From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Impatient of abstract theorizing, al-Afghani was now a political activist above all, with Islam as his major, though by no means only, instrument. Abdurreshid Ibrahim described how, unable to secure an audience with the tsar of Russia, al-Afghani appeared at the opera house in his robes and turban and took a box near the tsar. Not long after the curtain lifted on a scene, he rose from his seat. Facing Mecca, he loudly announced, ‘I intend to say the evening prayer, Allah o Akbar!’

  All eyes turned to al-Afghani as he began his recitation. A Russian general entered their box, demanding to know what al-Afghani had in mind. Nervously, Ibrahim asked him to wait until his companion had finished. As a puzzled tsar and his family watched, al-Afghani went on with his prayers. When he rose he told the general to inform the tsar that, ‘I have a time with God which has no room for King or Prophet.’114 To Ibrahim, who was terrified of being executed on the spot, al-Afghani claimed that he had brought the word of Islam to the tsar, the empress and the ministers of Russia.

  Although apparently impressed by this instance of Muslim devotion – enough at any rate to not immediately arrest al-Afghani and Ibrahim – the tsar failed to advance any anti-British conspiracies. This might have been the end of the line for al-Afghani. Budding revolutionaries usually have one shot at success. Al-Afghani had had several, but he had nothing to show for his efforts except a wide network of friends, sympathizers and fellow conspirators across three continents. His greatest political victory, however, was still to come, and it would be achieved in Persia, the country of his birth.

  APOTHEOSIS IN PERSIA

  Apparently influenced by al-Afghani’s networking in Russia, the shah of Persia overcame his dislike enough to invite him again to Tehran. The shah may have also wanted to put an end to al-Afghani’s loud strictures against rising British influence in his country. He offered the activist a sinecure of sorts – the editorship of a newspaper – but the first article al-Afghani submitted strongly denounced European influence over the Muslim world. According to the French ambassador in Tehran, the shah was appalled to read in al-Afghani’s article that the ‘blood of infidels must run in order that the number of Muslims should grow and their influence increase in the world, etc. etc.’115 This was probably an exaggeration as al-Afghani never used such language in his printed articles. In any case, the shah soon realized that inviting al-Afghani to Persia was a serious mistake, for Persia was fertile ground for an anti-imperialist Muslim agitator like al-Afghani – and popular opinion there was more favourable to him than it had been in Egypt.

  Persia had suffered little from Western encroachments, unlike its Ottoman neighbour and Egypt. This was partly because the country had no capital-generating item of export such as cotton with which to invite foreign investment or improve its infrastructure. Consequently, there weren’t enough resources to build a national army and administration, or to embark on extravagant public works. Guilds still organized life in cities and towns; social and economic arrangements hadn’t been disrupted by a Western-style economy emphasizing foreign trade and individual property rights. Unchallenged by Western modernity, Islam retained its moral appeal, cultural prestige and cohesive force, and was capable of turning into the political weapon al-Afghani now wanted it to be.

  Like the Ottoman sultan and the Egyptian khedive, the shah of Persia had also gone on expensive Grand Tours of Europe. He wrote admiringly of what he saw (a Moscow ballet, as well as things for which there were no words in Persian, such as ‘tunnel’, which he translated as ‘hole in the mountain’). He sent a few students to Paris, and allowed Christian missionaries to set up schools in Persia. But he carefully refrained from following the Egyptians and Turks in undertaking extensive reforms at home. Like many other despots, he was interested in modernization only in so far as it strengthened his apparatus of surveillance and control, and made him look enlightened to foreign investors.

  Visiting Persia in 1880, two Japanese diplomats took a sceptical view of the shah’s modernization. ‘If a ruler is striving hard only for a fair outside appearance without making the foundation secure, then the fate of the Empire is likely to hang in the balance:116 By the time he invited al-Afghani back to Tehran, the shah’s failure to consider any liberalization had begun to alienate young Persian intellectuals who wanted reform. The rival powers competing for influence over Persia – Britain and Russia – had grown more aggressive. They dominated Persia’s foreign trade; the British in particular transported opium grown in Isfahan to lucrative markets in China and used Persian territory for their overland telegraphic link to India.

  The shah and his dealings with foreigners were widely distrusted. The influx of infidels into the economy had provoked the conservative clergy. Generally, the power of Shiite clerics in Persia was greater than that of the Sunni ulema in Egypt. Meanwhile, Britain was driving hard bargains, and Russia pressed its own claims. In lieu of foreign trade, the shah had begun to grant concessions to European businessmen, expecting to share in the profits of new railways, oil discoveries and state lotteries.

  In 1872, the shah had granted a complete construction monopoly in railways, roads, factories, dams and mines to a British citizen, Baron Reuter (founder of the Reuters news agency). Even the die-hard imperialist Lord Curzon later described the sale as ‘the most complete surrender of the entire resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has ever been dreamed of much less accomplished in history’.117 Russian protests sank the arrangement; but Reuter got other favourable deals, and the shah persisted in selling concessions to Europeans in order to fund his massive fiscal deficit.

  This was, of course, how the khedive in Egypt had made his country dependent on European finance and eventually vulnerable to British occupation; innocuous traders from the West were usually followed by predatory soldiers. As al-Afghani, who had learnt the lessons of imperialism in several Muslim countries, warned in a letter addressed to the Persian authorities, the foreign enemies of Persia had entered the country under

  various deceitful pretexts. One under the name of the Police Chief [Count Monteforte], another under the pretext of being the Director of the Customs [Monsieur Kitabgi], one calling himself instructor [Russian officers], another saying he is a priest [Dr Torrence and American missionaries], another under the excuse of hiring the mines [English Mining Company], another of establishing a bank [Imperial Bank of Persia], and another under the plea of having the monopoly of tobacco trade [Major Talbot] are taking away the resources of the country and in time they will take possession of the country itself, when it will be the beginning of your misfortunes.118

  Al-Afghani broke with the shah almost immediately after reaching Persia, taking refuge in a shrine outside Tehran. From this sanctuary he kept up a barrage of speeches warning Persians of the imminent sale of their country: ‘Before you become the slaves of the foreigners like the natives of India you must find a remedy.’119 He acquired his most fervent supporters among Shiite nationalist intellectuals excited by his ideas, especially that the principles of Islam contained all the conditions necessary for bringing about democracy and the rule of law. Their battle cry was what today would be called ‘Islamic Democracy’, which they believed al-Afghani echoed in his speeches. As it turned out, al-Afghani’s campaign received the support of not only reform-minded nationalist intellectuals, or anti-foreign bazaar merchants, but also the conservative ulema (who in Egypt and Turkey had tended to distrust him).

  After seven months the shah finally got fed up with al-Afghani’s agitprop; his soldiers violated the sanctity of the shrine where al-Afghani was hiding, arrested him and forced him into a gruelling mid-winter march across the border into Ottoman-ruled Mesopotamia. A humiliated al-Afghani became even more vociferous in his exile; and now events conspired to give him, at last, a leading role in a major mass movement against foreign predators and their native enablers.

  In 1891, the shah granted a tobacco concession to a British businessman, effectively empowering him to monopolize the purchase, sale a
nd export of an agricultural crop universally popular among Persians. Al-Afghani pointed out, to a loud approving chorus, that tobacco growers would be at the mercy of infidels, who would also destroy the livelihood of small dealers while contaminating the smokes of strict Shiites. Secret societies set up by him in Tehran – a political innovation in Persia – sent out anonymous letters to officials and distributed leaflets and placards calling upon Persians to revolt. The language of these writings was strikingly similar to those of his speeches to the fellaheen in Egypt:

  These few pounds of tobacco, which were produced with labor and which a few men with trouble used to export in order to obtain a piece of bread have been coveted and they have been granted to the infidels and forbidden to the followers of the prophet. Oh great human beings, don’t you know yourselves? When are you going to wake up?120

  The Persians responded by erupting in angry protests in major cities in the spring of 1891. They were helped by the invention of the telegraph and the secret societies with their leaflets and placards; the mass demonstrations seem to have been as carefully co-ordinated as they would be in Khomeini’s cassette-tape-aided revolution in 1978 – 9, and women participated in large numbers.

  Al-Afghani wrote furious letters to leading Shiite clerics who were then resident in the shrine cities of Mesopotamia, asking them to shed their political indifference and move against the shah. One of his letters to Mirza Hasan Shirazi, a much-respected Shiite cleric, violently denouncing the shah as well as Russian and British influence over the country was widely distributed in Persia and Europe. Patiently, al-Afghani initiated the apolitical cleric into the ‘structural adjustments’ enforced by Western financiers in poor countries:

  What shall cause thee to understand what is the Bank? It means the complete handing over of the reins of government to the enemy of Islam, the enslaving of the people to that enemy, the surrendering … of all dominion and authority into the hands of the foreign foe.121

  Shirazi seems to have absorbed al-Afghani’s lessons. A few months later, while al-Afghani was in London, having escaped via Basra, Shirazi wrote his very first letter on political matters to the shah, denouncing foreign control of Muslim peoples through banks and commercial concessions. The shah, desperate to keep the ulema on his side, sent various intermediaries to plead with Shirazi. The latter not only did not relent; he issued a fatwa, effectively making it un-Islamic to smoke until the monopoly was withdrawn. The ban was astoundingly successful to the extent that even the shah’s palace became smoke-free. Finally, the shah capitulated to the alliance between intellectuals, clergy and merchants, and cancelled the concession.

  Al-Afghani had done much to bring about this victorious axis, which was to endure and would shape Iran’s history (Mohammad Mossadegh first developed his fateful distrust of foreign companies as a precocious nine-year-old in 1891). It was al-Afghani’s finest moment, and he let everyone know it. Much to the anger of the shah, he kept giving public speeches in London and publishing articles in the British press, calling upon the Shiite ulema to depose the corrupt and heedless regime in Tehran. Many of these articles were addressed to British readers, reproaching them for their government’s support of the despotic shah. Among the furious tracts there were insights that remain strikingly relevant today. Writing in the Contemporary Review, he explained why Muslims came to dislike the West as well as the despots it propped up in their countries:

  However bizarre it may seem, it is nevertheless a fact, that after each visit of the Shah to Europe, he has increased in tyranny over his people. Probably this may be more or less due to his receptions … in Europe. The result is that the masses of Persia … attributed their increased suffering to European influences, and hence their dislike of Europeans became yet more intense, at the very moment when a rapprochement might easily have been effected.122

  Al-Afghani deplored the British press for presenting Iranian protestors as religious fanatics when in fact they expressed a genuine desire for reform and a legal code. He pointed to biased reports by the Reuters news agency (owned, of course, by a British subject who still had banking and mining rights in Iran). He again called for the British to leave Egypt and India in order to reduce Muslim hostility to them, and to cease their support to the Persian shah. He continued to call for the shah to be overthrown. The Iranians protested repeatedly to the British about al-Afghani’s writings; London claimed helplessness. In an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette in December 1891, al-Afghani described the Persians as more disposed to progress and reform than other Asians, and stressed his own likely role as a catalyst for change in Muslim countries. ‘The true spirit of the Koran,’ he claimed, ‘is in perfect accordance with modern liberties … A learned Mussulman well acquainted with the liberal principles of Europe, can easily convey them to his people with the authority of the Koran, without the difficulties which surrounded Luther.’123

  IN A GOLDEN CAGE: AL-AFGHANI’S LAST DAYS IN ISTANBUL

  Al-Afghani had scarcely been more powerful as an agitator. But he was also reaching the end of his influence. His decision to accept a flattering invitation to counsel the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II and go to Istanbul would effectively remove him from the political scene he had hoped to alter.

  In the summer of 1892 al-Afghani arrived in Istanbul, surprising his Ottoman hosts with his meagre luggage. He was installed in one of the sultan’s large guesthouses in Yildiz, the palace complex Abdulhamid had built for himself on the banks of the Bosporus, and put on a monthly retainer. The Ottoman sultan had long distrusted al-Afghani, whom he thought was trying to stoke Arab disaffection with the Ottoman Empire. But Abdulhamid was also fascinated by the itinerant activist, and keen to employ him for his own purposes. He hoped that he could enlist al-Afghani as a propagandist for an Ottoman caliphate and also control him by keeping him in Istanbul.

  The reforms of the Tanzimat had long been stymied; they were widely perceived, and not just by the conservative ulema, to have encouraged non-Muslim secessionists while doing little for Muslims. The sultan had greatly increased his power, using a fully modern network of spies, informers and a police force proficient in torture. He was obsessed with the example of Japan, which was increasingly achieving parity with European powers in Asia. Risibly paranoid (he was worried, for instance, that the emperor of Japan might convert to Islam and pose a political challenge to him), Abdulhamid was eager to win the support of Muslims worldwide. He had invited various Islamic grandees from India and Syria to adorn his court and boost his claim as caliph, but he needed relatively independent figures like al-Afghani by his side too.

  He turned out to have calculated well. Al-Afghani himself did not much like or trust the sultan, but he was ready to use the ruler’s prestige, if that’s what it took, to rouse Muslims. And he may have been flattered to be asked to advise the most important Muslim ruler in the world, who now hoped to extend his realm of sovereignty. After all, al-Afghani had been looking for such an official boost to pan-Islamism for a long time.

  The sultan gave al-Afghani an audience soon after the latter reached Istanbul. Witnesses to their meeting were taken aback by the wandering agitator’s free and bold manner with the sovereign of all Muslims. Abdulhamid’s hospitality extended to offering al-Afghani marriage with a court concubine. The peripatetic thinker’s refusal was philosophically phrased: ‘Man in this world is like a traveler – naked, afraid, surrounded by obstacles on all sides, and fighting to free himself of them and to be liberated. What would happen if you burdened this traveler?’124

  In lieu of a female companion, al-Afghani gathered around himself his usual multinational retinue of fans and students. A Syrian student, Abd al-Qadir al-Maghribi, who like many Muslim thinkers credited his intellectual and emotional growth to the periodical al-Afghani and Mohammed Abduh had published from Paris, now became his ardent follower; al-Maghribi later compiled his recollections of al-Afghani in a book. And Afghanistan’s foremost writer and thinker, Mahmud Tarzi (1865 – 1933), began his poli
tical education during the seven months he spent with al-Afghani and his disciples in Istanbul.

  The Ottoman capital was also full of Persian exiles, including some radical freethinkers who advocated the renunciation of Islam. But even they found al-Afghani’s pan-Islamism compelling, embracing the belief that Muslim unity against the West took priority over internal reform. One of these freethinking Persians, the poet Shaikh Ahmad Ruhi, inscribed on his seal the words, ‘I am the propagandist of the Unity of Islam.’125

  The Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghlul visited al-Afghani in Istanbul, as did the young Rashid Rida, disciple of Abduh and later inspiration for the Muslim Brotherhood. Abduh himself remained aloof. Convinced that confrontation with European imperialists was futile, he had started on a journey that would take him back to Egypt and collaboration with the British.

  Al-Afghani gave talks, faithfully recorded by his disciples, in which he, like all isolated political exiles, greatly exaggerated his role in world events. He claimed intimacy with the tsar of Russia and the Mahdi; he boasted he had spurned the shah of Iran’s overtures. He shared some brilliant historical insights, such as that the innumerable wars in Europe in the centuries following Luther had helped hone the organizational skills of many European countries, which in the long term had led to modern civilization. He often returned to his favourite themes. Muslim mimicry of European ways, he argued, would expose them to European rule: ‘this is an imitation that by its nature will drag us into admiration for foreigners; and being content with their domination over us.’126 The imperatives for reform and science were contained in the Koran, which was perfectly compatible with modern science, politics and economics. He stressed a clear and modern reading of the Koran; no traditionalist interpretation of the holy text, he seemed to argue, should stand in the way of Muslim unity.