Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The new attitude surfaced first in Turkey, where, for example, there was a movement known as Tanzimat, or ‘Reform’.76 The country initiated a Supreme Council of Reform and was reorganised along French lines with the sharia being confined to family law alone. Tax farming was replaced by tax collection and the people became ‘subjects’. The key figure here was Namik Kemal (1840–1888), who edited a journal, Freedom, whose aim was freedom to pursue technological achievement, freedom of the press, the separation of powers, equality of all before the law and a reinterpretation of the Qur’an so as to make it consistent with parliamentary democracy. The most important message that Namik Kemal had was that not everything is predetermined by God. Ishak Efendi was appointed bashoca of the Imperial School for Military Engineering and in 1834 published his four-volume Mecmua-i Ulum-i Riyaziye, based on foreign sources, which introduced many of the modern sciences to the Muslim world. Twelve years later Kudsi Efendi produced his Asrar al-Malakut, which did its best to reconcile the Copernican system with Islam. In 1839 thirty-six students were selected from the military and engineering schools to study in Paris, London and Vienna and in 1845 a Temporary Council of Education began to consider the idea of ‘educating the public’. The first book of modern chemistry was published in Turkish in 1848 and the first title of modern biology in 1865. Factory-building, along Western lines, began in earnest in the 1860s. A civilian school of medicine was founded in Istanbul in 1867 and two years later registration began for the Darülfünân, or university. It opened for classes in 1874–1875, consisting of schools of letters, law and, instead of science, as originally intended, civil engineering (this latter was based on the French École des Ponts et Chaussées). The Encümen-i Danis (Learned Society), not dissimilar to the Academie Française, was conceived in 1851, a translation council was set up in 1866, the metric system adopted in 1869 and, when Pasteur discovered the rabies vaccine in 1885, the Turks sent a delegation of physicians to Paris to absorb the new information and to confer on the great man a Turkish decoration.77

  Overlapping with Namik Kemal in Iran was Malkom Khan (1844–1908), who had been educated in Paris, much influenced by Auguste Comte, and who wrote a Book of Reform, in which he advocated the separation of powers, a secular law and a Bill of Rights. He edited a newspaper Qanun or ‘Law’ in which he proposed two assemblies, a popular assembly and an assembly of the ulama or learned. Again overlapping with both of these was Khayr al-din al-Tunisi (1822–1890), a Tunisian who also studied in Paris, who made a survey of twenty-one European states and their political systems, much as Aristotle did in classical Greece. He argued that it was a mistake for Muslims to reject what others had achieved, simply because they weren’t Muslims, and he recommended the Islamic world should ‘steal the best’ of what Europe had to offer.78

  In all there were well over fifty major thinkers of the Islamic world who emerged at this time to campaign for the modernisation of Islam–people such as Qasim Amin of Egypt, Mahmud Tarzi of Afghanistan, Sayyid Khan of India, Achmad Dachlan of Java and Wang Jingshai of China. But the three most influential Islamic modernists, whose names deserve to be more widely known in the West, were: Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, of Iran (1838–1897), Muhammad Abduh, of Egypt (1849–1905), and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who was born in Lebanon but spent most of his adult life in Egypt.

  Al-Afghani’s main message was that European success was basically due to two things, to its science and to its laws, and he said that these were derived from ancient Greece and India. ‘There is no end or limit to science,’ he said, ‘science rules the world.’ (This was in1882.) ‘There was, is, and will be no ruler in the world but science.’ ‘The English have reached Afghanistan; the French have seized Tunisia. In reality, this usurpation, aggression and conquest have not come from the French or the English. Rather it is science that everywhere manifests its greatness and power.’ Al-Afghani wanted the whole Islamic position to be reconsidered. He argued that ‘mind is the motor of historical change’ and he said that Islam needed a Reformation. He pilloried the ulama or religious scholars of the day who read the old texts but didn’t know the causes of electricity, or the principles of the steam engine. How, he asked, could these people call themselves ‘sages’? He likened the ulama to a light with a narrow wick ‘that neither lights its surroundings nor gives light to others’. Al-Afghani studied in France and Russia and while he was in Paris he became friendly with Ernest Renan. Al-Afghani specifically said that the religious person was like an ox yoked to a plough, ‘yoked to the dogma whose slave he is’, and he must walk eternally in the furrow that has been traced for him in advance. He blamed Islam for the ending of Baghdad’s golden age, admitting that the theological schools stifled science, and he pleaded for a non-dogmatic philosophy that would encourage scientific inquiry.

  Muhammad Abduh also studied in Paris, where he produced a famous journal called The Strongest Link, which agitated against imperialism but also called for religious reform.79 Returning to Egypt he became a leading judge and served on the governing body of the al-Azhar mosque-college, one of the most influential bodies of learning in the Arab world. He campaigned for the education of girls and for secular laws, beyond the sharia. He was especially interested in law and politics. Here are some of the things he wrote: ‘Human knowledge is in effect a collection of rules about useful benefits, by which people organise the methods of work that lead to those benefits…laws are the basis of activities organised…to produce manifest benefits…the law of each nation corresponds to its level in understanding…It is not possible therefore to apply the law of one group of people to another group who surpass the first in level of understanding…order among the second group will be disturbed…’ Politics, he insisted on another occasion, should be determined by circumstances, not by doctrine. Abduh went on to make the case for legal reform in Egypt, for clear simple laws, avoiding what he called the ‘ambiguities’ of the Qur’an. He referred Egypt to France after the Revolution, which he said went from an absolute monarchy, to a restricted monarchy, to a free republic. He wanted a civil law to govern most of life, agreed by all in a logical manner. In his legal system, there was no mention of the prophet, Islam, the mosque, or religion.

  Muhammad Rashid Rida attended a school in Lebanon which combined modern and religious education. He spoke several European languages and studied widely among the sciences.80 He was close to Abduh and became his biographer. He too had his own journal, al-Manar (The Beacon), which disseminated ideas about reform until his death. Rida’s view was that social, political, civic and religious renewal was necessary and ongoing, so that societies could ‘ascend the paths of science and knowledge’. ‘Humans at all times need the old and the new,’ he said. He noted that while the British, French and Germans mostly preferred their own ways of doing things, and thinking, they were open to foreign influences as well. He admitted to being helped by, and liking, men who he deemed heretics. He sounds here a bit like Erasmus but he also recalls Owen Chadwick’s point, mentioned earlier, where he said that it was only from about 1860 that Europeans who regarded themselves as Christian could be friendly with non-believers. Most importantly, Rida said that the sharia has little or nothing to say about agriculture, industry and trade–‘it is left to the experience of the people’. The state, he says, consists of precisely this–the sciences, arts and industries, financial, administrative and military systems. They are a collective duty in Islam and it is a sin to neglect them. The one rule to remember is ‘Necessity permits the impermissible.’

  The collective achievement of modernism in the Islamic world consisted of the following elements. (1) Cultural revival. This was an attempt to revive Islamic arts and culture, mainly by referral to what had happened in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Here are a few examples: the practice of hagiography was changed and became much more like modern biography; there developed a tradition of travelogues in the Arab world, which openly marvelled at the prosperity of Europe and America–the gas lamps,
the railways and the steamships. The first plays began to appear, in Lebanon in 1847, with an adaptation of a French drama; the first Urdu play was produced in India in 1853 and the first Turkish play was performed in 1859. A new periodical press appeared in the Arab world, with the development of the rotary press (as in Europe). Titles: Liberty, Warning, Interpreter. Algeria even had a reformist newspaper, The Critic. The critic al-Tahtawi wrote a book about Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, and about Western laws; Namik Kemal, in Turkey, translated Bacon, Condillac, Rousseau and Montesquieu. (2) Constitutionalism. Constitutionalism in this context meant government restricted by law, what we would today call the separation of powers, with elected parliaments rather than government by kings, sheikhs, or tribal leaders. The constitutionalists specifically took a decision to ignore the concept of paradise, and argued that what mattered was equality in this life, here on earth. Constitutionalist proposals were produced, or passed, in Egypt in 1866, in Tunisia in 1861, in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and 1908, in Iran in 1906 and again in 1909. In Afghanistan a modernist movement was suppressed in 1909.81 People even started to talk of ‘the constitutional countries’. (3) Science and education was the third aspect of modernism. There was a great worry about Darwin, because many Islamic scholars were persuaded by Herbert Spencer’s ideas on social Darwinism and they thought that Muslim societies were old-fashioned and would go under. They therefore urged the adoption of the Western sciences, in particular, which were to be taught in the new schools. There was a new school movement at this time, usul-I jaded, meaning ‘new principles’, which taught religious and secular subjects side-by-side but where the aim, quite clearly, was to replace traditional religious scholars with more modern ones. Sociology became popular among the Islamic modernists; they followed Comte in particular and his view that societies could be divided into three progressive stages: natural, social and political. Afghani took the view that man does not differ from the animals and could be studied like them, arguing that the fittest would survive. Like Marx and like Nietzsche, he thought that, in the end, life was about power. Abduh visited Herbert Spencer, whose book he translated. Most important of all, the modernists argued that laws came from human nature, from the study of the regularities of nature, that that was how God revealed himself, not through the Qur’an. (4) As was happening in the West in the nineteenth century, with the deconstruction of the Bible (as we would say), so the text of the Qur’an and hadith came under criticism. Rida was a relentless critic of the hadith, as a set of texts introduced by later figures which he felt was most to blame for keeping Islam back. So far as the Qur’an itself was concerned, he argued that its text was only a guidance, not a command. Al-Saykh Tartawi Jawhari (1870–1940) made an exegesis of the Qur’an in twenty-six volumes, based on modern science. (5) Women. The nineteenth century saw the promotion of girls’ schooling in several Islamic countries, if not everywhere. It saw women’s organisations in Bengal and in Russia. It saw an end to polygamy in India. It saw women’s suffrage in Azerbaijan in 1918 (before France in 1947, and Switzerland even later). In the Lebanon in 1896 and in Tunisia in 1920 there were campaigns for women to be given free access to the professions.

  The reader may well ask what became of this modernist movement in the Islamic countries. The short answer is that it flourished until the First World War and then fragmented. Because it falls outside the time-frame of this book, a short summary of what happened between the First World War and the present is given in the notes.82

  Both Christianity and Islam came under sustained onslaught in the late nineteenth century. Who is to say, now, which faith resisted these attacks more successfully?

  36

  Modernism and the Discovery of the Unconscious

  To Chapter 36 Notes and References

  As a youth Sigmund Freud did not lack for ambition. Though he had a reputation for being a bookworm, his dark eyes and lush dark hair gave him an air of assurance to which the adjective ‘charismatic’ has been applied.1 He fantasised himself as Hannibal, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, Heinrich Schliemann–the discoverer of Troy–and even Christopher Columbus. Later in life, after he had made his name, he compared himself less fancifully with Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and Darwin. In his lifetime he was lionised by André Breton, Theodore Dreiser and Salvador Dali. Thomas Mann thought he was ‘the oracle’, though he later changed his mind. In 1938, the United States president, Franklin Roosevelt, took a personal interest in Freud’s protection, as a Jew under the Third Reich, and eventually induced the Nazis to let him leave Austria.2

  Perhaps no figure in the history of ideas has undergone such revision as Freud–certainly not Darwin, and not even Marx. Just as there is a disparity today between professional historians and the general reading public, concerning the Renaissance and what we might call, for shorthand, the Prenaissance–the period 1050–1250 when the modern world began–so there is a huge gap now between the general public’s understanding of Freud, and that of most psychiatric professionals.

  The first act of revision, as it were, is to remove from Freud any priority he may ever have been credited with in the discovery of the unconscious. Guy Claxton, in his recent history of the unconscious, traces ‘unconscious-like’ entities to the ‘incubation temples’ of Asia Minor in 1000 BC where ‘spirit release’ rituals were common. He says that the Greek idea of the soul implied ‘unknown depths’, that Pascal, Hobbes and Edgar Allen Poe were just three who had some idea that the self has a double that is mysterious, half-hidden, yet somehow exerts an influence over behaviour and feelings. Poe was by no means isolated. ‘It is difficult–or perhaps impossible–to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or medical psychologist–who did not recognise unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.’ This is Mark D. Altschule in his Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior (1977). The terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘psychiatric’, as we now use them, were introduced by Baron Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) in Vienna after 1833. Among novelists, the nineteenth century was known as ‘our century of nerves’, and the word ‘neurasthenia’ was coined by George Beard in 1858.3 The British philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte says that around 1870 the unconscious was a topic of conversation, not merely for professionals, but for those who wished to show they were cultured. The German writer Friedrich Spielhagen agreed: in a novel he published in 1890, he described a Berlin salon in the 1870s where two topics dominated the conversation–Wagner and the philosophy of the unconscious. But not even this does justice to the extent to which the unconscious, as an idea, had developed in the nineteenth century. For that we need to turn to Henri Ellenberger and his massive, magisterial work, The Discovery of the Unconscious.4

  Ellenberger divided his approach into three–what we might call the distal and proximate medical background to psychoanalysis, and the nineteenth-century cultural background. They were equally important.

  Among the distal causes, he said, were such predecessors as Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who was at times compared to Christopher Columbus, for he was believed to have discovered ‘a new world’, but in his case an inner world. Mesmer treated people with magnets attached to their bodies, after swallowing a preparation containing iron. After noting how some psychological symptoms varied with the phases of the moon, his aim was to manipulate ‘artificial tides’ within the human body. The method appeared to remove the symptoms in some instances, at least for several hours. Mesmer believed he had uncovered an ‘invisible fluid’ in the body, which he could manipulate: this coincided with the discovery of other ‘imponderable’ fluids, such as phlogiston and electricity, and partly accounts for the intense interest in his innovations, which were built on by the marquis de Puységur (1751–1825). He developed two techniques known as ‘perfect crisis’ and ‘artificial somnabulism’, which appear to have been forms of magnetically-induced hypnotism.5

  Jean-Martin Charcot (1835–1893) was perhaps the first proximate precursor of Freud. The greatest neurologist of his tim
e, who treated patients ‘from Samarkand to the West Indies’, he was the man who made hypnotism respectable when he used it to distinguish hysterical paralysis from organic paralysis. He proved his case by having patients produce paralyses under hypnosis. Subsequently he was able to show that hysterical paralyses often occurred after traumas. He also showed that hysterical memory loss could be recovered under hypnosis. Freud spent four months at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, studying with Charcot, though doubt has recently been thrown on the Frenchman’s work: it now seems that his patients behaved as they did to accommodate their therapists’ expectations.6

  Hypnosis was a very popular form of treatment throughout the nineteenth century, linked also to a condition known as ambulatory automatism, when people seemed to hypnotise themselves and perform tasks of which they were unaware until they recovered. Hypnosis likewise proved useful with a number of cases of what we now call fugue, where people suddenly dissociate from their lives, leave their homes and may even forget who they are.7 As the nineteenth century progressed, however, interest in hypnosis waned, though hysteria remained a focus of psychiatric attention. Because there were, roughly speaking, twenty female cases for every male one, hysteria was from the beginning looked upon as a female disease and although the root cause had originally been conceived as in some mysterious way having to do with the movement or ‘wandering’ of the uterus, it soon became clear that it was a form of psychological illness. A sexual role was considered possible, even likely, because hysteria was virtually absent among nuns but common in prostitutes.8