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 Qur'an so as to make it consistent with parliamentary democracy. The most important message that Namik Kemal had was that not everything is predetermined 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 Darulfunan, 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 Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees). The Encumen-i Danis (Learned Society), not dissimilar to the Academie Francaise, 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 In all there were well over fifty major thinkers of the Islamic world who emerged at this time to campaign for the modernisation of Islam-people such as Qasim Amin of Egypt, Mahmud Tarzi of Afghanistan, Sayyid Khan of India, Achmad Dachlan of Java and Wang Jingshai of China. But the three most influential Islamic modernists, whose names deserve to be more widely known in the West, were: Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, of Iran (1838-1897), Muhammad Abduh, of Egypt (1849-1905), and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935), who was born in Lebanon but spent most of his adult life in
Egypt. Al-Afghani's main message was that European success was basically due to two things, to its science and to its laws, and he said that these were derived from ancient Greece and India. 'There is no end or limit to science,' he said, 'science rules the world.' (This was in1882.) 'There was, is, and will be no ruler in the world but science.' 'The English have reached Afghanistan; the French have seized Tunisia. In reality, this usurpation, aggression and conquest have not come from the French or the English. Rather it is science that everywhere manifests its greatness and power.' Al-Afghani wanted the whole Islamic position to be reconsidered. He argued that 'mind is the motor of historical change' and he said that Islam needed a Reformation. He pilloried the ulama or religious scholars of the day who read the old texts but didn't know the causes of electricity, or the principles of the steam engine. How, he asked, could these people call themselves 'sages'? He likened the ulama to a light with a narrow wick 'that neither lights its surroundings nor gives light to others'. Al-Afghani studied in France and Russia and while he was in Paris he became friendly with Ernest Renan. Al-Afghani specifically said that the religious person was like an ox yoked to a plough, 'yoked to the dogma whose slave he is', and he must walk eternally in the furrow that has been traced for him in advance. He blamed Islam for the ending of Baghdad's golden age, admitting that the theological schools stifled science, and he pleaded for a non-dogmatic philosophy that would encourage scientific inquiry. Muhammad Abduh also studied in Paris, where he produced a famous journal called The Strongest Link , which agitated against imperialism but also called for religious reform.79 Returning to Egypt he became a leading judge and served on the governing body of the al-Azhar mosque-college, one of the most influential bodies of learning in the Arab world. He campaigned for the education of girls and for secular laws, beyond the sharia . He was especially interested in law and politics. Here are some of the things he wrote: 'Human knowledge is in effect a collection of rules about useful benefits, by which people organise the methods of work that lead to those benefits...laws are the basis of activities organised...to produce manifest benefits...the law of each nation corresponds to its level in understanding...It is not possible therefore to apply the law of one group of people to another group who surpass the first in level of understanding...order among the second group will be disturbed...' Politics, he insisted on another occasion, should be determined by circumstances, not by doctrine. Abduh went on to make the case for legal reform in Egypt, for clear simple laws, avoiding what he called the 'ambiguities' of the Qur'an. He referred Egypt to France after the Revolution, which he said went from an absolute monarchy, to a restricted monarchy, to a free republic. He wanted a civil law to govern most of life, agreed by all in a logical manner. In his legal system, there was no mention of the prophet, Islam, the mosque, or religion. Muhammad Rashid Rida attended a school in Lebanon which combined modern and religious education. He spoke several European languages and studied widely among the sciences.80 He was close to Abduh and became his biographer. He too had his own journal, al-Manar ( The Beacon ), which disseminated ideas about reform until his death. Rida's view was that social, political, civic and religious renewal was necessary and ongoing, so that societies could 'ascend the paths of science and knowledge'. 'Humans at all times need the old and the new,' he said. He noted that while the British, French and Germans mostly preferred their own ways of doing things, and thinking, they were open to foreign influences as well. He admitted to being helped by, and liking, men who he deemed heretics. He sounds here a bit like Erasmus but he also recalls Owen Chadwick's point, mentioned earlier, where he said that it was only from about 1860 that Europeans who regarded themselves as Christian could be friendly with non-believers. Most importantly, Rida said that the sharia has little or nothing to say about agriculture, industry and trade-'it is left to the experience of the people'. The state, he says, consists of precisely this-the sciences, arts and industries, financial, administrative and military systems. They are a collective duty in Islam and it is a sin to neglect them. The one rule to remember is 'Necessity permits the impermissible.' The collective achievement of modernism in the Islamic world consisted of the following elements. (1) Cultural revival. This was an attempt to revive Islamic arts and culture, mainly by referral to what had happened in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Here are a few examples: the practice of hagiography was changed and became much more like modern biography; there developed a tradition of travelogues in the Arab world, which openly marvelled at the prosperity of Europe and America-the gas lamps, the railways and the steamships. The first plays began to appear, in Lebanon in 1847, with an adaptation of a