From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  But late into his stay in Egypt, he became an active player in the country’s political scene. He also became one of the progenitors of activist journalism in the Arab world, creating a public sphere that eventually staged the politicization of the Middle Eastern masses. In one of his newspaper sketches, James Sanua describes a cafe discourser modelled on al-Afghani, addressing his listeners as ‘redeemers of their lands’.64 His disciples were among the most active of those forming public opinion and a sense of nationality – two of them, Abdallah al-Nadim and Salim al-Naqqsh, coined the slogan ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ that is still used today.

  This nascent nationalism in Egypt was to steadily become part of a larger assertion of Arab identity vis-à-vis both the Ottomans, who increasingly privileged Turks and the Turkish language, and Europe. Islam had originated in Arab lands and also achieved its classical glory there. But for centuries its real flowering had happened elsewhere, most recently in Persia, India and Turkey. Arabs were acutely conscious of their lowly position in Muslim countries as well as the larger modern world in general. The late nineteenth-century assertions of Arab identity that tried to alleviate feelings of inferiority were led by non-Muslim Arabs, such as the Syrian Christian and Jewish associates of al-Afghani, who set up the first Arabic independent newspapers. This is how Beirut, Alexandria and Damascus, where many Christian Arabs lived, became centres of modern Arab journalism and literature. Soon Muslims joined in, but they emphasized regaining the old glory of Islam as well as purifying and reviving Arabic as a language of modern communication. In 1871, al-Afghani had arrived in Egypt precisely as this intellectual and political ferment began; he quickly became its central figure.

  Egypt’s most famous newspaper, al-Ahram, had been set up in 1875 without any input from al-Afghani. However, by 1879 almost all of Egypt’s newspapers were being run by al-Afghani’s disciples. The demands of European financiers in Egypt had shaken up the staid world of establishment newspapers that had, as Abduh wrote, ‘only published facts of no importance’.65 ‘An irresistible desire pushed people to subscribe, with a force more powerful than despotism’ to the new lively papers. ‘With time, the newspapers touched on political and social questions concerning foreign countries and then set boldly to dealing with the question of Egyptian finances, which embarrassed the government.’66

  In 1877 James Sanua established, with al-Afghani’s help, a satirical journal, Abu-Naddara Zarqa (‘The Man With Blue Spectacles’). Containing conversations, short plays and essays, it denounced Ottoman-Egyptians as well as European ‘infidels’ looting the Muslim country – Sanua, though Jewish, was not above invoking Islamic rhetoric against European imperialists. The journal, which was the first to use colloquial Arabic rather than the formal language of scholarship, lasted all of two months before being shut down by the authorities. Sanua himself was banished to Paris in 1878, where he resumed publishing his journal (thousands of copies were smuggled back into Egypt and were read eagerly even in remote villages, until the magazine’s closure in 1910). Undeterred, al-Afghani encouraged his Levantine Christian disciple Adib Ishaq to make another attempt: Misr (‘Egypt’) appeared in 1877 in Cairo (before relocating to Alexandria) and was an immediate success.

  Ishaq launched a sustained attack in the paper on Egypt’s monarchy and its foreign backers. He criticized the preference given to expatriates in government jobs; he mocked the European habit of proclaiming liberty and equality at home and blocking constitutional reform abroad. He objected most strongly to the legal privileges enjoyed by Europeans under the Capitulations:

  Being pardoned for obvious misdeeds has encouraged them to rebel, so that they have acted violently and caused as much mischief as they wished, to the extent that not a day goes by but we hear that such-and-such Italian or Maltese stabbed an Egyptian national with a dagger. The wounded victim is carried to the hospital, whereas the assailant is delivered to the consulate, and put in a luxurious room where he eats gourmet meals.67

  As Lady Duff Gordon bitterly recorded, ‘What chokes me is to hear English people talk of the stick being “the only way to manage Arabs” as if anyone could doubt that it is the easiest way to manage any people where it can be used with impunity.’68

  All through the late 1870s Egypt and Turkey hurtled towards a political and financial crisis. The Congress of Berlin, which followed the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 – 8, deprived the Ottomans of most of their Balkan provinces, and revealed that only Western powers could guarantee the integrity and security of the Empire, which still technically ruled Egypt. Al-Afghani, like many Egyptians, had joined the Freemasons to hold political discussions – as in Persia, Freemasonry, which guaranteed a degree of secrecy, compensated for the lack of social and political organizations in Egypt. He took the opportunity to break cover and emerge as a bold thinker in the public eye. He was reading widely, often translations of European works, and Misr became a platform for some of al-Afghani’s own reading-based speculations, some published under his own name, others under a pseudonym. His study of the French historian François Guizot, who credited civilization to solidarity and reason and saw Protestantism as the decisive event in European history, confirmed al-Afghani in his convictions that the Islamic world needed a Reformation, preferably with himself as the new Luther.

  European interventions in Egyptian politics also spurred al-Afghani’s explicitly political writing. He was in close contact with Egyptian nationalists, many of whom were patrons and allies of the army officers under Colonel Urabi who were briefly to take over the Egyptian government in 1880. He had also developed friendly relations with the son of Khedive Islamil, Crown Prince Tawfiq, through his Masonic lodge. He gave speeches and wrote articles directly exhorting Egyptians to remember their glorious classical past and awaken to their political plight. As the Second Afghan War erupted in the autumn of 1878, he published an article praising the anti-imperialism of the Afghans, whom he had criticized previously as ‘unreliable’, and he hailed the unity between Hindus and Muslims during the Indian Mutiny in 1857.

  In an essay published in early 1879 called ‘The True Reason for Man’s Happiness’, al-Afghani denounced British claims to have civilized India by introducing such benefits of modernity as railways, canals and schools. In his defence of India, al-Afghani was ecumenical, praising Hindus as well as Muslims. Echoing Edmund Burke, who had asserted that Indians were ‘people for ages civilized and cultivated – cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods’, al-Afghani dismissively asked why the English ‘who suffered for long ages and wandered in wild and barbaric valleys’ should presume to speak of the ‘deficiency’ of the glorious ‘sons of Brahma and Mahadev, the founders of human sharias and the establishers of civilized laws’.69

  Al-Afghani went on to argue that the British improved transport and communication in order to drain India’s wealth to England and facilitate trade for British merchants. Western-style schools, he argued, were meant merely to turn Indians into English-speaking cogs of the British administration. This was a sophisticated idea for its time, when Indian nationalists had barely begun to formulate it. Al-Afghani’s experience of imperialism in India seems to have been deepened by his prolonged exposure to Egypt, where the presence of a few emblems of modernity – railways, commercial crops – had failed to generate a sustainable economy while stifling old cottage industries. But he was no less critical of fellow Muslims. Reviewing Butrus Bustani’s Arabic encyclopaedia in Misr in 1879, he wrote: ‘O, sons of the East, don’t you know that the power of the Westerners and their domination over you came about through their advance in learning and education, and your decline in those domains?’70 Moving quickly across a vast intellectual realm, al-Afghani tried to diagnose the reasons for Muslim backwardness.

  Chief among them, according to him, was despotism. In an article titled ‘Despotic Government’, he praised republican and constitutional forms of government, and called for the strengthening of the parliamentary system in Egypt. H
e attacked the Ottoman sultans for imposing their own backward-looking interpretation of Islam, and preventing the acquisition of new learning, which allowed Europeans to get ahead of, and then subjugate, Muslims. In his only recorded speech in Alexandria later in 1879, he identified his audience as descendants of the innovative ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians and Chaldeans who had made major breakthroughs in engineering and mathematics, and who had taught writing, agriculture and philosophy to the Greeks.

  Al-Afghani then wondered about the backwardness of Asian peoples who had once created great civilizations. He explained that the West had come to dominate the East because of the latter’s two basic evils of fanaticism and political tyranny. The only thing that would help Muslims, he insisted, was ‘zeal’, which was possessed only by people who ‘know that their honour is in their race, their power is only in their community [umma] and their glory is only in their fatherland’.

  This was the language of the Young Ottomans. Namik Kemal had been among the first Muslims to think of organizing anti-imperialist Muslims around the principle of watan (nation), and al-Afghani seems to have adopted this early discourse of nationalism for his own purposes. He said he hoped his listeners would establish a national political party and strive for parliamentary rule in Egypt, dispensing altogether with foreigners.

  He also pointed out some potential hurdles. ‘No doubt you know,’ he said, ‘that that national party has no power or permanence as long as the people of the country have no common language, developed with good style.’71 He returned to this subject in a later article warning against Muslim adoption of foreign languages, sounding more and more like the cultural nationalists of Europe who were even then building national languages and literatures:

  There is no happiness except through nationality and no nationality except through language … A people without unity, and a people without literature are a people without language. A people without history are a people without glory, and a people will lack history if authorities do not rise among them, to protect and revivify the memory of their historical heroes so that they may follow and emulate. All this depends on a national [watani] education which begins with the fatherland [watan], the environment of which is the fatherland, and the end of which is the fatherland.

  In the same speech at Alexandria, al-Afghani also stressed the importance of women’s rights. He declared it

  impossible to emerge from stupidity, from the prison of humiliation and distress, and from the depths of darkness and ignominy as long as women are deprived of rights and ignorant of their duties, for they are the mothers from whom will come elementary education and primary morality … I think that when a woman’s education is neglected, then even if all the males of a nation are learned and high-minded, still the nation is able to survive in its acquired stage only for that generation. When they disappear, their children, who have the character and educational deficiencies of their mothers, betray them, and their nation returns to the state of ignorance and distress.72

  There is little evidence apart from these speeches and articles that al-Afghani played a direct role in any of the complex intrigues – the revolt by nationalist army officers, or the appointment of Colonel Urabi to the khedive’s government – that were overtaking Egyptian politics in the late 1870s. However, he had spoken casually to Mohammed Abduh of assassinating the then khedive, revealing a preference for violent solutions that was to grow stronger as he grew more embittered with Muslim rulers. When Crown Prince Tawfiq became khedive in June 1879, al-Afghani sent his congratulations and urged the new ruler of Egypt to expel foreigners from the government. Publicly, he kept up his anti-imperialist rhetoric even as the new khedive, supported by European powers, cracked down on dissenters (and abandoned Egypt’s treasury to European accountants).

  A French journalist, Ernest Vauquelin, wrote the following eyewitness account of an al-Afghani lecture:

  One evening in the Hasan mosque in Cairo, before an audience of four thousand people, he gave a powerful speech in which he denounced with a deep prophetic sense three years before the event [the British occupation of Egypt] the ultimate purpose of British policy on the banks of the Nile. He also showed at the same time the Khedive Tawfiq was compelled to serve – consciously or not – British ambitions, and ended his speech by a war-cry against the foreigner and by a call for a revolution to save the independence of Egypt and establish liberty.73

  These speeches were always likely to get al-Afghani into trouble; and European consuls had been tracking him for some time. Writing to his superiors in London, the British consul in Cairo, Frank Lascelles, reported that al-Afghani

  is a man of considerable capacity and of great power as an orator, and he was gradually obtaining an amount of influence over his hearers which threatened to become dangerous. Last year [1878] he took an active part in stirring up ill feeling against the Europeans, and more especially the English, of whom he seems to entertain a profound hatred.74

  Rumours that al-Afghani wanted to overthrow the regime and install a liberal government prejudiced the new khedive’s mind against him; British pressure did the rest. The correspondent of The Times, who had previously described al-Afghani’s influence in Cairo, now reported his expulsion in late August 1879, amplifying Tawfiq’s alleged belief (contrary to al-Afghani’s) that ‘Egyptian regeneration must come from the West’. The correspondent did admit that the expulsion ‘may not seem consonant with English ideals as to the free expression of opinion’, but added that the ‘peculiar circumstances of the country must be considered’. 75 Arrested in Cairo, al-Afghani was denied food for two days in Suez, and his few possessions were taken from him by the police before he was expelled to India. A revolt led by Colonel Urabi was easily put down in 1882. That same year, the British ferociously bombarded Alexandria and began their long occupation of Egypt.

  Thus ended al-Afghani’s first – and only – stay in Egypt. His peremptory departure on political grounds confirmed his reputation, in British eyes at least, as an agitator, but it belied his more lasting intellectual influence on a broad range of Egyptian thinkers and activists. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the English poet and Arabophile who later befriended al-Afghani, was in Egypt in late 1880 when he came across a very liberal-minded and modern-sounding sheikh from al-Azhar. Enquiring further into this new and welcome trend in Egyptian Islam, he learnt that, as the sheikh put it, ‘the true originator’ of the liberal religious reform movement among the ulema of Cairo was, strangely enough, not an Arab, nor an Egyptian, nor an Ottoman, but a certain ‘wild man of genius’ who ‘preached the necessity of reconsidering the whole Islamic position, and, instead of clinging to the past, of making an onward intellectual movement in harmony with modern knowledge’.76 The sheikh from al-Azhar also reported that al-Afghani’s ‘intimate acquaintance with the Koran and the traditions enabled him to show that, if rightly interpreted and checked the one by the other, the law of Islam was capable of the most liberal developments and that hardly any beneficial change was in reality opposed to it’.

  Al-Afghani himself began to develop a more hardline and less liberal approach to Western imperialism and its native allies after his experience of Egypt. It was setbacks everywhere in the countries he knew best that pushed him towards it. The Ottomans’ own credit bubble had burst in 1875, with the Treasury defaulting on interest payments to European bankers. The following year in Istanbul, Egyptian-style bankruptcy through foreign debt encouraged reformers to try to introduce a new liberal constitution; but the new sultan, Abdulhamid II, abrogated it and, as future despots in Muslim countries were to do, he used the modernized structures of the Ottoman state, including a centralized police and spy system, to establish a repressive despotism in full view of his Western patrons.

  A similar demand for a constitution emerged in Egypt among disaffected men like Colonel Urabi. Supported by small landowners and young ulema like Abduh, Urabi scored some temporary successes, becoming a minister in the khedive’s cabinet. But the final outcome was
never in doubt once Urabi started asking for an end to European interference in Egyptian affairs. Visiting Cairo in January 1850, Gustave Flaubert had commented ‘it seems to be almost impossible that within a short time England won’t become mistress of Egypt’.77 In India, monitored closely by the British authorities, al-Afghani probably derived no satisfaction at seeing his own predictions, no less acute than Flaubert’s, come true. In the previous year – 1881 – the French had occupied Tunisia in much the same fashion as the British now took Egypt, despite the Tunisian elite’s desperate attempt at modernization.

  BEYOND SELF-STRENGTHENING: THE ORIGINS OF PAN-ISLAMISM AND NATIONALISM

  In the late 1870s, while he was still in Egypt, al-Afghani wrote to Sultan Abdulhamid describing his pain and outrage over the humiliation of Muslim countries by Western powers:

  When I considered the condition of the Islamic people [milla] it rent the shirt of my patience and I was overcome by fearful thoughts and visions from every side. Like a fearfully obsessed man day and night, from beginning to end, I have thought of this affair and have made the means of reform and salvation of this milla my profession and incantation.78

  Al-Afghani requested that the Ottoman sultan use his power and prestige as caliph to launch a pan-Islamic front against the West, offering to be his representative in India, Afghanistan and Central Asia. His expulsion from Egypt and the defeat of liberal hopes there seem to have convinced al-Afghani of the need for a new tack. He would still experiment with different modes of resistance, often seeking to exploit European rivalries, but he would now advocate nationalisms, religious-based rather than ethnic or secular, in different Muslim countries, and would also deploy such potent invocations as pan-Islamism and holy war.