Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The collective achievement of modernism in the Islamic world consisted of the following elements. (1) Cultural revival. This was an attempt to revive Islamic arts and culture, mainly by referral to what had happened in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Here are a few examples: the practice of hagiography was changed and became much more like modern biography; there developed a tradition of travelogues in the Arab world, which openly marvelled at the prosperity of Europe and America – the gas lamps, the railways and the steamships. The first plays began to appear, in Lebanon in 1847, with an adaptation of a French drama; the first Urdu play was produced in India in 1853 and the first Turkish play was performed in 1859. A new periodical press appeared in the Arab world, with the development of the rotary press (as in Europe). Titles: Liberty, Warning, Interpreter

. Algeria even had a reformist newspaper, The Critic. The critic al-Tahtawi wrote a book about Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, and about Western laws; Namik Kemal, in Turkey, translated Bacon, Condillac, Rousseau and Montesquieu. (2) Constitutionalism. Constitutionalism in this context meant government restricted by law, what we would today call the separation of powers, with elected parliaments rather than government by kings, sheikhs, or tribal leaders. The constitutionalists specifically took a decision to ignore the concept of paradise, and argued that what mattered was equality in this life, here on earth. Constitutionalist proposals were produced, or passed, in Egypt in 1866, in Tunisia in 1861, in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and 1908, in Iran in 1906 and again in 1909. In Afghanistan a modernist movement was suppressed in 1909.⁸¹

People even started to talk of ‘the constitutional countries’. (3) Science and education was the third aspect of modernism. There was a great worry about Darwin, because many Islamic scholars were persuaded by Herbert Spencer’s ideas on social Darwinism and they thought that Muslim societies were old-fashioned and would go under. They therefore urged the adoption of the Western sciences, in particular, which were to be taught in the new schools. There was a new school movement at this time, usul-I jaded, meaning ‘new principles’, which taught religious and secular subjects side-by-side but where the aim, quite clearly, was to replace traditional religious scholars with more modern ones. Sociology became popular among the Islamic modernists; they followed Comte in particular and his view that societies could be divided into three progressive stages: natural, social and political. Afghani took the view that man does not differ from the animals and could be studied like them, arguing that the fittest would survive. Like Marx and like Nietzsche, he thought that, in the end, life was about power. Abduh visited Herbert Spencer, whose book he translated. Most important of all, the modernists argued that laws came from human nature, from the study of the regularities of nature, that that was how God revealed himself, not through the Qurʾan. (4) As was happening in the West in the nineteenth century, with the deconstruction of the Bible (as we would say), so the text of the Qurʾan and hadith came under criticism. Rida was a relentless critic of the hadith

, as a set of texts introduced by later figures which he felt was most to blame for keeping Islam back. So far as the Qurʾan itself was concerned, he argued that its text was only a guidance, not a command. Al-Saykh Tartawi Jawhari (1870–1940) made an exegesis of the Qurʾan in twenty-six volumes, based on modern science. (5) Women. The nineteenth century saw the promotion of girls’ schooling in several Islamic countries, if not everywhere. It saw women’s organisations in Bengal and in Russia. It saw an end to polygamy in India. It saw women’s suffrage in Azerbaijan in 1918 (before France in 1947, and Switzerland even later). In the Lebanon in 1896 and in Tunisia in 1920 there were campaigns for women to be given free access to the professions.

The reader may well ask what became of this modernist movement in the Islamic countries. The short answer is that it flourished until the First World War and then fragmented. Because it falls outside the time-frame of this book, a short summary of what happened between the First World War and the present is given in the notes.⁸²

Both Christianity and Islam came under sustained onslaught in the late nineteenth century. Who is to say, now, which faith resisted these attacks more successfully?

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Modernism and the Discovery of the Unconscious