Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (45 page)

In 1895, unfortunately, an Iranian student assassinated King Nasiruddin. The Iranian government immediately blamed Jamaluddin for it and demanded that he be extradited to Iran for punishment. Sultan Hamid refused the demand but he put the great reformer under house arrest. Later that year, Jamaluddin contracted cancer of the mouth and requested that he be allowed to travel to Vienna for medical treatment but the sultan turned him down. Instead, he sent his personal physician over to treat him. The court physician treated Jamaluddin’s cancer by removing his lower jaw. Jamaludd
in-i-Afghan died that year and was buried in Asia Minor. Later his body was transported to Afghanistan for reburial. Wherever he had started out, he certainly ended up in Afghanistan: his grave is situated at the heart of the campus of Kabul University.

It’s interesting to remember that Sayyid Jamaluddin Afghan had no official leadership title or position. He didn’t run a country. He di
dn’t have an army. He had no official position in any government. He never founded a political party or headed up a movement. He had no employees, no subordinates, no one to whom he gave orders. What’s more he didn’t leave behind some body of books or even one book encapsulating a coherent political philosophy, no Islamist
Das Capital.
This man was purely a gadfly, rabble-rouser, and rebel—that’s what he was.

Yet he had a tremendous impact on the Muslim world. How? Through his “disciples.” Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan operated like a prophet, in a way. His charismatic intensity lit sparks everywhere he went. His protégé Mohammed Abduh became the head of Al Azhar University and the top religious scholar in Egypt. He did write books elaborating on and systematizing Jamaluddin’s modernist ideas.

Another of Jamaluddin’s disciples, Zaghlul, did found a political party, the Wafd, which evolved into the nationalist movement for Egyptian independence. Yet another of his disciples was the religious leader in the Sudan who erupted against the British as “the Mahdi.” In Iran, the Tobacco Boycott that he inspired spawned the generation of activists who forged the constitutionalist movement in the twentieth century.

Jamaluddin inspired an Afghan intellectual named Tarzi living in Turkey who returned to Afghanistan and, following in Jamaluddin’s footsteps, tutored Prince Amanullah, Afghanistan’s heir apparent. Tarzi shaped the prince into a modernist king who won full Afghan independence from the British and declared Afghanistan a sovereign nation just twenty-two years after the death of Jamaluddin.

And his students had students. The credo and the message changed as it was handed down. Some strands of it grew more radically political, some grew more nationalist, some more developmentalist—that is, obsessed with developing industry and technology in Muslim countries by whatever means. Mohammed Abduh’s student, the Syrian theologian Rashid Rida, elaborated ways for Islam to serve as the basis for a state. Another of Jamaluddin’s intellectual descendants was Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood; more about him later. In short, the influence of this intense, mercurial fi
gure echoes in every corner of the Muslim world he roamed so restlessly.

 

 

A
BDUL WAHHAB, Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan, and Sayyid Ahmed of Aligarh—each of these men typified a different idea of what went wrong with the Islamic world and how to fix it. Throughout the nineteenth century, numerous permutations of these three currents evolved and spread. Of them all, it was secular modernism, the direction championed by Sayyid Ahmad of Aligarh, that acquired political power most overtly. This is not to say that Sayyid Ahmad fathered some mighty movement himself. He was just one of many secular reformists across the Islamic world who came up with roughly si
milar ideas. What made these ideas so persuasive was a trio of phenomena spilling into the Islamic heartland just then, from Europe: industrialization, constitutionalism, and nationalism.

The most consequential of the three was probably industrialization, the seductions of which affected every part of the world. In Europe, the Industrial Revolution came out of a great flurry of inventions stradd
ling the year 1800 CE, beginning with the steam engine. Often, we speak of great inventions as if they make their own case merely by existing, but in fact, people don’t start building and using a device simply because it’s clever. The technological breakthrough represented by an invention is only one ingredient in its success. The social context is what really determines whether it will “take.”

The steam engine provides a case in point. What could be more useful? What could be more obviously world-changing? Yet the steam engine was invented in the Muslim world over three centuries before it popped up in the West, and in the Muslim world it didn’t change much of anything. The steam engine invented there was used to power a spit so that a whole sheep might be roasted efficiently at a rich man’s banquet. (A description of this device appears in a 1551 book by the Turkish engineer Taqi al-Din.) After the spit, however, no other application for the device occurred to anyone, so it was
forgotten.

Another case in point: the ancient Chinese had all the technology they needed by the tenth century to mechanize production and mass produce goods, but they didn’t use it that way. They used geared machinery to make toys. They used a water-driven turbine to power a big clock. If they had used these technologies to build labor-saving machinery of the type that spawned factories in nineteenth-century Europe, the Industrial Revolution would almost certainly have started in China.

So why didn’t it? Why did these inventions fail to “take” until they were invented in the West? The answer has less to do with the inventions themselves than it does with the social context into which the inventions were born.

When the Chinese invented geared machinery, theirs was an efficient, highly centralized state in which an imperial bureacracy managed the entire society. The main function of this bureacracy aside from record-keeping and defense was to organize public works. The genius of Chinese political culture was its ability to soak up surplus labor with massive construction projects useful to the public good. The first emperor, for example, put about a million people to work building the Great Wall. A later emperor employed even more workers to dig the Grand Canal, which connected the country
’s two major river systems. Yes, China had the technology to build labor-saving machinery, but who was going to build it
? Only the imperial bureacracy had the capacity, and why would it bother to save something it already had too much of? China was overpopulated and labor was cheap. If a lot of laborers were left at loose ends, whose job would it be to deal with the resulting social disruptions? The bureacracy. The one institution capable of industrializing China had no motive to undertake it.

Likewise, Muslim inventors didn’t think of using steam power to make devices that would mass-produce consumer goods, because they lived in a society already overflowing with an abundance of consumer goods, handcrafted by millions of artisans and distributed by efficient trade networks. Besides, the inventors worked for an idle class of elite folks who had all the goods they could consume and whose lot in life did not call upon them to produce—much less mass-produce—anything.

It wasn’t some dysfunction in these societies that generated their indifference to potentially world-changing technologies, quite the opposite. It was something working too well that led them into “a high-level equilibrium trap” (to borrow a phrase from historian Mark Elvin.
¹
) Necessity, it turns out, isn’t really the mother of invention; it’s the mother of the process that turns an invention into a product, and in late-eighteenth-century Europe, that mother was ready.

Steam engines evolved out of steam-powered pumps used by private mine owners to keep their mine shafts free of water. These same mine owners had another business problem they urgently desired to solve: getting their ore as quickly as possible from the mine to a river or seaport, so they could beat their competitors to market. Traditionally, they hauled the ore in horse-drawn carts that rolled along on parallel wooden tracks called tramways. One day, George Stephenson, an illiterate English mining manager, figured out that a steam pump could be bolted to a cart and made to turn the
wheels, with appropriate gearing. The locomotive was born.

England at this point brimmed with private business owners competing to move products and materials to markets ahead of one another. Anyone with access to a railroad could get an edge on all the others, unless they too shipped by train; so everyone started using railroads, whereupon everyone who had the means to build a railroad, did so.

Likewise, after James Watt perfected the steam engine in the late eighteenth century, clever European inventors figured out ho
w to mechanize textile looms. Anyone who possessed a power loom could now outproduce rival cloth makers and drive them out of business—unless the rivals acquired power looms too; so they all did.

But anyone who had the capital to acquire
two
power looms, ten looms, a hundred, could drive out many many many many competitors and grow rich, rich, rich! All the money to be made got clever tinkerers wondering what else could be manufactured by fuel-driven geared machinery. Shoes? Yes. Furniture? Yes. Spoons? Absolutely. In fact, once people got started, they came to find that almost every item in common use could be made by some fuel-driven machine faster, cheaper, and in much greater quantities than by hand. And who wouldn’t want to be a shoe tycoon? Or a spoon tycoon or any
kind of tycoon?

Of course, this process left countless artisans and craftspeople out of work, but this is where nineteenth-century Europe differed from tenth-century China. In Europe, those who had the means to install industrial machinery had no particular responsibility for those whose livelihood would be destroyed by a sudden abundance of cheap, machine-made goods. Nor were the folks they affected downstream their kinfolk or fellow tribesmen, just strangers whom they had never met and would never know by name. What’s more, it was somebody else’s job to deal with the social disruptions caused by widespread
unemployment, not theirs. Going ahead with industrialization didn’t signify some moral flaw in them; it merely reflected the way this particular society was compartmentalized.

The Industrial Revolution could take place only where certain social preconditions existed, and in Europe at that time they happened to exist. The Industrial Revolution also had inevitable social consequences and in Europe, at that point, turning production over to machinery did change societies, daily life, and Europeans themselves. Let us count (some of) the ways:

All these changes generated anxiety, but it was not catastrophic anxiety, because Europeans (and Americans even more) had already evolved a complex of attitudes enabling them to cope, and the core of this complex was individualism, an orientation that had taken centuries to develop in the West.

When Europeans came to the Islamic world, they brought along goods that were the end products of the Industrial Revolution, but not the evolutionary processes that made those goods possible. Muslims wanted the products, of course, as who wouldn’t: the cheap cloth, the machine-made shoes, the packaged dried goods and whatnot, and saw no reason why they should not have them. They could buy and operate any machine the West could make. They could take the machines apart, study how they were built, and make similar machines themselves. Nothing in the manufacturing process lay beyo
nd their comprehension.

But the social underpinnings were a different matter. The preconditions of industrialization could not be instantly imported. The social consequences could not be so easily absorbed in societies structured so differently from those of western Europe.