by Tamim Ansary
Mohammed Ali saw how easily Napoleon cut his way into Egypt, and he was impressed. He decided he had better bring Egypt into line with whatever Europeans and especially the French were doing so that no new Napoleon and no new Lord Nelson could march in like a bunch of gang-bangers and treat Egypt like a grade-school playground.
But what was Napoleon’s secret? Well, Ali knew that Napoleon had stripped the French clergy of power, shut down church schools, and built a secular school system to replace it. Mohammed Ali decided to do the same thing in Egypt. He cut state funding for the ulama. He cut funding for the charitable foundations, the religious schools, and the mosques. He ordered all religious foundations to produce titles for the lands they owned, and of course they couldn’t do it, since their ownership went back to early medieval times, three or four empires ago. So Ali’s state took their lands. Egypt still had a class of elite mamluks entrenched as the country’s tax farmers, but Ali saw that in Europe the state collected taxes directly. So Mohammed Ali invited the leading tax-farming mamluks to dinner and had them massacred. Then he launched a crash program to build modern roads, modern schools, and the like. This was all a foretaste of a pattern that was to be repeated many times in the next century.
All this sudden development bankrupted Egypt, and Mohammed Ali had to borrow money to keep his government afloat. He borrowed it from European bankers, of course, who insisted that European financial advisers be allowed to monitor the various agencies of Mohammed Ali’s government, just to oversee the work and make sure the money was not being misused.
Meanwhile, the Ottomans were getting nervous about Mohammed Ali, who was asserting some claims to Syria. They were already too weak to curb him on their own, so they asked the British for help. The British said they would lend a hand if the Ottomans would only sign a treaty allowing Europeans certain privileges on Turkish soil. They organized a consortium of European nations to come in on the treaty, a coalition of the willing, so to speak, and when the dust settled, Mohammed Ali was safely confined to Egypt, but Europeans were powerful players throughout the Levant. Now, only “the Eastern question” remained to resolve, the question being: which European nation would be responsible for “protecting” which part of the eastern Mediterranean?
Egypt was the richest prize, so both France and Britain cozied up to rulers here. Mohammed Ali legally established his family as dynastic rulers of Egypt, power passing to his sons, grandsons, and so on down, and in the next few decades, these governor-kings of Egypt, these khedives as they were called, gave Britain a concession to build a railroad in Egypt; then mollified France with a rich contract to build the Suez canal; then placated the indignant British by giving them the right to build and own the Egyptian national bank, squeezing kickbacks out of each transaction for themselves—you see where this is going.
Meanwhile, Mohammed Ali’s descendants decided Egypt’s future lay in cotton. Textile manufacturing was the first enterprise to be industrialized in Europe, so the market for cotton became voracious, and the Nile Valley grew excellent cotton. Around 1860, the price of cotton on the world market suddenly soared. The khedive of that moment, a spend-thrift playboy of the Eastern world named Ismail, got starry-eyed with dreams of wealth for himself and his country. He borrowed enormous sums of money from European bankers to industrialize Egypt’s cotton industry overnight: he bought cotton gins and other such machinery at enormous expense, money he figured Egypt could easily repay since it would be selling cotton forever.
But the rise in cotton prices was a mere blip caused by the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, which choked off cotton exports from the southern states there and forced English textile factories to look elsewhere for thread. As soon as the U.S. Civil War ended, the price of cotton dropped and Egypt was ruined. Now, the bankers and financial advisers flooded into the country in earnest. Every Egyptian government official ended up with a European adviser of his very own. The Eastern questions still remained—both France and Britain stood poised to achieve total dominance in Egypt.
Britain seemed to have the edge, however, which made France all the more determined not to lose the edge it had further west. In the period of France’s revolutionary turmoil, two Algerian Jewish families had sold 8 million francs’ worth of grain to France to feed its armies. When Napoleon fell and France reverted to monarchy, France disavowed that debt. The Ottoman governor of this province met with the French consul, Pierre Duval, to demand an explanation. Duval told him France did not discuss money with Arabs. The governor slapped Duval in the face with . . . a fly swatter. What a blow to French honor! L’Affaire de Mouche-Swatter (the “affair of the fly swatter”) made it into the French press, and nobody laughed. More insults were exchanged and tensions went on rising. As it happened, there was a struggle under way in France just then between monarchists and liberals. The monarchists who held power saw domestic political advantage in a quick, successful military adventure. Napoleon had proven how easily Arabs could be defeated in Egypt, and so, in 1830, France invaded Algeria.7
The venture proved as quick and successful as any Frenchman might have hoped. The governor fled to Naples, leaving his fortune behind and his country leaderless. France hauled about 100 million francs out of Algeria, about half of which made it to the French treasury. The rest disappeared into the pockets of the soldiers and officers who invaded the country.
With its government gone, Algeria was a power vacuum, and you know how nature abhors those things. Instead of setting up a proxy or puppet, France decided to incorporate Algeria into its national structure as three new provinces. In other words, the French treated Algeria not as a colony but as part of France. A “joint stock” company was set up to sell land to French citizens who would immigrate to these new provinces and help “develop” them.
Even here in Algeria, which France out and out invaded, the foreigners flooding in as immigrants didn’t fight a war with the natives. They just bought up 80 percent of the land, fair and square, and set up a whole new economy that didn’t compete with the native economy so much as ignore it. Algerian Arabs remained free to plant what they wanted on whatever land they retained, ship what they grew to Algerian ports if they could afford the freight charges, and sell their products in world market if they could find any buyers, which they couldn’t. Or if they preferred, they could leave the land and move to the cities and start businesses, if they had the capital—which they didn’t—and if they could get a business license from French officials, which for various good and legal reasons, they often couldn’t.
So the Arabs of Algeria ended up buying and selling to each other in the old traditional ways while the bulk of the country, absorbed as it was into the European and world markets, did business in streamlined, super-productive modern ways.
If any Algerian had been asked whether he opposed or supported selling 80 percent of the country to French buyers, he would surely have said he opposed it. If anyone had been faced with that decision, he would almost certainly have decided no. But no one ever had a chance to decide whether to sell off 80 percent of the country. Each landowner who sold property to “the French” was only deciding whether to sell his one piece of land to this one buyer. It was quite possible to oppose selling 80 percent of the country to foreigners while seeing persuasive reasons to sell one particular bit of it to one particular foreigner.
Over the next century, the French community in Algeria grew to seven hundred thousand French citizens. They came to own most of the land and considered themselves native Algerians, since they were born on Algerian soil and most were the children of parents born there. Inconveniently, some 5 million Arabs happened to be living there as well and no one could fathom where they had come from or what they were doing there. They didn’t seem to have any function, and whatever they subsisted on, it was an almost completely separate economy from the one the French Algerians were involved in.
By 1850, Europeans controlled every part of the world that had once called itself Dar al-Islam. They lived in
these countries as an upper class, they ruled them directly or decided who would rule, they controlled the resources, they dictated the policies, and they circumscribed the daily lives of their people. In places such as Egypt, Iran, and India, there were clubs that the native people could not enter because they were Egyptian or Iranian or Indian. Europeans had achieved this dominance without any grand war or broadscale assault. The Europeans were scarcely even aware that there had been a struggle and that they had won. But Muslims noticed, because it’s always harder to ignore a rock you’re under than a rock you’re on.
13
The Reform Movements
1150-1336 AH
1737-1918 CE
AT THE SAME TIME as these political developments, a crucial story was unfolding in the intellectual arena as well. This story began before 1800 and continued long after, with consequences that shake the world to this very day: it consisted of revival and reform movements that surged up throughout the Muslim world at the same time that Europeans were overwhelming these lands.
The two stories are related, though not identical. Some sort of sweeping challenge to the Muslim status quo was going to take place around this time with or without the Europeans. Why? Because in the Muslim world, by 1700 or so, religious institutions had bureaucratized spirituality in much the same way that the Catholic Church had bureaucratized Christianity in late medieval Europe. The whole system of Muslim law had been worked out so fully that there was no creative work left for any new enthusiast to do. The application of shari’a to every dot and detail of personal and social life was a done deal. The power of the ulama had grown encrusted. The Sufi orders had been institutionalized, and authorities at every level agreed that “the gates of ijtihad were closed.”
Ijtihad, remember, means “free and independent thinking based on reason.” It can’t depart from scripture, but it consists of thinking through the implications of scripture creatively. Muslim scholars had once allowed that ijtihad might be exercised on issues not explicitly settled by Qur’an; then by Qur’an and hadith; then by Qur’an, hadith, and the work of previous authoritative scholars. . . . And so by the eighteenth century, important scholars generally agreed that no unsettled issues existed. Everything had been covered, everything worked out; ordinary people no longer needed to exercise free and independent thought. There was nothing left for them to do but follow the rules.
Following the rules, however, does not provide the spiritual fulfillment people seek from religion. The bureaucratization of Islam created much the same stultifications and discontents that in Christendom had provoked the Protestant Reformation. And indeed, by the middle of the eighteenth century, reform movements were beginning to sprout throughout the Muslim world.
But there never was a Muslim version of Europe’s Protestant Reformation, and thus none of the consequences that followed from the Reformation: no doctrine of individualism emerged here, no coupling of religion to nationalism (except in a sense in Iran), no separation of church and state, no conceptual division of the world into secular and religious realms, no sudden development of enlightenment-style liberalism, and so no democratic, scientific, or industrial revolutions.
Why not?
Well, for one thing, some of the issues that fueled the Reformation could not arise in Islam. Protestant reformers rebelled against the Church; Islam had no church. Protestant reformers attacked the authority of the pope; Islam had no pope. Protestants said priests could not mediate between man and God; Islam never had a priesthood (the ulama were more like lawyers than priests.) The Protestant reformers insisted on a direct, personal interaction between the individual worshipper and God. The Muslim prayer ritual had always been just that.
But the Europeans were certainly a factor too. Without them in the picture, the Muslim reform movements might well have taken a different course. European religious reform took shape in a purely European context. That is, when Protestant reformers challenged Catholic practices and doctrines, they were addressing issues internal to their own society, not steeling Christianity against some external cultural challenge. In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it’s true, but they weren’t in the living room, and they certainly weren’t in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity.
Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I’ve discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years.
Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reformers as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-à-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it had absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that.
Conversion to Islam made the Mongols no less bloody (as Timur-i-lang proved), but at least, under the aegis of the converted rulers, the old quest could begin again, albeit starting over from the smoking rubble of a ruined world—the quest to build and universalize the community of Allah.
The same could not be said for the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn’t challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn’t bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?
Even if Muslim and Christian scholars had found some forum in which to exchange views, it would have been irrelevant to the conundrum facing Muslims because by the nineteenth century, the challenge to Islam came not so much from Christianity as from a secular, humanistic world-view that evolved out of the Reformation, the mélange now often called “modernity.”
The source of Muslim weakness and European strength was not obvious. It wasn’t strictly a question of military advantage. For the most part, the foreigners weren’t torturing and killing. For the most part, the new overlords didn’t even set themselves up as rulers, quite. Officially, most Muslims still had their own native monarchs, still had their own government buildings where Muslim officials still stamped documents, and somewhere in every Muslim state was still a capital dating back to ancient days of bygone splendor, and in that capital was a palace and in that palace a throne and on that throne usually a shah, sultan, nawab, khan, khedive, or what you will, some native ruler whose wealth and pomp made him all but indistinguishable from the potentates of old.
In Iran, the foreigners roamed the corridors of power merely as advisers. In Turkey, there they were, collecting salaries as consultants. In Egypt and the Levant, they stood by as “protectors.” Even in India, which had a governor-general appointed by the British parliament, the military and police forces that “kept order” consisted mostly of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsees, and other locals. How could Muslims claim that they were not still ruling themselves?
And yet by the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims looked around and saw with dawning horror that they had been conquered: from Bengal to Istanbul, they were subservient to foreigners in every aspect of their lives, in their own cities and towns and neighborhoods and in their very homes. And not just foreigners like
the ones next door, but people who spoke a whole different set of languages, practiced different religious rituals, wore different kinds of clothes and different kinds of headgear (or, shockingly, none at all!), built different kinds of houses, formed different kinds of groupings. These foreigners ate pork, they drank liquor, their women moved about in public with their faces showing, they laughed at jokes that weren’t funny and failed to see the humor in things that were hilarious, ate weird-tasting food, listened to music that sounded more like noise, and spent their leisure time in puzzling and pointless activities such as cricket and quadrilles.
So the question arose now, as it had in the wake of the Mongol holocaust: if the triumphant expansion of the Muslim project proved the truth of the revelation, what did the impotence of Muslims in the face of these new foreigners signify about the faith?
With this question looming over the Muslim world, movements to revive Islam could not be extricated from the need to resurrect Muslim power. Reformers could not merely offer proposals for achieving more authentic religious experiences. They had to expound how the authenticity they proposed would get history back on course, how their proposals would restore the dignity and splendor of the Umma, how they would get Muslims moving again toward the proper endpoint of history: perfecting the community of justice and compassion that flourished in Medina in the original golden moment and enlarging it until it included all the world.