Nation-States by Neil Davidson

Author:Neil Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-569-9
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2016-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Partial reform

Chinese history tends to support the view that the key issue is not religion but the nature of the economy and “the corresponding form of the state.” Like Islam, China encompassed a great civilization with important scientific and technical accomplishments, surpassing those of Europe. But here too was a bureaucratic tributary state acting to suppress emergent class forces and their dangerous ideas. Reading the work of one leading intellectual in seventeenth-century China, Wang Fuzhi (1619–92), it is difficult not to see him as a predecessor to Adam Smith in Scotland or the Abbe Sieyès in France, but his thoughts led to no immediate results.17 In China, as in the House of Islam, the state acted to control the spread of dangerous thoughts. During the eighteenth century in particular, critical writings were censored or destroyed. The high point of this “literary inquisition,” as it was known, ran between 1779 and 1789—the events of the latter year showing the distance that had opened up between China and Europe.18 But China was not an Islamic country: the similarities lie not in religion but in economy and state, and it was these that led them to a common fate.

The temporary conquest of the Ottoman province of Egypt by French revolutionary armies in 1798 not only revealed military weakness but also heralded the violent intrusion of Enlightenment ideas into the sealed world of Islam. This led to an attempt, first in Egypt and Turkey, to adapt at least some of the technical, scientific, and military aspects of Enlightenment thought. Many of the aspects of Islam that are ignorantly supposed to be “medieval” traditions are actually products of this period of partial reform. As one historian notes: “Often wrongly regarded in today’s West as a mark of medieval obscurantism, the burkah was actually a modern dress that allowed women to come out of the seclusion of their homes and participate to a limited degree in public and commercial affairs.”19 Another points out: “The office of ayatollah is a creation of the nineteenth century; the rule of Khomeini and of his successor as ‘supreme Jurist,’ an innovation of the twentieth.”20 The imperial division and occupation of the Middle East after the First World War froze and in some cases even reversed the process. It should not be forgotten, in the endless babble about Western superiority, that feudal social relationships—against which the Enlightenment had raged—were actually introduced into Iraq by the British occupiers after 1920, to provide a social basis for the regime.21

The subsequent history has been told in remorseless detail by Robert Fisk in The Great War for Civilization and cannot even be attempted here. The question is: after over a hundred years of imperialist intervention, does the Islamic world today have to reproduce the experience of the West, from Renaissance to Reformation to Enlightenment? In 1959 one Afghan intellectual, Najim oud-Din Bammat, wrote: “Islam today has to go through a number of revolutions at once; a religious revolution like the Reformation; an intellectual and moral

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