Islam's Reformers .pdf

wrote: “Jamâl ad-dîn al-Afghânî was the chief of the masoniclodge in Egypt, which had about three hundred members,mostly scholars and state officials. After him, the leading masterMuhammad ’Abduh became the chief. ’Abduh was a leadingfreemason. No one can deny that he has spread the masonicspirit in Arab countries.” [1]Seeing the reforms made by Muhammad ’Abduh, manypeople suppose that he was an Islamic scholar. The Ahl as-Sunna scholars have written answers to his articles and torn uphis mask. For example, Elmalılı Hamdi Beg, in his interpretationof the sûrat al-Fil, displays some of his heresies, which can beoutlined as follows:1. Thinking that the wisdom and the religion were differentfrom each other, he claimed to be the first man to unite them.2. He said that the Islamic scholars before him had notstudied logic, mathematics, history and geography, that it hadbeen deemed as a sin to learn sciences, and that he wouldintroduce these sciences into Islam. He denied that, for manycenturies, these had been taught in every madrasa and thatthousands of books had been written in these fields, thus hetried to put an end to the teaching of the Ahl as-Sunna booksand to spread the irreligious propagandas written by theenemies of Islam under the name of philosophy in Muslimcountries. When the professors of Jâmi’ al-Azhar raisedobjections to these propagandas, he stigmatized them with“retrogression and enmity against knowledge, science andlogic”.3. He attacked against marrying four women in the officialpaper in 1297/1880.4. He said that, before him, thousands of Islamic scholarshad introduced into Islam things which had nothing to do withIslam, that they had gone wrong in understanding the Qur’ânand Hadîth, and that he had been correcting them.5. In his book Islam and Christianity, he wrote that allreligions were the same with the exception of some minorfaçade differences, and recommended that Jews, Christiansand Muslims support one another. He wrote to a priest inLondon, “I expect that the two great religions, Islam and[1] Dâ’irat al-ma’ârif al-masoniyya, p. 197, Beirut, 1381/1961.- 191 -