaused cause”. All consequents have a cause. If we agree that nothing in the universe can be the cause of its own existence, but must owe its existence to a previously existing cause, we cannot explain the ultimate origin of creation without reference to another type of cause, one which is not a consequent at all, but whose existence is sufficient unto itself (dhātī lahu). It is this ultimate cause that gives rise to everything else in existence – and to suppose the existence of a second such cause would lead to absurdity, since not more than one thing can be the source of everything else. This proof of the absurdity of polytheism resembles the basic kalām approach.Footnote 82
From this purely rational proof, in the style of al-Afghānī, Riḍā echoed al-Jisr and moved to a discussion of nature, and the commonplace observation that the oneness of the universe's order must reflect the will of a single creator. Riḍā connected this principle with the Quranic verse, “Why, were there gods in earth and heaven other than God, they would surely go to ruin” (Q21.22).Footnote 83 He further observed that the natural proofs of monotheism include the opinion of most natural scientists (ʿulamā' al-kawn) that all beings have a single source in matter and energy, whose essence and reality are unknown (majhūl al-kunh wa'l-ḥaqīqa). Thus he wove together an old trope of natural theology (the oneness of nature), scriptural exegesis, and the contemporary view of natural science.
Probing the last element more deeply, Riḍā took up the issue of matter and energy. Scientists, said Riḍā, have said that “the actor (al-fāʿil) on the original matter of the universe, which transformed it into evolving stages (aṭwāran) that moved from one to the other … is naught but an existing thing they call energy”, whose essence they cannot understand, but which can only function with knowledge and wisdom (ʿilm wa-ḥikma). If one were to claim that this force is merely a phenomenon of matter, proof is to the contrary, for such a claim would require that the evolving stages (taṭawwurāt) of the universe go back infinitely (azaliyyatan), when in fact they were created at a definite point (ḥādithatan qaṭ‘an). Here, the strands of modern science and classical thought, which together have wound their way through these exchanges, finally disappear into each other. The entire statement is made on the authority of modern science, which has advanced this theory about the interaction of matter and energy. By the end of the discussion, however, we could easily be in the world of medieval kalām. The question of the relationship of matter and energy blends into the terms of the createdness or eternity of the universe: independent energy acting on matter is divine creation ex nihilo, while energy-as-a-function-of-matter requires the absurd position that the existence of the universe goes back eternally. Finally, Riḍā punctuated the fatwā with a reference to another article in al-Muqtaṭaf, a piece on “subliminal intelligence” from August of the same year.Footnote 84
The convergence of rationalist philosophy and modern, empirical science is on one level a philosophical problem: what we have assumed to be different epistemes might not be categorically distinguishable. As epistemic traditions, however, they are at least historically distinct in so far as we can identify the varying contexts out of which they emerged for Rashīd Riḍā, and the varying purposes they served in his responses to materialism. For Riḍā, trying to respond with authority to basic challenges to Islamic faith, and doing so in a world of increasingly available and multiple venues of knowledge and debate, philosophical coherence was perhaps not even a priority. The point was to answer, and if the tradition of rational proof could answer, then let it be a rational proof; if modern science could be used for natural theology, then let it. And if the Christian editor of a popular journal of science seemed to have a similar answer to similar questions, then borrowing some of his cultural authority would be a good idea, too. As with the debate on Riḍā's political thought, much can turn on whether one approaches him as a theorist, who should have a consistent body of doctrine – in which case one may well be disappointed – or one understands him primarily as a journalist, whose writing acutely reflects the changing circumstances of each day, or each question, not out of intellectual poverty but out of commitment to a certain kind of activism.Footnote 85
In making use of eclectic tools, however, Riḍā was also refashioning the role of the mufti and of iftā' in society. The kind of knowledge which Riḍā evinced in these fatwās, after all, was impressive but hardly singular. How many people understood a bit of biology, or read articles in al-Muqtaṭaf? The origin of these istiftāʾs in educational institutions suggests a growing number. In a sense, then, the very assertion of authority over explaining cell reproduction, for example, or the interpretation of popular science more generally, was itself a concession, in so far as it opened the door for the burgeoning population of people with knowledge of such areas to participate in a discussion. Thus we begin to see a shift from a “relation of power” between ʿālim and jāhil,Footnote 86 to a place in which the mufti certainly pieced together a kind of authority, but in some respects was only leading a debate.
Conclusion
Ahmad Dallal has argued that a seminal characteristic of Riḍā's contribution to Islamic thought was his effort to make Islam speak definitively to all aspects of life.Footnote 87 Dallal emphasizes that Riḍā's legal methodology expanded the authoritative voice of the sharia into domains traditionally beyond its purview. He points out that this expansive vision of the sharia makes sense in light of the fact that Riḍā (unlike the classical jurists of Islam) lived in an age of nation states, in which law was understood to be unitary and all-encompassing.Footnote 88 Elsewhere, discussing Quranic exegesis, Dallal has made a parallel observation concerning the modern vogue of tafsīr ʿilmī, a kind of exegesis that, he argues, radically expands the traditional scope of its genre in order to read the Quran as “a book of science of sorts”. Dallal observes that this trend only arises in an age in which a “hegemonic culture of science” has come to compete with scripture's claim to knowledge.Footnote 89 In both cases, Dallal highlights the unprecedented expansion of religious authority that follows from the approach of Riḍā (or his intellectual cousins) to aspects of modernity.
Dallal's analysis is persuasive, but it does not tell the whole story. As I have emphasized in this article, the expansion of religious authority, at least where the modern sciences were concerned, gave it a peculiar character, both composite and unstable. Riḍā's fatwās on materialism show his acquaintance with and interest in the new sciences, as well as his ability to read them in light of the older traditions of philosophy and natural theology on which his teachers had relied. As fatwās on a particularly empirical, atheistic brand of materialism, debated in print by people educated in new institutions, they are nothing if not an expansive effort to make Islamic tradition speak authoritatively to modern challenges. At the same time, they show the precariously constructed nature of Riḍā's authority. Drawing not only on traditional ways of addressing the challenge of materialism, but also trying to master the popular scientific literature of his own day, Riḍā could appeal in one breath to kalām or the Quran, and in the next to his Christian colleague at al-Muqtaṭaf. The point was not to answer questions in a way that articulated a consistent interpretation of science and religion, but simply to answer every question. To do so convincingly required a mastery of sources that would carry weight in an ongoing, public conversation. But these sources, the knowledge on which rested the mufti's authority, were no longer privileged territory. The invocation of a dynamic blend of the traditional and the new, scientific and philosophical, Christian and Muslim, gave even the most substantively conservative fatwā new, open-ended implications for the role and authority of the mufti.
