ʿAlī ʿAbd ar-Rāziq

ʿAlī ʿAbd ar-Rāziq

ʿAlī ʿAbd ar-Rāziq , also Ali Abdel Raziq ( Arabic علي عبد الرازق; * 1887 or 1888; † 1966 ), was an Egyptian scholar of Islam and Sharia judge. He can be seen as the spiritual father of Islamic secularism .

life and work

His main work is called "Islam and the basics of government" ( al-Islām wa-uṣūl al-ḥukm ), which was first published in 1925. Because of the controversial viewpoints about the necessity of the caliphate and the religious state, the book sparked a heated intellectual and political debate in Egypt .

Basically he claims that Muslims may agree on any form of government as long as it serves their interests and the common good, be it religious or secular.

He advocates the following arguments: Neither the two main sources of Islamic law ( Sharia ), i.e. the Koran and the Sunna , nor the Ijma (consensus), nor reason require the rule of a caliph or an imam . Experience also teaches that the caliphate only brought disaster to Muslims and Islam. It is precisely through the separation of state and religion that religion is protected from political abuse.

Above all, because Abd ar-Raziq emphasizes the atrocities of the caliphate, one can assume that he advocated a humanist mode of government, possibly a democratic state, even if he does not expressly formulate this in his book. This is confirmed not least by the fact that both his father, Hasan Abd ar-Raziq , and his eldest brother, the well-known philosopher Mustafa Abd ar-Raziq , were advocates of Egyptian liberalism.

Ali Abd ar-Raziq also wrote the book "Consensus in Islamic Law" ( al-iǧmāʿ fī š-šāriʿa al-islāmiyya ), which was published in 1947.

Fonts

• Ali Abderraziq: L'islam et les fondements du pouvoir . Transl. And preface by Abdou Filaly-Ansary. Éditions La Découverte, Paris 1994.
• Ali Abd ar-Raziq: al-Islām wa-Uṣūl al-Ḥukm: Bahṯ fī l-Ḫilāfa wa-l-Ḥukūma fī l-Islām ("Islam and the basics of governance: study of the caliphate and governance in Islam") . Criticism and comment from Mamdooh Haqqi. Beirut 1978 (first Beirut 1925)
  • Digitized version of the March 1925 edition.
  • in German: Islam and the foundations of rule, in Andreas Meier, The political order of Islam. Programs and Criticism between Fundamentalism and Reforms. Original voices from the Islamic world. Peter Hammer Verlag , Wuppertal 1994, ISBN 3872946161 , pp. 106-114. With the introduction of ed.
• Ali Abd ar-Raziq: al-Iǧmāʿ fī š-Šāriʿa al-Islāmiyya ("Consensus in Islamic Law"). Dār al-Fikr al-ʿArabī, 1947.
• Alî Abd ar-Râziq: Islam and the foundations of rule. Translation and commentary on the work of Alî Abd ar-Râziq . In: Leipzig contributions to research on the Orient . tape 24 . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-631-59613-5 .

literature

• Charles C. Adams: Islam and Modernism in Egypt . Russell & Russell, New York 1968, pp. 259-268.