The Muslim World in Modern South Asia

Power, Authority, Knowledge

Francis Robinson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438483023, 9781438483016
• eBook ISBN: 9781438483030
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Sets out the challenges presented to Muslim societies by Western dominance over the past two hundred years, and explores Muslim responses, particularly in the context of South Asia.

Over the past two hundred years, two great processes have shaped Muslim societies: Western domination and the industrial capitalism that came with it, and the Islamic revival that preceded the Western presence but came to interact significantly with it. In this book, Francis Robinson considers the challenges Western dominance has offered key aspects of Muslim civilization, particularly in the context of South Asia, which in the nineteenth century moved from being a receiver of influences from the rest of the Muslim world to being a transmitter of influences to it.

Robinson also considers aspects of the Muslim revival and how they have come to shape, in various ways, Muslim responses to Western dominance. The role of the transmission of knowledge, both formal and spiritual, in forming Muslim societies is explored, and also the particular role of the transmitters in sustaining the Islamic dimensions of Muslim societies under Western dominance. Attention, too, is paid to the imposition of the modern state and the restriction of cosmopolitan spaces.

1

The Islamic World in the Age of Western Dominance

MUSLIM SOCIETIES SINCE 1800 have been influenced by two developments of the first importance. First, the Islamic world system, which from its emergence had walked hand in hand with power, came to be dominated by forces from the West. This domination, moreover, was not just one of conquest and rule; there came with it economic, social, intellectual and political forces of great transformative power. Second, every Muslim society came to be animated by movements of Islamic revival and reform. These movements took different shapes according to the circumstances of the societies in which they flourished. By the end of the twentieth century the programmes of these movements were distinctive features in the lives of most societies and the defining features of some. From the outset it should be clear that the roots of religious reform lie deep in the pre-modern history of Muslim societies, that aspects of the movement were already manifest in the eighteenth century and that their prime purpose was inner renewal. However, the period of Western dominance gave urgency and extra purpose to these movements. From context to context there were different interplays between Western power and manifestations of Islamic revival. As time went by Western understandings of Muslim societies came increasingly to be coloured by their experience of the revival. In the same way movements of revival were both shaped by the contact with the West and energised by their resistance to it.

The onset of Western power in Muslim lands was swift and often brutal. The symbolic beginning was Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in June 1798. In fact, Muslim power had been on the retreat from at least 12 September 1683, when the Ottoman forces besieging Vienna had been ordered to retreat, never to return. Since then there had been a slow erosion of power on the margins of their world: the Dutch had gained a substantial foothold in island South East Asia, the British in India, the Russians in the Crimea, the Habsburgs in the Balkans. But this was the moment when Europe asserted itself in the central Islamic lands for the first time since the Crusades, and did so with armies bearing the banners of reason, nationalism and state power.

Within three years the British and the Ottomans had driven the French away. But this did not in any way impair the rapid movement of European power into Muslim lands. In 1800 the Dutch government took over from its East India Company in island South East Asia and spread its authority throughout the archipelago until the process was completed by the end of the Acheh War in 1908. In India, in 1799, the British defeated the last major independent Muslim power in Mysore. By 1818, once they had the descendants of the Mughal emperors as virtual prisoners in Delhi, they were acknowledged as the paramount power in the subcontinent. By 1858, after sacking the old Mughal capital in the suppression of the Mutiny uprising, they ruled all India, either directly or indirectly.

The strategic demands of British India meant further British expansion into Muslim lands. The Afghans, fortunate in their terrain, their warlike habits, and their position as a buffer between British India and tsarist Russia, succeeded in preserving their freedom. In the Gulf, however, British influence steadily grew, as it did in southern Iran and along Arabia’s southern shore. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and European competition for power led to British domination of the Nile Valley. In 1882, they occupied Egypt, which led in 1898 to the establishment of a condominium with the Egyptians over the Sudan, in which the British held effective authority. On the western shores of the Indian Ocean they shared out the considerable possessions of the sultans of Zanzibar with Germany and Italy. On the eastern shores, they had from the 1870s begun to assert their hegemony over the sultans of the Malay states.

At the same time tsarist Russia spread southwards and eastwards to absorb its Muslim neighbours. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia pressed forward in the Caucasus, conquering the Iranian territory of northern Azerbayjan. By 1864, after a bloody struggle for Daghistan, the whole region was occupied. In Central Asia, the lands of the Kazakhs were secured by 1854, the Khanate of Khokand by 1873, the lands of the Turkomans by 1885 and those of the Tajiks by 1895; protectorates were established over the ancient khanates of Khiva and Bukhara. After the Russian Revolution these became Soviet republics.

The French advance into North and West Africa was no less dramatic, and was accompanied in some areas, as the Russian one had been, by a great influx of European settlers. In 1830 they invaded Algeria; in 1881 they declared Tunisia a protectorate and in 1912 Morocco. The first two were the main focus of French settlement. By 1912 they had also expanded from Senegal eastwards across the savannah lands to the borders of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, subduing a string of Muslim states, several of which owed their origins to the Muslim revival. Only the British, who drew the sultanate of Sokoto into their main West African colony of Nigeria, also ruled large numbers of Muslims in the region. Other European powers picked up what crumbs they could; in 1912, for instance, Spain asserted a protectorate over the northern tip of Morocco, and Italy conquered Libya. By the outbreak of the First World War all the Muslims of Africa, except those in Ethiopia, were under European rule.

The Ottoman Empire was not exempt from the surging tide of European power. Through the nineteenth century European powers steadily put more and more pressure on the empire’s Balkan territories as they annexed a piece of land here and competed for influence there. The outcome was that the Christian peoples of the Balkans – Greeks, Serbians, Romanians, Bulgarians, supported by one European power or another – threw off Ottoman rule and brought the sizeable Muslim populations of the region beneath their sway. By the First World War only the rump of Rumelia remained of the empire’s European territories. The war itself saw the Arab peoples of the empire also fall under European rule as the British, with Arab help, drove Ottoman forces in the Fertile Crescent back into Anatolia, and divided the spoils with their French allies. By 1920 the Ottomans, whose subjects were now mainly Turks, were fighting to hold on to their Anatolian heartland, which the Europeans proposed to dismember, seizing chunks for themselves and creating a Greek Christian province in the west and an Armenian Christian state in the east.

In a mere 120 years or so almost all the Muslim peoples of the world had fallen under European rule.1 Only the Muslims of Afghanistan, the Yemen and central Arabia could pretend to real independence; those of Iran had one qualified by the division of their country into Russian and British spheres of influence. Great cities – Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Samarqand, Delhi – all redolent of the changing phases of Muslim glory and achievement, were now subject to European authority. Muslim peoples were in the hands of their European masters. But worse was to come. In 1924 the caliphate was abolished: not an act of European power, but of Mustafa Kemal, as he sought to bring a secular focus and new strength to the fledgling Turkish Republic. In one sense this meant little; the office of caliph had long been divorced of any real sense of power and leadership of the Muslim community. But, in another sense it symbolised much; its demise meant the breaking of a link that reached back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad and which spoke of how successful, until recently, the community had been.

The period from the post-First World War settlement to the 1960s saw most Muslim societies achieve freedom from European rule. First, the two peoples whose freedom was threatened by the designs of European imperialism, the Turks and the Iranians, succeeded in asserting their independence. The Ottomans under the remarkable leadership of Mustafa Kemal drove all foreign armies out of Anatolia and established a modern Turkish nation-state. In Iran the Cossack Brigade officer Rida Shah Pahlawi followed in his wake, enabling Iran to loosen the bonds of imperial control fashioned in the Anglo-Persian agreement of 1919. The limitations of his achievement, however, were demonstrated when in the Second World War both Britain and Russia were able to reassert their interests in the country. The two decades following this war saw the bulk of Muslim peoples gain their independence. In 1947, this was the fortune of one quarter of the world’s Muslims when, amidst appalling slaughter of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs, and of Hindus and Sikhs by Muslims, British India achieved independence as the sovereign states of India and Pakistan. In 1949 Indonesia emerged from Dutch rule and by 1971, after Pakistan split into Pakistan and Bangladesh, it had become the world’s most populous Muslim state. In 1957 the Malay states followed suit from British rule, becoming Malaysia in 1963. Between 1946 and 1958 it was the turn of Egypt, Libya, the Sudan and the Arab states of West Asia, which colonial power interacting with local forces had forged from the former Ottoman territories. Only the peoples of Palestine, Christians of course as well as Muslims, failed to share in the new world of infant nation-states, as Zionist settlers, whose ambition to found a homeland had been endorsed by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, forced the creation of a Jewish state in 1948. In the late 1950s and 1960s the Muslim peoples of North, West and East Africa gained their freedom, along with those of the southern Arabian shore and the Gulf. This left the Muslim peoples under Soviet rule as the last remaining group of significant numbers without their freedom. This they gained in the early 1990s.

Freedom from European rule, however, did not bring freedom from Western power. As they gained their freedom, many Muslim states, particularly in the central Islamic lands, found themselves entangled in the Cold War rivalries of the great powers. Turkey, Iran and Pakistan became part of what was known as the ‘northern tier’ of defence against the expansionism of the Soviet Union. Pakistan’s generals in 1958 would keep Washington closely informed of their intention to launch a coup.2 Arab socialist republics, on the other hand – Egypt, Syria and Iraq – allied themselves with the Soviet Union; for a time, it seemed the better way of asserting their independence and gaining some extra strength in confronting Israel. There were significant interventions, or attempted interventions, in the affairs of Muslim societies: the Anglo-American overthrow of Musaddiq’s regime in Iran in 1953, which arguably held back the growth of democracy for decades; the inglorious Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956 to secure the canal zone, which was the last ‘hurrah’ of the old European imperial powers; in 1958 the USA sent troops to the Lebanon and the British to Jordan with the aim of stemming the onward march of Arab nationalism; in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, leading to resistance organised by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, among others, which had a considerable impact on Muslim lives from Central Asia, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to Kashmir; from 1982 there was the substantial support which the USA, the USSR and France, in particular, gave to Iraq in its eight-year war with Iran; in 1983 and 1984 there was the intervention of the USA in the Lebanon which was supposed to hold back the advance of Syrian, and therefore also Soviet, influence.

From the 1990s the USA was the hegemonic power in the Muslim world. Russia imposed its will in its backyard, most notably and with brutal force on the Chechens of the Caucasus. Elsewhere the ‘new world order’ was decreed by the USA. It forced the Indonesians out of their rule of Christian East Timor. Very belatedly, although here British foot-dragging bears a heavy responsibility, the USA delivered aid to assist the Muslim Bosnians in resisting ethnic cleansing by the Christian Serbs.3 With greater speed it used massive force to relieve the Kosovan Muslims from Serbian oppression. Various states stood up to the hegemonic ambitions of the USA, among them Libya, the Sudan, Syria and Iran; indeed, the continuing capacity of the Islamic Republic of Iran to resist American pressure has demonstrated the greater strength of the revolutionary regime in the face of outside forces as compared with the Qajar and Pahlawi regimes that preceded it. All have been warned; they have been designated ‘states of concern’. In two cases, one an organisation, the other a state, active opposition to the hegemonic will led to awesome displays of American power. From the early 1990s Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa‘ida al-Sulbah (‘the Solid Base’) organisation had conducted a series of assaults on symbols of American power, which culminated on 11 September 2001 in the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. In the autumn of 2001 the USA responded by destroying the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which sheltered bin Laden. In 1990 Saddam Husayn of Iraq invaded Kuwait. The immediate response was the destruction of Saddam’s invading force by Western armies in the first Gulf War, the establishment of a major American military presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, action throughout the 1990s to contain Iraq, which led, when those containment measures appeared to be weakening, to an Anglo-American invasion of the country in the spring of 2003 and to the destruction of its Ba‘thist regime. A Muslim of historical bent might reflect that, some 205 years after the French entered Cairo, the West was playing the same old game in Baghdad, forcing its way into a major capital city of the Muslim world and claiming that it was bringing freedom and enlightenment to the people.

Nothing has more constantly reminded Muslims of the power of outside forces in their lives than the existence and the policies of the state of Israel. They know that the process of Zionist settlement in Palestine would not have been successful without British support, however qualified. They know that the emergence from the mid-1950s of Israel as a major power in West Asia would not have been possible without the unstinting material and political support of the West. They know that Israelis have only been able to achieve their colonial settlement of Arab lands seized in the war of 1967, and in breach of international law, because of American support. They know, too, that Israel has treated Palestinians with scant justice and much brutal force – though no more brutal than that deployed by many Muslim regimes – with the assurance of American support. For many Muslims the injustices meted out to the Palestinians symbolise both the injustices many experience in their own lives and their own impotence in the face of overwhelming power. In the twenty-first century Muslims know that the power of the West to intervene in their world in pursuit of its ends is greater than ever it was in the nineteenth.

The growing power of the West in the Muslim world meant much more than the capacity to dictate the boundaries of states or the lifespans of regimes. It transformed many of the structures of Muslim societies, as it has those of societies throughout the globe. The economies of Muslim societies came to be integrated into a global economy, driven by the industrial revolutions of the West, with their continuous processes of scientific and technological innovation. Whether it was in the plantations of South East Asia, the cotton fields of Egypt or the oilfields of the Middle East, whole new worlds of production and exchange were created which overshadowed those of peasant husbandry, handicraft production and the bazaar – undermining the communal solidarities they had bred and the Islamic institutions which had rested upon them for centuries. No new physical presence signalled the changes taking place more dramatically than the new Western-style cities, which more often than not grew up alongside the old ones, and which brought a new world of broad streets, glass-fronted shops, public clocks for the precise regulation of time and suburban hinterlands of slums, flats and villas.

Forms of the modern state were introduced either during the period of colonial rule or as part of an attempt to keep the Europeans out by threatened Muslim regimes. Powered by ever-growing bureaucracies, such states were increasingly concerned to reach down to individual citizens, direct them towards their purposes, and make them focus their first loyalty upon the state. Such states were likely to be intolerant of tribal and other competing sources of allegiance. Their relationship with the ‘ulama’, and others concerned to focus Muslim energies on godly ends, was likely to be more strained than previously in Islamic history. Western knowledge, which seemed to be a key source of Western power, increasingly came to be used in Muslim societies. It was needed to run the modern economy and modern state; it was particularly needed to enable Muslim societies to strive to keep up with the West and to be strong enough to look after themselves in an age of Western domination. Inevitably, the great traditions of madrasa learning came to be pushed to one side, as also the attitudes that pervaded the madrasa. No longer was the search for knowledge primarily a process of trying to discover and preserve all that one could learn from an age of past perfection. Now the emphasis was on innovation, the discovery of new ideas, new facts, new processes and the testing of all old knowledge in the light of new understandings.

New elites formed to run the new economic and political structures: bankers, traders, commercial farmers, industrial workers, bureaucrats, soldiers, politicians, intellectuals, journalists. All embraced the new knowledge to the extent that they needed it. Some were educated in the languages of Europe: English, French, Dutch, German, Russian. Many became divorced from their heritage of learning, and sought to understand it primarily through Western sources. Even those who did c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Transliteration
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 The Islamic World in the Age of Western Dominance
• 2 Global History from an Islamic Angle
• 3 Education in the Muslim World to the End of the Eighteenth Century
• 4 On How Since 1800 Islamic Societies Have Been Built from Below
• 5 Crisis of Authority: Crisis of Islam?
• 6 Strategies of Authority in Muslim South Asia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• 7 Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia
• 8 Iranian Influences on South Asia
• 9 South Asia and West Asia from the Delhi Sultanate to the Present: Security, Resources and Influence
• 10 The Memory of Power, Muslim ‘Political Importance’ and the Muslim League
• 11 The Modern State: Citizenship, Multiculturalism and Globalisation
• 12 What Ralph Russell Meant and Means to Me
• 13 Love on the Roof
• 14 Hunting the Tiger
• 15 The Garden of the Eight Paradises
• 16 Uses for Grass
• 17 The Muslim Commander Bond
• 18 Aromatherapy
• 19 Love of Mahal
• 20 Cosmopolis of a Shared Worldview
• 21 In Reverse
• 22 Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority
• Index
• Back Cover