Islamic Unity in Its Historical Trajectory: An Analytical Study from the 17th Century to the Modern Era

Abstract

The issue of Islamic unity and rapprochement between sects, as well as between the national and ethnic formations that make up the Islamic society, have attracted the attention of reformist religious scholars, thinkers, and Muslim writers throughout the various stages of Islamic history, especially in the last century (the fourteenth AH and the twenty AD), which witnessed, especially in its last decades, Great efforts and actions in this regard were represented in the establishment of bodies and institutions, or the holding of conferences, that sought and sought to achieve this goal, in addition to the calls and endeavors for approximation and unification that he called for, or carried out by Muslim scholars, thinkers, and writers, in the late last century, and the first half of The last century represented Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Imam Muhammad Abduh, and a number of senior scholars of Al-Azhar Sharif such as Sheikh Abd al-Majid Salim, Sheikh Muhammad Abu Zahra, and Sheikh Muhammad Shaltut, who issued his fatwa known as “permissibility of worshiping the Twelver Imami school of thought like all other Sunni schools of thought” and also Sayyid Mohsen al-Amin And Mr. Abd al-Hussein Sharaf al-Din in Lebanon, and Mr. Heba al-Din al-Shahristani and Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Kashif al-Ghita and Sheikh Muhammad Reda al-Muzaffar and Sheikh Abdul Karim al-Zanjani in Iraq and Mr. Mohsen al-Hakim al-Tabatabai and others. Accordingly, the efforts of these reformers, may God sanctify their secrets, pour into the achievement of social and political unity in the hope that these two units will pave the way to the great unity, meaning doctrinal unit y sooner or later. As for the first requirement, we will address the efforts of the reformers and scholars of the Holy Najaf Hawza and others in this field.