The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din (1838–97)

Best known as the founder and prime mover of Pan-Islamism in the second half of the 19th century, Afghani was born in Iran and educated in traditional Shi‘i religious schools both in Iran and in the holy centers of Ottoman Iraq. His formal education consisted of Islamic jurisprudence, hadith traditions, and Arabic language, but he was mainly interested in mysticism, philosophy, and theological concepts and schools deemed controversial, if not heretical, by the ‘ulama’ establishment. He was mostly attracted to the ideas of Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, known as Mulla Sadra (1572–1640), the brilliant thinker who attempted to reconcile mysticism and philosophy while satisfying religious fundamental principles, and Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i (1753–1826), the founder of Shaikhism, an important 19th-century speculative Shi‘i school of theology that inspired successive generations of prominent Iranian intellectuals. Afghani was also allegedly sympathetic to Babism, the mid-19th-century revolutionary religious movement, but there is no evidence that he ever adhered to its doctrines.

In his late teens, Afghani fled Iran. His political consciousness was then awakened when he visited British-ruled India at the time of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a revolt that was largely supported by India’s Muslim population. Witnessing the event left its mark on the impressionable youth, and the resultant anti-British sentiment defined his future political career as a champion of Muslim struggle against imperialism. In 1870, Afghani arrived in Istanbul by way of Afghanistan and Arabia. At the university, a lecture in which he praised philosophy and discussed prophecy in Islamic philosophical terms led to his expulsion from the Ottoman capital upon the order of the ‘ulama’. He then went to Cairo, where over the course of eight years he acquired a solid reputation as the most prominent Islamic intellectual and political leader of his time. In fact, his assumed Afghan Sunni identity dates back to this period, spread by his disciples, who most probably simply believed what he had told them. A Sunni identity proved to be an expedient passport for Afghani, one that facilitated an easy move in Arab and Turkish circles. He rallied around him a small but potentially influential group of Egyptian and Syrian intellectuals, including Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida, two important turn-of-the-century Muslim Arab religious reformers. In his lectures and private discussions, he severely criticized traditional Islamic teachings, holding the ‘ulama’ establishment responsible for Muslim intellectual decline. He called for a profound revision of the curriculum of Azhar University so it would include philosophy and science. He likewise directed his relentless assault at the ruling elite, accusing them of corruption, and his political message found eager reception among young Egyptian activists. It was also in Cairo that Afghani joined several British and French Masonic lodges and even attempted to independently establish one. His political intrigues within the Masonic lodges and his anti-British and antigovernment activities, in addition to his teachings declared heretical by the authorities of Azhar University, led to his expulsion from Egypt in 1879. He went back to India, where he stayed until 1882, when he went to Europe.

In Paris, Afghani published, together with fellow political exile Muhammad ‘Abduh, an Arabic journal, al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa (The firmest bond), which became an important organ for a Pan-Islamic, anti-imperialist movement. It promoted religious institutional reforms to help raise a new generation of Muslims who would be aware of the social and political exigencies of modern times. Seeking solutions to the problems resulting from European encroachment in the Muslim world, Afghani revived the old concept of the Islamic community as a sociopolitical entity. He rose in defense of Islam, which the French freethinking writer Ernest Renan denounced as a backward faith, incompatible with science and responsible for Muslim social and intellectual decline. In London, he met Wilfrid Blunt, a pro-Arab amateur politician with important connections to British government officials to whom Afghani was introduced. He also traveled in the Russian Empire for a period of two years, visiting Moscow and the Muslim regions in the Caucasus and Azerbaijan. Back in Iran in 1886 and 1887 and then again at the end of 1889, he rapidly involved himself with the opposition movement, led by some individual members of the ‘ulama’ and wealthy merchants who were rising against government corruption and the sale of national economic assets through a growing number of concessions to foreigners. He also began to organize a mass revolt movement until he was once again forced into exile.

From London and Istanbul, where he spent the last six years of his life, Afghani relentlessly called for the formation in Iran of a united political opposition front composed of members of the ‘ulama’, the merchant class, and the intelligentsia to combat royal tyranny and corruption. He collaborated with other political exiles and religious dissidents at home and abroad to incite the ‘ulama’ to renounce the time-honored tradition of political quietism and lead the opposition movement against the shah’s abuse of power. Two personal letters, one addressed to the leading mujtahid (legist) in Samarra and the other to a prominent mujtahid in Tehran, display Afghani’s ambiguous attitude toward the religious leadership of his time. In both letters, he refers to them in highly exalted terms, acknowledging them as the representatives of the Hidden Imam, divinely appointed to lead the nation and rescue religion from the evildoing of the corrupt shah. He urges them to take action and exercise their power in deposing the “pharaoh” and destroying the “roots of tyranny,” restoring “the creed of divine justice,” and reviving the Islamic government. The entire nation, put under the control of the “party of the ‘ulama’,” would then enjoy divine protection. Thus Afghani forcefully promoted the idea that, during the Imam’s occultation, the mujtahids’ authority overpowers that of the temporal ruler. This idea, doctrinally well founded as it may be, was never before exploited by the ‘ulama’ establishment in either the Safavid or Qajar eras. It was Afghani and his collaborators who first enunciated in explicit terms the religious basis for potential ‘ulama’ claims to political power. Afghani’s letters, while deferential in tone, also sharply criticize the Iranian ‘ulama’’s political acquiescence bordering on servility; he blames their “silence” for the nation’s defenselessness in the hands of foreign powers. Simultaneously flattering and angry and almost threatening, his appeal hardly conceals his manipulative intentions to mobilize the ‘ulama’ for his own political ends.

The attempt to mobilize the religious leadership for a political rebellion was first successfully tested with the campaign to revoke the concession the shah had granted a British company for the curing and sale of Iran’s entire tobacco crop. At the time of the Tobacco Protests (1891–92), Afghani was living abroad, and his own role in the protest was not as prominent as his contemporary and subsequent admirers claimed it to be, but his propaganda and rhetorical skills in staging a mass movement of protest—the first of its kind in modern Iranian history—left a lasting impact. The repeal of the concession marked the peak of Afghani’s career as a revolutionary leader. His Pan-Islamic scheme to forge the political unification of all Muslims under the rule of one Muslim monarch, however, proved to be a failure: he was unable to win the ruler’s confidence in Afghanistan, Egypt, or Iran. In Istanbul, Sultan Abdülhamid II, initially attracted to the idea of assuming the old Islamic title of caliph, granted his royal patronage until he, too, grew suspicious of the entire movement. Afghani was kept under close surveillance until he died of cancer, surrounded by his faithful followers, who were to keep up his spirit of revolt. At home and abroad, his so-called Pan-Islamic society included political malcontents, freethinkers and former Babis, social reformers and revolutionaries, as well as opponents of the current minister in power in Iran.

Afghani failed to influence the ‘ulama’ institutional establishment as he did the activist religious dissidents, who participated in the Tobacco Protests and most subsequent political events. High-ranking mujtahids, including Mirza Muhammad Hasan al-Shirazi, in whose name the fatwa banning the consumption of tobacco was issued in protest against the concession, and Mirza Hasan Ashtiyani, who led the revolt in Tehran, did not lay claim to political authority upon Afghani’s incitement, despite their role in the movement. Threat of prolonged violence in Tehran realigned Ashtiyani with government forces to restore order. On the other hand, Afghani’s reminder of the mujtahids’ doctrinal authority was an expedient tactic to appeal to their support for a short-term goal: to arouse public opinion for a mass movement of popular revolt. Mass appeal, he believed, could be successful only in the name of religion, because rational arguments could only be understood by the few educated individuals. He and Malkum Khan, the Armenian convert to Islam who played a major role in the reformist movement, as well as their respective followers, did not seriously consider establishing a theocracy or even an ‘ulama’-dominated government. His Pan-Islamism, formed with a group of disparate political and religious dissidents, never became a movement with its own organization, program, and leadership. The so-called Pan-Islamist group increasingly turned their attention to social and political causes, joining the lay reform-minded intelligentsia or more radical revolutionaries. They used the mosques and madrasas as effective forums for the dissemination of new ideas.

Inspired by medieval Islamic philosophy and Shaikhism, Afghani turned against the orthodox teachings of religion. In a notorious lecture delivered in Istanbul in 1870, he defined prophecy as a craft nobler than yet similar to any other. However, he judged philosophy to be loftier and universal. He argued that while prophecy is divinely inspired and varies according to times and conditions, philosophy is based on reason and is needed at all times to enlighten humanity. The Prophet is infallible, the philosopher is not, but the philosopher is the torchbearer leading the way out of ignorance. Elsewhere he attacked institutionalized religion for its anti-intellectualism and its stifling effect on scientific and philosophic inquiry. In his famous Answer to Renan, written in Paris, he specifically distinguished Islam from “the manner in which it was propagated in the world” and referred to Islamic science and philosophy as evidence of its past brilliant achievements despite the “heavy yoke” imposed on free investigation by the jurists, the guardians of the holy law. In most of his Persian essays, Afghani relentlessly called for the “renewal” of Muslim societies and culture, urging people to liberate themselves from the “heaviest and most humiliating yokes” imposed upon them by their educators. With the passage of time and his travels to Europe, he also came to denounce the very schools of Islamic philosophy and speculative theology he had earlier admired, although he often relapsed into traditional modes of thinking, attempting to reconcile science, philosophy, and religion in a manner reminiscent of the medieval philosophers. He condemned traditional Islamic thought for ignoring relevant social and political issues. He hailed European science and technology, which he believed to be the source of European world power. Assailing the ‘ulama’ for discouraging the faithful from learning from the non-Muslims, he wrote in one of his essays, “They have not understood that science is that noble thing that has no connection with any nation, and is not distinguished by anything but itself. . . . Men must be related to science, not science to men.” It is this intellectual standing that most defines the legacy of Afghani’s activism. He universalized the concept of ‘ilm by divorcing it from the traditional Islamic conception of it as the knowledge of the divine and related religious disciplines, which does not distinguish the sacred from the profane. In fact, he desacralized the concept of ‘ilm as no Muslim philosopher ever had, laying the ground for the secular reforms undertaken by the next generation of lay intellectuals and educators.

Afghani’s dedication was not to the “philosophic outlook” in the traditional sense, as Muhsin Mahdi, the late scholar of Islamic philosophy, asserted. Far from being a philosopher, Afghani was a social critic and a polemicist who devoted his most vehement critiques to the ‘ulama’ establishment he held responsible for the Muslims’ cultural and political stagnation. Yet, paradoxically, he appealed to them in deference to their religious authority and social status as the guardians of the holy law when he needed them most for his political activities. That may explain in part his tendencies to argue inconsistently and to contradict himself, leading scholars to depict him either as a true believer, a last representative of the Islamic philosophical tradition, an irreligious opportunist, an Islamic deist, or a genuine nationalist rising in defense of the Muslim struggle against European imperialism.