Mohammed Abduh and Rashid Rida
After Afghani’s departure from Egypt, his pupil, Mohammed Abduh, was inexplicably named the chief editor of the official British-controlled publication of the Egyptian government, the Journal Officiel. Working under him was fellow-Freemason, Saad Zaghul, later to be founder of the Wafd nationalist party. In 1883, Abduh joined Afghani in Paris, and then went to London.
In Paris and London, Abduh assisted Afghani in administering a journal in Paris, called Al Urwah al Wuthkah, or the “Indissoluble Bond”, also the name of a secret organisation he founded in 1883. Among the members of Afghani’s circle in Paris were Egyptians, Indians, Turks, Syrians, North Africans, as well as many Christians and Jews, and Bahais expelled from the Middle East.
Like his teacher, Abduh was associated with the Bahai movement, which had made deliberate efforts to spread the faith to Egypt, establishing themselves in Alexandria and Cairo beginning in the late 1860s. Abduh had met Abdul Baha, who became leader of the Bahai’s after his father’s death, and agreed with his one-world-religion philosophy. Remarking on Abdul Baha’s excellence in religious science and diplomacy, Abduh said of him that, “[he] is more than that. Indeed, he is a great man; he is the man who deserves to have the epithet applied to him.”96
Abduh was known for his “reformist” views about Islam. But in How We Defended Orabi, A.M. Broadbent declared that, “Sheikh Abdu was no dangerous fanatic or religious enthusiast, for he belonged to the broadest school of Moslem thought, held a political creed akin to pure republicanism, and was a zealous Master of a Masonic Lodge.”97
Like the Ismailis before him, he would advance his students progressively into deeper levels of heresy. To the higher initiates, he would reveal the doctrines of the Scottish Rite and the philosophy of one-world government. However, those Abduh deemed were much more disposed, he would introduce to an officer of British intelligence from London.
From 1888, until his death in 1905, Abduh regularly visited the home and office of Lord Cromer. In 1892, he was named to run the administrative Committee for the Al Azhar mosque and university, the most prestigious educational institution in Islam, and the second oldest university in the world. From that post, he reorganised the entire Muslim system in Egypt, and because of Al Azhar’s reputation, much of the Islamic world as well.
In 1899, Lord Cromer made Abduh the Grand Mufti of Egypt. He was now the chief legal authority in Islam, as well as the Masonic Grand Master of the United Lodge of Egypt. Lord Cromer was an important member of England’s Baring banking family which had grown rich of the opium trade in India and China. His motive in making Abduh the most powerful figure in all of Islam was to change the law forbidding interest banking. Abduh then offered a contrived interpretation of the Qur’an to create the requisite loophole, giving British banks free reign in Egypt. Of Abduh, Lord Cromer related, “I suspect my friend Abduh was in reality an agnostic,” and he said of Abduh’s Salafi reform movement that, “They are the natural allies of the European reformer.”98
The Salafi movement then became allied with the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia through another Freemason, Mohammed Rashid Rida, who, after the death of Afghani in 1897 and Abduh in 1905, assumed the leadership of the Salafis. Rida had become a member of the Indissoluble Bond at a young age. He was promoted through Afghani’s Masonic society through his reading of Al-Urwah al Wuthkah, which he later confessed was the greatest influence in his life. Rida had never met Afghani, but in 1897 he had gone to Egypt to study with Mohammed Abduh. Though Rida did not share his master’s opinions about the Bahai movement, it was through his influence that the Salafi movement became firmly aligned with the State of Saudi Arabia.
Footnotes:
96 Cole, Juan R. I. “Rashid Rida on the Bahai Faith: A Utilitarian Theory of the Spread of Religions”, Arab Studies Quarterly 5, 3 (Summer 1983): 278.
97 Raafat, Samir. “Freemasonry in Egypt: Is it still around?” Insight Magazine, March 1, 1999
98 Goodgame, Peter. The Muslim Brotherhood: The Globalists' Secret Weapon.
