From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  One of the few possessions of al-Afghani extant today is a passport from Cairo’s Iranian consulate for a trip to Istanbul, which he seems to have obtained soon after he arrived in Cairo in 1871. The planned trip to Istanbul did not happen. However, he was to return to the city at another, more difficult time, when his reputation was fixed as that of a widely feared and respected man, and the Ottoman Empire itself was beset with multiple challenges.

  Nevertheless, his first stay in Istanbul was crucial in his self-education. Despite the setbacks, al-Afghani was learning how to make his views acceptable to a broader constituency than the ruling classes in Muslim countries. Many Muslim reformers in his time spoke of following the West, but it was not easy for most ordinary Muslims to follow the ways of infidel peoples whom they feared or hated or knew nothing about. Like the Young Ottomans, al-Afghani knew how to speak of new ideas and possibilities in the idiom of Islam, and make reform acceptable, even attractive, as a step to political independence and unity. (His disguise as a Sunni Muslim gave him a secret advantage.) In Egypt this intellectual flexibility, and his ability to retrofit the Koran for modernity, would help al-Afghani from the outset, even if it again invited the displeasure of the traditionalist ulema.

  Al-Afghani arrived in Egypt when the country, like Ottoman Turkey, was reaching the limits of self-Europeanization. Political consciousness had been rapidly rising across the country, partly provoked by the Indian Mutiny, news of which had been relayed across Egypt by itinerant Indian merchants and pilgrims. In 1858, the British consul reported much local ‘sympathy’ for the mutineers. ‘There is reason to suppose,’ he added, ‘that Indian and Persian partisans have done their best to increase, if not excite, that sympathy.’46 In 1865, the region around the city of Asyut witnessed a major uprising by Egyptian disciples of an Indian Sufi who had fought the British during the Mutiny in 1857 and had then fled to Egypt; the khedive (viceroy) himself had to travel up the Nile with a military contingent to crush the revolt against his un-Islamic and pro-imperialist ways.

  EGYPT: THE POLEMICIST EMERGES

  Secluded from the disruptive advances of the West, and a relative cultural backwater compared to Mughal India or Persia, Egypt had been jolted into history by Napoleon’s invasion in 1798. It had to modernize, but so much of what had been available to Europe in its modernization – the long building-up of scientific knowledge, technical skills, intellectual and political freedom – was lacking in Egypt. The result was greater economic and political dependence on the West, more efficient despotism, and increasingly frustrated and resentful upwardly mobile Egyptians.

  Muhammad Ali (1769 – 1849), a renegade Ottoman soldier from Thrace who forced Istanbul to recognize his viceroyalty of Egypt, wished to build a formidable military and consolidate his own dictatorial power. To this end, he recruited soldiers from the French army, conferring on some of these mercenaries the title of Bey or Pasha (‘The French canaille abroad is impressive,’ Flaubert wrote to a friend from Egypt in 1849, ‘and let me add – there is a lot of it.’47). He also wooed European potentates, showering them with such extravagant gifts as the Rameses II obelisk that now stands in Paris’s Place de la Concorde and ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’ on London’s Embankment. Sycophantic before Europeans, he was ruthless with his Egyptian subjects. He confiscated the properties of old feudal grandees, and stripped Islamic institutions of their highly lucrative landholdings. Intervening heavy-handedly in traditional rural lives, he forced his peasants to focus on producing a single cash crop – cotton – for European factories, altering the fundamental pattern of what had been a strong and self-sufficient economy.

  Egypt had become one of the main exporters of cotton to Britain and France by 1840, and the proceeds of this lucrative export economy enabled Muhammad Ali to build a professional conscript army and meritocratic bureaucracy. His radical reforms were continued by his dynastic successors, who chose to give themselves the title Khedive. Very soon, modernization in Egypt, which was cheer-led and sponsored by the West, was inducing vast and tumultuous changes.

  Egyptian peasants, who had never previously left their villages, served in the armies that expanded Egyptian territory into the Sudan and defeated Wahhabi fundamentalists in Arabia as well as secessionists in Greece. Modern schools and factories were set up, producing teachers, bureaucrats and engineers; a few students even travelled to Europe. Egypt possessed telegraph and rail networks decades before Japan and China. The American Civil War, which disrupted exports from the American South, multiplied Egyptian revenues from cotton. An increasingly prosperous Cairo became the cultural as well as the financial capital of the Arab world, a status it was to retain into the mid-twentieth century.

  The Egyptian capital was graced with European-style urban conveniences such as broad avenues, waterworks, gasworks, and even an opera house (where Verdi’s Aida was premiered in December 1871). Like the Ottoman sultan, his nominal overlord (and petulant rival), Khedive Ismail (1830-95) had returned from the Paris Exposition in 1867 with a determination to make his capital resemble the magnificent city of the Second Empire. Accordingly, the compulsively polygamous khedive installed the rich – mainly European, Syrian and Sephardic Jewish businessmen – in Cairo’s new western flank, relegating such unattractive sights as the poor to other designated areas. One result of his urban planning was that everywhere near the Nile arose eyesores, as Stanley Lane-Poole, the chronicler of Cairo, wrote: ‘unsightly and ill-built palaces in which viceregal extravagance and ostentation have found an outlet’.48

  Like Istanbul, Cairo attracted its share of foreign buccaneers. A new rail line from Alexandria, completed in 1858, shattered its previous isolation from the Mediterranean. In 1868, the British travel agent Thomas Cook extended the Grand Tour to Cairo, presenting it as an irresistible ‘combination of ancient Orientalism with Parisian innovations’.49 Over 200,000 Europeans lived in Cairo and Alexandria by the 1870s. The khedive himself fervently courted, and was in turn pampered by, European rulers: invited to tea with Queen Victoria at Balmoral, and greeted by the French emperor with greater pomp and ceremony than the Ottoman sultan had been in 1867. (He was less tolerant of Western art forms, sacking the Jewish writer James Sanua as court playwright when the latter attacked polygamy and mocked the British.) In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal, attended by European royalty, seemed to confirm Egypt’s arrival in the modern world. Austria’s bemused Emperor Franz Joseph wrote to his wife about the khedive’s ball, which several thousand people attended, including Indian maharajas, Levantine merchants, European diplomats, desert chieftains and ‘very many vulgar people’.50 ‘My country is no longer in Africa,’ Khedive Ismail is reported to have boasted; ‘it is in Europe.’51

  The Europeans were even less persuaded by the Egyptian claim to high civilization than they had been by the Ottoman regard for their sovereignty. British tourists exploring the country in the late 1870s were warned by their Baedeker guides that the Egyptians ‘occupy a much lower grade in the scale of civilization than most of the western nations, and cupidity is one of their failings’.52 ‘I have been really amazed’, the British traveller Lady Duff Gordon wrote about her compatriots in 1863, ‘at several instances of English fanaticism this year. Why do people come to a Muslim country with such a bitter “hatred in their stomachs”?’53 The answer was, at least partly, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which had instilled a deep distrust, even violent loathing of Muslims and Islam among Britain’s colonial elite. Expatriate businessmen routinely had their Egyptian workers whipped. ‘They [the British] try their hands on the Arabs’, Lady Duff Gordon wrote, ‘in order to be in good training’ for India.54

  Beholden to coarse Europeans, and personally dissolute, the khedive singularly failed to impress the vast majority of his own people. The Egyptian poet Salih Magdi expressed a widespread revulsion when he wrote:

  Your money is squandered on pimps and prostitutes

  Normal men take a woman for a wife

  He wants a million wives
>
  Normal men take a house for a living

  He takes ninety.

  Oh, Egyptians, there is disgrace all around.

  Awake, awake!55

  As the Ottomans were demonstrating, hitching one’s fortunes to Europe carried unknown and potentially lethal costs. The revenues from cotton weren’t enough to subsidize modernization, and the end of the American Civil War and the subsequent collapse of cotton prices damaged the Egyptian economy. Egypt by then was already heavily dependent on huge high-interest loans from European banks, which fervently encouraged Ismail’s profligacy. While increasing Egypt’s debt, which soon made the country subservient to European financiers (and brought European ministers into his cabinet in 1878), the khedive failed to build institutions that could accommodate the rising aspirations of the many newly educated and self-confident Egyptians. His European patrons had even less need for popular institutions. Arab landowners, bureaucrats and military officers pushing for deeper modernization found themselves thwarted, and came to begrudge their country’s dependence on the West.

  Cotton produced great private fortunes, but the link to the international economy put Egypt into a precarious position, subject to the frequent panics and depressions of remote markets. Western-made industrial goods flooded the Egyptian market, destroying not only the old crafts economy but also the social and cultural life of guilds. The Egyptian journalist and politician Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi, one of al-Afghani’s disciples in Cairo, wrote angrily about the local merchant, who ‘has been impoverished by a stagnant market and forced to cling for shelter to the hem of the foreigner, who can, if he pleases, ruin him or allow him to remain where he is.’56

  Extortionate taxes imposed by the khedive also made life intolerable for many Egyptians outside the cities. Lady Duff Gordon, a rare European to have spent considerable time in the Egyptian countryside, reported a year after the opening of Suez Canal the exploitation of the fellaheen (peasants) that had made it possible: ‘I cannot describe to you the misery here now – Every day some new tax. Now every beast, camel, cow, sheep, donkey, horse is made to pay. The fellaheen can no longer eat bread; they are now living on barley-meal mixed with water and raw green stuff, vetches etc.’57 In addition to the country’s nascent intelligentsia, the peasantry furnished ripe material for an insurrection. Until the revolts of the 1870s, British officials counted on the possibility that the Egyptian peasant was so beaten down that ‘no amount of misery or oppression would provoke him to resistance’.58

  In 1878, a time of serious political crisis, al-Afghani would be sighted in Alexandria, trying to stir up a crowd of peasants: ‘Oh! You poor fellah! You break the heart of the earth in order to draw sustenance from it and support your family. Why do you not break the heart of your oppressor? Why do you not break the heart of those who eat the fruit of your labour?’59

  This political activism was an extraordinary change for al-Afghani. When he first arrived in Cairo he was little more than an eager participant in the city’s old culture of café discourses. The one unexpected result of the khedive’s obsession with recreating Paris on the Nile was that the historical quarter, which dated back to the Fatimid era, was neglected rather than destroyed altogether. Here were the great mosques and shrines and madrasas, and the residences of wealthy merchants in which intricately carved wooden screens shielded the household’s women from prying gazes from passers-by. ‘By god,’ an awestruck Flaubert had written in 1849,

  it is such a bewildering chaos of colours that your poor imagination is dazzled as though with continuous fireworks as you go about staring at minarets thick with white storks, at tired slaves stretched out in the sun on house terraces … with camel bells ringing in your ears and great herds of black goats bleating in the streets amid the horses and the donkeys and the pedlars.60

  It was in this colourful chaos of the old city that al-Afghani lingered – the European parts of the town would have spoken to him and his disciples of everything that was going wrong in the country. Yet again he secured the patronage of a local dignitary, Riyad Pasha, a powerful politician he had met in Istanbul. Offered a job at the al-Azhar mosque, he declined, preferring to teach at home and in a cafe (though he accepted a stipend from Riyad Pasha). He focused on teaching rational sciences and reinterpreting old Islamic texts rather than insisting on rote memorizing.

  He carried on from where he had left off in Istanbul, offering what conservative Muslims regarded as ‘heretical’ knowledge to his students. Certainly, he showed no excessive regard for Islamic beliefs. ‘One of his peculiar excellencies,’ the Syrian-Christian author and editor Adib Ishaq (1856 – 85) later recalled, ‘is that he used to follow the movement of European knowledge and scientific discoveries and acquaint himself with what scientists discovered and what they had recently invented.’61 He also taught Islamic classics that were not standard in Cairo at that time, such as Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history, Muqaddima (‘Introduction’). Al-Afghani’s lessons in mathematics, philosophy and theology soon provoked the wrath of the conservative clergy – particularly the sheikhs of al-Azhar, then as now Egypt’s leading theological centre. They denounced al-Afghani as an advocate of atheism. So virulent was the campaign against him that some of his students, including Saad Zaghlul (in many ways, the father of the modern Egyptian nation), had to conceal their association with him.

  Undeterred, al-Afghani went on. He lived in the city’s old Jewish quarter, which is near the old Turkish bazaar, now famous as Khan-ei-Khalili, and was often seen at the Matatiya Cafe in ‘Attaba Square, drinking tea while smoking cigarettes and expounding his views on Ibn Sina and Nasir al-din Tusi, the thirteenth-century Persian philosopher.

  This part of Cairo, a pit of disaffection, would produce Egypt’s future nationalists, revolutionaries and intellectuals. It was here, in the summer of 1879, that the correspondent of The Times of London met al-Afghani, ‘a mysterious being’, he later reported, whose name had ‘become recently familiar as attached to a considerable but unknown power in Egypt’, and who

  had almost obtained the weight of a Median law among the lower and less educated classes … There was certainly no striking originality in his views, nor did he give expression to that fanaticism with which he is credited. But certain well-defined ideas he possessed and he knew how to express them with force.62

  The Times’ correspondent went on to propose that a ‘native opinion exists … and is not to be entirely ignored’. This was a startlingly gracious acknowledgement given that the paper’s reporting from Egypt leading up to its occupation by Britain was otherwise near hysterical, obsessed with the dangers from ostensibly fanatical Muslim mobs to European life and property. But the London paper was right about the influence of al-Afghani on the ‘lower and less educated classes’, which were indeed becoming discontented after decades of upper-class accommodation with the West.

  But, apart from insurrections in the countryside, which were easily quelled, there was no organized opposition to the khedive and his European string-pullers. There was little information available about the outside world, and hardly any newspapers to articulate dissent or propose alternative ideas about political and economic life. Western-style schools had been opened, but their students had been trained in the old rote system of learning and didn’t know what to make of chemistry and engineering. Eventually, the schools were able to reorient their students, thus fulfilling their original aim. But meanwhile the old centres of education such as al-Azhar had been impoverished. So, while a Westernized generation lacked all real knowledge of Islam and Egypt, students in the old school system knew nothing of modern life.

  Adib Ishaq and the playwright later anointed as the ‘Molière of Egypt’, James Sanua (1839 – 1912), held cultural salons and organized educational societies in their own homes. Ahmad Urabi, who in 1881-2 led an army officers’ revolt against the monarchy, attended these informal gatherings, as did many others lacking a modern education. When the gatherings were prohibited by the khedive, Sanua move
d his activities to a Masonic lodge. Bringing news of the outside world to curious but isolated Egyptians, al-Afghani became similarly important to a generation of students.

  On someone like Mohammed Abduh, born into a peasant family and narrowly trained to read Islamic texts, al-Afghani had a liberating effect. As Abduh, who later wrote a near-sycophantic biography of al-Afghani and also became one of the leading modernist thinkers of the Muslim world, described it:

  The Egyptians before 1877 in their public and private affairs put themselves completely under the will of the sovereign and his functionaries … None of them dared to hazard an opinion on the way in which their country was administered. They were far from knowing the state of other Muslim or European countries … Beside, who would have dared to show his opinion? Nobody, since one could, on the least word, be exiled from one’s country or despoiled of his goods or even put to death. Amid this darkness arrived Jamal al-din.63

  Abduh did not exaggerate entirely about the ‘darkness’. More vividly than Ottoman Turkey, Egypt had revealed the severe limitations and problems of modernization within an international capitalist economy where the rules were made by European imperialists, and were usually rigged against latecomers. The Times’ correspondent encountered al-Afghani towards the end of his time in Egypt. With European bondholders and moneylenders practically running the country, al-Afghani was becoming less discreet than before about the dangers of Western encroachment. For much of his time in the country he had been content to advise piecemeal reform. Most people who met him attested to the essentially non-traditional nature of his teachings; some even thought him irreligious. Certainly he mostly spoke about religion only to the extent he could apply it to practical and secular ends.