Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi

Islamic Reform and Arab Revival

Itzchak Weismann

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780747965
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855–1902) was one of the most articulate and original proponents of reformist ideas in the Arab world, as well as a precursor of Arab nationalism. A journalist, political thinker and social activist from Aleppo, Syria, he was a sharp critic of both the scholarly and Sufi religious traditions, and of the autocratic Ottoman government of the day. Undeterred by persecution and arrest, he advocated returning to the model of the forefathers of Islam and was an overt supporter of liberty, an Arab Caliphate, and the separation of religion and state.The first full-scale biography of Kawakibi in any European language, this work combines an account of his life with a fresh look at his writings, from the newspapers he founded in Aleppo to the books he published in Cairo. Drawing on memoirs of relatives and colleagues and on archival material, Itzchak Weismann demonstrates Kawakibi's originality and assesses his impact on the evolution of Islamic political thought and the course of Arab nationalism during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

THE MAKING OF A SYRIAN ISLAMIC INTELLECTUAL

POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN LATE OTTOMAN ALEPPO

Aleppo was the largest urban center in the Eastern Mediterranean throughout most of the Ottoman period, second only to Istanbul and Cairo. It served as the administrative capital of a vast province bearing its name, Halab, which extended over today’s northern Syria and southeast Turkey and consisted of three districts: Aleppo, Mar‘ash, and Urfa. It was also a thriving center of manufacture and a nodal point for regional as well as international trade routes ranging from Europe to the Indian subcontinent.

Aleppo’s population of the eighteenth century was estimated at over 100,000 inhabitants. This measure was somewhat diminished in the first half of the nineteenth century after a devastating earthquake in 1822 and recurrent epidemics that carried off substantial parts of the population. The city began to recover after 1850 despite some new economic hardships, due mainly to delays in the construction of a carriage road to its Mediterranean port Alexandretta and the opening of the Suez Canal, which displaced the long-distance caravans that had frequented the city in the past. Yet, although overtaken by Damascus and Beirut, it continued to expand, demographically – reaching 116,000 inhabitants in 1890 – and physically – with the construction of new affluent neighborhoods to the west and northwest of the city.

As a center of long-distance commerce, Ottoman Aleppo displayed remarkable religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. The majority of its population were Sunni Muslims, constituting somewhere between 65 and 75 percent, but it also had a substantial Christian minority of 16 to 18 percent, most of whom, in the city as in the province at large, were Armenians of the Catholic, Greek-Orthodox, and Protestant denominations. Jews formed a smaller but still considerable community of up to 10 percent. The city was also home to a community of foreign nationals, mostly merchants from European countries, from Iran and from India. Ethnically, the urban centers of the Ottoman province of Aleppo were divided between Turks in the northern districts and Arabs in the city of Aleppo and its district. The nomad population of the Syrian Desert was predominantly Arab, while most of the rural population was of Kurdish extraction.

With the weakening of central Ottoman authority in the eighteenth century, an era of turbulence set in, affecting Aleppo’s social stability and economic prosperity. From the 1760s on, two armed factions – the Janissaries, the imperial militia that increasingly relied on locals and rural migrants, and the ashraf, the alleged descendants of the Prophet whose number in Aleppo was particularly large – fought each other for control of the city, while Bedouin tribes exploited the opportunity to drive away the peasants from the surrounding villages and pillaged caravans. On the other hand, this period witnessed the advance of new social forces, which often allied with one another: civil Muslim families of notables (a‘yan), which gained access to rural resources in the countryside, and minority merchants, who developed trading networks through their connections with European firms. The Kawakibi family belonged to the first group.

The Egyptian occupation of Syria in 1832 brought in its trail an unprecedented set of reforms aimed at creating strong government. Concomitantly, Christians were granted equal status, while for the first time European consulates could be set up in the major cities and missionary activity was allowed to take place in the country. In Aleppo, as in the rest of Syria, these measures met with strong resistance on the part of the Muslim leadership, whose position was undermined, and of the Muslim masses, whose religious feelings were hurt.

The restoration of Ottoman rule in Syria in 1840 heralded the inauguration of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), which embraced the goals of strengthening the central government and enhancing security in the provinces. Aleppo was chosen as a testing ground, and demonstrated the difficulties in effecting change in the face of a conservative Muslim society. Along with the reforms, the Anglo-Ottoman trade agreement of 1838 eventually opened Syria to Western economic exploitation through free trade. Almost nothing is recorded about the Kawakibis’ standing in Aleppo at that time, which seems to indicate a certain decline in their fortunes. Of Abd al-Rahman’s grandfather, Mas‘ud al-Kawakibi, we know only his name.

The Tanzimat reforms intensified social and communal tensions throughout Syria. In Aleppo, the power of the paramilitary factions was undermined by the imposition of direct taxation and conscription, while the poorer sections of the Muslim population were hard hit by the inundation of the local market with cheap European goods, products of the industrial revolution. By contrast, the civil a‘yan acquired a dominant position in the newly established local councils (sing. majlis), while the Christians were able to improve their standing by acting as middlemen for European interests. The ensuing uprising of 1850, which would repeat itself on a much larger scale in Damascus and other cities, was directed against the Christians, who displayed their new status through imposing churches and grand processions. Incited by the leaders of the Janissary and ashraf factions, the Muslim mob besieged the governor and looted the extramural affluent Christian suburbs. Dozens were killed and much property was damaged. The events provided the Ottoman government with the opportunity ultimately to eliminate militant factionalism in the city and reassert its central authority. By 1855, the year of Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi’s birth, the Muslim notables of Aleppo and their Christian allies were firmly in place as the new “aristocracy of service” in the local and provincial administrations.

The reformist principles of the Tanzimat era were enshrined in the Imperial Edict of 1856, which under European pressure promised equality of civil and political rights to the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire. This was followed by the Land Code of 1858, which granted private title to agricultural land, and the Vilayat Law of 1864, which based the provincial administration on a balance between central control and local representation. The notable families of Aleppo, most notably the Jabiris and Mudarrisis, took advantage of the new laws to appropriate large tracts of arable land on the Euphrates and dominated the municipal and provincial councils.

The notable families supported the endeavors of the Sublime Porte to forge a new Western-inspired Ottoman identity based on the loyalty of all citizens to the territorial state. Their more reform-minded members joined the Young Ottoman opposition, which demanded representative government and fostered the love of the fatherland. In the Syrian provinces, the idea of supra-communal Ottomanism was accordingly supplemented by local patriotic feeling, which was fostered by the revival of Arab culture and disseminated through the fledgling private press. The Arab renaissance (nahda) was heralded by the Christians of Beirut and other Syrian cities as a counterbalance to the increasing communal strife, but it also appealed to Muslim notables, who were becoming concerned by the backward state of their society and were eager to revive and reform their faith. This reawakening enjoyed the blessing of prominent Ottoman statesmen such as Midhat Pasha, who was governor of Damascus from 1878 to 1880. One of the most ardent reformers in Aleppo was Ahmad al-Kawakibi, the father of Abd al-Rahman.

The Tanzimat culminated in the promulgation of the first Ottoman constitution and the subsequent convening of an elected parliament in 1876. But their implementation was mired in formidable obstacles, further aggravated by an economic crisis leading to bankruptcy in 1875 and military defeat by the Russians in the war of 1877–8. Thereupon, the new Sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), prorogued the parliament and established in its place his own personal autocratic rule. His regime continued and indeed accelerated the pace of reforms. Its measures in Aleppo, as recorded in its almanacs (salname), included pacifying the countryside, connecting the city by rail lines to Tripoli and Damascus, and introducing gas lights and streetcars in the streets. At the same time, Abdulhamid persecuted the Tanzimat statesmen and the Young Ottomans alike, and resuscitated the old political principles of Muslim supremacy and the unrestricted authority of the ruler. These were augmented by a pan-Islamic policy that emphasized his religious role as the Caliph of all Muslims. The new ideology was propagated to the masses through the popular Sufi brotherhoods, while all other opinions were silenced by draconian censorship.

The contradictions inherent in the Hamidian regime resulted in a split in the ranks of the Ottoman upper classes. In Aleppo, most senior notables, now joined by a new group of individuals promoted through the civil service, adjusted to the new social and religious conservatism of the time. A few of the lesser notables adhered to the more liberal and egalitarian aspects of the reform, while prosperous Christians and Jews began to leave for Egypt and increasingly for the West. Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi’s career and writings indicate that he was the most fervent representative of the liberal reformist group in Aleppo.

THE URBAN RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE

Despite its sizable population, and the rich endowments (awqaf) it inherited from previous epochs, Aleppo was not a major center of learning in the nineteenth century. As in other parts of late Ottoman Syria, the senior official religious posts in the city, especially those of the Hanafi mufti, who represented the dominant school of law in the Empire, and the naqib al-ashraf, the doyen of the Prophet’s descendants, were monopolized by a few families. The highest post, that of Chief Qadi, was reserved for nominees coming from Istanbul, though its powers were gradually curtailed by the new courts of the Tanzimat. Prominent among the local religious families of Aleppo were the aforementioned Jabiris and Mudarrisis, along with the Qudsis, the Rifa‘is and, in the early part of the century, the Kawakibis. The last-named family was spatially apart from the rest, being located in the mixed Jallum quarter in the southwest of Aleppo, while most other families were based in the overwhelmingly Muslim northeastern quarters of Farafira, Bayyad, and Dakhil Bab al-Nasr. Notable families of lesser status, particularly the Tirmaninis and the Hibrawis, held the position of Shafi‘i mufti, the principal school of law to which the local Syrian population adhered, and supplied the city with its foremost teachers and preachers. By the mid-eighteenth century, the senior ulama of Aleppo usually went elsewhere to complete their higher education. Most went to al-Azhar University in Cairo, while others attended one of the prestigious colleges of Damascus.

The ulama families of late Ottoman Aleppo constituted part of the civil notable class that began to consolidate in the city after 1760. Their power was enhanced during the era of the Tanzimat reforms, as many of them sat on the provincial and local administrative councils. Moreover, from the 1870s, as members of the senior families throughout Syria moved to more lucrative secular positions, those of lesser families who took their place were challenged by upstart men of religion, who were favored due to their submissive service to the government rather than their piety or learning. This deterioration was particularly noticeable in the case of Aleppo, which lost control of its two major religious positions. The post of naqib al-ashraf was transferred in 1873 to Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi (1850–1909), a humble Sufi claimant from a small town near Hama, who would soon be called by Sultan Abdulhamid II to Istanbul and made one of his close advisors. The post of Hanafi mufti remained in local hands for the next twenty-five years, but in 1898 was passed to another outsider from Hama, Muhammad al-Ubaysi (d. 1922), Abu al-Huda’s principal protégé in Aleppo. Ubaysi won this prestigious post at the expense of a member of the Tirmanini family, whereas Abu al-Huda secured his position at the expense of the Kawakibis.

While the fortunes of the late Ottoman ulama were determined within what Albert Hourani described as the politics of notables, their evolving religious and sociopolitical worldview was expressed primarily through the idiom of Sufi reformism. Most ulama in Aleppo from the second half of the eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth belonged to one or other of the Sufi brotherhoods that thrived in the city in this period. Like the upper ulama, the founders of these brotherhoods were usually invested outside Aleppo. The earliest was Ibrahim al-Hilali (1742–1822), founder in 1789 of the Qadiriyya-Khalwatiyya, which was connected to the rising civil notable class. During his studies at al-Azhar, Hilali merged his family Qadiri affiliation with the reformist Khalwati way. He and his numerous disciples and followers no doubt recognized the relevance of the Khalwati endeavor to give voice to the grievances of the Egyptian common people against the tyranny of the unruly Mamluk elite to their own situation under the ashraf–Janissary armed factionalism in Aleppo. The Hilali lodge in the Jallum quarter, where the Kawakibis also resided, remained a rallying point for reform-minded elements in the civil notable class of Aleppo throughout the nineteenth century. Among its illustrious frequenters we find the rising merchant family of the Tabbakhs, as well as Abd al-Rahman’s father Ahmad al-Kawakibi.

The Sufi reformist bent of the notable ulama of Aleppo was reinforced in the Tanzimat period by the arrival on the scene of the Khalidi branch of the Naqshbandiyya. This brotherhood was characterized by its combination of profound religious learning with active involvement in the affairs of society and firm support of the state. The first to introduce the Khalidiyya in Aleppo, Ahmad al-Hajjar (1776–1861), had followed the Qadiri-Khalwati way before moving to Damascus to become a disciple of the founder, Sheikh Khalid al-Baghdadi. Returning to Aleppo during the Egyptian occupation, he distinguished himself both as an active scholar engaged in the revival of mosques and religious schools (madrasas) and as intercessor with the governors on behalf of the local population. Of more consequence to the cause of reform was Hussein al-Bali (1819–55), a native of Gaza, who after his initiation into the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya was invited in 1849 to Aleppo by a group of Muslim notables. In the few years he lived in the city, Bali gathered around him a group of young admirers who embraced his fervent support of the Tanzimat state reforms and his tolerant attitude toward non-Muslims. One of them was Muhammad al-Hilali, the son of the founder of the Qadiriyya-Khalwatiyya; another was again Ahmad al-Kawakibi.

After 1871, both these Sufi brotherhoods, and the reformist spirit they embodied, were challenged by the more popular Rifa‘iyya, which was able to gain imperial favor through the agency of the aforementioned Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi. Several families in Aleppo were affiliated to this brotherhood: the Rifa‘is and Kayyalis, who belonged to the notable class and shared in its ascendency from the second half of the eighteenth century, and the Khayrallahs, who had recently settled in the city and established there a thriving lodge. The foremost figure in the brotherhood in Ale...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Photo: Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Making of a Syrian Islamic Intellectual
• 2. Experiments in Journalism
• 3. A Provincial Ottoman Notable’s Career
• 4. The Crisis of the Muslim World
• 5. A Blueprint for Reform
• 6. Against Tyranny
• 7. In the Eyes of Posterity
• Bibliography
• Index