After Tamerlane (31 page)

There were of course social and cultural stresses. Military failures against Burma and Vietnam; symptoms of growing bureaucratic corruption; popular millenarian uprisings like the White Lotus movement: all hinted at the onset of dynastic decline, the gradual decay of the ‘mandate of heaven' on which dynastic legitimacy was thought to depend.
⁶⁹
But the Confucian tradition remained immensely strong. Its central assumption was that social welfare was maximized under the rule of scholar-bureaucrats steeped in the paternalist and hierarchical teachings of K'ung-fu-tzu. The Confucian synthesis, with its Taoist elements (which taught the need for material simplicity and harmony with the natural world), faced no significant intellectual challenge. Religion in China played a role quite different from that of its counterpart in Europe. While ‘pure' Taoism had some intellectual influence, and its mystical beliefs attracted a popular following, it had no public
status and was regarded with suspicion by the Confucian bureaucracy. Salvationist beliefs were officially frowned upon.
⁷⁰
Buddhism was followed mainly in Tibet and Mongolia. The emperors were careful to show it respect, as a concession to the Buddhist elites co-opted into their system of overrule. In China proper it was marginalized. Buddhist monks, like Taoist priests, were seen as disruptive and troublesome.
⁷¹

The scholar-bureaucracy, and the educated gentry class from which it was drawn, thus faced no competition from an organized priesthood. No challenge was made from within the social elite by the devotees of religious enthusiasm. Nor was the bureaucrats' classical learning threatened by new forms of ‘scientific' knowledge. For reasons that historians have debated at length, the tradition of scientific experimentation had faded away, perhaps as early as 1400. Part of the reason may lie in the striking absence in Confucian thought of the ‘celestial lawgiver' – a god who had prescribed the laws of nature.
⁷²
In Europe, belief in such a providential figure, and the quest for ‘his' purposes and grand design, had been a (perhaps
the
) central motive for scientific inquiry. But the fundamental assumption that the universe was governed by a coherent system of physical laws that could be verified empirically was lacking in China. Even the scholarly
kaozheng
movement in the eighteenth century, which stressed the importance of collecting empirical data across a range of scientific and technical fields, rejected ‘the notion of a lawful, uniform and mathematically predictable universe'.
⁷³
It should be seen instead as part of the long tradition of critique and commentary upon ‘classical' knowledge, not an attack upon its assumptions.

All this is not to say that scholarly debate was absent in China. The literati elite existed to write. The administrative system depended upon a stream of reports and inquiries, compiled, transmitted and then filed away. Scholar-gentlemen wrote papers and essays on matters of public interest to attract powerful patrons and advance their careers. The Confucian literati were especially numerous in the rich and urbanized Yangtze delta (Kiangnan) region, long seen as a hotbed of anti-Manchu feeling. From here criticisms circulated of the emperor's costly campaign to conquer Turkestan in the 1750s. But debate was constrained by the nature of China's political system. Unlike in Europe, there were no ‘free spaces' on the political chess
board where a dissident intellectual could hope to find refuge. Public opposition to the emperor's authority was dangerous. A writer suspected of fomenting unrest could expect no mercy.
⁷⁴
This was, after all, a Manchu
raj
, where key positions of civil and military power were carefully reserved to the Manchu minority. Manchus lived separately in special quarters of the towns; they were discouraged from intermarriage with the Han majority; and vigorous efforts were made to preserve their language and literature. The great imperial triumphs of the mid eighteenth century served, if anything, to reinforce the ‘Manchu-ness' of the dynastic regime. His vast Inner Asian domain made the emperor more than a Confucian ruler: his claim was now to be a universal monarch.
⁷⁵
The effect may have been to reinforce the conservatism of Confucian culture. Whatever their grumbles, for the scholar-gentry standard-bearers of the classical tradition the world seemed safer than in any previous era. The ‘high-level-equilibrium trap' (things are too good to make change worthwhile), which explains so plausibly the technical conservatism of economic life, had its cultural counterpart. Outside influences were not excluded. But, as in the case of the court's Jesuit map-makers, they were neatly tailored to a monocentric world-view. The official version of the Jesuit maps removed the lines of latitude and longitude, to preserve the image of a China-centred world.
⁷⁶
Official knowledge of European geography after 1800 remained grotesquely inaccurate.
⁷⁷
It was a striking paradox that, on the eve of Europe's arrival in force on the shores of East Asia, Chinese intellectuals saw less reason than ever to concern themselves with imprinting their culture on the outside world, or with predicting its impact on their own moral universe. When Lord Macartney visited China in 1793, hoping to persuade the Ch'ien-lung emperor to allow diplomatic relations with Britain, the Chinese rejected his proposal outright. The gifts and gadgets he had brought, hoping to impress the court with British ingenuity, were dismissed as valueless toys and baubles. ‘I set no value on objects strange and ingenious,' ran the emperor's message to King George III, ‘and have no use for your country's manufactures.'
⁷⁸

In the Islamic lands, there was much less reason for cultural self-confidence after 1750. Politically, Islam seemed under siege. Both the
Ottoman and Iranian empires suffered military defeats and territorial losses, mainly at the hands of Russia. Egypt had been occupied by the French in 1798, until they were chased out by the British. The Mughal Empire had become a shell after 1760. Muslim Bengal became a British province. Muslim-ruled Mysore was crushed by the British in 1799. In Central Asia, Chinese rule was riveted on the Muslims of Sinkiang. In South East Asia, the British invasion of Java in 1811 paved the way for the later reassertion of Dutch colonial power (when the colony was handed back) over the Muslim states of the Javanese interior. The Islamic world seemed to be bearing the brunt of imperialism from both ends of Eurasia.

The greatest Islamic state was also the most exposed to European empire-building, commercial expansion and cultural influence. Ottoman officials and
ulama
– the scholar class that included imams or prayer-leaders as well as the learned interpreters of Islamic law and theology – were alarmed at the signs of imperial collapse revealed by defeat in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74.
⁷⁹
European experts, like the military engineer Baron de Tott (the author of entertaining
Memoirs
), were already being employed to strengthen the Ottoman defences and instruct the army in European methods. Ottoman writers began to pay more attention to European politics and the military resources of the European powers. Some European books on geography and military subjects were translated. There was a trickle of Muslim travellers, some of whom wrote up their itineraries for the Ottoman government. How much impact this made is uncertain. Few Muslim scholars were familiar with European languages – perhaps none before the eighteenth century.
⁸⁰
There was little up-to-date knowledge of European affairs.
⁸¹
In fact the cultural life of Ottoman Muslims in the late eighteenth century seemed largely unaffected by the contemporary ferment in the West. The intellectual inheritance of classical Islam remained extremely powerful, and was deeply entrenched in the central concerns of the learned class, theology and law. This was especially true for literary culture, and was also reflected in the continuity of indigenous motifs in architecture and design.
⁸²

This might be disparaged as a sign of ‘decadence': the failure of a once-dynamic tradition to respond to the intellectual challenge posed by Europe's aggression. This would be a shallow judgement. Europe's
geopolitical assault was sudden and violent. But the deeper nature of the European ‘threat' was only gradually unfolded, and its ‘meaning' could hardly be grasped by contemporary European ‘insiders', let alone Muslim observers staring in from outside. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have often complained that the Ottoman Empire, like other Muslim societies, was very slow to adopt the cultural pattern of its European rivals: the outlook and ethos of the nation state; the ethics of liberalism; and the ‘technicalistic' mentality of an industrializing economy. In reality, embracing such dogmas – still deeply controversial among Europeans themselves – would have struck Muslim thinkers not just as a leap in the dark, but as the surest route to self-destruction. Collapse from within would have hastened the work of attack from without. It seemed much wiser to continue the long-standing practice of borrowing piecemeal from European expertise, adapting foreign techniques to Ottoman or Iranian needs – as Safavid and Mughal rulers had done in their day.

It is easy to see why this should have been so. The cultural life of Islam (in the Ottoman Empire and beyond) was strikingly cosmopolitan. An educated man might seek his fortune anywhere between the Balkans and Bengal. The historian ‘Abd al-Latif (1758–1806), born in Shustar at the head of the Persian Gulf, acquired his learning from scholars in Iran. But the hope of advancement took him to India, where his brother was already a physician in Awadh. He became the
vakil
(agent) of the ruler of Hyderabad to the Company government in Calcutta. His view of Indian history was Islamic not ‘Indian'.
⁸³
For the Islamic intelligentsia, the idea of territorial patriotism to an Ottoman, Iranian or Mughal ‘fatherland' was deeply alien. The nation state as the unique focus of loyalty was simply meaningless. In the Ottoman Empire, Muslims (like Christians and Jews) drew their identity from their script and religion, not from their language or a concept of race.
⁸⁴
Muslims enjoyed first place in a composite empire, as its soldiers, officials, lawyers and landowners. A Muslim nation state, a territory inhabited only or mainly by Ottoman Muslims, would have meant the end of the empire – indeed, it became possible only with the end of the empire in 1918. Nor were the guardians of culture sympathetic to the idea of a stronger state where that meant increasing the ruler's power. In an Islamic polity, there was always a tension
between the
ulama
's role as the exponents of the law and the ruler's duty to enforce and uphold it. ‘Reforms' that shifted the weight of authority in the ruler's direction were bound to be suspect. From this point of view, the
nizam- ijadid
– the ‘new army' created on the European model by Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) – looked more like a weapon against his domestic opponents than against the external aggressor. A
fetwa
issued by the
sheikh ul-Islam
(doyen of the
ulama
) denouncing the sultan's new force was the signal for his deposition in 1807. In Iran, where the
ulama
looked back to their legal pre-eminence in the Safavid regime (1501–1722) and regarded the Qajar shahs after
c
. 1790 as illegitimate upstarts, this mood was still stronger.
⁸⁵
Abbas Mirza, the crown prince, who also established a
nizam- i jadid
, was forced to learn military drill in secret. He was unfit to succeed, said his
ulama
antagonists, ‘for he has become a Farengi [i.e. Frank or Christian] and wears Farengi boots'.
⁸⁶

Even if the nature of Europe's ‘divergence' had been better understood than it was, and ‘reformist' elites had exerted more influence, there were multiple barriers to radical change. There was no secular ‘public opinion' whose support could be mobilized. Learning and culture were widely decentralized in the numerous madrasas where the scholars held court. Outside the scholarly class, literacy levels were low. A printing press (in Arabic) had been introduced into the Ottoman Empire in the 1720s, but then suppressed until the 1780s. The first newspaper in the empire was not produced until 1828, and was published in Cairo, by then the capital of an autonomous viceroyalty. Since very few Muslims had travelled in Europe or commanded its languages, Ottoman and Iranian rulers often relied for their dealings with European states on agents who were drawn from their Christian minorities, Greek or Armenian. As their own communities seemed likely to profit from more European influence and the wider use of European methods, the loyalty of these agents could not be above suspicion. Under these conditions, Muslims alarmed by contemporary happenings were far more likely to look for guidance within Islamic tradition. Those who undertook the haj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) went home to urge stricter conformity in their own localities or to distribute the texts of the scholars they had met.
⁸⁷
The Wahhabi movement in the Arabian peninsula (whose followers captured Mecca
and Medina in 1803–5) was an extreme rejection of all non-Koranic influence as the source of corruption and evil. Its adherents were active as far away as Java. The Sufi brotherhoods, with their mystical rites, patron saints, relics and charms, were the main expression of popular religiosity. Regarded with jealousy by the
ulama
elite, they could not be ignored as the potential vehicle for mass discontent with the direction of change.
⁸⁸
Even sophisticated observers of Muslim defeat at European hands, like the scholar-historians in late-eighteenth-century India, largely explained it away as a
moral
failure by decadent rulers. Restoring a state based on the sharia remained their common ideal.
⁸⁹
Nor did it help that Muslims experienced European methods amid the shock of invasion. The great historian of late Ottoman Egypt al-Jabarti (1753/4–1825) was deeply impressed by the speed and efficiency of the French occupation regime, but revolted by its brutality and atheism. It ‘established… a foundation of godlessness,' he wrote, ‘a bulwark of injustice and all manner of evil innovations'.
⁹⁰
Outrage, not curiosity, was the dominant feeling.