Islam and Colonialism

Western Perspectives on Soviet Asia

Will Myer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780700717651
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135785833
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tracing the development of western thought about Central Asia, this book argues that for historical and political reasons, Central Asia was seen as being in a colonial relationship with Russia. Consequently, an anti-colonial revolution in Asia was seen as the greatest threat to the USSR. The book questions the suitability of the colonial model for understanding the region's recent political history and challenges many of the assumptions which underlay the adoption of such a model, and examines how this one interpretation came to dominate western discourse to the virtual exclusion of all others.

1
HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

Scholars do not work in a vacuum. They are subject to a variety of factors that may affect the outcome of research. Developments in quantum theory have suggested that the result of a scientific experiment may be affected by both the structure of the experiment itself and the presence or absence of the experimenter, making ‘objectivity’ a chimera. If this is the case with the natural sciences it is even more so for the social sciences, in which a wide array of factors may influence both the findings of research and the subject and nature of the research itself. Amongst these is the historical context in which the research takes place.

The influence of historical factors on the way in which an area is approached for study and the way in which the results of that study are presented is seen in the case of Central Asia from the beginning of the systematic study of the region in the nineteenth century.

During most of the nineteenth century, Britain was the pre-eminent world power, with India its most important holding. The earliest Western reports on the region were compiled by British officers of the East India Company and concerned themselves primarily with strategic considerations. This tradition of the study of Central Asia outside Russia being carried out primarily by officers of the British Indian government or by other interested British parties and supporters of British interests persisted throughout the century.

In the first half of the century fears of French intentions towards British India resulted in the production of such works as The Dangers of British India from French Invasion (1808) by an anonymous ‘Late Resident at Bhagulpore’, which examined the possibility of invasion via Persia and Baluchistan. Russia's annexation of north Azerbaijan in 1828 and continuing involvement in Persia alarmed both London and Calcutta and prompted Colonel George Evans to return to the threat of invasion via Persia in his On the Designs of Russia (1828) and On the Practicability of an Invasion of British India (1829).

As Russia advanced further into Central Asia, Tashkent falling to General Chernyaev in 1865, the focus shifted to the threat of invasion from the north. This is particularly evident in writings of the 1870s, such as Burnaby's A Ride to Khiva (1876), written during the high point of Russo-British regional rivalry, known as the Great Game.

Describing his visit to Central Asia, which took place in 1888, G. Dobson, a correspondent for The Times, remained mindful of political considerations. Knowledge of Central Asia was necessary because of its strategic value:

[The Russians] argue that their advance into Central Asia, whether by railway or otherwise, has never been dictated by any unworthier motives than those of commercial cupidity … such as those which first led England to India. This … is fairly true as far as it applies to the time before Peter the Great; but we know well enough that another and powerful [motive] has since activated Russia in planning expeditions against India, and that is the desire for revenge against English opposition in Europe, especially at Constantinople.¹

The future Viceroy of India, George Curzon, justified his description of Central Asia in a similar way by referring to the region's strategic significance:

A record of a journey … through a country, the interest of which to English readers consists no longer in its physical remoteness and impenetrability [as had been the case in the first half of the century], but rather in the fact that those conditions have just been superseded by a new order of things, capable at any moment of bringing it under the stern and immediate notice of Englishmen, as the theatre of imperial diplomacy; possibly - quod di avertant omen - as the threshold of international war.²

These works focused on the newly built Trans-Caspian Railway, Dobson's listing points of military significance such as the principal bridges, where water was available for locomotives and the potential maximum traffic (how quickly an army could be moved along the route). Many later works, such as Skrine and Ross’ The Heart of Asia: a History of Turkistan and the Central Asian Khanates from the Earliest Time (1899), almost half of which comprised a description of the region as seen from the line, focused on the new route.

After the Russian conquest, travel in Central Asia became relatively safe and easy and a new form of literature developed. This was the description of Central Asia based on first-hand observation. One of the earliest such studies was written by the Hungarian orientalist (and Anglophile) Armenius Vámbéry, who published his findings in London. Other notable names are those of the US consul Eugene Schuyler, the British missionary and prison inspector Henry Lansdell and, perhaps most remarkably, the pioneering British woman anthropologist A. Meakin, who donned a paranja and travelled as a native, visiting many people's homes and leaving behind a fascinating account of Central Asian home life at the end of the nineteenth century. This body of work represents a first attempt to understand the internal dynamic of Central Asian society and remains a primary resource for understanding the Central Asia of the period.

Aside from the growth of Russian influence in Central Asia, another major development in world politics affected the way in which Central Asia was regarded. This was the intellectual revolution within Islam, which led to an increased focus on the study of Central Asia for itself rather than as the staging post for great-power politics.

Throughout much of the century, the undisputed leader of Islam in British India had been Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98), a figure who supported British governance on the grounds that majority rule would mean Hindu rule. Ahmad Khan advocated a form of assimilation into Western ways as the best means of preserving Islam. His near-contemporary Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1839-97) took a different tack.

Al-Afghani had spent part of his youth in India before travelling to Constantinople and Egypt, where he began to teach not only the traditional Islamic curriculum but ‘the danger of European intervention, the need for national unity to resist it, the need for a broader unity of Islamic peoples.’³ This was to become the core of a movement known, in imitation of pan-Slavism, as pan-Islamism.

Expelled by the Khedive, al-Afghani returned to India, where he was interned during the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, travelling in 1884 to Paris, where, with his former pupil Muhammed Abduh, he founded the journal al-‘Urwa al-wuthqa [The Indissoluble Link]. In this he argued that Europe was not inherently stronger than or superior to Islam but that its success was attributable to the disunity of the Islamic community. Politically reunited and spiritually renewed, Islam could regain its former glory.

Al-Afghani's journal became one of the most influential Arabic language publications of its day, and so seriously did the British authorities take the possible appeal of its message to Indian Muslims that its import into British territory was prohibited. This is not surprising, because ‘for Afghani Muslim renewal and reform had but one ultimate purpose, liberation from the yoke of colonial rule.’⁴ This was a serious threat to the British, who with the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 were beginning to lose their grip on India. The fear that an Islamic-inspired revolt in Central Asia could spill over into India suddenly seemed real. This affected the way in which Central Asia was presented. Thus, while Lansdell asserted that ‘the people are not fanatical but rather indifferent to religion’⁵ and Vámbéry had it that ‘[Sufi] fraternities do not in the least bother themselves with secret political objectives,’⁶ at the end of the century Skrine and Ross warned that:

Since the Russian invasion occult influence has increased, and it is not exerted in the invader's favour. Throughout Islam, indeed, the mullahs are irreconcilable enemies to Western progress, and the recent rebellion in Ferghana⁷ has led many experts to doubt whether tenderness to indigenous institutions has not been carried too far.⁸

Skrine and Ross claimed that ‘a wave of sedition’⁹ was sweeping Central Asia. If such a threat could exist in Central Asia, where ‘the conquerors and the conquered are connected by the ties of blood, and there is a latent and unconscious sympathy between them which renders the task of government easy’, how much more of a threat was there to British India where ‘our dominion can never strike its roots deeply into the soil. But for the bayonets on which our throne is supported it would fall …’¹⁰ They warned that:

The forces of Islam are also equipped for a coming struggle. A Puritan movement, inaugurated by Wahabi [sic] missionaries eighty years ago, has spread far and wide, and the Mohammedans of India have formed secret societies.¹¹

The end of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth century represented a high point in the Western study of Central Asia, which was not to be re-attained until after the Second World War. With the outbreak of the First World War and Russia's alliance with Britain the immediate threat to India was removed and Central Asia lost its primacy in British strategic thinking. After the war, changed political circumstances meant that Central Asia was low on the list of priorities. The USA retreated into isolationism and Europe struggled with the aftermath of the conflict, Britain in particular also becoming increasingly concerned with the internal threat against its Indian hegemony.

Central Asia again became difficult to access, and such information as there was consisted primarily of memoirs of the immediately pre-Revolutionary period, such as Fox's People of the Steppe (1925), and the recollections and political writings of émigrés, most of whom had come to be based in Istanbul.

These émigrés represented a particular type of Central Asian, being in the main part former members or sympathisers of the Jadidi reformist school¹² imbued with a certain type of political vision which before the Revolution had sought a degree of pan-Turkestani political and cultural unity in opposition to Russian dominion. Their political stance was initially not dissimilar to that of the Young Turk movement. Some, such as Mustafa Chokaev, came ultimately to fall under the spell of the Nazis.

Émigrés represented just a small fraction of Central Asian political opinion. However, as the only direct source on Central Asia available i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Central Asia Research Forum
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Text
• Introduction
• 1 Historical contexts
• 2 Colonialism and Central Asia
• 3 Anti-Colonialism in Central Asia
• 4 Writing on Islam: The 1950s
• 5 Writing on Islam: The 1960s
• 6 Islam and Opposition: The 1970s and 1980s
• 7 Contexts and Outcomes: Towards a Genealogy of Ideas
• Epilogue: Central Asia and the West: Colonialism Revisited?
• Bibliography
• Index