Al-Afghani and Abdu believed that the only way for the Muslim world to throw off the yoke of colonialism and push back against Western cultural hegemony was through a revival of Islam. These “modernists,” as they were called, blamed the clerical establishment—the ’ulama—for the sorry state of Muslim society. They sought to challenge the clergy’s self-proclaimed role as the sole legitimate interpreters of Islam by advocating an individualized, unmediated, and highly personal reading of the Qur’an and the Hadith (the collected sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad).
