Dr Ehsan Azari Stanizai
I agree with most of your beliefs (Pasdaran-e-Sharaf Mili) with solidarity that are arguably written with significant intelligence—just a few more remarks. Alama Sayed Jamaluddin, Afghan, remains tragically a misunderstood thinker even to most Afghans. I have been saddened by your allegations that Alama Sayed Jamaluddin Afghan was a “British spy”. This is part of disinformation hammered by the BBC and other British colonial quarters. I believe Afghan was a great reformist and a great secular-minded Islamic scholar. His historical encounter with French philosopher Ernest Renan when he lived in Paris was the nineteenth-century European most influential intellectual event. Renan called Afghan a living Aviccena. He was persuaded like a shadow by British agents wherever he lived in Afghanistan, India, Iran, Turkey, Russia, England, and Egypt. He died in Turkey in 1897 after British agents in Turkey poisoned him. He famously said that in Europe, there are Islam but no Muslims, but in Afghanistan and the Orient, there are plenty of Muslims but no Islam.” A few brief remarks on Alama Afghan.
- Alama’s Pan-Islamism was always portrayed as a radical Islamist agenda by the British colonial enterprise. Simply put, Pan-Islamis meant for Alama Afghan, a liberal intellectual movement for the survival of the golden age of Islam and a uniting flagship for fighting colonialism and petrified medieval Islamists.
- Alama Afghan must be studied in the nineteenth-century intellectual discourse. He was a determinedly modernist thinker. He believed in modernist reformism for Afghanistan and other Muslim countries in line with European modern science, technology, and social structure but free from colonialism.
- His criticism of Darwin’s theory of evolution was strictly based on philosophical and scientific critique. His views advocated the health of individuals and society and for the universal progress of Islam and humanity.
- The implication of Alama Afghan warning for the world in the 19th century can be seen by the naked eyes today in Afghanistan that the Taliban are flourishing a barbaric Jahlia. He remarked in India, “O Muslims! British colonialism wants to poison Islam with Jahalat in a way that Islam can be used against Islam. What Ikhwanis and Taliban do today is a shame. They have implemented a kind of religion that is synonymous with what radical communists and Marxists have done to the world.
- Alama Afghan advanced the rigorous power of reason, rationality, philosophy, and science in his glorious works.
- It is a false prediction if we think of Alama Afghan as a precursor of Salafism, Ikhwanism, Talibanism, etc.
- On women, Alama Afghan was, in my view, a feminist; he rejected male dominance and polygamy. He believed that a woman is free like a man and entitled to exercise her own will independently in society without the interference of a man.
