A Scene at Al-Azhar, 1925:
In mid-August 1925, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Islamic world’s most influential educational institution, witnessed a defining moment in the history of modern political and religious thought. Into the office of the Council of Senior Scholars, presided over by the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Mohammed al-Jizawi, walked a 37-year-old scholar: Sheikh Ali Abdel Raziq.
He opened the door and greeted them: “Peace be upon you.”
No reply came from the sheikh or any of the council’s 24 members. That heavy silence, defying even the simplest religious duty to return a greeting, was more than a slight. It was a sign of what lay ahead. This was not to be a debate, but a trial: a reckoning with both a man and his ideas.
Abdel Raziq sat facing the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, who hurled direct accusations, condemning Abdel Raziq’s book, Islam and the Foundations of Governance, as a “book of error and heresy” and a “book of unbelief.” Though Abdel Raziq carried a legal memorandum asserting that the council had no authority under Al-Azhar law to try him, his protest was brushed aside. He was asked to read the memorandum aloud, but it changed nothing. The episode exposed the essence of the struggle: this was not a free exchange of ideas but an assault, on both an idea and the man who embodied it, where judgments had already hardened into official rulings.
The Book That Shook the Institution
Ali Abdel Raziq was no ordinary figure. A graduate of al-Azhar with an Alimiyya degree, then equivalent to a bachelor’s, though today it corresponds to a PhD in sciences and humanities, the highest degree a scholar can obtain at the institution. he had also studied in Europe for three years before returning to serve as a Sharia judge in the personal status courts established by reformer Mohammed Abduh. He came from a prominent Egyptian family with deep influence in politics, culture, and religion.
His book, Islam and the Foundations of Governance, the product of a decade of work, was not a sudden reaction to the Ottoman caliphate’s fall in 1925, but the culmination of a broader vision that challenged entrenched dogma. It became the first “modern” text to argue that the caliphate was not intrinsic to Islam, and that governance was a temporal, civil matter wholly outside the scope of religion.
Abdel Raziq’s central argument came in his conclusion:
“The truth is that Islam is innocent of the caliphate practiced by Muslims … The caliphate is not among the religious duties, neither is the judiciary nor any other functions of rule and state. These are purely political institutions with which religion has nothing to do. Islam neither recognized nor rejected them, commanded nor forbade them, but left them to us to decide through reason, the experience of nations, and the rules of politics.”
Political and Religious Storm
The publication of Abdel Raziq’s book unleashed a storm of political and religious backlash in Egypt. The campaign against him went far beyond intellectual critique, descending into personal attacks led by Al-Azhar’s establishment, traditionalist currents, and Egyptian King Fuad.
This rejection was not purely theological but a fusion of politics and religion. King Fuad aspired to inherit the caliphate after its collapse in 1924, an ambition Britain also toyed with as it sought a successor to the Ottoman sultan, with Egypt considered a prime candidate. Abdel Raziq’s argument struck directly at this dream by proving the caliphate was not a pillar of Islam. Al-Azhar, eager to please the king, joined the assault.
On the religious front, Abdel Raziq was accused of unbelief, heresy, and immorality. He was branded an agent of the West and of crusaders, his ideas dismissed as copied from hostile orientalists. In the end, the Council of Senior Scholars delivered its verdict: stripping him of his degree and expelling him from Al-Azhar, punished not for misconduct, but for ideas.
At its core, the assault was not merely theological. It was a war on the very notion of the nation-state taking shape in Egypt, an idea Abdel Raziq embodied when he declared that governance belonged to the world, not to religion.
Roots of Political Islam
The assault on Abdel Raziq had consequences that reached far beyond his personal punishment. It convinced anti-secular forces of the need for strong organizations to carry forward the project of restoring the caliphate. The clash marked a turning point: the struggle moved from intellectual debate to organizational mobilization, laying the foundations of what would later be called political Islam.
In 1926, the Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya association was established to represent the Wahhabi current in Egypt. Two years later, in 1928, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Both movements advanced the same slogan: “Islam is religion and state,” and renewed the call to restore the caliphate, a direct rebuttal to Abdel Raziq’s thesis.
The alignment between Al-Azhar’s establishment and these rising Islamist movements –Brotherhood and Salafi alike – revealed a common front against the idea of a civil state, united under the banner that “Islam is religion and state.”
A Century Later
The battle over Islam and the Foundations of Governance did not end with Abdel Raziq’s death. It became, in effect, a daily battle for a hundred years. Those who attacked his book and spread the slogans “Islam is religion and state” and “sovereignty belongs to God” bear responsibility for all the terrorism we live with today.
In a historical irony, the very institution that condemned Abdel Raziq and branded him an infidel later embraced his ideas. In 1947, Al-Azhar’s Council of Senior Scholars reinstated his degree, and he went on to serve as minister of endowments. Even more striking, Al-Azhar’s current sheikh, Ahmed El-Tayeb, has openly declared: “The caliphate is not a pillar of Islam nor one of its fundamentals,” the very position for which Abdel Raziq was expelled and denounced a century earlier.
That it took a hundred years for the religious establishment to acknowledge ideas it once used as grounds to destroy one of its own reflects both the deep resistance to reform and the painfully slow pace of intellectual change within such institutions. Yet it also marks a delayed vindication of Abdel Raziq’s vision, showing that fundamental ideas do not die, even if suppressed for a time.
Ultimately, the struggle that began in 1925 was never a passing episode. It is an enduring contest over the very nature of state and society: a choice between nation and caliphate, between a civil state grounded in reason, human experience, and political rules, and the absolutist model of “God’s sovereignty” that drives societies toward tyranny and violence.
