French drama; the first Urdu play was produced in India in 1853 and the first Turkish play was performed in 1859. A new periodical press appeared in the Arab world, with the development of the rotary press (as in Europe). Titles: Liberty , Warning , Interpreter . Algeria even had a reformist newspaper, The Critic . The critic al-Tahtawi wrote a book about Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, and about Western laws; Namik Kemal, in Turkey, translated Bacon, Condillac, Rousseau and Montesquieu. (2) Constitutionalism. Constitutionalism in this context meant government restricted by law, what we would today call the separation of powers, with elected parliaments rather than government by kings, sheikhs, or tribal leaders. The constitutionalists specifically took a decision to ignore the concept of paradise, and argued that what mattered was equality in this life, here on earth. Constitutionalist proposals were produced, or passed, in Egypt in 1866, in Tunisia in 1861, in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and 1908, in Iran in 1906 and again in 1909. In Afghanistan a modernist movement was suppressed in 1909.81 People even started to talk of 'the constitutional countries'. (3) Science and education was the third aspect of modernism. There was a great worry about Darwin, because many Islamic scholars were persuaded by Herbert Spencer's ideas on social Darwinism and they thought that Muslim societies were old-fashioned and would go under. They therefore urged the adoption of the Western sciences, in particular, which were to be taught in the new schools. There was a new school movement at this time, usul-I jaded , meaning 'new principles', which taught religious and secular subjects side-by-side but where the aim, quite clearly, was to replace traditional religious scholars with more modern ones. Sociology became popular among the Islamic modernists; they followed Comte in particular and his view that societies could be divided into three progressive stages: natural, social and political. Afghani took the view that man does not differ from the animals and could be studied like them, arguing that the fittest would survive. Like Marx and like Nietzsche, he thought that, in the end, life was about power. Abduh visited Herbert Spencer, whose book he translated. Most important of all, the modernists argued that laws came from human nature, from the study of the regularities of nature, that that was how God revealed himself, not through the Qur'an. (4) As was happening in the West in the nineteenth century, with the deconstruction of the Bible (as we would say), so the text of the Qur'an and hadith came under criticism. Rida was a relentless critic of the hadith , as a set of texts introduced by later figures which he felt was most to blame for keeping Islam back. So far as the Qur'an itself was concerned, he argued that its text was only a guidance, not a command. Al-Saykh Tartawi Jawhari (1870-1940) made an exegesis of the Qur'an in twenty-six volumes, based on modern science. (5) Women. The nineteenth century saw the promotion of girls' schooling in several Islamic countries, if not everywhere. It saw women's organisations in Bengal and in Russia. It saw an end to polygamy in India. It saw women's suffrage in Azerbaijan in 1918 (before France in 1947, and Switzerland even later). In the Lebanon in 1896 and in Tunisia in 1920 there were campaigns for women to be given free access to the professions. The reader may well ask what became of this modernist movement in the Islamic countries. The short answer is that it flourished until the First World War and then fragmented. Because it falls outside the time-frame of this book, a short summary of what happened between the First World War and the present is given in the notes.82 Both Christianity and Islam came under sustained onslaught in the late nineteenth century. Who is to say, now, which faith resisted these attacks more successfully? 36 Modernism and the Discovery of the Unconscious To Chapter 36 Notes and References As a youth Sigmund Freud did not lack for ambition. Though he had a reputation for being a bookworm, his dark eyes and lush dark hair gave him an air of assurance to which the adjective 'charismatic' has been applied.1 He fantasised himself as Hannibal, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, Heinrich Schliemann-the
discoverer of Troy-and even Christopher Columbus. Later in life, after he had made his name, he compared himself less fancifully with Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and Darwin. In his lifetime he was lionised by Andre Breton, Theodore Dreiser and Salvador Dali. Thomas Mann thought he was 'the oracle', though he later changed his mind. In 1938, the United States president, Franklin Roosevelt, took a personal interest in Freud's protection, as a Jew under the Third Reich, and eventually induced the Nazis to let him leave Austria.2 Perhaps no figure in the history of ideas has undergone such revision as Freud-certainly not Darwin, and not even Marx. Just as there is a disparity today between professional historians and the general reading public, concerning the Renaissance and what we might call, for shorthand, the Prenaissance-the period 1050-1250 when the modern world began-so there is a huge gap now between the general public's understanding of Freud, and that of most psychiatric professionals. The first act of revision, as it were, is to remove from Freud any priority he may ever have been credited with in the discovery of the unconscious. Guy Claxton, in his recent history of the unconscious, traces 'unconscious-like' entities to the 'incubation temples' of Asia Minor in 1000 BC where 'spirit release' rituals were common. He says that the Greek idea of the soul implied 'unknown depths', that Pascal, Hobbes and Edgar Allen Poe were just three who had some idea that the self has a double that is mysterious, half-hidden, yet somehow exerts an influence over behaviour and feelings. Poe was by no means isolated. 'It is difficult-or perhaps impossible-to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or medical psychologist-who did not recognise unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.' This is Mark D. Altschule in his Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior (1977). The terms 'psychosis' and 'psychiatric', as we now use them, were introduced by Baron Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806-1849) in Vienna after 1833. Among novelists, the nineteenth century was known as 'our century of nerves', and the word 'neurasthenia' was coined by George Beard in 1858.3 The British philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte says that around 1870 the unconscious was a topic of conversation, not merely for professionals, but for those who wished to show they were cultured. The German writer Friedrich Spielhagen agreed: in a novel he published in 1890, he described a Berlin salon in the 1870s where two topics dominated the conversation-Wagner and the philosophy of the unconscious. But not even this does justice to the extent to which the unconscious, as an idea, had developed in the nineteenth century. For that we need to turn to Henri Ellenberger and his massive, magisterial work, The Discovery of the Unconscious .4 Ellenberger divided his approach into three-what we might call the distal and proximate medical background to psychoanalysis, and the nineteenth-century cultural background. They were equally important. Among the distal causes, he said, were such predecessors as Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who was at times compared to Christopher Columbus, for he was believed to have discovered 'a new world', but in his case an inner world. Mesmer treated people with magnets attached to their bodies, after swallowing a preparation containing iron. After noting how some psychological symptoms varied with the phases of the moon, his aim was to manipulate 'artificial tides' within the human body. The method appeared to remove the symptoms in some instances, at least for several hours. Mesmer believed he had uncovered an 'invisible fluid' in the body, which he could manipulate: this coincided with the discovery of other 'imponderable' fluids, such as phlogiston and electricity, and partly accounts for the intense interest in his innovations, which were built on by the marquis de Puysegur (1751-1825). He developed two techniques known as 'perfect crisis' and 'artificial somnabulism', which appear to have been forms of magnetically-induced hypnotism.5 Jean-Martin Charcot (1835-1893) was perhaps the first proximate precursor of Freud. The greatest neurologist of his time, who treated patients 'from Samarkand to the West Indies', he was the man who made hypnotism respectable when he used it to distinguish hysterical paralysis from organic paralysis. He proved his case by having patients produce paralyses under hypnosis. Subsequently he was able to show that hysterical paralyses often occurred after traumas. He also showed that hysterical memory loss could be recovered under hypnosis. Freud spent four months at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris, studying with Charcot, though doubt has recently been thrown on the Frenchman's work: it now seems that his patients