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The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times
by Christopher de Bellaigue
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Closer to home it suffices to open our eyes to see millions of people of Muslim faith or origin in the Western world who lead lives that have successfully incorporated the modern values of tolerance, empiricism and the internalisation or dilution of faith. They are not being paid much attention – and why should they be? They do not behead, rampage or try to convert their non-Muslim neighbours. But they are all around us, inhabiting the modern world and regarding themselves as Muslim. How they arrived at this accommodation is the story I am going to tell, through the lives and adventures of the Muslim pioneers we never thought existed. My intention is to demonstrate that nonMuslims and even some Muslims who urge an Enlightenment on Islam are opening the door on a horse that bolted long ago. Through the characters in this book we will see that for the past two centuries Islam has been going through a pained yet exhilarating transformation – a Reformation, an Enlightenment and an Industrial Revolution all at once. The experience of these places has been one of relentless yet vitalising alteration – of reforms, reactions, innovations, discoveries and betrayals.
But how did we in the West miss all the changes taking place in the Middle East at a time when the region was becoming a more popular destination for travellers, from Herman Melville, who visited Jerusalem in 1857 – finding 'arid rocks' fixing on him 'a cold grey eye' – to Queen Victoria's twenty-year-old son Bertie (the future Edward VII), who toured the Holy Land in 1862 and came alive only when shooting quail on Mount Carmel? The answer is that few Westerners came to the East with very open minds, whoever they were. It is amazing how seldom one comes across a convincing nineteenth-century acknowledgement of the tense, volatile and ultimately highly breakable societies that were forming across the Middle East, or the possibility that their inhabitants constituted a dynamic, even revolutionary force. For those whose idea of progress was so narrow as to consist only of what they themselves had experienced, and who were disposed to see repose and decay in unfamiliar societies, repose and decay was indeed what they saw. Whether viewing the East through the speeding train window of their own countries' progress, or in the hope, as in the case of the Victorian commercial photographer Francis Bedford (who accompanied Bertie in 1862), of monetising the timeless Mount of Olives, it was the default position of Western visitors to deplore, deride or capture – at any rate, to notice – the torpor of the East.
The influence of this prejudice on Western views of history has been remarkable. The tendency to reduce Eastern populations to the status of infants has entrenched the idea that they were passive observers as events unfolded before their uncomprehending eyes. These lesser places were condemned for being soporific, passive and tenacious only in defence of the status quo. Languor and sensuality served as a point of departure for nineteenth-century writers from whom we have inherited the view of the Muslim world as an atoll untouched by the streams of history.
'The old Orient,' Flaubert wrote to a friend from Cairo in 1850 (seven years before publishing Madame Bovary, for which he would be arraigned on charges of immorality), in between vivid anatomical descriptions of Egyptian prostitutes, 'is always young because nothing changes. Here the Bible is a picture of life today.' His speculations about Egypt's future revolved not around what the country would do but what others would do to Egypt: 'England will take Egypt, Russia will take Constantinople,' he predicted. In the meantime Flaubert took anyone going.
The orientalist and future colonial administrator Gertrude Bell should have known better – at least she knew the languages of the places she was visiting – but in the 1890s she described Persia as having 'slipped out of the vivid world . . . the simplicity of her landscape is the fine simplicity of death'. Recalling the experience of standing outside the gates of Tehran, she wrote, 'you realize what a gulf lies between you. The East looks to itself; it knows nothing of the greater world, of which you are a citizen, asks nothing of you and of your civilization.' Travel writers are different from journalists or historians. It is not so much the facts that interest them as their own pollination of them, and this makes them less than reliable contributors to the record. This is particularly true of the young Italian author and journalist Edmondo De Amicis, who visited Istanbul in the autumn of 1874. De Amicis was already known for the power of his descriptions, and his working method was to take notes prolifically before returning home to work up his written sketches, in the process 'improving' perspectives and compositional details for the final canvas, as it were. His travelogue Constantinople features scintillating descriptions of crowds on the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, the seraglio ('full of secrets and enticements . . . this monstrous palace') and the city's European quarter, where Flaubert's Madame Bovary – its scenes of adultery presumably missed by the Turkish censor – is for sale.
Excerpted from The Islamic Enlightenment by Christopher de Bellaigue. Copyright © 2017 by Christopher de Bellaigue. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
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