When organized national selfishness, racial antipathy and commercial self-seeking begin to display their ugly deformities in all their nakedness, then comes the time for man to know that his salvation is not in political organization and extended trade relations, not in any mechanical rearrangement of social systems, but in a deeper transformation of life, in the liberation of consciousness in love, in the realization of God in man.28
Often contemptuously dismissed in their own time, Tagore and Liang and al-Afghani created the vocabulary in which many Asians would phrase their aspirations and frustrations for the next century.
Politically the most prominent of these critics of Western modernity and reinventors of tradition was, of course, Gandhi. Gandhi could see how the unprecedented moral disasters of the modern age – the Western scramble for colonies in Asia and Africa, the world wars between rival nations and empires, the rise of totalitarianism – worked out the nihilist logic of a purely secular and materialistic outlook: that nothing is sacred in the battle for worldly power, and that nation-states with economies built around the endless multiplication of individual desires are likely to wage the most destructive wars in order to maintain their chosen ways of life.
China produced its own thinkers keen to preserve and propagate some if not all the norms and ideals of their country’s long Confucian tradition. Like many Asians who started out as Western-style liberals, Yan Fu did a U-turn, signing a petition in 1916 for Confucianism to be made the state religion:
Western culture, after this European war, has been corrupted utterly. Formerly, when I heard our scholars of the old school say that there would come a day when the teachings of Confucius would be practiced by all mankind, I thought they were talking nonsense. But now I find that some of the most enlightened men in Europe and America seem to be coming gradually to a like opinion … It seems to me that in three centuries of progress the people of the West have achieved four principles: to be selfish, to kill others, to have little integrity, and to feel little shame. How different are the principles of Confucius and Mencius, as broad and deep as Heaven and Earth, designed to benefit all men everywhere.29
Liang Qichao himself never overcame his distrust of the modern West and his regard for Chinese tradition. And the vehement rejection of Confucianism by May Fourth radicals did not end its intellectual and moral prestige in China. During Guomindang rule from 1927 to 1937, Chiang Kai-shek tried to restore the Confucian system as part of his attempt to reunite a fractious country. His campaign for the regeneration of China – grandly titled the New Life movement – was based on Confucian ideas of propriety, justice, integrity and self-respect.
Liang Qichao died in 1929, a believer to the last in Confucianism despite many attacks on him by younger intellectuals. The most famous Confucian of the 1920s and 1930s was Liang Shuming, who envisioned Gandhian-style self-sufficient and moral village communities across China. He actually put his theory into practice in Shandong province where he started a rural reconstruction programme designed to Confucianize the Chinese countryside. In 1938, Mao Zedong, another rural activist, visited Liang and they held long discussions about Liang’s work. Mao himself never seems to have shaken off his early Confucian moralism despite his public and virulent criticism of Confucianism. His utopian socialism carried more than a tinge of Kang Youwei’s fantasy of a harmonious world. Speaking in 1949, Mao was convinced that ‘Western bourgeois civilization, bourgeois democracy and the plan for a bourgeois republic have all gone bankrupt in the eyes of the Chinese people’. A ‘people’s republic’, he asserted, would now ‘abolish classes and enter a world of Great Harmony’ – one that Kang Youwei ‘did not and could not find the way to achieve’. In 1958, party cadres were instructed to learn from Kang’s book as they set out to establish ‘People’s Communes’ across the country.
As much as Liang Qichao and other Confucianists (and indeed Ho Chi Minh), Mao believed that the moral and spiritual transformation of individuals and collective virtuous action were the prerequisites for larger social and political changes. In the end, Mao succeeded where Liang Qichao failed in reviving and unifying China around a shared ethic. During their first three decades in power, the Chinese Communists tried to root out Confucianism from China, denouncing it as ‘feudal’ and reactionary. But as the appeal of communism has declined, party officials have returned to upholding Confucianism. Chinese culture, Mao insisted, should have its own form, its ‘own national form’.30 And the Chinese government seems to be striving towards this in a wholly unexpected way as it promotes Chinese culture abroad through the building of Confucius Institutes – Chinese versions of the Alliance Française and Goethe-Institut. Chinese leaders have also taken to using words like ‘harmonious society’ to burnish their credentials as mitigators of social and economic inequality.
The Counter-Moderns of the Islamic World
Nowhere were traditionalist ideals so strenuously invoked against the onslaught of modernity as in the Muslim world. Crisis convulsed the world of Islam from the moment it was confronted and then penetrated by the West. The course of history, which white men presumed to direct, seemed to violate the Muslim sense of a world order shaped exclusively by God. Malaise gripped the most intelligent and sensitive Muslims; it was what Jamal al-din al-Afghani expressed most passionately as he moved from a liberal interpretation of Islam to nationalism, and then to pan-Islamism.
‘Islam’ and ‘the West’: those were the dichotomies al-Afghani invented. They attested to no simple opposition but a fundamental imbalance of power. Internally weak, the world of Islam was threatened from outside. Yet its own belief in the divinely guided society and prescribed notions of social good survived the confrontation with a socio-economic order predicated on individual self-interest.
Nostalgia for the old world of Islam overcame some of the most brilliant and cosmopolitan men in the Muslim world, such as the Indian Muslim poet Muhammad Iqbal, the intellectual and spiritual father of Pakistan. Born in 1876 into an illiterate family, Iqbal came under the influence of the anti-British poet Akbar Illahabadi. In 1905 he travelled to Europe, where he studied philosophy in Britain and Germany. Impressed by Europe’s manifold achievements, Iqbal was nevertheless disturbed by its racist and ultra-competitive cultures. Anticipating Tagore and Liang and other post-Great War critics of the West’s materialist culture, he was already warning in 1908:
O, dwellers of the cities of the West,
This habitation of God is not a shop,
And that which you regard as true coin,
Will prove to be only a counterfeit.
Your civilization will commit suicide
With its own sword.31
Iqbal had started out as an Indian nationalist in the Akbar Illahabadi mould. But while in Europe, the history of Islam acquired new meanings for him. Returning to India in 1908, his sighting of the coast of Sicily, the setting of one of Islam’s greatest triumphs in Europe, brought forth a lament for what was now a ‘tomb of Muslim culture’:
Whose story is hidden in your ruins?
The silence of your footfall has a mode of expression.
Tell me of your sorrow – I too am full of pain;
I am the dust of that caravan whose goal you were.
Paint over this picture once more and show it to me;
Make me suffer by telling the story of ancient days.
I shall carry your gift to India;
I shall make others weep as I weep here.32
While in Europe Iqbal also became an admirer of Nietzsche – specifically of the latter’s idea of the Superman, of self-creation and self-assertion – even as he became hyperconscious of his Muslim identity and increasingly convinced that the progress of Indian Muslims lay not in imitating Europe but in reforming and reviving the religious community they had been born into. To this end, he began to exalt Nietzschean-style masculine vigour and the great Islamic past in his writings. Like many Islamic modernists who harked back to classical Islam, Iqbal became a critic of Sufi
sm and the mystical and folk traditions within Islam that advocate the rejection of the ego and the self, and even of Islamic sects like the Ahmadi. Europe, he believed, would destroy itself through excessive materialism; Islam, which concealed the principle of true individualism, would then emerge as a saviour of humanity.
Iqbal was to greatly influence a generation of Iranian thinkers who created the intellectual basis of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In his book We and Iqbal on the Indian thinker, Ali Shariati compared him to both al-Afghani and Tagore: ‘He fights with colonialism for the liberation of Muslim nations as Sayyid Jamal had done. He endeavors to save civilization as Tagore had tried to do from the tragedy of calculating reason and the pest of ambition.’33 Shariati claimed that Iqbal ‘gave ideological consistency’ to the Islamic movement al-Afghani began.34 Speaking in 1986 at a conference on Iqbal in Tehran, Iran’s Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei went even further, claiming that the Islamic Republic of Iran was ‘the embodiment of Iqbal’s dream’. ‘We are,’ Khamenei added, ‘following the path shown to us by Iqbal.’35
Shariati and Khamenei are correct in one sense, even though the enforced rituals and forms of Islamic ideologies and states in the modern era have little in common with Iqbal’s notion of spiritual freedom and the community of Islam. Towards the end of his life, Iqbal’s ideas, insisting on a ‘pure’ Islam, increasingly concerned with upholding the Sharia and contemptuous of Western political systems and ideologies, had much to offer to Islamic revivalists – especially those just beginning to posit a necessary conflict between Islam and un-Islam. In his magnum opus, a Dantean book of poems titled Jawid Nama (‘The Book of Eternity’), Iqbal invented a series of dialogues with famous figures. One of his interlocutors is al-Afghani; the two range across the ideologies of capitalism and socialism and the idea of the good, divine sovereign. For al-Afghani in the poem – and Iqbal – Western democracy is an opiate forced by the rich upon the poor:
The West’s republicanism is the same old instrument,
In its strings there are no tunes but those of Kaiserism.
The demon of exploitation dances in republican garb,
And you suppose that it is the fairy of liberty.
Constitutional bodies, reforms, privileges, rights,
Are sweet-tasting western soporifics.36
The conversation ends with al-Afghani sending a message to Soviet Communists to abandon Das Kapital and make the Koran the intellectual inspiration of their socialism. ‘What is the Koran? For the capitalist, a message of death; / It is the patron of the propertiless slave.’
This Islam-centred thought attracted to Iqbal a young writer called Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903 – 79). Three years after Iqbal’s death in 1938, Mawdudi founded Jamaat-e-Islami, the first Leninist-style revolutionary vanguard party anywhere in the Islamic world. Mawdudi, who was opposed to nationalism as well as socialism and capitalism, created the first coherent and consistent programme for an ‘Islamic’ state in which God was the absolute sovereign. Mawdudi’s initial lack of political success in Pakistan belies the great influence of his quasi-theocratic ideology upon a wide range of Muslim thinkers and activists, including Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini who translated many of the South Asian writer’s works into Persian. Aiming to turn Pakistan into an Islamic state, Mawdudi would posthumously receive official patronage from Pakistan’s brutal military despot Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s.
No Islamic leader described an entirely secular utopia. The Indonesian communist party, the PKI, did acquire widespread support in the Muslim-majority country from 1921 to 1965, when it was violently eradicated. Still, radical atheists like Mao Zedong had little chance of flourishing in Islamic societies. And even secular nationalist parties like the Baath in Iraq and Syria could not ignore the mobilizing power of Islam. In Indonesia, Sukarno’s own ruling ideology – ‘nasikom’ – was a composite of nationalism, Islam and communism. The revolutions that succeeded in Muslim countries were launched in the name of Islam not Marx or Paine. Liberalism, defined in the broadest sense, had a tenuous hold in the Muslim world.
Muslims initially admired Western-style liberalism for having created, at least in Europe, a humane civilization. But this prestige began to crumble in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; liberalism was discredited by its apparent complicity with imperialism, and its failure to sympathize with liberal nationalistic elements in Muslim society. Liberalism in Europe resolutely failed to amount to liberalism in the colonies. It seemed too much a sort of racially segregated liberalism. Mohammed Abduh summed up a widespread sentiment when, after successive disappointments, he confessed in 1895 that, ‘We Egyptians believed once in English liberalism and English sympathy; but we believe no longer, for facts are stronger than words. Your liberalness we see plainly is only for yourselves, and your sympathy with us is that of the wolf for the lamb which he deigns to eat.’37
But even indigenous and reformist liberalisms proved to have shallow roots. Men like Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the Indian educationist, Taha Husayn, the Paris-educated liberal Egyptian disciple of Abduh, or Namik Kemal, the Young Ottoman thinker accomplished the vital work of focusing Muslim minds on a world ordered by more than just the Islamic God. However, they remained peripheral in their own societies, unable to give them an enduringly original way forward. They could insist, as Taha Husayn did, that ‘I am pleading for a selective approach to European culture, not wholesale and indiscriminate borrowing.’38 Yet Western intellectuals thought they were not secular enough, while traditionalists suspected them of further hollowing-out Muslim societies with Westernizing ideologies of humanism and rationalism. At best, liberal constitutionalism, as al-Afghani espoused it, could be a tool to strengthen Muslim societies against the West. But a liberal Muslim like Sir Sayyid, who went so far as to challenge the basic tenets of Islam, invited the wrath of al-Afghani himself.
Among ideologies imported from – and then used against – the West, nationalism had more purchase, especially as old empires crumbled in the first half of the twentieth century and the idea of self-determination came into vogue. Someone like Iqbal, who was initially suspicious of nationalism which he blamed for the ‘suicide of the West’, and more inclined to al-Afghani’s pan-Islamism, bowed to the former’s political logic. ‘For the present,’ he admitted in the early 1930s, ‘every Muslim nation must sink into her own deeper self, temporarily focus her vision on herself alone, until all are strong and powerful to form a living family of republics.’39 Al-Afghani’s own exhortations to local nationalisms were prescient in this regard; they proved more practical than his pan-Islamism which, as the doomed campaign for the restoration of the caliphate proved, was a romantic idea. The Egyptians and Indian Muslims trying to overcome the British, the Syrians struggling against the French, the Iranians resisting Anglo-Russian designs on their country, the Indonesians ranged against the Dutch, and even the Turks expelling the Greeks from Anatolia in 1922 borrowed from the armoury of Western ideas and institutions. Many of the leaders of these nationalist movements – Mustafa Kamil, Saad Zaghlul, Jinnah, Atatürk, Nasser, Sukarno – belonged to the Westernized minorities in their respective countries, and left-wing ideals of socialism often played a major role in these anti-imperialist campaigns. Yet the entry of the Muslim masses into anti-imperialist politics inevitably gave an Islamic tinge to these various nationalisms.
Decolonization, and the gradual lessening of Western influence, did not undercut the power of popular Islam. In Pakistan the notion of Islam defining a national community eventually complicated – and compromised – the secular intentions of the country’s founder, Jinnah. In countries like Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Iran, Muslim groups energized by anti-Westernist nationalism, such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, had to be suppressed with brute force by quasi-socialist nationalist leaders. Yet neither the modernizing shah of Iran nor Saddam Hussein of Iraq could abandon the imagery and symbolism of popular Islam. Even the ideologically secular Atatürk introduced a state-sponsored Islam while careful
ly negotiating with Islamic leaders.
The most striking aspect of the Muslim world in the second half of the twentieth century has been the outbursts, frequently fanatical, of deeply politicized Islam in both Sunni and Shiite lands. During this time, Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood moved from the political margins of their societies to the mainstream. An Islamic Revolution erupted in Iran, and its aftershocks travelled as far as the Malay Peninsula and Java, transforming politics in these regions. Three years later, in 1981, an Islamic militant assassinated the president of Egypt. Within a decade transnational militant groups, often upholding hard-line Salafi versions of Islam, declared jihad against despotic Arab regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Syria and Libya.
Despite different political contexts, these Islamist groups had in common an idea of Islam as a framework for moral reform as well as a revolutionary ideology and an identity. They identified their adversaries as repressive indigenous state and local elites, which in turn were seen as part of a larger, remote and menacing entity called ‘the West’. In the Islamist worldview, not only liberalism, nationalism and socialism are seen to have failed, but the progenitor of these ideologies, the West itself, is also judged to have failed. As Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 66), the most influential of modern Islamist thinkers, wrote – echoing, among others, Gandhi’s radical strictures against modern civilization:
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