From the Ruins of Empire Read online

  Al-Afghani was not alone in moving on from piecemeal reforms and constitutionalism to stressing the need for a strong Islamic centre that could beat back the encroaching West. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the tone was changing all across the Muslim world as it took stock of its own helplessness against an increasingly aggressive West. Modernization, it was clear, hadn’t secured the Ottomans against infidels; on the contrary, it had made them more dependent. Nor had it saved Egypt from buckling to British pressure – indeed, its globalized economy had made Egypt a subservient client state.

  The failure of these first attempts at reform under European auspices created resentful new alliances between landowners, small entrepreneurs and bazaar merchants, creating a new sense of regional identity. It also first pushed many Muslim thinkers to ideas of nationalism that had emerged from the rivalries of nineteenth-century Europe.

  Post-Revolutionary France had vividly demonstrated how the impersonal institutions of the state that overruled older and parochial identities and loyalties could bind a country’s citizenry into a resilient unit. One after another, European nations had followed this model, partly to protect themselves against French imperial ambitions. Japan had already become the first country in Asia to attempt a national consolidation. Muslim thinkers, too, were increasingly attracted to the idea that an efficiently organized society could harness its cumulative social power well enough through a nation-state – one that could hold its own against other such national mobilizations.

  The big problem which all Asian leaders in diverse societies would face lay in finding a way of unifying disparate populations around shared ideals and goals. Was there a common Egyptian or Turkish identity that transcended all other religious and ethnic identities? It was hard to see, but for the moment the spirit of negative nationalism – of opposition to foreign aggressors under a shared banner – seemed to suffice.

  Moreover, nationalism could blend easily with, and even complement, pan-Islamism, as it did in al-Afghani’s ideas; the contradictions between the two would emerge only in the twentieth century. The idea of a strong Caliph bubbled up in such far-off places as India and Indonesia, where Muslims considered themselves oppressed by Europeans and hankered for their own universal civilization. It had its critics, such as the pro-British educationist Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, who claimed that ‘the Turkish khalifa’s sovereignty does not extend over us. We are residents of India and subjects of the British government.’79 But its emotional appeal was great.

  The ruling classes of Istanbul finally noticed Muslims’ rising international awareness during the 1870s. The Young Ottoman Namik Kemal ironically described the Ottoman public’s new-found interest in the Muslims of Xinjiang: ‘Twenty years ago, the fact that there were Muslims in Kashgar was not known. Now, public opinion tries to obtain union with them. This inclination resembles an overpowering flood which will not be stopped by any obstacle in its way.’80

  The Ottomans heeded the distant calls from Muslims partly because of their own bitter experience of transnational solidarities. The Ottomans had witnessed, and suffered from, Russian-inspired pan-Slavism in the Balkans and the rise of ethnic and religious solidarities elsewhere in Europe. As Namik Kemal pointed out, ‘Against this kind of European union, we are obliged to secure our own country’s political and military union.’81 Sultan Abdulhamid, who faced both financial implosion and military defeat, was only too happy to revive the moribund post of the caliph. Reform had run its course; the dalliance with Europe’s values was over. It was the turn of Islam to serve as a ruling ideology.

  Abdulhamid took his universal leadership of Muslims, which to Western eyes seemed like a version of the papacy, very seriously, building, for instance, a railway for pilgrims to Medina in Arabia. He needed an ideological justification for his despotism, and some kind of leverage over European powers who ruled millions of restless Muslims in colonized countries; pan-Islamism served him well on both counts. Very quickly, Muslims around the world embraced the idea that what could now save Islam was a strengthened pan-Islam centred in Istanbul, with the only surviving great Muslim power, the Ottoman sultan, as the caliph or khalifa.

  Meanwhile, European expansion provoked violent backlashes from Islamic peoples who had so far been untouched by the West or those, like the Wahhabis, who completely rejected their native modernizing rulers. In the Sudan in the 1870s, a charismatic leader calling himself the Mahdi emerged at the head of a millenarian movement to beat back not only the Egyptian khedive but also his British allies. Scoring one brilliant victory after another, he promised to Islamize the entire world.

  Al-Afghani later claimed, probably falsely, to know the Mahdi. Like many Muslims around the world, he was electrified by this previously unknown Sudanese’s exploits against British forces in the early 1880s, particularly his long siege of the Anglo-Egyptian garrison in Khartoum which ended with its massacre in 1885. Indeed, the Sudanese Mahdi seemed to many Muslims a better candidate for the post of caliph than the Ottoman sultan himself.

  It is not clear what al-Afghani thought in the 1870s of this ferocious warrior who promised instant revolution to Muslims, but by the time he completed his second stint in India in 1882, he had clearly and vehemently turned against the kind of accommodation to Western power and tutelage that many Muslim elites had previously advocated. Though no more devout than before, al-Afghani adopted the guise of an orthodox Muslim, an uncompromising defender of Islam against Western encroachments. In 1883, soon after leaving India, he claimed in a French newspaper that

  All Muslims await the Mahdi and consider his coming as an absolute necessity … The Indian Muslims, in particular, in view of their infinite sufferings and the cruel torments they undergo under English domination, await him with the greatest impatience … Does England hope to stifle the voice of the Mahdi, the most awesome of all voices since its power is even greater than the voice of the Holy War, which issues from all Muslim mouths? … Does she think herself able to stifle this voice before making itself heard in all the East from Mount Himalaya to Dawlaghir, from north to south, speaking to the Muslims of Afghanistan, of Sind and of India.82

  In India from 1879 to late 1882, al-Afghani visited Karachi and Bombay but spent most of his time in Hyderabad and Calcutta. Tailed everywhere he went by British spies, he kept his distance from political activism. Nevertheless, he refined his ideas in a series of published articles. Many of these were directed against Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, the foremost Muslim leader in India, who had, since the British suppression of the Mutiny, led a campaign to make Indian Muslims useful and trustworthy again to their foreign rulers. Khan thought that Indian Muslims had lagged behind Hindus in taking up the opportunities of modern education. He set up the Aligarh College in north India to close this evident gap between the two communities.

  Al-Afghani couldn’t have agreed more with Khan’s belief in educating the Muslim community. As he himself wrote in an Indian periodical, ‘With a thousand regrets I say that the Muslims of India have carried their orthodoxy, nay, their fanaticism to such an evil extreme that they turn away with distaste and disgust from sciences and arts and industries.’83 Berating the insular Indian ulema in another article, al-Afghani wrote:

  Why do you not raise your eyes from those defective books and why do you not cast your glance on this wide world … You spend no thought on this question of great importance, incumbent on every intelligent man, which is: What is the cause of the poverty, indigence, helplessness, and distress of the Muslims, and is there a cure for this important phenomenon and great misfortune or not?84

  As al-Afghani saw it, Khan emphatically did not have that cure. On the contrary: al-Afghani regarded him as a deluded and parochial Westernizer, who was blind to the fate of his co-religionists elsewhere and the mala fide intentions of the British in Muslim lands. Khan was a very dangerous man, al-Afghani asserted in a Calcutta-based periodical, who aimed ‘to weaken the faith of the Muslims, to serve the ends of the aliens, and to mould the
Muslims in their ways and beliefs’.85

  This was unfair. Khan took a pragmatic attitude, and in the early twentieth century his college in Aligarh was to produce some of the most influential leaders of the Indian Muslim community. And he was no more pro-British than many Hindu reformists of the nineteenth century, such as the grandfather of Rabindranath Tagore. Yet al-Afghani was at least partly right. Khan regarded Muslim participation in the Mutiny as an appalling folly, and even claimed that most Muslims had stayed loyal to the British. Visiting Europe in 1869, he wrote a series of letters home, stating that the English were justified in seeing Indians as ‘imbecile brutes’. ‘What I have seen,’ Sir Sayyid warbled, ‘and seen daily, is utterly beyond the imagination of a native of India … all good things, spiritual and worldly, which should be found in man, have been bestowed by the Almighty on Europe, and especially on England.’86 Passing Sicily, he wondered about the lack of enduring monuments built by Muslims during their long presence there. In 1876, he claimed, ‘The British rule in India is the most wonderful phenomenon the world has seen.’87

  Sir Sayyid’s sycophancy had its Indian critics. The poet Akbar Illahabadi (1846 – 1921) had this to say to Anglophone Muslims like him:

  Give up your literature, say I; forget your history

  Break all your ties with shaykh and mosque – it could not matter less.

  Go off to school. Life’s short. Best not worry overmuch.

  Eat English bread, and push your pen, and swell with happiness.88

  Illahabadi thought that the Muslims supporting Sir Sayyid’s Aligarh College, though well-meaning, were essentially flunkeys of the British.

  What our respected Sayyid says is good.

  Akbar agrees that it is sound and fair.

  But most of those who head this modern school

  Neither believe in God, nor yet in prayer.

  They say they do, but it is plain to see

  What they believe in is the powers that be.89

  He saw Western-style education as a particularly insidious form of colonialism. ‘We of the East break our opponents’ heads / They of the West change their opponents’ nature / The guns have gone, and now come the professors.’90 And he bitterly denounced the uprooting of young Muslims from their tradition:

  We do not learn the things we ought to learn –

  And lose what was already in our keeping;

  Bereft of knowledge, plunged in heedlessness,

  Alas, we are not only blind but sleeping.91

  Al-Afghani did not disagree. In article after article published in Indian periodicals he attacked Khan’s efforts to create local functionaries for the British by promoting Western-style education and government jobs for Muslims. ‘Why should’, he wrote, deploying words to be used often against Westernizing despots in Muslim countries, ‘someone who destroys the life spirit of a people be called their well-wisher; why should a person who works for the decline of his faith be considered a sage? What ignorance is this?’92

  Visiting India in the mid-1880s, Wilfrid Blunt came across many Indian Muslims attracted by al-Afghani’s assaults on Khan. Nothing, however, enraged them and their hero more than Khan’s preaching of a new materialist Islam that took human beings to be the judge of all things. Al-Afghani, who was not known for religious fundamentalism, encouraged and welcomed reinterpretations of Islamic texts. Both he and his most influential disciple, Mohammed Abduh, hoped to restore a weakened Muslim umma by portraying Islam as a rational religion, contrasting such an ‘authentic Islam’ with one corrupted and far removed from its glorious origins, and regrettably manifest in much of the Muslim world’s recent history and practices. But al-Afghani stuck close to his belief in a transcendent god and rejection of creeds that took ‘the world or man [as] being a fit object of worship’. In his longest published work, ‘Refutation of the Materialists’, a riposte to Sir Sayyid’s view of Islam, al-Afghani took on everyone, from Democritus to Darwin, who exalted man and explained the world as self-created. As he saw it, attacking religion risked undermining the moral basis of society altogether and weakened the bonds that held communities together – precisely the weakening that had plunged Muslims everywhere into crisis.

  Increasingly, al-Afghani veered towards armed struggle and violent resistance to the West. He was clearly emboldened by the Mahdi’s successes in Sudan. In his long letter to the Ottoman sultan in 1879, written shortly before he arrived in India, al-Afghani had proposed himself as a roving revolutionary who could arouse and unify Muslims across Central Asia and India and provoke a clash between the Russian and British Empires, fulfilling the sultan’s pan-Islamic programme. It was full of lines such as these: ‘I wish after the completion of the Indian affair to go to Afghanistan and invite the people of that land, who like a wild lion have no fear of bloodshed and do not admit hesitation in war, especially holy war, to a religious struggle and a national endeavor.’93 Abdulhamid’s response to him is not known. The sultan’s pan-Islamism was less adventurous and more opportunistic; he also had a clearer sense of invincible European power than al-Afghani did. But he may have taken note of the latter’s intellectual and political passion – he was to try to make al-Afghani serve his purposes a decade later.

  Interestingly, al-Afghani did not speak of pan-Islamism to the Indian Muslim intelligentsia, which was growing conscious of its echoes around the Muslim world; he seemed aware that India’s large non-Muslim population could also be harnessed to his anti-imperialist cause. This was shrewd. As it turned out, Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s political influence over Indian Muslims would fade, and the more vigorous campaign in support of the Ottoman caliphate would come in the early 1920s in the form of a countrywide agitation – the first major mass movement of Muslim India – backed by the great Hindu leader, Mahatma Gandhi. As Akbar Illahabadi would write, explaining the joint campaign for the caliphate by Gandhi and the Indian Muslim leader Maulana Muhammad Ali: ‘Maulana has not blundered, nor has Gandhi hatched conspiracies / What blows them on the same course is the gale of Western policies.’94 Al-Afghani may have anticipated this nationalist moment by stressing the need for Hindu-Muslim unity in India. In the same vein, he also argued that linguistic ties were more profound than religious ones (a lesson Pakistan was to learn when the Bengali-speaking Muslims in East Pakistan seceded to form Bangladesh in 1971).

  Whereas in Egypt he had invoked the country’s pre-Islamic greatness, in India he hailed the discoveries of science and mathematics by Hindus of the classical age. Speaking in Calcutta to a largely Muslim audience, he pointed to the presence of young students, and confessed to be

  happy to see such offspring of India, since they are the offshoots of that India that was the cradle of humanity. Human values spread out from India to the whole world. These youths are from the very land where the meridian circle was first determined. They are from the same realm that first understood the zodiac. Everyone knows that the determination of those two circles is impossible until perfection in geometry is achieved. Thus we can say that Indians were the inventors of arithmetic and geometry. Note how Indian numerals were transferred from here to the Arabs, and from there to Europe … [The Indians] reached the highest level in philosophic thought.

  Invoking the religious and legal texts of Classical India, the Vedas and the Shastras, al-Afghani added that ‘these youths are also the sons of a land that was the source of all the laws and rules of the world’.95

  In the century ahead, India’s Hindu nationalists would frequently make similar assertions about India’s scientific and philosophical heritage. Certainly, al-Afghani knew how to tailor his message. But he was consistent in his anti-colonialism, according to which Muslims in India, as in other countries, should awaken and join other Muslim and non-Muslim peoples in a united front against the British. At the same time, Islam for Muslims ought to remain the main source of strength and values; they should not be deluded by Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s pro-British agenda. And neither Hindus nor Muslims should turn their backs on thei
r traditions. As Akbar Illahabadi exhorted himself: ‘Akbar, in all the verse you write / Make this your theme repeatedly / Muslim, take up your rosary / And Brahman, wear your sacred thread.’96 India had originally alerted al-Afghani to the advantages of Western science and knowledge; India also served as a warning against those advocating drastic, total Westernization.

  THE EUROPEAN INTERLUDE

  After a brief stopover in London, during which he met Wilfrid Blunt and contributed an anti-British article to a newspaper run by a Lebanese Greek Catholic disciple, al-Afghani arrived in Paris in January 1883, shortly after Britain had suppressed the uprising in Egypt and occupied the country. The French capital was then, as it had been for much of the nineteenth century, a Mecca for various political malcontents. Among the host of exiles from North Africa there was al-Afghani’s old disciple from Egypt, James Sanua. He heralded al-Afghani’s arrival in Paris with a lithographed drawing of the latter in his magazine, Abu Nadarra Zarqa. Al-Afghani began writing for Sanua immediately.

  Shortly before leaving India for Europe, al-Afghani was interrogated by the British authorities in Calcutta, and briefly placed under house arrest. The harassment, together with the apparent prostrations of Muslims like Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan before the British, seems to have embittered him. Explaining why he went to Paris after India, he wrote to his old patron Riyad Pasha in Egypt that he wanted to be in