After Tamerlane (52 page)

Confidence in their unique command of progress explains in part the disconcerting arrogance that Europeans so often displayed towards other cultures. It has been plausibly claimed that the invention of an oriental ‘other', sunk in the quagmires of moral and intellectual ‘backwardness', was essential to the European self-image of progress. Only by insisting on the failings of the ‘Orient' (in practice all non-Western peoples) could the Europeans be sure of their own progressive identity. This almost certainly exaggerates the intellectual interest that Europeans took in other parts of the world. Like most civilizations, they were obsessed not with others but with themselves. It was from viewing their own past that they derived the lesson that they had made astonishing progress, although there was no general agreement on howit had happened. They were also conscious that in many parts of Europe this progress had been slow, where it existed at all. The fiercest debates in European thought were not about non-Europe, but about howfar it was safe to abandon the beliefs and values of Europe's pre-industrial past. Some of the sharpest exchanges between European
intellectuals were over the place of religion, ‘traditional' morality, ‘folk' culture and language, and pre-modern social relations (social paternalism) in a modern society.
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There was a pervasive sense that progress was fragile. It was threatened by ‘reaction', especially, liberals thought, in the shape of the Church. It could be overthrown from below, by a popular revolt against its fierce economic discipline (the threat of socialism or anarchism). It might lead to ‘degeneracy', the physical and moral consequence, so it was often claimed, of urban and industrial life. It could be self-destructive, by erasing the individual in favour of the mass, and replacing the spiritual with a crass materialism. A sense of social panic infused these arguments with a mood of urgency.
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Amid these introverted concerns, ignorance and indifference ruled European attitudes towards the non-Western world. Its peoples were bystanders in the great struggle of life. Interpreting them fell to a small minority. It was all too easy to explain their cultures in terms of a stagnant past from which only Europe (or its developed regions) had escaped.

This tendency was strongly reinforced by the circumstances in which much of non-Europe came to the attention of a European audience. Of course, a mass of literature introduced European readers to the Afro-Asian world. But most of it derived from the peculiar activities that Europeans pursued there. In the reportage of soldiers, explorers and missionaries, it was the violence, remoteness and superstition of Afro-Asian societies that received greatest emphasis. In existing colonies (the best example is India), ethnographic investigation was largely conducted by European officials.
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It was hardly surprising that they deployed fashionable racial and physiological theories (like craniology), originally devised to explain differences within Europe,
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to insist on the absence of those ‘progressive' features that might set a term to their alien rule. Far from forging ahead in the wake of Europe, most Indians and Africans were portrayed as chained to traditions that made self-rule unthinkable, but which could be modified only over an indefinite period. In the newly occupied zones of colonial rule, it was even easier to argue that the disorders occasioned by the European intrusion were positive proof of the chaos and barbarity of the pre-colonial order. Far from plodding towards the distant goal of modernity, non-Western societies, if left to themselves, would
follow a downward spiral of social and ethical decay. Where they faced the direct competition of European peoples, it might be their fate to die out altogether – the outcome often predicted for New Zealand Maori and Australian Aborigines.

By the end of the century, European commentators were increasingly inclined to see the ‘stagnation' of non-European societies as a hereditary condition. Cultural differences, whatever their origin, became ‘racial' differences, and cultural habits the product of racial ‘instinct'.
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Careless intervention, overhasty reform or irresponsible exploitation (the lofty official viewof merchant and settler activity) could cause an explosion, and shatter the cohesion on which all order depended. Stability was the pressing need, and it was best promoted by favouring local customary law (rather than imported jurisprudence), and neo-traditional rulers (local dignitaries who accepted their colonial status) rather than the colony's Western-educated elite – a ‘microscopic minority' in the dismissive phrase of an Indian viceroy.
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In some cases, it was thought, stability was best secured by a deliberate policy of territorial segregation, the solution mooted by an official commission on South Africa's ‘native affairs'.
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Thus the Europeans had no single grand theory for their future relations with the non-Western world. The much-touted influence of Social Darwinism had no clear message of imperial expansion: indeed, many Social Darwinists were ardently opposed to the cultural and racial dilution they thought it would bring.
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Just as they argued over the reasons for Europe's exceptional dynamism, Europeans disagreed sharply over the causes and effects of non-European ‘stagnation'. India was variously interpreted as an immobile society of self-sufficient villages, a relic of medievalism, or as the unfortunate consequence of racial mixing between its original Aryan rulers and indigenous Dravidians.
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Some European thinkers, disenchanted with industrialism, found much to admire in the ‘spiritual' East: the survival of handicrafts, the lack of class conflict, or the ‘closeness to nature' of non-Western societies.
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Europeans struggled to categorize the bewildering variety of non-Western cultures. They acknowledged pragmatically the privileged status of the special groups on whom their rule depended: the ‘martial races' needed for their colonial armies, or the Islamic elites in Nigeria and North India. They lacked the means, and also the nerve, to impose
their own cultural blueprint (even if they had one). They were forced to rely upon local informants who supplied much of the data from which official histories, handbooks, law codes, gazetteers and ethnographies were compiled. It was thus not surprising that official wisdom in India decreed the traditional pre-eminence of the Brahmin castes, and affirmed caste as the basis of Indian society: it was from Brahmin scholars and pandits that the officials had derived much of their knowledge of the Indian past.
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The importance of this was that in most of the regions that fell under European dominance indigenous elites could still find the space for cultural resistance. We can see them waging three different kinds of cultural ‘warfare'. The first drew heavily upon European models of cultural change. In Bengal, for example, the newliterate class that sprang up to man the British administrative machine was quick to acquire an ‘English' education. But it was also keen to equip Bengal itself with a cultural persona on the English model. Bengali should become a literary language. Poetry, fiction, history and journalism in the Bengali vernacular would create a new sense of Bengali identity.
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Teachers and journalists would create a modern Bengali people. The embryonic institutions of the colonial regime would become a protoparliament, a Westminster-to-be. The vital role of political leaders like Surendranath Banerjea, the uncrowned king of Bengal, was to build the framework of self-rule for a new Europe-style nation.
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A similar pattern could be seen in Maharashtra in western India, where Western-style history in the vernacular language was consciously used to create political and cultural awareness.
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Ambitions of this sort formed part of the fuel of early Indian nationalism. But as a cultural strategy they needed the presence of a strong literate elite to act as the intermediaries between the colonial power and the local society.

Partly for this reason, a commoner form of cultural resistance was found in religious revival. With fewexceptions, Europeans were inclined to see Christianity's great Eurasian rivals like Islam or Hinduism as decadent or moribund. Islamic learning was dismissed as an obsolete scholasticism, with a glorious past but no intellectual future. Islamic scholars were chained to their classical texts, unable to acknowledge that the world had changed or to adapt their ideas to the flood of empirical data. It was this failure on the part of orthodox
scholars – the
ulama
or learned men – that gave so much scope to the Sufi ‘brotherhoods' and their charismatic leaders, the sheikhs and marabouts. It opened up a space for ‘fundamentalist' movements to wage jihad against infidels, pagans and corrupt fellow Muslims. Europeans reserved a particular loathing (and a special fear) for this Muslim ‘fanaticism', symptomatic, they thought, of Islam's arrested development. Its most famous victory in the late nineteenth century was the Mahdist revolt against Egypt's colonial rule in the Nilotic Sudan, which culminated in 1885 with the capture of Khartoum and the death of General Gordon, the governor-general sent by the Egyptian government (under heavy British pressure) to stage an orderly retreat.
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When the British re-entered the city thirteen years later, after defeating the Mahdist army at Omdurman, Kitchener ordered the bones of the first Mahdi ruler (Muhammad Ahmad, 1844–85) to be thrown in the Nile. A word from Queen Victoria was needed to stop him from using the Mahdi's skull as an ashtray.

In fact the general Muslim response to Europe's cultural expansion was much less sensational and a good deal more lasting. The Mahdi was a charismatic preacher on the outer margins of the Islamic world. The Muslim teachers at the main centres of learning were all too aware that their classical scholarship had become out of date. Ways had to be found to adapt orthodox learning to modern ideas. This was the project of the two great Muslim scholars of the late nineteenth century, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97) and Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905). Both were at pains to master European thinking, and both studied in Paris. Both were committed to uphold Muslim solidarity in the face of Europe's advance, which they saw at first hand in the British occupation of Egypt, the home (in Cairo) of Islam's greatest centre of intellectual life at al-Azhar. The ultimate purpose was to revitalize the
umma
, the Muslim faithful around the world, and re-educate the
ulama
, their scholarly guides and advisers. That meant rooting out the superstitions, unorthodox beliefs, and syncretic practices adopted by Muslims from the widely varied cultures into which Islam had spread. It meant purification, but also a kind of modernization. A reformed
ulama
would be in closer touch with the main centres of scholarship. They would be properly trained in Muslim theology and history. They would be better equipped to
counter European ideas with a convincing Islamic response. They would transmit Islam's message to the Muslim faithful with greater confidence and by more efficient means. Preaching, teaching and the diffusion of ideas would exploit the new media (the cheapness of print for newspapers and books), new kinds of education (using Western-style classrooms and schools) and the newease of travel. The steamship and railway allowed many more Muslims than ever before to make the haj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), to sit at the feet of the leading scholars, and grasp the full scale of the Islamic world. Pan-Islamic solidarity, a more proficient elite, a more disciplined
umma
, and a much keener sense of Islam's special place in the modern world would be the promised reward.
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To many Muslim observers, it seemed that only limited progress towards this ideal had been made by 1914. The task of mobilizing an
umma
that was vast, scattered, and often illiterate and impoverished was a daunting one. The Islamic world was riven by political, ethnic and linguistic divisions. Modernizing Arabic, the classical language of Muslim science, lawand theology, was a massive challenge. The principal Muslim states suffered (as we shall see) further defeats and humiliations at European hands. Indeed, in some Muslim communities, ethnic nationalism and the territorial state seemed a more promising basis for anti-colonial resistance than the remote ideal of pan-Islamic unity. There was sometimes fierce disagreement between those who insisted that Islam had no quarrel with Western science and politics and those who regarded the influence of these as corrupting. But there was also no doubt that the sharpening sense of Islamic identity that al-Afghani and Abduh had been so keen to promote had begun to energize a wide variety of Muslim societies. In West Africa, the Muslim religious elite consolidated their influence over the French authorities as well as tightening their grip on the community of faithful.
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In Egypt, the epicentre of Islamic modernism, the Muslim concern for moral reform and greater social discipline extended the appeal of nationalist politics among the educated class.
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In India, the newMuslim university founded at Aligarh (the ‘Anglo-Oriental College') may have emphasized the value of the West's modern knowledge, but it was also a seminary of the ‘Young Muslim' leaders who came to prominence after 1914.
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In colonial South East
Asia, reformist movements and the newprint media helped spread Islamic consciousness, and in the Dutch East Indies this took the form of a political movement, Sarekat Islam.
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In Hinduism, there was a similar trend towards cleansing and codifying religious practice. Reformist movements like the Arya Samaj implicitly acknowledged the spiritual appeal of Christian worship, with its stress upon the individual's relationship with God. At the popular level, this religious revival could be seen in campaigns for ‘cowprotection' and for encouraging the cult of the Hindu pantheon rather than local deities. Better means of travel encouraged more pilgrims to make their way to Benares and Mother Ganges, as well as other centres of Hindu devotion. Among the educated, the printed word in India's vernacular languages helped spread the influence of spiritual teachers and movements. But perhaps the most remarkable development before 1914 was Gandhi's manifesto for cultural resistance, published in 1909 under the title of
Hind Swaraj
(‘Indian selfrule').
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Hind Swaraj
(composed while Gandhi travelled by sea between London and South Africa, where he lived and worked between 1893 and 1915) was a brilliant synthesis of religion, culture and politics. It set out a third grand strategy for cultural revival. It affirmed the value of a purified Hinduism as the moral base of society. It also adopted the European viewof Indian society as a vast mosaic of ‘village communities'. Gandhi's purpose was not to repeat the diagnosis of ‘stagnation'. Instead he insisted on the moral superiority of the self-sufficing village over the artificial, exploitative and divisive civilization imposed by the West. Thus Indian self-rule would not be achieved by merely taking over the institutions of the colonial government – keeping the tiger's nature, while getting rid of the tiger, in Gandhi's colourful phrase. It meant repudiating everything that Western dominance had brought, including lawand medicine, railways and telegraphs, and the Indian state itself. In Gandhi's formulation, religious reform merged into moral reform, moral reform into social reform, social reform into political struggle. Moral liberation would lead to political freedom, since once Indians rejected the mental hegemony on which British rule depended (the Indians, said Gandhi, had
allowed
the British to rule) they would revoke the collaboration on which the Raj was built. With astonishing skill (and in little more
than a pamphlet) Gandhi had shown how a cultural movement could avoid direct confrontation with its colonial regime until the crucial moment. But when the process of (mental) liberation was complete, the final assault would be brief and bloodless.