From the Ruins of Empire Read online

  Sultan Mahmud’s efforts to create a modern state were supplemented by his successor, Sultan Abdulmejid (1839 – 61), whose bureaucrats launched with great fanfare a reform programme called Tanzimat (‘regulations’). Though prefaced with references to the Koran and the law of Sharia (a conciliatory gesture to the ulema and other conservative forces), the Tanzimat edict explicitly aimed to create a legal and administrative system along Western, and more specifically French, lines. It promised legal equality to minorities instead of assigning them to the millet system, sought to establish a secular university, and even allowed peasants to migrate from their villages. Modernizing reformers within the government centralized the administration, undermining the power of local notables and encouraging new secular ideas of Ottoman ‘citizenship’. They set up a finance ministry and began to promote secular education.

  The effects of the Tanzimat were soon visible. Journalism and literature received a boost; European lifestyles became highly sought after. Western-style private schools for the wealthy classes, which Lord Macaulay might have approved of, were set up. Among the first such schools was the Lycee Imperial de Galataseray in Pera, the European quarter of Istanbul, which was reputedly more cosmopolitan than any comparable school in Western Europe or Russia. (These centres of secular education were to produce Turkey’s educated elite.) A grand quasi-European palace, the Dolmabahçe, arose on the shores of the Bosporus, replacing the Topkapi, the traditional residence of the Sultan.

  The pashas (officials) enforcing the Tanzimat, many of whom had been educated in Paris, were almost totally sold on the idea of Westernizing social, cultural and intellectual life in Turkey. They had little time for old pieties. As Fuad Pasha, one of the reform-minded and autocratic ministers of the Sublime Porte, the government of the Ottoman Empire, declared, ‘Islam was for centuries, in its setting, a marvellous instrument of progress. Today it is a clock which has lost time and which must be made to catch up:36

  Personally suave in the European sense, the reformists could be ruthless in the preservation of their power and prerogatives as a modernizing class, rarely hesitating to ride roughshod over traditional elites. Indeed, reform for them was a means to securing their own position at the heights of Ottoman society. They partly aimed the Tanzimat at European opinion, hoping to persuade it of Turkey’s claim to civilization (the modernizing Turks had some European fans: the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte decided that Turkey could be the right laboratory for his Religion of Humanity).

  Certainly, the Ottomans succeeded in improving their international standing. Fighting alongside France and Britain against Russia in the Crimean War (1853 – 6), they were promoted to parity with the Christian powers. Ottoman desire to be part of the Concert of Europe, echoed today by the Turkish application to join the European Union, was fulfilled at the end of the war by the Treaty of Paris of 1856. Britain became an informal ally against the ever-present Russian threat; the Ottomans reciprocated by calling upon Indian Muslims to remain loyal to their British masters during the Mutiny.

  But the multi-ethnic, multi-religious character of the Ottoman Empire did not cease to be an anachronism in the age of nationalism. The sultan ruled Armenian, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and Arab Christians as well as Muslim Arabs and Kurds. Christians comprised 35 per cent of the Ottoman population, and seemed to invite Western interference in Ottoman affairs, which actually became more flagrant after the Treaty of Paris. Posing as protectors of Christian and Jewish minorities in Ottoman lands, and indulged by Turkish statesmen, European ambassadors in Istanbul were extraordinarily overbearing. Ottoman ministers decided on important matters only after close consultation with them, while foreigners accused of crimes against Ottoman subjects claimed the legal protection of consular courts.

  In 1860 French troops stepped in to protect Christians in Lebanon, and the Ottomans had to appoint a Christian governor. Nationalists in the Balkans forced more concessions out of Istanbul. Meanwhile corruption persisted, helped by the growth of the bureaucracy. Most peasants were indifferent to their new freedom to migrate to the cities. Endowed with legal equality, non-Muslims preferred the jurisdiction of their own communities to that of the central government. Christian minorities such as Greeks and Bulgarians benefited from the new careers opened up by modernization, but Muslim Turks felt isolated: not surprisingly, European garb became an object of mockery among ordinary people. Westernization had its strongest opponents among the ulema, who saw the outgrowth of secular educational institutions and their un-Islamic teachings as a direct threat.

  Muslims deeply resented the granting of apparently blasphemous legal equality to non-Muslims who not only remained exempt from military conscription but could also call upon their European Christian patrons to exert pressure upon the Ottoman state with impunity (even as Muslims remained without rights in Asian and African countries administered by European colonial powers). Looking back at European attitudes towards Turkey, Hüseyin Cahid, Turkey’s most prominent journalist in the early twentieth century, explained why he and other Young Turks became such fervent nationalists and anti-imperialists:

  The Turk was a tyrant, an oppressor, he knew nothing of right and justice. The Turk had no conscience, he was hostile to civilization, he understood nothing, his heart was indifferent to human sentiments. Turkey was the legitimate and natural property of the civilized West that could exploit it as it pleased; its inhabitants were in the eyes of the Europeans exploitable and only fit to be made to work as hard as possible. Yes, citizens, we Turks had to submit to all this, though our only fault was that our ancestors were hospitable to our guests. While we groaned under these calamities, when we turned at times to beg for mercy, our supplications, which showed that we had begun to recognize our honour and dignity, were met by new oppressions. Every time we raised our heads, we received a blow; every time we tried to stand erect we received a kick. Such was the lot of the Turks! While in their own countries their own citizens coveted the bread of their brothers and the poor started revolutions to secure a large part of the riches of the wealthy, we ourselves were not allowed to aspire to any part of the riches stolen from our country. While in their countries king and coachman are equal before the law, here an Ottoman vizier was inferior to a foreigner’s servant. We were doing all we could to help any Westerner who came to our land; the income of all the taxes paid by this poor nation went to ensure his well-being. On his part, he had no regard for this country, paid no taxes, and found fault with our law courts. Sometimes, there were attacks on our citizens and our officials, attacks that made our blood boil. But we could do nothing.37

  Young Turks such as Cahid emerged at the end of the nineteenth century to protest against the dire state of their country. But by the 1860s some young Ottoman intellectuals had also begun to fret about Istanbul’s seemingly relentless capitulation to ever-aggressive demands from Europeans (or Franks, as they were called), and advocated a more democratic and constitutional regime. These were often bureaucrats in the Ottoman government who suspected the Tanzimat modernizers of being anti-Islamic as well as mindlessly pro-European. The most articulate figure in the secret group that came to be known as the Young Ottomans was Namik Kemal; he felt keenly the bewilderment of ordinary people who were left ‘stranded, materially and spiritually’ by Westernization.38 Kemal also deplored the superficial and often tawdry Westernization preferred by the enforcers of the Tanzimat, which, according to him, consisted of no more than ‘the establishment of theatres, frequenting ballrooms, being liberal about the infidelities of one’s wife and using European toilets’.39 Another Young Ottoman, Ziya Pasha, complained:

  Islam, they say, is a stumbling block to the progress of the State;

  This story was not known before and now it is the fashion.

  Forgetting our religious loyalty in all our affairs

  Following Frankish ideas is now the fashion.40

  All in all, the top-down modernization during the Tanzimat years left an ambiguous legacy. It broadened
the gap between elites and masses. Contrary to assumptions, the old Turkey did not disappear before the new, nor did religion lose its appeal. The rhetoric of equality released nationalist aspirations, and centralization from above provoked more defiant assertions of identity. No less importantly, deeper economic links with Europe brought about traumatic social changes. As the Young Ottomans pointed out repeatedly, manufactured goods from Europe that flooded into the Turkish economy, destroying local industries and trade associations and guilds, removed a central plank on which urban life was built.41

  Turkey was now outlining a pattern soon to be visible in Egypt and Iran – the countries al-Afghani would go on to visit – and also elsewhere in Asia: that modernization shifted, often drastically, the locus of power within any society, and invited resistance from old elites who felt ignored or slighted. For instance, the reformist Ottomans who imposed a uniform wool hat, or fez, on all Ottoman government employees, regardless of their faith, provoked severe disaffection among tradition-minded elites, especially the ulema, as the fez, chosen for its resemblance to Western hats, was not the ideal headgear for the prostrations required during prayers. (It nevertheless was to become a symbol of Muslim identity outside Turkey.)

  Indeed, one of the two most enduring consequences of modernization everywhere in the Asian world would be the rise to power of new secular and Westernizing groups, whether military officers or government bureaucrats and new professionals. The other would be the backlash from those ordinary citizens who were asked to pay taxes, the religious-social elites who saw their influence threatened by the Westernizers, and the minorities who, in the face of a centralizing authority, became aware of their separate ethnic or religious identity.

  Unless the conditions were propitious – as in Japan with its ethnically uniform population and secular state, or in Russia under Peter the Great – modernization could unleash chaos and disunity. As it turned out, the Ottomans with their unwieldy territories, massive Christian populations and institutionalized ulema turned out to be extremely poorly equipped for rapid social and political reorganization along Western lines. So disruptive was the overall effect that in 1876 Sultan Abdulhamid would himself join the growing popular reaction against Westernization, and turn to pan-Islamism as a bulwark against Western encroachments upon the Muslim world.

  Why did al-Afghani go to Istanbul in the late 1860s? Indian Muslims harassed by the British, and Muslim Tatars ill-treated by the Russians, were beginning to call for the Ottoman sultan to assume leadership of the Muslim world and declare jihad (holy war) on infidels. But pan-Islamism, of which Istanbul became the magnetic centre for Muslims in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was no more than a rumour among exile circles in 1869 – Namik Kemal in 1872 was the first writer we know of to use the phrase ‘Muslim Unity’.42

  Istanbul was, however, famous as a centre of the protective modernization that al-Afghani would later urge upon fellow Muslims – a theme he stressed in his first recorded speech in Istanbul in 1870. The same year he arrived in Istanbul, a former grand vizier, Fuad Pasha, had written to the sultan to warn him that his empire ‘is in danger. We must change all our institutions, political and military, and adopt the new laws and new appliances invented by the Europeans.’43 But al-Afghani couldn’t bring himself to advocate wholesale Westernization of the kind Istanbul, a city with a Christian majority, had become an exemplar of. In many ways he had more in common with the Young Ottomans, who argued for self-strengthening without blind imitation of the West, and who insisted that the Koran itself sanctioned many of the values – individual freedom and dignity, justice, the use of reason, even patriotism – touted by Turkish high officials as ‘Western’.

  The people who later gathered around al-Afghani in Egypt were Muslims marginalized and rendered insecure by modern reforms. A typical Young Ottoman like Ali Suavi, an alim or scholar and a representative of the traditionalist lower-middle class in Istanbul who resented being left behind by Tanzimat-style modernization, would have gravitated to al-Afghani. However, since the Young Ottoman group had been proscribed and its members exiled in 1867, two years before al-Afghani arrived in the city, he had very different collaborators in Turkey.

  Al-Afghani met Ali Pasha, one of the most powerful of the Westernizing statesmen. His host was a leading reformist in the field of education, a Tanzimatist. As in Afghanistan, al-Afghani seems not to have had much trouble insinuating himself into the highest echelons of the ruling class. Within a few months of his arrival he was appointed to the Council of Education and invited to speak at the opening of Darülfünun-i Osmani, a new modern university, where the education minister was in attendance along with other top officials of the administration.

  Al-Afghani knew the director of the university, a freethinker who was frequently attacked by conservative ulema. The modernizing Tanzimatists probably saw al-Afghani as a useful ally, a token alim with whom to defuse criticism of secular education by their own religious figures. Certainly, al-Afghani himself seemed sincerely committed to reviving Muslim power through modern education. Thanks to his Persian background of heterodox philosophy, al-Afghani was also more likely than the Sunni Ottoman ulema to recognize the importance of reason and science. In his first recorded speech at the secular-minded Darülfünun-i Osmani in 1870, al-Afghani lamented the ignorance bred by madrasas and ‘dervish convents’ among the Islamic people (milla) and their resulting subjugation by the scientific West:

  My brothers, Arise from the sleep of neglect. Know that the Islamic people [milla] were [once] the strongest in rank, the most valuable in worth … Later this people sank into ease and laziness … Some of the Islamic nations came under the domination of other nations. The clothes of abasement were put on them. The glorious milla was humiliated. All these things happened from lack of vigilance, laziness, working too little, and stupidity … Are we not going to take an example from the civilized nations? Let us cast a glance at the achievement of others. By effort they have achieved the final degree of knowledge and the peak of elevation. For us too all the means are ready, and there remains no obstacle to our progress. Only laziness, stupidity, and ignorance are obstacles to [our] advance.44

  Al-Afghani’s choice of words was instructive. ‘Civilized nations’ was a term of nineteenth-century politics, used by Western European statesmen to exalt their countries above all others. The terms used to define ‘civilization’ were exclusively European and Christian; the Tanzimatists had taken them on as a challenge in their bid to promote Turkey on the scale of evolution. Al-Afghani’s own deployment of the term hinted at how far he had gone in his rejection of Muslim vanity and exceptionalism. It implied, dangerously, that Muslims were no longer the chosen people; their history was no longer congruent with God’s plan. And madrasas were no longer up to the task of educating Muslims.

  Clearly, the lessons from Afghanistan and India were crystallizing in al-Afghani’s mind – mainly that Muslims could not return to the glorious imperial past. They had to look ahead and to catch up with the West; and it wasn’t enough to confine the necessary modernization to the army, as the Ottomans and the Egyptians were then doing. The great Muslim adversary of the British in South India, Tipu Sultan, had deployed tactics learnt from French soldiers but still lost to the British. The rebel soldiers of the Mutiny belonged to a modern army of a European type. But, lacking central organization, they could conceive of no higher objective than restoring the hapless Mughal emperor to his throne in Delhi. As al-Afghani saw it, a much greater transformation – primarily in the mind – was needed.

  But al-Afghani had arrived in the last phase of the Tanzimat, in the midst of a growing backlash against the modernizing reformers by the ulema. Whether he liked it or not, he was identified with the modernizers and exposed to the malignity of the conservatives; he was soon to feel the full force of their disapproval. In the course of another public lecture at the same university, the first of a planned series of fourteen such lectures, al-Afghani ventured to compare prophe
ts to philosophers, coming down slightly on the side of the latter: ‘The teachings of the philosopher are universal, and do not take into account the particularities of a given epoch, whereas those of a prophet are conditioned by the latter. That is why the prescriptions of the prophet vary.’45

  This sounds innocuous to modern ears. But al-Afghani was proposing nothing less than that the Prophet Muhammad’s Sharia was not immutable, that it was open to revision by philosophers. Many Muslim thinkers in Persia and India in previous centuries, and even in the Arab world before that, had accepted this principle; they believed that men of reason could forego the literal observance of prophecy, which was meant strictly for the uneducated masses. But the paranoid resisters of modernization in Turkey thought al-Afghani had come close to apostasy and deserved swift execution.

  Al-Afghani was to go much further fifteen years later in his riposte to the French historian Ernest Renan, who believed that Islam made Muslims incapable of a scientific temperament. But the Tanzimatist reformers had handled the old ulema very cautiously; al-Afghani had broken their delicate protocol by connecting secular ideas to old controversies of dogma, and appeared to challenge the authority of the Prophet himself. Promoting secular disciplines of history, law, economics and philosophy, the new university was already a formidable rival to the traditional madrasas; now al-Afghani seemed to be questioning Islamic theology itself. In the storm of protests that followed, the director was sacked. The university itself was closed down after just a year of operation. Al-Afghani was removed from the Council of Education and his lecture series was cancelled. In early 1871, he was expelled from Istanbul; he had spent less than two years there.