From the Ruins of Empire Read online

  Who were the main thinkers and doers in this long remaking of modern Asia? How did they prefigure the world we live in and the one that future generations will inhabit? This book seeks to answer these questions by looking at the history of the modern world from several different vantage points in Asia (the continent being defined here in its original Greek sense, with the Aegean Sea dividing Asia from Europe, and the Nile as the border between Asia and Africa – a geographical conception not dissimilar to today’s geopolitical divisions).

  The West has seen Asia through the narrow perspective of its own strategic and economic interests, leaving unexamined – and unimagined – the collective experiences and subjectivities of Asian peoples. It may be disorientating to inhabit this other perspective, and this book will doubtless invoke many names and events that are unfamiliar to its Western readers. But it does not seek to replace a Euro-centric or West-centric perspective with an equally problematic Asia-centric one. Rather, it seeks to open up multiple perspectives on the past and the present, convinced that the assumptions of Western power – increasingly untenable – are no longer a reliable vantage point and may even be dangerously misleading.

  From a Western standpoint, the influence of the West can seem both inevitable and necessary, requiring no thorough historical auditing. Europeans and Americans customarily see their countries and cultures as the source of modernity and are confirmed in their assumptions by the extraordinary spectacle of their culture’s universal diffusion: today every society, save some isolated tribal communities in Borneo or the Amazonian rainforests, seems at least partially Westernized, or aspiring towards a form of Western modernity. But there was a time when the West merely denoted a geographical region, and other peoples unselfconsciously assumed a universal order centred in their values. Until late into the nineteenth century, people of societies with belief-systems like Islam or Confucianism at their core – much of the known world – could assume that the human order was still fused inseparably with the larger divine or cosmic order defined by their ancestors and gods.

  This book seeks to offer a broad view of how some of the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East responded to the encroachments of the West (both physical and intellectual) on their societies. It describes how these Asians understood their history and social existence, and how they responded to the extraordinary sequence of events and movements – the Indian Mutiny, Anglo-Afghan Wars, Ottoman modernization, Turkish and Arab nationalism, the Russo-Japanese War, the Chinese Revolution, the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference, Japanese militarism, decolonization, postcolonial nationalism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism – that together decided the present shape of Asia.

  The book’s main protagonists are two itinerant thinkers and activists: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838 – 97), a Muslim who pursued a long career in trenchant journalism and political exhortation in the Middle East and South Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century; and Liang Qichao (1873 – 1929), perhaps China’s foremost modern intellectual, who participated in many events that led to the destruction of his country’s old imperial certainties and its subsequent re-emergence, after many horrors, as a major world power. Many of al-Afghani’s and Liang’s ideas ultimately became major forces for change. These early modern Asians stand at the beginning of the process whereby ordinary resentment against the West and Western dominance, along with anxiety about internal weakness and decay, was transformed into mass nationalist and liberation movements and ambitious state-building programmes across Asia.

  Many other Asian thinkers and leaders also appear here. Some do relatively fleetingly, like the Vietnamese worker, later called Ho Chi Minh, in his rented morning suit trying to petition President Wilson in Paris in 1919 for an end to French colonialism in Indochina. Others like Sun Yat-sen, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati and the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb move swiftly across the changing backdrop. Major figures like Gandhi play supporting roles in this drama; his description of modern Western civilization as ‘satanic’ was preceded by other, more influential such critiques in the Muslim world and China.

  The focus on lesser-known individuals is deliberate. It makes it possible, I believe, to see the main political and intellectual tendencies that preceded and outlasted the better-known figures that have come to monopolize, and limit, our sense of India, China and the Muslim world. Liang Qichao bequeathed his obsession with building state power to Mao Zedong and his heirs in Communist China; al-Afghani’s fear of the West and obsession with Muslim self-strengthening prepared the way for Atatürk and Nasser as well as Ayatollah Khomeini, and still animates the politics of Islamic societies.

  During their long and eventful lives the Asians discussed in the book manifested all of the three main responses to Western power: the reactionary conviction that if Asian people were truly faithful to their religious traditions, which were presumed to be superior to those of all other civilizations, they would be strong again; the moderate notion that only a few Western techniques were required by Asians whose traditions already provided a sound basis for culture and society; and the vigorous determination, embraced by radical secularists like Mao and Atatürk, that the entire old way of life had to be revolutionized in order to compete in the jungle-like conditions of the modern world.

  The form of this book – part historical essay and part intellectual biography – is primarily motivated by the conviction that the lines of history converge in individual lives, even though the latter have their own shape and momentum. The early men of modern Asia it describes travelled and wrote prolifically, restlessly assessing their own and other societies, pondering the corruption of power, the decay of community, the loss of political legitimacy and the temptations of the West. Their passionate enquiries appear in retrospect as a single thread, weaving seemingly disparate events and regions into a single web of meaning. So while describing the general intellectual and political atmosphere in Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I hope above all to retrace their wanderings in the byways of modern history and thought. For these men, though relatively unknown, helped make the world we live in, for better and for worse.

  ONE: ASIA SUBORDINATED

  They hold the throne in their hand. The whole realm is in their hand. The country, the apportioning of men’s livelihoods is in their hand … The springs of hope and of fear are in their hand … In their hand is the power to decide who shall be humbled and who exalted … Our people is in their hand, education is in their hand … If the West continues to be what it is, and the East what it is, we shall see the day when the whole world is in their hand.

  Akbar Illahabadi, in the 1870s

  EGYPT: ‘THE BEGINNING OF A SERIES OF GREAT MISFORTUNES’

  Early on the morning of 5 May 1798, Napoleon slipped out of Paris to join a 40,000-strong French army sailing towards Egypt. A popular general after his victories in northern Italy, he had been lobbying his civilian superiors for an invasion of Britain. But the Royal Navy was still too strong, and the French were not ready to confront it. In the meantime, France needed colonies in order to prosper, as its foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand believed, and a presence in Egypt would not only compensate the French for their loss of territory in North America, it could also pose a serious challenge to the British East India Company, which produced highly profitable cash crops in its Indian possessions.

  Expanding across India, the British had expelled the French from most of their early bases on the coast. In 1798, the British were locked into a fierce battle with one of their most wily Indian opponents, Tipu Sultan, an ally of France. French control of Egypt could tip the balance of power against the British in India while also deterring the Russians, who eyed the Ottoman Empire. ‘As soon as I have made England tremble for the safety of India,’ Napoleon declared, ‘I shall return to Paris and give the enemy its death blow.’ Apart from his country’s geopolitical aims, Napoleon cherished his own private fant
asy of conquering the Orient. ‘Great reputations’, he was convinced, ‘are only made in the Orient; Europe is too small.’1 From Egypt he planned to push eastwards in an Alexander-the-Great-style invasion of Asia, with him riding an elephant and holding a new, personally revised Koran that would be the harbinger of a new religion.

  Napoleon travelled to Egypt with a large contingent of scientists, philosophers, artists, musicians, astronomers, architects, surveyors, zoologists, printers and engineers, all meant to record the dawn of the French Enlightenment in the backward East. The momentousness of the occasion – the first major contact between modernizing Europe and Asia – was not lost on Napoleon. On board his ship in the Mediterranean, he exhorted his soldiers: ‘You are about to undertake a conquest, the effects of which on civilization and commerce of the world are immeasurable.’2 He also drafted grand proclamations addressed to the Egyptian people, describing the new French Republic based upon liberty and equality, even as he professed the highest admiration for the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in general. Indeed the French, he claimed, were also Muslims, by virtue of their rejection of the Christian Trinity. He also made some noises – familiar to us after two centuries of imperial wars disguised as humanitarian interventions – about delivering the Egyptians from their despotic masters.

  Appearing without warning in Alexandria in July 1798, the French overcame all military opposition as they proceeded towards Cairo. Egypt was then nominally part of the Ottoman Empire though it was ruled directly by a caste of former slave-soldiers called Mamluks. Its meagre armies were not equipped to fight war-hardened French soldiers who outnumbered the Egyptians and were also backed by the latest military technology.

  Reaching Cairo after some easy victories, Napoleon commandeered a mansion for himself on the banks of the then Azbakiya Lake, installed the scholars from his baggage train at a new Institut d’Égypte, and set about politically engineering Egypt along republican lines. He thought up a Divan consisting of wise men, an Egyptian version of the Directory that exercised executive power in Paris. But where were wise men to be found in Cairo, which had been abandoned by its ruling class, the Ottoman Mamluks? Much to their bewilderment, Cairo’s leading theologians and religious jurists found themselves promoted to political positions and frequently summoned for consultation by Napoleon – marking the first of many such expedient attempts at politically empowering Islam by supposedly secular Westerners in Asia.

  Suppressing his allegiance to the Enlightenment, Napoleon vigorously appeased conservative Muslim clerics in the hope they might form the bulwark of pro-French forces in the country. He dressed up in Egyptian robes on the Prophet’s birthday and, much to the disquiet of his own secular-minded soldiers, hinted at a mass French conversion to Islam. Some sycophantic (and probably, derisive) Egyptians hailed him as Ali Bonaparte, naming him after the revered son-in-law of the Prophet. This encouraged Napoleon to suggest to the clerics that the Friday sermon at al-Azhar Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest buildings, be said in his name.

  The devout Muslims were flabbergasted. The head of the Divan, Sheikh al-Sharqawi, recovered sufficiently to say, ‘You want to have the protection of the Prophet … You want the Arab Muslims to march beneath your banners. You want to restore the glory of Arabia … Become a Muslim!’3 An evasive Napoleon replied: ‘There are two difficulties preventing my army and me from becoming Muslims. The first is circumcision and the second is wine. My soldiers have the habit from their infancy, and I will never be able to persuade them to renounce it.’4

  Napoleon’s attempt to introduce Egyptian Muslims to the glories of French secularism and republicanism were equally doomed. Cairenes deplored his dramatic alterations to the cityscape, and the corrupting influence of the French in general. As one observer wrote, ‘Cairo has become a second Paris, women go about shamelessly with the French; intoxicating drinks are publicly sold and things are committed of which the Lord of Heaven would not approve.’5 In the summer of 1798, Napoleon made it mandatory for all Egyptians to wear the tricolour cockade, the knotted ribbon preferred by French republicans. Inviting members of the Divan to his mansion, he tried to drape a tricolour shawl over the shoulders of Sheikh al-Sharqawi. The Sheikh’s face turned red from fear of blasphemy and he flung it to the ground. An angry Napoleon insisted that the clerics would have to wear the cockade at least, if not the shawl. An unspoken compromise was finally arrived at: Napoleon would pin the cockade to the chests of the clerics, and they would take it off as soon as they left his company.

  The Islamic eminences may have been trying to humour their strange European conqueror while trying to live for another day. Many other Muslims saw plainly the subjugation of Egypt by a Christian from the West as a catastrophe; and they were vindicated when French soldiers, while suppressing the first of the Egyptian revolts against their occupation, stormed the al-Azhar mosque, tethered their horses to the prayer niches, trampled the Korans under their boots, drank wine until they were helpless and then urinated on the floor.

  Napoleon, though ready to burn hostile villages, execute prisoners and tear down mosques for the sake of wide roads, actually indulged in fewer atrocities in Egypt than he was to elsewhere; he was always keen to express his admiration for Islam. Still, the Egyptian cleric and scholar ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, who chronicled Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, described it as ‘great battles, terrible events, disastrous facts, calamities, unhappiness, sufferings, persecutions, upsets in the order of things, terror, revolutions, disorders, devastations – in a word, the beginning of a series of great misfortunes’.6 And this was the reaction of a somewhat sympathetic witness. When the news of Napoleon’s exploits arrived in the Hejaz, the people of Mecca tore down the drapery – traditionally made in Egypt – around the sacred Kaaba.

  The dramatic gesture clearly expressed how many Muslims would see Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. It had disrupted nothing less than the long-established cosmic order of Islam – something that human history had shown to be more than a widely shared delusion.

  The word ‘Islam’, describing the range of Muslim beliefs and practices across the world, was not used before the nineteenth century. But few Muslims anywhere over the centuries would have doubted that they belonged to both a collective and an individual way of life, an intense solidarity based on certain shared values, beliefs and traditions. To be a good Muslim was to belong to a community of like-minded upholders of the moral and social order. It was also to participate in the making and expansion of the righteous society of believers and, by extension, in the history of Islam as it had unfolded since God first commanded the Prophet Muhammad to live according to His plan. This history began with astonishing successes, and for centuries it seemed that God’s design for the world was being empirically fulfilled.

  In AD 622, the first year of the Islamic calendar, Muhammad and his band of followers established the first community of believers in a small town in Arabia. Less than a century later, Arab Muslims were in Spain. Great empires – Persian and Byzantine – fell before the energetically expanding community of Muslims. Islam quickly became the new symbol of authority from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, and the order it created wasn’t just political or military. The conquerors of Jerusalem, North Africa and India brought into being a fresh civilization with its own linguistic, legal and administrative standards, its own arts and architecture and orders of beauty.

  The invading Mongols broke into this self-contained world in the thirteenth century, briskly terminating the classical age of Islam. But within fifty years the Mongols had themselves converted to Islam and become its most vigorous champions. Sufi orders spread across the Islamic world, sparking a renaissance of Islam in non-Arab lands. From Kufa to Kalimantan, the travelling scholar, the trader and the Friday assembly gave Islam an easy new portability.

  Indeed, Islam was as much a universalizing ideology as Western modernity is now, and it successfully shaped distinctive political systems, economies and cultural attitudes across a wide geographi
cal region: the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta had as little trouble getting jobs at imperial courts in India or in West Africa as a Harvard MBA would in Hong Kong and Cape Town today. The notion of a universal community of Muslims, the umma, living under the symbolic authority of a khalifa (caliph), in a Dar al-Islam (land of Muslims), which was distinct from the remote and peripheral Dar al-Harb (land of war), helped Muslims from Morocco to Java to imagine a central place in the world for themselves and their shared values.

  Itinerant Muslim traders from India were still displacing Hinduism and Buddhism in Indonesia and even Indochina as late as the seventeenth century. Extensive mercantile networks and pilgrimage routes to Mecca from all corners of the world affirmed the unity of Dar al-Islam. World trade in fact depended on Muslim merchants, seafarers and bankers. For a Muslim in North Africa, India or South-east Asia, history retained its moral and spiritual as well as temporal coherence; it could be seen as a gradual working out of God’s plan.

  Though beset by internal problems in the eighteenth century, Muslim empires still regarded Europeans as only slightly less barbarous than their defeated Crusader ancestors. So the success of Napoleon suggested something inconceivable: that the Westerners, though still quite crude, were beginning to forge ahead.