A Thousand Yearnings

by Ralph Russell

  One was Nazir Ahmad, a powerful propagandist of the new movement. He was by no means an uncritical supporter of everything Sir Sayyid said. He once compared Sir Sayyid’s more laboured efforts at a modern interpretation of Islam to the efforts of a man trying ‘to touch his buttocks with his ears’. But this makes his support for the main thrust of Sir Sayyid’s argument all the more striking:

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  Nazir Ahmad on The creation of Adam

  The story in the Quran of the Creation of Adam tells us of God’s object in creating humankind and of the nature of humankind.* God, with some design which only He knows, created this splendid workshop of the universe and established the laws that govern it. Then, with some design which only He knows, He desired that man should be his deputy and vicegerent and by His command should exercise certain limited powers in ordering the affairs of this workshop in accordance with the laws of nature, and should, to a limited extent, make use of its resources. God gave him intelligence, so that he might know and understand the law. Now let us see how man’s perception of his role as God’s vicegerent, and his education in learning the names of things and his awareness of his stature as the ‘best of created things’ has progressed. Man is not God, but there is in him without a doubt a reflection of God, because he rules over all that is in the world. To level the mountains, dry up the seas, break the force of turbulent rivers, make the barren plains bloom, beat off the attacks of fierce animals like the elephant and the tiger, subdue the strong, rebellious forces of steam and electricity—all this is child’s play to him. Yes, he is God’s servant, but when you see the authority he wields and the power he holds it seems that other created things are his servants. But in order to bring into full play the authority and the power which God has prescribed for him he needs to know the laws of nature, because no matter what the authority he wields and no matter what the power he exercises, he remains subject to these laws. He cannot by so much as a hair’s breadth transgress their bounds or exercise any power over them. He stands in the same relation to these laws as the rider does to his horse. It is not the rider that completes the journey; it is the horse. But the rider has put a bridle in the horse’s mouth and a saddle on its back; he has a whip in his hand and spurs on his heels; and the horse carries him where he wants to go. In the same way if we look at the workings of the world we see that man both commands and is himself commanded by it, is at once a cause and an effect, an origin and an outcome. At all events, man has been granted sufficient power to understand the properties and the uses of things or, in other words, the intelligence which enables him to understand the causes of things, and by furnishing these causes, to obtain the results he desires. And this is the essence of what human vicegerency, human deputyship means. And then this vicegerency which God in His majesty and glory has bestowed upon man has been bestowed on every human being, without distinction of country or community, on every human being as a human being. And in this respect every one of the children of Adam is God’s vicegerent. Granted that there are degrees of vicegerency...The deeper and more perceptive a man’s knowledge of the laws of nature is, the more extensive is his power, the more sweeping his authority and the higher and more exalted his rank and status as vicegerent will be. In our time there are about two hundred and sixty million people on the face of the earth. And Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, idolaters—each one of them—no matter who he is or where he is from or what his colour or his appearance and his faith—each one is the vicegerent of God. Even so, it is of course true that people differ from one another: ‘one is a diamond, another a pebble’. There are the British and American vicegerents who beat the drum of ‘to me is the power in these days’ and there are the Muslim vicegerents who are being shattered more and more in the explosions of ‘Just see the difference between this and that!’* And now the question arises of where this difference comes from. It comes from a failure to understand what God’s vicegerency means. It comes from man’s ignorance of his destiny. It comes from his failure to recognize his own worth. It comes from the fact that, living in the world of cause and effect he has not sought out the causes of things.

  While all of us were spending time in useless disputation

  The men of Europe leapt into the void of God’s creation.

  Time was when their condition was more miserable than ours

  But now the wealth of all the world rains down on them in showers.

  Now God Himself has moved to share his secrets with these nations

  Because they have perceived the mode of Nature’s operations.

  To sum up: God has made man His vicegerent, which means that in this law-governed universe he is to bring into play, while subjecting himself to the laws of nature, a limited authority and limited powers. In order to fulfil the conditions of his role properly as vicegerent, it is necessary to know the laws of nature. And his ability to do this depends on education—not the old-style education in which there is nothing but verbiage and intellectual hypotheses, but the new education which the British, in their great kindness and generosity, are propagating. It was this education that enabled the British themselves to rise in the world. By ill fortune, Muslims have, for ages, out of ignorance and religious prejudice, thought of this education as that of infidels and renegades. When ‘the sparrows had gleaned the field’,* then a few of them—not all—began to feel disturbed at the state of affairs and began to think about it. Their rivals had almost reached their goal when they sensed that they were suffering ‘loss both in this world and the next’, as the saying goes, and began reluctantly to move slowly from the stand they had taken. What we have ‘lost in this world’ is everywhere plainly visible. Be it government service, trade, agriculture or any other means of livelihood, the Muslims lag behind. As for what we have ‘lost in the next world’, whether Muslims accept it or not, I am fulfilling my responsibilities when I tell them that every created thing worships God by realizing the aims and objects for which it was created. For example, the sun worships God by giving light and warmth to the earth, and the earth by growing grain for those who live on it... In the same way man’s effort to fulfil his duties as God’s vicegerent, which is what he was created for, is an act of worship. In the light of this, look at [the verse of the Quran which says] ‘Without doubt the most Godfearing among His servants are the learned’ and the Tradition,†‘Without doubt the acquiring of knowledge is the duty of every Muslim man and every Muslim woman’—and then decide whether Islam regards the acquisition of modern education as justified or unjustified, as a duty or as a sin!

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  Sir Sayyid on the Need to Become ‘Modern’

  Sir Sayyid’s social and political writings evidence the same qualities as his religious writings, including quite often an extremism which most of those reading him nowadays would find unacceptable and occasionally quite absurd. He often regarded most of the current conventions and fashions of the British society of his day as essential features of modernity, and argued that his own community should adopt them wholesale. He also tried to shock his readers into a realization of their backwardness by contrasting them with the British in the most unfavourable terms—and by so doing gave deep and wholly understandable offence not only to his opponents but also to his supporters.

  It helps us to see this in context if we bear in mind that such extremism was not confined to India. Kemal Ataturk, the creator of modern Turkey, evinced an equally astonishing extremism well into the twentieth century, insisting to his fellow countrymen that only if they changed their dress, wore boots or shoes on their feet, trousers on their legs, shirt, tie, jacket and waistcoast on the upper part of their bodies, and a ‘cover with a brim’ on their heads—(‘this head-covering is called a hat,’ he explained to them) could they regard themselves as civilized. Even Sir Sayyid did not go as far as that!

  In 1869 Sir Sayyid travelled to England to see the marvels of English civilization at close range, and wrote an account of his journey to the secretary of the Scientific S
ociety, which he himself had founded, for serial publication in its journal:

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  I have received your kind letter dated 9th September 1869. You are not pleased with me because I have not sent you any [further] account of our journey; I ask your forgiveness for this and acknowledge that I am at fault. But I had heard that some members of your Society disapprove of the freedom with which I wrote, and are displeased with me. It is not in me to conceal, out of fear of the members of your society, the impressions which I form in the course of this journey or the honest conclusions I draw from them. If I did that I would myself be committing the very sin of which I accuse my fellow Indians. So I decided it would be better to stop writing. If you think that publishing my independent opinions and statements will not harm your Society, and if you are not afraid of the displeasure of the members of the Society (and indeed of anyone but God), then I have no objection to continuing to send you full accounts of events, and of the wonders of this country, and of the lessons and warnings we should take from them.

  If you will print this letter just as it stands in your journal and give your frank opinion on the matter I have just mentioned, then I will continue to send you letters as before.

  For the present, to make amends, I am writing you an account of the outcome so far of the past six months... It is about six months since I arrived here. During that time, despite the fact that there were many things that shortage of money has made it impossible for me to see, I have at any rate seen some things. I have been in the society of lords and dukes, have taken part in their great banquets and assemblies, have met nobles of lower rank, had friendly relations with gentlemen of middle rank—people who, so to speak, have the same sort of rank and status as we have—and taken part in their dinners and assemblies. On each occasion I have met their ladies, educated and talented ladies of their class. I have met gentlemen who are rich, others who have modest means, and yet others who are poor. More than that, I have seen the homes of people of extremely humble status, and seen the way they live. I have also seen great merchants and their factories, merchants of middle rank and their shops, their warehouses and the way they conduct their buying and selling, and the way they behave with, and talk to, their customers. I have also seen craftsmen and labourers, imposing houses and museums, engineering factories and shipyards, armaments factories, factories that manufacture the cables that lie under the sea and connect one world with another, and warships (on board one of which I have travelled several miles). I have attended meetings of some societies, and have participated in dinners and meetings at some clubs.

  He then announced the conclusion he had drawn from this experience—in words so harsh that even the most bigoted white racist would hesitate to use them today:

  This is the conclusion I have drawn from all this: In India we used to say that the British behaved extremely rudely to Indians (and I do not acquit them of this charge even now), and that they look upon Indians as no more than animals. [But] this is what we really are. I tell you without exaggeration and with complete sincerity that Indians, from the highest to the lowest, rich and poor alike, traders and craftsmen alike, from the most learned and accomplished to the most ignorant, when one compares them with the education and training and cultured ways of the British, bear the same resemblance to them as a filthy wild animal does to an extremely talented and handsome man. And do you think any animal deserves to be treated with honour and respect? So we have no right (even if we have reason) to object if the British in India look upon us as wild animals.

  He returned later to the point about British attitudes in India:

  I say that the British in India behave extremely badly in their dealings with Indians, and they ought not to. This is not because I think that the Indians are so cultured that they deserve better treatment, but because when the British, with all their culture, behave like this they discredit their own culture and education, and put obstacles in the way of the general spread of culture.

  He knew that he would get a hostile reception:

  My fellow countrymen will think that these are exceedingly harsh words, and will ask in surprise, ‘In what are we wanting?’ And ‘in what ways do the British surpass us?’ that I should write like this. Their surprise is nothing to be surprised at. They know nothing about anything here; and it is a fact that everything here is beyond the grasp of their imagination... Any of my fellow countrymen who cannot think that what I have written can be true and factual, is, I assure you, like the frog in the story of the frog and the fish.

  A living fish that an angler had caught fell into a well in which there were frogs living. One of these, seeing this fair new arrival, shining like silver, welcomed him and asked him where he came from. He said, ‘I come from the River Ganges.’ The frogs asked him,‘Is your country like ours?’He said,‘Yes,but there it is much, much lighter; it is a fine country over which the gentle breeze blows, and there are waves in the water in which we move like people in a swing... It is a vast, broad country in which we swim about.’At this one of the frogs moved about a hand’s breadth from the wall of the well and asked,‘As broad as this space between me and the wall?’ The fish said, ‘Even broader.’ The frog moved out another hand’s breadth and asked the same question.‘Even broader,’ said the fish. The frog continued to move, repeating the same question and receiving the same answer until he reached the other wall of the well. There he again asked ‘As broad as this?’, and when the fish replied,‘Much broader than even this,’ he said,‘That’s not true. How can it be broader than this?’ At this point someone lowered a bucket into the well, and the water moved. The frog said, ‘Are your waves like this?’ The fish laughed and said, ‘Why ask about something you have never seen, that you cannot imagine and that cannot be described to anyone who has never seen it?’

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  Maintaining Self-respect—Hali on Sir Sayyid

  This sort of writing may well give a false impression to modern readers. Hali, in his biography of Sir Sayyid, Hayat i Javed, makes clear that he wrote in this way not to flatter the British but to goad his fellow countrymen; and his admiration for the British and their works was not a servile one. Throughout his life it was the interests of his own community which dominated his thinking, and his policy of identifying with British interests was pursued not for the sake of the British but because he saw this as a means of enhancing the achievements and status of his fellow countrymen.

  In his personal dealings with the British he had a very proper regard for his self-respect and did not hesitate to protest publicly against behaviour that accorded him and his fellow countrymen less respect than he felt they were entitled to. The following extract from Hali’s biography gives some instances of this:

  In February 1867 a grand exhibition took place at Agra. Sir Sayyid and a number of other distinguished Indians were members of its organizing committee, along with a number of British members. All of them had equal powers, and there was no distinction made between the British and the Indians. On the last day of the exhibition, a durbar was to be held, and arrangements for this were in the hands of Mr Pollock, district magistrate for the Agra district. He had had chairs arranged for the participants in the durbar in an open space near the exhibition ground. One part of this open space was somewhat higher than the rest, and one line of chairs had been set out there, with a canopy erected over them to keep off the sun. A parallel line of chairs was on lower ground, and there was no canopy over them. Sir Sayyid had assured the Indian participants that it was the government’s wish on this occasion that no distinction should be made between the Indians and the British, and that all would be treated alike.

  One distinguished Indian participant happened to be passing that way perhaps a day before the durbar was due to be held, and he chanced to sit down on a chair in the upper line. A clerk came and moved him off, telling him that the lower line was for him. He went straight to Sir Sayyid, told him what had happened, and said, ‘You were mistaken in thinking that the Indians and the
British were to be treated equally.’ Sir Sayyid was taken aback, and felt extremely embarrassed at having given an assurance which was now proved to be wrong. He at once went to the durbar ground and deliberately took a seat in the upper line. The clerk came to him too and rebuked him. He got up, went straight to the government secretary Mr James Simpson who was issuing tickets, and told him the whole story. He too disapproved of what had been done and told Sir Sayyid he should see Mr Pollock about it. At this point Mr Thornbull [an important British official] arrived. When he was told what had happened he was extremely angry with Sir Sayyid and said to him,‘During the Mutiny you people behaved as if there was no ill treatment that was too bad for us. And now you want to sit side by side with us and our womenfolk?’ Sir Sayyid replied, ‘Everything that has gone wrong is because you people have always despised and humiliated us Indians. But for that, things would never have come to this pass.’ Mr Thornbull got even more angry. In the end Mr Simpson persuaded Sir Sayyid that it was no good continuing this conversation. Sir Sayyid went away and took no part in the durbar.

  Information reached the Lieutenant-Governor, and he too disapproved of the arrangements that had been made. He issued orders to the effect that no significant change could be made at this stage but that the British officials in charge of every district and divison should sit in the lower line with the Indian gentlemen and officials of their respective districts and divisions. After the durbar all the European officials who met Sir Sayyid asked him what had happened, and were very put out when he told them. Sir Sayyid concluded that it was not advisable for him to stay on, and left for Aligarh the same night. A few days later he received a letter from the local government secretary demanding to know why he had not attended the durbar, and why he had left for Aligarh without permission. Sir Sayyid wrote and explained why he had left Agra, and apologized for not having attended the durbar. After that no further enquiry was made. Before this exhibition Lord Lawrence, Viceroy and Governor-General, had ordered the award of a gold medal to Sir Sayyid. Since Sir Sayyid had not attended the durbar the Lieutenant-Governor gave the medal to the Commissioner of the Meerut division so that on his way to Meerut he could stop off at Aligarh and present the medal with his own hands. When the Commissioner arrived at Aligarh railway station, Sir Sayyid, in accordance with instructions that had been sent to him, was there. The Commissioner took him to one side, and because he was offended by the blunt words Sir Sayyid had used to Mr Thornbull, said,‘I would not have been willing to hang this medal round your neck with my own hands, but I am under government orders.’ Sir Sayyid replied,‘I too am under government orders,’ and then bent his neck, put the medal on, and left.