Historical Movements & Reform (Tajdid)

Tajdid means “renewal” — the idea that Islamic scholarship and practice periodically need figures who refresh the community’s understanding and application of the religion, correcting drift back toward the Qur’an and authentic Sunnah rather than introducing something new. The concept has a direct basis in a hadith graded sahih by Al-Albani: “Allah will raise for this community at the end of every hundred years the one who will renovate its religion for it.” This single hadith has shaped how later Muslim scholars described major turning points across Islamic intellectual history.

Scholars have traditionally applied the term “mujaddid” (renewer) to figures at different points in Islamic history — for example, the Umayyad caliph ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz is widely cited as an early candidate for the first Islamic century, credited with restoring earlier standards of governance and, significantly, formally commissioning the written collection of hadith. Other names commonly proposed for later centuries include al-Shafi’i (systematising fiqh methodology) and al-Ghazali (whose work bridged theology, law, and spirituality at a time of real intellectual fragmentation). It’s worth being clear that the specific list of who counts as a mujaddid in a given century is itself a matter of scholarly opinion, not a settled roll call — the hadith establishes the concept of periodic renewal, not an agreed name for every century.

From the 18th century onward, the idea of renewal took on new, more contested forms as the Muslim world faced colonisation, and later, rapid social and technological change. Different movements answered “what does renewal mean now?” in genuinely different, sometimes opposing ways: some called for a return to the practice of the earliest generations (the Salaf) as the standard for correcting later accretions; others argued for reinterpreting Islamic law and institutions to engage directly with modern science, education, and governance; others focused on reviving spiritual practice and popular religious education. These movements often disagreed sharply with each other, and still do — on questions of theology, method, and political strategy alike.

This page deliberately does not attempt to rank, endorse, or adjudicate between these later movements, or to characterise any one of them as the true continuation of tajdid. That kind of judgement is a genuinely live, often heated debate among Muslims themselves, shaped as much by politics and history as by theology — not something a general reference page should settle. What can be said plainly is that the underlying concept, periodic renewal in response to real conditions, has real prophetic grounding, and has been claimed, in very different ways, across the whole span of Islamic history.