lands whose inhabitants enjoy sound minds, attentive ears, and sympathetic hearts to whom I can recount how a human being is treated in the East. Thus will be extinguished the fire that so many sufferings have lit in me and my body will be freed from the burden of sufferings that have broken my heart.97
After a long spell in Dar al-Harb, al-Afghani now intended to give priority to Muslim self-strengthening against the West above the issue of internal reform. A measure of this new defensive mood could be found in one of his first articles in an Arabic periodical in Paris, an open letter to its editor, a Lebanese Maronite disciple of al-Afghani’s, admonishing him for excessive criticism of ‘Easterners’, who were suffering at the hands of foreign imperialists, and of the Ottoman Empire, which was the only protector of Muslims worldwide. Only internal unity among Easterners, he asserted, could stop them from becoming prey to foreigners. Likewise Ottomans should remain united behind their potentate. Al-Afghani would look for and find supporters in both France and the Ottoman Empire for such views.
His articles praising the Ottoman sultan as a potential unifier of Islam were received particularly gratefully by his old Egyptian disciples and colleagues who had gone into exile in Beirut after the British occupation of Egypt. Mohammed Abduh, among others, wrote to lavishly praise his role in the awakening of Egypt. A few months later Abduh joined him in Paris and together they founded a secret society of Muslims dedicated to the unification and reform of Islam.
Funded by a wealthy Tunisian political reformer and other well-off sympathizers, and assisted by such volunteers as Qasim Amin (1863 – 1908), the Alexandria-born advocate of women’s rights, al-Afghani and Abduh started a magazine called al-‘Urwa al-wuthqa (literally, ‘The Firmest Bond’) for free distribution in the Muslim world. Published from a small room near the Place de la Madeleine, its eighteen issues dealt with the ravages of British imperialism, the need for Muslim unity and cultural pride, and the correct reinterpretation of Islamic principles. Though prevented from circulating in European-controlled countries, the magazine in its samizdat incarnations became hugely influential across the Muslim world and beyond. The opening issue of al-‘Urwa al-wuthqa addressed itself to ‘easterners in general, and Muslims in particular’, claiming that the magazine would serve them by explaining the causes of their decline and offering a remedy. It went on to assert that European imperialists had finally been exposed and that long-oppressed Muslims were now beginning to be aware of the need for unity against the foreigners occupying their lands.
The exhortatory note makes the magazine sound like the Communist Manifesto. But it is hard to underestimate its importance as the first international periodical to call explicitly for the revival of Islamic solidarity in the face of the encroaching West. Nothing like it had ever existed in Arabic, or in any of the other languages of the Islamic world. Having invented liberal journalism in Egypt, al-Afghani and Abduh were now inaugurating a tradition of radical polemic which explicitly rejected the previous Muslim programme of internal reform and national consolidation. As Abduh explained in an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette before the British occupation of Egypt:
We wished to break down the tyranny of our rulers; we complained of the Turks to the foreigners; we wished to improve ourselves politically, and to advance as the nations of Europe have advanced on the path of liberty. Now we know that there are worse evils than despotism and worse enemies than the Turks.98
It was al-‘Urwa al-wuthqa that first offered, in Abduh’s prose, an interpretation of jihad as an individual rather than a communal duty – an obligation to keep Muslim lands under Muslim control which was binding on all Muslims, not just their rulers. Both Abduh and al-Afghani worked hard to find messages in the Koran that could fit their political programme of awakening the Muslim masses; they also dispatched copies of the periodical as far as Tripoli and the Malay Peninsula. The Syrian writer Rashid Rida wrote of how, when he read the articles in al-‘Urwa al-wuthqa of ‘the call to pan-Islamism, the return of glory, power and prestige to Islam, the recovery of what it used to possess, and the liberation of its people from foreign domination’, he was ‘so impressed that I entered into a new phase of my life’.99 Rida, mentored later by Mohammed Abduh, was to continue al-Afghani’s work through al-Manar (‘Beacon’), a major periodical which combined an anti-imperialist programme with the revival of Islam between 1898 and 1935; it would spread al-Afghani’s reputation deep into Central Asia and further east to the Muslims of China and the Malay Peninsula.
The wide circulation of al-Afghani’s writings brought him the unwelcome attention of the British Foreign Office in London. One of Britain’s spies in Hyderabad sent a letter claiming that James Sanua’s magazine was ‘not fit to be allowed into India’ and was ‘even less suitable for Egypt’. The letter included a translated article in the magazine, a report from Egypt under British occupation: ‘Power is in the hands of the Europeans who have purchased us through traitors and today we are led by them like donkeys.’ The article ended with a eulogy to al-Afghani, pleading with him to ‘send us his lucubrations which inspire a new soul into us since they open our hearts to national honour and patriotism and incite us to unfurl the standard of liberty’.100
The alarmed British authorities asked the French police to enquire into al-Afghani’s activities. They received a less than reassuring report, which noted the anti-British agitator’s close association with James Sanua. Al-Afghani ‘passes as very well-educated’, the report said, ‘and although he expresses himself in French with difficulty, he commands eight languages’. It confirmed that ‘his habitual conduct and his morality do not give rise to any unfavourable remark’, though ‘he receives many visits and appears to be in comfortable circumstances’.101
This was partly true. In Paris, al-Afghani seems to have savoured the raffish cosmopolitanism of political exiles. Visiting al-Afghani and Abduh at their offices in a garret on the rue de Seize, Wilfrid Blunt found a ‘very curious party of strangers who quite filled the room – a Russian lady, an American philanthropist, and two young Bengalis who announced themselves as Theosophists, come, they said to consult the great Sheykh’.102
The Indian visitors were keen to learn about the Mahdi, then the kind of minatory figure to Westerners that Osama bin Laden was to become later. Previously reticent about the Sudanese, al-Afghani now hailed him as the harbinger of a worldwide Muslim revolt against the West: ‘Another serious victory of the Mahdi’, he wrote in a French newspaper, ‘would have as a fatal consequence not only the provocation of an insurrection in the Islamic countries under Turkish domination, as well as in Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Sind, India, Bukhara, Kokand, Khiva – but also lead to troubles in Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, and as far as Morocco.’103
With this religious-political messianic strain fully established in al-Afghani’s thought, he underwent a sartorial makeover. While previously he had usually dressed in flowing robes and turban, al-Afghani now switched to stiff white collars, necktie and coat. He invited the attentions of an attractive German woman. He had a brief affair with her – the only recorded romantic intimacy in his life – but left her letters unread. He provoked, too, the curiosity of European intellectuals, most prominently Ernest Renan.
Renan met al-Afghani in March 1883 through an Arab exile in Paris who often contributed to the magazine Journal des Débats. ‘Few people’, Renan later wrote, ‘have produced on me a more vivid impression.’ Their conversation led Renan to write and deliver a lecture titled ‘Islam and Science’ at the Sorbonne. Al-Afghani responded to it with a long article; Renan wrote a rejoinder. It was the first major public debate between a Muslim and a European intellectual, and it prefigured many later Western discussions about Islam in the modern world.
In the article that opened this debate, Renan eulogized Hellenism and denounced Islam as the begetter of despotism and terrorism. He invoked the racial hierarchy in which rationality, empiricism, industriousness, self-discipline and adaptability defined Western man, and
their near-total absence defined the people he dominated. ‘The liberals who defend Islam do not know it,’ he asserted in his article. ‘Islam is … the reign of a dogma, it constitutes the heaviest chains which have ever shackled humanity.’104 Renan attacked Islam in terms similar to those he and other European freethinkers deployed against Catholicism: with its claims to supernatural revelation, it was an affront to reason, and a violent persecutor of free thought. He also stridently identified progress as the unique achievement and prerogative of the white race and Christianity, arguing that Islam and modern science were incompatible. He explained away Arab achievements in philosophy and sciences as the work of near-apostates who had rebelled against Islam and borrowed heavily from the Greeks and Persians.
Al-Afghani refuted the racialist argument easily by pointing to Persian Islamic philosophers who were Muslim and worked in Arabic. Then he went further than any modern Islamic thinker by agreeing with Renan’s view of religion’s intellectual failings, though he objected to Islam being singled out in this regard. All religions, he said, began with manifesting intolerance towards reason and science, and only slowly broke free of these prejudices. Islam was behind Christianity by many centuries in the long curve of learning. It had ‘tried to stifle science and stop its progress’, but it had been and could still be made compatible with the traditions of intellectual enquiry. It was important to believe it could, otherwise ‘hundreds of millions of men would thus be condemned to live in barbarism and ignorance’.105
Renan began his rejoinder patronizingly: ‘There is nothing more instructive than studying the ideas of an enlightened Asiatic in their original and sincere form.’ He insisted that intelligent Muslims, like al-Afghani, were those ‘entirely divorced from the prejudices of Islam’, who, furthermore, came from places like Persia and India, ‘where the Aryan spirit lives still so energetically under the superficial layer of official Islam’. Still, he conceded some ground to al-Afghani: ‘Galileo was,’ he admitted, ‘no better treated by Catholicism than Averroes by Islam.’106
This is where the debate ended. Interestingly, Abduh declined to translate al-Afghani’s response to Renan. He did not want any criticism of Islam to circulate among the devout. ‘We cut off the head of religion only with the sword of religion,’ Abduh explained to al-Afghani, and the latter does not seem to have disagreed. For both Abduh and al-Afghani at this time, Islam, however inadequate, was the only source of ethics and stimulus for political mobilization. And al-Afghani also presciently saw that a totally secular society – the dream of nineteenth-century rationalism – was doomed to remain a fantasy in the West as well as in the Muslim world. As he concluded in his response to Renan:
The masses do not like reason, the teachings of which are understood only by a few select minds. Science, however fine it may be, cannot completely satisfy humanity’s thirst for the ideal, or the desire to soar in dark and distant regions that philosophers and scholars can neither see nor explore.107
There were many such responses to Renan from Muslim intellectuals. The one from the Young Ottoman Namik Kemal became best known but it was mainly defensive in nature, upholding Arab scientific and philosophical accomplishments and attacking the West, whereas al-Afghani admitted the currently deficient state of Islamic learning.
This exchange proved yet again al-Afghani’s intellectual flexibility, his ability to interpret Islam, and also to project himself, in new contexts. During his debate with Renan, he argued that the original teachings of Islam were in accordance with modern rationalism but since then Muslim societies had become internally weak and intolerant; they needed a Martin Luther to reconcile themselves with the modern world.
That Islam needed a Reformation, with himself as Luther, was gradually becoming a favourite theme of al-Afghani. In the meantime, he was ready to settle for a strong ruler who could unite Muslims against the West. One of the likely candidates was Sultan Abdulhamid, whom al-Afghani carefully praised in his articles. The other was the Mahdi. Writing for left-wing French papers, al-Afghani invoked the likelihood of a Russo-Franco-Ottoman attack on the British, which, he claimed, could be followed by a massive worldwide uprising of Muslims. The Mahdi was a crucial figure in his plan to alarm the British, which was not purely fantastical. During his time in Paris he was involved in various intrigues, including one proposal, advanced by Wilfrid Blunt, to persuade the Mahdi to cease his attacks on the British in exchange for Egypt’s independence.
Al-Afghani’s centrality to this scheme depended on his exaggerated claims of influence over the Mahdi. They persuaded at least some people. He was believed to be an efficient mediator by high-ranking British officials, and in July 1885, he even went to London, on Blunt’s invitation, to meet with Randolph Churchill, the Secretary of State for India. Blunt warned Churchill beforehand that his house guest al-Afghani ‘is in the black book … of everyone here, and is an enemy of England’. ‘But,’ he added, ‘if he was not he would be of no use to us.’108 Al-Afghani bluntly informed Churchill that Indian Muslims hated Britain more than they hated its great rival in the Great Game, Russia. Still, Britain could redeem itself by leaving Egypt and entering into an ‘alliance with Islam, with the Afghans, the Persians, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Arabs … The Mullahs would preach a jihad to join you against the Russians.’109
Nothing came of these implausible and overreaching plans (they foreshadow the Anglo-American anti-Russian jihad in Afghanistan by nearly a century). The Mahdi disappointed by abruptly dying in 1885, and the opportunistic al-Afghani would soon enjoin the Russians to ally themselves with Muslims against the British. After three futile months of scheming with the British, al-Afghani had to leave Blunt’s home in London after a loud quarrel with two of his Muslim friends. ‘Jamal al-din’, Blunt later wrote,
was a man of genius whose teaching exercised an influence hardly to be overrated on the Mohammedan reform movement of the last thirty years. I feel highly honoured at his having lived three months under my roof in England; but he was a wild man, wholly Asiatic and not easily tamed to European ways.110
Certainly, Europe and the placid pleasures of exile were not for al-Afghani. It was also around this time that he parted ways with Abduh. The reasons were never stated, but they were apparent in their respective political journeys, which would take them to very different places.
For nearly two decades, al-Afghani had not returned to his homeland; he hadn’t even kept in touch with his family until he was living in Paris. In 1886, he travelled to Persia, spending several months in the port city of Bushehr. He was a famous man by then. And, yet again changing his persona to meet new circumstances, he now stressed his Persian ancestry. His hosts in Persia were powerful men of the court, merchants and landowners, and even budding activists like Mirza Nasrallah Isfahani, later known as Malik al-Mutakallimin, a progressive member of the ulema, who would become one of the leaders of Persia’s constitutional revolution in 1906.
Malik al-Mutakallimin had just been exiled from India by the British; he found a fatherly figure in al-Afghani, who discoursed at length on pan-Islamism. Other members of the Persian intelligentsia attached themselves to al-Afghani, and some of them were to constitute his inner circle during his exile in Istanbul in the 1890s. Even Shah Naser al-Din had heard of him, and invited him to Tehran. On their first meeting al-Afghani told the shah that he was like a ‘sharp sword’ in the ruler’s hands and asked him not to keep it idle. The aggressive words seem to have alienated the conservative shah, who was already disturbed by news of al-Afghani’s political speeches and writings; he quietly banished the potential troublemaker from Persia.
Al-Afghani then went on to Moscow. The British were closely monitoring his movements at this time, and the British ambassador to Russia expressed his concern to the Russian foreign minister about the man who had ‘launched the most violent attacks on Her Majesty’s Government’, and who was trying to ‘promote disaffection in India’.111 This was correct, and al-Afghani himself made no secret of his int
entions of provoking Russia’s tsar into action against British influence in the Muslim world. In July 1887, the Moscow Gazette, a newspaper edited by Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, a well-known conservative nationalist and al-Afghani’s host in Moscow, claimed that ‘his object in visiting Russia was to make himself practically acquainted with a country on which 60,000,000 Indian Muslims place sole reliance, and which they hope will afford them protection and emancipate them from the detested English yoke’.112
Unfortunately, Katkov died soon after al-Afghani’s arrival. But the latter continued to lobby for influence at the tsar’s court. In an interview given to Novoe Vremya, al-Afghani expressed surprise at Russian willingness to let Britain define the Russian-Afghan border. He confessed he was worried about British influence in Afghanistan; the British, he said, always crept into countries as advisers before becoming their masters. This could also, he added, be proved true in Persia, where the shah was beginning to make major concessions to the British at the expense of Russia.
In Moscow, al-Afghani met with likely co-conspirators, including Dalip Singh, the colourful son of the last Sikh king of Punjab, who felt militantly aggrieved by his treatment by the British. Together the two plotted a Russo-British war that would lead not only to the liberation of India but also to the extirpation of European presence in all Eastern lands. More evidence of al-Afghani’s ecumenical approach to anti-imperialism came from the Russian-born Muslim Abdurreshid Ibrahim, who was then at the beginning of a remarkable career in international activism. He observed al-Afghani in dialogue with a Russian alim in St Petersburg, and later reported that al-Afghani shocked the Russian when in response to a question of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), he laughed and said, ‘Haven’t you stopped being concerned with questions of fiqh? You will drown in a sea of contradictions.’113
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