What if I told you that the Islamic Republic, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda all trace their ideological roots to the same man? And that this man was actually a liberal with little interest in religion? This man turns out to be Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the most fascinating person you have never heard about. Al-Afghani styled himself as the Martin Luther of the Middle East and sought to bring the Muslim world through a period of reformation, encouraging liberal modernization while still preserving the unifying Islamic culture.
Pankaj Mishra breathes life into the story of this remarkable but little known man in From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia." Al-Afghani lived in India in the years after the 1857 mutiny and witnessed the horrific aftermath of the British response, engendering in him a lifelong conception of the British as the natural enemies of the Muslims. Mishra credits him with being “the first major Islamic thinker to use the concepts 'Islam' and 'the West' as violently opposed binaries. In other ways, he was way ahead of his time, participating in popular movements, speaking of Muslim unity and rebellion when political awareness among Muslim masses was still underdeveloped.”
And of the rich collection of Islamic faiths, which tradition did he call his own? Which nation did he speak for? Actually, al-Afghani spoke for the entire Muslim world, or at least attempted to. A cultural chameleon, he would change his country of origin and religious sect to whichever was the most useful depending on his location. At times he claimed to be an Afghani Sunni and at times a Persian Shia; he joined the freemasons in Egypt and finally scrapped the sectarian posing and advocated for Pan-Islamism in the Ottoman Empire. In countries where he clearly had no origin, he still took pains to glorify their cultural traditions, as he did when he spoke to Hindus in India. He would both praise local heritage and achievements, while insisting on the need to modernize and invest in education. Ironically, considering he remains one of the modern era’s foremost Muslim intellectuals, as far as we can tell he wasn’t particularly devout. Mishra claims “his own relationship with religion bordered on the instrumental." Mostly al-Afghani mined the Quran for quotes that would justify whichever reforms he was pushing at the time.
Though al-Afghani advocated for mass education and favored constitutional republics, he generally attempted to push his reforms through ruling elites, rather than the impoverished masses - a move he was to regret later in life. Apparently possessing of significant charisma, al-Afghani would move from country to country in the Middle East and North Africa, ingratiate himself with the rulers, and work to sow the seeds of liberal reforms and anti-imperialism - until he was inevitably kicked out. British intelligence followed him with interest and suspicion as he traveled across the Middle East, stirring up rebellion and denouncing forced Westernization. In each new region al-Afghani found himself close to the throne, and counselled whichever leader held his ear on strategies to resist the imperialists. In Afghanistan he attempted to merge an anti-British alliance between the Amir and the Russian Empire; in Iran he helped lead a public rebellion against the hand-over of the tobacco industry to British merchants; in the Ottoman Empire he encouraged the sultan to become the Caliph of a pan-Islamic world movement against the Europeans. For his repeated efforts he saw exactly zero successful long term rebellions, but his philosophy sowed the seeds for a host of anti-Western movements which were to follow in his death.
Perhaps in an echo of al Afghani’s tendency to switch fluidly between different sects, his legacy and followers have influenced a wide array of modern Islamic movements, from Muhammad Iqbal's early Pakistan, to Saad Zaghlul's Egyptian Wafd and Osama Bin Laden's Wahabbi Al-Qaeda. Indeed, ideologies on both sides of the oppositional Sunni-Shia divide trace their philosophical roots to his teachings, including the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as well as the Iranian Islamic Republic. Given Al-Afghani’s support for united pan-Islamism towards the end of his life, he might have been confused and disappointed to see the nations of the Middle East powerful, but separate and opposed, and still struggling with modernization.
Al-Afghani was also, by the standards of his time and of the modern day, a dedicated liberal. He promoted education and the sciences, spoke out for women’s rights and argued against despotism, dogmatic thinking and religious intolerance. Several of his contemporaries accredit him with being one of the first thinkers to even rationalize and voice the idea that the Quran justified these kind of reforms. Speaking to a journalist towards the end of his life, al Afghani said of his life's work: "I have striven and I will strive . . . for a reform movement . . . where I would like to subsitute law for arbitrariness, justice for tyranny and toleration for fantacism." Today, however, many of the most influential movements which call him their founder are notoriously illiberal .
This legacy may partially be a symptom of al-Afghani’s own conflicting relationship with modernization as tied to Westernization. He would speak of the importance of education but also launch diatribes against the British school system, claiming their history books “are marked by the hands of English self-love, with the pens of conceit and the pencils of deception, and inescapably they do not relate the truth and do not report reality.” He would speak of the importance of political reform but argue forcefully that to mimic the West would be tantamount to sacrificing one’s own vital heritage. He himself held no ill will towards Christians, and Mishra comments that “he spoke of the essential unity of the great monotheistic religions, underlining the fact that what he opposed of the West was not Christian values but its imperialism.” However, given al-Afghani’s repeated insistence that “Islam and the West” were “violently opposed binaries”, it is perhaps not shocking that his hardline intellectual descendants are morally and vocally opposed to Christianity, the religion that comes hand in glove with Western culture. With all these mixed messages, it’s understandable that his followers didn’t necessarily see his constant struggle to carefully tease out the elements of value in the Western system.
Al-Afghani saw Islam both as a powerful tool for political mobilization and also as the ideological bedrock necessary to preserve a stable, unified society. However, his intellectuals descendants have drawn significantly from his emphasis on Islamism and resistance to the West and paid much less attention to his urgings for modernization. This has led to a proliferation of fundamentalist religious groups focused on preserving their culture against a hostile outside world. The current state of the Middle East is a far cry from the unified, egalitarian Islamic societies al-Afghani dreamed of. The strongest clear continuation from his teachings to these modern movements is the powerful strain of anti-Western, anti-imperialism. Indeed, this may be the only similarity.