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Shaykh Rashid Rida was born in a small village near Tripoli, in present-day Lebanon, in 1865. His family, who claimed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad, was reputed for its piety and religious learning, and his father officiated as imam.1 He received a traditional education, first in the local kuttab, then in Tripoli under Shaykh Husayn al-Jisr, a scholar of some renown. He soon felt the urge to put his knowledge and energies at the service of his community and started preaching at the local mosque. Rida also went to the coffeehouses where the men gathered to talk about religion and organized lessons for the women at the family home. However, the accidental discovery of several copies of al-'Urwa al-umthqà among his father's papers was to change the course of Rida's life. The periodical, edited from Paris by Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani2 and his collaborator Muhammad 'Abduh between March and October 1884, circulated widely throughout the Muslim world and in spite of its short life, was hugely influential. Rida avidly read his father's issues, then looked for the others (it turned out that Shaykh al-Jisr had them all) and copied them down. He felt that new horizons had opened before him, and wrote to al-Afghani, who at the time resided in Istanbul as a virtual prisoner of Sultan 'Abd al-Hamid, asking to become his disciple. But the Sayyid died in 1897, possibly poisoned, and the young man never had a chance to meet him.
Rida had more luck with Imam Muhammad Abduh. He met him when the older man, temporarily exiled in Beirut due to his involvement in the "Urabi revolt, visited Tripoli in the mid-1880s. He went back in 1894 and Rida was able to establish a relationship with him. After obtaining his diploma of ulema in 1897, Rida decided to join 'Abduh in Cairo. He suggested to 'Abduh the publication of a periodical fashioned after al-'Urwa al-wuthqà to spread his reformist ideas; a few weeks later, the first issue of al-Manar saw the light. Rida continued editing it - initially weekly, later monthly - until his death in 1935, and became known as sahib al-Manar (al-Manar's proprietor). The Shaykh wrote most of its contents, which included pieces on religious and social issues,...