Rafīq Bey al-ʿAzm

Rafīq Bey al-ʿAzm

Rafīq Bey ibn Mahmūd al-ʿAzm ( Arabic رفيق بك بن محمود العظم, DMG Rafīq Bak ibn Maḥmūd al-ʿAẓm b. 1865 in Damascus , died June 30, 1925 in Cairo ) was a Syrian historian and politician who, after moving to Egypt (1884), wrote several works on the early history of Islam and participated in various societies and parties that aimed at an administrative reform of the Ottoman Empire worked towards. He is attributed to the Nahda movement.

Early years in Syria

Rafīq Bey came from the respected Damascus ʿAzm family. His father Mahmūd was a mystical poet and belonged to the Shādhilīya order . At the request of his father, Rafīq first attended a Greek Orthodox school at the age of nine, where he was supposed to learn French as well as Arabic. When his father died in 1875, his older brother Chalīl Bey, who served as an officer in the Ottoman army, took him into his care. He sent him to a state school in Damascus for three years so that he could learn Turkish and Arabic there. At the age of eighteen, Rafīq Bey suddenly discovered his interest in history and philosophy and began, under the guidance of his older brother, with intensive literary and historical studies and the writing of poems. He also sought contact with reform scholars such as Sheikh Tāhir al-Jazā'irī (died 1920), Sheikh Taufeeq ibn Muhammad al-Aiyūbī (died 1932) and Sheikh Muhammad Salīm al-Buchari (died 1928).

Publication activity in Egypt

In 1884 his relative Chālid ʿAbdallāh took him to Egypt, where he quickly achieved high esteem in intellectual circles. After a year, however, as a result of his unhealthy lifestyle (intensive study of books, little sleep), he developed a nervous problem that forced him to give up his studies. After a short trip to Istanbul, where he made contact with liberal intellectual and political circles, he returned to Damascus, where he frequently attended the teaching sessions of Tāhir al-Jazāʾirī and also participated in the activities of the “constitutional society ” ( ǧamʿīyat ad-dustūr ), which Asʿad Bey, the chief of the local police, had founded. In 1885 he returned to Cairo, where he wrote his book "Explanation of Civilization and the Reasons for Prosperity" (al-Bayān fī t-tamaddun wa-asbāb al-ʿumrān ), in which he called for the dissemination of knowledge Stressed freedom as a prerequisite for the acceptance of new ideas and called on the rulers to reform. He first presented this work to ʿAbd al-Hādī Najā al-Abyārī, the chaplain of Ismail Pasha , and then to the Tunisian scholar Muhammad Bairam, both of whom encouraged him to print. The font was finally published in Cairo in 1886.

In 1892 Rafīq Bey finally moved to Egypt and began writing articles for the newspaper al-Ahram . Attempts to learn the French language, however, failed. In his "treatise on the exposition of the manner in which religions were spread" published in 1894, Rafīq Bey defended Islam against the accusation that it was a religion of the sword. In the following time he developed intensive relationships with the circles of Muhammad Abduh and the nationalist politician Mustafā Kāmil and published essays in the newly founded journals al-Manār by Raschīd Ridā (from 1897) and al-Muʾaiyad (from 1899).

In 1899 he published the booklet "Wisdom Teachings for Islamic Youth" ( ad-Durūs al-ḥikmīya li-n-nāšiʾa al-islāmīya ), in which he took the view that the backwardness of Muslims can only be achieved through instruction in the Islamic virtues, in particular the “independence of mind and will” ( istiqlāl al-ʿaql wa-l-irāda ), as well as through a “spiritual union based on the principles of Sharia ” ( tauḥīd al-kalima ʿalā mabādiʾ aš-šarīʿa ) could be abolished. In 1900 he published the book "Turning the Spirits to the Goals of Social Life in Islam" ( Tanbīh al-afhām ilā maṭālib al-ḥayāt al-iǧtimāʿīya fī l-islām ).

In 1901, Rafīq Bey began work on his new multi-volume historical work "The Most Famous Personalities of Islam in War and Politics" ( Ašhar mašāhīr al-islām fī l-ḥarb wa-s-siyāsa ), in which he discussed various personalities of early Islam presented in an idealizing way and connected with historical-philosophical considerations. Rafīq Bey took the view in the work that the caliphate originally had the character of a democratic government ( ḥukūma dīmūqrāṭīya ) and was a purely "secular leadership" ( riʾāsa dunyawīya ), but had degenerated into despotism over time . The first two volumes on Abū Bakr and his important contemporaries, as well as on ʿUmar ibn al-Chattāb , he completed by the beginning of 1902. Since during this time his previous nervous disease recurred, he had to postpone the publication of the third volume, which was for the contemporaries of ʿUmar ibn al-Chattāb, until 1903.

Again and again he was concerned with the subject of the weakness of Muslims in the present. In July 1904 he wrote in the magazine al-Manār :

“Isn't it sad and heartbreaking that there is not a single Muslim nation that can compete with the smallest Christian principality in terms of progress and development. See how such states as Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, which have recently fallen away from the great [Ottoman] Islamic nation, have outstripped the Muslim nation and become its most stubborn opponents. What, I wonder, is the cause of this devastating and ubiquitous indolence that has captured Muslims, disrupted their systems, and made them lag behind other nations? Christians and Buddhists have left Muslims far behind in progress, their opponents have subjugated them, and they have overcome their rivals in all areas of life in all areas of the world. "

Rafīq Bey also corresponded with other Arab scholars about early Islamic history . In 1905 he had an exchange of letters with the Arab intellectual Jurdschī Zaidān , about whose negative portrayal of the Umayyads in his "History of Islamic Civilization" he was indignant.

Political activism

In 1905 Rafīq Bey founded together with Raschīd Ridā the "Ottoman Consultation Society" ( ǧamʿīyat aš-šūrā al-ʿUṯmānīya ), which turned against despotism and fought for the restoration of the Ottoman constitution . In addition to Arabs, Turks and Armenians also took part in this society. Rafīq Bey was elected treasurer of the society, while Rashīd Ridā acted as chairman of its governing committee. From February 1907, the society published its own magazine with the title "The Ottoman Consultation" ( aš-šūrā al-ʿUṯmānīya ), the Arabic part of which was edited by Rafīq Bey, while his cousin Haqqī Bey was responsible for the Turkish part. In his work "The Islamic League and Europe" ( al-Ǧāmiʿa al-islāmīya wa-Urubbā ), which was published in the same year, Rafīq Bey again emphasized the need for education and freedom, and made the rulers' self-importance and turning away from the true Islam is responsible for the disagreement and weakness of Muslims.

In an article for the magazine al-Manār , Rafīq Bey welcomed the coup of the Young Turks in 1908 as a “happy revolution” ( inqilāb maimūn ), which opened up the possibility of acknowledging the neglect of education, economic development and technical modernization under Abdülhamid II overcome. The Ottoman Consultation Society has now been dissolved and Rafīq Bey joined the Society for Unity and Progress on a trip to Istanbul . In the same year he participated in the Arabic translation of the report of the Ottoman legation under Sādiq Pāscha al-Muʾaiyad al-ʿAzm to the Negus of Abyssinia.

Rafīq Bey soon broke with the Ottoman ruling party, which accused him of spreading fanaticism ( taʿaṣṣub ) and thus preventing the renewal of society and Ottoman institutions. He publicly condemned the arrogance and nationalist arrogance of the Young Turkish leadership, whom he viewed as “non-democratic nationalists”. In December 1912 he founded the "Ottoman Party for Administrative Decentralization" ( Ḥizb al-lā-markazīya al-idārīya al-ʿUṯmānī ) together with Raschīd Ridā , Muhibb ad-Dīn al-Chatīb and some other Muslim and Christian personalities Arab autonomy occurred within the Ottoman Empire, but at the same time saw it as necessary to defend the Ottoman state against external aggression. Rafīq Bey himself acted as chairman of the governing body of the party and in this capacity opened a conference in the Hotel Continental in Cairo on May 1, 1913, attended by more than 200 Syrian and Turkish liberal intellectuals. It served in preparation for the first Arab Congress in Paris.

Even before the First World War, Rafīq Bey had to deal with Zionism . When Nachum Sokolow , the President of the World Zionist Organization, explained the Zionists' goals to the Arab press in April 1914 , he responded with an article in which he explained the complaints of the Arabs in Syria and Palestine about the immigrant Jews separated themselves from the Arabs in education, economy and language, and pointed out that the youth in Palestine were already filled with the idea of ​​fighting the Zionist movement.

Cooperation with British and Hashimites

During the First World War, Rafīq Bey developed friendly relations with the British, but he refused to work with the French. After various Arab notables were hanged in Syria for treason by the Ottoman authorities in January 1915, Rafīq Bey and his cousin Haqqī Bey helped distribute a leaflet in Syria calling on the population to cooperate with the British and containing further instructions.

When, in March 1918, after the Balfour Declaration became known, the mood of the Syrian intellectuals in Syria and Egypt turned even more against the Zionists, Rafīq Bey traveled to Palestine with four other Syrians living in Egypt to come to an understanding with the Zionists . In May 1918 he founded the Syrian Unity Party ( ḥizb al-ittiḥād as-sūrī ) together with other Syrian intellectuals based in Egypt, including Raschīd Ridā and Muchtar as-Sulh . As one of their first activities, the leading members of this party sent a memorandum to the British government reminding them of the pre-war promises and asking them to clarify their political intentions. In the course of the year Rafīq Bey traveled to Syria, but had to refuse the ministerial position offered to him by Faisal I for health reasons. In July 1919 he became a member of the "Arab Scientific Academy" ( al-maǧmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿArabī ) of Damascus, newly founded by Muhammad Kurd Ali .

Another examination of Islamic history

After the collapse of Faisal's rule, Rafīq Bey returned to Cairo. There he had a controversy in 1923 with the Egyptian intellectual Tāhā Husain about the abandonment of modern Arabic historiography. The starting point of the dispute was a series of essays on the history of Arabic literature in which Tāhā Husain took the view that the fall of the Umayyad Empire and the emergence of the Abbasid Empire took place in an "age of doubt, frivolity and cynicism". ʿAzm then accused Tāhā Husain of hasty, unjust judgments over the first centuries of Islamic history, which should be the pride of the Arabs. In the last years of his life, Rāfiq Bey developed the idea of ​​an Arab-Islamic League ( Ǧāmiʿa ʿArabīya Islāmīya ), which was to serve as an instrument for the fight against Western colonialism. In 1925 his last book, “History of Islamic Politics” ( Taʾrīḫ as-siyāsa al-islāmīya ) appeared, in which he divided the history of Islamic politics into four great ages ( ʿuṣūr ): 1.) Islamic ascent ( at-taraqqī al- islāmī ), 2.) stagnation ( wuqūf ), 3.) decline ( inḥiṭāṭ ), and finally 4.) new growth ( an-našʾa al-ǧadīda ). The work, however, remained unfinished.

literature

Works

• ad-Durūs al-ḥikmīya li-n-nāšiʾa al-islāmīya. Maṭbaʿat al-Muʾaiyad wa-l-ādāb, Cairo, 1317h digitized
• Ašhar mašāhīr al-islām fī l-ḥarb wa-s-siyāsa. 4 vols. 2nd edition Maṭbaʿa Hindīya, Cairo, 1908. Digitized version of the first volume

Secondary literature

• ʿAbd ar-Razzāq al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar fī taʾrīḫ al-qarn a-ṯāliṯ ʿašar . 3 vols. Maǧmaʿ al-luġa al-ʿArabīya, Damascus, 1961–1963. Vol. II, pp. 630-634. Digitized
• Carl Brockelmann : History of Arabic Literature. Leiden 1937–1949. Supplement-Volume III, pp. 388f.
• ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ad-Dūrī: The historical formation of the Arab nation: a study in identity and consciousness . Croom Helm, London, 1987. pp. 198-204.
• Werner Ende : Arab Nation and Islamic History. The Umayyads as Judged by 20th Century Arab Authors . Beirut 1977.
• Justin Hoyle: Arabism and the Syrian intelligentsia in Cairo: 1900-1918. MA thesis, American University of Cairo, 2010. Digitized
• Antonino Pellitteri: Islam e Riforma. L'ambito arabo-ottomano e l'opera di Rafīq Bey al-ʿAẓm intellettuale damasceno riformatore (1865-1925). Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Palermo, 1998.
• Rashīd Ridā : "Rafīq al-ʿAẓm: wafātu-hū wa-tarǧamatu-hū" in al-Manār (1925) 288-299. Online version (obituary)
• Eliezer Tauber: The Emergence of the Arab Movements. Cass, London, 1993.
• Ḫair ad-Dīn az-Zirikli: al-Aʿlām . 8 vol. 10th edition Beirut 1992. Vol. III, p. 30.
• Florian Zemmin: "Validating Secularity in Islam: The Illustrative Case of the Sociological Muslim Intellectual Rafiq al-Azm (1865-1925)" in Historical Social Research 44 (2019) 74-100.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. az-Zirikli: al-Aʿlām . 1992, Vol. III, p. 30.
2. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 89.
3. ↑ Cf. al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar. 1963, p. 630.
4. ↑ Cf. al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar. 1963, p. 631.
5. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 91.
6. ↑ Cf. al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar. 1963, p. 631.
7. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 93.
8. ↑ See Duri: Historical Formation. 1987, p. 198.
9. ↑ Cf. al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar. 1963, p. 631.
10. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 121.
11. ↑ Cf. al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar. 1963, p. 632.
12. ↑ Cf. al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar . 1963, p. 632.
13. ↑ Cf. Brockelmann: History of Arabic Literature Supplement-Vol. III, p. 388.
14. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 94f.
15. ↑ Cf. Rafīq Bey: ad-Durūs al-ḥikmīya. 1317h, p. 5, and Duri: Historical Formation . 1987, p. 198.
16. ↑ Cf. al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar. 1963, p. 632.
17. ↑ Cf. Rafīq Bey: Ašhar mašāhīr al-islām. 1908, pp. 17, 120 and Duri: Historical Formation. 1987, p. 199.
18. ↑ Cf. al-Baiṭār: Ḥilyat al-bašar. 1963, p. 632.
19. ↑ Quoted from Mahmoud Haddad: “The Manarists and Modernism. An Attempt to Fuse Society and Religion ”in Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Komatsu Hisao and Kosugi Yasushi (ed.): Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic World. Transmission, transformation, communication. Routledge, London and New York, 2006, pp. 55-73. Here p. 58.
20. ↑ See end: Arab Nation. 1977, pp. 32-42.
21. ↑ See Duri: Historical Formation. 1987, p. 186.
22. ↑ See Tauber: The Emergence. 1993, p. 51.
23. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 94f.
24. ↑ See Duri: Historical Formation. 1987, p. 212.
25. ↑ Cf. David Commins: "Al-Manār and popular religion in Syria, 1898-1920" in Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Komatsu Hisao and Kosugi Yasushi (ed.): Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic World. Transmission, transformation, communication. Routledge, London and New York, 2006, pp. 40-55. Here p. 46.
26. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 95.
27. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 96.
28. ↑ See Tauber: The Emergence. 1993, pp. 129f.
29. ↑ See Neil Caplan: Futile Diplomacy. Vol. I: Early Arab-Zionist Negotiation Attempts 1913-1931. Cass, London, 1983. p. 14.
30. ↑ See Hoyle: Arabism and the Syrian Intelligentsia. 2010, pp. 70-74.
31. ↑ See Tauber: The Emergence . 1993, p. 121.
32. ↑ See Hoyle: Arabism and the Syrian Intelligentsia. 2010, p. 76f.
33. ↑ See Hoyle: Arabism and the Syrian Intelligentsia. 2010, pp. 79, 82.
34. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 96.
35. ↑ End of quote: Arab Nation. 1977, p. 56.
36. ↑ See end: Arab Nation. 1977, p. 57.
37. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 100.
38. ↑ Cf. Pellitteri: Islam e riforma. 1998, p. 125.
39. ↑ Cf. Ridā: Rafīq al-ʿAẓm (end).