The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (20 page)

A parallel figure in the Russian Empire was his Tatar contemporary `Abd al-Qayyum Nasiri (1825-1902), who tried to bring to his people the benefits of the Russian language and European science and culture in their Russian form. A student in a Madrasa in Kazan, he defied the ban of the ulema on learning Russian and set to work secretly to master the language of the empire of which he was a subject. He taught for several years in Russian schools and colleges and wrote or translated into Tatar a great number of books on science, geography, and other subjects. He also produced a Russian grammar, reader, and dictionary in Tatar, to help his people learn Russian, their key to modern knowledge. Not surprisingly, he was made much of by Russian orientalists and others and is still praised by the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, which defends him against the slanderous attacks of "bourgeois nationalists." Among his Tatar contemporaries, he was known as Uris Qayyum: Russian Qayyum.

It was not long before a violent reaction against this form of collaboration with the West began to develop. It was further stimulated by new moves in the expansion and consolidation of Western power. In 1858 the Indian Mutiny was crushed, and the last shreds of the Mogul Empire were swept away. In 1868 the Russians occupied Samarkand and reduced the amir of Bukhara to the level of a native prince. In 1877 the Turks suffered a humiliating defeat at Russian hands, and in the same year Queen Victoria became Empress of India; in 1881 the French occupied Tunisia; in 1882 the British occupied Egypt; in 1884 the Russians conquered Marv and appeared on the borders of Afghanistan; and in 1885 the Germans established a protectorate in East Africa.

The idea of pan-Islamism-of a common front of the Muslims against the common threat of the Christian empires-seems to have been born among the Young Ottomans, in the 1860s and 1870s, and was probably in part inspired by the examples of German and Italian nationalism and unification. Transposed into Islamic terms, this meant the solidarity and unity of all the Muslims, not of the Turks or any other ethnic or linguistic nation, a concept that would have been meaningless to most Muslims at that time. The Young Ottomans spoke frequently of the union of Islam (ittihad-i Islam) as an important common goal of Muslims and reproached the Ottoman government for failing to help the Central Asian Khans when they were being overwhelmed by Russia. Bonds with outlying provinces like Egypt and Tunisia must, they said, be tightened, and closer relations established with the rest of the Muslim world, of which the Ottomans are the natural leaders. Namik Kemal's pan-Islamism was more cultural than political and was linked with the desire for modernization. Since the Ottoman Empire was the seat of the caliphate and was the most advanced of the Muslim states and the nearest to Europe, it was the natural center of the future Islamic union. "When that happens, the light of knowledge will radiate from this centre to Asia and Africa."3 Others, like Ali Suavi, preached a more militant brand of pan-Islamism, and in 1876 the first Ottoman constitution formally claimed the "high Islamic caliphate" as belonging to the Ottoman house.

The history of Ottoman political pan-Islamism, embodied in the notion of the caliphate, may be dated from the treaty of Kiiriik- Kaynarca of 1774, when for the first time the Ottoman sultan put forward a claim to religious jurisdiction over Muslims outside his dominions. This was partly a face-saving counterclaim to the czar's right of intervention for the Russian church in Istanbul, abusively extended to a kind of protectorate over the Ottoman Orthodox Christians. It was also partly an attempt to preserve some link with the Crimean Tatars, whose political allegiance the sultan formally renounced in the treaty. It was a few years after this that we first encounter the story that the caliphate was transferred by the last Abbasid caliph to the Ottoman sultan Selim I, after his conquest of Egypt in 1517. The purpose of this story-unknown to previous historiography, whether Turkish or Arab-was clearly to provide support for this new claim.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the claim was still regarded as new and controversial. Thus, for example, an English writer in 1819, speaking of some tactless German tourists with a gift for asking awkward and dangerous questions, remarks that "they would scarce have neglected the opportunity had it offered of enquiring of the Sultan himself whether he was legitimate heir to the Caliphate, as he asserted." In another passage in the same book, an Egyptian commenting on the universal dishonesty of officials remarks that even the sultan "cheated Allah himself, when he assumed the title of Caliph of the Faithful.j4

Nevertheless, the claim was made and repeated and gained force as the other Sunni sovereigns who might have contested it were subjected to or threatened by foreign conquest. It found symbolic expression in the ceremony of the girding of the sword on the accession of a new sultan. In the past, a variety of swords preserved among the sacred relics in the palace had been used for this ceremony. In 1808, Mahmud II, like many of his predecessors, was girded with the swords of the Prophet and Osman I, symbolizing the religious and dynastic aspects of his office. In 1839, Abdulmejid was girded with only one sword, that of the caliph Omar, and the contemporary Ottoman imperial historiographer makes the significant and demonstrably false statement that this was "ancient Ottoman prac- tice.i5 At the accession of Abdiilaziz in 1861, the sword of Omar was again used, and the point was made clear by the historian Cevdet:

This sword was the blessed sword of the caliph Omar ... which was in the possession of that Abbasid caliph who fled to Egypt at the

notion of the caliphate, may be dated from the treaty of Kiiriik- Kaynarca of 1774, when for the first time the Ottoman sultan put forward a claim to religious jurisdiction over Muslims outside his dominions. This was partly a face-saving counterclaim to the czar's right of intervention for the Russian church in Istanbul, abusively extended to a kind of protectorate over the Ottoman Orthodox Christians. It was also partly an attempt to preserve some link with the Crimean Tatars, whose political allegiance the sultan formally renounced in the treaty. It was a few years after this that we first encounter the story that the caliphate was transferred by the last Abbasid caliph to the Ottoman sultan Selim I, after his conquest of Egypt in 1517. The purpose of this story-unknown to previous historiography, whether Turkish or Arab-was clearly to provide support for this new claim.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the claim was still regarded as new and controversial. Thus, for example, an English writer in 1819, speaking of some tactless German tourists with a gift for asking awkward and dangerous questions, remarks that "they would scarce have neglected the opportunity had it offered of enquiring of the Sultan himself whether he was legitimate heir to the Caliphate, as he asserted." In another passage in the same book, an Egyptian commenting on the universal dishonesty of officials remarks that even the sultan "cheated Allah himself, when he assumed the title of Caliph of the Faithful.j4

Nevertheless, the claim was made and repeated and gained force as the other Sunni sovereigns who might have contested it were subjected to or threatened by foreign conquest. It found symbolic expression in the ceremony of the girding of the sword on the accession of a new sultan. In the past, a variety of swords preserved among the sacred relics in the palace had been used for this ceremony. In 1808, Mahmud II, like many of his predecessors, was girded with the swords of the Prophet and Osman I, symbolizing the religious and dynastic aspects of his office. In 1839, Abdulmejid was girded with only one sword, that of the caliph Omar, and the contemporary Ottoman imperial historiographer makes the significant and demonstrably false statement that this was "ancient Ottoman prac- tice.i5 At the accession of Abdiilaziz in 1861, the sword of Omar was again used, and the point was made clear by the historian Cevdet:

This sword was the blessed sword of the caliph Omar ... which was in the possession of that Abbasid caliph who fled to Egypt at the

notion of the caliphate, may be dated from the treaty of Kiiriik- Kaynarca of 1774, when for the first time the Ottoman sultan put forward a claim to religious jurisdiction over Muslims outside his dominions. This was partly a face-saving counterclaim to the czar's right of intervention for the Russian church in Istanbul, abusively extended to a kind of protectorate over the Ottoman Orthodox Christians. It was also partly an attempt to preserve some link with the Crimean Tatars, whose political allegiance the sultan formally renounced in the treaty. It was a few years after this that we first encounter the story that the caliphate was transferred by the last Abbasid caliph to the Ottoman sultan Selim I, after his conquest of Egypt in 1517. The purpose of this story-unknown to previous historiography, whether Turkish or Arab-was clearly to provide support for this new claim.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the claim was still regarded as new and controversial. Thus, for example, an English writer in 1819, speaking of some tactless German tourists with a gift for asking awkward and dangerous questions, remarks that "they would scarce have neglected the opportunity had it offered of enquiring of the Sultan himself whether he was legitimate heir to the Caliphate, as he asserted." In another passage in the same book, an Egyptian commenting on the universal dishonesty of officials remarks that even the sultan "cheated Allah himself, when he assumed the title of Caliph of the Faithful.j4

Nevertheless, the claim was made and repeated and gained force as the other Sunni sovereigns who might have contested it were subjected to or threatened by foreign conquest. It found symbolic expression in the ceremony of the girding of the sword on the accession of a new sultan. In the past, a variety of swords preserved among the sacred relics in the palace had been used for this ceremony. In 1808, Mahmud II, like many of his predecessors, was girded with the swords of the Prophet and Osman I, symbolizing the religious and dynastic aspects of his office. In 1839, Abdulmejid was girded with only one sword, that of the caliph Omar, and the contemporary Ottoman imperial historiographer makes the significant and demonstrably false statement that this was "ancient Ottoman prac- tice.i5 At the accession of Abdiilaziz in 1861, the sword of Omar was again used, and the point was made clear by the historian Cevdet:

This sword was the blessed sword of the caliph Omar ... which was in the possession of that Abbasid caliph who fled to Egypt at the

sible against the pressure of Western power and the criticism of Western thought.

Far more successful in the long run in these tasks than Jamal al-Din was his associate, disciple, and intellectual superior, the Egyptian Muhammad `Abduh (1849-1905), for a while the chief mufti of Egypt and a leading figure in the intellectual revival of Islam. At first closely associated with Jamal al-Din in his political panIslamism, Muhammad `Abduh soon began to follow a line of his own. For him, politics, even the central problem of independence from foreign domination, is of secondary importance; both patriotism and nationalism are suspect in his eyes, since they tend to weaken the religious bond of brotherhood that binds all Muslims together and forms their true identity and solidarity: "He who professes the Muslim faith, once his belief is firm, ceases to concern himself with his race or nation; he turns away from sectional ties to the general bond, the bond of the believer. "7

The first concern of the Muslim, then, is Islam, which educates, civilizes, and identifies him, makes him what he is, and seeks to make him better. But Islam has fallen on bad days; through internal weakness and error, through external pressure and influence, Islamic values have been corrupted and distorted and must be restored and defended if they are to withstand the attack of Western criticism and survive the competition of Western ideas. It was to this task, to the construction and elaboration of a system of Islamic principles and values related to the needs and conceptions of his time, that Muhammad `Abduh dedicated his life.

A book by a professor at Al-Azhar University on the relation of modem Islamic thought to Western imperialism distinguished two main trends, to which the author, drawing on the terminology of our time, gives the names of collaboration and resistance. The collaborationist trend is represented by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Qadiani Ahmadiya sect; the resistance consists of Jamal al-Din and Muhammad `Abduh."

Resistance to Christian and post-Christian Western intellectual and spiritual influences was no doubt one of the main purposes of Muhammad `Abduh's thought and teaching. His insistence on the need to cast off the accretions of postclassical Islam and to return to the pure, unadulterated, and uncorrupted faith and practice of the early Muslims is reminiscent of the teaching of the Naqshbandi revivalists and Wahhabi puritans by whom, directly or indirectly, he was certainly influenced. The movement of ideas that he led is indeed known, from this characteristic doctrine, as the Salafiyya, those who follow the Salaf, the great ancestors. But Muhammad `Abduh was neither a mere fanatic nor a mere reactionary and offered his people something more substantial than empty hatred of the infidel or the mirage of a return to a largely mythical past. While rejecting the excessive subservience to Western civilization of some modernists and reformers, he was perfectly willing to accept modern science and technology and modern methods of education and even to take account of modern thought as well as knowledge in a reformulation of Islamic doctrine.

Muhammad `Abduh's struggle for Islam was essentially pacific, concerned with religious, ethical, and cultural matters, not with politics or war. Armed religious resistance to the domination of the West or of Westernized regimes, of a simpler and more militant kind, still flared up from time to time in remote or outlying areas. The action of the Sanusi order in Libya against first the Ottomans and then the Italians, the revolt of the Mahdi in the Sudan against Turco-Egyptian rule and European encroachment, Ma' al-`Aynayn in Mauritania and the so-called Mad Mullah of Somaliland are all examples of such movements, reminiscent of Shamil, `Abd al-Qadir, and Ahmad Brelwi in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is noteworthy that all of them occurred in Africa, by now the main area of Western colonization.