Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Notion of Political Adab
Ethics as a Virtue of Modern Citizenship in Late 19th Century Khedival Egypt
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.9383Abstract
This paper extends the emphasis on contingency and context in Islamic ethical traditions into the distinctly modern context of late 19th century Khedival Egypt. I draw attention to the way Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s engagement with Islamic ethical traditions was shaped by his practice in addressing the broad social and political questions of his context to do with nation-building and political journalism. As a bureaucrat and state publicist, he took pre-modern Islamic ethical concepts into the emerging discursive field of the modern state and the public sphere in Egypt. Looking at a series of newspaper articles for the state newspaper, al-Waqāʾiʿ al-miṣriyya, I show how he articulated an ethics of citizenship by defining a modern civic notion of adab that he called “political adab.” He conceived of this adab as the answer to the problem of how a unified nation emerges from the condition of “freedom” by which journalists and the reading public at the time were conceptualizing the politics of the ʿUrābī revolution in late 1881. This was a “freedom” of the public sphere that allowed for free speech and the power of public opinion to shape governance. ‘Political adab’ would be the virtue or situational skill, internalized in each participant in the public sphere, that would regulate this freedom, ensuring that it produces unity rather than anarchy. I argue that adab here enshrined ʿAbduh’s holistic approach to nation-building; Egypt with political rights would be a nation in which the very idea of the nation is comprehensively embedded—through adab—in people’s lives, animating their “souls”. This was a politics conceived not as a self-standing domain, but as growing out of society, becoming thereby an authentic unity and self-regulating “life”. In developing this vision, ʿAbduh was amplifying pre-modern meanings of adab implying wide breadth of knowledge, good taste, and the virtues, labelled in the paper as ‘comprehensivness,’ ‘consensus’ and ‘habitus.’
Keywords: Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Adab, Freedom, Nation, Politics, Egypt
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
For content published in editions of JAIS before 2002, copyright belongs to the author. Content published between 2002 and 2017 is copyrighted by Edinburgh University Press (reproduced on FRITT with permission). Text and other material published in these journal volumes can only be shared and republished with written permission from the rights holders.
Starting from 2017, the content published in JAIS is - unless otherwise is stated - licensed through Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Through this licence content can be copied and distributed but also remixed, transformed and built upon for any purpose under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit to the creators of materials published in JAIS, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Notice: No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.
Authors who publish in JAIS accept the following conditions:
Author(s) retains copyright to the article and give JAIS right to first publication while the article is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. This license allows sharing the article for non-commercial purposes, as long as the author and first publishing place JAIS are credited. The license does not allow others to publish adapted versions of the article without the author's permission.
The author is free to publish and distribute the work/article after publication in JAIS, as long as the journal is referred to as the first place of publication. Submissions that are under consideration for publication or accepted for publication in JAIS cannot simultaneously be under consideration for publication in other journals, anthologies, monographs or the like. By submitting contributions, the author accepts that the contribution is published in both digital and printed editions of JAIS.