From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Representing a small political tendency initially – Rida played no part in Egypt’s 1919 anti-British uprising – the strain of Salafi Islam would grow stronger underground in the second half of the twentieth century as one modernizing despot after another launched brutal crackdowns on Islamist groups. The ideology travelled elsewhere, most fatefully to Afghanistan, where in the person of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-conspirator in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, it married Arabia’s even more austere Wahhabi Islam, embodied by Osama bin Laden. Brought together in Afghanistan, Islamist refugees from Westernized and despotic regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Algeria began to plot the overthrow of pro-West and Westernizing governments; they also began to target these regimes’ main Western patrons, the United States and Europe, translating al-Afghani’s internationalist anti-imperialism and often romantic Islamic revivalism into the language of global jihad.

  Al-Afghani’s potent revolutionary formula of Islamic unity and anti-Westernism was also adopted elsewhere.

  Colonialism has partitioned our homeland and has turned the Moslems into separate peoples … The only means that we possess to unite the Moslem nation, to liberate its lands from the grip of the colonialists and to topple the agent governments of colonialism is to seek to establish our Islamic government. The efforts of this government will be crowned with success when we become able to destroy the heads of treason, the idols, the human images and the false gods who disseminate injustice and corruption on earth.134

  This could be al-Afghani in one of his more Islamic moods. It is actually Ayatollah Khomeini. Al-Afghani may have slightly resembled the kind of Muslim ally the United States sought in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 – this is what the American ambassador seemed to imply at his speech in Kabul in 2002. In fact, he was the first major Islamic thinker to use the concepts ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ as violently opposed binaries.135 In many other ways, he was ahead of his time, participating in popular movements, speaking of Muslim unity and rebellion when political awareness among Muslim masses was still underdeveloped. His Islamic anti-imperialism can be seen now to have inaugurated a tradition of political activists and revolutionaries that culminated, more than a century later, in a major assault on the very capital of Western modernity.

  Unlike bin Laden, another peripatetic observer of Muslim infirmity, al-Afghani was no preacher of terrorist violence. Witnessing the insidious influence of European bondholders in Egypt and tobacco traders in Iran, he recognized early how the power of the West did not just rest on military force and could not be resisted by military means alone. He warned presciently against any Muslim ruling class’s accommodation with, or blind allegiance to, Western geopolitical and economic interests. His failure to make the Muslim potentates of his time heed his warnings gave him, towards the end of his life, the bitterness of the spurned prophet: ‘The entire Oriental world,’ he told the German journalist who visited him in Istanbul, ‘is so entirely rotten and incapable of hearing the truth and following it that I should wish for a flood or an earthquake to devour and bury it.’

  Decades later, Muslim leaders such as Mehdi Bazargan (1907 – 95), the Islamic Republic of Iran’s first prime minister, would fault al-Afghani for investing his political energies in ruling elites rather than ordinary people. Al-Afghani himself seems to have realized his mistake. In his last years he seemed to draw great solace from the ideal of mass democracy. In probably the last letter he wrote (to a Persian disciple), he grieved that he wouldn’t live long enough to witness the imminent awakening of the East. He lamented the fact that he had wasted the seed of his ideas ‘in the salt and sterile soil’ of kingly sovereignty:

  For what I sowed in that soil never grew, and what I planted in that brackish earth perished away. During all this time none of my well-intentioned counsels sank in the ears of the rulers of the East whose selfishness and ignorance prevented them from accepting my words … Would that I had sown all the seed of my ideas in the receptive ground of the people’s thoughts!136

  Trapped by Sultan Abdulhamid in Istanbul, al-Afghani finally admitted that the kind of political mobilization he was looking for was not going to be led by despots, enlightened or not. More drastic, and popular, revolutions from below were needed; and they needed to shatter the bases as well as the superstructures of oppression. As he put it, ‘the stream of renovation flows quickly towards the East. Strive so far as you can to destroy the foundations of this despotism, not to pluck up and cast out its individual agents.’137

  The Arab Spring has finally brought popular mass movements to the Middle East. But what if the individual agents of despotism, periodically cast out, keep returning in new incarnations? And what if the foundations of despotism remain untouched? What if external intervention and internal weakness cancel out the gains of mass nationalist mobilizations, and pro-Western despots either linger long or periodically emerge to power? A measure of the magnitude of al-Afghani’s self-appointed task is that the problems he dealt with remain as dauntingly intransigent as ever, and their ramifications now extend not only to the Muslim countries he travelled through but also to the rest of the world.

  THREE: LIANG QICHAO’S CHINA AND THE FATE OF ASIA

  Europe thinks she has conquered all these young men who now wear her garments. But they hate her. They are waiting for what the common people call her ‘secrets’.

  A Chinese intellectual in André Malraux,

  The Temptation of the West (1926)

  THE ENVIABLE BUT INIMITABLE RISE OF JAPAN

  In 1889, while al-Afghani was stirring up anti-foreign agitation in Persia, an Ottoman frigate called the Erturul set sail for Japan on a goodwill mission. On board were some senior Ottoman military and civilian officials. It travelled for nine months, passing many ports in South and South-east Asia. Myths about the Ottoman Empire had long been in circulation in East Asia, and large numbers of Muslims turned out wherever the ship docked to witness the ‘man-of-war of the great Padishah of Stamboul’.1 Though slightly decrepit, the frigate seemed living proof of the potency of the last great Muslim ruler, the Ottoman sultan.

  It also attested to the growing fascination with Japan among peoples suffering from what the Japanese journalist Tokutomi Soh, writing three years previously, had described as an ‘unbearable situation’:

  The present-day world is one in which the civilized people tyrannically destroy savage peoples … The European countries stand at the very pinnacle of violence and base themselves on the doctrine of force. India, alas, has been destroyed. Burma will be next. The remaining countries will be independent in name only. What is the outlook for Persia! For China? For Korea?2

  The outlook for Japan at least was clearer. The country, after a brief period of tutelage to the West, was breaking free of its masters, whereas the Ottomans, the Egyptian and Persians, while trying to modernize themselves, had slipped into a profound political and economic dependence on Western powers. The Ottoman frigate’s mission was evidence of how Asians everywhere were beginning to be transfixed by the amazingly rapid and unique rise of Japan.

  The Ottoman officials were received by the Japanese political elite, including the prime minister and the emperor; they were taken to military parades and given tours of factories. Eager to match the West, and making good progress, the Japanese were prone to look down upon their poor Asian cousins. In 1885, Fukuzawa Yukichi had proposed that since Asian countries were hopelessly backward and weak, Japan should ‘escape Asia’ and cast its lot in with ‘the civilized nations of the West’.3 This was the dominant mood of the Japanese elite at that time.

  Still, there were some dissenting voices, too, about the real intentions of the ‘civilized nations of the West’ in Asia, and the Ottomans, a curious sight in Japan, managed to provoke some nascent fellow-feeling — the first pangs of what would later turn into full-blown pan-Asianism. Welcoming their Ottoman guests, Japan’s highest-circulation newspaper, Nichi Nichi Shinbun, expressed sympathy for a country that Europea
ns had subjected to

  blatant outrages … The unjust and overbearing system of extraterritoriality was first practiced on them. Their country has yet to be able to escape from those shackles. Europe then extended these practices to the other countries of the East. Our country, too, suffers from this disgrace. The Turks are Asians like us … And so, they’ve come to us and communicated their friendship.4

  When on its return journey the Erturul collided with a reef and sank, killing more than four hundred Turks on board, a wave of sympathy moved across Japan. Many Japanese donated generously to a fund set up for the survivors, and religious services for the dead were held across the country. Two Japanese warships took the remaining sixty-six Turks all the way to the Sea of Marmara. Sultan Abdulhamid himself received the Japanese naval officers in Istanbul and pinned medals on them.

  Japan’s reputation continued to rise in Istanbul throughout the 1890s and the next decade, especially after Japan achieved what the Ottomans had for decades tried unsuccessfully to do: a military pact with Great Britain in 1902, signalling its arrival as an equal in the Europe-ordained system of international relations. Abdulhamid, keen on stoking pan-Islamism, was disconcerted by the Japanese emperor’s rising status in Asia. Advised by al-Afghani, he politely declined a proposal from the Japanese emperor to send Muslim preachers to Japan. But he was also intrigued by how the Japanese had remained loyal to their emperor while modernizing. In 1897, shortly after al-Afghani’s death, the sultan’s mouthpiece newspaper, published from Yildiz, editorialized that

  The [Japanese] government, adorned with great intelligence and ideological firmness in progress, has implemented and promoted European [methods] of commerce and industry in its own country, and has turned the whole of Japan into a factory of progress, thanks to many [educational institutions]; it has attempted to secure and develop Japan’s capacity for advancement by using means to serve the needs of the society such as benevolent institutions, railways, and in short, innumerable modes of civilization.5

  The Young Turks who raged against the Ottoman Empire’s inability to achieve parity with Western powers, and blamed their oldfangled monarchy for it, drew a different lesson from Japan’s alliance with Great Britain and its subsequent victory over Russia in 1905. ‘We should take note of Japan,’ the exiled Ahmed Riza wrote in 1905 in Paris, ‘a nation not separating patriotic public spirit and the good of the homeland from its life is surely such that [though] sustaining wounds, setting out against any type of danger that threatens its existence, it certainly preserves its national independence. The Japanese successes … are a product of this patriotic zeal.’6

  For the Young Turks, soon to assume power and build a nation-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Japan provided clear inspiration. These envious outside observers of Japan’s progress did not see the extreme violence of the country’s makeover. Nor did they notice the trends towards conformity, militarism and racism that were later to make Japan an ominously successful rival to Europe’s imperialist nations – by 1942 Japan would occupy or dominate a broad swathe of the Asian mainland, from the Aleutian Islands in the north-east to the borders of India, after booting out almost all the previous European masters in between. For many Asians in the late nineteenth century, the proof of Japan’s success lay in the extent to which it could demand equality with the West; and, here, the evidence was simply overwhelming for people who had tried to do the same and had failed miserably.

  Its previous seclusion made Japan’s transformation between the years 1868 and 1895 particularly astonishing. The Ottomans had been nervously aware of Europe’s great intellectual ferment – the Enlightenment, the French Revolution – all through the eighteenth century. But the Japanese learnt of the French and American revolutions only in 1808, after closely questioning the few Dutch traders who had been allowed, following the expulsion of all foreigners from Japan, to retain an outpost at Deshima, a small island off Nagasaki.

  In the 1840s, the British began to impose the first of many settlements designed to make China as dependent as India on a ‘free trade’ regime defined by Western powers. But even the news of their great neighbours’ woes travelled late to Japan. In 1844 the Dutch monarch addressed a formal proposal to the Japanese shogun, praising the universal virtues of free trade and gently pointing to China’s humiliation as an example of countries that had tried to buck the ‘irresistible’ worldwide trend. He received a brusque reply from the Japanese asking him not to bother writing again.7

  Japan’s remarkably self-contained world was, however, nearing its end. The British, ensconced in India and coastal China, had long eyed Japan; British ships often sailed menacingly up the latter’s coast. But it was left to a new Western power, the United States, to force the issue.

  Having completed its conquest of California in 1844, the United States looked across the Pacific for new business opportunities. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo (then called Edo) Bay with four men-of-war, and handed over a letter for the Japanese emperor from the American president which began with the ominous words, ‘You know that the United States of America now extend from sea to sea.’8 Denied an audience with the emperor, Perry retreated with subtle threats to return with more firepower if the Japanese did not agree to open their ports to American trade. They refused. He did as he said; and the Japanese succumbed.

  During the long period of national isolation, many Japanese had studied with the Dutch traders and sailors based in Deshima; they turned out to be well informed about the strengths of Western barbarians – enough at any rate to know that resistance would be futile until Japan was internally strong. Much to the resentment of Japanese nobles and the samurai, the Americans were granted trading rights and consular representation. Soon the British, Russians and Dutch were demanding the same for themselves.

  The capitulation to foreign barbarians and the repeated violation of Japan’s long-preserved sovereignty incited great hostility, and eventually a full-scale rebellion, against the shogun. Meanwhile, the Americans pressed for more privileges, such as extraterritorial jurisdiction, and received them from an increasingly hapless old regime. Eventually, the shogunate collapsed under the strain of simultaneously appeasing foreigners and placating domestic xenophobia, and the Meiji Restoration began.

  The westward expansion of America, and the rivalries of European powers, had abruptly begun to shape Japan’s politics. Japan looked as abject before Western soldiers, diplomats and traders as the Egyptians, Turks, Indians and Chinese had been. But what happened next broke radically with the pattern of dependence set by other Asian countries.

  A generation of educated Japanese, some exposed to Western societies, came to occupy powerful positions in the Meiji Restoration. They recognized the futility of unfocused xenophobia, shrewdly analysed their own weaknesses vis-a-vis the West as scientific and technical backwardness, and urgently set about organizing Japan into a modern nation-state.

  To this end, the emperor was brought out of seclusion and exalted as a symbol of the new religion of patriotism with its own shrines and priests. Buddhism was denounced, and Shinto, an assortment of beliefs and rituals, turned into a state religion, yet another glue to use for nation-building. Students were sent abroad; Japanese delegations, many of which included Japan’s future leaders and thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, travelled to the West. Foreign experts were welcomed in every realm, from education to the military. Western dress and hairstyles were adopted and Christian missionaries tolerated. The series of painstaking efforts culminated in a constitution in 1889 that, though exalting the emperor to divine status, tried to follow Western models in other details.

  In apprenticing Japan to the West, the Meiji statesmen were lucky to face fewer obstacles than their modernizing Ottoman or Egyptian peers had to deal with (and which the Chinese were yet to experience). Their powers of organization were helped by the fact that Japan, a small country, had an ethnically homogenous population. Groups such as the samurai and wealthy merchants d
id not resist modernization in the way that traditional elites in the Muslim world did. Indeed, the power of the supplanted elite, the samurai, could be redeployed in the task of national consolidation.

  Japan’s economy had remained strong. So-called ‘Dutch’ learning – useful Western knowledge – was circulating in Japan well before Commodore Perry’s arrival. A strong local tradition of banker-merchants and an efficient tax-collection system meant that the Japanese economy was not crippled by foreign loans of the kind that banished Egypt, the first non-Western country to modernize, to the ranks of permanent losers in the international economy.

  Moreover, the Meiji state never lost sight of its main objective: to radically revise the terms of Japan’s relationship with the West. If this meant accepting the superiority of Western civilization, as Fukuzawa Yukichi and others advocated, it seemed a small price to pay for national regeneration and admission to the exclusive club of powerful Western nation-states. For this to happen, however, the unequal treaties imposed on Japan by force of arms had to be revised. Japanese diplomats kept pleading, especially with the British who, of all the Western powers present in Japan, most vehemently opposed the withdrawal of their special concessions. The Japanese even resorted to flattery, presenting themselves as Anglophiles and the ‘civilized’ equivalent of the British in the East. Finally, after one failed attempt in 1886, which incited a backlash from patriotic Japanese, Japan persuaded the British in 1894 to agree to terminate extraterritorial rights in five years’ time.