The Transformation of the World (193 page)

In the sphere of religion, it is problematic to advance a dichotomy between revolt and reform, between messianic movements, often visualizing the future as a return to a mythical golden age of the past, and religious doctrines and practices that propose a rational, cautious adaptation to the changing times. Such a distinction becomes more plausible, however, if one and the same movement can be shown to shift from the first pole to the second. This was the case with the Bab movement, a Shi'ite heresy in Iran, in which Sayyid Ali Muhammad Shirazi advocated the divine rule of God's chosen representatives on earth and finally claimed for himself a prophetic authority, based on direct communication with the Almighty, that superseded the teaching of the Qur'an.
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After his execution by firing squad as an apostate and political rebel in 1850, the movement did not collapse but passed on the original charisma as it implemented a series of reforms. A comrade of the Bab, Mirza Husain Ali Nuri (or Bahaullah), undertook this task during his decades of exile in the Ottoman Empire. While referring to himself as the universal messiah—or the reborn Christ, Mahdi, and Zoroaster rolled into in one—he took great pains to recast the teachings of the movement in cosmopolitan terms attuned to the modern world. Following his death in 1892, the Shi'ite messianism of the founder became the modern Bahai religion, which after 1910 spread to Europe and America and today has its spiritual and organizational center in Haifa (Israel). Along with Mormonism and Indian Sikhism, it is one of the few new religious creations to have survived from the nineteenth century. Bahaullah,
together with the exiled Chinese philosopher Kang Youwei (the creator of “Great Community” utopianism), was one of the major thinkers of the late nineteenth century who cut across cultural boundaries. The modern elements in the Bahai faith were its advocacy of a constitutional state and parliamentary democracy, its support for an expansion of women's rights, its rejection of religious nationalism, its renunciation of the doctrine of holy war, its concern for world peace, and its openness to science.
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Modernity and Modernism

This last point was and is—precisely in the light of early twenty-first century debates between Darwinists and biblical “creationists”—perhaps the most important criterion of all for religious modernity. Not all facets of scientific knowledge were equally well known or accessible to lay people. According to this yardstick, religious modernization meant not discarding the latest science per se as a source of truth. Through the astronomical demonstration of plural worlds, the discovery of deep time by geology and paleontology, and above all the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin (with its more radical, militant expressions in the work of men such as Thomas H. Huxley in England or Ernst Haeckel in Germany), the natural sciences confronted all religions and denominations with major challenges.
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The relationship between faith and religion therefore became, at least in Europe, a central theme in philosophies offering a world orientation; and hopes for a harmonization of religion and science, nurtured in Biedermeier Germany and early Victorian England, have been under a cloud ever since. Explicitly rationalist post-theistic quasi-religions have not been able to bridge the gulf for long: neither the elevation of science into a creed (the “religion of science”), nor various secret doctrines based on Freemasonry, nor the “social religion” sketched around 1820 by the French socialist Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and cultivated for decades after his death in the form of a sect, in which scientists and artists were supposed to give the new industrial age an ethical foundation and thereby make possible its fully productive blossoming. As to the positivism of Auguste Comte (which already the master's late works elevated to a “religion of humanity”), it was principally in Mexico, Brazil, and Bengal that it was understood as a secular salvationism, a message of scientifically guided progress, in which political liberalism and economic laissezfaire retreated behind visions of technocratic order. Comte had expected the triumph of his doctrine in Western Europe, but he also sought, in vain, to win the support of Pasha Muhammad Ali in Egypt, where Saint-Simonists tried for a time to realize their utopian ideas of communes. Positivism did not catch on there, but rather in countries where it was regarded as a comprehensive worldview allowing them to catch up in the modernization race.
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Similar problems to those resulting from scientific corrections to the biblical story of the Creation emerged through new historical approaches in the humanities. The arts, philosophy, and sciences were now studied as they took
shape over the course of time; historical accounts of the slow evolution of national literatures took their place alongside literary criticism. Kant had still sketched only in broad strokes the development of philosophical thought up to his own time, but just a few years after his death Hegel was giving richly detailed lectures on the subject. Nor did religion escape historicization. The clash between conventional beliefs and the new sense of the historical became an issue for many communities and churches, causing am even greater stir in Judaism, for which the idea of reform was traditionally alien, than in the Christian denominations. A relationship to history and temporality became the core of the modernization of the Jewish faith.
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In Christianity, Bible criticism had similar dramatic effects. Insofar as it involved the investigation of Old Testament sources and textual tradition, it also directly affected the way in which Jews perceived their history. In the long run, patient philological work did more than a sharp polemic attack such as David Friedrich Strauss's
Life of Jesus
(1835) to advance an historical approach to Christianity, also among sections of the public with a broad education. Its methods yielded ever more accurate knowledge of the historical facts, as well as a wide range of interpretations that each took a critical distance from the biblical narrative. Nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theology and church history tended to portray Jesus as an ethical teacher of transcendent values. When the comparative history of religions became a rival focus of interest, this led to a different image of Jesus as an Oriental prophet, who urged the world to change direction in the face of impending doom.
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The fact that European scholars also subjected the founding of other religions (e.g., Islam or Buddhism) to historicist critique or critical historicization came to be seen in the eyes of their devotees as a challenge and a desacralizing affront—one source of present-day accusations of “Orientalism.”

It would be wrong to construct a stark opposition between the West (religion safely channeled along the lines of bourgeois rationality) and the non-Christian remainder of the world (religious dynamic expended in militant fervor, charismatic leader cults, and holy wars). Diehard traditionalism, charismatic challenges to it, subsequent development through reform: these existed in both East and West in the nineteenth century. Under Pius IX the Catholic Church explicitly came out against the legacy of the Enlightenment, and in truth Pius was almost as reactionary as he was painted in the polemics of liberal Europe at the time. To his successor Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) he bequeathed a Catholic laager mentality. Yet Leo, also a man with deeply conservative inclinations, risked a cautious opening when he turned to the social issues of the age and tried to find a third way between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. On the whole, the church remained a force of inertia.

At the time of these two long pontificates, modernist renewal was becoming a factor of major significance in Islam. The beginning of its rise may be dated to the 1840s. This multistrand reform movement, encompassing the whole Muslim world from North Africa to Central Asia to Malaya and Indonesia, was an
important element in the nineteenth-century history of ideas. Borne along by legal and religious scholars, at times also by political leaders with very different backgrounds, it displayed a common concern that faults of Islam's own making would throw it into the intellectual defensive in an age of European world hegemony and exacerbate its political weakness. The modernizers—the best known internationally were the charismatic Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97), a restless wanderer through Muslim lands; Muhammad Abduh in Egypt, a high clerical dignitary, politician, and (in comparison with al-Afghani) systematic theoretician; the philosopher and educationist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan in northern India; and the Crimean Tatar intellectual Ismail Gasprinskii—searched for compromises between the stock of Islamic tradition with its ubiquitous defenders and the challenges and opportunities presented by the modern world. They fought for free critical spaces where a reinterpretation of Islamic textual sources would be possible. Their debates, given novel resonance by the emergence of a Muslim press after about 1870, addressed the requirements and opportunities of modernization, forms of constitutional government, the rapprochement with modern science, the content and methods of education, and the rights that should be accorded to women.
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Of the dozens who spoke their mind, some women among them, there were virtually no freethinkers who sought to question Islam at a fundamental level. The intention was to refute, with demonstrations to the contrary, the widespread view among Europeans that Islam was a rigid and tyrannical dogma. New things had to become capable of expression in the language of Islam.

The Islamic modernists did not stop at theory. Many of them were especially active in the realm of education—for example, the scholarly polymath (originally judge) Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who, at the Cambridge-style Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (today the Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh) that he founded in 1875 with the primary aim of training senior officials for the colonial state, tried to link Muslim identity building with the role model of the English gentleman.
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Even more successful in terms of recruitment and growth was a network of reform-minded theological colleges, designed mainly to educate
ulama
to serve the spiritual needs of the community. The first to get off the ground, in 1867, was the Koranic school (madrasa) in Deoband in northern India—hence the title of the Deoband Movement, whose affiliates subsequently spread to many other areas of the Subcontinent. The traditional jumble of religious institutions in Muslim India thus became subject to a degree of streamlining and bureaucratization, but it kept its distance from the colonial state, which, not needed as a source of funding, looked with some suspicion on such “civil society” initiatives from its Muslim subjects.
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In 1900 it was not unrealistic to foresee a great future for the highly diversified modernist tendencies within Islam. Their decline in the midst of secular (e.g., Kemalist) nationalism, fascism, and Bolshevik socialism belongs in a different epoch—and in a history of missed opportunities.

Reform movements also appeared in the variegated religious worlds of non-Muslim India, often aiming at broad cultural renewal rather than simply a purification of religion.
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Ram Mohan Roy, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and his disciple Svami Vivekananda (who in the early 1890s developed a monist conception of the Absolute that gave Hinduism a more universalist dimension) are just three thinkers who became known far beyond the confines of India.
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The superiority that Christians of all denominations increasingly claimed over educated Asian elites also forced the other side into a stronger identification with religion that helped to build up “Hinduism” (the term first appeared in the early nineteenth century) as a uniform doctrine and social institution. Drawing on cultural resources of their own, reform movements reacted in various ways to new impulses: to the European discipline of Oriental studies (often taught in India itself), to the Christianity on offer from missionaries, and also to one another, since, as in Christianity and Islam, modernist forces in turn triggered neo-orthodox responses. In exceptional cases the impetus came from outside: in the 1880s in Ceylon, for instance, US theosophists and local disciples reinvented Buddhism by writing a catechism, restoring monuments, and popularizing Buddhist symbols.
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The basic options regarding the problems of the age were everywhere the same, in a spectrum that went from militant rejection of the new and alien to large-scale adaptation to what were considered the dominant forces of the contemporary world. More interesting than the extremes are the many intermediate solutions, which cannot be grasped through a simple counterposition of “tradition” and “modernity.”

Religious Communication

Along with science, religion belongs among the great creators of extensive communication networks. It would be a banality to call such networks transnational. Many of them are today more comprehensive than modern nation-states, and nearly all are older. Not necessarily having to rely on state structures, they operate across existing borders and also create new ones. By no means do they survive only in the form of official church organizations. Over many centuries, mystical orders within Islam have developed huge networks stretching from China to Central Asia to the Mediterranean.
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Apart from the frontiers of Christian or Islamic conversion and such one-off events as the World's Parliament of Religions that convened in Chicago during the international “Columbian Exhibition” of 1893, religious communication in the nineteenth century occurred mostly within the framework of a single religion.
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Some of these spheres were quite large, though, and new means of transportation were developing them better than ever before. Muslims from many parts of Asia and Africa traveled by steamship to the holy sites in Arabia or to centers of learning such as Cairo, Damascus, or Istanbul. In Malaya, it was journeys to Mecca that actually brought into being something that could be described as a tourist industry.
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The railroad made it affordable to visit Islamic
shrines in the Tsarist Empire or sacred places in Catholic Europe (in 1858, apparitions of the Virgin in Lourdes helped this little town in the French Pyrenees to become a major center of pilgrimage). The new logistics also bolstered Rome's image as the Eternal City, since believers could now travel there en masse even outside holy years.
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Pius IX, who scarcely ever left Rome and declared war on the modern zeitgeist, paradoxically became the creator of the worldwide papal church. Less a bureaucrat than a pastoral worker, he actively sought contact with the faithful, encouraged their financial contributions to the papal coffers, and was the first pontiff to call bishops from all over the world to Rome. An unprecedented total of 255 bishops gathered there in 1862, several years before the First Vatican Council (1869–70), on an occasion that was itself “global” in character: the canonization of twenty-six individuals who had suffered religious martyrdom in Japan more than a quarter of a millennium before.
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This ceremony happened to come at the end of a year when many new martyrs had been created among missionaries and converts in Vietnam, in the last major “old style” persecution of Christians in Asia, before the rise of atheistic state apparatuses in the twentieth century.