Muhibb ad-Dīn al-Khatīb

Muhibb ad-Dīn al-Chatīb ( Arabic محب الدين الخطيب, DMG Muḥibb ad-Dīn al-Ḫaṭīb , b. July 1886 in Damascus ; died December 30, 1969 in Cairo ) was a Syrian publicist who founded several societies with an Arab-nationalist and pan-Islamic orientation, published various magazines and contributed significantly to the spread of the term Salafiyya .

Origin and early years

Muhibb ad-Dīn al-Chatīb was born in 1886 into a Damascus family of scholars who were of sherif origin on the father's side and who traced back to the Hanbali Sufi ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī . The family name came from the fact that in 1869 the family had become the Friday preacher in the Umayyad Mosque . Muhibb ad-Dīn's father, Sheikh Abū l-Fath al-Chatīb (1834–1897), was close friends with the Maliki Sheikh Tāhir al-Jazā'irī (1852–1920), who was one of the founding directors of the "Islamic Welfare Society" ( al -Ǧamʿīya al-ḫairīya al-islāmīya ) was in Damascus. In 1879 Abū l-Fath became the first director of the Zāhirīya library founded by this society. Muhibb ad-Dīn's mother Āsiya came from the Damascus landowner family al-Jallād. She died in 1893 when Muhibb ad-Dīn was only seven years old.

Muhibb ad-Dīn first attended a primary school that was behind his father's library, and from 1896 the Maktab ʿAnbar, the only secondary school in the city that was run by Turks. Here Muhibb ad-Dīn received instruction in modern science, Ottoman Turkish, French and Persian.

As a political activist in the Ottoman Empire

At the Maktab ʿAnbar, Muhibb ad-Dīn experienced an internal politicization. In 1902, together with Arab classmates, he founded an Arab secret circle, the "Little Damascus Circle" ( ḥalqat Dimašq aṣ-ṣaġīra ), with the aim of promoting commitment to God and the fatherland . The circle's spiritual mentor was Tāhir al-Jazāʾirī, while the writings of al-Kawākibī and Muhammad Abduh were read in the hand . As a result, there was a polarization between Turkish and Arab students among the students at the school.

Due to his political activities at the school, Muhibb ad-Dīn had to leave the Maktab ʿAnbar. He then attended a state school in Beirut and received his diploma there on July 9, 1905. In the autumn of 1905 al-Khatīb traveled to Istanbul to study law . There he founded the secret "Society of the Arab Resurrection " ( ǧamʿīyat an-nahḍa al-ʿarabīya ) with Amīr ʿĀrif asch-Shihābī on December 24, 1906 , the aim of which was to encourage the Syrian youth for Arabism and the decentralization of the Ottoman Empire to inspire. After the Ottoman authorities had become aware of authorities on al-Khatib's political activities and had placed him under surveillance, he traveled to Damascus in October 1907 and also moved the center of his society there. However, since he continued to fear persecution by the Ottoman authorities, he accepted a position as a translator at the British consulate in al-Hudaida that same month and traveled to Yemen via Beirut and Cairo, where he arrived on November 27.

Cairo: Cooperation with Rashīd Ridā

After the restoration of the Ottoman constitution in the summer of 1908, al-Khatīb saw no more reason to stay in Yemen and returned to Damascus. However, as his political activities there were further hampered, he traveled on to Cairo, which at that time had become a popular refuge for Syrian opponents of the Hamid regime. There in September 1909 he worked as a journalist for the conservative Muslim newspaper al-Mu'aiyad . In the same year al-Chatīb founded together with ʿAbd al-Fattāh Qatlān in the Kairin Khan el-Chalili opposite the Husain mosque the "Salafist bookstore" ( al-Maktaba as-Salafīya ). As al-Khatīb himself writes, the idea of ​​choosing this name came from his Sheikh Tāhir al-Jazāʾirī. As can be seen from the list of books sold in the bookstore (including works by as-Suyūtī , al-Farabi and Avicenna ), al-Chatīb and Qatlān did not yet have a fixed religious understanding of the term Salafīya at that time.

In 1912, al-Chatīb and Qatlān entered into business relations with Rashīd Ridā . The Salafstische Bookstore was relocated to ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Street and connected there with the bookstore al-Manār, in which al-Chatīb and Qatlān briefly became shareholders. In December of the same year al-Khatīb helped found the "Ottoman Party for Administrative Decentralization" ( Ḥizb al-lā-markazīya al-idārīya al-ʿUthmānīya ), which advocated a federal system and was headed by Rashīd Ridā. On January 12, 1913, al-Khatīb was elected General Secretary of the Executive Committee of that party. As a representative of the party, he took part in the first Arab Congress in Paris in June 1913, which worked out a reform plan for the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire with representatives of the Young Turkish government. Al-Khatīb published a report on the Congress on behalf of his party in Cairo that same year.

After the First World War broke out in August 1914 , Rashīd Ridā instructed al-Khatīb in October to contact the political leaders of Iraq and Najd in order to find out their views on the future of the Arab countries. The mission was financially supported by Milne Cheetham, the British High Commissioner in Egypt who was in contact with the Decentralization Party. Al-Chatīb wanted to travel to Iraq by ship via Aden and Bombay , but was arrested en route by the British authorities in Bushehr , who appeared to be unaware that his mission was being supported by the British authorities in Egypt. In November 1914 he was brought to Basra , which had just been captured by the Anglo-Indian troops, and imprisoned there for several months. Only after the British High Commission had intervened in Egypt, al-Khatīb was released on July 27, 1915 and was able to return to Egypt.

As a propagandist for the Hashimites

A new turning point in al-Khatīb's life came with the beginning of the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire in June 1916. The Sherif Husain , who led the uprising with British support, invited al-Khatīb to Mecca to publish a newspaper there, which should provide for the ideological foundation of the Arab uprising. Al-Khatīb accepted the offer and arrived in Jeddah in July 1916 . From mid-August 1916 on, he published the newspaper al-Qibla ("The Qibla ") every two weeks , which was distributed worldwide. In addition, al-Chatīb founded a state printing press called al-Ma albaʿa al-ʿĀmirīya in Mecca , with which he published books on modern science and technology. After Husain's son Faisal I had led the Arab troops to Damascus in 1918 , al-Khatīb traveled to Syria in June 1919 and in the summer took over the publication of the newspaper al-ʿĀsima , the official organ of the Hashimites in Damascus. In cooperation with Sheikh Muhammad Kāmil al-Kassab, he founded the “High National Committee” ( al-Laǧna al-Waṭanīya al-ʿUlyā ) in September , which had the task of supplying Syria with weapons and training the Syrians in combat.

In al-ʿĀsima , al-Khatīb published an article with the title “Our Arab Nationalism” ( Qaumīyatu-nā al-ʿArabīya ) in 1919 , in which he used the Semitic wave theory in order to claim the Hāshimites to rule over the entire fertile area Legitimize crescent . According to the Semitic wave theory, which goes back to Hugo Winckler and Leone Caetani , Arabia was originally an extremely fertile region and housed not only the Arabs, but all Semitic peoples, including the Assyrians , Aramaeans , Canaanites , Phoenicians and Hebrews . Due to climate changes, however, Arabia dried out more and more, so that the various Semitic peoples emigrated in successive waves from Arabia to the area of ​​the Fertile Crescent. The Islamic expansion movement of the Arabs was also interpreted as such a Semitic emigration movement. Since the Semitic peoples originally all had the same homeland, al-Khatīb concluded in his article, they should also be under political leadership in the present.

However, after the Battle of Maysalun (July 24, 1920) and the subsequent French occupation of Damascus, the rule of the Hashimites in Syria collapsed and al-Khatīb returned to Egypt.

Return to Cairo, approaching the Wahhabis

In Cairo, al-Khatīb revitalized the "Salafi bookstore" he founded in Bāb al-Chalq near the Egyptian National Library ( Dār al-Kutub ) and added a printing company to it. In it he published important writings with pan-Arabic orientation until the mid-1920s, for example his 1925 book "The Direction of Human Waves on the Arabian Peninsula" ( Ittiǧāh al-mauǧāt al-bašarīya fī Ǧazīrat al-ʿArab ), in which he tried to show the relevance of the Semitic wave theory for Arab nationalism. From 1921 he also worked as an editor for the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahrām . In August 1924 al-Chatīb founded the literary magazine az-Zahrāʾ , which appeared monthly until 1929 and published in the well-known Arab poets and writers, but also pan-Islamic thinkers such as Shakīb Arslān. In this journal in April 1925 he wrote a very critical review of ʿAlī arAbd ar-Rāziq's book "Islam and the Basics of Government", in which the latter had questioned the necessity of the caliphate .

In the autumn of 1924, Saudi - Wahhabi troops captured the hijaz and expelled the hajimite king Husain, who had assumed the title of caliph, from the hijaz. Al-Khatīb, who had great admiration for the Wahhabis, renounced the Hāshimites in a critical article about his former employer Husain. At the same time, he entered into business relationships with the Saudis, who gave him orders to print medieval Hanbali texts. The collaboration with the Saudi ruling house expanded in the period that followed. In 1927, al-Chatīb and Qatlān received the order to set up a branch of their “Salafi printing and bookshop” in Mecca. This branch opened in 1928 and specialized in the publication of Hanbali and pro-Wahhabi literature. This also had an impact on the term Salafīya, because the Salafīya was now very strongly identified with the Hanbali and pro-Wahhabi textual material that al-Chatīb and Qatlān published in Mecca.

Al-Fath and the Muslim Youth Association

Al-Chatīb's main business continued in Cairo, however. In the spring of 1926 he founded the new weekly newspaper al-Fath ("The Conquest") here. As Al-Khatīb made clear in a programmatic article on June 30, 1927, his journal was supposed to fulfill seven goals: 1. Revitalization of Islamic civilization; 2. Return to the authentic Islamic roots; 3. Fight against atheism and the false renewal of modernists; 4. Dissemination of news about the Islamic world; 5. Presentation of selected excerpts from older Islamic authors; 6. Explanation of the basics of Islamic law; and 7. Explanation of the passages from the Koran and Sunna that concern society and morals. This program was summarized under the concept of " Jihad for the cause of God "

In November of the same year, al-Khatīb founded the Society of Muslim Young Men together with Sheikh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Jawish (1876–1929) and the student ʿAbd al-Hamīd Saʿīd to achieve these goals . Al-Chatīb worked in this organization, which was to form an Islamic counterpart to the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), in the following period as general secretary. In this capacity he attended the celebrations for the renovation of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in August 1928 at the invitation of Mohammed Amin al-Husseini . From 1929 on, the meeting reports of the association, whose members met three times a week, were also printed in the Salafist printing house al-Chatībs.

In his magazine al-Fath , al-Khatīb fought against all forms of westernization, the reform program of Kemalism in Turkey, which he tried to denigrate as de facto "Christianization", the westernization program of the Afghan King Amanullah Khan , whose wife visited in the late 1920s occurred in Europe without a veil, but also the westernization in Egypt itself, where at that time there were considerations to introduce the Latin alphabet for the spelling of Arabic. In many issues of the magazine from the years 1926/27, he attacked Egyptian liberal thinkers such as Taha Hussein , ʿAlī ʿAbd ar-Rāziq and Salāma Mūsā and branded them as "enemies of Islam". Other important topics in the magazine were the fight against the Christian mission, which was active in many Arab countries at the time, as well as the Egyptian women's movement around Hudā Schaʿrāwī, which campaigned for the "unveiling" and equality of Muslim women. In this context, Al-Chatīb proved to be an ardent defender of the hijab system and criticized all forms of public display of female beauty. He recommended the tarboosh as headgear for men , so as not to assimilate to the infidels by wearing hats .

Al-Khatīb also made great use of his magazine to defend the Wahhabis , who had a very bad reputation in Egypt at the time. In various articles he emphasized that the Wahhabis, contrary to what they were accused of, strictly adhered to Sharia law . In the 1930s he also occasionally turned against the scholars of the Azhar in his magazine . In 1936, for example, in several articles he criticized Farīd Wadschdī, who had demanded in the Azhar magazine he published that the ban on translating the Koran into other languages ​​should be lifted.

As a publicist for the Muslim Brotherhood

Already since 1926 Muhibb ad-Dīn al-Chatīb had been in close contact with Hasan al-Bannā , the later founder of the Muslim Brotherhood . Al-Khatīb, who was friends with al-Bannā's father, introduced the young man to the Islamic circles of Cairo, and al-Bannā visited al-Chatīb's Salafist bookstore very often. In 1927 he joined the Muslim youth organization founded by al-Khatīb and worked as a correspondent for his magazine al-Fath in Ismailia . After al-Bannā graduated from Dār al-ʿUlūm in Cairo in 1928 , al-Khatīb recommended him for a position at the Religious Institute in Mecca, but al-Bannā's application there was unsuccessful.

The Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hasan al-Bannā soon left the youth association founded by al-Khatīb behind in importance. Al-Chatīb himself supported al-Bannā in setting up the new organization. In May 1933 he took over the publication of the weekly "magazine of the Muslim Brotherhood" ( maǧallat al-iḫwān al-muslimīn ), which he had printed in his own "Salafist printing house". From 1946 to 1948 he published her daily newspaper. To an Indian visitor he passed himself and his magazine al-Fath off as belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. His closeness to the Muslim Brotherhood was so great that at the end of 1948, al-Khatīb had to discontinue his magazine under pressure from the Egyptian government, which at the time banned all of the Muslim Brotherhood's publications.

Despite the ideological closeness between al-Khatīb and al-Bannā, there were also some differences between them. He was very hurt, for example, that Hasan al-Bannā agreed to rapprochement between Sunnis and Shiites and at the meetings of the "Society for rapprochement between the Islamic schools of law " ( Ǧamāʿat at-taqrīb baina l-maḏāhib al -islāmīya ) participated. In response to this, al-Khatīb published an article in his magazine in October 1948 with the title “Clear and less clear about the fairy tale of the rapprochement of the schools of law,” in which he publicly took a stand against this society.

Another point of contention was the relationship with the Saudi ruling house. While the Muslim Brotherhood rejected the principle of hereditary monarchy , as practiced in Saudi Arabia, and advocated a caliphate based on Shūrā (“consultation”), al-Khatīb considered hereditary rule to be legitimate. The difference of opinion on this point was particularly evident after the Free Officers Revolution on June 23, 1952, when a political controversy arose between al-Khatīb and Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazālī, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The starting point of the controversy was the book al-Qawāṣim wa-l-ʿawāṣim by the Maliki scholar Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī , published by al-Chatīb in the same year, who had defended the Umayyad ruler Muʿāwiya I. baiʿa was not lawful for his son Yazid I.

Muhammad al-Ghazālī saw in the publication and favorable commentary on the work by al-Khatīb a clear support for the principle of hereditary monarchy and criticized the book extremely fiercely in the magazine ad- Daʿwa , which at that time was in fact the official organ of the Muslim Brotherhood. In his view, Muʿāwiyas baiʿa had been a victory for his son in “political paganism”, which has caused serious damage to Muslims up to the present day, because it established the principle of hereditary monarchy in Islam. Al-Ghazālī believed that the only legitimate basis for political rule in Islam was the principle of shūrā. In his reply, al-Khatīb rejected al-Ghazālī's criticism of his defense of Muʿāwiyas and referred to several scholars who had declared the Shūrā unnecessary.

In the service of the Azhar, anti-Shiite polemics

Although al-Ghazālī's criticism of al-Chatīb's publication amounted to political denunciation in the special post-revolutionary situation, his relationship with the Revolutionary Council apparently did not suffer too much, because in October 1952 he became editor-in-chief of Nūr al-Islām , the Azhar's magazine ( Maǧallat al-Azhar ), called. From this position, too, he fought all initiatives to bring Sunnis and Shiites closer together. The anti-Shia tendencies of the Azhar magazine after al-Chatīb took office found in the Iraqi Shiite scholar Muhammad Mahdī al-Chālisī a permanent critic. After the reform-minded scholar Mahmūd Schaltūt was appointed Sheikh of the Azhar in October 1958 , al-Chatīb was dismissed as editor-in-chief of the Azhar magazine.

Al-Khatīb's journalistic activity did not end there, however, because in 1960, with the support of a Wahhabi scholar, he published an anti-Shiite pamphlet in Jeddah with the title "The main features of the foundations on which the religion of the Twelve Shiite Imāmīya is based "( al-Ḫuṭūṭ al-ʿarīḍa li-l-usus allatī qāma ʿalai-hi dīn al-Imāmīya al-iṯnāʿašarīya ). In it he claimed that the Twelve Shia should be regarded as a separate "religion" because the Twelve Shiites would not recognize the Koran as genuine in its form, as the Sunnis handed it down.

literature

• Rainer Brunner: Approach and distance. Schia, Azhar and Islamic Ecumenism in the 20th Century . Berlin: Schwarz 1996. Digitized
• Werner Ende: Arab Nation and Islamic History. The Umayyads as Judged by 20th Century Arab Authors. Beirut-Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner 1977. pp. 91-110.
• Werner Ende : "Muḥibb ad-Dīn al- Kh aṭīb" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition Vol. XII, p. 640.
• Amal N. Ghazal: "Power, Arabism and Islam in the Writings of Muhib al-Din al-Khatib in al-Fath " in Past Imperfect 6 (1997) 133-150. Available online here: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/pi/article/view/1427/967
• Nimrod Hurvitz: "Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib's Semitic wave theory and Pan-Arabism" in Middle East Studies 29 (1993) 118-134.
• Henri Lauzière: "The Construction of Salafiyya: Reconsidering Salafism from the perspective of conceptual history" in International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010) 369-389.
• Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen: "Les débuts d'une revue neo-salafiste: Muhibb al-Dîn al-Khatîb et Al-Fath de 1926 à 1928" in Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 95–98 (2002) 227–255 . Available online here: http://remmm.revues.org/234
• Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi: Muhibb ad-Din al-Khatib: a portrait of a Salafi Arabist (1886–1969). PhD thesis Simon Fraser University 1991. Available online here: http://summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/3579/b1411415x.pdf
• Mehdi Sajid: Muslims in interwar Europe and the deconstruction of fascination with the West. A critical examination of Šakīb ʾArslān's articles in the Egyptian magazine al-Fatḥ (1926-1935) Berlin: EB-Verlag, 2015; ISBN 978-3-86893-185-3 . Pp. 182-236.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Rizvi 13.
2. ↑ See Rizvi 14, Mayeur-Jaouen § 2.
3. ↑ Cf. Rizvi 13, 16.
4. ↑ See Rizvi 16.
5. ↑ See David Dean Commins: Islamic Reform. Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria. New York-Oxford 1990. p. 95.
6. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 2, Lauzière 376.
7. ↑ See Rizvi 19.
8. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen Paragraph 2.
9. ↑ Cf. Commins 95f.
10. ↑ See Rizvi 18.
11. ↑ Cf. Rizvi 22f, Mayeur-Jaouen § 3, Brunner 134.
12. ↑ Cf. Rizvi 23f., Mayeur-Jaouen § 3, Lauzière 376.
13. ↑ Cf. Rizvi 25f.
14. ↑ See Lauzière 377f.
15. ↑ See Lauzière 377.
16. ↑ See Lauzière 378.
17. ↑ See Rizvi 27.
18. ↑ Cf. Rizvi 29f, Hurvitz 119.
19. ↑ See Rizvi 31–34.
20. ↑ Cf. Rizvi 37-40, Lauzière 379.
21. ↑ See Rizvi 46.
22. ↑ Cf. Hurvitz 121–127.
23. ↑ See Lauzière 382.
24. ↑ See Hurvitz 120.
25. ↑ See Rizvi 50.
26. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 5.
27. ↑ See Rizvi 67.
28. ↑ See Rizvi 44.
29. ↑ See Lauzière 383.
30. ↑ See Lauzière 384–385.
31. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 9.
32. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen, § 41.
33. ↑ See Rizvi 77.
34. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 44.
35. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 13.
36. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 14.
37. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 15.
38. ↑ Cf. Rizvi 71, Mayeur-Jaouen § 18f.
39. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 17.
40. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 22-25.
41. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 26.
42. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 33.
43. ↑ See Rizvi 84.
44. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 45.
45. ↑ See Richard P. Mitchell: The Society of the Muslim Brothers. Oxford et al. a. 1969. p. 5.
46. ↑ See Brynjar Lia: The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement, 1928-1942 . Reading 1998. p. 30.
47. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 46, Mitchell 185.
48. ↑ See Mitchell 322f.
49. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 47.
50. ↑ See Brunner 196.
51. ↑ See Mayeur-Jaouen § 47.
52. ↑ See end of 99f.
53. ↑ See end of 101.
54. ↑ See end of 100.
55. ↑ See Brunner 198.
56. ↑ See Brunner 193-208.
57. ↑ See Brunner 146.
58. ↑ See Brunner 216.
59. ↑ See Brunner 252f.