From Defending Tawḥīd in Najd to Apostasy in the Cafes of Cairo: The Life of ʿAbdullāh al-Qaṣīmī

ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAlī al-Najdī al-Qaṣīmī, an enigmatic and ultimately tragic figure, was born in a village of al-Qaṣīm in the Najd region, most probably in 1325 AH (1907 CE), and died in 1416 AH (1996 CE). His forefathers had come to Najd with the army of Ibrāhīm Pasha (d. 1264 AH/1848 CE) when it invaded the region.

Childhood and Upbringing

He grew up in a harsh upbringing amid conditions of extreme poverty. When he was four years old, his father separated from his mother; his mother then remarried and moved with her new husband to a neighbouring village, whilst his father left to trade in pearls in Sharjah, and all news of him ceased to reach his son. The young ʿAbdullāh remained behind with his maternal grandfather, a man of severe poverty, who, by the time the boy was only five years old, had already set him to work in the livestock market and in agriculture (Wasella, al-Tamarrud ʿalā al-Salafiyyah, p. 23 et seq.).

Al-Qaṣīmī himself spoke of this period of his life, as recorded by Jürgen Wasella in the doctoral dissertation he prepared on him:

“All that I am aware of regarding the earliest days of my childhood is that I found myself with my maternal grandfather… whom human deprivation, natural deprivation, and other calamities had drained of everything… I hired myself out without wages, yes, without wages, working in the livestock market, in agriculture, and in gathering the very scarce wild desert plants of that environment… It was an aggression against humanity, and a degradation of it, that the people for whom and with whom I worked without wage should be called human beings, even as all their talk concerned Paradise and Hellfire, religion, faith and piety, and the fear of Allah, the Just, the Avenger, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate, the Most Forbearing, the Compeller.” (Wasella, p. 23 et seq.)

He worked as a hired labourer in these difficult circumstances in Najd until the age of ten, at which point he set out in search of his father, who had moved to the Gulf. After an arduous journey in which he endured considerable hardship, he succeeded in his aim and was reunited with him in Sharjah, where his father worked as a pearl broker, purchasing pearls from the diving vessels before exporting them to India. Alongside this seasonal trade, the father was also a preacher of Salafī orientation, and his life was governed by strictness, a discipline he imposed upon his son the moment the boy arrived seeking refuge with him (Wasella, p. 27).

Al-Qaṣīmī describes his shock at his father’s want of warmth and affection towards him:

“I arrived at where my father resided, and for the first time I saw, encountered, and experienced fatherhood… It was a harsh shock, beyond all reckoning… I found him devout to the point of boundless fanaticism; religion and religiosity had turned him to coarseness, or else he himself had turned religion and religiosity into coarseness… From the very beginning of our encounter, he began to treat me with a severity difficult to describe, indeed one feared and dreaded even to attempt to describe, all under the pretext that he wished to gather every branch of knowledge he knew, imagined, or had heard of, together with every refined quality of conduct he considered the height of perfection, and to compress it all into a single morsel for me to swallow at once, without tasting or chewing.” (Wasella, p. 27)

He received his education there under his father’s supervision until his father departed this life before the boy had reached puberty, having suffered for some years from a debilitating illness from the time of their reunion until his death (Wasella, p. 45, paraphrased).

Travels in Pursuit of Religious Learning

Following his father’s death, al-Qaṣīmī threw himself into study. He encountered a generous older man named ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Rāshid, upon whom the young ʿAbdullāh made a considerable impression. Ibn Rāshid resolved to accompany him on his quest for religious learning, and together they spent several months in Iraq at the school of Shaykh Muḥammad Amīn al-Shanqīṭī (d. 1351 AH/1932 CE), before travelling on to Delhi, where they enrolled at the Raḥmāniyyah school for two years. Al-Qaṣīmī would later describe this institution as of little consequence; all its teachers were Indian and delivered their lessons in Arabic (Wasella, p. 45). The pair then departed for Cairo, intending to enrol at al-Azhar University.

Al-Azhar: Between the Hammer and the Anvil

Al-Qaṣīmī arrived in Cairo in 1345 AH (1927 CE) and studied at al-Azhar for four years (Wasella, p. 70). At that time, al-Azhar was subject to fierce attacks upon its curricula and was riven by internal conflicts among its shaykhs, developments that left a deep impression upon the young al-Qaṣīmī and upon his intellectual formation. He was further affected by the prevailing cultural climate of Egypt during this period, which surged with powerful currents of Westernisation. In 1343 AH (1925 CE), ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq (d. 1386 AH/1966 CE) published his ill-fated work al-Islām wa-Uṣūl al-Ḥukm (Islam and the Foundations of Governance), and in 1344 AH (1926 CE) Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (d. 1393 AH/1973 CE) published his Fī al-Shiʿr al-Jāhilī (On Pre-Islamic Poetry). Al-Azhar’s institutional standing had already begun to weaken when, in 1343 AH (1925 CE), Prime Minister Saʿd Zaghlūl (d. 1346 AH/1927 CE) placed al-Azhar’s financial administration under the oversight of the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Endowments, while the Ministry of Education was granted considerable influence over its administration and senior appointments (Wasella, p. 70).

These upheavals occurred during the very period in which al-Azhar had taken up the cause of opposing the Salafīs and the call of the reviver of the age, Shaykh al-Islām Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1206 AH/1792 CE; may Allah have mercy upon him). This culminated in the writings of Shaykh Yūsuf al-Dujwī (d. 1365 AH/1946 CE), one of the scholars of al-Azhar, who openly espoused and vigorously defended the visitation of saints and seeking intercession through the righteous dead, urging recourse to them for intercession whilst denying that this constituted either major or minor shirk.

The Salafī Defender: Early Writings and the Expulsion from al-Azhar

In 1349 AH (1931 CE), al-Qaṣīmī published his first book, al-Burūq al-Najdiyyah fī Iktisāḥ al-Ẕalumāt al-Dujawiyyah (The Najdī Lightning Bolts in Sweeping Away the Darknesses of al-Dujā), a scholarly refutation of al-Dujwī in which he laid bare the weakness of his arguments, provoking a fierce reaction among those in charge of al-Azhar. The Shaykh al-Azhar at that time was Muḥammad al-Aḥmadī al-Ẕawāhirī (d. 1363 AH/1944 CE), himself also of Ṣūfī orientation.

Al-Azhar took a severe decision against him: his expulsion from the university. It issued the following statement:

“A book has been published attributed to a student from Najd at al-Azhar University, containing insults and abuse directed at a professor from the Council of Senior Scholars. Following this, the teaching staff commissioned one of the professors to conduct an investigation into the student regarding the slanders and insults the book contained. The professor submitted the findings of his investigation to al-Azhar’s board of administration, which, in its session held on 13 September 1932, issued a decision expelling the student from his affiliation with al-Azhar.” (Al-Azhar University, official statement, session of 13 September 1932)

This decision did not deter his resolve. He pressed on with his criticisms and authored two further books on the same theme: Shuyūkh al-Azhar wa-al-Ziyārah fī al-Islām (The Shaykhs of al-Azhar and Visitation in Islam) and al-Faṣl al-Ḥāsim bayna al-Wahhābiyyīn wa-Mukhālifīhim (The Decisive Verdict between the Wahhābīs and Their Opponents), in which he addressed the shaykhs of al-Azhar with even greater boldness and presented the Salafī creed with considerable force. In the writings of this period, al-Qaṣīmī appears as a committed Salafī, and among his most prominent supporters was Shaykh Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1354 AH/1935 CE), who attempted to defend and support him and undertook to print his books, stating that al-Qaṣīmī had, in truth, overwhelmed these scholars with the breadth of his learning and had put them to shame.

Continued Defence of Islam and the Salafī creed

Al-Qaṣīmī continued in his defence of Islam, undertaking to refute Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (d. 1376 AH/1956 CE), who had written a book on the life of the Prophet ﷺ in which he affirmed nothing of the Prophet’s ﷺ miracles save that of the Qurʾān itself. Al-Qaṣīmī engaged him with both scriptural and rational arguments; when Haykal’s book touched upon the incident of the splitting of the Prophet’s ﷺ breast, which Haykal had denied, al-Qaṣīmī expressed his astonishment, asking how, if any ordinary surgeon possesses the capacity to open the chest, this could be beyond the power of Allah ﷻ and His angels, an example of the strength of his rational arguments in debate.

He continued in his vigorous defence of the Salafī creed, explaining that it represented a spiritual revolution for the liberation of the human intellect. He called upon the Muslim nation to return to monotheism, to stand alongside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and to regard Mecca as a living homeland for all Muslims, calling further for the Kingdom to be supported by every available material and moral means, and for funds to be invested in projects within the land of the two sanctuaries so that it might attain the prestige and economic strength to fulfil its obligations towards the Muslims.

He reached the height of this period when he responded to the Syrian Shīʿī writer Muḥsin al-ʿĀmilī, who had written Kashf al-Irtiyāb fī Ittibāʿ Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (Removing the Doubt concerning the Following of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb), attacking the Salafī call revived by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (may Allah have mercy upon him). Al-Qaṣīmī rose against him as a lion rises, answering him in his substantial work al-Ṣirāʿ bayna al-Islām wa-al-Wathaniyyah (The Struggle between Islam and Paganism).

This book met with tremendous acclaim among the people of knowledge, to the extent that the Imam of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca at that time composed verses of fragrant praise for it, and it was related that some scholars said to King ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Saʿūd (d. 1373 AH/1953 CE; may Allah have mercy upon him): “Al-Qaṣīmī has paid the dowry of Paradise with this book of his.”

Following this book, and the acclaim it received among the people of knowledge, and the deep impression and wound it inflicted upon the people of innovation, al-Qaṣīmī felt a considerable measure of pride and self-satisfaction. Two thousand five hundred pages in defence of religion and faith, and in the demolition of paganism, were sufficient to make of him a shaykh regarded with approval, presented in gatherings, given prominence in assemblies, and granted precedence in councils.

The Turn: 1940 and the First Signs of Rupture

Yet this aura soon faded and dimmed, and al-Qaṣīmī returned to his former standing: neither advanced nor honoured. This produced in him a fierce reaction. In 1359 AH (1940 CE), he published Kayfa Ẕalla al-Muslimūn? (How Did the Muslims Fall into Disgrace?), setting out the causes of the Muslims’ decline and backwardness. Through this book, his open contradiction of his own previous positions became apparent for the first time, as he wrote of the peoples of the West:

“These peoples did not attain what they attained in this powerful and conspicuous domain, industry, invention, the sciences and the arts, except after they had set religion aside from every aspect of their social and individual life.” (Wasella, p. 171)

1946: Hādhihi Hiya al-Aghlāl and the Break with Tradition

In 1365 AH (1946 CE), al-Qaṣīmī startled the world with a disgraceful, thunderous bombshell: his book Hādhihi Hiya al-Aghlāl (These Are the Fetters), which he dedicated to King ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Saʿūd. Up to that point, he had continued to regard Ṣūfism, the veneration of the dead and of graves, and superstitious beliefs as responsible for the decline of the Muslim world. Yet in this same book, he called for the liberation of the individual from religious conceptions he held to obstruct the flowering of personal character, a position that drew him close to secularism and paved the way for his eventual turn against the Salafī creed, and subsequently against Islam altogether. He rose up against everything known of the Muslims, drawing no distinction between customs, traditions, superstitions, and matters of creed.

The book provoked a fierce uproar throughout the Muslim world, East and West. As soon as news of it reached King ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (may Allah have mercy upon him), he sent a telegram to Shaykh Fawzān al-Sābiq (may Allah have mercy upon him) requesting that he publicly declare, in the newspapers, his disavowal of al-Qaṣīmī (Wasella, p. 171). Many regarded the book as an assault upon the fundamental values of Islam, since it set religion in opposition to material success, a juxtaposition widely understood as an invitation to turn away from religion altogether. This prompted the senior scholar Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm (d. 1389 AH/1969 CE) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to call for the cleansing of this disgrace and to declare al-Qaṣīmī’s blood ḥalāl.

The eminent scholar of his age, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Nāṣir al-Saʿdī (d. 1376 AH/1957 CE; may Allah have mercy upon him), said:

“I came across a book authored by al-Qaṣīmī titled Hādhihi Hiya al-Aghlāl, and found it to contain the rejection of religion and propaganda calling for its rejection and total dissolution from it. This man was known for his learning and his alignment with the way of the righteous predecessors, and his previous writings had been filled with the championing of truth and refutation of innovators and disbelievers, by which he had attained a standing and good reputation among the people. Yet he gave the people no warning before startling them this year with the contents of this book, in which he abrogated and nullified everything he had previously written concerning religion. Having been, in his earlier books, numbered among the supporters of truth, he turned in this book into one of its greatest opponents, and the people were astonished at this strange reversal of all that had preceded it from him.”

He further stated:

“Whoever examines it and reflects upon it as it deserves will know that no one has written with greater force, nor with greater enmity and hostility towards the Islamic religion, seeking to repel people from it; that no foreigner or other has ventured what this man has ventured; that no slanderer has slandered religion as he has slandered it; that no one has rambled as he has rambled; and that no one has so openly declared impudence, mockery, and ridicule towards religion, its foundations, its teachings, its morals, and its adherents as he has declared in his mockery and ridicule. For it comprises the rejection of religion, opposition to it, and hypocrisy towards it in three respects that leave nothing of evil unaccounted for: an explicit and total dissolution from religion, and a complete departure from its creedal foundations, let alone its subsidiary branches; it stands as the greatest propaganda for disbelief and opposition to religion and its adherents; and it contains such ostentation and deception, dressed in the guise of championing religion, as amounts to one of the gravest forms of hypocrisy, scheming, and plotting against Islam and its people.”

Shaykh al-Saʿdī added that al-Qaṣīmī had absorbed from the enemies of religion every variety of doubt they had directed against it, doubts intended to call others to disbelief, and had added further matters they themselves had not reached: just as the heretical materialists and Pharaoh and his followers were intent upon denying the Lord of all the worlds entirely, and just as the heretical Unionists later claimed that all existence is one and the same in essence, so al-Qaṣīmī came with an approach more abhorrent still, claiming that there is no distinction between the Creator and the created, and that whoever distinguishes between them, among the prophets, messengers, and the people of religion, is mistaken and misguided

Shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Suwayḥ likewise authored a refutation titled Bayān al-Hudā min al-Ḍalāl fī al-Radd ʿalā Ṣāḥib al-Aghlāl (Clarifying Guidance from Misguidance, in Refutation of the Author of al-Aghlāl), stating in his introduction: “We have no need here to argue for the corruption of this man’s understanding and the frequency with which his views have shifted.”

Shaykh ʿAbdullāh ibn Yābis responded to him in a substantial work titled al-Radd al-Qawīm ʿalā Mulḥid al-Qaṣīm (The Sound Refutation of the Apostate of al-Qaṣīm), setting out the man’s disbelief and apostasy in detail. Ibrāhīm Āl ʿAbd al-Muḥsin, in the section on the events of the year 1366 AH in his historical work Tadhkirat Ulī al-Nuhā wa-al-Furqān, included an entry titled “An Account of the Apostasy of ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAlī al-Qaṣīmī,” in which he wrote:

“This man was from the people of Khabb, one of the villages of al-Qaṣīm. He then grew up in Egypt and acquired learning to the point that he championed the religion of Allah, and produced refutations of the people of misguidance who opposed and resisted the call of Shaykh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, until he tore away their veils of pretence. Yet he was self-admiring, and it occurred to him afterwards to expand upon matters of creed and to introduce things in which the marks of hypocrisy and corruption became apparent. Had he remained upon what he held at the outset, in the books he wrote in support of religion, such as al-Faṣl al-Ḥāsim, al-Burūq al-Najdiyyah, and al-Ṣirāʿ bayna al-Islām wa-al-Wathaniyyah, it would have been better for him; and indeed, a scent of hypocrisy could already be detected in his later writings. Then, in this year, he published his book al-Aghlāl, by which he stripped himself of the religion of Islam and cast off its yoke from his neck, naming the laws of Islam fetters that shackled the Muslims from progress, and presenting the way of disbelief favourably, having strayed from guidance, accusing Islam of deficiency and backwardness, launching an assault upon the Muslims, and preferring the way of disbelief and polytheism over the way of the Muslims.” (Āl ʿAbd al-Muḥsin, Tadhkirat Ulī al-Nuhā wa-al-Furqān, events of 1366 AH, cited in the secondary biographical source)

Al-Azhar, together with its scholars and religious bodies, likewise rose up in condemnation of this apostate renegade.

Notable Incidents from This Period

Several notable incidents are recorded from al-Qaṣīmī’s life during this period of rupture.

Ibn Yābis relates, on the authority of a trustworthy source who encountered al-Qaṣīmī, that he asked him where he had come from. Al-Qaṣīmī replied that he had come from the company of Hudā Shaʿrāwī (d. 1366 AH/1947 CE), the Egyptian feminist activist. The narrator asked, with astonishment, “Hudā Shaʿrāwī?” “Yes,” he replied. Asked what he had learned from her, he said, “I have learned from her a branch of knowledge unknown to the scholars of al-Azhar… how to break these fetters.” Asked which fetters he meant, he replied, “I mean the ḥijāb.” Al-Qaṣīmī thus reveals that he drew his ideas from a repugnant, dissolute woman.

Ibn Yābis further relates that a soldier who used to sit with al-Qaṣīmī came to him after al-Qaṣīmī had stirred doubt within his heart, and said:

“Does not every man wish good for his father? We said: certainly. He said: then how can it be that the people of Paradise will have whatever they desire, when the Companions know that their own fathers are in the Fire? Is this not a contradiction? We said to him: are you a believer? He said: yes. We asked: do you love Allah more than your father? He said: yes. We said to him: if Allah despises your father for his denial and disbelief, do you love what your Lord loves, or do you love your father? At this, he realised he had been deceived.”

The narrators reminded him of what Allah relates concerning Ibrāhīm (peace be upon him), and he was confounded and fell silent. He then raised further doubts with them, which they dispelled for him in that gathering, and he revealed that the one who had instilled these doubts in him was his teacher, al-Qaṣīmī. This unfortunate man later married the daughter of one of the brothers and sought to take her out into the street unveiled. Her father objected fiercely, whereupon the soldier said to him, “Shaykh al-Qaṣīmī says that Islam commands this and does not forbid it.” Her father cursed him, cursed al-Qaṣīmī, and separated his daughter from him.

In a further incident, al-Qaṣīmī attended a gathering with a friend, in the company of a number of junior students of religious knowledge, and raised the doubt that one could not claim the Qurʾān to be true merely because it had been transmitted through multiple, continuous chains of narration (tawātur), since the Torah and the Gospel were likewise so transmitted, and yet held to be false. This doubt found favour among these half-learned youths, until his companion rose to answer him, observing that the Torah had been burned and destroyed on two occasions, and that the Gospels had been composed long after the time of Christ, and so neither could be said to possess continuous multiple transmission, as the sensible among the Jews and Christians themselves attest; the Qurʾān, by contrast, is known by men and jinn alike to possess such transmission. The gathering applauded this decisive response. Al-Qaṣīmī, in his malice and rancour, refused to relent, raising the further objection that the Qurʾān’s transmission was itself impugned, citing Shīʿī books that say as much. His companion replied that this Shīʿī claim was made only after the generation of the Companions had passed away, breaking the scholarly consensus, a position to which no weight is given. Al-Qaṣīmī was reduced to silence.

A discussion also took place between al-Qaṣīmī and Muḥammad Mutawallī al-Shaʿrāwī (d. 1419 AH/1998 CE) – whom many scholars have said to be from the people of desires, in the presence of the Egyptian Prime Minister and a number of intellectuals, in which al-Qaṣīmī grew boastful and posed a series of provocative questions concerning the existence of Allah, before asking what would become, in Paradise, of the wives of Muslim men, given that men would have the right to relations with an unlimited number of women there. Al-Shaʿrāwī, upon seeing the signs of Allah being mocked, and recognising that his opponent held no faith in Allah, in Paradise, or in the Fire, simply left the gathering, judging that no benefit could come of debating him further.

Even Sayyid Quṭb (d. 1386 AH/1966 CE) – whom many scholars later criticised for his extreme views and innovations, could scarcely believe what he was hearing when he recounted his encounter with al-Qaṣīmī during this period:

“The man presented me with his book Hādhihi Hiya al-Aghlāl, and I was unable to read it until he came to visit me with a dear friend. My friend said to me: freedom of thought is in danger; the author of al-Aghlāl who stands before you, when he wrote his book with such boldness, met with fierce hostility and opposition from the reactionaries, and he is on the verge of a trial that will end in his execution. I grew enthusiastic at what my friend told me, and prepared myself to defend him. But as our conversation progressed, I began to detect an unwholesome odour in al-Qaṣīmī’s speech, an odour suggesting that something was amiss; for he sought to persuade me that the English were a reforming people, not colonisers, and that their methods in the East were nobler and more honourable than the methods of the Muslims when they had conquered other peoples, meaning, by this, that they were nobler than the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions. He went further still in his error, expounding at length, when he intimated that the Qurʾān permits destruction and mutilation. After he left, I hurried to his book, and what I read there appalled me; my feeling turned to deep revulsion. It became clear to me that the man was a hypocrite, striking a blow at the very heart of religion whilst concealing himself behind it and taking refuge in it. It became clear to me that this man carried a wicked and twisted call against religiosity, and he displayed open hostility towards Islam.”

The Causes of His Apostasy

Reactions varied considerably regarding the apostasy of this heretic and the analysis of its causes. The following causes may be identified, drawn from his biography and from the testimony of those who knew him.

Doubt, confusion, and excessive disputation. ʿAbdullāh ibn Yābis relates: “For close to fifteen years, al-Qaṣīmī had been disputing matters of self-evident religious truth, until he became known for the frequency of his disputation concerning necessary religious certainties, to the point that he would dispute, in some of his gatherings, even the existence of his own self. A close friend among the eminent scholars told me: this creature, al-Qaṣīmī, used to come to me some fifteen years ago and confess to me that doubts would overtake him when night fell; his body would grow feverish, and sleep would flee from his eyelids. He used to dispute with me concerning Allah and concerning the Prophet ﷺ, and my heart would fill with loathing and contempt for him. I would come to visit you and find him reading in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim with some of the brothers, and my soul would return saying: perhaps these are merely whisperings, not settled convictions.”

Arrogance and conceit. When he wrote al-Burūq al-Najdiyyah, he was filled with pride, self-admiration, and arrogance. Ibn Yābis relates that when their shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Bishr (may Allah have mercy upon him) examined this book, he recognised, through the insight granted by his learning, that its author had deviated from Islam. This arrogance and self-admiration are manifest throughout al-Qaṣīmī’s career and require no further argument; what his own pen set down in the introductions to his books stands as the clearest witness and proof of this when he wrote of the “wretched and defeated state of the Muslim world in his time, together with the strength and dominance of the secularist current over the cultural and religious life of Egypt during the 1920s and 1930s, a current advanced by figures such as Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq, and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, who raised the banner of assault upon religion under the pretext of reforming it, attributing the nation’s backwardness to its religion”.

The accusation of foreign collusion. Several researchers have pointed to this cause. Shaykh al-Saʿdī (may Allah have mercy upon him), the eminent scholar of al-Qaṣīm, said: “Many people entertain suspicions of him that are not farfetched, that he was bribed by certain anti-religious foreign propaganda agencies.”. Shaykh ʿAbdullāh ibn Yābis likewise wrote: “This creature was enticed by the coloniser, who bought him and then enriched him, and so he went on to attack this religion, its bearers, and its rulings in his book Hādhihi Hiya al-Aghlāl. Should someone ask: how can you claim they enticed and bought him, when you neither heard the enticement nor witnessed the purchase? We answer: yes, and success comes from Allah alone. We are among those who know Allah through His signs, and know His attributes through His actions in His creation, and we believe that He, exalted is He, has granted mankind a clear mirror, namely the intellect, by which they may distinguish truth from falsehood, and the genuine from the worthless. By this intellect we have grasped, as others have likewise grasped, that no one would dare to attack his own religion, homeland, and people, and praise the enemies of religion, without recompense or reward in return. We thus concluded that some manner of buying and selling had taken place. What else could it be?”

In summary, al-Qaṣīmī bears full personal responsibility for his own apostasy. His susceptibility to the overwhelming secularist current of his age, and his immersion in the corrupt milieu of Cairo that made it easier for him to respond defiantly to the harsh measures taken against him by religious institutions. His disbelief did not arise from intellectual conviction, nor from settled and firmly grounded positions; rather, all his statements on disbelief amount to nothing more than utterances charged with an immense weight of bitterness, devoid of evidence, a judgement borne out by the very condition in which he died, occupied at the end only with the recitation of the Qurʾān and speaking to no one (“Ṣadīq al-Kātib al-Saʿūdī ʿAbdullāh al-Qaṣīmī Yaftaḥ Khazāʾin Asrārihi,” al-Arabiya.net, 27 Dhū al-Ḥijjah 1437 AH/30 September 2016 CE).

Final Years and Later Writings

From the late 1940s onward, al-Qaṣīmī began to withdraw from public life, yet he did not abandon his ideas; rather, he pressed further, drawing closer to outright disbelief step by step through his writings from 1383 AH (1963 CE) onward. Having been expelled from Egypt, he settled in Lebanon. By this stage of his life, he had come to regard religious conviction in any human being as nothing more than a subjective psychological response, belief itself being no more than an emotional process. In his book Firʿawn Yaktub Sifr al-Khurūj (Pharaoh Writes the Book of Exodus), he states:

“All acts of worship and all prayers are nothing but conversations with the self and addressed to the self, conducted in ancient languages… All human discourse concerning deities, creeds and beliefs is nothing but discourse about the self, and about necessities, conducted in language that is neither truthful, nor intelligent, nor considered.” (al-Qaṣīmī, Firʿawn Yaktub Sifr al-Khurūj, p. 220)

In these words, which admit of no ambiguity, al-Qaṣīmī sank fully into the mire of disbelief, regarding faith and worship as nothing more than a psychological process undertaken by the soul for its own sake, rather than for the sake of Allah. He continued in this vein in further works, among them al-Kawn Yuḥākim al-Ilāh (The Cosmos Puts the Deity on Trial) and Yakdhibūn kay Yaraw al-Ilāh Jamīlan (They Lie So That They May See the Deity as Beautiful), among others.

Jürgen Wasella, in his study of al-Qaṣīmī, noted that his writings fall far short of constituting any coherent or rigorously structured philosophical system, and that his books amount to little more than repetitions of the same ideas. Wasella observes that al-Qaṣīmī follows a circuitous and meandering approach in both subject matter and style, dwelling at excessive length upon the presentation of his ideas without possessing the capacity to construct a sustained, coherent extended text; he frequently digresses from his subject, only to return to it several pages later (Wasella, p. 144).

He aspired, throughout this final period, to shine as brightly as the celebrated writers of his era, men such as Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid (d. 1383 AH/1963 CE), Salāmah Mūsā (d. 1377 AH/1958 CE), and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, drawing progressively closer to their line in opposing religion, yet going further still, surpassing them all; for whereas they stopped at the boundary of state secularism, he pressed on past it into complete disbelief.

Final Words and his Death

ʿAbdullāh al-Qaṣīmī rose as a learned and capable defender of tawḥīd, and he paid for that defence with considerable harm, expelled from al-Azhar for his rebuttal of Shaykh Yūsuf al-Dujwī (d. 1365 AH/1946 CE). He answered al-Dujwī in al-Burūq al-Najdiyyah, laid bare the weakness of his arguments, and pressed on undeterred, authoring two further works in the same defence. Shaykh Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā himself came to his aid, declaring that al-Qaṣīmī had overwhelmed these scholars with the breadth of his learning and put them to shame. He went on to refute Ḥusnayn Haykal’s denial of the Prophet’s ﷺ miracles, and continued in his vigorous defence of Salafism, calling the Muslim nation back to monotheism and to the support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Yet hearts lie between the Hands of the Most Merciful, who turns them however He wills, glorified is He. The very gifts that had elevated al-Qaṣīmī, his learning, his eloquence, his confidence in disputation, became in time the instruments of his ruin. Vanity and self-admiration had been present in him from early on: when he authored al-Burūq al-Najdiyyah, his soul was already filled with self-satisfaction and pride, to the point that he prefaced the book with verse in which he praised and flattered himself, a vanity his own pen bears witness to throughout his career.

In time, this same man who had once written in defence of Allah’s Oneness turned to write a book mocking it, his affair ending in apostasy after Islam, his companions becoming people of disbelief, of loose women, and of drink.

Strangely, His neighbour and close associate, Ibrāhīm ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, related that in his final days, in 1416 AH (1996 CE), as his illness intensified and he was taken to hospital, the last thing al-Qaṣīmī was occupied with was the recitation of the Qurʾān, and he spoke to no one (“Ṣadīq al-Kātib al-Saʿūdī ʿAbdullāh al-Qaṣīmī Yaftaḥ Khazāʾin Asrārihi,” al-Arabiya.net, 27 Dhū al-Ḥijjah 1437 AH/30 September 2016 CE).

My Muslim brother, my brother who seeks knowledge: do not be deceived by yourself, nor by your knowledge, nor by your religious observance, nor by your uprightness, for whoever Allah does not make firm will fall, and whoever Allah does not aid will collapse. We have, in what we observe around us, many examples: how many a flatterer, how many a fallen one, in the trials of this worldly life.

So ask Allah for steadfastness, and make this supplication every time you prostrate. May Allah grant me and you success in goodness, righteousness, and steadfastness upon His religion.

Reference

Al-Azhar University, official statement regarding the expulsion of ʿAbdullāh al-Qaṣīmī, session of 13 September 1932, cited in the secondary biographical source on al-Qaṣīmī’s life and writings.

Āl ʿAbd al-Muḥsin, Ibrāhīm, Tadhkirat Ulī al-Nuhā wa-al-Furqān, events of the year 1366 AH

Ibn Yābis, ʿAbdullāh, al-Radd al-Qawīm ʿalā Mulḥid al-Qaṣīm [The Sound Refutation of the Apostate of al-Qaṣīm]

Al-Qaṣīmī, ʿAbdullāh, Firʿawn Yaktub Sifr al-Khurūj [Pharaoh Writes the Book of Exodus], p. 220.

“Ṣadīq al-Kātib al-Saʿūdī ʿAbdullāh al-Qaṣīmī Yaftaḥ Khazāʾin Asrārihi” [Friend of the Saudi Writer ʿAbdullāh al-Qaṣīmī Opens the Vaults of His Secrets], al-Arabiya.net, 27 Dhū al-Ḥijjah 1437 AH / 30 September 2016 CE.

Al-Suwayḥ, Ibrāhīm, Bayān al-Hudā min al-Ḍalāl fī al-Radd ʿalā Ṣāḥib al-Aghlāl [Clarifying Guidance from Misguidance, in Refutation of the Author of al-Aghlāl], introduction, cited in the secondary biographical source.

Wasella, Jürgen, al-Tamarrud ʿalā al-Salafiyyah [Rebellion against the Salafī creed], translated by Maḥmūd Kabībū, Dār Jadāwil, Beirut.