by Ed Husain
The great Indian uprising of 1857 against British rule in India was the culmination of a long simmering of grievances against imperial England. The historian William Dalrymple informs us, in his poignant and masterful The Last Mughal, that of the 139,000 sepoys of the Bengal army, the largest army in Asia, all but 7,796 turned against their British masters. The British had offended and abused Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, where it hurt and humiliated them most: their faith. To the Hindu, the cow was a sacred animal; to the Muslim, the unclean was defiling of ritual purity. By the mid-1850s, much like the Ottoman Empire, the British had subjected Indian troops to a process of military modernisation and adjustment. There were widespread rumours that the coating of new-issue cartridges contained cow and pig fat. Fears that the British East India Company was actively undermining India’s religions had precipitated earlier mutinies in 1806, 1824 and 1852, when a regiment of largely high-caste Hindu troops refused service in Burma, since crossing the sea would have been polluting to their caste. But the 1857 rebellion coalesced around Muslims and Hindus marching to Delhi demanding full reinstatement of the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar.
The name Bahadur Shah Zafar still sends shivers down the spines of Indian Muslims and Hindus alike. Already eighty-two years old, he was a poet and Sufi master who spent his days at the last Mughal court in Delhi in meditation, Islamic instruction and writing verse. He had neither the stamina nor the military strength and finances to head the rebellion against the British. But he was the inheritor of Hindustan, or India, and the son of a great Muslim dynasty that included the legendary figures Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Jahanara, Aurangzeb and others. Powerless as Bahadur Shah Zafar was, he was the standard-bearer of Islam and India against the Christian English and their increasingly evangelical zeal. A few years earlier Emily Eden, accompanying her brother the Governor General, Lord Auckland, on a tour of India, had described Bahadur Shah Zafar’s prestige even among the Governor General’s own entourage, regardless of whether they were Hindu or Muslim: ‘All our servants were in a state of profound veneration,’ she wrote. ‘The natives all look upon the King of Delhi as their rightful Lord, and so he is, I suppose.’1 And in 1857 this revered emperor supported the uprising and the rejection of the British.
The failure of the Indian masses, together with the military, political and religious elites, was not the only degradation. It was the way the British deposed the last Mughal monarch and disposed of him that most deeply humiliated the Muslims (and Hindus). His family had ruled India for 350 years. He was born in 1775, when the British colonisers were still a relatively modest and mainly coastal power in India, at an early stage in their rise from traders to an aggressive military expansionist force. Yet the British removed Shah Zafar’s name from coins, removed the Mughals from the Red Fort, their historical home, and started to control the city of Delhi itself.
Zafar was no fighter. He was a Sufi poet, calligrapher, curator of gardens, patron of the arts, and an amateur architect. But the British could not leave this popular and intellectual Sufi emperor in peace; the direct descendant of Genghis Khan could not be allowed to die in his ancestral palaces. Instead, the British exiled him to Burma, where he died in 1862. His English captors buried him in an unmarked grave behind a prison in Rangoon, with large quantities of lime to ensure the speedy decay of both bier and body. After a week the British Commissioner, Captain H. N. Davies, wrote to London reassuring the government that news of the emperor’s death had been kept secret, and armed guards kept away the crowds that arrived from the bazaar. Davies telegrammed: ‘A bamboo fence surrounds the grave for some considerable distance, and by the time the fence is worn out, the grass will again have properly covered the spot, and no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.’
Britain’s success in subduing and humiliating the figureheads of Islam in the nineteenth century did not stop with the disgracing of Shah Zafar. Egypt, a land at the heart of Sunni Islam, with Cairo the seat of the centuries-old Al-Azhar Mosque and University, Islam’s greatest centre of learning, was similarly shamed.
The Suez Canal, cutting through Egypt from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, provided Britain, more than any other world power, with naval advantages and a shorter route to India. Anglo-French control of the canal had been major news for almost a decade even before its opening in 1869. It continued to make global headlines, while facilitating British trade, naval and military domination, until 1956, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalised it. From the beginning, Anglo-French control of Egypt’s most strategic asset, the imposition of a ministry responsible for the canal, its financial domination of a bankrupt Egyptian government, and the presence of tens of thousands of Europeans in Cairo to control Egypt’s economic and political affairs, all led to deepening feelings of subjugation among Egyptians.
In 1878, Colonel Urabi Pasha led a revolt of elite Egyptians and military personnel against European control of Egyptian affairs. From constitutional liberals to landlords, and from Muslim religious leaders to the long-suffering peasantry, Egyptians of all classes joined Urabi. The uprising was portrayed in Paris, London and other European capitals as threatening the prosperity of Europe. ‘Egypt crisis’ headlines suggested, despite the lack of concrete evidence, that the Suez Canal was somehow unsafe in Egyptian hands. When rioting broke out in Alexandria in June 1882 and some forty Europeans died, British and French newspapers inflated the casualty toll and sensationally wrote of hundreds of Europeans dead.
In the autumn of 1882, a British expeditionary force overpowered Egyptian forces in the battle of Tel el-Kebir, not far from the canal. The British visit saw Urabi imprisoned and the uprising brought under control. British Prime Minister William Gladstone quipped: ‘We have done our Egyptian business, and we are the Egyptian government.’ And in order to become Egypt’s government, Lord Cromer, an eminent member of the Barings banking family, was sent from London to become Consul-General of Egypt.
Nascent feelings of Egyptian nationalism were not extinguished with Urabi’s rebellion, however. And it is interesting to reflect that although Urabi and his followers rose up against the European powers, nationalist uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere were actually inspired by European thinking. The nationalist movements in the Balkans against Ottoman rule were similarly motivated by ideas stemming from Europe.
The Western assumption that nation-states are a positive development was the outcome of a specifically European history of wars and compromise. That assumption, the response to a particular time and place, was destined to become a global marker of modernity and civilisation. Centuries earlier, sectarian conflict and political upheaval across Central Europe had culminated in the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48. To find peace between Europe’s fanatical factions, the exhausted protagonists broke off their fighting to create a balance of power by establishing multiple political units, none of them powerful enough alone to defeat all of the others. This ‘Westphalia peace’, in American statesman Henry Kissinger’s words, was a ‘practical accommodation, not a unique moral insight’.2 Each country was granted the sovereignty of its monarch within its territory. States would respect and acknowledge each other’s domestic political and religious structures as realities, and refrain from challenging their existence. This was the balance of power that Westphalia created in 1648 – and the basis of the modern international world order, based on sovereign nation-states.
Kissinger lays this revered and oft-cited treaty bare:
The 17th-century negotiators who crafted the Peace of Westphalia did not think they were laying the foundation for a globally applicable system. They made no attempt to include neighbouring Russia, which was then reconsidering its own order after the nightmarish ‘Time of Troubles’ by enshrining principles distinctly at odds with the Westphalia balance: a single absolute ruler, a unified religious orthodoxy, and a programme of territorial expansion in all directions. Nor did the other major power centres regard the W
estphalia settlement (to the extent they learned of it at all) as relevant to their own regions.3
Yet this was the order imposed on the Muslim Ottoman territories. A Muslim civilisation born of, and sustained largely by, faith networks and scripture was now turned on its head to accommodate French revolutionary ideas, and reorganised according to the Westphalia system of nation-states. The Ottomans and Russians were not alone in their surprise. The Chinese were also out of step with this new order of national sovereignty and mutually reinforced weakness. The Ottomans, Russians, Chinese and, arguably, the Indians had for millennia operated on religious, political and cultural principles radically different from the Westphalia experiment. Would the new approach in Europe work equally well in other parts of the globe? The Europeans were in no doubt: they knew best what was right.
‘The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping,’ explains Kissinger. He goes on:
The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order ... The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive. If a state would accept these basic requirements, it could be recognised as an international citizen able to maintain its own culture, politics, religion and internal policies, shielded by the international system from outside intervention.4
The theory sounded attractive. But reality was, and remains, different. There was no precedent in the Muslim world for a European-style secular state.
The mistakes of the Muslims continued. During the First World War the Ottomans joined the wrong side. The Germans lost, and with them the Ottomans lost too. Three empires ended in 1918 with the end of the Great War: the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman. The Russian end of empire produced communism; Germany produced Nazism; and Ottoman decline produced Islamism. Not, however, before the hundred years’ humiliation was made worse.
The French and British imperialists carved up the Ottoman Empire in a short-sighted, arbitrary and utterly prejudicial manner, drawing lines in the desert to create new countries where nations simply did not exist before – Iraq and Jordan, for example. Out of the corpse of the caliphate were carved twenty-one separate nations. France took control of parts of Syria, Lebanon and Morocco, while Britain ruled Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and others. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, signed with what was left of the Ottoman Empire, created a ‘Middle East’ that was a patchwork of states on the Westphalia model.
By 1924, little over a century after Napoleon burst upon the scene in Egypt, Muslims were left with no caliph for the first time in their history. Worse, European powers – unbelievers – were now dominant in Muslim lands, not just across the Middle East and North Africa but also in Asia, where the Mughals had been exiled to Burma, and India was now controlled by the British.
How had the power of Islam tumbled from the heights of the minarets to the point where Atatürk, the secular president of Turkey, could now forbid the gatherings of dervishes, and the call to prayer itself? What calamity had befallen Muslims? How did they decline from being the world’s most innovative, powerful people – in trade, technology and political command – to being dominated by the West? The attempt to answer this question continues into our own times.
8
Who is an Islamist?
Islamists come in many varieties, but making their version of Islam a powerful political force in the modern world drives them all. For clarity, we will define them as political activists who seek to impose their reading of the sharia as the law of the land. To Islamists, committing Haram acts, those forbidden in sharia, is not just a matter of having a guilty conscience for one’s sins and having to face God’s judgement in the next life. It means doing something that should be illegal and punished in this life on earth. He or she therefore feels a religious obligation to seek an Islamic state, or caliphate, that would enforce these laws.
The prevailing political ideology of Islamism – the zeitgeist among young Muslim activists – says that being a Muslim, a believer in Islam, is not sufficient. Islamists yearn for something deeper: to bring back the caliphate as the perceived restorer of Muslims’ lost dignity and end the feelings of loss and humiliation inflicted on Muslims. Despite their ambitions, they face challenges within mainstream Islam.
For 1,400 years Muslim literature made no reference to ‘Islamism’. There were very few Muslim treatises written on ‘Islamic government’. There is no agreement on what constitutes ‘an Islamic state’. The Prophet left no heir or designated successor, so there were leadership crises within early Islam, with the claims and counterclaims of rival caliphs, and the shedding of blood at the iconic battle of Karbala. Yet these did not give rise to Islamism or to political Islam.
In traditional Muslim societies, the family, the local mosque, seminaries, the qadi (sharia judge), the tribal leader, village leader or za‘eem (mayor) all mattered more than the central government in Istanbul or Delhi. There was no ideology of statism and central state power, or any mass movement of Islamism – there was only Islam, and interpretations of it.
During the upheavals of the twentieth century, however, as world wars and political ideologies drove millions to reshape their governments in the name of Marxism, communism and socialism, activist Muslims responded by politicising their faith: after a hundred years of Muslim humiliation, loss of power and identity crisis, Islamism was born. To this day, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims are not Islamists, but the slogans, discourse and political vision of Islamism nowadays dominate Muslim conversations.
Just as Marxism, communism and socialism exist across a spectrum from violent revolutionary (the Russian Bolsheviks) to democratic socialist (the British Labour Party), so it is with Islamism. Based on their geography, circumstances, history, and political leadership, Islamists range from violent nationalists (Hamas in Gaza) to rebellious and repressed opposition (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt), to those who have moved away from Islamism and become Muslim conservatives, much like Christian democrats. In this last category, Tunisia’s Ennahda Party under the leadership of Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi and Turkey’s AKP are the two most prominent examples, to which we will return shortly.
Some of the earliest Islamist thought was almost entirely influenced, whether consciously or not, by the rise of communism. Abul-Ala Maududi (1903–79), in particular, opposed capitalism in the same terms as Marxism, while neglecting to examine the Prophet’s own merchant background and the sharia’s honouring of property, something communists abhorred and confiscated. Maududi, through his influential books and journalism in the 1930s, was among the first to describe Islam as a political ideology. His was a modern Muslim identity that was not content with praying, fasting, works of charity and pilgrimage, but actively poured scorn on Muslims who contented themselves with these things and did not work to create an Islamic state, a caliphate, with a single leader for all Muslims. In his book Let Us be Muslims – mandatory reading for Islamist organisations – he chides believers who are observant but do not view Islam as a contemporary political project.
Unlike Marx, Maududi was not content only with writing. He created a mass movement based on socialist party models, with a cadre and a highly ideological leadership: the Jamaat-e Islami, one of the most organised and active political parties in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and the South Asian diaspora in the West. Maududi’s Jamaat has not secured significant electoral support in Pakistan or Bangladesh, however, consistently polling well below 20 per cent of the vote in free and fair elections.
The scholar and writer Ziauddin Sardar, who met Maududi in London in 1968, describes the extent of the man’s appeal:
Today, there is hardly a corner of the Muslim world where Maududi and Jamaat-e-Islami are not influential. Pious Muslims love his simplistic diatribes. The intensity of his writing on matters of spirituality and faith, and his confidenc
e in the virtues of Islam as a total system that will reassert itself in history, shift attention from how he conceives that Islam should operate in contemporary times. Unleashed as a political entity, his pious individuals lack self-criticism, humility and, above all, doubt about their possession of unswerving righteousness. Islamic bookshops are stocked full with his books, many of which are misogynistic and aggressively anti-Western. The end product of his thought can now be seen in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, where his followers are busy closing down cinemas, banning music, locking women behind four walls, setting up religious police to monitor vice, and generally establishing an ideal Islamic society.1
Maududi was not alone in his new form of political activism in the name of Islam.
In Egypt a similar strain of Islam was in gestation, emerging in Ismailia on the Suez Canal just four years after the destruction of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. The Muslim Brotherhood was launched in 1928, claiming that its aim was to reverse the decline of Muslims. The Brotherhood’s answer to Muslim confusion was at once simple and all-encapsulating: ‘Al-Islam huwa al-hall’ – ‘Islam is the solution’ – a slogan that remains popular today. When probed by other Muslims as to what such a grand statement meant in practice for improving lives, being in government, or restoring Muslim glory, the Brotherhood would respond with the oft-repeated manifesto: ‘Allah is our objective, the Qur’an is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our path, and death in the name of Allah is our goal.’
The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), became one of the most influential Arab Muslim figures of the twentieth century. He combined Sufi influences with the methods of European mass political movements, deriving from the Muslim sense of humiliation by the West a conviction that every Muslim should prepare for jihad. The ideas, infrastructure and political aims al-Banna bequeathed to those who surrounded him in their millions continue to shape the modern Middle East and, by extension, the wider Muslim world. Despite pressure and persecution, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamists are still a pervasive international Sunni movement, with branches or affiliated groups in over seventy countries, sometimes operating openly and sometimes acting as an unofficial underground opposition. The Brotherhood also maintains formal political parties in many Middle Eastern and African countries, including Jordan, Bahrain, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Israel.
