Rashid Rida

Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) was one of the most influential Muslim reformist scholars of the modern Arab world. He was born in the village of al-Qalamun, near the city of Tripoli in Ottoman Syria (present-day Lebanon); sources give his birth as 23 September 1865, with one giving 17 October 1865 — the year is secure, the exact day disputed. After early schooling in his village and an Ottoman state school, he studied at the National Islamic School of Tripoli under Shaykh Husayn al-Jisr, who blended traditional religious learning (hadith and fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence) with modern subjects, and earned a scholar's diploma in 1897.

That year Rida emigrated to Cairo, drawn to the circle of the reformer Muhammad Abduh, himself a student of the activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. (Rida had hoped to study with al-Afghani directly, but al-Afghani remained in Istanbul until his death in 1897; sources disagree on whether Rida traveled there, and most reference works have him moving directly from Syria to Egypt without ever meeting al-Afghani.) In 1898 Rida founded al-Manar ("The Lighthouse"), a journal he edited until his death, which carried reformist ideas across the Arab world, North Africa, and as far as Southeast Asia. Through it he co-produced an influential, incomplete Qur'an commentary (Tafsir al-Manar).

Scholars generally describe Rida as beginning within Abduh's rationalist, modernizing reform and later moving toward a more text-centered Salafi outlook, including sympathy for the emerging Saudi state and Wahhabi movement and a noted concern with restoring the caliphate. The exact character of this shift is debated among historians. He died on 22 August 1935, reportedly of a heart attack, on the road back to Cairo after seeing off King Ibn Saud at Suez.