Some historical scholarship has dismissed Blunt as an ‘anti-imperialist British gadfly’, even as many scholars of that period of Egypt’s history have drawn on his copious notes on what unfolded during the Urabi uprising.15 Yet no study of British anticolonialism can ignore this figure who, as Gregory Claeys notes, ‘produced over the course of some thirty years an exceptionally detailed, critical narrative of British imperial policy, more sweeping in its scope and relentless in its condemnation than anything outside Positivist circles’.16 Indeed, I would argue that Blunt’s criticism was frequently more radical and textured than that produced by Positivists, including Harrison, and that this was in no small part due to his regular contact with anticolonial figures from the Arab world. While it is certainly true that Blunt had a self-important air about him, and tended to overestimate his ability to influence individuals and events, there is also little doubt that he had both a ringside view of events and extraordinary access to the corridors of power and key players both in Britain and in Egypt, being regarded by some in government as ‘a considerable authority on Asiatic matters’.17 Certainly, many of the Egyptian actors in the revolution were fulsome in their praise when recollecting his role. Blunt sought in turn to provide an alternative voice to British establishment discourse on empire, and self-consciously construct a counter-history delineating ‘the true condition of things’. This he opposed to what called the ‘manipulation of the organs of public news in the interests of our diplomacy’, including the presence in Cairo and elsewhere of what we might today call ‘embedded journalists’ – a fact he cautions future historians to bear in mind when consulting newspaper files in search of information.18 My argument in this chapter is that what Claeys rightly describes as the ‘subtlety and complexity of his anti-imperialist outlook’ was directly shaped by Blunt’s witnessing of the Urabi revolt, and by engagement with some of the most renowned thinkers of that moment and milieu.19 Blunt’s campaign on behalf of Urabi also provided a structural space that drew others into the fray. In this sense, the revolt in Egypt and Blunt’s engagement with it can be said to have inflected British dissidence on empire in that moment very profoundly.
An Unlikely Anticolonialist: The Education of Wilfrid Blunt
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was not born to be an imperial sceptic, let alone the forceful anticolonialist he would eventually become, even going to jail for his efforts on behalf of Ireland in the late 1880s. This is precisely what makes him important. The milieu of landed gentry into which he was born was conducive neither to political radicalism nor even to the sort of persistent dissent on imperial questions which would become something of a vocation for him in the wake of the events of 1882. Described by a recent biographer as a ‘West Sussex country squire, society darling, ladies man [sic], horse fancier and middling poet’, Blunt was a political Conservative (he had even regarded the Liberal Gladstone as ‘an ignoramus and fanatic’ on ‘Oriental questions’) who came into some wealth upon the death of his older brother, prior to which he had spent ten unremarkable years as a bored career diplomat in Europe and South America.20 The money enabled him to leave the service and, along with his wife, Lady Anne, also a writer of some note, to indulge a passion for travelling in the Middle East from the mid 1870s onwards.21 During these sojourns, the couple purchased Arabian horses that were shipped back to England to establish what would become a well-known stud farm at Crabbet, their estate in Sussex; the lineage of most British racehorses today can still be traced back to the Crabbet Stud. It appears to have been during these travels – along with time spent in India – that Blunt, the gentleman of leisure, became something of a professional Orientalist, developing a lifelong interest in Islam and Arab culture, as well as an antipathy to what he deemed to be repressive and brutal Turkish Ottoman rule. Although it was Lady Anne who wrote the two compendious travelogues detailing their journeys through Arab lands, Blunt claimed to have had a heavy editorial hand in them.22 His own career as a writer and self-described Arab expert began with articles he contributed to the journals Nineteenth Century and Fortnightly Review, where he expounded his views on Arab people and culture, Islam and politics in the Middle East. These were remarkable works inasmuch as they both drew on established Orientalist frameworks for understanding the Middle East, and combatively challenged many widely espoused assumptions generated by those very frameworks. Such early intimations of dissident tendencies notwithstanding, it would not be until Blunt spent time in Egypt and came to know – and learn from – many of the chief players in the making of the Egyptian revolution that he would come into his own as one of the earliest and most powerful voices of British anticolonialism. Blunt’s own trajectory of change presages aspects of British criticism of empire that would emerge more distinctly in the decades to come, his own learning curve representing, in some ways, the evolution of dissident discourse. Blunt came to unlearn a habitual paternalism and understand that there were substantive cultural resources available to non-European subjects for thinking about emancipation and change which did not preclude engagement with other cultures. With these insights in hand, Blunt began to formulate a textured humanism which was not about the ‘abstract promise of a shared humanity’ available to the colonized ‘if they embraced Western values, customs and practices’.23 The ideas Blunt began to espouse were more akin to what Edward Said describes as ‘critical humanism’, a practice not restricted to any particular culture or civilization, which recognizes that all human beings and cultures are capable of ‘a continuous process of self-understanding and self-realization’.24 Starting out with something like the abstract promise of inclusion on European terms, Blunt’s experience of the revolutionary milieu in Egypt, and the cultural resources it drew on, brought him to acknowledge, in Said’s terms, ‘what has long been a characteristic of all cultures, namely, that there is a strong streak of radical antiauthoritarian dissent in them’.25 It was this streak that could provide the basis for solidarity between Britons of a dissident inclination and Egyptian anticolonialists.
Wilfrid Blunt and Lady Anne with Crabbet stud
‘Islam does move’
The profound change that Blunt underwent over the course of his engagement with Islamic intellectuals and his experience of the milieu of the Urabi revolution can be mapped through his writing on both the Arab world and Islam in a short period between 1880 and 1882 in the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly Review. After a piece based on his long-standing equine expertise, which compared English and Arabian thoroughbred horses, Blunt began to explore Bedouin life and Arab culture.26 He offered a counterpoint to the wearying ‘tale of Oriental corruption and Oriental tyranny’, in an idealized account of the Arab as practical, physically vigorous, and prone to despotic rule, in which ‘popular feeling’ nonetheless exerts its influence.27 With familiar Orientalist benevolence, Blunt suggested that the Arab was exceptional, and thus ‘fully entitled by his intellectual and moral powers to political freedom’.28 (Later, he would note that, while liberty, equality and brotherhood were ‘three blessings’ that Europe liked to boast about, ‘we do not in truth possess them’.)29 Certainly, in Blunt’s early forays into thinking about Islam and the Arab world, the keynote was benevolence. It was still a time, he would recall, when he ‘clung to the thought that England in the East might yet … be made an instrument for good’.30 Accordingly, he stressed points of equivalence between Europe and Central Arabia, where he had spent some time in 1879, suggesting that liberal values prevailed there: ‘Englishmen should rejoice to hear that there is at least in one corner of Asia a state where life and property are absolutely secure, where justice is impartial, taxation light, military service voluntary, and where a prosperous and happy people cheerfully acquiesce in the established forms of law.’31 Charting that period later in his memoir, Blunt notes that his thoughts were not then especially political, though he was struck, in Algeria, by the ‘spectacle’ of ‘an Eastern people in violent subjection to a Western’, and felt a certain ‘sympathy’ with the
former.32 Of his early travels to ‘Arabic-speaking lands’, Blunt also confessed: ‘I heard their voices, but knew neither their language nor their ways of thought’33; Egypt, to begin with, was ‘another pleasant travelling adventure’; and though he noted the abysmal condition of the fellah, or Egyptian peasant, as the upper classes feasted on plenty, he assumed the former not to have any thoughts of revolt in their nature – though he would later acknowledge he had been wrong.
Blunt’s personal encounters during his lengthy travels in the Middle East were clearly an important element of his evolution from poet-squire to, first, advocate of benevolent British imperialism, and then vociferous critic of British rule in Egypt, India and Ireland; but they do not in themselves explain his trajectory. Other such travellers and ‘experts’ on the Middle East during this period were to be found, after all, including the likes of Richard Burton and Edward William Lane, each believing, in Said’s classic terms, that ‘his vision of things Oriental was individual, self-created out of some intensely personal encounter with the Orient, Islam, or the Arabs’.34 All such Orientalists also typically ‘expressed general contempt for official knowledge held about the East’.35 Yet Blunt was different – and not only because he did not express what Said described as ‘the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient’. What is more significant is the way in which he ended up bearing faithful witness to the unfolding of one of the first major anticolonial revolutions in Africa and Asia, and learning from it – moving from an early Orientalism with idealizing tendencies to studying Islam in more substantive ways, and then finally being politicized by anticolonial Egyptian thought. Where British imperialism may have turned Burton into an ‘imperial scribe’, resistance to British imperialism turned Blunt into an anticolonial voice of some distinction.36 This was due in no small part to his intentional efforts to understand Egypt and Islam from the standpoint of those who were resisting Europe’s incursions. Blunt’s evolution was ultimately not about experimenting with alternative Oriental identities, as it was for some travellers to antique lands, but something rather more substantial and enduring. Neither posture nor performance, Blunt’s transformation into an advocate for Egypt was deeply influenced by a sense of voice – both those voices he heard raised in Egypt against Europe’s incursions, and his own as a vehicle for carrying them over to the heart of the Empire.37
In 1880, Blunt was thrown into a ‘chaos of ideas, literary, social and political’.38 Inspired by intense discussions with scholars of the religion, Blunt found himself thinking about Islam in both its spiritual and political dimensions. He wrote retrospectively that these conversations ‘affected me profoundly, and to a certain extent revolutionized my ideas’.39 Beset by the feeling ‘that in all my thought of freeing and reforming the East I had begun at the wrong end’, he decided to study Islamic thought properly (he was already being tutored in Arabic).40 This study would be parlayed into an eloquent and informative set of essays, published under the characteristically magisterial title The Future of Islam.41 Blunt’s authorial persona in these essays – published serially in the Fortnightly Review – was still very much that of an Orientalist who sought to understand how the past of an entity can teach us something about its future. With the overweening confidence in the importance of his own views to matters of state that marked much of his political writing, Blunt claims that he had set out his disquisition on the question of Islam ‘in the hope that it may be instrumental in guiding the national choice’.42 By this, he meant that Britain’s responsibility as a power governing a very large number of Muslims could be better discharged if there was a more informed sense of what Islam had to offer. Nothing in The Future of Islam indicates anything less than faith in the imperial project, with England (Blunt rarely uses ‘Britain’) maintaining a ‘position as the guide and arbiter of Asiatic progress’.43 The last essay ends with a classically paternalistic image, Blunt calling on England to ‘take Islam by the hand and encourage her boldly in the path of virtue’ – a path preferable to ‘a whole century of crusade’.44
Yet, even as he was completing these essays, Blunt’s thinking was beginning to shift in critical directions. For all that he maintains a position towards Britain’s imperial reach that is loyal and hopeful (he would, with the benefit of hindsight, in a tellingly religious register, call it a ‘failing faith’), The Future of Islam nonetheless carries within it intimations of a different set of possibilities that would underpin Blunt’s transformation into a sharp-voiced antagonist of empire in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. He had started to identify cultural and social dynamics that would lead him to abandon thoughts of assimilating Arab societies to British liberal values, having found ‘new worlds of thought and life in an atmosphere I had fancied to be only of decay’.45 Mapping the beginnings of a significant personal transformation, he writes: ‘if I had not exactly come to scoff, I certainly remained, in a certain sense, to pray’.46 If there was one formative insight that changed Blunt’s perspective, it was that Islam and Islamic cultures were no less capable of introspection and change than any other – just as Christian societies were as capable of stagnation and reaction as any other. ‘I know’, he writes, ‘that it is a received opinion … that Islam is in its constitution unamenable to change, and by consequence to progressive life.’47 For all that, there is plenty of evidence to marshal in favour of this assertion: ‘The fact is, Islam does move’.48 It is around this insight that any considerations of the past and the future of Islam and Islamic polities must necessarily arrange themselves. While he acknowledged that equivalences should not be strained beyond credibility, Blunt recognized, in a way that Frantz Fanon would also do decades later, that the capacity to change is not unique to particular cultures and societies. For Fanon, this is a capacity which is put into abeyance in the face of colonization, a ‘tragic labyrinth’ in which ‘the truth objectively expressed is constantly vitiated by the lie of the colonial situation’.49 Blunt too was coming to understand what Fanon articulated so clearly well over half a century later: until it is distorted and arrested by the fact of colonialism and its insistence on ‘successful integration’ to the supposedly superior values of the colonizing entity, cultures have a healthy dynamic that includes engagement with new ideas and other cultures.50 Reason and faith coexist as much in Muslim societies as in Christian ones, so that Islam ought to be treated on par with Christianity as ‘a true religion, true inasmuch as it is a form of the worship of that one true God in whom Europe, in spite of her modern reason, still believes’.51
Towards the end of his set of essays on Islam, much of which is devoted simply to explicating Islam in an historical frame and delineating differences within it and between Muslim societies, Blunt also reverses his own initial emphasis on European influence in the Middle East – a gesture at once historically sound and polemically powerful. Now he notes that European thought itself has long been influenced by Arab ideas: ‘We have seen in Europe, even in England, a land never brought physically into contact with Arabia, how long Arabian thought, filtered as it was through France and Spain to our shores, has dominated our ideas’.52 If it has survived so far away, ‘Who shall fix the term of its power, and say that it cannot renew itself and live?’53 Still in a moderate and reformist vein, Blunt’s goal in this work was to find a modus vivendi for Islam and Christianity to coexist. Yet, in less than a year, Blunt would again come to see his own position as well-intentioned but naive, not least in its belief that England had a special relationship with the Muslim world, ‘seeking of them practical advantages of trade rather than conquest’.54 Now he saw himself, schooled by the Egyptian revolution, as ‘a single voice against a multitude, the voice of one man who had lived inside the house of liberty against the many voices of men who had only stood outside’.55 In September 1882 he would announce himself to his countrymen as one who was in ‘violent sympathy with the enemy’, Egypt, and the country’s devout Muslim leader, Colonel Urabi.56 The ‘violence’ of this sympathy spoke of a
dramatic wrenching of self from the Englishman’s benevolent interest in Egyptian Arabs as the subjects of Britain’s informal empire to complete solidarity with the Egyptian resistance. The conversion to ‘so strange a state of feeling’, as he put it, was one in which he would fulfil a promise to ‘return and throw in my lot with [the Egyptians] in a campaign for independence’.57 What had happened? Two strands of Egyptian life had become Blunt’s touchstones for speaking up against the doings of the British in that country: one was that the restless fellahin, already ‘despoiled of everything’, were willing to rise up, and Urabi represented this strand. The other was represented by a man who was, for a time, a pivotal figure in providing the intellectual scaffolding for the rebellion. By the time the ‘Urabi revolt’ broke out, Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani had been banished from Cairo for his role in fomenting it. In what Blunt described as his ‘courageous teaching’, Afghani had told his Egyptian audiences that their choice was either to ‘live like free people or die as martyrs’.58 Between them, the conjoined movements represented by Urabi and Afghani transformed Blunt’s political views.
Insurgent Empire Page 18
