Rashid Ridā's Legacy

125 Rida accused secularists of immorality and treason;126 al-Qaradawi portrays them as an elite rejected by the people and wonders who is behind them.127 For Rida, Christian Ethiopia's independence proved that the western colonial powers targeted Muslim lands;128 for al-Qaradawi, western support for Ethiopia against Eritrea was one of the examples that proved the fallacy of claims that the west is interest-driven, not anti-Islam.129 Despite his criticisms of Mu'awiya, Rida idealized the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates;130 al-Qaradawi consecrated his book Our Calumniated History to defend them against their detractors.131 Both attributed the end of the caliphate to a Jewish conspiracy,132 and contrasted the tolerance of the Qur'an with the bloodthirstiness of the Torah,133 and so on. Rida's change of direction was reinforced by the traumatic experience of colonialism and post-colonialism, the military defeats that led to the loss of Palestine and the invasion of other Arab territories, repression in the hands of autocratic regimes that claimed to stand for "foreign" ideologies like socialism or liberalism, a hasty and unequal modernization that has not fulfilled its promises but has led to disenchantment and alienation.