Farah Antun

Phases of ''Al-Jami'ah'' ''Al-Jami'ah was created by Antun in 1899 in Alexandria, after the Alexandria branch of Al-Ahram'' closed, and disappeared around 1910 in Cairo. Possible reasons for the irregularity of his publications was that Antun wrote, edited, printed and even mailed out his magazines all on his own, in addition to keeping track of the financial records with no assistant. New York was the exception to this, as Antun had the full-time help of his brother-in-law, Niqula Haddad. Other publications Farah and his sister Rose also published a women's magazine called al-Sayyidat wa al-Banat (Arabic: The Ladies and Girls) between 1903 and 1906 in Alexandria. ==Political views==

Saladin The great Muslim hero of the Crusades was a Kurd, Saladin (1138–93). Having defeated the crusaders in 1187, and become sovereign and founder of the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt and Syria, Salah al-Din (Saladin) has been for a century the object of an intense glorification in the Arab world. Farah Antun's play Sultan Saladin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1914) illustrates how the historical figure of Saladin came to be presented as a prophet of Arab nationalism. Antun was a Syrian Christian who presents Saladin as the champion of a just jihad against the Crusaders and as a faithful upholder of the virtues of wisdom, determination, and frankness, calling on the peoples of all Arab countries to unite against Western imperialists. The refusal of Antun's Saladin to become embroiled in quarrels within Europe had obvious echoes in World War I and caused the play to be censored by the British authorities in Egypt. Secularism and Western influence A distinct view of Farah Antun is that one is great in spite of their education, not because of it. In examples of this, he brings up men such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazali, all of whom, in his view, would have achieved more impressive accomplishments had they had the resources of 19th-century French education. And although he was not interested in the religious aspects of Islamic culture, he often quoted or referenced Muslim historians like Ibn Khaldun, as well as al-Ghazali, in "Al-Jami'ah". He also argued that Ibn Rushd was the first to discover the principle of "survival of the fittest," not Darwin. Antun largely rejected Arabic heritage, whether Muslim or Christian, as he considered it irrelevant to his interests and needs. Antun's only foreign language was French and his experience in French was limited to 18th- and 19th-century literature. When reading French critique of Islam, he tended to agree with their criticisms. He was largely affected by French intellectuals and philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire. and sometimes limited job opportunities. Many Orthodox Christians in Syria desired to live among Muslims in a secular state, and with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, this opened the door to Syrian intellectuals calling for exactly that. ==Debate with Abduh==

Antun's debate with Muhammad Abduh in 1902 to 1903 was the high point of his career, yet may have been considered only a small event in the life of the Mufti of Egypt, Muhammad Abduh. Abduh had also read Western social thinkers like Renan, Rousseau, Spencer and Tolstoy, just as Antun, but coming to different conclusions on what that meant for Arab thought. Abduh believed that Islam needed to be central to Middle Eastern society and its core principles and tenets never to be comprised, while also remaining fluid and selectively borrowing from the West. The debate then took off when Abduh published a rebuttal to Antun's article of Ibn Rushd titled al-Manar and Antun decided to respond in an effort to catapult his inconspicuous career into the public sphere, hopefully to also receive attention for "al-Jam'iah". Antun focused solely on compiling responses to Abduh for three months, studying Islamic classics for the first time day and night. Because these beliefs basically implied that every event in the universe is a result of God's exercise of free will, Antun felt that they discouraged scientific and philosophical research of the universe. He emphasized that all religions were based upon the same principles, only differing on minor issues and so disliked to debate over the polemics between them, and that science and religion were working towards the same goal, the betterment of mankind. As long as both science and religion stayed in their own realms, there would be no conflict between them. Antun called for religion, a personal matter, to be separate from science and reason. Abduh refuted Antun's claim that Islamic theology supported the belief that the unrestricted will of God was directly responsible for every event in the universe. Similar to the Mu'tazili argumentations, Abduh argued that in Islam regularities of the universe, human reason or logic and secondary causes were not necessarily rejected. Science and philosophy were wholly a part of Islam, a religion of reason and faith. He equated the Western concept of natural laws of the universe with the '"sunnah" of God.' In addition to that, they also believed in educating women in order to improve Middle Eastern societies through the home and through schools, and that social reform would be more productive for change than political activism. The details of both of these ideas, however, were very different for Antun and Abduh. Stephen Sheehi states that this debate marks a central theme in the writing of nahdah intellectuals. The difference in their overall goals was that Abduh desired to keep Islam as the centerpiece of modern society, while Antun preferred religion to be separate from society and, overall, science and intellectual thought. Despite this difference, Sheehi states, they both maintain the same epistemological reference points for Arab social renewal that poses a Western inflected notion of progress as the teleological endpoint of both of their arguments. On the other hand, according to Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour and Umran Khan in their new translation of Abduh's work comparing Christianity and Islam, Abduh aptly refuted Antun's point that the West was more tolerant of intellectual inquiry than Islamic civilization through a cogent historical argument, tracing the persecution of free thinkers by the Catholic and Protestant Church and Europe's religious wars. Moreover, in Abduh's own comparison of the two religions, he equally criticized Christian and Muslim populations, as needed, for failing to bring about modern reform. However, Antun did not engage in such a sophisticated or nuanced historical argument and followed Renan in blaming Islamic sectarianism for a greater portion of the world's ills than Christianity. Whereas Donald Reid has implied that Abduh misunderstood what Antun meant, Despite Reid's opinion, Abduh demonstrated an astute recognition that liberal secularism colluded with Western religion in a two-pronged imperial attack. Such a ploy worked to distance Muslim populations further from their religious foundations and diminish Islam in the spiritual life of the colonized Muslim world at the turn of the twentieth century. ==References==