The dilemma that faced the Vatican at the end of the nineteenth century, the century of Lyell, Darwin, Strauss, Comte, Marx, Spencer, Quetelet, Maxwell and so many others, was that a strategy to keep the still-faithful within the Church could never appeal to those who had already fled the fold – it could only ever be a holding action. In 1903, when Pius X ascended the papal throne, he did so believing that ‘the number of enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly’. He said he was convinced that only believers could be ‘on the side of order and have the power to restore calm in the midst of this upheaval’.74 He therefore took it upon himself to continue Leo’s fight against modernism, and with renewed vigour. In Lamentabili, his decree of 1907, he condemned sixty-five specific propositions of modernism, including the biblical criticisms, and reasserted the doctrine of the principle of the mystery of faith. Yet more books were placed on the Index and candidates for higher orders were obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, in a form of words which required their rejection of modernist ideas. Lamentabili reasserted the role of dogma one more time, in the famous phrase: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’75
Faithful Catholics across the world were grateful for the Vatican’s closely reasoned arguments and its firm stance. By 1907, fundamental discoveries in the sciences were coming quick and fast – the electron, the quantum, the unconscious and, most of all, perhaps, the gene, which explained how Darwin’s natural selection could take place. It was good to have a rock in a turbulent world. Beyond the Catholic Church, however, few people were listening. While the Vatican wrestled with its own modernist crisis, the wider movement in the arts, also known as modernism, marked the final arrival of the post-romantic/post-industrial revolution/post-French Revolution and post-American Civil War sensibility. As Nietzsche had foreseen, the death of God would unleash new forces. ‘Christianity resolved to find that the world was bad and ugly,’ wrote this son of a pastor, ‘and has made it bad and ugly.’ He thought nationalism would be one new force and he was right. But other forces also filled the vacuum that was being created. One of these was Marxist socialism, with its own version of an afterlife, and a second was an allegedly scientific psychology with its own, up-dated version of the soul – Freudianism.
We saw in Chapter 29, on the Oriental renaissance, that the Muslim world’s relationship with the West was chequered, to say the least, a mixture of arrogance that there was little Islam could learn from Europe, later tempered as European achievements filtered across the religious divide. But the gap only really began to close with the retreat of the Ottoman empire, based in Turkey, which culminated in the Crimean War of the 1850s. This proved crucial because that war was the first real alliance in history between Christian and Islamic forces, when Turkey joined together with France and Britain against Russia. As a result of this closer-than-usual co-operation, Muslims discovered that there was a huge amount they could learn and benefit from Europe, not just about weapons and fighting, and medicine, which had always attracted them, but in other walks of life too.
The new attitude surfaced first in Turkey, where, for example, there was a movement known as Tanzimat, or ‘Reform’.76 The country initiated a Supreme Council of Reform and was reorganised along French lines with the sharia being confined to family law alone. Tax farming was replaced by tax collection and the people became ‘subjects’. The key figure here was Namik Kemal (1840–1888), who edited a journal, Freedom, whose aim was freedom to pursue technological achievement, freedom of the press, the separation of powers, equality of all before the law and a reinterpretation of the Qurʾan so as to make it consistent with parliamentary democracy. The most important message that Namik Kemal had was that not everything is pre-determined by God. Ishak Efendi was appointed bashoca of the Imperial School for Military Engineering and in 1834 published his four-volume Mecmua-i Ulum-i Riyaziye, based on foreign sources, which introduced many of the modern sciences to the Muslim world. Twelve years later Kudsi Efendi produced his Asrar al-Malakut, which did its best to reconcile the Copernican system with Islam. In 1839 thirty-six students were selected from the military and engineering schools to study in Paris, London and Vienna and in 1845 a Temporary Council of Education began to consider the idea of ‘educating the public’. The first book of modern chemistry was published in Turkish in 1848 and the first title of modern biology in 1865. Factory-building, along Western lines, began in earnest in the 1860s. A civilian school of medicine was founded in Istanbul in 1867 and two years later registration began for the Darülfünân, or university. It opened for classes in 1874–1875, consisting of schools of letters, law and, instead of science, as originally intended, civil engineering (this latter was based on the French École des Ponts et Chaussées). The Encümen-i Danis (Learned Society), not dissimilar to the Académie Française, was conceived in 1851, a translation council was set up in 1866, the metric system adopted in 1869 and, when Pasteur discovered the rabies vaccine in 1885, the Turks sent a delegation of physicians to Paris to absorb the new information and to confer on the great man a Turkish decoration.77
Overlapping with Namik Kemal in Iran was Malkom Khan (1844–1908), who had been educated in Paris, much influenced by Auguste Comte, and who wrote a Book of Reform, in which he advocated the separation of powers, a secular law and a Bill of Rights. He edited a newspaper Qanun or ‘Law’ in which he proposed two assemblies, a popular assembly and an assembly of the ulama or learned. Again overlapping with both of these was Khayr al-din al-Tunisi (1822–1890), a Tunisian who also studied in Paris, who made a survey of twenty-one European states and their political systems, much as Aristotle did in classical Greece. He argued that it was a mistake for Muslims to reject what others had achieved, simply because they weren’t Muslims, and he recommended the Islamic world should ‘steal the best’ of what Europe had to offer.78