By Spahic Omer
(Summary: This article discusses the meaning and genesis of the Muslim dilemma of modernisation. The focus is on the role of ideas and values and how they were correlated with the physical manifestations of modernisation. The discussion features such fundamental subjects as the Ottomans, French Revolution, Jamaluddin al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, educational conundrums in Egypt, and Kemal Ataturk. The sensitive issue of the abolition of the caliphate is also touched on.)
Islam and its civilisation instilled in Muslims a sense of pride, contentment and self-assurance. Muslims were the custodians of the heavenly truth and were mandated to actualise it and to convey it to the rest of the world. Their life mission unfolded between this honourable identity and the equally honourable aims. Their internal trials and tribulations notwithstanding, Muslims were rarely faced with problems from outside that were of epic proportions. Their convictions continued unabated.
Considerable exceptions were the Crusades (1095-1291) and the Mongol invasion (in 1258 Baghdad was destroyed). The two campaigns were carried out by barbarous and benighted infidels: misguided Christians and pagan Mongols. However, both in the end were defeated: the former militarily and the latter ideologically, resulting in the conversion of Mongols to Islam. Thus, Muslims’ sense of pride and invincibility remained intact. If a force could defeat Muslims, nothing could defeat Islam and the heavenly mandate.
Even when Europe was undergoing its initial transformation, despite the perpetual contacts between the two worlds, the Muslim world was unmoved. Bernard Lewis writes that “such earlier European movements as the Renaissance and the Reformation woke no echo and found no response among the Muslim peoples.” Europe was seen as having little or nothing to offer. It rather flattered “Islamic pride with the spectacle of a culture that was visibly and palpably inferior.”
The Impact of the French Revolution
The French Revolution was the first great movement of ideas in Western Christendom that had any real effect on the world of Islam. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, the event proved pivotal in more ways than one. It connoted the first and immediate interaction between Islamdom and the powerful ideas of the Revolution. In fact, Napoleon and his enterprises represented the products, embodiments and marketers of those ground-breaking ideas. Napoleon came to Egypt as much in his capacity as a leader and conqueror, as in the capacity of a missionary and proselytiser.
As a result of those efforts, according to Edward Said, even Orientalism as a science expanded significantly. He calls its post-Napoleonic phase “modern Orientalism”. The phase was more systematic and more scholarly an enterprise. It was a time when Europe came “to know the Orient more scientifically, to live in it with greater authority and discipline than ever before. But what mattered to Europe was the expanded scope and the much greater refinement given its techniques for receiving the Orient.” Hence, although Napoleon’s campaign was a military failure, it nevertheless was a huge scientific and cultural success. It spelled a watershed in the cultural and civilisational relations, together with exchanges, between Islam and the West.
The beginning of modern Egyptian cultural development has traditionally been set at 1798, the date of Napoleon’s invasion. Yet, it is sometimes regarded as the country’s cultural turning-point. The socio-economic development was also affected. An episode in the history of Anglo-French imperialist rivalry, the French invasion, apart from being a military failure, witnessed transformations that were radically to change the cultural and educational development of the country. Paul Starkey elaborates: “The teams of scholars and scientists Napoleon brought with him undertook a comprehensive survey of the country, subsequently published as Description de l’Egypte; a scientific Institut de l’Egypte was founded; a printing-press was introduced to Egypt, used not only for printing proclamations for the local people but also for production of a newspaper, Le courier de l’Egypte, and a scientific and educational journal, La decade egyptienne. To win support Napoleon also set up an administrative council and a series of provincial councils, by means of which the Egyptians were involved in western representative institutions for the first time.”
Moreover, Napoleon’s first manifesto to Egyptians contained some supposedly attractive terms. As part of his first proclamation, Napoleon said: “Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion…Do not believe it!…I worship God more than the Mamluks do, and…I respect His prophet Mohammed and the admirable Koran … Tell the people that the French also are true Muslims.” The proclamation closed with these words: “All Egyptians shall render thanks to God for the destruction of the Mamluks, saying in a loud voice, ‘May God preserve the glory of the Ottoman Sultan! May God preserve the glory of the French army! May God curse the Mamluks and bestow happiness on the Egyptian nation!’”
It is no wonder that the reaction of especially educated Egyptians to these developments was ambivalent. An Egyptian scholar of the day, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (d. 1825), described the invasion as “the beginning of a reversal of the natural order and the corruption or destruction of all things.” Elsewhere, however, “he makes clear his admiration for the scientific and cultural achievements of the French, while (still) sounding a warning-note about the dangers to traditional Muslim morality inherent in the mingling of the two cultures.”
In the Aftermath of Military Setbacks
During the French invasion of Egypt the country was under the Ottoman rule. However, in the heart of the Ottoman state, the winds of change and modernisation started to blow earlier, as early as the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. That was so on account of a few serious Ottoman military setbacks due to which the state decided to turn to Europe, to some degree, in matters pertaining to the art of war as one of the correction measures. The initiative was mostly about guns, shipbuilding, cartography and navigation. The state wished “to throw off its weakness and once again become the terror of its enemies.”
However, as the gap between the Ottomans and their European foes widened in terms of warfare, calls for a more intensive modernisation and a more systematic study of European military models and inventions, grew louder. So much so that Ottoman embassies were established in Vienna, Austria, and Paris, France, in 1719 and 1721 respectively with instructions to “make a thorough study of the means of civilisation and education, and report on those capable of application in Turkey.” The efforts resulted in the introduction of printing, reforms in municipal services, reforms in admiralty and navy, and general reforms in military education, sciences, training and equipment.
The European Civilizational Package
There was a problem, though. We have said earlier that the Renaissance (14th-17th century) and Reformation (16th-17th century) movements passed without even an echo and found no response whatsoever in the Muslim world. But those were the harbingers of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, playing the role of the ideological foundation of, and the driving force behind, the European civilisational transformation. They were the soul of the new European (Western) identity.
Thus, understanding the fast-emerging European spectacle required understanding its ideological foundations and essence as well. The former was the effect, the later the cause. As a consequence, with regard to overall importance and impact, the European philosophy and thought were on a par with its technological and industrial outputs. European values were equivalent to, if not pricier than, its machineries.
The European civilisational package could not be fragmented. Neither dimension could be fully – and appropriately – operational without the other. Any attempts to do something like that, followed by indiscreet picking and choosing, were doomed to fail – as the Ottomans, and other Muslims, in the end found out. If truth be told – parenthetically – that is how every civilisational story works. It is about the reciprocal rise, subsistence and fall of spirit and matter.
Many Ottomans failed to realise what they were getting themselves into. They did not see the material progress of Europe as an embodiment of values and ideas, and as a result of complex systems of thought. Hence, as they were importing machineries and means of warfare, they had no choice but to import ideas and values too, sometimes consciously and sometimes otherwise. It must be admitted however that most of the time – especially at the beginning – they did not want to, but little choice did they have, as the principles and procedures of the rise and fall of civilisations had to take their natural course.
The pattern was a hint at a principle highlighted by Ibn Khaldun as part of his philosophy of history and of the dynamics of the rise and fall of civilisations. That principle is: “the vanquished always want to imitate the victor in his distinctive mark(s), his dress, his occupation, and all his other conditions and customs.” The reason for that is “that the soul always sees perfection in the person who is superior to it and to whom it is subservient. It considers him perfect, either because the respect it has for him impresses it, or because it erroneously assumes that its own subservience to him is not due to the nature of defeat but to the perfection of the victor. If that erroneous assumption fixes itself in the soul, it becomes a firm belief. The soul, then, adopts all the manners of the victor and assimilates itself to him. This, then, is imitation.”
Jamaluddin al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh (Thought Reform)
As a small digression, Jamaluddin al-Afghani (d. 1897) – the first Muslim reformer who attempted to face head-on the problems of Europe and modernisation – knew that the successes of Europe were due to knowledge and its proper application, and the weakness of the Muslim states was due to ignorance. It was also his conviction that it was becoming inevitable for Muslims to learn the useful arts of Europe. “But for him the urgent question was, how could they be learnt? They could not be acquired simply by imitation; behind them lay a whole way of thought and – more important still – a system of social morality.”
Obviously, al-Afghani did not speak about Islam as a mere religion and Muslims as mere followers of that religion. Rather, he spoke about Islam as a civilisation and Muslims as intended civilisation-makers. The idea of civilisation (as comprehended in the Western context) was one of the seminal ideas of the 18th and 19th-century Europe, and it was through al-Afghani, primarily, that it as such reached the Islamic world.
In passing, the first known use of the word “civilisation” in French was in 1757 by Victor de Riquety Marquis de Mirabeau, a French economist, and the first use in English was in 1767 by Adam Ferguson, a Scottish philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment, in his influential book “the History of Civil Society”.
Al-Afghani’s most prominent student and one of the most prominent Muslim reformers in general, Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), shared his teacher’s beliefs. He is said to have lectured on Islamic ethics based on the philosophy of Ibn Miskawayh, on European civilisation based on the Arabic translation of Francois Guizot’s book “History of Civilisation in Europe”, and on Islamic civilisation based on Ibn Khaldun’s “The Muqaddimah”.
Indeed, the choice of Muhammad Abduh’s themes and references shows the direction in which his mind was moving. There could be no proper understanding of the concept and essence of Islamic civilisation without understanding Islamic ethics (and by extension the Islamic worldview) and its relationship with the former; nor could there be a proper understanding of the existing predicaments afflicting Islamic civilisation, and of a way forward, without properly understanding the gripping phenomenon of Western civilisation and how best to deal with it. When he tried to reform the University of al-Azhar – with mixed results though – Muhammad Abduh wanted to do so in his own intellectual image.
So, therefore, with the military and other technological hardware, cultural, intellectual and ideological “software” made its way to the Ottoman state (the Muslim world) and to the Muslim mind. The more the former was targeted, the more the latter was fed on. Often – additionally – the former was used as an excuse, and justification, for the latter.
The French Revolution and Secularism
With the advent of the French Revolution, a great movement of ideas penetrated the barrier that separated the Muslim from the Western world. A ready welcome among Muslim leaders and thinkers was found. It affected to a greater or lesser degree every layer of Muslim society. “Indeed, the success of Western ideas in the Islamic world in the 19th century is often attributed to the advance of the material might of the West – to the establishment of European economic, political, and eventually, military supremacy in much of the Islamic world.”
However, having been torn apart and suffocated for centuries by the ever broadening rift between the political and religious intellectual leadership, the Islamic world was not as much attracted to the ideas and values of the West per se, as it was to their loose ideological framework of secularism. The French Revolution was “the first great social upheaval in Europe to find intellectual expression in purely non-religious terms.”
The Revolution and its secularism disposition appealed to the increasingly tired and blurred Muslim mind because it was non-Christian, non-religious, and, in many ways, did not mind the inferior presence of religious traditions. It was a new and exciting thing. It offered a hope to the discontented ones and a potential go-around and circumvention to the rest. As if secularism stood for the latest, and perhaps final, phase in the evolution of the rift between the ruling elites – including the fast-growing non-religious intellectual community – and the religious community and its own intellectual leaders. Certainly, secularism denoted the rift’s climax and a point of no return. It was also a compromise of a sort. It was a necessary evil.
Bernard Lewis explains: “Secularism as such has no great attraction for Muslims, but in a Western movement that was non-Christian, even anti-Christian, and whose divorce from Christianity was stressed by its leading exponents, the Muslim world might hope to find the elusive secret of Western power without compromising its own religious beliefs and traditions. During the century or so that followed the first percolation of these new ideas from Europe, the channels of transmission became broader and more numerous, the trickle grew to a river and then to a flood. While Western material culture transformed the structure and aspect of Islamic society, often for the worse, ideas from the West were affecting the very basis of group cohesion, creating new patterns of identity and loyalty, and providing both the objectives and the formulation of new aspirations. These new ideas may be summarised in three words: liberty, equality, and – not fraternity, but what is perhaps its converse, nationality.”
The new ideas were welcome as the war-cries of the struggles against pervasive decadence, domestic despotism and foreign imperialism. They could be employed both by religious and non-religious campaigners. For instance, while many activists with formative nationalist and liberalist tendencies were criticising the progressively impotent and dictatorial Ottoman leadership, government and institutions, al-Afghani, as well, had a low opinion of them, and of all Muslim rulers of his day. “They were not worthy of their position; they cared about nothing except their own pleasures and caprices, and so had fallen easy victims to the guiles and craft of the British (and other Western powers). They had allowed foreign officials, linked with the nation neither by religion nor by race, to insinuate themselves into their counsels.”
In the same vein, Muhammad Abduh believed that the Muslim rulers of his time – above all the Ottoman sultans – were the pillars of “unintelligent conservatism in matters of religion”. To him, Islam was corrupted by its rulers; “intellectual anarchy spread among Muslims under the protection of ignorant rulers.”
The ideals of the French Revolution in particular, and of modernity in general, were thus useful to all reformatory minds in the Muslim world, to some more and to others less. Even the most conservative and radical minds could avail themselves of some of their properties and implications for the greater good. Each political ideology, from nationalism to pan-Islamism, was able to strike a chord. At any rate, it was unlikely that a restless mind – and soul – in the Orient remained unimpressed and unmoved by what was going on in the Occident. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and such was a time to act.
Ideas Calling for Their Institutionalisation and Application
However, organised liberty, freedom from injustice and falseness, and realisation of internal equality and equality between nations (the Western principle of national self-determination) required constitutions, representative governments, the rule of law and newly custom-built institutions and their systems of administration. And these in turn involved new forms of authority, legislation, a new class of lawyers, politicians, scientists and scholars. In short, the entire political, religious, social, cultural and intellectual landscapes needed to change. The roles and scopes of the political, scientific and religious leaderships, and the relationships between them, also needed to be revisited. Together with political and economic reforms, educational reforms, clearly, were needed most.
It was becoming apparent to all that there was more to modernisation than just importing gunnery, military education and training, and the printing press. As a compendium and a total system, it was tantamount to a full westernisation and acculturation. All Muslim protagonists walked down that path and were subject to its fixed laws: the proponents of the status quo towards collapse and insolvency, and the proponents of change towards a new hope and perhaps a new dawn.
So entrenched was the distrust between the political and religious intellectual leadership that neither could trust the other, nor take it as an ally, on the modernisation journey. They went their separate ways, continuously dissociating themselves from each other and trying to undermine each other’s position and progress. When utterly unavoidable, though, theirs was a marriage (partnership) of convenience, which was guided by expediency rather than principle.
As a case in point, the basis of Kemalist religious policy in the newly-formed secular Turkey “was laicism, not irreligion; its purpose was not to destroy Islam, but to disestablish it – to end the power of religion and its exponents in political, social, and cultural affairs, and limit it to matters of belief and worship. In thus reducing Islam to the role of religion in a modern, Western, nation-state, the Kemalists also made some attempt to give their religion a more modern and more national form.”
Thus, sweeping military and economic reforms led to wholesale educational, cultural, religious, social, political and institutional reforms. The efforts spelled a reform of civilisational paradigms and proved too much to handle for any of the incapacitated – and isolated – political, intellectual or religious leaderships. From some ostensibly innocent initiatives and programs, the process grew into a system of monumental proportions.
The Case of Egypt (al-Azhar versus the American University in Cairo)
For illustrative purposes, it is said about the modernisation drives in Egypt by Muhammad Ali (d. 1849) – who was an Ottoman wali and the founder of the Muhammad Ali dynasty in Egypt and Sudan – that they were military, political and cultural in character. Their principal aim was to consolidate his own position, and in so doing, “he laid the foundations for the development of modern Egyptian culture.” “The principal cultural innovations of Muhammad Ali’s reign lay in the sphere of education. This was a two-way process. On the one hand, foreign teachers (at first Italian, later mainly French) were imported to train the administrators and officers needed to run his new Egypt. At the same time, Egyptian students were dispatched to study in France and Italy. On their return, they were often required to translate the textbooks they had studied. In 1828 the Egyptian official newspaper, al-Waqa’i’ al-Misriyya, was founded, and in 1835 new impetus was given to the translation movement with the founding of the school of languages… (As a result, in the course of the reigns of Muhammad Ali’s successors) the number of European-run schools increased; Catholic missions set up orders in Egypt; the state school system was revitalised, to incorporate for the first time a clear distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘military’ establishments.”
Needless to say that the traditional educational institutions, headed by the University of al-Azhar, were becoming outdated and obsolete by the day. They were throwbacks to medieval times, anachronisms that have outlived their usefulness. As such, they were often a subject of scorn and ridicule. They faced the prospect of complete demise, if they failed to reform themselves in accordance with the new benchmarks.
One of the most important educational institutions in Egypt, which was set up as part of the modernisation crusade, was the American University in Cairo. The University was founded in 1919 by American Mission in Egypt, a Protestant mission sponsored by the United Presbyterian Church of North America. The Mission’s operations in Egypt commenced in 1854.
Basil Mathews, who visited the Muslim world around that time, wrote that in 1926 the high Muslim officials in Egypt preferred to send their sons to the Christian (American) University in Cairo, in spite of the presence of al-Azhar, “the central Moslem university of the world”. The author said that the American University in Cairo was known as a Christian institution, albeit not controversially so. It was a proof of how the most conservative circles of Islam were coming into touch with the progressive teachings of Western science and even of Christianity. The main motive of those officials – all elites – was the desire to give their sons equipment in mind and in character for a career in the world of tomorrow.
While studying in the University, daily chapel (religious service) was required of all students – Muslim and non-Muslim – and two periods of religious (Christian) instruction each week. The approach was “sympathetic” and “humane”. It aimed to equate education with the purpose of life, to instil a sense of responsibility, and to create capacity. Those were the supreme needs of Egyptians and all Muslims. The Muslim students were told: “These are the things which we have found helpful in our own personal lives. We want to tell you about them. You can take them or you can leave them, as you wish.” Basil Mathews concluded that the Muslim students were ready to listen to such Christian teaching.
The mood was all-pervading. The same author said when he visited al-Azhar, “the central intellectual citadel of historic Islam”, he saw a cluster of students grouped on the pavement under the arcade around an atlas open at a double-page map of the world. He also noticed the presence of some French novels of the more lurid order, and that a student was reading a Christian Arabic pamphlet.
To the author, all that was a symbol of the fact that for the first time in history the eyes of the Muslim world are turned, not in arrogant self-content, but with genuine inquisitiveness, upon the life of man all over the earth. It was furthermore a portent of the increasing flow of “the secular and sceptical western mentality into the Mohammedan peoples steeped in tradition and age-long habit”. The youth of Islam were interested not merely in the scientific and economic secretes of the West, but also in its faith.
Kemal Ataturk and Kemalism
When promoting his ultimate secularisation reforms, Kemal Ataturk always had recourse to the civilisation factor. What he did – to him – was in the name of revolution, freedom, truth, new and genuine civilisational progress and cultural refinement. He said that all struggles were “to bring the people of the Turkish Republic into a state of society entirely modern and completely civilised in spirit and form. This is the central pillar of our Revolution, and it is necessary utterly to defeat those mentalities incapable of accepting this truth. Hitherto there have been many of this mentality, rusting and deadening the mind of the nation. In any case, the superstitions dwelling in people’s minds will be completely driven out, for as long as they are not expelled, it will not be possible to bring the light of truth into men’s minds.”
The well-known struggle – yet often bloody fights – in Turkey between “hat”, as a symbol of modernisation and westernisation, and “fez”, as a symbol of tradition and its backwardness, personified the radical changes imposed on the country by the Kemalist modernisation. Basil Mathews, an eyewitness, considered the developments as the new vista of Turkey. In his view, furthermore, the battle between “hat” and “fez” was a crucial battle in the clash of civilisations, which was unfolding everywhere in the Muslim world. It was also a clash of internal standards and models. The victory of “hat” was critical because it evoked heads seething with new ideas and thoughts. “Fez”, on the other hand, had an opposite effect. The change from “fez” to “hat” was the visible index of a cultural and civilisational transformation.
Kemal Ataturk was clear about the matter when he said: “In wearing a head-dress different from the rest of the universe we are held at a distance from them. Look at the Turkish and Moslem world. You will see people who suffer and struggle because they do not conform their thoughts and spirits to the changes that civilisation demands. That is the cause of our backwardness and of the misfortunes that have befallen us. If we have saved ourselves in the space of some years, it is thanks to the transformation of our thinking. We cannot stop. We must always advance. The nation must know that civilisation possesses so great a force that she scorches up and destroys all those confronting her who remain indifferent.”
The Abolition of the Caliphate
In 1924 Kemal Ataturk abolished the caliphate (khilafah) and replaced the Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey, adopting a radical form of secularism (Kemalism or Ataturkism) as a way of life. He did so in the interest of modernisation and westernisation, to the point that he wanted to be more modern and more western than Europeans and westerners themselves.
Kemal Ataturk looked for his models not in the East, but in the West. He was surrounded by likeminded individuals who were mostly agnostic intellectuals educated in Europe. Some yet believed and openly preached that the supreme mistake of the Turkish people was the adoption of Islam which led them “out of the path of progress and civilisation up a cul-de-sac.” Islam and its traditional educational and socio-political institutions were outmoded and impeded progress.
Much has been said about those catastrophic developments, albeit habitually with lots of exaggerations and untruths. The abolition of the caliphate, understandably, stands out. Without attempting to justify in any way the act of the abolition, nor to absolve anybody of any culpability he warrants, Kemal Ataturk but performed euthanasia on the caliphate. In the name of his newly created nationalistic interests, he ended its life to relieve pain and suffering. He took the “life” of the caliphate for reasons of mercy, so as to give “life” to the Republic for reasons of hope and future. He abolished absolute monarchism in favour of a constitutional government.
As a Machiavellian manoeuvre, he tried to save what could be saved of his nation’s wellbeing. The ends were absolutely justifying the means. The caliphate was a soulless body for quite some time, epitomising the soulless and directionless Muslim Ummah. If the Ottoman state was a “sick man of Europe”, the caliphate institution, which was under its guardianship, was correspondingly unwell and was dying. It was on life support.
Certainly, eliminating the caliphate was not – and could not – be a one-man show. Nor could it be a sudden and hasty occurrence. More people than Kemal Ataturk alone, with different degrees of fault and over a span of several centuries, were responsible and should be held accountable. What Kemal Ataturk did signified the apex of a process that started ages ago – perhaps as early as when the caliphate was turned into monarchy at the time of the Umayyad rule. During that extensive and painful process, all the noble thought and philosophy that surrounded the concept and physical reality of the caliphate were extinguished. Kemal Ataturk’s was the final act.
Following in Kemal Ataturk’s footsteps, most other Muslim leaders worldwide adopted nationalism and secularism as their national agendas, thereby pushing their peoples into the abyss of backwardness and confusion. That the Ummah stood at a crossroads at that point of time (the pinnacle of modernisation and westernisation) would be an understatement. Rather, the Ummah was back to square one. It was abandoned and left high and dry. And that was the biggest crime against Islam and Muslims for which Kemal Ataturk and his counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world should be called to account. Abolishing the dysfunctional caliphate was only a part – and an outcome – of a bigger and gloomier picture.***