Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Accordingly, Afghani and his milieu sought to revivify critical practices of reading, interpretation and epistemological inquiry within Islam. Nikki R. Keddie has argued that Afghani’s appeal to the Islamic tradition ‘was strengthened by a desire to avoid identification with the Western oppressors or feelings of inferiority toward them’.100 It was also, however, a genuine process akin to what Said has described as ‘restlessly self-clarifying’ critique ‘in search of freedom, enlightenment, more agency’.101 Describing his time in Cairo as a student ‘seeking Mohammedan instruction’, Blunt attests to a sense of joy in encountering through his teachers Islam’s most expansive and ecumenical manifestations – ‘the larger and purer school of thought’, as he saw it.102 This he attributed largely to Afghani’s influence, which ‘taught that Sunnite Islam was capable of adapting itself to all the highest cravings of the human soul and the needs of modern life’ (it is worth noting here Blunt’s emphasis on articulating both material needs and more ineffable human aspirations).103 Afghani’s influence in Egypt extended to institution-building; himself a fixture in Cairo’s café culture, which provided spaces for intense debate, he encouraged the setting up of newspapers and secret societies, including Freemasonry, which facilitated political organization.104 Sometime in 1879, Afghani also called for the establishment of hizban wataniyyan or a patriotic (‘homeland’) party.105 His circle at the Azhar included Christians like Adib Ishaq and Louis Sabunji (who worked very closely with Blunt during the 1882 crisis and Urabi’s trial) and the Jewish writer Yaqub Sanu (or James Sanua), all of whom played a role in emerging nationalist political and public activities. For disciples like Mohammed Abdu, Afghani played a crucial role in enabling opinions critical of the regime to be voiced openly by encouraging the establishment of newspapers which combated the tendencies of the older, more subservient ones. By 1879, when his once-friendly acquaintance, Khedive Tewfik, alarmed at the extent of Afghani’s anticolonial preaching, would expel him from Egypt, even the correspondent of The Times noted that Afghani and his followers showed that ‘a native opinion exists, has means to find expression, and therefore is not to be utterly ignored’.106

  It is not necessary to overstate the correlation between Afghani’s teachings and the rise of Egyptian nationalism to note the significance of his presence in Egypt for nearly a decade in the run-up to the revolution. Astonishingly, as Pankaj Mishra has noted, ‘Afghani is barely known in the West today, even though his influence … at least in its longevity, almost matches Marx’s’.107 Afghani, a notoriously evasive and shape-shifting figure, would go on after his Egyptian sojourn to become perhaps the most influential political theorist of pan-Islamism as an anticolonial strategy and ideology. His fierce anticolonialism, with a particular animus against the British, is thought to have developed in India at the time of the 1857 rebellion.108 In Cairo, the wandering intellectual’s speeches calling for Egyptian independence invoked the ways in which ‘they, the Egyptians, had submitted to centuries of despotism and submission and their oppressive governments had taken from them what they had created with the sweat of their brows’.109 Emphasizing what would be theorized in the twentieth century as ‘self-emancipation’ or ‘self-liberation’, their choice, he told his listeners, was either to ‘live like free people or die as martyrs’.110 Afghani also addressed the fellah directly: ‘You break the heart of the earth in order to draw sustenance from it and support your family. Why do you not break the heart of your oppressor? Why do you not break the heart of those who eat the fruit of your labor?’111 By advocating resistance both to ‘egotistical Sultans’ and the forces of European colonialism, Afghani appears to have anticipated many anticolonial arguments that ‘were generally brought forth only some decades later’.112 His copious, very diverse body of work – and the way in which it changed over time – merits further study in its own right, for which there is insufficient space here. I do, however, want to pause on a couple of lectures that give us some sense of the ‘new critical spirit’ Blunt saw as integral to the wandering teacher’s influence in Egypt. The lectures were given in India, where he returned shortly after he was expelled from Egypt and give us a flavour of his thinking in that period.

  A powerful commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, as well as a sense of epistemological inquiry as a human rather than culturally specific endeavour is evident in Afghani’s thought. Afghani’s speeches frequently suggested that knowledge necessarily involves the transmission of ideas across borders, so that they could not be said to ‘belong’ to any single culture – even if, reversing the colonial order of things, he cannily told his Indian audience: ‘Human values spread out from India to the whole world.’113 The recovery and revivification of hermeneutic traditions in the face of stagnation did not mean that colonized peoples were thereby acceding to the West; it was to return to something that was already embedded in their own traditions and histories. For Afghani, scientific thinking was part of a political explanation for the West’s current domination and prosperity but not an inherently Western mode. In a speech in Alexandria, Afghani noted that present-day Egyptians were the descendants of peoples who had ‘made major breakthroughs in engineering and mathematics, and who had taught writing, agriculture and philosophy to the Greeks’.114 Equally, those countries – including India and the Muslim polities of the Middle East – which had neglected their scientific traditions were now paying the price for intellectual dereliction. Afghani’s own investments are in philosophy or falsafa – a comprehensive mode of inquiry that subsumes the other sciences because, he says, ‘its subject is universal’.115 Hence, those Muslim scholars ‘who forbid science and knowledge in the belief that they are safeguarding the Islamic religion are really the enemies of that religion … and there is no incompatibility between science and knowledge and the foundation of the Islamic faith’.116

  Reclaiming knowledge as an ineluctably human endeavour, Afghani defines the provenance of philosophy as ‘the wide arena of human feelings’, and its goal as ‘human perfection in reason’.117 In another essay probably written around the same time (c.1882), addressed explicitly to Indian Muslim clerics or ulema, Afghani figures ‘Reason’ not as a particular mode of thinking, but as part of the ‘light of natural intelligence’ which all human beings have necessarily deployed to know and shape the world around them, ‘to cultivate, to plant trees, preserve fruits, procure animals, protect rivers, bring forth waters, dig canals, dikes, and dams, to spin and weave, in an agreeable and appropriate way’.118 All of this requires knowledge through the spirit of inquiry, whether this be of ‘the nature of soils’ or ‘the action and reaction of the elements’.119 Knowledge by definition is limitless, which is why those Muslim scholars who seek to narrow its scope, closing ‘the doors of why and wherefore to pure minds’ and wearing the ‘garment of infallibility’, are ‘defective and incomplete’.120 As he would note in his famous rebuttal of Renan’s condemnation of Islam, all religions have it in them to be intolerant and stifle learning and all have done so at different points in their history.121 For Afghani, the ‘Precious Book’ or Holy Koran itself, however, makes clear the importance of ‘knowledge, wisdom, learning, reflection, thought and insight’, and clarifies the laws of civic and domestic relationships so as to prevent ‘the harm of oppression and injustice’.122 Equally, knowledge cannot be culturally bounded, for ‘to be proud regarding learning is to be satisfied with ignorance’; humbly learning from other cultures is vital to the natural progression of ideas.123 Many ideas that are seen as Greek or Roman have travelled there, Afghani tells his audience, through India, Babylonia and Egypt, in each move acquiring ‘a new form, and in each migration … fresh adornment’.124 Spirituality and science are neither closed nor mutually exclusive systems. ‘No end exists for this great Book’, which is open to infinite study and interpretation, he writes of the Koran, and anyone who either claims to have fathomed it or attempts to close off its meanings ‘is suffering from compound ignorance or madness’.125 In closing, he urges
the ulema of India to give up defective scholarship, to cast their glance on the ‘wide world’ around them and ask why Muslims are afflicted by ‘poverty, indigence, helplessness, and distress’.126 To do this, they will need to engage with science, technology, indeed modernity itself: ‘Is it not a fault for a percipient sage not to learn the entire sphere of new sciences and inventions and fresh creations … when the world has changed from one state to another?’127 Keddie suggests that Afghani was drawing here on a longer Islamic philosophical tradition in which ‘when scripture apparently contradicted reason or science, scripture must be reinterpreted’.128

  An Egyptian Nationalist Returns to Britain

  When, in early 1882, Blunt left Cairo, radicalized by the ferment, his sense of himself as a mediator who was, in the final instance, loyal to the British crown had been badly shaken. He wrote that the three months he had recently spent in Egypt had felt like a lifetime, ‘so absorbing had been the interests they had brought me’.129 In a marked reversal, he began to think of key British officials in Egypt such as Malet as former friends, ‘gone over to the enemy’s camp, and … now no longer to be trusted’, and himself described the Joint Note he had set out to advocate to Urabi as an attack on the national movement.130 This attack was taking place under the cover of ‘a crusade of civilization’ which was in fact ‘a support to the established order in Cairo of financial things’.131 As his visit to Urabi in December on behalf of Malet had so clearly demonstrated, the Egyptians were not credulous and passive recipients of his attempts to translate imperial intentions. He himself, meanwhile, had turned from being a mere sympathizer – he would now subject ‘romantic sympathy’ to critique – into a man who would see himself as an Egyptian nationalist, who perhaps felt the betrayal of Britain and its messianic rhetoric of spreading liberty more sharply than any other. Leaving for England on 27 February 1882, a bare four months before the bombardment of Alexandria which led up to Urabi’s defeat, he noted another inversion, in which it was not the colonized who assimilated to English values: ‘I looked upon Egypt already like a second patria and intended to throw my lot in with the Egyptians as if they were my own countrymen. I was estranged from those of my countrymen in blood, except Gregory, who formed the then little English colony at Cairo.’132 This was not the romantically Orientalist Blunt going native, like many before him, including his acquaintance Richard Burton, or toying with his admitted attraction to Islam (he would, later in life, consider converting).133 What Blunt had undergone by the time Alexandria was shelled and Urabi put on trial was, as it were, a Cairene conversion to anticolonialism. He would bitterly distinguish the genuineness of his own identification with the cause of Egyptian liberty from the fraudulence of the Liberal, Gladstone, who ‘like the tragedian in Dickens, when he had to act Othello … began by painting himself black all over’.134

  Despite the efforts of Blunt, Sir William Gregory and others to sway Gladstone’s government, in the end the British occupation of Egypt (the French bowed out early on) was indeed the result. Ably assisted by Malet and other colonial administrators, Gladstone succeeded in his efforts to portray Urabi as a military dictator who would usurp rather than represent Egypt’s national aspirations, which both the Liberal Party and the liberal press continued to claim to respect. Although attempts were made to obtain the consent of other European powers to the invasion, Britain ultimately went it alone. The sleight of hand did not go unremarked by the Annual Register:

  Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt

  Up to this time, and indeed for a long time afterwards, Arabi Pasha was regarded by the English Foreign Office as a mere military adventurer – the national support which his programme gradually received was altogether ignored, and a deaf ear was turned to those warnings which came from even official sources; whilst those addressed to the public by Sir William Gregory, Mr Wilfrid Blunt, and others who were conveniently classed together as dreamers or partisans, were put aside as unworthy of a moment’s attention.135

  Blunt was incredulous: ‘I could not believe that England had an interest in crushing liberty anywhere’, he wrote in an article after Urabi’s defeat at Tel-el-Kabir.136 He had been wrong: ‘It has been to prevent a crime that I have laboured – alas, in vain!’137 His experience of colonial myth-making around Egypt gave him a fresh perspective on other situations, such as Ireland, of which restive colony it was also being said that ‘agitators’ were at work, ‘that the Irish fellahin are not really with the National Party, and that armed intervention would set things right’.138 Despite Gladstone’s having labelled him the ‘one unfortunate exception’ among Englishmen with Egyptian experience in opposing the war, Blunt was not exactly a ‘single voice against a multitude’ (as he described himself) even if he had been the most vociferous.139 There was even one high-profile resignation over the intervention – that of the Liberal MP John Bright, who had been very active with the Jamaica Committee. ‘I think that in the present case there has been a manifest violation both of international law and of the moral law, and, therefore, it is impossible for me to give my support to it’, Bright maintained in his resignation address, the day after the bombardment.140 Most questions, unlike Blunt’s, Harrison’s or Gregory’s, were asked after the event. Had ‘the bombardment of Alexandria … been undertaken to protect British subjects and British interests, or to protect the interests of British and French bondholders?’ Had parliament ‘been drifting into war with their eyes open … carrying fire and sword into the country on behalf of usurers’?141

  Gladstone’s government held the line even as it declared that it was not at war with Egypt at all. Invoked in a trope that will be all too familiar to present-day readers, Egypt was represented as a land of ‘lawless military violence, aggravated by cruel and wanton crime’, while ‘Arabi was a military oppressor; whose success would revive the worst abuses of old Egyptians’ misrule; and our troops were engaged not in a war with Egypt, but in freeing Egyptians from oppression’.142 Furious at criticism in the House, Gladstone insisted that the bombardment had been undertaken in ‘self-defence’.143 Less credulous Liberals demanded of their leader: which party in Egypt had invited Britain to rid them of the despot? And how could the arrival of the fleet well before the riots be construed as ‘self-defence’? The answer was not precisely satisfactory, but it came in the form of Sir Charles Dilke’s groundless assertion that, had action not been taken, it ‘would be to put the lives of Europeans throughout the East absolutely at the mercy of a fanatical mob of Mahomedans’. What was at stake, he noted, with greater honesty perhaps as he appealed to the working-men of Britain, was not only ‘the sanctity of European life’ but the right of British traders not to be ‘completely debarred from operations in the East and driven out’.144 Although Dilke went on to insist that the protection of British trade was not the reason for bombardment, the revolution had portended significant changes to the way in which Egypt would be governed, in particular, with regard to labour and finance. What cantankerous British parliamentarians referred to as ‘bondholders’ backed by military force were in fact an expandable tribe in the service of international capitalism, ‘a foreign stratum of investors, merchants, workers, and diplomats [with] extraordinary leverage over the indigenous state’.145 There is little doubt that this was a class whose interests were firmly in the sights of the revolution, and that their privileges would have been significantly undermined if Urabi and his allies had not been stopped. One of the first – and, for the Anglo-French alliance, more alarming – acts of the Urabi government was the cancellation of fellah loans contracted from foreigners. Whatever changes may have been forthcoming, they were certainly not conducive to the maintenance of the advantages of powerful foreign commercial and financial interests.

  Once Urabi had surrendered and been taken prisoner of war, on 13 September 1882, his trial and presumed death sentence would bring together a small but articulate group of British campaigners, including the anti-war Radicals Wilfrid Lawson MP, Frederic Harrison and John Seym
our Keay.146 The Gladstone government did not look upon the prospect of a fair trial in open court with equanimity; too much might come out in the wash, putting their carefully constructed version of events in jeopardy. Neither, of course, did the khedive and his advisors. It took extraordinary persistence on Blunt’s part, combined with a shift in British public opinion, for an agreement to emerge that Urabi could, after all, be represented by the barrister A. M. Broadley, who had already been working on behalf of apprehended rebels in French-occupied Tunis. Upon Broadley’s advice, Blunt (reluctantly) and Urabi accepted the compromise offer that, if the latter pleaded guilty to the charge of rebellion, other charges would be dropped and his sentence commuted to exile. Once the initial flush of military success died down, Blunt thought, ‘reasonable people were beginning to ask themselves what after all we were fighting in Egypt about’.147 The aftermath of war and the highly publicized attempt to save Urabi’s life certainly made way for increased domestic criticism in Britain of the annexation of Egypt. Urabi’s trial and all the various components of ‘the Egypt crisis’ would become the point of departure for writing alternative histories of the annexation, which in turn were also ‘secret histories’ of British imperialism itself. What is common to this small but significant body of work – which would provide a historical resource for the development of a more sustained body of anticolonialism within Britain – is the way in which it both takes native Egyptian resistance seriously and finds points of cross-cultural identification with it.