Islamic Reform Movements

Muhammad Abduh's reformist call to reject taqlid and return to the Qur'an and early practice, carried forward by his student Rashid Rida, is historically the closest precedent for the "strip away tradition, return to the text" argument. Historians including Albert Hourani and Henri Lauzière document that the movement did not converge on the renewal it promised, splitting instead into a rationalist-modernist strand and a literalist Salafism substantially shaped in the twentieth century.