Rashid Rida

Muhammad Rashid Rida (Arabic: محمد رشيد رضا, romanized: Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā; 1865–1935) was a prominent early Salafist Sunni Islamic scholar, reformer, theologian, and Islamic revivalist. As a Salafi scholar who called for the revival of hadith studies and a theoretician of an Islamic state, Riḍā condemned the rising currents of secularism and nationalism across the Islamic world following the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate and championed a global pan-Islamist program aimed at re-establishing an Islamic caliphate.

As a young hadith student who studied al-Ghazali and ibn Taymiyyah, Riḍā believed reform was necessary to save the Muslim communities, eliminate Sufist practices he considered heretical, and initiate an Islamic renewal. He left Syria to work with Abduh in Cairo, where he was influenced by Abduh's Islamic Modernist movement and began publishing al-Manar in 1898. Through al-Manar's popularity across the Islamic World, Riḍā became one of the most influential Sunni jurists of his generation, leading the Arab Salafi movement and championing its cause.

He was Abduh's de facto successor and was responsible for a split in Abduh's disciples into one group rooted in modernism and secularism and the other in the revival of Islam. Salafism, also known as Salafiyya, which sought the "Islamization of modernity," emerged from the latter.

During the 1900s, Riḍā abandoned his initial rationalist leanings and began espousing Salafi-oriented methodologies such as that of Ahl-i Hadith. He later supported the Wahhabi movement, revived works by ibn Taymiyyah, and shifted the Salafism movement into a more conservative and strict Scripturalist approach. He is regarded by a number of historians as "pivotal in leading Salafism's retreat" from the rationalist school of Abduh. He strongly opposed liberalism, Western ideas, freemasonry, Zionism, and European imperialism, and supported armed Jihad to expel European influences from the Islamic World. He also laid the foundations for anti-Western, pan-Islamist struggle during the early 20th century.