Antun arrived in Alexandria to study journalism, upholding a secular identity, while Rida, a Muslim, became a disciple of Muhammad Abduh.
[4] Antun's mother and sisters came to live with him in Alexandria after Ilyas's death, where he was the sole provider for the family until Rose began to teach.
[21] Possible reasons for the irregularity of his publications was that Antun wrote, edited, printed and even mailed out his magazines all on his own, in addition to keeping track of the financial records with no assistant.
Farah and his sister Rose also published a women's magazine called al-Sayyidat wa al-Banat (Arabic: The Ladies and Girls) between 1903 and 1906 in Alexandria.
Having defeated the crusaders in 1187, and become sovereign and founder of the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt and Syria, Salah al-Din (Saladin) has been for a century the object of an intense glorification in the Arab world.
Antun was a Syrian Christian who presents Saladin as the champion of a just jihad against the Crusaders and as a faithful upholder of the virtues of wisdom, determination, and frankness, calling on the peoples of all Arab countries to unite against Western imperialists.
The refusal of Antun's Saladin to become embroiled in quarrels within Europe had obvious echoes in World War I and caused the play to be censored by the British authorities in Egypt.
[28] Because he was a Christian living during the late Ottoman Empire, his family was subjected to dhimmi restrictions, such as extra taxes, legal disadvantages,[30] and sometimes limited job opportunities.
[31] Many Orthodox Christians in Syria desired to live among Muslims in a secular state, and with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, this opened the door to Syrian intellectuals calling for exactly that.
[32] Abduh had also read Western social thinkers like Renan, Rousseau, Spencer and Tolstoy, just as Antun, but coming to different conclusions on what that meant for Arab thought.
[33] Abduh believed that Islam needed to be central to Middle Eastern society and its core principles and tenets never to be comprised, while also remaining fluid and selectively borrowing from the West.
[33] The debate between the two was sparked by an article by Antun on the biography and thoughts of the Muslim medieval philosopher and jurist Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), in which he argued that Islamic orthodoxy had hindered the spirit of free intellectual inquiry.
[36] Antun also argued the part of Greek and some Muslim philosophers who regarded God as only an initial actor in the course of the universe and creator of natural laws, who then left mankind to run their own lives and explore as they so desired.
Abduh refuted Antun's claim that Islamic theology supported the belief that the unrestricted will of God was directly responsible for every event in the universe.
[39] Similar to the Mu'tazili argumentations, Abduh argued that in Islam regularities of the universe, human reason or logic and secondary causes were not necessarily rejected.
[41] In addition to that, they also believed in educating women in order to improve Middle Eastern societies through the home and through schools, and that social reform would be more productive for change than political activism.
Despite this difference, Sheehi states, they both maintain the same epistemological reference points for Arab social renewal that poses a Western inflected notion of progress as the teleological endpoint of both of their arguments.