From the Ruins of Empire Read online

  A number of highly intelligent men turned to a traditionalist worldview grounded in fealty to the moral prescriptions of Islam, Confucianism and Hinduism. Some of the most innovative Asians sought an enlightened synthesis between their religious traditions and the European Enlightenment. Islamic modernists, for instance, called for a selective borrowing of European science, politics and culture, insisting that the Koran was fully compatible with modernity.

  But in whatever these Asians did they all affirmed the extraordinary dominance of the West in almost every aspect of human endeavour in the modern world. It was as though Asia’s vast empires, its venerable traditions and time-honoured customs had no defence against Europe’s purposive traders, missionaries, diplomats and soldiers. One by one, the Egyptians, the Chinese and the Indians revealed themselves as vulnerable, poorly fitted for a new modern world the West was making and which they had to join or perish. This is why the European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which left its victims resentful but also envious of their conquerors and, ultimately, eager to be initiated into the mysteries of their seemingly near-magical power.

  TWO: THE STRANGE ODYSSEY OF JAMAL AL-DIN AL-AFGHANI

  What brought on this era? What happened that other people, ignoring us completely while they changed and developed their machines, built, carried out plans, and moved in and out of our midst and we awoke to find every oil derrick a spike impaling the land?

  Why did we end up Westoxified?

  Let’s go back to history.

  Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (‘Westoxification’), 1962

  AN INSIGNIFICANT MAN IN ROUGH GARMENTS

  In the early 1960s, a group of Iranian exiles in Paris often met at a café called Au Depart in Saint Germain. Most of them were political refugees from Iran, where in 1953 the American CIA and British MI6 had helped topple the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh after the latter nationalized the Iranian oil industry. Among these angry figures was Ali Shariati (1933 – 77), later the primary intellectual guide of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. ‘Convicted of the crime of having afflicted the first lash at the pillaging West,’ he lamented on the eighth anniversary of the Anglo-American coup, ‘a people still remain in chains.’1 Like his fellow exiles, Shariati had few aims in Paris other than to advance his political and intellectual training, and then to inform and educate his compatriots in turn. He translated Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into Persian. He wrote about Sun Yat-sen, the anti-French revolt in Algeria, and Gandhi and Nehru (whom he saw as India’s Mossa-deghs) in periodicals run by Iranian exiles (which were often smuggled back to Iran); he attended demonstrations against the brutal murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. He also closely monitored the bloody uprising of June 1963 against the pro-Western regime in Iran, which first made a cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini politically prominent; and increasingly in their Saint-Germain haunts, he and his friends discussed an itinerant nineteenth-century activist and thinker called Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.

  Early in 1892, in a letter to the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, al-Afghani had articulated the fear that ruled his life and which now dominated Shariati’s as well, that Western powers

  all have only one desire, that of making our land disappear up to our last trace. And in this there is no distinction to make between Russia, England, Germany, or France, especially if they perceive our weakness and our impotence to resist their designs. If, on the contrary, we are united, if the Muslims are a single man, we can then be of harm and of use and our voice will be heard.2

  As a young student in 1955 in Mashhad, Shariati had written one of his very first articles about this relatively obscure figure. In Paris in the 1960s he turned again to al-Afghani after a long intellectual detour through Western secular ideologies of emancipation, and, as he wrote in 1970, Shariati was convinced that ‘to understand him is tantamount to recognizing Islam and Muslims, and our present and future as well’.3

  In Iran, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani is revered as the intellectual godfather of the Islamic Revolution, which Michel Foucault, visiting Tehran in 1979, called ‘the first great insurrection’ against the ‘global systems’ of the West.4 More remarkably, left-wing secularists as well as Islamists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists in Muslim countries as disparate as Egypt, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Malaysia regard al-Afghani as a path-breaking anti-imperialist leader and thinker. Compared to the two other great political and philosophical exiles of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Alexander Herzen, al-Afghani is barely known in the West today, even though his influence exceeds that of Herzen and, at least in its longevity, almost matches Marx’s.

  This is at least partly because there are gaping holes in his biography. Much of what he did and said during his journeys across the Muslim world has been lost to history. To reconstruct his intellectual trajectory, as the following pages attempt, is to explore the social and political tumult of the different countries he travelled through – the experiences that defined his worldview. In any case, a history of his ideas cannot depend, as is the case with many Western thinkers, on published texts setting out clear concepts and well-referenced biographies. Intellectual history in this case is the history of his arguments, which are not and could not be internally consistent with his world.

  Certainly, there was scarcely a social or political tendency in Muslim lands – modernism, nationalism, pan-Islamism – that al-Afghani’s catholic and vital sensibility did not either ignite or stoke. Nor was there a realm of political action – anti-imperialist conspiracy, education, journalism, constitutional reform – on which he did not leave the imprint of his ideas. Ali Shariati was only exaggerating a bit when he claimed that al-Afghani was ‘the man who first raised the voice of awareness in the dormant East’.5

  By his own admission, al-Afghani was an ‘insignificant man, who has no high rank and who has not achieved exalted office’. Yet, as he warned, ‘great deeds’ were performed by men like himself, ‘wandering and with rough garments, knowing cold and heat, bitter and sweet, and having traversed many mountains and deserts and experienced the ways of men.’6 His deeds look greater in retrospect, especially when compared to those of the Muslim thinkers who preceded him.

  Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt had first demonstrated to many Muslims that some people of the West had discovered new sources of economic and military power, and could project it thousands of miles away from home. But long afterwards, many among the Islamic countries’ ruling classes and intelligentsia kept fervently advocating assimilation to Western modes of life, and accommodation with rather than resistance to European power. They did not yet fear Europe as a profoundly disruptive force, one that would challenge Muslims’ most strongly held conceptions about their place in the world. Though rattled by Napoleon’s incursion, the Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti found it easy to mock the French for their toilet habits. He did not enquire into French motives for coming to Egypt, and he met the ideas of the French Revolution that plunged Europe into turmoil – republicanism, social equality and mobility, the just and impartial state – with near-total incomprehension. Later observers of the West’s innovations were more curious than anxious, especially as Egypt and the Ottoman Empire set about creating modern states and armies on the Western model.

  Europe actually appeared to be a benign example to the great Egyptian scholar Rifa‘a Badawi Rafi al-Tahtawi (1801 – 73), who spent five years in Paris from 1826 to 1831. Explicating the French Revolution and the French constitution, he provided Arabic speakers with their first full account of a political system in a Western country. ‘The French people’, he wrote admiringly, ‘are equal before the law despite their differences in prestige, position, honor, and wealth.‘7 Similarly, during his many trips to Europe between 1850 and 1865, the Tunisian Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi became a devoted a
dmirer of Voltaire, Condillac, Rousseau and Montesquieu, regretting only these philosophers’ bitter attacks on religion. He noted the voluntary associations and organizational skills of Europeans: ‘If people join with one another to achieve a joint end, it is possible for them to attain even the most difficult things.’ One of the ‘incredible examples’ of this was British rule over India. ‘The British government through an association of her merchants known as the India Company, acquired about three hundred millions, five hundred square metres of land with a population of over one hundred and eighty million persons.’8

  Al-Tahtawi, Khayr al-Din and the Syrian educationist Butrus al-Bustani (1819 – 83) – whose dictionary, great encyclopaedia and periodicals helped create modern Arabic language and literature – were among the first officials, teachers and soldiers in the Muslim world convinced of the necessity of reform to offset internal decline and decay. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many intellectuals around the Ottoman court in Istanbul, too, had come to the same conclusion: that their social-political order had grown old and decrepit, and needed to be renewed by outside learning. These intellectuals did not relate, as al-Afghani was soon to do, their domestic conditions to the alarming shifts in international relations. They saw reform as largely a matter of adopting European knowledge and practical skills into their societies, and updating their militaries. Many European elites had already begun to regard Christianity and the white race as superior and unique. But the Turkish and Egyptian admirers of Montesquieu and Guizot, who initiated modernization under Western tutelage in the 1830s, had yet to become fully aware of Europe’s new racial hierarchies; they hoped their Muslim societies would eventually become advanced enough to achieve parity with Europe. The Ottoman writer Namik Kemal was convinced in the 1860s that

  it took Europe two centuries to reach this condition and while they were the inventors in the paths to progress, we find all the means ready to hand … can there be any doubt that we, too, even if it takes us two centuries, can reach a stage where we would be counted as one of the most civilized countries?9

  Remarkably, al-Afghani was already alert to the perils ahead for Muslim countries in the 1860s, when the European presence in Asia was still largely confined to India. He realized that history was working independently of the God of the Koran, and that the initiative had been seized by the restless, energetic peoples in the West who, erupting out of longstanding cultural and political backwaters, were discovering and exploring new worlds and subjugating with means never wielded in previous imperial expansions Muslim as well as other non-Western peoples.

  The Awakening in India and Afghanistan

  Facts about al-Afghani’s early life are scarce and obscured by his claim, repeated in several countries, to have been a Sunni Muslim from Afghanistan. But it is clear now that he was born in 1838 in the village of Asadabad near Hamadan in north-west Persia, and educated in Tehran, the seminaries of great Shiite cities, mainly Najaf, and then in India. His early years in Persia coincided with the rise of Babism, a radical and messianic interpretation of Islamic traditions. Suppressed in Persia, many followers of Babism fled to Shiite cities in Ottoman-ruled Mesopotamia; they may have had some effect on al-Afghani’s own bold and sometimes nearly heretical view of Islam, and his revolutionary messianism. But he also received an early grounding in the tradition of Persian Islamic philosophy, which, more open to innovation than its Sunni Arabic counterpart, clearly emboldened al-Afghani’s revisionist Islam.

  Shiite Islam had a more unorthodox tradition in Persia, which even as late as the nineteenth century produced a major Islamic philosopher, Mullah Hadi. Shiite Persia had preserved philosophical traditions that had long been moribund in Arabic-speaking lands, such as reconciling rationalist ideas with revealed religion. Trained in a heterodox tradition, al-Afghani was sooner able to speak of reform and change than his Sunni peers. But, as a Shiite, his appeal would have been limited among Sunnis, and he seems to have thought it prudent to claim Afghan ancestry in order to pass himself off as a Sunni Muslim in the countries that he wished to reform. He was also, if briefly, a Freemason in Egypt. Neither an unthinking Westernizer nor a devout traditionalist, al-Afghani seems to have been concerned most with the exigencies of anti-imperialist strategizing. He travelled to India in the late 1850s to continue his education, and spent a considerable part of the next decade there, in, among other places, Bombay (which had a large community of Persians) and Calcutta. It was during this time of fierce Indian assaults on the British and the latter’s brutal backlash that his intellectual heritage of revolt from the Babis began to turn from a local into a global ideology of resistance.

  Soon afterwards, al-Afghani entered documented history in a small but tantalizing role, appropriately enough in Afghanistan, which was then, as it has been recently, the treacherous crossroads for many different geopolitical ambitions. Secret British government reports from Kandahar and Kabul in 1868 describe al-Afghani as having arrived from India in 1866, a virulent anti-British agitator and likely Russian agent, a slender man with a pale complexion, open forehead, penetrating azure eyes and goatee, who drank tea constantly, was well-versed in geography and history, spoke Arabic, Turkish and Persian (the last language like a native of Persia), not visibly religious and with a European rather than Muslim lifestyle.10

  Shortly after arriving in Kabul, al-Afghani became a counsellor to Afghanistan’s amir, who was then involved in a complex civil war with his half-brother and was suspected by his powerful neighbours, the British in India, of conniving with Russia. The Afghans had proved perspicacious foes of the British. In 1839, the British in India tried to install a friendly ruler in Kabul. Afghan guerrilla fighters bided their time, and then assaulted a large British expeditionary force sent to the city, reducing it through successive attacks to just one man: a British army surgeon whose slumped figure on a horse, famously depicted in a Victorian painting titled Remnants of An Army, came to stand for the worst of British military disasters in the nineteenth century.

  By the 1860s, the British were pressing Afghanistan again, and al-Afghani apparently saw an opportunity. In a history of Afghanistan he wrote in 1878, al-Afghani affirmed his faith in Afghan hatred of foreign usurpers: ‘Nobility of soul leads them to choose a death of honor above a life of baseness under foreign rule.’11 Here was al-Afghani’s chance to pit the fiercely proud Afghans against the British. He advised the amir to consider collaborating with the Russians, by now the well-established rivals of the British in the region spanning the Ottoman Empire and Tibet. Among the reasons for preferring Russia over Britain that al-Afghani gave to an Afghan informant of the British was this: ‘The English are thieves of unknown extraction, who have lately sprung up, and owe all that they have gained to their intrigues. The Russian state has existed since the time of Alexander the Great.’12

  In any case, al-Afghani overplayed his hand. In 1868 the amir was defeated by his half-brother, Sher Ali, and lost his throne. Sher Ali struck a deal with the British and promptly expelled al-Afghani from Kabul, forcing him to look for another Muslim ruler to indoctrinate with the perils of British imperialism. Al-Afghani left Afghanistan with a particularly poor impression of Afghan leaders, whom he thought were unreliable and prone to collaborate with European powers (he later altered his impression when Sher Ali turned against his British patrons in 1878, sparking the second Anglo-Afghan War).

  Imprisoned at the Bala Hisar fort in Kabul awaiting expulsion from the country, he composed in rhymed prose an ironic commentary on the misunderstandings he evoked in Afghanistan (and would soon evoke in many other countries):

  The English people believe me a Russian

  The Muslims think me a Zoroastrian

  The Sunnis think me a Shiite

  And the Shiite think me an enemy of Ali

  Some of the friends of the four companions have believed me a Wahhabi

  Some of the virtuous Imamites have imagined me a Babi

  The theists have imagined me a
materialist

  And the pious a sinner bereft of piety

  The learned have considered me an unknowing ignoramus

  And the believers have thought me an unbelieving sinner

  Neither does the unbeliever call me to him

  Nor the Muslim recognize me as his own

  Banished from the mosque and rejected by the temple

  I am perplexed as to whom I should depend on and whom I should fight

  The rejection of one makes the friends firm against its opposite

  There is no way of escape for me to flee the grasp of one group

  There is no fixed abode for me to fight the other party

  Seated in Bala Hisar in Kabul, my hands tied and my legs

  Broken, I want to see what the Curtain of the Unknown will

  Deign to reveal to me and what fate the turning of this malevolent

  Firmament has in store for me.13

  In the decades ahead, al-Afghani would frequently find himself on the losing side. But still he would amplify, more eloquently and urgently than any Muslim of his time, the manifold threats posed by the West to the civilization built by Islam. And he would never cease to stress his early experience of India, the only country with a large Muslim population to be occupied and partly administered by the British. In 1857 Maulvi Baqar, the editor of Delhi Urdu Akhbar, was already expressing an incipient religious anti-colonialism, using Hindu epics and mythology as well as Koranic fables and Turkish history to describe an Indian nation wholly different from and opposed to the British. Writing about the Mutiny in 1878, al-Afghani, too, claimed to have been struck by the anti-British feeling shared across all social and religious divisions in India. ‘Their rancour and enmity [toward the British]’, he wrote, ‘have attained such a pitch that there is not an Indian living who does not pray for the advance of the Russians to the frontier of India.’