Patriot of Persia
Rebel Land
In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs
The Struggle for Iran
Mehemet Ali (1769–1849), by Louis Charles Auguste Couder, 1840 (oil on canvas). Château de Versailles, France/Bridgeman Images.
The Battle of the Pyramids 21 July 1798, by Louis Lejeune 1806 (oil on canvas). Château de Versailles, France/Bridgeman Images.
Personnages egyptiens, Duterre, from Description de l’Egypte, E.M., vol. II, pl. B. The New York Public Library. ‘Costumes et portraits. 1. Le poëte; 2. L’astronome.’ The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1809 - 1828. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-21d1-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
The Inauguration Procession of the Suez Canal at El-Guisr in 1865, from Voyage Pittoresque à travers l’Isthme de Suez by Marius Fontane, engraved by Jules Didier, by Edouard Riou 1869-70 (colour litho). Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, FranceArchives Charmet/Bridgeman Images.
Crown Prince Abbas Mirza, attributed to Mehr Ali, early 19th century. Golestan Palace, Tehran. Photographer: Abbas Kowsari.
Iranian military band, late 19th century, artist unknown (on tiles). Golestan Palace, Tehran. Photographer: Abbas Kowsari.
Amir Kabir, by Abul-Qassem Taki Nuri, c. 1851. Golestan Palace, Tehran. Photographer: Abbas Kowsari.
Execution of Mirza Reza Kermani, with shadow of camera and photographer, Antoin Sevrugin, 1896. Collection of Azita Bina and Elmar W Seibel.
Materialistic Science on Display at the Imperial Military Academy, Abdullah Frères, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Abdulhamid II Collection, LC-USZ62-77267 http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ahii/item/2002716937/
Constantinople (Istanbul) c. 1900: sailboats on the Bosphorus / Photo © PVDE / Bridgeman Images
View from the Galata Bridge, Constantinople, Turkey (coloured photo), French School, (20th century) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Elgar Collection / Bridgeman Images.
Persian lady in Indoor Costume © The British Library Board. Ella C. Sykes, Through Persia on a Side-saddle, London, MacQueen, 1901, 10077.e.37., p.17.
Dame turque voilée, 1880. Pierre de Gigord collection of photographs of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. Series I. Large format albums, 1852-1920. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. Getty Research Institute 96.R.14(A25). http://hdl.handle.net/10020/96r14d1058
Portrait of Seyyed Jamal al-Din Afghani from The Persian Revolution of 1905 –1909 by E. G. Browne, (Frank Cass, 1966).
Railway to Shah ‘Abol al-‘Azim Shrine, 12 km south of Tehran, Antoin Sevrugin, late 19th century. Collection of Azita Bina and Elmar W. Seibel.
‘Now they perform Brotherhood Vows’, Molla Nasreddin (Iranian journal), 2 May 1910.
Portrait of Muhammad Abduh. Alchetron http://alchetron.com/Muhammad-Abduh-1183849-W
Portrait of Hassan Taqizadeh from The Persian Revolution of 1905–1909 by E. G. Browne, (Frank Cass, 1966).
Gymnasium at Drilling Ground, Tabriz, Antoin Sevrugin, late 19th century. Collection of Azita Bina and Elmar W. Seibel.
Abdulhamid II cheered by crowd after restoring the constitution. The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Magazine, London, 8 August 1908.
Bastinado, unknown photographer, late 19th century. Collection of Azita Bina and Elmar W. Seibel.
Halide Edib before an aeroplane flight at the front © The British Library Board. The Turkish Ordeal, London, John Murray, 1928, 10607.ccc.17., p.16.
Jamal Al-e-Ahmad and his wife Simin Daneshvar, c. 1956, from the collection of Ali Dehbashi. © Abdullah Amin.
Egyptian soldiers fire on Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat while reviewing a military parade in honour of The October 1973 War, on 6 October 1981 in Cairo. The assassination is attributed to Muslim extremist group Muslim Brotherhood. MAKARAM GAD ALKAREEM / AFP / Getty Images.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Azita Bina and Elmar W. Seibel Collection.
For Diana Rodney
At Lowood School for girls, in the reign of King George III of England, an ill-used, orphaned teacher called Jane Eyre lies abed thinking about her future.
‘I have served here eight years; now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so much of my own will? Is not the thing feasible? Yes – yes – the end is not so difficult; if only I had brain active enough to ferret out the means of attaining it.’
I sat up in bed by way of arousing this sad brain: it was a chilly night; I covered my shoulders with a shawl, and then I proceeded to think again with all my might.
‘What do I want? A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new circumstances … How do people do to get a new place? They apply to friends, I suppose: I have no friends. There are many others who have no friends, who must look for themselves and be their own helpers; and what is their resource?’
I could not tell: nothing answered me; I then ordered my brain to find a response, and quickly … as I lay down it came quietly and naturally to my mind:– ‘Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the —shire Herald.’
‘How? I know nothing about advertising.’
Replies rose smooth and prompt now:–
‘You must inclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a cover directed to the Editor of the Herald; you must put it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed to J. E. at the post-office there: you can go and inquire in about a week after you send the letter, if any are come, and act accordingly.’
This sleepless hour is the corner that Jane Eyre turns in order to fall into the arms of Mr Rochester, for her decision to place an advertisement in the county newspaper will lead to her moving many miles from Lowood and taking up a new position, as governess of Mr Rochester’s ward at Thornfield Hall. The passage here determines the path that a much loved novel will follow, and yet it is possible to think of it in a bigger, socially more significant way: as an avenue into a new world.
Jane’s urges need no introduction: variety and movement are what she seeks, and the education she has received is her means of achieving it, for the instruction she has received at one of a burgeoning number of English girls’ schools has not only lent purpose to an excellent mind, but also raised her above any sense of inadequacy. Jane is independent of spirit and this will allow her to be independent of means. Jane Eyre is modern.
Her modernity extends to the rational way she sees the world and her place in it. Jane is a Christian but in her hour of indecision she does not finger a wooden cross or leverage the Gospels – far less seek signs in the stars. Faith guides and gives her strength in the moral and emotional crises of her life; however, in times of functional dilemma – when she is in search of the ‘clear practical form’ that will set her fluttering brain to rest – Jane interrogates not God but Jane.
And yet, for Jane to see her scheme to its conclusion, she needs the help of certain features of modern England. Without the provincial newspaper, the post office and finally, when it comes to making the journey to Thornfield Hall, a wheeled conveyance trundling along one of the turnpike roads, safe enough for a woman to take on her own, she will be able to do nothing.
Perhaps more important than any of these things, Jane will need society to agree that she is sovereign over her own destiny – an unmarried woman free to climb aboard a post-chaise and go wherever she pleases, at no risk to her reputation.
Now I want to take up this picture of Georgian England and put it into a quite different setting. Imagine that the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Brontë’s novel has been transposed to a non-European situation. By the standards of nineteenth-century globalisation this new environment is not very distant – to get there merely involves crossing the Mediterranean. There one meets the close sibling of the Judaeo-Christian world inhabited by Jane, a civilisation built on the third and most recent of the Hebraic monotheisms and influenced by Greek patterns of thought.
This is the civilisation of Islam. How would this civilisation have dealt with Jane Eyre and the vistas of personal fulfilment preventing her from closing her eyes at night? Would it approve or wrinkle its nose? Would Islam ‘get’ Jane Eyre?
Were I able to answer this question in the affirmative, it is likely that you would not be holding this book, or you would be holding a very different book. Islamic civilisation in the first decades of the nineteenth century would neither have appreciated nor understood Jane Eyre, because it hadn’t the wherewithal to do so.
First consider the vehicle by which Muslim audiences would have met her: the printed book. This would have been a non-starter at the time in which Jane Eyre is set, because almost four centuries after Gutenberg revolutionised intellectual and religious life in Europe with the invention of movable type, the printing press continued to be regarded by Islam as an unwelcome and alien innovation, and had not been admitted to general use. Then there was the matter of translating Brontë’s prose into the local languages. The number of Turkish, Arabic and Persian speakers who knew good English was minuscule and there was no market in the Middle East for translated works from abroad.
Even if these constraints had been somehow overcome, and the trusty copyists were induced to inscribe large quantities of a translated Jane Eyre, audiences would have remained tiny for another reason. The latest scholarship puts the literacy rate in Turkey, Egypt and Iran – the three most important intellectual and political points in the region – at roughly 3 per cent at the turn of the nineteenth century, compared to more than 68 per cent for men and 43 per cent for women in England. In Amsterdam, the world’s capital of literacy at the time, the figures were 85 per cent and 64 per cent respectively. There can be no reading public when no one can read.
Still, ploughing doggedly on, supposing we could wave aside these considerations and imagine that through public storytellers large numbers of Muslims were exposed to the life and times of Jane Eyre, what would their reaction have been? The notion of newspapers and a postal service would have caused bemusement in lands where neither existed, no less than the fantasy of wheeled traffic between towns. Then there was the moral Pandora’s box opened by Jane’s behaviour. It was scandalous that a heroine should gad about the country without a chaperone, fall in love with one man, attract the attentions of another – and after this wanton display be presented by the author as a model of virtue.
The very systems of society were completely different in Jane’s England: where was the harem, the protected, female-only sanctum within the family, and why did Mr Rochester not have slaves? And don’t even mention Mr Rochester’s dissipated female guests at Thornfield Hall, playing airs on the fortepiano and riding horses and showing off their bosom and long flowing hair.
Perhaps the kindest thing that could have been said about the plot of Jane Eyre is that it illustrated the superiority of Muslim doctrine. Under Muslim law Mr Rochester would have been able to take Jane as his second wife (being permitted a maximum of four) and he would have been able to save what remained of her virtue without all that nonsense about the madwoman in the attic.
In short, from the perspective of a Muslim at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the character of Jane Eyre was a rank impossibility accessible to almost no one and the story of her life so preposterous as to approach derangement.
*
With the invention of the steamship, possible destinations multiplied in number. Getting around became easier. Following that, with railways, travel became easier still. In the same way that travel was accelerated through this means, so was communication, by means of the telegraph. News that would have taken a year to arrive from a distant land now took an hour. The world was poured into a different mould.
In this paragraph from 1891, the Turkish woman of letters Fatma Aliye conveyed the immensity of the technological changes that had been agitating and inspiring the Ottoman Empire over the preceding decades. Her last sentence is deliciously unresolved: the meaning of life and the onus of interpreting it trickle from the certain past to a future that is soft and impressionable. It’s all so different from Aliye’s rigid and compartmentalised childhood in the 1860s, with the secluded and rarefied world inhabited by Aliye – daughter of a renowned Ottoman grandee – seemingly designed to maintain distinctions.
Aliye went into purdah aged fifteen, was married off four years later and learned French in secret in order not to outrage her mother, for whom the infidel tongue was a flag of apostasy. But no one – not even the frowning and despotic sultan, Abdulhamid II – could stop modernity, and the effect of the inventions that were seeping into the empire was to increase the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual. What Aliye wrote in seclusion the newly embraced institution of the press enabled her to diffuse among a rapidly expanding audience of literate Ottomans that was coming into existence thanks to the spread of education. Fatma Aliye’s was a distinctive voice in the young universe of newspapers in Turkish; she wrote on girls’ education and kicked against the stock male denigration of women. Her early literary output appeared under pseudonyms such as ‘a woman’, and when she eventually summoned the courage to publish novels under her own name, cynics of both sexes attributed them to her father or her brother.
The Brontë sisters had also published under pseudonyms – male-sounding ones in their case – because they had doubted whether anyone would want to read the work of unknown young women from Yorkshire. Strange to say, similar questions concerning the capacity of women would shortly be raised half a world away in Istanbul, where as early as 1869 a contributor to one of the new women’s magazines, the weekly Terakki-i-Muhadderat (‘Muslim Women’s Progress’), declared irately, ‘men were not made to serve women any more than women were made to be kept by men … are we not capable of gaining knowledge and dexterity? What is the difference between our legs, eyes and brains – and theirs? Are we not humans? Is it only our different sex that has condemned us to this condition? No one possessed of common sense accepts this.’ As the Ottoman Empire modernised over the nineteenth century the world view of a growing number of assertive Turkish women grew substantially closer to that of their Western counterparts – to the point where the story of a young woman like Jane Eyre, taking decisions for herself, falling in love, making her living, making her way, wasn’t so outlandish after all.
One of the things that make the life of Fatma Aliye so poignant is the productive relationship she had with the changing world around her. She was a true modern, formed by modernisation and forming it back again; and she advanced without fear into the new and dangerous fields of women’s rights and public opinion.
Among her best-known works is a novel comprising letters by upper-class women speaking of their lives and their loves, a storyline that would have been nonsensical without an Ottoman postal service to draw on – this had been established in 1840. Aliye wrote about women who discussed philosophy with strange men aboard the steamships that plied the Bosporus dividing historic Istanbul from Asia; this service that had been introduced to great acclaim in 1854.
Fatma Aliye assumed the same philanthropic functions as many prominent women in the West, setting up a charity to help the families of soldiers who had fallen in the 1897 war between Turkey and Greece. Her works were translated into French and Arabic, and she was honoured with inclusion in the Women’s Library of the World’s Fair, in Chicago, in 1893. She spent her declining years pursuing her errant younger daughter Zubeyda, who had to her mother’s chagrin converted to Catholicism and taken holy orders at Notre-Dame de Paris. In this lugubrious quest Aliye travelled around Europe – a Muslim woman alone (or with another of her daughters) in an infidel land. For a woman of her background to exercise this degree of autonomy would have been unthinkable in her youth. To travel to France and there hold intercourse with the natives would have been considered defiling of her morals, and she would have been shunned on her return. No longer.
What are we to make of the statement by Zubeyda that her mother had been ‘haunted’ by the question of the ‘equality of the sexes in society and the struggle to achieve it’? In the Turkey of Fatma Aliye’s childhood there had been no question of ‘equality of the sexes’. There had been no ‘struggle’. Now there were both.
We do not have to rely on a novel like Jane Eyre to have an idea of the strides that were made by women in the Western world in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Many history books and biographies have been written about women educating themselves and entering the workplace while a constellation of laws and attitudes changed around them. On the other hand, the story of their later Muslim counterparts – the story of Fatma Aliye, so to speak – is much less known in the West, and this cannot simply be ascribed to the natural inclination of people to interest themselves in stories close to home. Nor does this blind spot in the Western historical understanding relate solely to Muslim women; the West has traditionally refused to see in any aspect of Muslim culture and life the possibility – indeed, the inevitability – of regeneration and modernity. This black spot has existed for hundreds of years, but recently it has got bigger and darker. It dissuades us from trying to understand the past, encouraging us, instead, to go off on tangents, enter blind alleys and credit the claims of demagogues and simplifiers. It is an impediment to a balanced and coherent vision of world history.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God – just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex – for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Closer to home it suffices to open our eyes to see millions of people of Muslim faith or origin in the Western world who lead lives that have successfully incorporated the modern values of tolerance, empiricism and the internalisation or dilution of faith. They are not being paid much attention – and why should they be? They do not behead, rampage or try to convert their non-Muslim neighbours. But they are all around us, inhabiting the modern world and regarding themselves as Muslim.
How they arrived at this accommodation is the story I am going to tell, through the lives and adventures of the Muslim pioneers we never thought existed. My intention is to demonstrate that non-Muslims and even some Muslims who urge an Enlightenment on Islam are opening the door on a horse that bolted long ago. Through the characters in this book we will see that for the past two centuries Islam has been going through a pained yet exhilarating transformation – a Reformation, an Enlightenment and an Industrial Revolution all at once. The experience of these places has been one of relentless yet vitalising alteration – of reforms, reactions, innovations, discoveries and betrayals.
But how did we in the West miss all the changes taking place in the Middle East at a time when the region was becoming a more popular destination for travellers, from Herman Melville, who visited Jerusalem in 1857 – finding ‘arid rocks’ fixing on him ‘a cold grey eye’ – to Queen Victoria’s twenty-year-old son Bertie (the future Edward VII), who toured the Holy Land in 1862 and came alive only when shooting quail on Mount Carmel? The answer is that few Westerners came to the East with very open minds, whoever they were. It is amazing how seldom one comes across a convincing nineteenth-century acknowledgement of the tense, volatile and ultimately highly breakable societies that were forming across the Middle East, or the possibility that their inhabitants constituted a dynamic, even revolutionary force. For those whose idea of progress was so narrow as to consist only of what they themselves had experienced, and who were disposed to see repose and decay in unfamiliar societies, repose and decay was indeed what they saw. Whether viewing the East through the speeding train window of their own countries’ progress, or in the hope, as in the case of the Victorian commercial photographer Francis Bedford (who accompanied Bertie in 1862), of monetising the timeless Mount of Olives, it was the default position of Western visitors to deplore, deride or capture – at any rate, to notice – the torpor of the East.
The influence of this prejudice on Western views of history has been remarkable. The tendency to reduce Eastern populations to the status of infants has entrenched the idea that they were passive observers as events unfolded before their uncomprehending eyes. These lesser places were condemned for being soporific, passive and tenacious only in defence of the status quo. Languor and sensuality served as a point of departure for nineteenth-century writers from whom we have inherited the view of the Muslim world as an atoll untouched by the streams of history.
‘The old Orient,’ Flaubert wrote to a friend from Cairo in 1850 (seven years before publishing Madame Bovary, for which he would be arraigned on charges of immorality), in between vivid anatomical descriptions of Egyptian prostitutes, ‘is always young because nothing changes. Here the Bible is a picture of life today.’ His speculations about Egypt’s future revolved not around what the country would do but what others would do to Egypt: ‘England will take Egypt, Russia will take Constantinople,’ he predicted. In the meantime Flaubert took anyone going.
The orientalist and future colonial administrator Gertrude Bell should have known better – at least she knew the languages of the places she was visiting – but in the 1890s she described Persia as having ‘slipped out of the vivid world … the simplicity of her landscape is the fine simplicity of death’. Recalling the experience of standing outside the gates of Tehran, she wrote, ‘you realize what a gulf lies between you. The East looks to itself; it knows nothing of the greater world, of which you are a citizen, asks nothing of you and of your civilization.’ Travel writers are different from journalists or historians. It is not so much the facts that interest them as their own pollination of them, and this makes them less than reliable contributors to the record. This is particularly true of the young Italian author and journalist Edmondo De Amicis, who visited Istanbul in the autumn of 1874. De Amicis was already known for the power of his descriptions, and his working method was to take notes prolifically before returning home to work up his written sketches, in the process ‘improving’ perspectives and compositional details for the final canvas, as it were. His travelogue Constantinople features scintillating descriptions of crowds on the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, the seraglio (‘full of secrets and enticements … this monstrous palace’) and the city’s European quarter, where Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – its scenes of adultery presumably missed by the Turkish censor – is for sale.
In the case of De Amicis, the problems inherent in travel writing were compounded by the fact that he stayed in Istanbul barely a week and was in denial of the superficial nature of his engagement. Yet he was so sure of himself that he wrote Constantinople in the present tense, the tense of timelessness, as if all he witnessed had endured beyond his visit – and is carrying on right now, as we read.
De Amicis displayed his romantic sensibility to the fullest extent in his description of the city’s dogs. This is a finely wrought Gothic vignette, all grotesque couplings, snarling battle royals and meatballs steeped in poison (distributed by a local doctor so he could get some sleep at night). For all its literary qualities, however, it leaves us in the dark as to the dogs’ importance to the story of Istanbul’s modernisation.
Not so a discussion of the same question by a Turk, Ibrahim Sinasi, a few years earlier. Born in Istanbul in 1826, Sinasi had received a wide-ranging education and gone on to father modern Turkish journalism, and his approach to the city’s flee-ridden curs, rummaging through rubbish, barking, snarling and holding people up with their frenzied turf wars or contests over a scrap of bone, was defiantly unpicturesque. It was utilitarian. Was it right, he asked in his newspaper column, that an ‘upright person’ be exposed to ‘this kind of irrational beast’ while going about his business in the city? He recommended that the dogs be removed, if necessary to rural areas where they could be used as guard dogs, before concluding with an aphorism of which Victorian health campaigners would have approved, and which translates loosely as ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’. The difference between De Amicis’ and Sinasi’s treatment of the same issue – the resident who uses Istanbul versus the visitor peering through his opera glasses – is an eloquent warning against taking orientalist writing on trust.
In fact, the East of which these European visitors wrote was, in important ways, very different from the way they depicted it. Their received wisdom and assumptions, which they passed on to their readers in the West, were at best incomplete. The lands of which these and other writers wrote in terms of petrified strata were in fact shaking violently.
That earthquake had been caused by the very same West from which the travel writers came – Frenchmen, Englishmen, Iberians, Italians, who over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sensed that the Ottoman Empire was weakening and fanned out to take advantage. Onto North Africa, the Levant, Turkey and Greece stepped these merchants, ambassadors, soldiers of fortune, poets, missionaries and, ultimately, occupiers. For symbolic reasons their first impact is often dated to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, when one of the world’s most modern societies collided with one of the most backward.
The mass arrival of Westerners in the Muslim world for the first time since the Crusades forced the region’s elites – rulers and clerics, administrators and military commanders – to concede that only by adopting Western practices and technologies could they avoid political and economic oblivion. The extraordinarily rapid changes that followed have been neatly summarised by the historian Juan Cole.
In the space of decades intellectuals forsook Ptolemaic for Copernican astronomy … businessmen formed joint-stock companies (not originally allowed in Islamic law), generals had their armies retrained in new drills and established munitions factories, regional patriotism intensified and prepared the way for nationalism, the population began growing exponentially under the impact of cash cropping and the new medicine, steamboats suddenly plied the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and agrarian capitalism and the advent of factories led to new kinds of class conflict.1
Change accelerated throughout the nineteenth century. It recognised no boundaries, no red lines. In the middle of the century the Ottoman Sultan declared equality between his Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, the slave trade was outlawed and the segregation of the sexes, symbolised by the harem, went into decline. The sheikhs and mullahs saw their old prerogatives in the law and public morality taken over by an expanding government bureaucracy. Clerical opposition to medical dissection was overcome and theatres of anatomy opened. Culture, too, was transformed, with a surge in non-religious education, and the reform of the Arabic, Turkish and Persian languages – the better to present modern poetry, novels and newspaper articles before the potent new audience of ‘public opinion’.
One of the features of innovation in the nineteenth century was its telescoped quality. This compression of events was illustrated by the fact that the movable-type printing press, dating back to the fifteenth century, was introduced almost at the same time as the telegraph, invented in 1844.
For all his unwillingness to recognise change when he saw it, Edmondo De Amicis did in the pages of Constantinople proffer one description of violent transformation. The city was, he wrote in this exceptional passage, ‘in the process of transformation, composed of ancient cities that are in decay, new cities which emerged yesterday, and other cities now being born; everything is in confusion; on every side can be seen the vestiges of gigantic works, mountains bored through, hills cut down, entire districts levelled to the ground’.
The story of Muslim modernisation has sometimes been depicted as the efforts of a few potentates to enforce alien precepts on resistant populations. Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s viceroy for most of the first half of the nineteenth century, and his near contemporary (and nominal sovereign), Turkey’s Sultan Mahmud II, were indeed both modernisers and martinets, and there were many instances of popular opposition to what were depicted as godless innovations.
That reforms as fundamental as these gave rise to controversy and opposition is no cause for astonishment. Modernity is even at the best of times a tension, dislocation and agitation, and (in a phrase by Nietzsche that expresses a kaleidoscopic weirdness of perspective) ‘a fateful simultaneity of spring and autumn’. But the idea that modernisation had no natural constituency in the Middle East is inconsistent with the very nature of progress, which is generally articulated by a minority, meets with opposition or mirth, and finally overcomes obstacles before taking root. And although the principles of modernity and progress were introduced to the Middle East from the West, the fact that they had originated elsewhere was not in itself an obstacle to their adoption in this new environment. Contradicting assumptions of wilful Muslim backwardness, Islam did not show any more opposition to modernisation than Judaeo-Christian culture had done to its earlier iteration in the West.
As the authentic thrill felt by many of the characters in this book shows, ideas transfer best when they are perceived to be universal and not the business end of a hostile ideology. The sovereignty of the individual, the usefulness of hygiene and the fallibility of a crowned head (to name but three) carry no brand of exclusivity but can be understood by all. In fact, the Muslim world adapted itself to these values and many others much more rapidly than the West had devised them, albeit with changes of emphasis.
Indeed, when they fought back against the new ideas and practices, Muslim conservatives and reactionaries found that they could not stop change, only hope to tame and subdue it. From this came the seductive idea that modernity could be reduced to a limited series of propositions (and gadgets) that would invigorate the body of Islam without changing it. Islam would borrow some of the advances that the Westerners had devised in their off-hours from being disagreeable and impious. These ideas would be grafted onto the surface of things to make them work better, while underneath good old Islam went on, superior to anything the West had to offer. But this cherry-picking approach did not really work. When people bend themselves to thinking of new ways of doing things it becomes hard for them to give up this progressive way of looking at the world. Every practical effort in this direction seems to be handsomely repaid in the form of new conveniences, expanded horizons and a sense of exaltation and self-worth. Progress is its own propaganda.
For an idea of just how much Islamic society changed over the nineteenth century it suffices to look at the evolution that was experienced by Egypt’s clerical establishment. In 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, the sheikhs responded to the values and knowledge of the French with revulsion, and the main Egyptian chronicler of the invasion, Abdulrahman al-Jabarti, entreated God to ‘strike their tongues with dumbness … confound their intelligence, and cause their breath to cease’.
A century later on, Jabarti’s benighted country had changed to such an extent that its senior judicial authority, the cleric Muhammad Abduh, was an admirer of Darwin, corresponded with Tolstoy (who had been excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church) and used his knowledge of European languages to absorb as much as he could of infidel learning.
By the First World War, under the influence of Abduh and others like him, a liberal modernising tendency had emerged strongly in the three intellectual and political centres of the Middle East, Egypt, Turkey and Iran, attracting ideas that in turn spun off into the adjacent regions. Political consciousness had taken flight and political and national aspirations were increasingly aimed at securing that universal symbol of political liberalism, the democratically elected legislature, without which no regime could enjoy legitimacy.
Yet the onset of war and its devastating consequences emboldened opponents of liberalism and progressive thought who began to strike back vigorously. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles, under which the victorious allies divided the spoils and imposed punitive reparations on Germany, also formalised the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Muslim lands were scattered and many entered the imperialist inventory of Western powers, while following the Second World War, despite a strong current of anti-colonialism, they became a Cold War battleground where the two blocs competed for influence. In the light of this mass subjugation and manipulation, it is not surprising that many Muslims sought political means to express their hatred of the West.
The First World War was a watershed in the history of the Islamic Enlightenment. Before the conflict the region had been moving towards modernity and the adoption of liberal, secular values. Now this movement was arrested and the revulsion of Muslims for colonial exploitation found expression in ideologies of resistance.
The rise of such ideologies and their mutation into violence begs an important question which bears directly on the Islamic Enlightenment. If Islam engaged so successfully with modernity until the First World War, why since then has reactionary revivalism been able to impose itself on ever larger swathes of the Muslim world?
Political Islam – Islamism, properly known – is an ideology that started as an anti-imperialist, and later also an anti-Communist, response to the carve-up of the Middle East, providing an outlet for a common fear among Muslims that the region would fall irrevocably to one or other of these all-absorbing ideologies. Radical Islam grew out of this, an unappetising millennialism that the vast majority of Muslims recognise but dimly. The violence and ignorance that we often see today being glorified by a minority of Muslims should in fact be seen as blowback from the Islamic Enlightenment – a facet, however detestable, of modernity itself.
When dealing with terms that have arisen and acquired currency in the West, such as ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’, one should exercise caution. The word ‘Enlightenment’ is perhaps the trickiest benchmark of all because it comes with its own baggage of self-congratulation. The Enlightenment of Sir Isaac Newton; the Lumières of France; the Aufklärung of Leibniz; in whatever European language you say it, this word evokes daring and challenge to the status quo on every front, from the Cartesian affirmation of individuality to the majestic opening chords of Mozart’s Magic Flute, Enlightenment opera par excellence. These brilliant events happened amid more general ferment and change: the rise of education (from which Jane Eyre would benefit), mass printing and public opinion, refinements to hygiene and domestic life (it was during the eighteenth century that the modern nuclear family began to form), worlds discovered (in the heavens; under the microscope), museums going up, feudalism coming down, and preparations being made for the modern apotheosis of the French Revolution.
The Muslims were not the authors of the achievements that we now associate with the Enlightenment. No Istanbul blacksmith discovered movable type. No Muslim Voltaire sniped at the clerics by the Nile. But there is a great difference between accepting that Muslim civilisation did not initiate the Enlightenment and saying that it did not accept its findings or eat of its fruit. This is a big claim to make. It means that Muslims are either congenitally barred or – even worse – have deliberately cut themselves off from experiences that many consider to be universal. It means that the lands of Islam have remained aloof from science, democracy and the principle of equality. It is a claim that is often heard in today’s divided, rebarbative, edgy world, and it is nonsense.
This book argues that an Islamic Enlightenment did indeed take place, under the influence of the West, but finding its own form. The juxtaposition of the two words may look strange, but just as it’s possible to speak about the Roman and British empires while understanding that they were different in terms of organisation, ethos and economy, so we can speak about a modern ‘Islamic’ Enlightenment and not expect it to follow the same path as its European or American equivalent. This term evokes the defeat of dogma by proven knowledge, the demotion of the clergy from their position as arbiters of society and the relegation of religion to the private sphere. It denotes the ascendancy of democratic principles and the emergence of the individual to challenge the collective to which he or she belongs. These ideas are transferable across all systems of belief, and they have also entered the Islamic one. They are at work right now – even if they have suffered rebuffs, as we shall see.
The Western awakening has been documented with great thoroughness, but this is the first book written in English, for the general reader, that documents Islam’s transformation. I have drawn on the writings of scholars, journalists and memoirists. Writing in many cases with the poignancy that comes from describing their own experience, they have shown how from the eighteenth century the world of Islam was impelled towards change – not only by Western influences, but also by rumbling, internal needs. The world of Islam was convulsed into a new age.
‘World of Islam’ – and yet The Islamic Enlightenment concentrates on what happened in three places in the Middle East: Egypt, Turkey and Iran. Modernisation did also of course occur elsewhere. The first constitutional monarchy in the Muslim world was established in Tunis in 1861. In India, the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, founded in 1875, became one of the first higher institutions of secular learning in the Muslim world. Yet the phenomena and characters we associate with the great shifts in thought and culture existed in their most influential form in the catalysing territories of Egypt, Turkey and Iran. Just as the heart of Islam looks to Mecca, for the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century the brain of Islam looked to Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran. It was in these three dynamic and turbulent loci that modernisation, social change and revolution took place – at first in lunges that happened concurrently but more or less independently, and then as a grand interlocked transformation that altered the Muslim world.
This gradual unification of different endeavours is reflected in the structure of this book, which begins with geographically delineated parts – Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran – before dovetailing in Chapter 4, ‘Vortex’, which deals with the furious social changes that took place over the nineteenth century, and Chapter 5, ‘Nation’, which addresses the rise of the modern state. The final chapter, ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, describes the challenge to these trends that was witnessed after World War I.
A new era opened in Islamic history in the 1980s when this book closes. Iran’s revolution of 1979 twinned Islamic militancy with regime change and altered the terms of Islam’s political engagement. When in 1981 Egypt’s President Sadat was assassinated by his own soldiers, it was a triumph for takfiri Islamism, which declares impious or unjust Muslims to be deserving of death and is the basic precept behind many of today’s militant groups. Turkey also embarked on a new path in 1980 when the military took over the country. The dictatorship of the military led indirectly – and inadvertently – to an electable Islamism that brought the AK Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to power in 2002.
These developments took place in the context of a strengthening internationalist jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which in turn permitted Saudi Arabia, the jihad’s sponsor, to muscle onto the world stage and challenge Iran, Turkey and Egypt as the motors of development in the Islamic world. Indeed, with the internationalisation of global Islamic causes, from the Afghan, Algerian and Bosnian wars to the emergence of transnational Islamic players such as al-Qaeda, established geographical centres of ideology and politics ceded ground to a global, virtual market of religious barter and exchange. No longer would Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran exercise leadership to the Islamic world, in thought, politics, and society. The very idea of a geographical physical centre exercising leadership over Islamic thought became outmoded and quaint. The relatively peaceful coexistence of Sunnis and Shias collapsed after the Western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, with Saudi Arabia and Iran squaring up against each other to divide a devastated landscape. In 2011 the Arab Spring briefly promised a revival of Enlightenment values before succumbing to further violence and totalitarianism, exacerbated by mass migration and environmental disaster.
This later chapter of Muslim history – since 1980 – has been much pored over and written about. The origins of its present-day predicament lie further back.
The modernisation of the Islamic world was sparked by the collision of Western and Islamic civilisations that accompanied Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. However, in order to understand how it came into being it is going to be necessary to return briefly to the more distant Islamic past, which provided fuel and inspiration for many of the arguments that came later on.
Roughly understood, the earlier history of Islam’s heartlands can be divided into a period of glory, prosperity and achievement lasting over half a millennium following Islam’s expansion out of its Arabian birthplace after Muhammad’s death in 632, and a later period of insularity and strengthening conservatism that made the region acutely vulnerable to the West. The religion’s medieval pomp proved its ability to generate ideas and lead the wider cause of human development; its later decline suggested the opposite. What should happen for Islam to rediscover its vital spirit? Would it need to open to the world or protect itself from it? These were the questions that nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers asked again and again as they tried to find the right formula, and for guidance they reached back into their own past.
Central to the Muslims’ ambivalent feelings towards Western innovation was the idea that they, not the Westerners, enjoyed God’s favour. God had created Islam last of the Abrahamic faiths, not to complement Christianity, but to extinguish it, and it was naturally assumed that once Islam had been introduced there would be no further necessity for Christianity or Judaism.
For hundreds of years after Islam’s foundation there seemed to be good reason for the umma, or community of believers, to consider themselves history’s victors. Divine partiality fertilising human genius was the only way to explain Islam’s miraculous expansion after 632, when it burst out of the Arabian peninsula, seized huge territories from Byzantium and ended Iran’s 400-year-old Sassanian Empire. In the name of Islam arose new empires, first in Damascus under the Ummayad dynasty, then, from the middle of the eighth century, in Baghdad under the Abbasids. Expansion continued deep into Africa, Iberia and China. Islam went from being an embattled desert cult to the dominant force over the known world.
In 732 its troops came close to making Europe Muslim. Had the Battle of Poitiers been won by the Caliph, and not the Franks, as the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon later wrote, ‘the interpretation of the Qoran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad’. The German historian Hans Delbrück exulted that ‘there was no more important battle in the history of the world’.
After Poitiers the Muslim and Christian polities were more or less established in their respective parts of Eurasia, and for much of the next millennium they pushed and yanked in the most prolonged clash of civilisations since the ancient Greeks and Romans grappled with the Persians. But there was no doubt that the political, military and moral balance was tipped in the Muslims’ favour. Nowhere better illustrated Islam’s refulgence than Abbasid Baghdad, which for some two hundred years had a claim to be the capital of the civilised world. Conceived in the mid-eighth century by the caliph Mansur, drawing in not only Arabs but also Persians and Aramaic-speaking Jews and Christians, the polis on the Tigris was the centre of an administration that united East and West for the first time since Alexander the Great. The Abbasid dominion was belted by writ, commerce and intellectual trade routes thousands of miles long. At the same time, willing to be marked by others, Islam under the Abbasids took on the taste and knowledge of others.
In the ninth century envoys sent out by the Abbasids traversed the known world and brought back Indian mathematical treatises, theories of Iranian statecraft and the models for that affable literary mongrel, the Thousand and One Nights