The Islamic Enlightenment by Christopher de Bellaigue

Author:Christopher de Bellaigue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2017-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

5

Nation

When we look back from our twenty-first century, it seems surprising to find a time that pre-dates this era of apparently permanent conflict and confusion involving the West and the heartlands of Islam. There was such a time. It was not, as we have seen, one of perfect serenity; on the contrary, from the first major encroachments of Western interests into Muslim lands the nature of the encounter was grating and asymmetric. However, from Muhammad Ali and clerics such as Hassan al-Attar and Rifaa al-Tahtawi in Egypt, to the Crown Prince Abbas Mirza in Iran and even Turkey’s Tanzimatists, a tale of gain and useful emulation was slowly embedded in Middle Eastern attitudes towards the West, while some Muslim Westernisers persisted in regarding the objectives of the powers with more optimism than was warranted.

From around the middle of the nineteenth century, when European colonial interests ran up against Muslim resistance from North Africa to India, it is possible to say that a rolling agenda of conflicts between an expanding Western imperium and the Muslims in its path became inevitable. India’s subjugation by the British had produced a situation of almost chronic religious revolt, of which the rebellion of 1857, or Indian Mutiny, was a virulent spasm. In the middle decades of the century there were also rebellions against the French in Algeria (and later on in Tunisia, which became a French colony in 1881). The Russian-occupied northern Caucasus was the scene of disturbances aimed at dislodging the newcomers, while Britain’s strategy of using Afghanistan as a barrier to keep Russia out of India was bloodily resisted by the Afghans themselves. In the 1880s involvement by the British in Egyptian Sudan embroiled them in a full-scale religious cataclysm, led by a self-proclaimed successor of the Prophet, the ‘Mahdi’, or right-guided one, which climaxed in the famous massacre of General Gordon’s army at Khartoum in 1885.

These disruptions to the smooth establishment of Western colonial supervision were interpreted by many Europeans as the writhing of a retrograde civilisation that had condemned itself to extinction. Yet others considered the agitations and uprisings in a more sophisticated manner. What united these disparate events that were happening in the face of colonial encroachment? Transport had greatly enhanced the mobility of political movements in the Muslim world, with an increasing number making the pilgrimage to Mecca, while the technologies of printing and the telegraph carried ideas in all directions. The borders between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds were not impermeable, as evidenced by the satisfaction that was expressed by many in Istanbul, Cairo and Tehran when, in 1905, the Russian navy was annihilated by a small Japanese fleet in the Tsushima Strait. From Government House in Calcutta, which, by happy coincidence, was modelled on his family home in Derbyshire, the viceroy Lord Curzon noted that the reverberations of this victory by a small oriental power over a vast imperial one had gone ‘like a thunderclap through the whispering galleries of the East’.1

By the turn of the century

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