The most fundamental
question that faced Egypt, and with it different parts of the Arab and Turkish
and Persian-speaking orient at the beginning of the 19th century, was why have
we fallen so far behind Europe? A few hundred years earlier, Europe had been a
backwater of ignorance and crudity when compared to our own learned and
sumptuous cultures.
اضافة اعلان
That we were shockingly lagging behind was
uncontested. Defeat at the hands of Napoleon’s conquering army at the very end
of the 18th century and the glaring European superiority in sciences and the
arts and living standards — conspicuously clear throughout Napoleon’s short
campaign in Egypt — left no room for debate.
The most fundamental problem in attempting to answer
the question then lay in the fact that Egypt did not know Europe. It only got a
glimpse of it through what it had gleaned from the lives and manners of the
soldiers, scientists, and artists who had come to Egypt with Napoleon. But the
whole behind these fragments was unknown.
Up until the early 19th century, Europe was neither
a stirring notion for Egyptians nor an interesting destination for travelers
from the country or from the neighboring region. There were scattered accounts
of Levantine administrators during the mediaeval Crusades who had collaborated
with the European armies, and who, fearing death at the hands of the victorious
Mamelukes, had then fled to Europe. These accounts talked of hardship in cold
weather, dense forests, and poor towns, but it is likely that they also
contained a lot of fabrication.
Some warlords from the Levant had also sought refuge
in Europe from the Ottomans in the 15th century, particularly in Tuscany in
Italy. Stories of their lives at the courts of rich Italian families reached
the region and were quite popular in the Levant. Scholars in Egypt were also
aware of them. Then there were the accounts of Ottoman ambassadors to European
capitals, most notably to London and Paris in the 18th century. These found a
good reception back home in Istanbul, but primarily in elite circles. We do not
know if the stories they contained crossed the Mediterranean and reached Egypt
at this time.
It was for these reasons that Europe remained terra
incognita in Egypt until the early 19th century. To the Egyptian mind at the
time, Europe lacked the cultural and material richness of India and Iran; it
lacked the mystery that surrounded China’s ancient civilization; and it even
lacked the mythical factor that had for centuries informed Egyptian thought
about Sub-Saharan Africa and the lands beyond the Atlantic.
This way of framing the question gave rise to a corresponding answer that ignored the advances that Europe had made in the few centuries beforehand and attributed Egypt’s (and the East’s) lagging behind to its having abandoned the truth.
For some Egyptians in the early 19th century, Europe
was perhaps Christendom, but that was vastly different from Christianity. For
most Egyptians at the time, Christianity was an Eastern religion, philosophy,
and way of life, and one in which Egypt had played a key role in developing,
protecting, and spreading. In the Egyptian worldview of that time, that of both
Christians and Muslims, Egypt was the land in which Jesus and the Virgin Mary
had once found refuge, and it was the land of the founding fathers of Eastern
Christian thought whose ideas had sculpted true Christianity.
In this worldview, true Christianity — the theology
that was believed to be correct, the veneration that was deemed right, and the
way of life that was reckoned to be blessed — was from and of the East, with
Egypt at the very core. In this worldview, Europe was also different in that
apart from its politics and laws, it was essentially made up of societies that
had adopted a different Christianity than most Egyptians at the time and one
that was deemed a deviation from the true religion, which was that of the East.
This explains why Egyptian Christians, and not only
Muslims, were hardly drawn to visit Europe before the 19th century, and why
Christian and Muslim Egyptians were asking the same question at that time of
why had the (erroneous) Europe advanced so far ahead of us, the possessors of
the truth?
This way of framing the question gave rise to a
corresponding answer that ignored the advances that Europe had made in the few
centuries beforehand and attributed Egypt’s (and the East’s) lagging behind to
its having abandoned the truth.
Truth, here, meant religion, and for a large cohort
of the scholars of Islam, at the time the most notable community leaders in
Egypt, true Islam entailed a strict interpretation of the religion. This was
one that was not overly concerned with theology in its philosophical
dimensions, but was rather highly focused on the role of religion in society.
In this view, Egypt (and the entire East) had regressed and had been conquered
because it had abandoned the norms of living and organizing society according
(in this view) to the divine will.
This narrative
essentially blamed the authorities that had been ruling Egypt, in other words
the Ottomans and the Mamelukes, for having lost their moral compass. They had
forgotten the religious tenets upon which Islamic states must be built and at
the same time, and in this view consequently, had grown weak and succumbed to
the lethargy of luxury.
In answer, there was a need for a return to the
“purity” of Islam in its earliest phases and a resuscitation of the spirit of
the early mujahideen — the companions of the Prophet Mohammad and of the early
Muslim communities whose successes, especially on battlefields extending from
Iran to Southern Europe, had been among the most impressive in human history.
Jihad was seen, in its correct definition, as self-control and strict
discipline of thought and behavior much more than any calls for violence.
It was an answer that entailed two new ideas. First,
in blaming the authorities for the comparative backwardness of the East, it was
a bottom-up resuscitation of “true religion”. This resuscitation was not
expected from the Ottoman caliphate in Istanbul or from any Mameluke prince.
Instead, it was the duty of society and was an expression of the sense of
agency, of the taking control of the fate of society, in Egypt and in vast parts
of the region that had been theirs many centuries before.
Second, the answer effectively called for a
revolution in Egyptian politics, for if the old regime of the Ottomans and
Mamelukes had led to defeat and regression, a new regime had to come to power.
A revolution did indeed take place, one led by
Al-Azhar in Cairo, the most famous seat of learning in Sunni Islam and the
world’s oldest university.
Tarek Osman is the author of Islamism: A History of
Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010). A version of this article
appeared in print in the October 6, 2022, edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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