PAN-ISLAMIC AND PAN-ASIAN ideas emerged after the liberal Westernist moment in Ottoman and Japanese reformist thought. Their genesis was closely related to the break in the Asian elite’s perception of the west. The global image of the West changed dramatically during the 1880s following the European scramble to colonize Africa in the aftermath of the British occupation of Egypt. On a global scale, the period from the early 1880s to 1914 was both the peak of European imperial expansion and the formative period of modern social sciences in Europe. Michael Adas describes this period as an era of high imperialism, typified by an “unprecedented closure for the human community and consequently all of the life and lands of the earth.”1 Emphasizing the uniqueness of this period, Hannah Arendt considered the three decades from 1884 to 1914 separate from the nineteenth century, which, for her, “ended with the scramble for Africa and the birth of the Pan-movements”.2 With this categorization, Arendt underlined that the three decades before WWI exhibited a rupture, and even a deviation, from the larger trends of the rest of the nineteenth century.
During these three decades, there was also a tension between the universalist and particularist trends in the center of international society. The Christian and white race aspects of international law and international society, which already existed in the system created by the Vienna Congress, became more noticeable toward the end of the nineteenth century. There was also a contradictory trend to open the Eurocentric international society to non-Western areas to create a “spaceless universalism” of indiscriminate international law.3 The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 was a sign of the universalization of the system. That same year, however, Rudyard Kipling wrote the most succinct and poetic expression of the imperialist ideology, “The White Man’s Burden,” in celebration of the American annexation of the Philippine islands.4
Another conflicting signal about the inclusive norms and the exclusive Christian and racial character of the international society came only three years after the American colonization of the Philippines, when Britain concluded the Anglo-Japanese Alliance with Japan. This alliance symbolized the end of the unequal treatment of Japan by the Western powers and the unprecedented acceptance of a nonwhite nation into the club of white-Christian great powers. Yet, despite Japan’s inclusion into the international society as an equal member, European and American public perceptions of Japan as belonging to the yellow race and thus not equal to the superior Christian and white nations continued, leading to a tension between Japan’s legal status in international law and popular Western perceptions of Japanese racial inferiority.5
The elective affinity between the “formal imperialism” turn in Europe’s relationship with Asia and Africa and the changes in European thought with regard to hierarchies of race, religion, and culture was more than a matter of coincidence and causality. There is continuing debate in scholarship on whether the British Empire had to turn some of its informal colonies into formal ones or if its decisions were partly contingent on their response to the Urabi Revolt in Egypt in 1882. There is a similar debate on the economic and political rationality of the intense inter-European competition for land grabbing in Asia and Africa after the British occupation of Egypt.6 A resolution to these debates is beyond the scope of this book. What is important for the history of anti-Western thought, however, was Asian intellectuals’ perception of the new ethos of race and cultural superiority that celebrated European empires as agents of progress and civilization.
The increasing social and political mobilization of the imperial centers gave ideologies of self-civilizing mission not only a populist national character but also a Christian and racial identity. For Muslim observers, the symbol of the new era in Europe was the prime ministership of William Gladstone in England, who was a popularly elected leader and public opinion maker.7 Gladstone’s hostile remarks about Muslims and Turks reflected both a larger European sentiment about “infidel Muslims” and a more refined European Orientalist discourse on Muslim inferiority.8 Observing the new anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from the top politician in the center of the European international society, Muslim reformists felt they were being pushed away by the very Europe they were trying to emulate. Gladstone’s constant remarks about the uncivility of the Ottoman Muslim elite were sharp contrasts to the way Ottoman diplomats and statesmen were having cordial, encouraging conversations with the leaders of the Concert of Europe such as Metternich and Palmerston about their self-civilizing reforms.9
The new sense of Western self-reflection in relation to the non-Western world implied that no matter the success rate of non-Western reforms, non-Christian and non-white nations would never perfectly fulfill all the required standards of civilization because of defects in their racial makeup, religious dogmatism, or cultural character.10 In that sense, Orientalist and racist discourses in the last quarter of the nineteenth century began to contradict the idea of the universality of European modernity and its civilizing mission. If non-Western societies were permanently relegated to an inferior status in the international hierarchy because of their faith or race, what could be the meaning and ultimate goal of their reforms? Would they have to live, forever, under the tutelage of European masters?
Ottoman intellectuals, like those in other parts of the Islamic world, reassessed their understanding of the relationship between Western civilization and universal modernity in the face of the perceived conflict between the two. The person who brilliantly formulated the Muslim modernist attempt to separate the universality of modernity from the Western experience was Ahmed Midhat Efendi, whose prolific writings on Western and Islamic civilization made him unquestionably the most influential Ottoman intellectual during the high age of imperialism.11 By producing a large corpus on topics such as science and technology, Islamic civilization, the West’s superiority in progress, and Eastern and Western cultures, Midhat Efendi not only confirmed the liberal modernism of the earlier generation and harmonized Islamic identity with the promodernist attitudes but also responded to the dominant European discourse on the inferiority of Muslims. Like many others in his generation, he had to discuss the backwardness of the Muslim world in relation to the West, the conditions of other Eastern civilizations in the face of the Western challenge, and finally the image of Muslims and Easterners in Western public opinion. While offering a moderate position on most of these issues, one that embraced both Islamic identity and the universality of Western civilization, Ahmed Midhat continued to spread the ethos of modernity by praising Western civilization with reference to its material achievements in areas such as city planning, public hygiene, parks and forests, transportation, travel convenience and hotels, youth and sports activities, and other aspects of life. Even Ahmed Midhat’s observations on the norms of socialization, such as hosting and dinner manners, attire, the public role of women, and grooming in Europe were generally positive, although he did not suggest that the Ottomans should necessarily emulate the Europeans in all these social aspects.
In the generation of Ahmed Midhat Efendi, the literature of comparison between Western and Islamic civilizations was important partly because it was the venue for intraintellectual debate on formulating a distinctly modern Muslim identity and redefining the limits and criteria of Ottoman Westernization. In this process, Ahmed Midhat Efendi and many others condemned what they considered to be the perils of over-Westernization among educated Ottomans and the consequent loss of identity and nationality that would create an unbridgeable gap between modern youth and the general population. In one of the most popular Ottoman novels at the end of the nineteenth century, Felatun Bey ile Rakim Efendi (Mr. Felatun and Mr. Rakim), Ahmet Midhat describes the difference between an imitative, cosmetic Westernization, which is ridiculed as superficial, and a preferred model characterized by a relentless effort to hold on to both Ottoman cultural tradition and the principles of the new age. Imitative Westernist Felatun Bey spends his life on the European side of Istanbul gambling and socializing with women while true Muslim modernist Rakim Efendi works diligently and cherishes modern life in a more modest and balanced manner. Rakim Efendi also knows French and is familiar with European civilization, but, in contrast to Felatun Bey with his consumerist decadence, he is presented as a true heir to both the real European and the Ottoman norms of hard work, seriousness, and morality. In his critique, Ahmed Midhat Efendi truly reflected a global climate of opinion. He was inspired by the very similar concerns of Russian intellectuals about the ills of over-Westernization and, around the same time, Japanese intellectuals associated with the group called Seikyôsha (Society of Political Education) also expressed like-minded fears of the erosion of national culture by over-Westernization. Midhat Efendi’s distinction between real universal modernity and superficial Westernization indicated that he wanted to preserve loyalty to the former by warning his readers about the negative impact of the latter.12
The other major concern of Ahmed Midhat Efendi and other reformists in his generation was the European rejection of the potential success of Islamic modernity. After a visit to Europe to attend a congress of European Orientalists, Midhat Efendi personally noted the discomfort of European delegates when he, as an Ottoman participant, spoke to them in good French and dressed in modern attire.13 His critique of Orientalism and European perceptions of Ottoman Muslims showed that his generation was very sensitive about what Europeans thought about them but were not passive disciples of European discourse. As Carter Findley succinctly formulated, the West was “omnipresent” in Muslim modernist thought, but “it was never omnipotent”.14
Overall, however, in the renewed Muslim modernist commitment to both the Western-inspired universal modernity project and Islamic identity, there is no rejection of Western civilization or any conservative anti-Westernism. The Ottomans were highly aware of the different varieties of national modernity in Europe, especially after the German victory over France, and could find no contradiction in emphasizing their cultural and national differences even when they were aspiring to adopt the shared elements of European progress. Theirs was a search for a global modernity that would be in harmony with the multiple traditions of different religions and cultures, at a time when European discourses of Orient and race were trying to limit the achievements and future of modernity only to the Western race and Christian culture. A look at modernist Muslim literature shows that Muslim intellectuals sincerely believed in the universality of modernity.15 There were no fundamentalist Muslims among Ottoman intellectuals of the time. During the age of high imperialism, however, Muslim reformists had to be critical of Western thought and policies in order to ask for equality in international affairs and affirm this very belief in the universality of modernity.
The fact that Japanese intellectuals showed similar intellectual tendencies during the 1890s, despite the sharp contrast in the rate and success of the Ottoman and Japanese modernization processes, indicates that debates on modernity, cultural identity and Western civilization had a global character. Contrary to the failures of the Ottoman reform process, the Japanese reforms were highly successful in creating an efficient centralized government, developing a modern economy, and establishing a strong army. Parallel to these achievements produced by Japanese Westernization, however, the first Meiji generation raised questions about their cultural and racial identity, Japan’s relationship with Western powers, and the limits of Japanese Westernization. These second thoughts about Western civilization and the Westernization process at home should not be seen as a conservative reaction to modernity and a rejection of Japan’s integration into the global community. Rather, they represent a critique of the changing Western attitudes to Japan and the global unevenness of the international order. The so-called Meiji Conservatives of the 1890s were more familiar with Western ideas, and it was they who perceived a greater threat from Western imperialism and Westernization despite the relative rise in Japan’s international standing and military power.16
The first Meiji political novel, Kajin no Kigu (Strange encounters of elegant females), presents the characteristics of the new thinking on the West and Japanese identity. Written by Shiba Shirô (1852–1922) under his pen name Sanshin Tôkai, this novel reflects the universalism and global consciousness of the 1880s seen with the eyes of a world traveler.17 Shiba Shirô studied in the United States, where he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. Although the narrative of his novel relates the encounter of a Japanese student in the United States with two beautiful female characters, the daughters of a Spanish constitutionalist and an Irish patriot, there is no developed romance in the novel. Instead, as the main characters tell their families’ stories of resistance against the oppression of mostly Western governments both at home and abroad, the Japanese student connects them to present a picture of a universal struggle for justice against oppressive Western governments, imperialism, and global inequity. The novel even includes a conversation with the Egyptian nationalist general Urabi about British imperialism and the double standards of European powers. The author’s sympathy for the weak nations of the world is partly related to his anxiety over Japan’s fate in the face of the alarming encroachment of the European powers, but it is also a reflection of his universalist humanism. This work became the most popular novel during the mid-Meiji period, selling so many copies that it earned the reputation of “raising the price of paper” in Japan?18 This popularity is evidence not only of concerns about Japan’s position in the changing world order but of the well-established global sympathies of the educated Japanese public of that time and the emergence of the notion of the shared destiny of non-Western People’s.
It was in the early 1880s that the idea of Asian solidarity found its most eloquent formulation in a book by Tarui Tôkichi, titled Dailô Gappôron (Theory of uniting the great East).19 The first draft of this book, written in 1885, argued for Asian solidarity in the context of the reformist movement in Korea and the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement in Japan. Tarui then completed a rewritten version of the book in 1893, using classical Chinese in an effort to gain wider readership among Koreans and Chinese. Chinese progressive intellectual Liang Qichao wrote a preface in praise of Tarui’s proposal of a federation of the East.20 Tarui later noted with pride that his book sold as many as one hundred thousand copies and was read extensively in Korea and China.21
Tarui’s book advocated cooperation between Japan and Korea accompanied by the modernization of both nations; it cited as an ultimate goal the unification of the two countries, which would herald the era of the revival of East Asia. Invoking both Western thought and classical Confucian learning, Tarui’s vision for the future did not stop at predicting the federation of the East; he went on to argue that with increasing globalization the whole world might be expected to unite in some distant time. Tarui noted that technologies such as electricity and steam power acted to facilitate more interaction among different societies. Estimating that the unification of all states would be achieved within five hundred years, he urged the leaders of East Asia to take a proactive stance toward this inevitable process of globalization for the benefit of their populations. Tarui had great respect for Western thought and quoted John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Robert Owen in his book. His theory was quite different from later, race-based international conflict theories in its optimism about the ability of globalization to bring about world harmony in the future. Until such a state could be achieved, he reasoned further, the East could protect its independence against the strength of the West with its own efforts at unification and cooperation.
Why would a member of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, who opposed the Meiji leadership and asked for more popular participation and a less arbitrary government in Japan, develop a theory of East Asian solidarity? Influence of the appropriation of European geographical knowledge, which divided the world into Europe and Asia, cannot alone explain Tarui’s vision of East Asian unity as a step toward worldwide global unity. There was clearly a consciousness of belonging to a shared Chinese cultural zone, defined by Confucianism and a common writing style, in Tarui’s identification with China and Korea. More important, however, was the influence of the intra-East Asian reformist network, which facilitated encounters of Japanese reformists with Korean and Chinese reformists.
A pan-Asian solidarity association already existed before the publication of Tarvi’s book; as Kôakai (Raise Asia Society) was established by Sone Toshitaro (1847–1910) in 1880. Kôakai was highly successful in attracting members of the reformist groups in China and Korea and in turn influencing their ideas.22 This intra-East Asian interaction among like-minded Chinese, Japanese, and Korean reformists was crucial in the diffusion of the idea of Asian solidarity against Western imperialism or the Russian threat. Similarly intra-Asian interactions and dialogues facilitated by the travel of Buddhist monks and lay intellectuals in Japan, India, Sri Lanka, and other parts of Asia, in addition to their encounters with Europe and America, would help to expand the notion of a shared Asian legacy and anti-Western solidarity to India as well.23
The group of Japanese intellectuals that formed Seikyôsha (Society for Political Education) in 1888 gave anti-Western critiques of Japanese intellectuals additional philosophical grounding by formulating a new global assessment of Westernization, imperialism, and national identity. For them, nationalism contradicted full-scale, holistic Westernism. Seikyôsha writers were not cut off from the Western trends of the time. On the contrary, they evinced a deeper awareness of the complexity of Western thought and politics, recognizing that each European nation, as well as America, had a different cultural legacy and national identity. They were also open to the influences of the growing number of voices in Europe and America admiring the traditional arts and culture of Japan and hoped for their protection despite the need for Western-style reforms. For example, one of the early leaders of Seikyôsha, Miyake Setsurei, studied with Ernest Fenollosa, an American intellectual who urged the Japanese to follow an authentic path rather than a cultural Westernist one. Otherwise, Seikyôsha intellectuals had the same Western intellectual nourishment as their more Westernist colleagues, including a close familiarity with the writings of Herbert Spencer, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Francois Guizot, Henry Buckle, and Thomas Carlyle. Seikyôsha writers, however, aspired to combine Japanese traditions, Buddhism, and Confucianism with the modern Western ideas of parliamentary democracy, industrial development, and social progress. They objected to the prevailing tendency to prefer Western values over Asian ones, espousing instead a formulation of cultural diversity that would produce, through globalization, a universal world civilization. In “Shin-zen-bi Nihonjin” (The Japanese: Truth, goodness, and beauty), a treatise written in 1891, Seikyôsha intellectual Miyake Setsurei noted that the competition among diverse cultural views of truth, beauty, and goodness was necessary to produce the best form of world civilization, not the Westernization of diverse global cultures. While he accepted that the cultures of the Western nations were at the highest stage of civilization, he argued that the cultures of other nations had to be preserved in order to bring the progress of world civilization to higher stages.24
The paradox of Seikyôsha intellectuals’ immersion in European thought and their partly anti-Western formulation of cultural nationalism can best be seen in Miyake Setsurei’s promotion of European philosophy while continuing a harsh critique of Meiji Westernization. His veneration of Kant and Socrates, but not Jesus, together with his elevation of Buddha and Confucius to the status of universal sages, was partly an attempt to decouple the universal West from Christianity and partly an attempt to put Asia, via Buddha and Confucius, into the construction of this universality via the agency of Japan or Japan’s intellectuals.25 Seikyôsha intellectuals embraced and redefined Japan’s Asian identity in the context of their quest to synthesize national cultural identity with Western-style reform. They established an “Oriental Society” (Tôho kyôkai) to raise awareness of the greatness and legacy of Asian civilization in order to counter the adulation of Western civilization.
Around the same period, Japanese historians had to rethink and reformulate Japan’s position in Asia and the position of Asia in world history to offer an alternative to the Eurocentric vision of world history, a vision that relegated Japanese national identity to a marginal and insignificant position. A revised view of world history was crucial for the Seikyôsha group to explain what had gone wrong in Japan and Asia at large that made these regions become or stay backward and what made Europe more advanced. In developing this Japanese view of world history, the emphasis was on the historical relativity of the rise and decline of several world civilizations. It was noted that the Arabic, Indo-Egyptian, and Mongolian civilizations were the most advanced in the world previous to the European civilization. This meant that European superiority was not intrinsic to European culture, race, or even geography, although a set of contingent factors made Europe the most advanced civilization in the world during the nineteenth century. According to these thinkers, Japan always knew how to select and assimilate the best among the diverse world civilizations, and it should still have been able to adopt the elements of the highest level of civilization without loosing its cultural and national sense of self.
Although both Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals offered similar critiques of Orientalism, a Eurocentric view of world history, and racism, there were peculiarities in the way they formulated their visions of a universal modernity inclusive of their own traditions and cultural identities. One major characteristic of the predominantly Islamic discourse of modernity was its insistence on the essential compatibility between the fundamental teachings of Islam and the qualities of universal progress and science. In order to understand the genesis of this predominant Muslim interpretation of modernity, one must look at the politics and legacy of the Muslim intellectual responses to Eurocentric thought and Orientalism. The best historical laboratory for this examination can be found in the now-classical statement of Orientalist arguments on Islam by Ernest Renan in 1883 and the various Muslim refutations of Renan’s ideas in the following two decades.
THE MUSLIM WORLD AS AN INFERIOR SEMITIC RACE: ERNEST RENAN AND HIS MUSLIM CRITICS
The representative statement of the imperial discourses of Orientalism and race that excluded Muslims from the universality of progress and civilization was a speech entitled “Islam and Science” that Ernest Renan delivered at the Sorbonne in 1883. Renan did little more than express the European notions of Islam’s religious dogmatism, which he defined as the biggest obstacle to the progress of science in Muslim societies. He also added Aryan race theory to an explanation of Islamic backwardness to emphasize further the eternal incompatibility between the Semitic and Turco-Mongolian races (most of whom were Muslim at that time) and the production of modern science. In that sense, Renan linked the discourses on inferior races, whether Semitic-Jewish or colored, with Orientalist notions of the inferiority of Islam with regard to Christianity. Renan also championed a reinterpretation of the secular Christian culture of Europe as an Aryan culture and a refashioning of Jesus as a non-Semitic figure. Renan’s intellectual output was thus a representative synthesis of imperial era discourses of race and Orient that would render Muslim reformists’ dream of becoming members of the Eurocentric world order impossible.26
From the moment of the publication of Renan’s “Islam and Science” in the Journal des Débats on March 30, 1883, Muslim students in Paris were infuriated by the speech’s arguments, criticizing Renan for advocating misjudgments and fallacies about Muslims.27 During the following years and even decades, several Muslim intellectuals from Russia, Ottoman lands, Egypt, and India wrote direct refutations or responses to Renan’s claims.28 Despite the obvious contradictions, weaknesses, and errors in Renan’s thesis, his arguments became a transnational topic of discussion in the Muslim world and beyond, and ultimately earning a permanent focus in modern Islamic thought.29
Renan’s reputation as a prominent secular European intellectual of the late nineteenth century cannot alone explain this intense Muslim response to his ideas on the history of Islamic science. Muslims took these arguments seriously because Renan’s thesis about the history of Islamic science was seen as a symbol of a larger European justification for Europe’s racial superiority of white and “Aryan” Christians over Semitic Muslims as a way to justify its imperial “civilizing mission” in the Muslim world. Therefore, Muslim refutations of Renan were intimately related to their discontent with European hegemony and their alternative visions of world order.
Renan’s credentials as a famous secular European intellectual who nevertheless was proud of his Christian cultural legacy meant that he was not seen as part of the missionary campaign against Islam, a fact that contributed to the appeal of his ideas. Ernest Renan was born in France on February 28, 1823, and studied theology, philosophy, and Oriental languages, publishing his dissertation on Averroes and Averroism in 1852. Renan became a controversial yet influential European intellectual for his secular critiques of Christianity and the church. He was no marginal Orientalist whose reputation relied solely on his knowledge of the languages and cultures of the exotic, distant East. On the contrary, Renan was at the center of mainstream European intellectual life, and even today he is known more for his ideas on nationalism than for his reflections on Islamic civilization.
Ernest Renan’s anti-Islamic comments, at their core, were no different from the widespread antireligious ideas of scientism and positivism predominant in Europe. He argued that Muslims could never reach the level of the European civilization while remaining loyal to their culture, religion, or even ethnicity.30 He suggested that only by denying their religious dogmatism and getting rid of the influence of Islam could Muslims come to terms with rationality and science-based European modernity.
What made Renan’s ideas different from the frequent anti-Muslim writings in the European media was their precise attack on the historical consciousness of optimist Muslim modernists, who saw their own history as part of the history of European civilization and progress. If Muslims had once achieved a golden age in science and technology, Muslim reformism believed, there was no reason why they could not reach similar achievements in scientific progress in the right circumstances. Muslim achievements in science in the first five centuries of Islamic history, at the time when their religious zeal was strong, gave encouragement to Islamic modernists from Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani to Namik Kemal that Islam and modern civilization were already compatible and supported their view that the argument of a conflict between science and religion was relevant only for Christian societies, not for Muslims (the debates on the conflict between science and religion were just intensifying in Europe as a result of the impact of Darwin’s book on evolution). Furthermore, Muslim reformists saw the Christian legacy of Europe not as a disadvantage but rather as an advantage for Muslim reforms, since both Muslims and Christians had shared cultural and religious characteristics. If Christians could be civilized, there was no reason Muslims could not.
Renan was familiar with this optimistic Muslim reformism as well as with understanding how it was related to the pan-Islamic variety of anti-imperialism before he made his speech. In fact, initially, it was the European intellectual Renan who was reacting to this optimistic Muslim modernism. He personally met several Muslim reformists in Paris, such as Şinasi and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was in France during 1883–1885. al-Afghani was publishing his pan-Islamic magazine al-Urwa al-Wuthqa (The firmest bond) in Paris between March and October 1884. He was championing both a vision of Islamic modernism and a call for the decolonization of the Muslim world, al-Afghani believed that independence and autonomy from Western colonial rule was a precondition for Muslim revival and for Muslims’ gaining their rightful position on the international scene as equal and respected members. Ernest Renan later commented that al-Afghani’s optimism about the potential success of modernizing reforms in the Muslim world was one of the reasons he gave his speech on the conflict between Islam and science.
What was so disturbing for Renan, and for new Orientalism in general, about the optimistic Muslim reformism and Muslims’ belief in the compatibility of their faith and modern scientific progress? Muslim reformists easily appropriated the Eurocentric view of the history of world civilization with a slight modification that emphasized the contribution of Muslims to this civilization through the inheritance, protection, and transmission of the Hellenistic legacy for modern Europe. The nature of early nineteenth-century European supremacy made it easier for Muslims to accommodate Islam within Eurocentric world history, because the European belief in their own essential superiority was mostly based on the ability of the different races to produce science, technology, and arts. In that sense, it was mostly directed against the natives of new colonies and did not include the People’s of the Middle East.31 Muslim intellectuals could accept that the Caucasian race was unique in terms of its high intellectual capacity and contribution to civilization, as long as they could count the Turks and Arabs as belonging to this superior Caucasian race. Hence some Muslim intellectuals even contended that the black race, “by its very nature and creation, was not capable of grasping the issues of science and philosophy.”32
Similarly, Muslim modernists did not see Islam as an impending force against the development of science. Even when they read about the conflict between religion and science in European thought, they tended to think that this conflict was peculiar to Christianity or other religions and that Islam would have not shared it. Interestingly, this idea was formulated in the French language by a positivist French thinker, Charles Mismer, who served as a consultant to the Ottoman and Egyptian governments from 1867 onward.33 Mismer devoted the third chapter of this book Soirées de Constantinople to the question of Islam and science, emphasizing Muslim contributions to the development of modern science and predicting the success of Muslim modernization projects in the future.34
Renan did not share Mismer’s conviction about the future success of Muslim modernization. He first declared his general belief that religion in general and Islam in particular were hostile to science and progress. Challenging Muslim modernist beliefs that the golden age of Islam had proved that Islam and science were compatible, Renan argued that the scientific achievements in Islamic history were not “due to Islam” but in fact had occurred” in spite of Islam.” In saying this, Renan was declaring the impossibility of Islamic modernism, as he was specifically attacking the Muslim appropriation of Enlightenment history within a form of Euro-Islamic-centric world history. According to Renan, the historical achievements of Muslims in the sciences did not contradict the science-versus-religion principle, since this success had nothing to do with either Islam or the Arab race.
Renan offered an alternative historical explanation for the past achievements in science and progress in Muslim societies, arguing that the flourishing of science in Islamic history was due either to Iranians, who were Aryan by race, or to Christian Arabs, whose religion carried elements of Aryan culture. Thus Renan cast a pessimist theory that Muslims, as long as they remained Muslims, could never fulfill the “standards of civilization”. More important, Arabs and Turks did not have the capacity to develop science because of the characteristics of their race. The political saliency of this Orientalist argument, which meant that Muslims needed colonial tutelage to overcome their backwardness, explains the response of Muslim reformers.
Renan’s assertions about the Arab and Turkish-Mongolian races being in-capable of scientific progress led him to emphasize that most Islamic science was produced not by Arabs but by the non-Arab Aryan/Iranian race. In this second argument, Renan offered a set of inconsistent claims. The Iranian race could produce science even when they became Muslims, because, as the Aryan race, they could somehow protect their genetic genius from religious fanaticism. Moreover, Christian Arabs, despite the defects in the Arab race, still had the chance to achieve scientific activity and progress, because Christianity was less antirational than Islam. Hence, for the secular rationalist Renan, Christianity would always be superior to Islam in its contribution to modern progress.
Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani wrote the first public response from a Muslim modernist perspective to Renan’s arguments. al-Afghani’s letter sent to Journal des Débats was published within two months of the publication of Renan’s text.35 As the Arabic original of this text does not exist, there has been a controversy as to whether al-Afghani could be the author of some of the remarks conceding the obstacles of all religions, including Islam, to the progress of sciences. Yet, despite its apologetic character, al-Afghani’s response still successfully underlined some of the contradictions in Renan’s arguments. His main focus was rightly on the rejection of the political implications of Renan’s thesis, which al-Afghani summarized by saying “several hundreds of millions of [Muslim] men, . . . would thus be condemned to live in barbarism and ignorance.”36 al-Afghani criticized Renan for not doing full justice to the Arab contributions to the legacy of Hellenistic sciences, which Arabs “developed, extended, clarified, perfected, completed and coordinated with a perfect taste and a rare precision and exactitude.”37 He successfully demonstrated several contradictions in Renan’s claims, especially his assertion that all the great philosophers and scientists in Islamic history, such as Avicenna, Averroes, and Ibn Tufayl, were either Iranian or born into non-Arab races. Finally, even though al-Afghani affirmed Renan’s argument about the conflict between religion and philosophy, he suggested that if Christians could overcome the burden of their faith to advance in modern civilization and science, with time Muslims would be able to do so as well.
Renan wrote a letter to the same journal two months later to respond to al-Afghani. This time, Renan pushed his argument forward, suggesting that only the decline and eradication of Islam from the minds and cultures of Muslims could liberate them from the chains of backwardness. This letter became the last comment by Renan on this issue, and his direct response to al-Afghani remained a rare instance in which a late nineteenth-century European intellectual directly responded to a critique by a Muslim intellectual.
Upon the translation of Renan’s speech into different languages, a large group of Muslim modernists wrote on this issue, all emphasizing the following common points. First, Muslim modernists agreed that the Muslim world was in a grave state of decline and backwardness, yet they argued that the real cause of this was not Islam, which, they all insisted, was not against reason, thinking, progress, science, and technology. Second, they wrote that Muslims had a great civilization in the past and the main inspiration of this golden age was Islam itself. Third, they asserted that it would be a revival of this earlier, progressive Islam, not an abandonment of it, that could again bring Muslims close to progress.38 These Muslim modifications of Eurocentric world history and Orientalism left an indelible mark on the modernist ideals not only of mainstream reformists but also revivalist (salafi) Muslims who merged their advocacy of adaptation to the inevitable path of progress with a call for the revival of the imagined “pure” and “original” Islam. Revivalist modernist Muslims hence conceded some of the arguments of Orientalist literature about the backwardness and decline of contemporary Muslim civilization but interpreted the cause of decline as a deviation from their imagined normative Islam.39 More important, the defense of Islam by modernist Muslims, some of whom were not devout in their daily lives, demonstrates the extent to which Islam and the Muslim world conjured the meanings of race in the age of high imperialism. Similar to the identity of being Jewish, being Muslim was a quasiracial category. It is due to this racial implication that Muslim modernists had to defend Islam against Orientalist critiques of inferiority and backwardness, while conceding a certain level of civilizational backwardness and working for the “revival” of their fellow coreligionists.
The well-established conviction of several generations of Muslim modernists that Islam fosters progress was partly a product of the way refutations to Renan reversed his essentialist argument about Islam’s relationship with science. By reversing Renan’s argument and insisting that Islam fostered the rise of scientific activity, Muslim intellectuals also challenged the Orientalist justifications for Western imperial rule in the Muslim world. The fact that this debate started during the 1880s reveals much about the changing climate of opinion on a global scale regarding the relationship between religious-cultural identity and Eurocentric world order. While Muslim intellectuals in the age of high imperialism were contending with European Orientalism, they also popularized the concept of Islamic civilization as different from Western civilization, a distinction that could not be found in the early Tanzimat era reformist writings. In both the Orientalist and Muslim modernist arguments, the development of science and civilization was assumed to be directly related to the religious beliefs and mentality of a society. Since Renan’s debate, not only the polemics but later even the historical scholarship on this issue were shaped around the issues of whether Islam stifled or fostered progress, in contrast to the earlier generation of Muslim reformists, who approached the issue of scientific progress in the Muslim world on a largely sociological basis.40
This new Muslim reformist discourse did not mean the abandonment of the vision of universal progress in science and technology. In fact, together with the globalization of economic forces, scientific progress was seen as an inevitable factor. Yet what post-Renan Muslim modernists created was a narrative of Islamic civilization, based on the religion of Islam, that was judged to be superior to the Christian faith simply because Islam was claimed to be more conducive to modern rationality and science. The most poignant example of this attitude can be seen in Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s notes to the translation of John William Draper’s book History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. Midhat Efendi agrees with Draper’s argument that Christianity conflicted with the modern sciences. In his commentary to the translation, however, he observed that religious opposition to scientific progress was not an issue for Islam, which, as a proscientific and rational faith, never conflicted with science.41
From the early 1880s on, Muslim modernists tried to attend the Orientalists’ congresses and other intellectual gathering to deliver their messages of dialogue and self-explanation directly to the European intellectuals whose misperceptions they were trying to correct. Ahmed Midhat Efendi’s attendance at the 1889 Orientalist congress in Stockholm facilitated dialogue between him and various European Orientalists.42 Sometimes, the Ottoman state would dispatch a bureaucrat to attend an Orientalist congress in Europe to present a semi-official paper.43 For instance, Numan Kamil Bey went to the tenth Orientalist congress in Geneva in 1894 to read a paper that was later published in the Ottoman language under the title Islamiyet ve Devlet-i Aliyye-i Osmaniye Hakkinda Doğru bir Söz (Several true remarks concerning Islam and the Ottoman state).44 Kamil’s presentation focused on proving the compatibility between Islam and modern civilization, as well as the modern image of the Ottoman caliphate. He first presented a summary of Islamic history with the agenda of refuting the European image that Islam was spread by the force of sword and violent jihad. In his narration of Islamic history, Kamil underlined the civilized behavior of powerful Muslim states toward their Christian adversaries. He describes the conduct of Salahuddin al-Ayyubi (Saladin) toward the defeated European commanders during the Crusades as conforming to both the international law (hukuk-i beyne’l-milel) of the time and the requirements of Islamic principles.45 Kamil devotes a special section to what he calls “the origins of European scholars’ opinions against Islam and the Ottoman state” and identifies Constantin Volney, François-René Chateaubriand, Ernest Renan, and William Gladstone as especially “fallacious” in their ideas in this regard.46 The concluding sentence of this text almost invites European Orientalists to accept the arguments of Muslim modernists by asking them to be “objective” in their responses to the question of whether Islam is the “destroyer of civilization” or a “servant of civilization.”47 Here, Kamil’s thesis on Islam and civilization was partly about the politics of the Ottoman state’s international relations with the European powers according to the diplomacy of the “standard of civilizations.”
The very fact that the Ottoman government sometimes picked a state official, instead of funding a scholar, to give a paper at an Orientalist congress indicates their awareness of the politics of Orientalist literature in Europe.48 More important, various attempts by the Ottoman government and individual Muslim intellectuals to engage with their imagined European public opinion, generally through conversations with European Orientalists, reveal the nature of Muslim-European cooperation and contestation in the formulation of Western images of Islam, as well as modern Muslim images—and critiques—of the imperial era West.
YELLOW VERSUS WHITE PERIL? PAN-ASIAN CRITIQUES AND CONCEPTIONS OF WORLD ORDER
Despite the growing military and economic might of the Japanese state, and sometimes precisely because of it, Japanese ideas of Asian solidarity gained a new anti-Western character. Especially after the international recognition of the rising military power of Japan during the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, some European statesmen viewed Japan as a potential threat to Western colonial interests in East Asia. The German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm encapsulated this negative perception when he purportedly described this rising Japanese power as the “yellow peril” in a conversation with the Russian czar.49 From then on, the term was repeated many times, by both European and Japanese papers. Because of the rising discourse on the yellow peril in Europe and America and the intensity of European competition for colonial hegemony in the world, a growing number of Japanese intellectuals began to be more suspicious of the West and advocated solidarity with China both to avoid the breakdown of that nation and to create solidarity within the yellow race. The gradually rising awareness of a conflict between the yellow and white races that resulted fueled a sense of Japanese identity and a consciousness of belonging to the colored races of Asia in relation to the white race of Euro-America.
The ideal of Asian solidarity was never officially endorsed by the Japanese government. Toward the end of the 1890s, however, even some high-level Meiji bureaucrats began to consider pan-Asianism as a potential alternative to the aggressive policies of Western powers in East Asia. The strong thesis by Prince Konoe Atsumaro (1863–1904) favoring solidarity with China exemplifies the appeal of pan-Asianist ideas among the Japanese political and diplomatic elite. Konoe Atsumaro was a member of the court nobility, carrying the title of prince by birth, and, according to the Japanese constitution of 1889, was a member of the House of Peers, one of the two legislative chambers. Konoe in fact became president of the House of Peers in 1896, after five years of study in Germany. In an article published in Taiyô in 1898, Konoe predicted an inevitable racial struggle in East Asia between the white and yellow races, with both the Chinese and the Japanese siding together as sworn enemies of the whites.50 Konoe expressed concern over the partition of China by the Western powers. Observing the imperialistic activities of the white powers all over the globe, he asked the Japanese to prepare for a future alliance with China against the white race’s attempts to dominate East Asia.51 It is important to note that this concern over a racist and aggressive West was coming from a figure at the top of the Meiji elite who was personally acquainted with the leading political personalities of the Western world. In 1898 Konoe founded Dôbunkai (Common Culture Association), renamed Tôa Dôbunkai after a merger with Tôakai in the same year, an organization with the purpose of studying China and developing cultural policies with an eye toward a long-term alliance between the two nations.
The events in the years following the Sino-Japanese War provided the context for Konoe’s call for racial solidarity in East Asia against the white powers. The intervention by Russia, France, and Germany forced Japan to return the captured Liaotung Peninsula to China in 1895. Only three years later, however, the same territory was leased to Russia, an event that caused uproar in Japanese public opinion at the idea that their nation was receiving second-class treatment in the context of the international standards set by Western powers. Meanwhile, the notion of the “yellow peril” showed its first negative effect on Japan’s relations with America, where anti-Asian racism increased and a movement to stop Japanese immigration arose. One major strand of Japanese response to this “yellow peril” labeling was indignant, triggering the retaliatory coinage of the term “white peril” as a description of Western hegemony in Asia.52
Konoe Atsumaro’s anxiety over dangers from the West was indicative of a paradoxical development. At the same time that Japan was growing stronger through the Meiji reforms, its concern over the Western threat was also increasing. This situation can be attributed to both the emergence of a rivalry between Japan and the expanding Western imperial powers and the political relevance of racial identities. It also typified a long-lasting pattern in which Japan’s relations with East Asia, even under slogans of solidarity with people of the same culture and the same race, were always shaped by the tensions in its relations with the Western powers.
As a practical political response to the perceived threat of Western aggression, Konoe Atsumaro formulated an Asian Monroe Doctrine that reflected elements of both an idealistic mission to protect China on moral grounds and a realistic foreign policy to pursue Japan’s long-term national interest in East Asia. In this Japanese application of the American Monroe Doctrine to the conditions of East Asia, it was maintained that Japan had an interest in any decision regarding the future of China, since geographic proximity and a shared cultural and racial background dictated that the two nations be very closely linked in their political destinies.53 These ideas about an Asian Monroe Doctrine were to have an enduring legacy in the history of Japanese pan-Asianism. The proposal, however, did not alter the general direction of Japan’s foreign policy of cooperation with Western powers over the affairs of East Asia. On the contrary, Japanese diplomacy entered a new phase in 1902, when the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was created, signaling that Japan’s security and foreign policy was officially linked with that of Great Britain and not with its fellow members of the “yellow race” of Asia.
In the context of increasing Japanese power in East Asia after its victory over China in 1895, the expansion of the Japanese Empire first to Taiwan and then to Korea led to several Japan-centered pan-Asianist visions of world order. Once Japan’s world status changed from that of a non-Western nation under the imposition of unequal treaties to that of an ally of the British Empire and an imperialist power in its own right, the meaning of early liberal Asianist ideas in Japan was almost reversed along with the changing context of power relations.54 Thus the legacy of liberal Asianism symbolized by Tarui Tôkichi, Ôi Kentarô, and Miyazaki Tôten could later be utilized to justify the Japanese annexation of Korea.55 It was thus possible that the democratic Asianism advocated by Tarui could be appropriated as a moral justification for Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 by a later generation of Asianists with a different political ideology.56 Similarly, one can observe a shift in focus between the first and last parts of the first Meiji political novel, Kajin no Kigu (Strange encounters of elegant females). As this novel was written in short installments over a period of thirteen years, from 1885 to 1897, its author, Shiba Shirô, had the opportunity to reflect on Japan’s transformation into a colonial power after defeating China in 1895 and seizing Taiwan. Hence Shiba Shirô’s sympathy for oppressed People’s and their anticolonial struggles takes an interesting patriotic turn in the last installments of the novel, where he merges anticolonial resistance to European powers with the Japanese sense of mission as the leader of Asian awakening, meanwhile obscuring Japanese imperial interests. It is one of the main female characters of the novel who encourages the Japanese student not to be pessimistic about the conditions of Western hegemony in Asia, because Japan is reviving its nation and will one day lead the Asian People’s in their struggle against the colonial powers.57
The fact that anti-imperialist visions of world order embodied in early pan-Asianism were sometimes used to advocate Japanese rule over Korea should not, however, be taken as an indication that the Japanese political elite needed Asianism to justify the political process that led to the annexation of Korea in 1910. On the contrary, the progressive image of the civilizing mission of imperialism, combined with a discourse on Japan’s security needs, constituted the official legitimization of the annexation of Korea, while Asianism served as a convenient but not crucial source of corroboration for this process.58
The process of transforming the anti-imperialist and democratic visions of world order in the Asianist ideas of the 1870s into an ideology of Japanese hegemony in East Asia was also symbolized by the relationship between liberal Tarui Tôkichi and ultranationalist Uchida Ryôhei, the founder of Kokuryûkai (Amur River Society). Together with Genyôsha (Black Ocean Society), Kokuryûkai turned the early Meiji ideals of Asian solidarity into a conservative doctrine of Japan-centered pan-Asianism and expansionism. Genyôsha was founded in 1881 by Hiraoka Kôtarô and Tôyama Mitsuru. Hiraoka (1851–1906) was a mine owner and a former samurai who had taken part in the rebellion of Saigô Takamori. Similarly, Tôyama Mitsuru (1855–1944) had links with both Saigô’s samurai rebellion and the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, a political background he shared with Ôi Kentarô and Tarui Tôkichi. The aims that Genyôsha declared for itself were “to revere the imperial family,” “to respect and honor the fatherland,” and “to guard the rights of the people,” yet they mostly focused on protecting and expanding Japanese interests in East Asia.59 In spite of its initial links with the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, Genyôsha soon moved away from liberal ideas, promoting a right-wing political agenda in domestic politics and simultaneously advocating the continental expansion of Japanese power with the supposed moral mission of protecting the security and rights of the Koreans and Chinese. During both the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese wars, the society was involved in intelligence-gathering activities and covert operations. Kokuryûkai was formed by Uchida Ryôhei in 1901 as an offshoot of Genyôsha, with its purpose declared as the expulsion of Russia from the East Asian region up to the boundaries of the Amur River.60
Both Genyôsha and Kokuryûkai, whose members never numbered more than several hundreds, served as support centers for tairiku rônin, the idealistic Japanese adventurers who went to the Asian continent to take part in the Chinese revolution. Many of the tairiku rônin saw their Asianism as being in harmony with Japanese political interest and imperial expansion, but some of them, such as Miyazaki Tôten (1871–1922), did take the side of Asian nationalism against the interest of Japan when the two conflicted.61 Despite their devotion to the cause of Japanese interests in Asia, Kokuryûkai and Genyôsha never came to represent the modern political elite of Japan.62 The network of members of Genyôsha and Kokuryûkai, gathered around the charismatic personality of Tôyama Mitsuru, would often exercise its influence to assist Asian revolutionaries who visited Japan, giving them financial, political, and moral support.63 These two organizations thus successfully fostered ties with nationalists and intellectuals from Asia, such as Sun Yat-sen of China, Emilio Aguinaldo of the Philippines, Resh Behari Bose and Rabindranath Tagore of India, and Abdurreşid İbrahim of Russia. By the end of the Russo-Japanese War, Genyôsha and Kokuryûkai had become symbols not only of conservatism and antiliberal nationalism but also of Japanese expansionism in East Asia in the name of pan-Asian solidarity. They thus represented the alliance between chauvinist nationalism and pan-Asian internationalism.
There were still expressions of a more progressive and nonchauvinistic Asianism. The Asian Solidarity Society, organized in 1907 by Chinese and Indian residents in Tokyo in cooperation with Japanese socialists and liberals, was one example. Its efforts to promote an Asian internationalism independent of the idea of Japanese hegemony in the region proved short-lived, however.64
The pan-Asianist vision of world order was not merely a Japanese invention. It had two major intellectual and political sources, both originating outside of Japan. One was the intellectual trend in Europe and America critical of the materialism and imperialism of Western civilization. The other was the nationalist movements in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia. Both of these sources influenced the Japanese vision of pan-Asianism through the writings of Okakura Tenshin. In the aftermath of the Anglo-Japanese treaty, Okakura Tenshin formulated the most sophisticated and internationalist version of pan-Asianism, critical of both the Anglo-Japanese alliance and Japan’s Westernization.65
The greatest novelty in Okakura Tenshin’s pan-Asianism was his rejection of Meiji era Westernization and the Eurocentric ideal of civilizational progress. He tried to establish the idea that the multiplicity of global civilizations, in which the West and Asia had equal claim to universal truth, had to be protected to save humanity from the excesses of global Westernization. Okakura also symbolized the beginning of the links between Japanese Asianism with both the admirers of Asian civilization in the West and Indian nationalists. He became a well-reputed figure among Asian art collectors in the USA as he worked for the Asian art section of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.66 Meanwhile, he maintained his contacts with the Bengali intellectuals around Rabindranath Tagore. Okakura’s book The Ideals of the East, viewed as a pioneering formulation of Japanese pan-Asianism from its first sentence, “Asia is One,” was completed within a circle of Indian intellectuals in India in 1902.67 It was Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble, 1867–1911), an Irish Theosophist follower of Swami Vivekenanda and later an ardent Indian nationalist, who wrote the introduction to Okakura’s Ideals of the East and placed his work within the framework of both anticolonial nationalism and Asiaphile criticism of Western civilization.68
Okakura could be confident in his call for a return to Asia, as his ideas were strongly inspired by the rising critiques against Western rationalism and materialism in Europe around the turn of the century. The following passage from Okakura Tenshin’s Ideals of the East reveals how closely the notion of a return to Asian cultural traditions was tied to a perception of a larger crisis in European civilization: “Not only to return to our own past ideals, but also to feel and revivify the dormant life of the old Asiatic unity, becomes our mission. The sad problems of Western society turn us to seek a higher solution in Indian religion and Chinese ethics. The very trend of Europe itself, in German philosophy and Russian spirituality, in its latest developments, towards the East, assists us in the recovery of these nations themselves nearer to the stars in the night of their material oblivion.”69
Okakura Tenshin saw the international affairs of the late nineteenth century as a conflict between East and West, taking the opinion that “the glory of Europe is the humiliation of Asia.” He attributed European aggression to the “restless maritime instincts of the Mediterranean and Baltic, born of chase and war, of piracy and pillage” and contrasted it with the “continental contentment of agricultural Asia.”70 To belittle the modern vision of linear progress from barbarism to civilization, Okakura sarcastically noted that Japan used to be considered barbaric when it was an isolated peaceful state; only after the Japanese army began to commit mass killings of enemy soldiers on the battle-fields of Manchuria did it begin to be described as a civilized nation.71 For Okakura, it was not the decadent materialism of the West but rather the virility and energy of its own civilizational legacy that should become the basis of Asia’s political revival and liberation. Okakura urged Asians to prepare themselves for an intellectual confrontation with Western colonialism by reviving their native civilizations.72
Before Okakura Tenshin, others, such as Tarui Tôkichi, Ôi Kentarô, and Uchimura Kanzô (1861–1930), had advocated a Japanese mission to support the liberation and development of Asian societies. In their thinking, however, Asia needed freedom not only from European hegemony but also from Asian tradition and despotism, a goal to be achieved through a process of civilization and enlightenment.73 Okakura’s most original contribution to pan-Asianist thought came through his rejection of a Eurocentric notion of Enlightenment and universal civilization. His Asianism was not based on the identity of the yellow race, of Chinese culture, or of the East Asian region but instead on a notion of Asian civilization. Although the content of this Asian civilization was defined by the universalism of Buddhism and Asian art, Okakura’s anticolonial sensibilities and embrace of Asia as an alternative to the West rendered a metageographical image that sometimes included even the non-Buddhist parts of Asia. Okakura was confident in his view of Asia as a civilization distinct from, but also aesthetically and morally superior to, the civilization of the West. Finally, Okakura clarified the political implications of his view of Asian civilization and his critique of the West by writing anticolonial political essays in support of nationalism in India and other parts of Asia.74
CRESCENT VERSUS CROSS? PAN-ISLAMIC REFLECTIONS ON THE “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS” THESIS
Starting in the late 1880s, Ottoman intellectuals gradually began to perceive international relations as a global conflict between Christian Europe and the Muslim world. In order to overcome the unequal and uneven relationship with the Western powers, Abdulhamid II’s regime had to establish the legitimacy and international recognition of a large Muslim empire ruling over millions of non-Muslim, especially Christian, populations. In that process, the Ottoman sultan continued to appeal to the notions of rights and legality for “civilized” states in the imagined, though Eurocentric, global public sphere.
It was not just the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II who expressed a sense of international isolation and insecurity in the face of the European competition to colonize the whole world.75 Abdulhamid II’s constitutionalist opponents, who were mostly in exile in European cities, also diagnosed international affairs as a dangerous encirclement of Muslim populations by an aggressive Christian West. Despite their admiration for the civilizations of France, England, and Germany, the Young Turk intellectuals condemned the Western powers’ violation of the standards of civilization in international affairs, even while they were trying to achieve a revolution to implement some of the standards of civilization, especially a constitutional regime, in the Ottoman Empire.
The tensions that many Muslims perceived between the universal notions of global modernity and the immoral and imperialist politics of the Eurocentric world order led them to imagine an alternative vision of world order that would be more in harmony with their search for equality in the international sphere. The idea of a transnational solidarity of the Muslim People’s as a way to overcome their subjugation by the Western powers developed in this context as a pragmatic realpolitik option. Muslim modernists initially favored implementing the standards of civilization in a secure international environment based on the normative notions of the rights of states. Yet, against the dynamics of the power politics of imperialism and under the influence of the Darwinian idea that the weak will be eliminated by the powerful unless the weak parties cooperate and protect themselves, pan-Islamism seemed like a necessary defensive idea. Such a response to European aggressiveness was in fact predicted by the European imperial powers, which were aware of the reactions against the contradiction between imperial rule and their own slogans of liberty, civilization, and nationality.
Although the origin of the term “Muslim Unity” goes back to the mid-1870s, the transnational vision of pan-Islamic solidarity as a geopolitical concept belongs to the 1880s. The thesis of Islamic solidarity surged after the Ottoman loss of large territories in the Balkans and Eastern Anatolia in 1878, suggesting that the Ottomans could compensate for the loss of the Christian-majority areas in the Balkans by attracting Muslim-majority lands in South Asia into its orbit of international influence. In 1880 an Indian Muslim, Nusrat Ali Khan, succeeded in convincing Ottoman authorities to provide financial support for a journal, named Peyk-i Islam (Courier of Islam), addressing Indian Muslims from Is-tanbul. Although the British authorities in India did not find Peyk-i Islam dangerous, the British Foreign Office branch and embassy in Istanbul strongly protested its publication and pressured the Ottoman government to close the journal down.76 The occupation of Tunisia by France in 1881 and of Egypt by Britain in 1882 further galvanized the emotional and intellectual attitudes of educated Muslims toward the Eurocentric world order and its legitimizing ideology of the “civilizing mission.” It was during this period of rising Muslim protests over the increasing threat from the West that the great powers began to worry about a pan-Islamic solidarity, and the early articles and discussions on this issue began to emerge.
European newspapers began to refer to the idea of pan-Islamic reaction to Western expansion during the 1880s. In fact, one of the first uses of the term “pan-Islam” can be attributed to Gabriel Charmes, a prolific French journalist, in his description of the Muslim response to the French takeover of Tunisia.77 From then on, numerous visions of pan-Islamism cropped up all over the Muslim world, either in the form of diplomatic cooperation among the Ottoman state, Iran, Afghanistan and other potentially independent Muslim states or in the sense of cultural awakening, economic development, and political solidarity.78 The variety of visions, geographical locations, and diversity of its advocates indicates that no single person or institution can be credited with initiating and developing multiple versions of pan-Islamism. Several dominant characteristics and personalities did come to symbolize the movement, however.
The impact of the invasions of Tunisia and Egypt on the emergence of a global pan-Islamic vision can be seen in the biography of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897). al-Afghani traveled in the larger Muslim world extensively and already had ideas about the necessity for Muslim solidarity against the larger expansion of Western hegemony. It was immediately after the formal British occupation of Egypt that al-Afghani began to publish his pan-Islamic ideas in Paris in the journal he edited together with Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), al-Urwa al-Wuthqa (The firmest bond), a highly influential publication that was distributed throughout the Muslim world. The journal invited all Muslims to overcome their political and theological divisions and establish Muslim unity, “al-Wahda al-Islamiyya,” in order to expel foreign intruders and establish their independence and dignity.79
From the mid-1880s on, several Muslim intellectuals tried to define the nature and content of Islamic solidarity. While European authors perceived it as xenophobic anti-Westernism that the Ottomans could use against British interests, Ottoman and other Muslim writers either denied the existence of any reactionary alliance against the West or defended the idea of Islamic solidarity as a peaceful and defensive method against the common threat of Western domination. For example, in 1881 Ahmet Midhat Efendi (1844–1912) argued in his article in the journal Osmanli that the union of Muslims was not aggressive and was the only way to defend the Muslim world.80 Midhat Efendi’s arguments, inspired by his observations on pan-Slavism, pan-Germanism, and pan-Hellenism, were used in the context of international alliances based on geoculture. From this historical point until the 1908 Ottoman constitutional revolution, many in the Islamic world advocated ideas of pan-Islamic solidarity. Yet the practical projects derived from this vision had to consider the spiritual and political authority of the Ottoman caliph-sultan in Istanbul.
The ambivalence in the relationship between the modern notions of pan-Islamic solidarity and the seat of the caliphate in Istanbul led to a debate on the legitimacy and international influence of the Ottoman caliphate.81 Once the notion of pan-Islamic solidarity emerged as a realistic geopolitical response to the tensions and potentialities in the imperial world order, it was natural that the issue of Ottoman leadership in any pan-Islamic project would raise several crucial political questions. Could the caliphate authority in Istanbul, which was hereditary through the Ottoman dynastic line, be reinterpreted and redesigned to become a power center in the changing global politics? Would the Ottomans be inclined to use the developing sentiments against colonialism and global consciousness regarding Muslim solidarity and cooperation to their advantage in the balance-of-power politics? Would a combination of pan-Islamic sentiments centered on the leadership of the Ottoman caliphate be advantageous or disadvantageous to the interests of the European great powers?
As early as 1873, British intelligence officer George Percy Badger questioned the prestige and legitimacy of the Ottoman caliphate among the Arabs in a report indicating a policy path for the British government in the case of a conflict of interest with the Ottoman caliphate.82 Just three years after the initial British interest in this question, the Ottoman constitution of 1876 declared the sultan to be the caliph of all Muslims. From the European imperial point of view, two policy options were available to counter the increasing symbolic importance of the Ottoman caliphate in the Muslim world. They could either use the Ottoman caliphate for their own interests, or they could try to weaken it by encouraging intellectual and political challenges to the caliphate. These two competing points of view led to an international controversy over the legitimacy and political nature of the Ottoman caliphate. For example, the first book on this issue, written by J. W. Redhouse (1811–1892), a famous British scholar, linguist, lexicographer, and political adviser, was titled A Vindication of the Ottoman Sultan’s Title ‘Caliph’: Showing Its Antiquity, Validity, and Universal Acceptance. It was published in 1877 in London to refute the arguments, popular in the British press and parliament, that the Ottomans had usurped the right to the caliphate.83 In 1882 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) wrote a provocative article on the illegitimacy of the Ottoman caliphate, leading to a series of responses to his ideas in the Muslim world.84 There emerged a group of Muslim Arab intellectuals who doubted the future of the Ottoman caliphate and envisioned a potential Arab caliphate in the aftermath of the Ottoman defeat of Russia.85 Later on, many figures from both the Islamic world and Europe joined this caliphate debate, taking sides for or against the legitimacy of the Ottoman caliph’s fulfilling the requirements of the Islamic caliphate.86
Whatever the position of each participant with regard to the legitimacy of the Ottoman caliphate, they all had two shared assumptions: One was the politicization of the idea of a united caliphate for the Muslim world parallel to the globalization of information and transportation technologies and rising anti-imperialist sentiments in the Muslim world. The second was the recognition of the increasing prestige of the Ottoman caliph. It is in this context that one should evaluate Abdulhamid’s pan-Islamic policy, which reflected more of the international context of the changing nature of the relations between the Muslim world and the Western powers than the sultan’s own personal inclinations. Abdulhamid II refrained from identifying himself with any actively anti-Western ideology or rhetoric, as he believed in the necessity of continuing Westernizing-modernizing reforms without the destabilization threat of a parliament in the multiethnic and multireligious structure of the empire. For example, Abdulhamid II did not want to or could not support the nationalist Urabi revolt in Egypt, a revolt that facilitated the British military intervention in that country. In fact, reluctant to appreciate the nationalist mood of the uprising, Abdulhamid II blamed Urabi for facilitating it and thus serving the British intervention in Egypt.87 Yet, despite his loyalty to the politics of Western-inspired reform in the high age of imperialism, Abdulhamid II also fostered the development of an Istanbul-based unofficial personal network of religious dignitaries and leaders in the Islamic world. Since this personal network was not official, it would not lead to an official diplomatic and military reaction from the Western powers, though it definitely aroused their suspicions.
The peculiarities of the anti-Western critiques and the political appeal of pan-Islamic visions of world order in the age of high imperialism can best be examined through the writings of Young Turk exiles in Europe. As they lived in Europe for a very long period of time and were highly familiar with both European intellectual trends and the network of Muslim and non-Muslim elite’s visiting European cities, the Young Turks had the opportunity to diagnose the global structures of power and ideas. They also had to resolve the tension between their emulation of the universal aspects of Western civilization and their vision of creating a well-recognized, civilized and equal Muslim political entity in the international society. One Ottoman intellectual whose biography best represents the shift to pan-Islamic ideas among disillusioned liberal Ottoman intellectuals in the high age of imperialism was Halil Halid, who wrote a classic book on the question of the conflict between the Christian and Muslim worlds in 1907. In addition to publishing three books in English, Halil Halid wrote numerous letters and opinion pieces in European papers on the question of the relationship between Europe and the Muslim world, clearly indicating his efforts to address the imagined international public opinion and the European intellectuals.88
Halil Halid was born in Ankara in 1869 and went through a madrassa education. In 1894 he left Turkey for Europe partly for fear of arrest in relation to his political opposition to the regime of Abdulhamid II, though he maintained good relations with the Ottoman embassy during his years in England.89 He met the famous Orientalist Elias John Wilkinson Gibb and helped him in the preparation of his book A History of Ottoman Poetry.90 In 1902 Halid was appointed to teach Turkish at the Special Indian Civil Service section of Cambridge University. Later he continued to teach Turkish for the Foreign Service Students Committee and the Board of Oriental Studies and became a member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. In the meantime, he completed a master’s degree at Pembroke College at Cambridge University in the field of politics and law. In 1904–1905 he tried to organize a fund-raiser for the construction of a mosque in London. In that context, he traveled to Egypt and Sudan. In 1905 he participated in the fourteenth Orientalists congress in Algeria. In 1908 he initiated a campaign of popular economic boycott of Austria-Hungary to protest its annexation of Bosnia in that year. He left his teaching job in England in 1911 and returned to Turkey to assume parliamentary and diplomatic posts.91
Halil Halid’s main disillusionment was Europeans’ violation, by their imperialistic and Christian policies in the rest of the world, of the moral ideals that they proclaimed. He viewed European policies directed against the Muslim world as part of a general European imperialism that lacked moral values in its search for economic and material gain. As a solution, he advocated a moderate form of pan-Islamic alliance against European imperialist politics and their modern Christian crusade. His writings on issues relating to an Islamic response to Western hegemony found a large audience in English, Ottoman, Urdu, and Arabic. In them, Halid formulated the general Young Turk critique that European imperialism hid a Christian agenda behind its claim to establishing standards of universal civilization in international affairs.
Halil Halid’s The Crescent Versus the Cross, published in 1907, received approximately sixty reviews and commentaries in the European press.92 The critique of the “civilizing mission” ideology of Europe is the central theme of Halid’s writings. He argued that the constant reference to the civilizing mission of the European powers had lost its appeal and credibility through overuse, abuse, and malpractice. He was sure that this European discourse was just a ruse to intervene in the internal affairs of the Muslims and to violate their national honor and self-rule. He went on to explain two areas where this political discourse of a civilizing mission was utilized in the practice of colonialism. One was the conquest of natives of lower civilizations. Over time, colonized native populations were destroyed completely, while only a small group, unable to resist the lure of European civilization, was allowed to convert to Christianity to be used as servants. Halid cynically notes that if European colonization were limited to only uncivilized areas, no one would have objected. There was, however, a second area where the discourse of civilization was bound to fail because it faced the resistance of people who had their own sophisticated, superior civilization. Halid believed that those who already belonged to a well-established civilization such as Islam, India, or China could never be assimilated like primitive natives. Therefore, France could never achieve in Algeria what Britain had done in Australia.
To counter the politics of the European discourse of civilization, Halil Halid boldly declared that his book contained arguments and essays against the idea of the superiority of the European civilization. He noted that he himself had been a great worshipper-admirer of European civilization at one time, like so many people in Ottoman Turkey. Yet his fourteen years of residence in England, his travels to various European countries, and his position at Cambridge University had taught him that it was wrong to see European civilization as superior to his own in every respect. He hoped that his book would offer some advice and lessons for those who were pessimistic about everything Eastern and who always favored things Western.93 Halid’s purpose in shattering the myth of Western superiority in civilization was clearly more than just comparative cultural analysis. He made his challenge to the ideology of the civilizing mission very explicit. He was especially disturbed by the political language describing the Muslim world as a semicivilized or barbaric civilization that needed European guidance (6). In response to this discourse, he introduced the concepts of “material” and “spiritual-moral” civilizations, a distinction that would serve his challenge to the discourse of civilization of European imperial diplomacy.
Halil Halid devoted special attention to the European Christian biases toward Islam. For him, although Muslims and Christians could have cordial relations and Muslims had no historical enmity toward Christianity, zealot Christians created the issue of the “crescent versus the cross.” He quoted William Muir’s comment that Islam was the only religion resisting and competing with Christian missionaries (27). Similarly, he referred to Gladstone’s characterization of Ottoman Muslims as “anti-human specimen[s] of humanity” as a reflection of this xenophobic anti-Muslim version of Christianity (14). In addition to the general Christian cultural bias of Europe, Halid also emphasized that the failure of missionaries to convert Muslims further fueled their anti-Muslim feelings. In his view, Christianity had many irrational practices and beliefs, something that made it hard to accept for those familiar with Islam (43). Muslims were not only resisting the attempts at Christianizing, they were also becoming more successful than Christian missionaries in attracting new believers (56). Halid believed that the relative success of Islam in converting nonmonotheistic People’s derived from its more humane and rational beliefs, an argument revealing of his anti-Christian emotions (70–81). Continuing his secular defense of Islam against Christianity, he provided a very extensive apology for several aspects of the Muslim tradition that Orientalists had shown to be reasons for the semi-civilized nature of Islam, such as the oppression of Muslim women in Islamic law and the historic practice of slavery. 94 He usually sided with the more liberal segments in the European intellectual spectrum in his polemical writings against Evangelical Christian missionaries and exponents of European imperialism. In his analysis of “English Turcophobia,” he explained the anti-Turkish and anti-Islamic discourse in the British press as a consequence of the British perception of the Ottoman state as the most serious obstacle to its total hegemony over the Muslim world.95
Halil Halid then focused on three main arguments European powers used to legitimize their hegemony in the Muslim world, namely, bringing democracy to an authoritarian society, the elimination of Islam as an obstacle to progress, and facilitating free trade. First, with regard to the European claim to bringing democracy to despotic Muslim regimes, he argued that even if the Ottomans had very civilized and enlightened rulers, this would not be enough to change British Turcophopia, because the Ottoman Turks would still oppose the unfair hegemony of the European powers in the Muslim world. Halid still advocated fighting against oppression in Muslim societies but urged Muslims not let Europeans get rid of local institutions and traditions in the name of higher civilization. He compared a colonized state to a “toothless dog” and indicated his preference for the Abdulhamid II regime over any so-called enlightened colonial rule.
Second, with regard to the Orientalist discourse that Europeans would bring progress to Islamic societies, which had declined because Islam as a religion prevented secular progress, Halil Halid elaborated on evidence from European scholarship about the progressive nature of the Islamic faith in history. He underlined that Islam was never against progress, making reference to the writings of William Draper, a scholar famous for his ideas on the conflict between religion and science and on the positive role Islam played in the progress of Muslim Spain.96 Halid explained the decline of the Islamic civilization by the military might of European alliances, which Ottoman power could not stop. In short, it was the economic rise and military victories of the West that had led to the stagnation of the East.97 The East did not decline because of faith or fatalism. Muslims were not fatalists, but they also would not go around plundering nature and colonizing others.98 Halid also wrote about the compatibility of Islam and modernity with reference to the question of women’s rights and slavery to oppose the “necessity” of a European civilizing mission in these areas.
Third, with regard to the justification of European colonialism as a necessity to create free liberal trade, Halil Halid noted that no Muslim nation had refused to engage in fair free trade with Europe. Hence this could not alone explain colonialism. Historically, Muslims always welcomed European merchants, as could be seen in the history of Ottoman capitulations. In fact, Halid reminds his readers, it was only under the rule of colonialism that trade was no longer free in Muslim lands. European colonialists created a closed and illiberal system in which the British monopolized trade in Egypt and France controlled trade in Algeria and Tunisia to prevent the free activities of merchants from rival nations.99
Halil Halid discusses the question of Pan-Islamism in relation to the political tensions between rising nationalist demands for decolonization and Western attempts to continue their unjust hegemony over the non-Western world. He first attributes Western perceptions of Pan-Islamic unity and the yellow peril in Asia to the West’s attempt to suppress an awakening of Eastern and Muslim nationalism. For Halid, there was only white/Western peril in the world, as Europeans collaborated to colonize Muslim areas and to mobilize world public opinion through the discourse of civilization.100 It is ironic that the response of Ottoman nationalists to the Christian biases of the European powers, in the perceived conflict between the crescent and the cross, was a defense of Islam and the Muslim world through a secular language of Islamic “civilization” and the “natural rights” of Muslims to be free of colonialism. They developed a defensive Muslim internationalism. Especially the Young Turks believed that their ideas of Islamic unity were not a defense of Islam as a religion from a theological point of view but a refutation of the arguments of European fanaticism. For example, Halid rejected the depiction of Pan-Islam as a reactionary conservative xenophobia. He argued that it was Western hegemony itself that was leading to conservative reactions among some Muslims, because there were almost no free Muslims left. He quotes anti-Muslim statements by Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, a French diplomat and politician, as evidence of European aggressiveness: “The role of an officer who should undertake to disintegrate any forces of Islam would be the noblest and most useful that a man can play for his country”.101 The discourse of blaming Muslims for resisting oppressive foreign rule was only good for colonialists, he averred, lamenting the fact that ordinary people in Europe were easily deceived by the discourse of humanity and civilization and thus even good people in Europe were beginning to believe in the threat of Muslim unity.
Halil Halid calls on his European readers to try to understand why some Muslims under colonial rule resorted to armed resistance and had to rebel against their so-called civilized just rule. He notes that the European public did not have the chance to read about the problems of social decay, oppression, and material and spiritual poverty resulting from European colonial rule exercised in the name of civilization. He also offers a comparison of the French, British, Russian, and Dutch colonial regimes in the Muslim world. Though he finds British colonial rule to be a lesser evil in comparison to the other three, because of the absence of settler colonialism, he condemns all of them.102 He finds the British and French support for the Russian and Dutch authorities’ suppression of Muslims a sign of the absolute hypocrisy of Western civilization even within their own discourse of civilization. Similarly, he observes a kind of Pan-European solidarity in the European press’s neglect of news of the sufferings of Muslim immigrants escaping from Russian rule.
The Young Turk exiles in Europe could be very receptive to critiques of the Ottoman regime with regard to the rights and freedoms of its subjects. But they could see no consistency and legitimacy in European attempts to liberate Bulgarians and Armenians when they were depriving Egyptians and Algerians of the same liberties. They concluded that, behind the European discourse of civilization, there was a strong Christian sentiment, a prejudice inherited from medieval times, against the Muslim world. They pessimistically noted that the crusading spirit in the modern form of the civilizing mission ideology and Orientalism were two of the main obstacles to a peaceful and just relationship between the Christian West and the Muslim world. They found it especially intriguing that the majority of British and French politicians, who were themselves not religious, supported missionary attempts to spread Christianity in Islamic lands. They despaired that the contemporary cultural misunderstanding was worse than the medieval one, because it was not due to ignorance but instead derived from deliberate distortion by a group of journalists, politicians, and scholars who were depicting the Muslim world in a certain way to serve their individual and collective Western interests.
Halil Halid’s writings reflect the basic outlines of a critique of the West among Western-educated and modernist Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. He represented the larger trends, partly because he was a key member of the transnational Muslim intellectual networks, extending from Ottoman lands to India, but mostly intersecting in European capitals such as London or Paris. His writings were very much followed, translated into other Muslim languages such as Arabic and Urdu, and, more important, Halil Halid occupied important positions in Ottoman government on his return to Istanbul from exile. His intellectual biography shows that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Western-educated Muslim elite’s were already debating the merits and possibilities of a larger solidarity and unity not only within the Muslim world but also with non-Muslim Asians in order to force European powers to revise and improve the normative and moral principles of the international order.103
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the perception of international relations as a conflict between crescent and cross or as a conflict between the white race and the yellow race became so acute that Muslim and East Asian nationalists searched to create alternative power combinations to protect themselves from the overwhelming might of the Western imperial nations. Ottoman and Japanese elite’s perceived the anti-Muslim statements of British prime minister William Gladstone or the anti-yellow race statements by German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm, as emblematic of the rejection of their liberal reform attempts and evidence of the impossibility of their gaining equality with the Western nations. There was also growing pessimism and frustration stemming from the perception that the Eurocentric world order did not have any moral standards that could regulate conflicts of interest according to fair rules. Many non-Western nationalist intellectuals thus became convinced that each civilization had to gather its own power to balance the perceived unified power of the West, while benefiting from the existing inter-European rivalry as much as possible.
This dominant perception of the world order and its European center led to the formation of alternative universalist visions in the non-Western world both to define a more global form of modernity and to imagine a more inclusive international system. Pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist notions of solidarity were supposed to create the means to attain a new world order in which regional blocks, whether the Islamic world or East Asia, would regain their autonomy and dignity from Western hegemony as equal members of the global commonwealth of modernity. Their critique of the West was mostly limited to the imperialist West identified with the world order, and in fact anti-Westernism in this period continued to make reference to the proclaimed enlightenment values of the West.