The searing events that culminated in the British invasion cemented a bond between Abduh and Blunt that would span decades. Blunt continued to pound at successive British governments for the follies of imperialism, while Abduh worked within the system established by the British protectorate in Egypt and campaigned tirelessly for educational and legal reform. Both were critics of their respective societies, and in many ways, they were mirror images: Blunt the Englishman who rejected the bombastic self-assurance of imperialism and railed against the hypocrisy of a liberal society ruling an illiberal empire; Abduh the esteemed shaikh who rejected the moribund tradition handed down to him and demanded that his society remember what it had forgotten.
MERCHANTS, MISSIONARIES, AND MISFITS
DURING THE LAST
decades of the nineteenth century, Blunt watched with dismay as the British Empire grew in scope and in arrogance. The old policy of intervention only when absolutely essential gave to way to
intervention everywhere. The reason for the shift was the competition between the states of Europe. An emerging Germany after 1870 had altered the balance cultivated by the Congress of Vienna, and the major powers—England, France, Russia, Germany, Holland, and Italy— rushed to plant their flags on the remaining unclaimed parts of the globe, from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia and the Near East.
The Ottoman Empire continued to play one European state off the next, manipulating the hopes and fears of each of the contenders, but by the early part of the twentieth century, the Balkan provinces had declared their independence, North Africa was directly controlled by either France or England, Arabia was largely autonomous, the Caucasus was under the sway of Russia, and French influence in Syria and Lebanon made even collecting taxes difficult at best. In Africa, France and England nearly came to blows in the Saharan hinterland, while in southern Africa, the Germans tried to gain a symbolic foothold to demonstrate to the world that they too were a global empire. Even the United States, which had traditionally confined its expansionist ambitions to the Western Hemisphere, acquired its own colony in the Philippines at the expense of Spain in 1898.
Blunt was part of a vocal minority who believed that imperialism was not just wreaking havoc on the globe but destroying England and its cherished liberalism. In his eyes, the mores of imperialism were incompatible with the ethics of liberalism, and any country that used brute force to control the destiny of others would soon be incapable of nurturing the values of democracy and liberty in its own citizens. His ideal of mutual respect between cultures clashed with the views of many of his countrymen that Britain was superior not just militarily and economically but morally as well. Because he moved in elite circles, his words were listened to, but rarely heeded. He was the conscience of his class, a reminder to an increasingly self-satisfied imperial elite that power can corrupt.
Blunt was also a member of a select club of Europeans who were drawn to the Arab world and to Islam. The pull of the desert was lost on most of his contemporaries, but not all. The known history of the nineteenth century paints a stark picture of European conquest and disdain for the conquered, but the forgotten history includes a panoply of other reactions and interactions. It may have been the case that few Europeans traveled far from home, that even fewer traveled beyond the continent to
the other shores of the Mediterranean, and that those who did by and large looked down on foreign cultures. But some fell in love, others felt complete, and still others were swept away with awe and respect for the alien societies they encountered. Blunt was one of them; Sir Richard Burton was another.
Burton’s relationship to the Arabs was fraught, but so was his relationship with everyone else. He not only managed to pass as a Muslim in Mecca but provided the romantics back home with a tingling erotic translation of the
Arabian Nights.
Blunt and Burton’s fraternity included not only eccentrics but also members of the elite such as the young Benjamin Disraeli. Descended from a Jewish family and struggling to find his place in English society, Disraeli looked on the Near East and Palestine as a realm of wonder, danger, and promise. Before entering politics, he penned several novels where East met West, and he might have merited a footnote as an author had he not risen to the heights as Queen Victoria’s prime minister. In addition to Disraeli and Burton, the cohort included intrepid travelers such as Gifford Palgrave, Charles Doughty, Lucy Duff-Gordon, and anonymous seekers and misfits who were never comfortable in the parlors of London or Paris but were at home in the souks and oases of the Arab world.
Similar souls could be found in France, though their focus was not just the Near East but also the North African coast stretching from Morocco to Tunisia. Germans and Italians came late to the imperial party, but German universities excelled at producing scholars who could read and translate the classics of Arabic and Persian literature. They studied what Muslim societies had produced during their heyday and parsed the Quran as well as the rich philosophical and cultural heritage that had defined medieval Baghdad and Spain and that, as Abduh so acutely recognized, had begun to fade from memory in the contemporary Muslim world. Often, these “Orientalists,” as they were called, took a condescending attitude toward their subject. The nineteenth-century imbalance between Muslim societies and the West was taken as proof of a fatal flaw in Islam. By carefully analyzing the central texts of Islam, the Orientalists hoped to solve the puzzle of why the Muslim world had fallen so far behind the West.
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The question was perfectly reasonable. It was the same question that reformers in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran asked. And for the most part, the answers suggested by both Westerners and reformers in the Muslim
world were the same: Muslim states, at their height, had encouraged interpretation as well as adaptation of the Quran and hadith to the circumstances of the present. When those societies turned away from inquiry and shunned science in favor of unquestioned acceptance of the authority of the past, they lost touch with the spark that had made them so successful. The result was stagnation. Some Orientalists, like Renan, indicted Islam as a whole, but others drew a distinction between vibrant, classical Islam and what came later. These scholars focused on the conundrum of what went wrong in the Muslim world. While their immediate influence was on a relatively small group of like-minded students, their views were adopted by statesmen and diplomats, who had a more direct impact on the interaction between Western states and the Muslim world. In fact, one of the indirect consequences of Orientalism was the Arab Revolt in 1916, whose celebrated protagonist was T. E. Lawrence, made famous by the American journalist Lowell Thomas as “Lawrence of Arabia.”
The “Orientalist” legacy was more than one of patronizing attitudes and flawed policies. Some scholars went native, and like Blunt became ardent critics of the West and avid defenders of the virtues of Islam and of Muslims. One of the strangest and most colorful of these was the improbably named William Marmaduke Pickthall. He was born in Suffolk, England, in 1875, and attended the famed Harrow school, which he hated. The only consolation of his wretched experience there was the beginning of a lifelong friendship with another student who suffered through its Darwinian rigors, Winston Churchill. Pickthall lost himself in languages but couldn’t find an adequate Arabic teacher, so as soon as he reached eighteen and the end of Harrow, he set off for Port Said on the northern end of the Suez Canal. As it had been for Blunt, it was love at first sight.
Pickthall found a tutor and began reading the
Arabian Nights
in the original. He was enthralled. Recounting how he felt when he read the stories of Harun al-Rashid, he wrote that the old Arabic revealed to him “the daily life of Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Cairo, and the other cities as I found it in the nineteenth century. What struck me, even in its decay and poverty, was the joyousness of that life compared with anything that I had seen in Europe. The people seemed quite independent of our cares of life, our anxious clutching after wealth, our fear of death.” As he traveled through the Near East, he confronted a society that
seemed to him a perfect mix of community and individualism, and that practiced a truer form of democracy than what passed for it in Europe. Where most of his contemporaries saw decadence and decay, he saw personal liberties, freedom from the ominous hand of the state, and genuine piety. After a near-conversion experience in Damascus, he returned to England just as the century was ending, wrote a novel, and became a literary celebrity with his tales of the Orient.
Events in the Ottoman Empire drew Pickthall back. He was appalled when he heard his countrymen railing against the “infidel Turks” during successive wars that were fought between the Ottomans and the newly independent Balkan states before World War I. He was equally disillusioned by the Gallipoli campaign waged by his old schoolmate Churchill against the Ottomans during the war. In 1917, he renounced Christianity and very publicly converted to Islam. He went to India to support Mahatma Gandhi, and then began work on a translation of the Quran, which he published in 1930, a few years before his death. By then, he had become well known in India and throughout the Muslim world as a convert who spoke out against the injustices of European rule and who defended Islam against its many Western critics. Pickthall applauded the honesty and moral purity that he observed in Muslim communities, and was angered by the hypocrisy of the British. The West, he believed, claimed a moral high ground based on the principles of liberty, but then flagrantly violated those principles in the way it governed its empires and treated their people. For Pickthall, it wasn’t Islam that needed reform; it was the West.
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Disenchanted souls like Blunt and Pickthall were not the only ones drawn to the Muslim world. There were also merchants who saw the Near East as a land of opportunity to make a fortune. Many of them were undoubtedly adjuncts to imperialism, interested in exerting control and extracting what they could. Businessmen, however, tended to be indifferent to ethnicity and religion and sought only to cement contracts. Europeans often relied on Christians in the Near East to act as intermediaries, but in other parts of the Muslim world—Algeria and Persia for instance, or northern Nigeria—they partnered with Muslims. Religion almost never intruded on these commercial interactions, and local Muslim merchants did not hesitate to work with European Christian businessmen. If an English aristocrat wanted to buy horses in Egypt, he could find a dozen Egyptian horse traders; if a French concern
wanted carpets from Isfahan, Tabriz, or Van, it had only to demonstrate its willingness to buy in order to find many who wanted to sell.
As Europe became more involved in the Arab and Ottoman world, those regions became more tightly tied to the continental economy. In Lebanon and Syria, the increased influence of France in the second half of the nineteenth century was an economic boon. Textile and silk merchants and manufacturers enjoyed a burst of demand for their products. Beirut became an international center for the cultivation of silk pods and the production of fine silk thread, and the riots of 1860 only hastened the economic integration of the Levant with Europe. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 also led to a long period of economic development. The rewards were unevenly distributed, but the country nonetheless saw the influx of considerable foreign capital. A similar process occurred in the still-independent Ottoman Empire, which late in the century under the autocratic and crafty Sultan Abdul Hamid II courted a rising Germany as a counterweight to France, England, and Russia. German banks worked closely with Ottoman officials to build the Baghdad Railway connecting the provinces of Iraq to central Turkey and Istanbul.
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It wasn’t just Western merchants who ventured forth. In Beirut and in Cairo, American missionaries opened schools that shaped educational life for decades. The school that became the American University in Beirut was founded as the Syrian Protestant College in the 1870s by a group of Presbyterians and Congregationalists under the aegis of the aptly named Daniel Bliss. His missionary impulse was augmented by his zeal to educate. “We do not aim,” Bliss said at the end of his career in 1904, “to make Maronites, or Greeks, or Catholics, or Protestants, or Jews, or Muslims, but we do aim to make perfect men, ideal men, Godlike men, after the model of Jesus against whose moral character no man ever has said or can say aught.” His creed was a liberal Christianity that championed religious freedom, and while he was adamant about the necessity of belief in a higher power, he was indifferent about what form the worship of that higher power took. “We wish every student to be religious,” he proclaimed, but he did not force his students to be religious in any particular way.
The spirit of religious tolerance governed not only the curriculum but the choice of the school’s name. When members of the board of trustees proposed that the name be changed to Beirut Christian University,
Bliss’s successors vetoed the suggestion, on the grounds that using the term “Christian” in the title “seemed to provide unnecessary emphasis on religious differences which might prove unfortunate.” While the school never lost touch with its missionary roots, it always attracted a mix of Jews, Muslims, and Christians to study on the campus. There was occasional friction between them, but the only major complaint of the Jewish and Muslim students was that university officials were less than accommodating about respecting dietary restrictions in the choice of food served at the cafeteria. Even as sectarian tensions increased in the early twentieth century, the American University remained a haven. It set an example for toleration and coexistence that resisted successive waves of conflict in Lebanon but could not withstand the 1975 civil war that engulfed the entire country
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