Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  Afghani’s early life took him across the Islamic world, east to west, each stop overlaying unorthodoxy with political radicalization. Symptoms of crisis stretched from the Himalayas to the Mediterranean. In Persia, a failed Babi attempt to kill the shah caused the expulsion of the sect. In India, Afghani saw a jihad against Christian control, known to the British as the Indian Mutiny, which ended in defeat and the consolidation of Christian power. In Afghanistan, he saw how imperial competition created a civil war.

  Believing in the unity of Islamic civilization, and the imperative of its global mission, he assumed a unity of Christian purpose. He decided that the Christian empires, rather than growing through trade, had an expansionist program to destroy Islam. The British, subverters of the Mughal, Persian, and Turkish empires, were the prime agents of the war on Islam.

  At the same time, British India also demonstrated to Afghani the value of modern weapons and ideas. He did not repeat the error of the Ottoman sultans, who had identified machines with their inventors, and banned imports of technology from Christian countries: To Afghani, economic and scientific progress were weapons of defense. No less useful were European ideas of revolutionary politics and religious skepticism. These confirmed his suspicion that in the new world political power counted for more than spiritual depth. The result was a dilemma of attraction and repulsion: attraction to the power of the industrial, skeptical West, and repulsion at its heretic, atheistic intent. Like those European liberals who, disillusioned by the failure of the 1848 revolutions, succumbed to nihilism and anarchism, what Afghani really believed in was the utility of power. The further he developed his ideas in its pursuit, the further he drifted from the faith he wished to restore.

  Although his blend of religious and political heresies marked him as a radical, new type of Muslim, the only viable path to power obliged him to dress his rebellion in orthodoxy. His travels had shown that religion was the great unifier of the Islamic world, and that simple appeals to tradition could raise revolutions against the Christian empires. His enemies also invoked transnational ideas to justify their expanding influence. The Russians used pan-Slavism to push the Turks from the Balkans, and the British saw the colonies of their emigrants as elements of a global Anglo-Saxon civilization. Like his European contemporary Karl Marx, Afghani blended philosophy, mysticism, and vestigial messianism into an ideology designed to resist the imperial, commercial onslaught. While Marx looked to the shared miseries of the Western industrial city as the fuel of revolution, Afghani turned to the foundation of his world.

  He realized that philosophy would never bring revolution to conformist Sunni Islam. He had to appeal to the international patriotism of Islam, to the simple orthodoxies of popular tradition. So the father of modern Islamic politics disguised himself as a Turkic Sunni to overcome the double handicap of being a minority Shia, and a Persian in Indian, Arab, and Turkish societies.

  Afghani inverted the Islamic belief that politics was an aspect of religion: to him, religion was an implement of politics. He went to great lengths to mask this heresy at the heart of his thought. Unlike Marx, he never formulated his thoughts in a manifesto; articulating his program would have revealed his profound modernity. Instead he campaigned relentlessly, his ambitions masked in local issues, his agitations less an answer than the parameters of a new question. He claimed to speak for all Islam, although only a small coterie of intellectuals, many of them not Muslim, knew who he was. He mobilized the technology of propaganda to create an impression of influence, introducing the tools of European activism—the journal, the leaflet, and the secret society—to the Islamic world. He began the carving of a modern political ideology from traditional Islam, adapting the weapons of the West to create a weapon for confronting the West: pan-Islamism, an attitude as much as an agenda.

  Wherever Afghani went he tried to adapt local opportunities to his jihad. In Afghanistan, he spied for the Russians. In Turkey, he signed up with the liberal reformers. In Egypt, where hostile clerics threw stones through his windows, the Shia sheikh from Persia added to his repertoire a pose from eighteenth-century Paris: the coffee-drinking, café-haunting, freethinking philosophe. He slept all day, stayed up all night at the café, got himself elected the head of a Masonic lodge, the Star of the East, and even made saucy comments to the waitresses in the outdoor café in the Ezbekiyyeh Gardens. Not that Afghani indulged in sex. Like Charles Gordon, Afghani deferred consummation to the end of the world. “Owing to his preoccupation with great things, he had lost the need and capacity for marriage,” explained Rashid Rida, an early adherent who would become the intellectual link between Afghani and Hassan al-Bana’s Muslim Brotherhood. When the sultan of Turkey offered Afghani a spare woman from his harem, Afghani refused, citing his impotence, and threatened that if the sultan insisted on bestowing his gift, he would “cut the organ of procreation.”4

  The disciples at the table of this bloodthirsty bachelor made unlikely harbingers of Islamic revolution. Most were educated dropouts from government service, stepping off the ladder of promotion in protest at the slowness of their climb. Yacub Sanna was an Italian Jew who had switched from teaching in a government college to become Ismail’s court playwright; when the khedive stopped laughing, he had become a salon agitator, satirical journalist, and Masonic organizer. Adib Ishaq, an atheist Syrian Catholic, had also left the theater and Ismail’s patronage for journalism. Abdullah Nadim had left a post in a provincial telegraph office for the life of an itinerant poet and handkerchief salesman.

  Only one of Afghani’s recruits might become more than a useful ideologue. Sheikh Mohammed Abdu was a fellow renegade from Islamic orthodoxy. A brilliant scholar from al-Azhar and a “complete votary” of the café circle, Abdu rejected traditional Islamic interpretation, called for the study of “the sciences of the Franks,” and grew his hair long like a Whirling Dervish. Afghani groomed him as the bearer of the revolution, and Abdu responded with moist-eyed idolatry. “You have made us with your hands,” he gushed, “invested our matter with its perfect form, and created us in the ideal shape. Through you we have known the entire universe.”5

  A Jewish comedian, a Christian playwright, a footloose haberdasher, and an infatuated sheikh: Afghani’s collection of misfits and dreamers made an unlikely cadre to lead the renewal of the Islamic world. But to the true revolutionary, as to the servant of God, the end justified all means.

  KHEDIVE ISMAIL did his best to prevent the growth of civil society, but it grew anyway. Having invited the flood of private capital, international communications, mass literacy, and immigration, he proved powerless to channel it. The props and scenery of the modern state, littered artfully for the benefit of European investors and politicians, assumed malevolent animation. Railways, the telegraph, and a postal system imported foreign information and ideas. French and English, the languages of technical manuals for engineers and soldiers, were also languages of ideas, of fiction and philosophy. The army that intimidated the sultan and enslaved the Sudanese developed a native core of Egyptian officers who expected equal rewards. The Masonic lodges established by networking businessmen became incubators of radical politics. The mass education that created a civil service also created a reading public, and cheap printing allowed the production of independent newspapers. The days when an autocrat could arrange Egyptian society around his throne had gone forever.

  When Ismail had come to power, Egypt had no Arabic newspaper. As part of his program of furnishing Egypt with the amenities of the modern West, he had reconstituted the government Gazette as a useful tool of control and publicity. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, however, a sheaf of privately owned newspapers grew up to serve Egypt’s expanding readership. First, Ismail and his ministers tried to contain the press by bribery. Secret “donations” guided the newspapers’ editorial stance, and the government rewarded their assistance by buying advertising space for its announcements. Originally, this worked; Nile Valley, the first Arabic weekly, subsisted entirely on the khedi
ve’s money and consequently praised the policies that drove Egypt into bankruptcy. By 1873, the government allocated nine thousand pounds to its “Newspaper Intelligence Offices,” a figure equivalent to a fifth of the education budget, and far more than it gave to the antiquities museum. But the Debt Crisis of 1876 diverted funds to more urgent ends. At the same time the reading public expanded and more newspapers opened. As printing costs fell, and editors began to sell advertising space to private buyers, low-budget independence became feasible. By 1877, the Afghani protégé Adib Ishaq could afford to print the first issue of Egypt on a budget of one pound, the contents of his pocket.6

  For the first time, Ismail’s Egypt, and the khedive’s character, came under independent examination. Like all of Ismail’s innovations, the press was a double-edged sword. While Mahroussah allowed investors to follow the daily prices of Sudanese commodities, and Nile Valley loyally distributed government propaganda, brave reporters from The Pyramids exposed mass starvation, child labor, beatings, and corruption in the villages of the Nile Delta. Most popular of all were satirical journals that mocked the corruption, incompetence, and inertia of Ismail’s officials. Entire print runs of To Laugh Or To Cry sold out within minutes of delivery, while Mr. Blue Spectacles ridiculed the government so skillfully that Ismail exiled its editor, Afghani’s accomplice Yacub Sanna.

  “I used to see them in the streets of Cairo and the old city,” recalled the historian Mikhail Sharubim. “Crowds of them, gathered about a man, or a boy from among the Koran-schooled pupils, while he read to them the translation of a piece by the publisher of the London Times or another foreign newspaper. All the time, they clamoured and shouted, There is no power save through Allah!”7

  Egypt now had an independent press to formulate political ideas, a communications infrastructure to distribute them, and enough readers to ensure that their message reached all levels of society. The titles showed how local interests were creating a national identity, at least in the minds of intellectuals: Nile Valley, The Pyramids, The Nation, Egypt. Their editors requested that Ismail grant what he already claimed to have offered: a constitution, equal legal rights for all, an independent judiciary, and representative government. Like Ismail, the political journalists framed their program in “Ottomanism,” the idea that Egypt could reform without compromising its subordinate relationship to Turkey. But while Ismail used Ottomanism as a gesture to cover his drive for independence, the political journalists used it as a means to import a revolution.

  In Turkey, Sultan Abdul Aziz had initiated a program of mild reforms as the key to escaping his debts but had halted in the face of religious and aristocratic opposition. In May 1876, students inspired by Mazzini’s revolutionary Young Italy movement rioted in Istanbul with the cry “Turkey for the Turks!” Allying with progressive nobles, disaffected clergy, and a populace punished by Turkey’s foreign debt, the Young Ottomans managed to tip Sultan Abdul Aziz from his throne. The caliphate passed into the shaking hands of Aziz’s alcoholic son Murad V, whom the rebels forced to rubber-stamp a constitution and proposals for total political liberalization. This bracing dose of secular constitutionalism drove ex–sultan Abdul Aziz to suicide, and reactionary aristocrats to overthrow Murad V in favor of his brother Abdul Hamid II.

  Thoroughly hostile to reform and foreigners, Abdul Hamid II led Turkey into a disastrous confrontation with Russia. He waged war on the Christian secessionists of Serbia and Montenegro and massacred Christians in Bulgaria. When Russia weighed in on behalf of Orthodox Christians everywhere, Turkey’s Sheikh el-Islam declared jihad against the Christians. A bungled political reform had mushroomed into a war between Christianity and Islam. God, it appeared, backed the Russians, who were soon at the gates of Constantinople. Rallying to prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Concert of Europe called the parties to a peace conference in Berlin. Neither Russia nor Turkey gained any great advantage from the resulting treaty. In a remarkable feat of conjuring by Disraeli and his foreign secretary Lord Salisbury, Britain became the main beneficiary of a war it had not fought. In return for a renewed promise of British protection, Turkey surrendered Cyprus to Britain. The island became the fortress from which the Royal Navy supervised the Mediterranean approaches to both the Black Sea and the Suez Canal, further cementing its maritime supremacy. With Cyprus overlooking the Eastern Mediterranean, Aden at the tip of the Red Sea, and Ismail’s shares in a vault in the Bank of England, only the collapse of Ismail’s Egypt could imperil the India Route.

  Ismail was caught between the same forces as the sultans: the reformers agitating from below, and the Europeans imposing from above. Although Ismail favored everything modern in principle, if he imported Young Ottoman ideas into Egypt, he risked deposition and the fate of “Abdul the Damned,” as the erstwhile Defender of the Faithful was now known. Meanwhile the Anglo-French Commission of the Debt gave birth to the inevitable commission of inquiry into Egypt’s accounts. Not unreasonably, the inquiry concluded that Ismail could not be trusted with Egypt’s finances and advised further austerities. Less wisely, they refused to reschedule Egypt’s debts and insisted that the bondholders should receive their dividends on time. More concerned with their banks than Ismail’s peasants, the British and French forced Ismail to send “iron-fisted” tax collectors into the Delta so that he could pay the biannual dividend paid to European bondholders. Scraping the last piastre from the peasants, the tax collectors extracted a “great diversity of currency,” much of it in antique or small coinage, still strung together as jewelry. Where beatings failed, moneylenders loaned the fellahin cash to pay their taxes, the security being the next harvest. The dividend due on May 1, 1878, was paid with hours to spare.8

  That summer the Nile flood broke its banks, sweeping away over thirty villages, hundreds of villagers, and crops to the value of five hundred thousand pounds. Already broke, the fellahin now had nothing to eat. Ismail had no further source of income. The commissioners made him an offer he could not refuse: They would organize a loan so that Egypt could meet the next coupon, but Ismail must abandon his autocratic methods. There must be a Council of Ministers and an independent Finance Ministry supervised by Europeans. Ismail must subsist on a fixed salary, and he must surrender to the state the million acres of prime land he had accumulated. It was a design to turn Ismail into a bearded cherub adorning a European bank.

  Hopeless, Ismail consented to the hostile takeover. The British and French brought Nubar Pasha back from Parisian retirement and installed him as head of the council. An official from the British treasury, Sir Rivers Wilson, took over the Finance Ministry. Rivers Wilson knew nothing of Egypt, but he spoke excellent French. He needed it to converse with his French counterpart M. de Blignières, newly resident at the Ministry of Public Works. Between them, they sacked dozens of Egyptian employees, replacing them with Europeans. Rivers Wilson went to Paris and borrowed £8.5 million from the Rothschilds’ bank, so that Ismail could pay the coupon due on November 1.

  “I have a strong impression that the proceedings of the Commission are wholly wanting in commonsense,” observed Lord Salisbury, Disraeli’s foreign secretary. “If they want to dethrone the khedive, their policy might lead to the desired result. But they do not want to dethrone him. What then is the use of driving him to desperation?”9

  Squeezed between the rebels, the Royal Navy, and the commissioners, Ismail had no room for maneuver. If he chipped at the brittle plaster of the Egyptian state, the entire edifice would collapse and crush him. He had cultivated a bourgeoisie as the human decoration of his European boulevards, but it had mutated beyond recognition. The educated children of the middle class demanded more than seats at the opera and concerts in the Ezbekiyyeh Gardens. They formed secret societies with names like Young Egypt, impersonating the revolutionaries of Italy and Turkey. At the Star of the East lodge, budding Freemasons imbibed Afghani’s preaching that all religions were the same, and that this banal heresy somehow commanded the overthrow of the European empires.
At study circles led by Afghani’s crony Yacub Sanna, they mined rebellious ideas from eighteenth-century novels and ancient philosophy, hiding their sedition behind innocent names like the Circle of Progress or the Society of Lovers of Knowledge. And if, like many respectable young Muslim men, they were repelled by the theological cavorting of the Freemasons, or the prominence of Christians and Jews in Young Egypt and the reading circles, then the handkerchief-vending poet Abdullah Nadim was on hand to induct them into the ostensibly traditional Islamic Philanthropical Society or the Young Men’s Association. Even the progressive Turkish nobility joined in, devising its own mildly impertinent suggestions about how Ismail might improve his ways.

  Ismail knew what these groups were plotting, because his spies had infiltrated them all. Their existence posed a serious problem. If he repressed the most productive element among his subjects, he lost their contribution to the economic recovery that was his only way out of debt. Yet if he indulged the fashion for free speech and constitutionalism, he undercut his own power. It was Ismail’s good fortune that Egypt’s rebels were as remote from the people as the Turkish aristocrats they sought to topple.

  Ismail’s enemies slid into the traditional Ottoman politics that they hoped to disrupt. Organizing into rival elites, they sided with one aristocratic patron against another. As Mohammed Abdu explained, the fellahin and the urban poor were too mired in “political ignorance” to take part in a republican government. Facing the same problem, Marx had admitted that the leaders of the revolution were more likely to emerge not from the proletariat, but from among the overeducated children of its bosses. Similarly, Afghani and Abdu wanted to create an alliance of enlightened minds to lead the struggle. So the rebels retreated to their private salons to play parlor games of factional rivalry and theoretical delusion. Afghani had a lifelong weakness for powerful patrons and ready cash. Instead of leading his followers to liberty, he led them into the bogs of Ottoman conspiracy. He and his followers became partisans of Ismail’s exiled uncle Halim, who plotted his nephew’s overthrow from Istanbul and drew support from the reactionary sultan Abdul Hamid II. Afghani served a greater tyrant to overthrow a lesser, more progressive one. It made no political sense, but it paid well.10