Islam's Reformers .pdf

“There is a devil in every person. But this means a power whichbears the evil desires in man. It is an effect which is likened togenies.” That wretched man, who knew nothing about thebooks and knowledge of Islamic scholars, came forward withthe claim that it was necessary to follow only reason, knowledgeand science, refused to follow a madhhab and attempted toadapt all the religious knowledge to the scientific discoveriesand to philosophies of his time. Because he did not want toread the books of Islamic scholars and because he had notstudied science, he wrote books on religion according to hisshort sight and to what he had heard. This shows that he knewnothing of kalâm, fiqh and tasawwuf and that he had not tastedIslamic flavour. If he had understood the greatness of Islamicscholars and escaped the talons of his nafs, and if he hadcomprehended the inner nature of the matter and the spirit, hewould not have said such incongruous things.15. He wrote a commentary on the book Nahj al-balâgha byRadî, who was the brother of ’Alî Murtadâ’, a convert from theJewish religion. This book, which caused faction amongMuslims, had been commented on first by Ibn Abi ’l-Hadîd ’Abdal-Hamîd al-Madâ’inî ash-Shî’î and then by another Shî’ite,Maisum al-Bahrânî. Abduh’s commentary was printed in Beirutin 1301 (1885).48 - Sayyid Qutb, one of the religion reformers of thiscentury, too, announced his admiration for Ibn Taimiyya andMuhammad ’Abduh in almost all his books. In The Future isIslam’s, for example, he praised only the word ‘Islam’ but hedid not explain what he understood from this word or in whichmadhhab he was. On its ninety-fourth page, he wrote:“The spiritual leader struggling in the front row of those whoprotected Muslim countries against the Tatar invasions was IbnTaimiyya.”If he meant the empire of Jenghiz by Tatars, Ibn Taimiyyahad not been born yet when the Georgians (of Caucasus), thePersians and the Tatars in the army of Hulago, the notoriousunbeliever, burned and ruined Baghdad and put hundreds ofMuslims to the sword in 565 A.H. Ibn Taimiyya was born inHarrân in 661 A.H. It is written in the Turkish IslamAnsiklopedisi (volume V) that he was assigned to preach forjihâd against Mongols, and in 699, as a preacher, he was in thevictory won against Mongols in Shaqhab in the vicinity of- 194 -