From the Ruins of Empire Page 7

  The political instruction al-Afghani drew from the Mutiny and its particularly bitter aftermath served him well for the rest of his life. Talking to an Afghan years later, he was still lamenting the weakness of the mutineers and the ease with which the British had annexed Awadh. He would compare the British to ‘a dragon which had swallowed twenty million people, and drunk up the waters of the Ganges and the Indus, but was still unsatiated and ready to devour the rest of the world and to consume the waters of the Nile and the Oxus’.14

  The violence of al-Afghani’s language was provoked at least partly by the destruction of a whole Muslim society and culture that he witnessed in post-Mutiny India. In Delhi the British had levelled large parts of the city, and killed or expelled most of its Muslim inhabitants. ‘When the angry lions entered the town,’ Ghalib, the greatest poet of the last Mughal court, wrote to a friend, ‘they killed the helpless and burned houses. Hordes of men and women, commoners and noblemen, poured out of Delhi from the three gates and took shelter in the small communities and tombs outside the city.’15 ‘The city,’ Ghalib lamented, ‘has become a desert.’16 The British did not allow Muslims back into the city until 1859. ‘The Muslims’ houses remained so long empty … that the walls seemed to be made of grass,’ Ghalib wrote.17

  The forebears of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been administrative officials at the Mughal court, were among those who fled British vindictive fury in Delhi in 1857. But the Nehrus, high-caste Hindus from Kashmir, did not suffer as much as elite Muslims such as their munshi (secretary), who, Nehru relates in his autobiography, saw his family financially ruined and then partly exterminated by English troops. And these weren’t the only kind of losses. For Indian Muslims accustomed to ruling over India, the vicious quelling of the Mutiny was nothing less than a radical and comprehensive spiritual defeat.

  It was the poets who evoked most eloquently the humiliation and deracination of their community. Akbar Illahabadi, who witnessed the Mutiny, versified a widespread bitterness: ‘If you should pass that way you’ll see my ravaged village / A Tommies’ barracks standing by a ruined mosque.’18 In another poem, Illahabadi described the painful sensation of adjusting to an entirely new world:

  The minstrel, and the music, and the melody have all changed. Our very sleep has changed; the tale we used to hear is no longer told. Spring comes with new adornments; the nightingales in the garden sing a different song. Nature’s every effect has undergone a revolution. Another kind of rain falls from the sky; another kind of grain grows in the fields.19

  Altaf Hussein Hali, a poet from the provinces, also evoked the fallen state of Muslims in his popular poem Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam (1879):

  If anyone sees the way our downfall passes all bound,

  The way that Islam, once fallen, does not rise again,

  He will never believe that the tide flows after every ebb,

  Once he sees the way our sea has gone out.20

  In the early twentieth century, Hali’s elegies would be routinely recited at political meetings of Muslim anti-colonialists, many of whom would later agitate for a new homeland – Pakistan – for Indian Muslims.

  When autumn has set in over the garden,

  Why speak of the springtime of flowers?

  When shadows of adversity hang over the present,

  Why harp on the pomp and glory of the past?

  Yes, these are things to forget; but how can you with

  The dawn forget the scene of the night before?

  The assembly has just dispersed;

  The smoke is still rising from the burnt candle;

  The footprints on the sands of India still say

  A graceful caravan has passed this way.21

  The British tended to blame Muslims more than Hindus for the Mutiny, and after it they were more eager than ever to reduce the role of Muslims in public life. In a personal meeting with Randolph Churchill, the British Secretary of State for India in 1885, al-Afghani would confront him with reasons why Indian Muslims hated Britain: ‘You destroyed the Empire of Delhi; secondly, because you give no salaries to the imams and muezzins and keepers of the mosques. And you have resigned the Wakf property and do not repair the sacred buildings.’22 But when he first arrived in a humiliated country in the late 1850s, al-Afghani seems to have been more interested in absorbing the larger lessons from the victims of imperialism.

  Indian Muslims, such as Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, an official in the East India Company during the Mutiny, had already begun to stress a Western-style education for Muslims, convinced that the mastery of science was the basis of success in the modern world. Asked by mutineers to leave the British and join the rebellion in 1857, Sir Sayyid gambled correctly. ‘British sovereignty,’ he replied, ‘cannot be eliminated from India.’23 (He went on to secure safe passage for a British district collector and his family, who were likely to be murdered by the mutineers.) Subsequently assisted by the British in his efforts to set up educational institutions, most famously at the north Indian town of Aligarh, Sir Sayyid advised his Muslim compatriots to profit from ‘the style and art of Englishmen’.24 His motto became ‘Educate, Educate, Educate’, and he had many supporters among Indian Muslims. Nazir Ahmed, a leading novelist and essayist in Urdu, claimed that

  While all of us were spending time in useless disputation

  The men of Europe leap into the void of God’s creation.

  Time was when their condition was more miserable than ours

  But now the wealth of all the world rains down on them in showers.

  Now God himself has moved to share his secrets with these nations

  Because they have perceived the mode of Nature’s operations.25

  Al-Afghani would exhort his fellow Muslims similarly over the next decades. ‘O, sons of the East,’ he wrote in 1879, ‘don’t you know that the power of the westerners and their domination over you came about through their advance in learning and education, and your decline in those domains.’26 At the same time, he would never cease to hate and distrust perfidious Albion – feelings developed during his time in India, and best summarized by the satirical poet Akbar Illahabadi:

  The Englishman can slander whom he will

  And fill your head with anything he pleases.

  He wields sharp weapons, Akbar. Best stand clear!

  He cuts up God himself into three pieces.27

  In Egypt in 1878, when his account of British oppression in India was challenged, al-Afghani dismissed his critics as influenced by history books authored by English people, which, he claimed, ‘are marked by the hands of English self-love, with the pens of conceit and the pencils of deception, and inescapably they do not relate the truth and do not report reality’.28 Convinced that British accounts of India ‘laid the snare of ambiguity and the trap of duplicity’ for their readers, al-Afghani also never succumbed to the claims of imperial propagandists that the British were in India for the good of the Indians, and had built cities, railways and schools, and deposed tyrants like the king of Awadh, to this end. This was laughable, he claimed. Even if Indian rulers were oppressive and corrupt, their reach was very limited, and they spent their ill-gotten wealth in India. The British terrorized and exploited all Indians, and exported the spoils to Britain. As for their telegraph and railways, any Indian would say, he asserted, that they were built

  only in order to drain the substance of our wealth and facilitate the means of trade for the inhabitants of the British Isles and extend their sphere of riches: other than this, what has brought us to poverty and need, our wealth exhausted, our riches ended, and many of us dead, consumed by hunger?29

  Claiming to speak on behalf of Indians, al-Afghani sounds presumptuous. But, writing his autobiography decades later, Jawaharlal Nehru was no less emphatic that the ‘heralds of industrialism’, railways, telegraphs and the wireless, ‘came to us primarily for the strengthening of British rule’ – to the extent that, Nehru wrote, ‘the railway, the life-giver, has always seemed to me like i
ron bands confining and imprisoning India’.30

  It appears – reliable information is lacking on this score – that after completing his education in British-ruled India in the early 1860s, al-Afghani went to Iran, and, probably, to Mecca, Baghdad and Istanbul. His little cameo in the Great Game in Afghanistan was only the first of many international intrigues al-Afghani involved himself in. But it set a pattern: the consistent thread through his activities from now on would be his fear and distrust of Western, particularly British, power and its native enablers in Muslim countries.

  Certainly, India was already a subjugated country, and Afghanistan a backward little principality, its rulers petty feudatories compared to the rulers and intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire, to which al-Afghani next went in 1869. But here he was to witness how even the most powerful Muslim empire of its time, though not militarily threatened by the West, had slipped into dependence on it; and how the Ottomans in their attempt at self-renovation – by creating new administrative structures, modern armies and efficient taxation – had set off a great internal tumult.

  THE ‘SICK MAN’ OF EUROPE AND HIS DANGEROUS SELF-THERAPY

  By late 1869, when al-Afghani arrived there, Istanbul was the largest city in the Muslim world and the political centre of both Arabs and Persians. Horse-drawn trams clattered through the western quarter, a mosaic of nationalities – Bulgarians, Circassians, Arabs, Greeks, Persians and Kazakhs – was on display at the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn. Most of Istanbul’s population was Christian, and parts of it – the western quarters of Pera and Galata – resembled, superficially at least, a more cosmopolitan version of Berlin or St Petersburg.

  Europeans attracted by the possibility of easy money had poured into the city after 1838, when the Ottomans signed a free-trade agreement with Britain and loosened their control of the economy. Al-Afghani lived in the old city where Muslims in turbans and flowing robes still studied the Koran and Hadith. But elsewhere Turks wore the fez and the stambouline, a cut-away frock-coat, and an imperial decree issued in 1856 (a ‘day of weeping and mourning for the people of Islam’, according to some Turkish Muslims) had permitted church bells to be rung in the city for the first time since the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

  Indeed, churches, palaces, hospitals, factories, schools and public gardens were advancing relentlessly to the shores of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, squeezing out traditional Muslim neighbourhoods. In 1867, Sultan Abdulaziz, who was determined to build palaces more magnificent than any in Europe, had returned from a grand tour of Paris, London and Vienna with big plans to make Istanbul appear more European. In 1869, the Prince of Wales visited the city. Attending the opera with him and the sultan, the British journalist William Howard Russell marvelled at the obvious wealth and glamour of the audience. ‘It needed an effort to believe we were in Constantinople, so brilliant and Europeanized was the spectacle.’31 The Westernizing Ottoman statesmen would have received this as a tremendous vindication of their efforts. But Europeanizing was an expensive business which exacted a high political as well as economic cost from the Ottomans.

  European banks mushroomed, offering loans at extortionate interest rates. As the Ottomans sank steadily into debt, European power inexorably grew. Ambassadors of Britain, France, Russia and other European nations sailed into Istanbul on warships; Ottoman soldiers saluted them at every guard post they passed and they intervened with impunity in Ottoman affairs. Under the long-standing Ottoman millet system, religious communities were allowed a high degree of self-rule; they had their own legal courts, for instance, and collected their own taxes. But the Capitulations, a system of legal privileges granted to foreigners in the Ottoman Empire, made leading European powers – the French, Russians and British, in particular – the formal protectors of ethnic minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the Capitulations made Europeans immune to litigation or trial in Muslim courts, no matter how severe their crime.

  A year before al-Afghani reached Istanbul, Ziya Pasha, one of the discontented ‘Young Ottomans’ who began to protest against European influence in the 1860s, had written: ‘We have remained mere spectators while our commerce, our trades, and even our broken-down huts have been given to the foreigners … Soon it will not be possible to make a living.‘32 Many Ottomans, accustomed to a sense of superiority over ‘infidels’, were appalled by their apparent weakness before Europe, which they had long threatened. Sitting by Rumeli Hisari, the fortress from which the Ottomans launched their capture of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, the writer and statesman Ahmed Vefik could only lament, ‘Perhaps we are justly punished. We were insolent and unjust in our dealings with foreign nations in our day of power. Now in our adversity you trample us.’33

  In Ottoman Turkey the dominion of the West was achieved not through outright conquest, as had happened in India, but through urgent borrowings of political, economic and cultural ideas from Europe. Nonetheless, as al-Afghani was to find out, the changes unleashed upon ordinary Muslims were no less disorientating than they had been in India.

  Compared to its Safavid and Mughal peers, the Ottoman Empire still looked intact and politically independent as the nineteenth century opened. Spread across three continents, from the Danube to the Persian Gulf, and from Tripoli to Trebizond on the Black Sea, it was the most cosmopolitan state in the world, with a light imprint in its peripheries many of which were fully or partially autonomous. It had proved over centuries to be a vast, sophisticated political organism, capable of accommodating much ethnic and religious diversity and adjudicating disputes between different regions and communities: the millet system, promoting a degree of cultural and religious pluralism, was exemplary in this regard in the pre-modern world. Contrary to European perceptions of irreversible decline, which were shaped by the Ottoman failure to capture Vienna in 1683, the empire had been flourishing politically, economically and culturally. Nevertheless, as European power expanded across the world, the empire’s eighteenth-century rulers grew anxious about their ability to build a state strong enough to compete with its continental rivals. As Sultan Mustafa III (1757 – 74) put it in a quatrain shortly before his death:

  The World is turning upside down, with no hope for better during our reign

  Wicked fate has delivered the state into the hands of despicable men,

  Our bureaucrats are villains who prowl through the streets of Istanbul,

  We can do nothing but beg God for mercy.34

  This was too melodramatic. But it is true that post-Enlightenment Europe had already embarked on its extraordinary ascent; and proximity to the continent made the Ottomans as eager and anxious as the Russians to do the right thing and join the European-led march of progress. Even Egypt, nominally an Ottoman province, had started a programme of rapid internal modernization after its encounter with Napoleon in 1798. As it turned out, one shock after another in the first half of the nineteenth century focused some of the brightest Ottoman minds on the imperative of reform.

  Having become even more aggressive after its defeat of Napoleon in 1812, Russia carved out large chunks of the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Mahmud II (1808 – 39) had to countenance the nationalist rebellions of his Balkan Christian subjects, emboldened by their patrons in the West. The successful Greek insurgency, which was jointly enabled by European powers in 1829, encouraged more minorities within the Ottoman Empire to internationalize their grievances.

  In the meantime, the Europeans nibbled away at Ottoman territory. In 1830 the French occupied Algeria, provoking nothing more than an official protest from Istanbul. Wahhabi fundamentalists, espousing a return to a bleakly puritanical Islam, overran parts of Arabia before being pushed back. Much of Muslim North Africa, including Egypt, was effectively independent of Ottoman control. Muhammad Ali, the insubordinate viceroy of Egypt, even dared threaten the Ottoman heartland itself in 1832 and 1839 and had to be deterred with the help of Russian and British forces. Things unravelled so quickly that only the fierce rivalry
between Western powers and Russia and the fear of a wider European war seemed to protect the empire from demise. As the duke of Wellington proclaimed, ‘The Ottoman Empire stands not for the benefit of the Turks but of Christian Europe.’35 This was true in more ways than one: apart from a guarantee against European conflict, an unimpaired Ottoman Empire also offered a lucrative single market for European products, especially after trade treaties favourable to Europe reduced tariffs.

  Military defeats made it imperative for the Ottomans to reform the army; however, that meant more buttressing and centralization of the civilian administration, which in turn made changes in the social and economic habits of the population imperative. Still, Sultan Mahmud II managed, often brutally, to force through a degree of centralization. As Muslim rulers in India had done, the Ottomans had tried to train their army in the European way in the late eighteenth century. Military and naval academies were set up and fiscal administration was reformed in order to pay for regular infantry. Now, the Ottoman ruling class instituted such further reforms as a conscript army, taxes, a trained bureaucracy (rather than court appointees) and modern education.