The Refutation of the Materialists

Introduction

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani wrote the treatise in Persian in 1881 in Hyderabad, during a stay in India. Its target is the naychiri (“naturalists”), a term aimed above all at the modernising movement of Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Afghani argues that materialist doctrines from Democritus to Darwin, by denying God and the hereafter, undermine the virtues of shame, trustworthiness and truthfulness on which human societies rest; he also counts socialists, communists and nihilists among them. Religion appears here above all as a social and civilising force. Muhammad Abduh translated the text into Arabic in the 1880s, and it became one of the best-known texts of Islamic reform thought.

Connections

Criticizes

• On the Origin of Species1859 · Charles Darwin