From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  He rejected the Shiite – Sunni schism in Islam, blaming it on selfish rulers who used wars to keep their populations ignorant. He spoke, too, of the necessity of constitutional reforms, which were then being stressed by reformers and political activists in all the Muslim lands ruled by despots and European colonialists. More surprisingly, he spoke of the essential unity of the great monotheistic religions, underlining the fact that what he opposed of the West was not Christian values but its imperialism.

  However, unwritten rules prohibited him from any explicit political activity, like summoning the Iranians to revolt against their shah. The Iranian diplomats in Istanbul insisted on police surveillance of al-Afghani. The sultan also forbade him from publishing anything. It was only in 1894 that al-Afghani wrote to the Shiite ulema, requesting the clerics support the sultan’s claim to be caliph. And he found himself more and more isolated within the Ottoman city.

  The Iranian government kept lodging one strong protest after another against al-Afghani’s presence in Istanbul. The obsessively secretive sultan’s spies also kept an eye on him and his followers. There were enough conservatives at the imperial court wary of al-Afghani and his freewheeling ways with Islam. They became more suspicious when Egypt’s new khedive came to Istanbul and expressed a wish to see him (the request was denied).

  Rumours circulated around the capital about al-Afghani’s lack of religion, and, more implausibly, his beer-drinking and frequenting of disreputable taverns. Abdurreshid Ibrahim, who had witnessed al-Afghani’s Islamic ostentations before the tsar in St Petersburg, now saw him in Istanbul rejecting the requests of a devout Muslim who wanted to break up his usual gathering for prayers. In 1895 al-Afghani tried to leave Istanbul by securing a British passport. His old enemies bluntly refused to help him out.

  His vision of the world grew darker. In 1896 he dramatically summed up the Muslim condition:

  The Islamic states today are unfortunately pillaged and their property stolen; their territory is occupied by foreigners and their wealth in the possession of others. There is no day in which foreigners do not grab a part of the Islamic lands, and there is no night in which foreigners do not make a group of Muslims obey their rule. They disgrace the Muslims and dissipate their pride. No longer is the command of [the Muslims] obeyed or their word heeded. [The foreigners] chain up the Muslims, put around their necks a yoke of servitude, debase them, humiliate their lineage, and they do not mention their name but with insult. Sometimes they call them savages and sometimes regard them as hard-hearted and cruel and finally consider them insane animals. What a disaster! What an affliction! What kind of situation is this? What kind of adversity is this? England has occupied Egypt, the Sudan and the great Indian Peninsula which are large parts of the Islamic states; the French have taken possession of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria; the Netherlands have become a despotic ruler of Java and the Oceanic islands; Russia has captured West Turkistan, the large cities of Transoxiana, Caucasia and Daghestan; China has taken East Turkistan. Not more than a few Islamic countries, which are also in great danger, have remained independent.

  Out of fear of the Europeans and Westerners they [the Muslims] cannot sleep at night and have no peace in the daytime. The foreigners’ influence has affected [even] their blood vessels to the extent that they shudder with fear when they hear the words of Russia and England; they become stupefied with dread when they hear the words of France and Germany. This is the same nation which used to take poll-tax from great kings and to whom the leaders paid tribute voluntarily with the utmost humility, [but] today [the Muslims] have come to the point where the whole world lost hope about their existence [because] they are bitterly oppressed in their own homes. The foreigners are forever frightening these helpless people by tricks and making them unhappy by deceit and ruining their lives. [On the other hand], the Muslims neither have legs to run away nor have they hands to fight. Their kings humble themselves before the non-Muslim kings in order to live a few days longer. The subjects of the [Muslim] kings take refuge in different houses here and there, hoping to have peace of mind. Oh! Oh! What an immense tragedy! What a great catastrophe has fallen [on us]! What a situation has arisen! Where is that power and dignity? What happened to that omnipotence and greatness? Where did that magnificence and glory go? What is the cause of this measureless decline? What is the reason for this poverty and helplessness? Is it possible to doubt God’s promise? God forbid! Is it possible to lose hope of God’s mercy? God protect us! What should be done then? Where can we find the cause? Where can we look for the reason and whom should we ask? [There is no answer to these questions] except to say that: ‘God changes not what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves.’127

  Imprisoned in Kabul in 1868, al-Afghani had written, ‘I want to see what the Curtain of the Unknown will deign to reveal to me and what fate the turning of this malevolent firmament has in store for me.’ Wilfrid Blunt, who visited Istanbul in December 1895, reported that the sultan no longer received al-Afghani. His position finally became untenable after one of his Persian disciples, Mirza Reza Kermani, assassinated the shah in 1896, just as the latter was about to celebrate his fiftieth year in power, at the shrine outside Tehran that al-Afghani had made his base in 1889. Explaining his action to Iranian interrogators, Kermani deployed some al-Afghanian rhetoric:

  When a king has ruled for fifty years and still receives false reports and does not ascertain the truth, and when after so many years of ruling the fruit of his tree are such good-for-nothing aristocratic bastards and thugs, plaguing the lives of Muslims at large, then such a tree ought to be cut down so it won’t yield such fruits again. When a fish rots, it rots from its head.128

  The Persians immediately pointed to al-Afghani as the assassination’s instigator. Certainly al-Afghani’s hatred of the shah was pathological. A month before the assassination, a Persian follower of al-Afghani in Istanbul had found him furiously pacing his room and crying out, ‘There is no salvation except in killing, no way out except in killing!’ Furthermore, the shah’s assassin had spent much time with al-Afghani in Istanbul during the previous year. Interrogated by the Persian police, Kermani cited al-Afghani’s harsh expulsion by the shah in 1891 as his prime motivation.

  Al-Afghani in turn disclaimed all connection with the assassin, asserting his innocence in several interviews with European journalists, including a German who met him in Istanbul. Al-Afghani’s own dwelling was simple, the German reporter said, but he spent much of his time at a large salon with European furnishings, surrounded by Muslims of many different nationalities. His black eyes were as sharp as ever, but also full now of bitterness: ‘I have striven, and still strive,’ al-Afghani told the German, ‘for a reform movement in the rotten Orient, where I would like to substitute law for arbitrariness, justice for tyranny, and toleration for fanaticism.’129

  The Persian government now pressed even harder for his extradition. Briefly imprisoned by the sultan, al-Afghani would have stewed for some more years in obscurity and bitterness had a lifetime of smoking not caught up with him. In late 1896, he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw – news greeted with great exultation among Persian diplomatic circles. ‘There is no more hope for him,’ the Persian ambassador in Istanbul reported back to Tehran. ‘Surgeons have cut off one side of his chin along with its teeth and he will soon die.’130

  Al-Afghani spent a few painful months before dying, still only fifty-nine, on 9 March 1897, with only his Christian servant beside him, another of the expiring century’s political exiles to perish in obscurity, far away from home and relatives and friends, his self-appointed tasks unfulfilled, bitterness eating away at him as ruthlessly as the cancer that had consumed half his jaw. His grave was left unmarked. It would not be disturbed for almost a half century. During this time, ordinary people rather than despots would eagerly absorb his ideas. Then, in yet another pendulum swing of fortune usual with political exiles, he would be famous again, revered by a new generation of politicized Mus
lims who had taken to heart his favourite Koranic injunction: ‘God does not change the condition of a people until they change their own condition.’

  THE LONG AFTERMATH

  In 1924, with Turkey embarked on its most ambitious modernization programme following the death of the Ottoman Empire, an American millionaire and Arabophile called Charles Crane, who was ‘searching the world for a really great Moslem’, heard of al-Afghani from Sultan Abdulhamid, then living in exile in San Remo. As Crane, who later served as a diplomat for Woodrow Wilson’s government, described in his memoir, he looked for al-Afghani’s remains a long time in the cemeteries of Istanbul. Then one day a distinguished-looking Muslim man in a green turban appeared before him, offering to take him to the right cemetery in Istanbul.

  ‘There is no mark on the grave of al-Afghani,’ the man said, ‘but I know its place by the line from two trees which I noted when I first found it.’ According to Crane, ‘we found the two trees and on taking our bearings came to the little plot of ground, absolutely flat and unmarked, where this man, one of the most distinguished Moslems that ever lived, was buried.’131

  Based on this identification of al-Afghani’s grave by the turbaned Turk, Crane built a monument on the spot. In 1944, the Afghan government disinterred the body; an Afghan minister flew with al-Afghani’s apparent remains to Karachi, and then took them on a train to Peshawar, and from there to Kabul by road. Awestruck crowds lined the streets everywhere the cortege passed through – Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Jalalabad. In a ceremony attended by Afghanistan’s leaders and Kabul’s foreign diplomats, al-Afghani was reburied in the grounds of Kabul University. Potentates and poets vied to hail the Muslim leader as Afghanistan’s most distinguished son (carefully avoiding Tehran’s objections that al-Afghani was actually Persian by birth). The British, the Americans and the Russians laid wreaths on the grave. The German ambassador gave a Nazi salute.

  The tomb of al-Afghani (if it is indeed his) still lies in Kabul University, overshadowed by a black marble plinth, and the ironies of the Western reverence for this greatest of modern Muslim activists continue to accumulate. In October 2002, almost a year after the Taliban were driven from power by the United States, the tomb, damaged by Afghanistan’s endless wars, received an unexpected visitor: Robert Finn, the then American ambassador to Afghanistan, who pledged a donation of $25,000 to help restore it. Speaking on the occasion, he said:

  This is, in a sense, a double tribute by my country. In doing so we honor the memory of an Afghan and Muslim intellectual giant of the 19th century: a scholar, journalist, political thinker, advisor to kings and a revolutionary who inspired Muslims from Egypt to India. This was a man steeped in the learning of the Qur’an who called for freedom, reason and scientific inquiry. He was a learned man, a skilled writer and debater, he had the moral courage of strong convictions, criticizing the West for its materialism but not shying away from criticizing the Muslim rulers of the day and what he saw as self-destructive tendencies in his own religion … This donation is also a recognition that the day will come when Afghanistan will again produce great leaders and thinkers that will shake the world and inspire hope and reform.132

  After a long delay, the mausoleum’s repairs were finally completed in early 2010. But now the black monument radiates a particularly bleak historical irony as the most recent armed missionaries for Western ‘values’ meet their nemesis in the Pashtun tribes al-Afghani celebrated for their anti-foreign intransigence; and Afghanistan proves yet again to be the graveyard of empires.

  There was much wishful thinking in the American ambassador’s speech (quite apart from the claim, long disproved, that al-Afghani was from Afghanistan). The tribute made the man in the tomb sound like the moderate and liberal Muslim much sought-after in contemporary Europe and America after 9/11 – the kind who might help his co-religionists reach a reasonable modus vivendi with the modern West. The mercurial and brilliant al-Afghani was anything but this bland figment of sanguine imagination.

  In the late nineteenth century many Muslims were to develop their sense of a world out of touch with God, of a glorious history gone terribly wrong, and the related suspicion that their failure to adhere to a ‘true’ path of Islam was to blame for their political setbacks. These have since become recurring notes in the modern history of Muslim countries. It was al-Afghani’s unique achievement to sense and amplify this predicament more keenly than anyone before him, from places – the central parts of the Muslim world – where it was most acutely felt.

  He was not a systematic thinker, and seems to have developed his ideas on the run; he was consistent only in his anti-imperialism, for which cause he accumulated a variety of resources. He advocated both nationalism and pan-Islamism; he lamented the intolerance of Islam; he evoked its great glories in the past; he called for Muslim unity; he also asked Muslims to work with Hindus, Christians and Jews, and did so himself. He admired Western achievements in science; but he claimed that rationality was intrinsic to Islam. In the end, one may be left with an impression of a tremendous energy and enthusiasm rather than thoughtfulness: a vitality that could not be fruitfully directed.

  Yet al-Afghani was among the first to insist that Muslims discard their passive and resigned ways before the overwhelming power of Western nations. He recognized the key to that power – science, education, military power – and was convinced that Muslims, too, could acquire it. He never ceased to quote the Koranic verse, ‘God does not change the condition of a people until they change their own condition.’ And if Muslim peoples moved within a century from being subjects of history to its makers, this was in no small measure due to al-Afghani’s continuous exhortations and endeavours across three continents, and their subsequent amplification by his influential followers. It is impossible to imagine, for instance, that the recent protests and revolutions in the Arab world would have been possible without the intellectual and political foundation laid by al-Afghani’s assimilation of Western ideas and his rethinking of Muslim traditions.

  He was among the new lay educated men, the first people from outside the traditionalist world of Islamic scholarship to reckon with the apparently fallen state of Muslims: the predecessor of India’s Muhammad Iqbal as well as Egypt’s Sayyid Qutb and Saudi Arabia’s Osama bin Laden. His devised solutions also anticipated the two main and interconnected Muslim responses to the West in the modern era: modernism, which sought to strengthen a revealed religion against the challenge of Western knowledge and power, and Islamism, which attempted to reshape the West-dominated world itself according to a utopian and revolutionary understanding of Islam.

  Of the two, we have become more familiar in recent years with the second, and in many countries al-Afghani is seen as the founder of modern political Islam along with his main disciple and collaborator Mohammed Abduh, whose own disciples consisted of the Muslim world’s foremost leaders in the early twentieth century. This doesn’t seem on the face of it an entirely accurate claim to make for a man whose own relationship with Islam bordered on the instrumental. Furthermore Abduh, who, appointed Grand Mufti by the British occupiers of Egypt, went on to develop his own rationalist and flexibly contemporary interpretation of the Koran, had many Westernized disciples who went on to serve in important political and administrative positions in Egypt. The most famous of them, Saad Zaghlul, also a follower of al-Afghani, led the mass nationalist movement against the British after the First World War under the banner of ‘Wafd’, a broad-based coalition of young professionals and the working class. The idea that Islam offered a solid basis for anti-Western solidarity was developed further by such Turkish cultural nationalists as the poet Ziya Gökalp (1876 – 1924), who, though a secularist himself, famously wrote, ‘The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army.’

  Another set of al-Afghani’s and Abduh’s followers, however, became proponents of a puritanical movement called Salafism, which spread across the Muslim world as far as Malays
ia and Java; they are also part of al-Afghani’s mixed legacy. The movement, which stressed a model of virtue and conduct associated with the Salaf, Islam’s righteous forefathers, would assume different forms everywhere, but it had certain shared traits. In the beginning, the Salafists espoused an Arab-centric and sternly Sharia-minded Islam as a bulwark against European powers and their native enablers, whom they saw as corrupt and overly Westernized. They had a vision of Islam as a motor of socio-economic and political change; and they were unafraid to use the tools of modernity – the press, political organizations – to propagate their ideas. Their leader was Rashid Rida, who initially revered both Abduh and al-Afghani, and who then distanced himself from Abduh as the latter became an official cleric under British auspices and an advocate of Muslim co-operation with European imperialism. Expounding the more conservative pan-Islamist ideas of al-Afghani, Rida would later become the inspiration for the Islamic fundamentalist group Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood), which was founded in 1928, and spawned in turn a host of similar movements across Asia and Africa. Speaking in 1930, Rida stressed that the umma needed ‘an independent renewal like that of Japan to promote our economic, military, and political interests and develop our agricultural, industrial, and commercial wealth’. It definitely did not need the ‘imitation of Western Civilization’ that Turkey and Egypt had disastrously attempted.133