by Reza Aslan
By midnight, as the glorious moon came out through the clouds and reflected herself in myriad pools and streams, we had gathered 282 of the Bengali rebels. In the morning, a party of Sikhs arrived with a large supply of rope. But being as the trees were scarce, the rope was not used. A larger problem lay in dealing with the loyal Mohammedan troopers, who would surely not have stood by in silence as justice was meted out upon their rebellious co-religionists. As fortune would have it, the 1st of August was the anniversary of the great Mohammedan festival of Bukra Eid. A capital excuse was thus afforded to permit the Mohammedan horsemen to return to their homes to celebrate, while we Christians, unembarrassed by their presence and aided by the faithful Sikhs, might perform a ceremonial sacrifice of a different nature upon their brethren.
There remained one last difficulty, which was of sanitary consideration. But again, as fortune would have it, a deep dry well was discovered within one hundred yards of the police-station, furnishing a convenient solution as to how to dispose of the dishonoured soldiers.
At first light, the prisoners were bound together in groups of ten and brought out of their prisons. Believing they were about to be tried and their unwarranted grievances heard, the Sepoys were unusually docile. But when the shots began to ring in the still morning air, and they suddenly discovered the real and awful fate that awaited them, they were filled with astonishment and rage.
The execution commenced uninterrupted until one of our men swooned away (he was the oldest of our firing-party), and a little respite was allowed. After we had shot some 237 of the Mohammedans, the district officer was informed that the remaining captives were apparently refusing to come out of the bastion, where they had been imprisoned temporarily in expectation of their execution. Anticipating a rush and resistance, preparations were made against their escape. The bastion was surrounded, the doors opened, and behold! Forty-five bodies, dead from fright, exhaustion, fatigue, heat, and partial suffocation, were dragged into the light. These dead, along with their executed comrades were thrown by the village sweepers into the well. Thus, within forty-eight hours of their escape, the entire 26th regiment was accounted for and disposed of.
To those of you fond of reading signs, we would point to the solitary golden cross still gleaming aloft on the summit of the Christian church in Delhi, whole and untouched; though the ball on which it rests is riddled with shots deliberately fired by the mutinous infidels of the town. The cross symbolically triumphant over a shattered globe! How the wisdom and heroism of our English soldiers seem like mere dross before the manifest and wondrous interposition of Almighty God in the cause of Christianity!
There were a number of reasons for what the British described as the Sepoy Mutiny, but which is now universally recognized as the Indian Revolt of 1857. The history that led to the revolt is clear enough. Under the auspices of the East India Company, which maintained a total monopoly over Indian markets, the British Empire had been the effective ruler of India since the mid-eighteenth century, though it was not until the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, was forcefully deposed, in 1857, that it assumed direct control over the country. By then, the British had so effortlessly pressed their will on the enfeebled population that they were free to plunder the vast resources of the Subcontinent.
To keep Europe’s industries running, the colonized lands were rushed toward modernization. European ideals of secularism, pluralism, individual liberties, human rights, and, to a far lesser degree, democracy—the wonderful legacy of the Enlightenment that had taken hundreds of years to evolve in Europe—were pressed upon the colonized lands with no attempt to render them in terms the indigenous population would either recognize or understand. Western technology was shared only insofar as it increased production. New cities were built instead of old cities being developed. Cheaply manufactured imports destroyed most local industries, and native markets had little choice but to focus almost exclusively on the economic needs of the colonial powers.
In return for the pillaging of their lands, the suppression of their independence, and the destruction of their local economies, the colonized peoples were to be given the gift of “civilization.” Indeed, in every region to which Europeans laid claim, the colonialist project was presented in the guise of a “civilizing mission.” As Cecil Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond company and at one time the virtual dictator of modern-day South Africa, famously declared, “We Britons are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.”
Among the many problems with this so-called civilizing mission was that, well-intentioned as it may have been, it was often deliberately shadowed by a “Christianizing mission,” the principal goal of which was, in the words of Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras, “nothing short of the conversion of the natives to Christianity.” In India, Christian evangelists were placed in the highest positions of government, including at all levels of the British Army. Charles Grant, the director of the East India Company (which until 1858 retained nearly all powers of government in the Indian Subcontinent), was himself an active Christian missionary who believed, along with most of his countrymen, that Britain had been granted dominion over India by God in order to rear it out of its heathen darkness and into the light of Christ. Nearly half of all schools in the Subcontinent were run by missionaries like Grant who received large amounts of aid from the British Empire to indoctrinate the natives into Christianity.
Not all colonialists agreed with Britain’s missionary agenda. Lord Ellenborough, Governor General from 1842 to 1844, continually warned his countrymen that the imperial promotion of Christian evangelism was not only detrimental to the security of the Empire, it would likely lead to popular resentment and perhaps to open rebellion. Yet even Ellenborough would have agreed with Trevelyan, who argued that the Indian religion was “identified with so many gross immoralities and physical absurdities that it [would give] way at once before the light of European science.”
The British conviction that the ancient foe of Christendom was in desperate need of civilization created a sense of inferiority and fear among India’s Muslims, many of whom believed that their faith and culture were under attack. So while the annexation of native states, the dispossession of landowners, the disregard for the plight of the Indian peasantry, and the harsh revenue policies of the rapacious East India Company had formed a massive pyre of anger and resentment in India, in the end it was what Benjamin Disraeli called “the union of missionary enterprise with the political power of the Government” that struck the match of rebellion.
The fact is, the soldiers who launched the Indian Revolt in 1857 were not only angry at colonialist policies that had stripped their land of its natural resources, they were convinced, and rightly so, that the British Army was trying to convert them and their families forcibly to Christianity. It was enough that their commanding officer openly preached the Gospel to all his military classes, but when they discovered that their rifle cartridges had been greased with beef and pork fat, which would have contaminated both Hindus and Muslims, their greatest fears were confirmed. In an act of civil disobedience, a small group of soldiers refused to use the cartridges. Their British commanders responded by shackling them in chains and locking them in military prisons. Seeing this response as yet another indication of the colonialist mindset, the rest of the Bengali Army—some 150,000 soldiers—mutinied.
The soldiers quickly took control of Delhi and set up the deposed Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, as their leader. The octogenarian emperor released a written proclamation to the country, urging both the Hindu and Muslim populations to help him “liberate and protect the poor helpless people now groaning” under colonial rule. The proclamation reached every corner of India, and soon what had begun as a military mutiny among the Sepoy forces escalated into a joint Hindu-Muslim rebellion of the civilian population.
The British responded mercilessly and without restraint. To subdue the uprising they were compelled, somew
hat reluctantly, to unleash the full force of their colonial might. There were mass arrests throughout the country; demonstrators both young and old were beaten on the streets. Most major cities were ravaged. In Allahabad, British soldiers indiscriminately killed everyone in their path, leaving the dead bodies to rot in piles on the streets. Lucknow was sacked, Delhi practically razed. Approximately five hundred Sepoys of the 14th Native Infantry were massacred at Jhelam. In Benares, the bodies of civilian sympathizers were hung from the trees. Entire villages were looted, then set aflame. It took less than two years of carnage and plunder before full colonial control was restored. With the rebellion crushed and the East India Company dissolved, the administration of the Subcontinent became the direct responsibility of the Queen, who could now proudly proclaim that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”
The violence with which colonial control was reasserted in India forever shattered any illusions of British moral superiority. For most Muslims, Europe’s civilizing mission in the Middle East was revealed for what it truly was: an ideology of political and economic dominance achieved through brutal military might. The ideals of the Enlightenment, which the British never tired of preaching, could no longer be separated from the repressive imperialist policies of the colonizing government. In short, India became the paradigm of the colonialist experiment gone awry.
Even so, a large number of Muslim intellectuals remained convinced that the adoption of European values, such as the rule of law and the pursuit of scientific progress, was the sole means of overcoming the rapid decline of Muslim civilization in the face of European imperialism. This group became known as the Modernists, and perhaps no intellectual better represented their reformist agenda than Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan.
Born to a family of Mughal nobility, Sayyid Ahmed Khan was a devoted follower of the aforementioned Indian neo-mystic Shah Wali Allah, though by the mid-nineteenth century he had begun to distance himself from the puritanical overtones of an ideology that had already sparked a few anti-Hindu, anti-Sikh rebellions in India. During the Indian Revolt, Sir Sayyid worked as an administrator in the East India Company and had witnessed for himself the gruesome revenge meted out by the British forces upon the rebellious population of Delhi. Although the experience did not deter him from remaining a loyal subject of the British Empire (as his knighthood suggests), he was nevertheless deeply pained over the plight of Indian Muslims after the collapse of the revolt. In particular, Sir Sayyid was worried about the way in which the revolt was being described by British authorities as “a long concocted Mohammedan conspiracy against British power,” to quote Alexander Duff, Britain’s leading missionary in India. Such beliefs had made the Muslim community the main target of government reprisals.
To combat this misperception, Sir Sayyid published his most famous work, The Causes of the Indian Revolt, which strove to explain to a British audience the reasons behind the events of 1857. This was not, he argued, a premeditated rebellion. It was the spontaneous result of a combination of social and economic grievances. That said, Sir Sayyid admitted that at the heart of the Indian Revolt was the widespread belief that the British were bent on converting the population to Christianity and forcing them to adopt European ways. This, according to Sir Sayyid, was surely a ludicrous notion. Despite the preponderance of evidence, he refused to accept the idea that the Queen’s purpose in India was the conversion of its people. Sir Sayyid did, however, recognize that the mere perception that the colonialist project was a Christian war against Indian religions was enough to rouse the masses to revolt.
As a devout Indian Muslim and a loyal British subject, Sir Sayyid took upon himself the challenge of building a bridge between those two civilizations, so as to explain the culture, faith, and values of the one to the other. The problem as he saw it was that the Indians “did not understand what right the Government, whose subjects we are, had upon us, and what was our duty towards it.” If only the goals and ideals of the British were explained to the indigenous population in a language they could understand, the Indians would become “not a burden but a boon to the community.”
In 1877, Sayyid Ahmed Khan founded the Aligarh School, the primary goal of which was the revitalization of Islamic glory through modern European education. Sir Sayyid was convinced that if he could shine the light of European rationalism and scientific thought upon traditional Muslim beliefs and customs, the result would be an indigenous Islamic Enlightenment that would propel the Muslim world into the twentieth century. The Aligarh taught its students to throw off the shackles of the Ulama and their blind imitation (taqlid) of Islamic doctrine, for none of the problems facing Muslims in the modern world could be solved through their antiquated theology. The only hope for Islamic revival was the modernization of the Shariah; and the only way to achieve this was to take it out of the hands of the incompetent and irrelevant Ulama.
“What I acknowledge to be the original religion of Islam,” Sir Sayyid claimed, “[is not the] religion which … the preachers have fashioned.”
It was Sir Sayyid’s Kashmiri protégé, Chiragh Ali (1844–95), who most succinctly outlined his mentor’s argument for legal reform. Chiragh Ali was incensed at the way Islam had been portrayed by Europeans as “essentially rigid and inaccessible to change.” The notion that its laws and customs are based “on a set of specific precepts which can neither be added to, nor taken from, nor modified to suit altered circumstances” is a fiction created by the Ulama to maintain their control over Muslims, Chiragh Ali said. He argued that the Shariah could not be considered a civil code of law because the only legitimate law in Islam is the Quran, which “does not interfere in political questions, nor does it lay down specific rules of conduct.” Rather, the Quran teaches nothing more than “certain doctrines of religion and certain general rules of morality.” It would be absurd, therefore, to regard Islamic law, which Chiragh Ali considered the product of the Ulama’s imagination, to be “unalterable and unchangeable.”
As one can imagine, the Ulama did not respond well to these charges of incompetence and irrelevance, and they used their influence over the population to fight with vehemence the Modernist vision of a new Islamic identity. Certainly, the Modernist cause was not helped by the fact that after the Indian Revolt it became increasingly difficult to separate the ideals of the European Enlightenment from its imperialist connotations. But it was the Modernist demand that the Shariah be withdrawn entirely from the civil sphere that caused the greatest concern among the Ulama. Religious scholars like Mawlana Mawdudi, founder of the Jama’at-i Islami (the Islamic Association), countered the Aligarh platform by arguing that, far from separating the religious and civil, Islam requires that “the law of God should become the law by which people lead their lives.”
Ironically, though Mawdudi was himself a fervent antinationalist, his ideas were instrumental in providing the ideological foundation for the creation of the world’s first “Islamic state,” Pakistan. Yet to understand how India’s Muslim community progressed from the disastrous aftermath of the Indian Revolt to the triumphant creation of their own separate homeland in less than a hundred years requires a brief detour through Egypt, where another group of Muslim reformists living under colonial rule were on the verge of launching an awakening in the East that would ripple through the whole of the Muslim world.
EGYPT AT THE turn of the nineteenth century had become, in the words of William Welch, “an essential spoke in the imperial wheel” of the British Empire. Unlike India, where the British held uncontested and unconcealed control over every level of civic administration, Egypt was allowed to maintain a façade of independence through the hereditary reign of its utterly impotent viceroys, or khedives. Though their fealty remained, in principle, to the Ottoman Empire, by the nineteenth century the khedives were little more than subjects of the British Empire. They were powerless to make any political or economic decisions in Egypt without the consent of their colonial masters. In exchange for a seemingly inexhaustible line of credit,
which they could never hope to repay, a succession of viceroys had gradually settled into apathetic reigns characterized by unrestrained excess and political indifference.
Meanwhile, Egypt was inundated with foreign workers, wealthy investors, and middle-class Englishmen eager to stake their claims on a country with few bureaucratic obstacles and unlimited opportunities for advancement. To accommodate the rapid influx of Europeans, entire cities were built on the outskirts of Cairo, far away from the indigenous population. The foreigners quickly took charge of Egypt’s principal export of cotton. They built ports, railroads, and dams, all to implement colonial control over the country’s economy. With the construction of their crowning achievement, the Suez Canal, Egypt’s fate as Britain’s most valuable colony was sealed.
To pay for these massive projects, taxes were increased, though they were already too high to be paid by the average Cairene, let alone by the expanding peasant class (the fellaheen) forced into the cities by the destruction of their local industries. Making matters worse, the khedives had been pressured into allowing the foreign élite unreasonable concessions, including exemption from all taxes except those levied on property, and total immunity from being tried in Egyptian courts.
Naturally, the iniquitous situation in Egypt led to widespread anticolonialist sentiment and sporadic uprisings, both of which were used by the British as further excuses to tighten their control over the population. The result was a government in staggering debt to European creditors and a disenfranchised population desperately in search of a common identity to unite them against the colonialist menace. By the middle of the century, the situation in Egypt was ripe for the Modernist message then being formed in India. That message would be brought to them by the man known as “the Awakener of the East”—Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838–97).
