Nationalism in Asia and Africa

Elie Kedourie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136276200
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Published in the year 1974, Nationalism in Asia and Africa is a valuable contribution to the field of Middle Eastern Studies.

1. REPORT ON THE PRESENT STATE OF CIVILIZATION IN GREECE^*

Adamantios Koraes

If the state of a nation is to be fruitfully observed, it is mainly in the period when this nation degenerates from the virtues of its ancestors, as well as in the period when it is in the process of regeneration. The observer in both cases is placed at a vantage point which, by placing before him the succession of causes which lead to civilization being fostered or destroyed, affords him lessons useful for humanity.

Such causes may be more or less numerous, more or less efficacious, according as the people among whom such a revolution takes place is more or less removed from other civilized nations, more or less favored by climate, more or less advanced in that civilization which it is on the point of losing, or plunged in the barbaric state from which it is striving to emerge. To these considerations, which the observer must take as a guide, one can and one has to add the kind of barbarism in which the people under observation is stagnating. The same causes do not operate with equal force on a people which is advancing for the first time toward civilization, and on one which is striving to find once again the path from which it had long wandered. The steps of the former are more timid; it progresses but hesitantly; whilst the latter advances more rapidly, provided that monuments of its ancient civilization are still in existence and that external causes do not obstruct its progress.

If I limit myself to man’s barbaric or civilized state, if I do not consider him in the savage state, this is because only rarely has the European philosopher been able to reach those remote regions where human reason is still in its cradle, in order to survey the moral infancy of his species; it is also and mainly because in this Report I propose to put before the Société des observateurs de l’homme, not the history of man in general but observations which I have actually made on the present state of my own nation. How happy I would be if I could interest my respected colleagues in the fate of a people which is striving to escape from that barbarism in which various causes have plunged it, and to make them feel that delightful emotion which a philosopher’s soul must experience at the breathtaking sight of man trying to perfect himself.

May I be allowed to tell the Society that it should not feel mistrust toward me because I am Greek. I may have been mistaken in my observations, or rather in the conclusions which I desired to draw from them. But the reason of my mistake must be sought not in my national prejudices but in the weakness of my reasoning powers. Nothing undoubtedly is more natural than to love the nation to which one belongs more than any other. This preference is as far removed from that partiality for cosmopolitanism so much praised by men who are attached to nothing, as true love is from coquetry; but the man who observes only in order to be instructed, and who does not publish his observations except with the purpose of being useful, must above everything else love the truth.

To want to instruct the Society in what Greece was formerly, in what she successively became through the various revolutions to which she was subjected, would be to rehearse facts which are familiar to it, which are familiar to any man with a good upbringing. The last of these revolutions, dating four centuries back, has plunged her in a state of lethargy similar to that in which Europe was plunged before the Literary Renaissance. Very rarely did she give some faint sign of life: from time to time some men of learning would appear among the nation paying her a tribute of excessive admiration; but, heedless of their voice as of their example, the nation would let them pass on, without reaping from them any advantage; just as during the terror of a dark night one is dazzled rather than illuminated by the meteors which from time to time travel across the vault of the sky.

I will not be asked what, during that unhappy interval, were the moral and religious ideas of the Greeks. Ignorance, daughter of tyranny, is always accompanied by superstition, and superstition insensibly leads to depraved habits. It is useless to seek for virtue in a society which is not ruled by wise and just laws. If a virtuous man happens to be born in such a society, he must be considered, as Socrates said,¹ to be a gift of heaven rather than the handiwork of education.

It is, however, true to say that among European travelers there are some who, not having seen Greece, apparently convinced that in order to know a nation it is unnecessary to move from one’s own study, and wishing to give a picture of the degeneration of the modern Greeks, have merely painted a caricature. They did not want to see among the Greeks but what has always been seen among all enslaved peoples; what in fact is seen today among many nations who are not nearly as arbitrarily governed as the Greeks of the present time. These observers, by means of a reckoning which does honor neither to their judgment nor to their heart, have charged the present generation of Greeks with the accumulated vices and errors of all the preceding generations from the day when Greece lost its freedom. These observers have not seen, or have not wanted to see, that the Greeks of today have been the victims of crimes of which they were not the authors. Peoples who have reached such a stage are like unhappy individuals born from parents whom debauchery had exhausted: all that they may be justly reproached with, is not following a contrary mode of life, the only one which can save them from their family’s vices; and we shall see by and by that the modern Greeks try to avoid such a reproach. They are infinitely more culpable, those Greeks who first allowed themselves to be corrupted by Macedonian gold, and who, forgetting the brilliant example of virtue and patriotism set by their ancestors, whose tombs were still visible to them and whose voices they could still so to speak hear, sold the freedom which they had inherited; those who afterwards hindered the success of the Achaean League; those who after that by means of their dissensions brought upon themselves Roman arms and the Roman yoke; those, lastly, who, still retaining a shadow of political liberty, allowed themselves to be invaded by a Scythian nation: all these Greeks, I say, are infinitely more guilty than their unhappy descendants to whom all has been left to repair, and not a single error to perpetrate. Deprived of liberty, without pecuniary resources, or those resources which enlightenment procures, abandoned by the whole world, inspiring in some but a feeble interest, in others a sterile pity, in most an indifference which could not but make them despair, what could the modern Greeks do?

What then was to be seen in that unhappy Greece, birthplace of the sciences and of the arts? What in fact may be seen among almost all enslaved peoples: a superstitious and ignorant clergy, leading as they liked an even more ignorant people; so-called notables of the Nation, whose alleged nobility, fed by the sweat of the people whom they tried vexatiously to exploit, was all the more ridiculous because, placed as they were between government and people, they were compelled to abase themselves more and more before the idol of despotism, and were more exposed than the rest of the nation to the blows of arbitrary malice on the part of the rulers; heads of families too exhausted by vexatious demands, or too blinded by superstition to provide a good education for their children; young people deprived therefore of any kind of knowledge and who added to such ignorance the weakness of Sybarites or the strength of savages. If occasionally one saw some young man expatriate himself in order to seek in Europe the enlightenment which he could not find in his own fatherland, such enlightenment was limited to the study of medicine; and Italy, where the subject was studied, represented usually for the modern Greeks what for the ancients the Columns of Hercules were for a time. But, since they went there without any preparation, and rather in order to learn a craft than to acquire a science, and that at a time when in Europe itself medicine was no more than a craft, all that they brought back to their unhappy fatherland, as the fruit of their studies, was the means to do harm accompanied by that presumption which prevents the forestalling or the preventing of it. Sometimes the study of theology was associated to that of medicine; and these theologians, some of them embracing the cause of the Greek Church, others that of the Church of Rome, have been seen to write polemical works which served to nourish, against the spirit of Christianity, the mutual hatreds of the two communions.

These studies usually constituted the limits of enlightenment among educated men. The others hardly knew how to read or write; and yet this part of the nation which, no doubt, was the most ignorant, was yet neither the most superstitious nor the most depraved. It seems to owe this advantage to its very ignorance which prevented it from reading bad books. All that Venice, which was practically the only place in Europe where books for the use of modern Greeks were printed, sent us—if exception is made of works indispensable to religious worship and other elementary works for the use of schoolboys learning ancient Greek—was confined to a few tasteless productions designed more to increase the ignorance of the nation, rather than to enlighten it. It was a happy accident which indebted us to the Venetian printing-press for the translation of Télémaque by the immortal archbishop of Cambrai and of Rollin’s Ancient History; two books which, as will be seen in the sequel, proved to be of some use to the Greeks.

The nation continued in this deplorable state until after the middle of the last century. Yet it was not difficult for the attentive observer to discern through the heavy darkness which covered unhappy Greece that this state of affairs could not last. On the one hand, the very small number of schools where ancient Greek was taught, in spite of the discouraging imperfection of the teaching methods, in spite of the teachers’ ignorance and obstinacy and the small benefit which consequently was derived from them, preserved in the nation the knowledge of its ancestral tongue like a sacred fire which would one day bring it back to life. On the other hand a national vanity, ridiculous in its motives but salutary in its effects, rendered the Greeks as proud of their origin as would be somebody who was the descendant, in direct line, of Miltiades or Themistocles. This vanity, together with the difference in religion and habits and the treatment, equally unworthy and impolitic, which the Greeks received from the hands of their conquerors, resulted in the fact that a large part of the nation always looked upon itself as prisoners of war and never as slaves. It was therefore easy to predict, as I have just observed, that it required only the help of some favorable circumstances for such a state of affairs to change.

It is quite remarkable that one such circumstance was precisely that ever memorable period when the mind of the enlightened part of Europe, tired of systems, and of that scholastic method used in the teaching of the sciences which was then not yet wholly abandoned, felt the need to make a new path for itself, and to take for guide no other but the faithful and exact observation of facts. This happy discovery soon led the Europeans to another—no less important—namely, to look on our sciences not as parts isolated from one another, but rather as the various branches of a great tree, or as the different compartments in a vast edifice, not a single one of which could be studied unless considered in its relation to the rest. It was France which had the glory of being the meeting-place in the middle of the last century of philosophers who were the first to lay the foundations of that vast edifice known as the Encyclopédie. The clarity which issued from this literary revolution, following the same laws as physical light, had necessarily to shed light wherever obstacles did not impede it, far from its original source. We have already seen how great these obstacles were on the part of the Greek nation; but, as may also be observed, they were counterbalanced by the feelings which a large part of the nation entertained. The Greeks, proud of their origins, far from shutting their eyes to European enlightenment, never considered the Europeans as other than debtors who were repaying with substantial interest the capital which they had received from their own ancestors.

In the year 1766 (that is, some fifteen years after the publication of the Encyclopédie) appeared among the Greeks for the first time a treatise on Experimental Physics, with plates included, as well as a treatise on Logic. These two works, written in Ancient Greek and published in Leipzig by two respectable Greek ecclesiastics, were as learned as the authors’ circumstances then allowed. A little while afterwards, the author of the Logic published a translation of Segnert’s Mathematics, and a translation, in Modern Greek, with the original text facing it, of a small work attributed to Voltaire and entitled, Historical Essay on the Dissensions of the Polish Churches. This same ecclesiastic has given us, in 1786 and 1791 respectively, a translation in Greek verse of Vergil’s Georgics and his Aeneid. This last work, which shows through its accompanying notes the translator’s zeal, efforts, and learning and which would have even had some success as a literary work, had it been possible to translate the felicities of one dead language into another dead language, must be remembered all the more by an impartial observer in that it constitutes one of the most characteristic symptoms of present-day intellectual ferment in Greece and indicates that the happy revolution which is working in this country has taken a direction such that nothing can stop it anymore. And yet it was in 1788, two years, that is, after the publication of the Georgics, that Pauw in his Philosophical Researches Concerning the Greeks, could prophesy before the whole of Europe, with the tone and confidence of someone inspired, that among the Greeks ignorance and superstition have put down roots so deep and so tenacious that no force, no human power could extirpate them. If he had known what was going on among the Greeks, and if he had wanted to reason like a philosopher, as is proclaimed in the ostentatious title of his book, he would have seen and concluded from such an extraordinary phenomenon as the translation of Vergil among a people hardly emerging from barbarism, that among this people an intellectual ferment was going on. Thus the branches of a vigorous tree, bent under the load of an alien force, once rid of this load, grow past the point where they would be at rest; and it is only after much oscillation that they regain their natural position.

I return, however, to the period when for the first time Greece saw treatises on physics and logic written in the manner of the enlightened peoples of Europe. And here we see such a succession of cause and effect, such a concourse of varying circumstances, yet all tending to the same result, that it is quite impossible for me to assign to each its proper place in the sequence of events, or to evaluate with any precision its influence over the moral revolution which is now at work among the Greeks. Such an enterprise may even be unphilosophical, since no revolution, whether moral or political, among any people in the world, has ever been effected through isolated causes. In order to change an individual’s condition, one cause may often be sufficient; but men united in society do not move or change their situation except as a result of several causes working jointly and in succession. I must therefore limit myself to presenting in their natural order the most noteworthy events which might be considered to have contributed to the present state of Greece. I myself have been an eyewitness of most of them, and the rest I have collected from the testimony of other eyewitnesses.

The works of which I have spoken were received in the Greek schools (long attached, with the same superstition which has denatured the simplest of religions, to Aristotle’s philosophy or rather to his commentators’ fancies) by the greater number of the teachers as an innovation which was at the very least useless, and by almost all the students as a curious thing about which one had at least to show oneself to be informed. This curiosity on the part of the youth, however adequately fed by the teaching of the new logic, a teaching which took place for an unfortunately brief period in a school on Mount Athos,² this curiosity, I say, would no doubt have remained barren if the Greeks had continued to be as poor as they had been so far, and to vegetate in that discouragement, the deplorable fruit of oppression, which reduces the rational being to a brutish state. Above everything else man tries to secure his subsistence; and since under a tyrannical government the difficulties of earning it increase by reason of the oppression, he must continually busy himself with the means of overcoming these difficulties. It is only when he has satisfied this primary natural need, and somewhat rendered his life less precarious, that man looks around him and seeks to broaden the circle of his understanding. Such has been, always and everywhere, the course of the human spirit among the Greeks as I have observed it. At the period of which I speak, the Greeks were neither free, nor nearly as rich as the inhabitants of a region so marked for the variety and abundance of its products ought to have been. And even today they can hardly be considered wealthy; but two noteworthy events have contributed to make them less poor and to inspire in their stricken souls, not the courage which comes from ease and freedom, but at least hope, which made them discern at once both the cause of their unhappy state and the possibility of arresting its nefarious effects.

Because of a new direction which various circumstances gave to the channels of commerce, many Greek commercial houses found themselves in a short time in possession of extraordinary riches; and the word millionaire was for the first time heard among a people who had been accustomed to consider the small number of those who owned a capital of one hundred purses as men overwhelmed with the favors of fortune. These newly enriched men, who unfortunately had as yet nothing but their wealth, did not take long to understand that if fortune distributed her gifts blindly, yet eyes and far-seeing eyes were required to retain these gifts and render them fruitful. Accustomed hitherto to use European agents in the management of their businesses, they now thought they could dispense with these and in fact replace them, in great part, by the native youth who thanks to the attraction of large salaries now found themselves tempted to study.

The study of the languages of those countries with which they had commercial relations gave them a tincture of learning and of culture; and by the study of arithmetic and the fine art of bookkeeping which enable the mind to discover truth by following error to its source, they were, unwittingly, taking a course in logic. The study of foreign languages made clear the advantage of those who had started by studying their own tongue, or who were going to study these languages in the countries and among the peoples where they were spoken. The desire to study and the desire to go abroad took hold of the young men, therefore, and was seconded by the desire which great riches inspire in those who possess them, to extend their trade, on the one hand by opening branches in foreign countries, and on the other to increase the means of instruction in their own midst if only for the benefit of their own children. Soon enough, merchants had established new commercial houses in the ports of Italy, in Holland, in various parts of Germany, and particularly in Trieste, which today has a Greek colony composed of hundreds of families. Thus commerce, by spreading in the nation, saved from idleness a multitude of young Greeks, and scattered them into various regions of Europe, and at the same time provided through the increase of schools more means for the remaining youth of the nation to educate themselves. The desire to excel which necessarily arose out of such conditions made a section of this youth, once their training in the native schools was completed, decide to come to Europe in order to complete their studies; and here many of them, destined for commerce, have been seen to desert the countinghouse and take refuge in some university. Such have been the results of the increase in the pecuniary means of the Greeks; but at that period nothing contributed more to excite the spirit of emulation, to increase the intellectual ferment, and to inspire the Greeks with courage than the event of which I will now speak.

It was in 1769 that Russia declared war on Turkey. This latter power, however much it had declined from that state of ferocious energy which made her as redoubtable to the European powers as fearsome to her own subjects, still preserved an appearance of greatness which inspired respect. An illusion difficult to reconcile with the progress of knowledge, and particularly with the improvement of the art of war, led Europeans to see in the army of this power the same heroes who had conquered the Eastern Empire, who had expelled the Venetians from Candia and the Peloponnesus, and who, penetrating into the heart of Germany, had dared to lay siege to and almost capture the capital of the Empire. Russia has forever dissipated this illusion, by proving to the whole of Europe that the girth which had been taken to indicate a vigorous constitution was nothing but a dropsy which, sooner or later, would lead the Ottoman Empire to its fate. The effects of this glorious war did not merely serve to enlighten the Europeans. Russia, which then had an interest in being considerate to the Greeks, whom she hoped one day to count among her subjects, employed a number of them in this war and attached them to herself by m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Report on the Present State of Civilization in Greece
• 2. The Ideal of Nationalism: Three Currents of Thought
• 3. The Restoration of Turkish History
• 4. The Study of Indian History
• 5. The Idea of Pakistan
• 6. The Negro in Ancient History
• 7. The Contribution of Ethiopia-Nubia and of Egypt to Civilization
• 8. The Resurrection of the Negro
• 9. Arabism
• 10. The Principle of Nationalism
• 11. The National Entity of Japan and the Japanese Subject
• 12. Islam and Nationalism
• 13. Hinduism and Indian Nationalism
• 14. The Moral Poverty of India and Native Thoughts on the Present British-Indian Policy
• 15. The Pan-African Movement
• 16. The “Circle”
• 17. Imprisonment and Execution of Ibrahim Nassif El Wardany
• 18. The Making of a Terrorist: From the Autobiography of Damodar Hari Chapekar
• 19. The “Mau Mau” Oath
• 20. A Messianic Creed from the Congo
• 21. The Mass Movement
• 22. Concerning Violence
• 23. Theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International on the National and Colonial Questions
• 24. Nationalism Outside Europe
• 25. Social Revolution and the East
• Index to the Introduction
• About the Editor