Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (22 page)

Another prominent Ottoman, Sabahattin Bey, founder of the Party of Liberals (Ahrar), had his “aha” moment at the turn of the twentieth century while reading French writer Edmond Demolins’s
À quoi tient la Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons
, or
The Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due
. He pinned down the secret of progress as “individual entrepreneurship and decentralization” and promoted these ideas among the Ottoman elite. “[The] obstacle for our progress is not religion,” he once said, in response to the then-nascent ultra-secularist movement that blamed religion. “The obstacle is the structure of our society.”
⁸⁰

Meanwhile, prominent poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy, author of the Turkish national anthem, was writing influential poems calling on Muslims to abandon blind obedience to tradition and use their reason to understand the scripture. “We should take the inspiration directly from the Qur’an,” he said in a famous line, “and make Islam speak to the mind of the [modern] age.”
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A T
RAGIC
E
ND
—
AND THE
E
ND OF
A
LL
P
EACE

Despite the new ideas, laws, and institutions that the Ottomans adopted in their final century, the empire failed to catch up with the industrialized nations of Europe and felt trapped when Britain and France, its former friends, allied themselves in 1907 with Russia, its perpetual enemy, in the face of rising German power. For the Ottoman elite, the only option was to ally themselves with Berlin—a fateful decision that would place them on the losing side in World War I.

The most lethal nail in the empire’s coffin, though, was what ultimately tore apart its pluralist system: nationalism. One by one, the Christian peoples of the Balkans launched rebellions to achieve independence. Each was a joyful moment of national liberation for the new nation, but for those in the minority, it was a nightmare. “Serbia for the Serbs, Bulgaria for the Bulgarians, Greece for the Greeks,” went a popular slogan of the early nineteenth century, along with a crucial caveat: “Turks and Jews out!”
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The fate of Turks and Jews converged—as the latter, who had no territorial claims, remained loyal to the empire until its end. As late as the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the Turco-Jewish axis was operative. “In Fear of Greeks, Jews Plead for Aid,” read a 1913
New York Times
headline. The Greek nationalists, the story reported, were “punishing [the Jews] for being friendly with the Turks.”
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During such nationalist campaigns against the empire, both the Ottoman Jews and the much more numerous Turks—a term that then referred to almost all Ottoman Muslims—faced several tides of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Crimea. According to some estimates, more than five million Ottoman Muslims perished in these regions between 1821 and 1922.
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Some of them were killed in battle, others died from starvation and disease. Those who could make it to Turkey itself (including my own great-grandfather from the northern Caucasus) brought with them many stories about the cruelty of the Russians and their allies.

Nationalism slowly crept into the minds of the Muslim peoples of the empire as well. In fact, Ottoman administration was not considered alien rule in any Muslim province of the empire until the beginning of the twentieth century. But in less than two decades, the desire for independence affected first the Albanians and then some (not many) Arabs. Hence, on the eve of World War I, Ottoman armies found themselves engaged in hopeless wars throughout a vast territory stretching from Macedonia to Yemen.

The century-long shrinking of the empire, and the enormous suffering it caused Turks, created a deep fear among the Ottoman elite and propelled them to develop their own nationalism. That’s why the Young Turk party that encapsulated this trend, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which took over the Ottoman state with a military coup in 1913, was ready to save the remaining part of the country—Asia Minor—by any means possible. When they entered the Great War in October 1914, the Turks, once again, faced the Russian onslaught from the east, and they found that Armenian nationalists had established paramilitary units to support the enemy. This discovery formed the basis for the catastrophic decision made by the CUP government in April 1915, when it chose to expel all Armenians in Eastern Turkey to Syria. Hundreds of thousands perished en route, due to massacres, other atrocities, famine, and disease. This awful ethnic cleansing is certainly the biggest stain on Ottoman history, and is inexcusable, but it did not happen because of the Ottoman system. Rather, it occurred because of
the fall
of the Ottoman system.

The collapse of the empire would have other tragic consequences that only time would reveal. Yet Archibald Wavell, a British officer, had the foresight to see them as early as 1918. Watching the victorious European powers happily carving up the Ottoman Empire in Paris after “the war to end war,” he dismissed the optimism. What the Europeans achieved instead, he said, was “a peace to end peace.”
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B
EYOND THE
O
TTOMANS

Ottoman modernization was the most important Muslim step forward in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it was not the only one. “Within all the Ottoman-related areas there was a general pattern that was repeated with local variations,” which was essentially “an attempt to integrate Islamic ideas and Western techniques.”
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Egypt, officially an Ottoman territory but a self-governing state since the beginning of the nineteenth century, had in place an extensive modernization program under Muhammad Ali Pas¸a (1805–49). Prominent Egyptian religious scholars such as al-Attar and al-Tahtawi championed the revival of Islam’s early rationalism and liberation from the constraints of outdated traditions.

In Tunis, which was part of the Ottoman Empire but very much a self-governing entity, a reform program modeled on the Tanzimat was put in practice, accompanied by important reforms such as the abolition of slavery in 1846. Soon Tunisians felt themselves so advanced that on October 31, 1863, Husayn Pas¸a, the mayor of Tunis, wrote a letter to Amos Perry, the American consul general, urging the Americans to reconsider their attitude toward slavery in the name of “human mercy and compassion.”
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This was fifteen months before the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, was passed by the U.S. Congress.

A decade later, another Tunisian statesman named Hayreddin Pas¸a published a book titled
The Surest Path to Knowledge Concerning the Condition of Countries
. “With God’s help, I have collected all possible information about European inventions related to economic and administrative policies,” he wrote.
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Then, with quotations from the Qur’an, the Hadiths, and classical Muslim thinkers, as well as from Montesquieu and John Stuart Mill, he argued for the acquisition of “political institutions based on justice and liberty.” He concluded:

Freedom of person, of the press, of participation in government; without this, material prosperity is not possible. Freedom inspires men to work by giving them the assurance that they will receive the reward of their work; economic prosperity is not possible without the free movement of goods and people, and also that free economic association to which modern Europe owes its material achievements. . . . Without freedom too there can be no diffusion of knowledge.
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In the foreword, Hayreddin Pas¸a also warned “those who are heedless among the generality of Muslims against their persistence in closing their eyes to what is praiseworthy . . . simply because they have the idea engraved on their minds that all the acts and institutions of those who are not Muslims should be avoided.”
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(This criticism is still quite relevant today.) According to Hayreddin Pas¸a, the modern West’s principles of freedom already existed during the golden age of Islam, but that era was followed by a decline, and now it was time for a revival.

In 1873, Hayreddin became the prime minister of Tunis. Four years later, Sultan Abdülhamid II, who had read and apparently admired his book, invited him to Istanbul and appointed him the grand vizier. Unfortunately, the Tunisian bureaucrat did not assimilate well into Istanbul’s complicated politics, so his career there was short lived, but his ideas survived, especially in his homeland, where books such as
The Liberal Spirit of the Qur’an
were published in the early twentieth century.
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In the same era, Jamal al-Din Afghani (1838–97), a scholar and activist from Iran, embarked on an ambitious mission to “awake” Muslims from obscurantism and encourage them to embrace Western science and rationalism, which he considered already inherent in the Qur’an. Egyptian scholar Muhammed Abduh, a professor at the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, embraced al-Afghani’s views and developed a reformist Islamic view that clearly was inspired by the Mutazilites of the earliest centuries of Islam. Abduh criticized some of the established Hadiths, including the ones that promote misogyny, and argued for the emancipation of Muslim women.
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The neo-Mutazilite trend grew among Arab intellectuals in the early twentieth century, leading the important Egyptian writer and intellectual Ahmad Amin to remark in 1936 that “the demise of Mu’tazilism was the greatest misfortune to have afflicted Muslims; they have committed a crime against themselves.”
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These reformist Muslims were opposed to Europe’s colonialist ambitions for Islamdom, but they were far from anti-Western. Abduh, who traveled in Europe, famously said that in Paris he saw “Islam without Muslims,” and on his return to Egypt he saw “Muslims without Islam.” He felt that all the good things Muslim societies should have were in the West but not in Islamdom. He and his followers were only proud that Islam did not share Europe’s virulent anti-Semitism. During the infamous Dreyfus affair in France, some of the Muslim press, both in Turkish and in Arabic, sympathized with the falsely blamed Jewish captain, and one of Abduh’s followers, Rashid Rida, criticized the persecution of Jews in France.
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Albert Hourani, probably the most prominent scholar of Arab history, defines this reformist trend as “the liberal age” in Arabic thought, which dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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And not just in the Arab world. The interaction with modernity also led Muslim intellectuals from non-Arab lands to conclude that there was a problem in the tradition and that reform was necessary. Not too surprisingly, these intellectuals looked back to the earliest centuries of Islam and noticed that the Mutazilite Rationalists had been overshadowed by the Traditionists. So, criticism of the Traditionist school and the Hadith literature (and occasionally Sufism for its “laziness”) became a hallmark of the reformers.

In India, Syed Ahmed Khan—whose overly pro-British stance cost him some legitimacy—argued that most Hadith sources comprised “the garbled words of previous centuries.” Hoping to have a “Muslim Cambridge” in India, he opened a modern university and launched publications that inspired millions. The modernist tradition in the subcontinent would later be continued, and much refined, by Muhammad Iqbal, the wise philosopher-poet of the early twentieth century who articulated an Islamic form of individualism and empiricism.

Among the Turkic Muslims of the Russian Empire, too, an intellectual movement called Jadidism grew in the late nineteenth century. The term came from the Arabic word
jadid
, meaning “new.” A prominent scholar among the Jadidists, Musa Jarullah Bigiev, a Kazan Turk who translated the Qur’an into the Tatar language, promoted gender equality and argued that God’s compassion in the afterlife would extend beyond Muslims to encompass all people from all faiths—an idea that the more exclusivist Traditionists found scandalous.
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All these reformist Muslim thinkers are commonly referred to as “Islamic modernists.” They had their differences, but their common idea was that the values of Western liberalism were compatible with, and even inherent in, the original message of Islam. Muslim societies, they believed, needed to reopen the gates of
ijtihad
(independent reasoning) and reform their Traditionist ways, in order to achieve freedom, justice, and prosperity.

Quite notably, this was the dominant intellectual trend in the Muslim world in the early twentieth century. “Nearly every leading intellectual in the Islamic world,” notes historian Karen Armstrong, “was a liberal.”
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And there were few notable Islamic fundamentalists.