Reporting the World to the Umma: Muhammad Rashîd Ridâ's al-Manâr, Panislam, and “The Interests of Humanity”

This paper traces the changing conceptual coordinates of the umma in the writings of one of the most important and influential, modern Muslim thinkers and reformers. When Syrian-Egyptian publicist Muhammad Rashîd Ridâ (1865-1935) founded his journal al-Manâr in colonial Cairo in 1898, his declared goals had been “to work for the unification of the Muslims of the world”, i.e., to guide “the faithful to the ways of progress and civilization”. By reporting news of the world, publishing translations, editing traditions, providing moral guidance through didactic pieces, engaging his contemporaries into social and political debates and polemics, critical letters to the editor and the issuance of print fatwas, the Journal al-Manâr realized many of its goals. His inspiration for launching this project and his emphasis on founding or co-founding of numerous associations and a school for guidance and propaganda (madrasat al-da’wa wa-l-irshâd, 1912) stemmed from his concern to counter the many American and European missions that sprouted in Muslim lands under Ottoman and colonial rule. Yet he faced additional obstacles. Realizing that his journal could not surmount the censorship in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, he began to target an audience beyond the old Islamic core, in the Americas, Africa, South and South-East Asia. As this paper will show, it is through this experience, that Ridâ came to the conclusion that the “Empire of Islam” lay outside the confines of the Ottoman Empire, i.e, within the world itself, where it would have to not only work for the realization of the interests of the umma (masâlih al-muslimîn) but also to contend with concerns of humanity itself (masâlih al-bashar).