Al-Ahram Weekly: Egypt
Thursday 27 Oct 2022
In Al-Afghani’s words, Europe knew Aristotle and Plato in Arabic rather than Greek garb.
Al-Afghani’s ideas were applicable throughout the entire East. But, as he had made clear, Egypt was special. Its location at a central point between the Mashreq and the Maghreb, between Asia and Africa, and between the seat of the Islamic caliphate in Istanbul and the Islamic holy shrines in the Hijaz made it a natural destination for people from different regions of the East.
Al-Afghani had worked in Kabul, Istanbul, Calcutta, London, Paris, St Petersburg, and Munich, it was in Cairo that his thought blossomed.
Al-Afghani’s thought was one of the most interesting attempts to position traditional Islamic culture to benefit from West-inspired modernisation. He worked on pragmatic and serious elaborations of how far Islam’s historical trajectory in the different regions of its growth and spread could meet Western advances not only in the sciences but also in the humanities.
Sheikh Mohamed Abdou, later one of the key thinkers on the role of Islam in modern society, when he described Al-Afghani’s thought as a “holistic multi-faceted truth.”
Al-Afghani was uncompromising. For him, the British must be resisted, and the East must mobilise all its resources to fight the colonisers. He went further and advocated that the rulers who cooperated with the invaders, or whose actions had facilitated the West’s encroachment, must be opposed and if possible deposed. One of those rulers in his view was the khedive Ismail, whose borrowing of Western policies had proven reckless and therefore had been a way for the West to expand its influence.
Al-Afghani was neither childishly feeding the eastern ego, nor stupidly asserting the East’s equality in knowledge and development with Europe. He had made it perfectly clear that Europe owned its advances, and that these advances were the results of thought and ways of living and behaving that Europe had curated to an exquisite degree of refinement. His key point was that the bases upon which modernity was built in the West were not necessarily Western as such, but originally and in essence were the flow of universal knowledge.
Al-Afghani understood that knowledge and development were inextricably linked to thought and behaviour. No advanced society tolerates chaos, noise, and dirt, he said. Internalising true knowledge instils refinement and an inclination towards beauty. For Al-Afghani, like scores of philosophers before him, this was a natural law without exceptions.
Al-Afghani’s ideas were applicable throughout the entire East. But, as he had made clear, Egypt was special. Its location at a central point between the Mashreq and the Maghreb, between Asia and Africa, and between the seat of the Islamic caliphate in Istanbul and the Islamic holy shrines in the Hijaz made it a natural destination for people from different regions of the East.
Al-Afghani’s revolutionary ideas about deposing rulers resulted in his being repeatedly expelled from almost all the countries in which he attempted to settle, including Egypt. He became an inspiration for different thinkers and activists. But, lacking a base, he failed to create a movement. This was why many of his ideas came to later generations in truncated form and in fragments, often shaped by those who conveyed them and often utterly missing or deliberately obfuscating their main points.
Al-Afghani was far from being the traditionalist knee-jerk defender of Islam that several historical narratives have presented him as being. Instead, he was a subtle and deep thinker who believed that a fundamental role of divine inspiration lay in humanising and civilising the social milieu.
Al-Afghani’s thought was one of the most interesting attempts to position traditional Islamic culture to benefit from West-inspired modernisation. He worked on pragmatic and serious elaborations of how far Islam’s historical trajectory in the different regions of its growth and spread could meet Western advances not only in the sciences but also in the humanities.
Selection:Taandwal
