In August of 1921, Muhammad Rashid Rida—by then a writer and reformer of considerable renown—traveled to Geneva to attend the first Syro-Palestinian Congress. Intended to be a representative body for the Arab communities of the former Ottoman Empire at the home of the League of Nations, the Congress was convened by Shakib Arslan, a close friend and collaborator of Rida’s. It is remembered for its opposition to the mandate system then being implemented in Bilad al-Sham and Iraq, contesting as it did the racial hierarchy that underwrote theories of mandatory rule circulating among the colonial administrators, legal experts and internationalists of the day. According to such theories, Arab societies were underdeveloped in the domain of modern government, requiring a period of tutelage by a designated European power before they could attain independence. Drawing on recent work in the field of Arabic intellectual history that calls for greater attention to connections between the activism, political engagement, and scholarly productions of men like Rida, this paper examines selections from Tafsir al-Manar that dealt, in characteristic fashion, with the concerns of Rida’s day, commentary upon which was enfolded into his interpretations of early Islamic society as depicted in the Qur’an. Particularly at issue are the citational practices Rida developed in his dialogue with the works of the British colonial propagandist Benjamin Kidd, heir to a long tradition of post-Darwinian and post-utilitarian thinking on a wide array of topics. Among these were: the functionality of ethical-religious systems from a materialist perspective, the requisites of civilizational progress, the key fault-lines of human difference. In studying Rida’s appropriation of Kidd’s writings on ‘social efficiency,’ an econometric-sociological category of sorts, I show how reflection on British imperial concerns provided for both men an occasion to generalize about the central mechanisms of social cohesion. In doing so, both Rida and to some extent Kidd contributed to an international conversation taking place between the wars that generated rubrics for inter-civilizational comparison such as that embedded in the regulations of the mandate system. Other scholars have argued that theories of mandatory rule, as well as the broader discourses in terms of which they were justified, functioned as a means of legitimizing postwar imperial expansion. In attending to the encounter of Rida with Kidd's thought, I argue that such theories also furnished materials for the formation of a renegade sociology in the Islamic world and Global South.