Unseen Worlds

surprisingly moving chronicle of in- UNSEEN WORLDS tellectual and political flourishing in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran—“the brain of Islam”—in the nineteenth and Islam’s forgotten reformation twentieth centuries. We trail some extraordinary figures, each of whom By Yasmine Seale sought to integrate Islamic and Euro- pean ideas: Rifaa al-Tahtawi, Egypt’s “forward-thinking mandarin,” the Discussed in this essay: first Arab to use the word jumhuriyya (“republic”); the gay savant Hassan The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to al-Attar, who, between prolific writ- Modern Times, by Christopher de Bellaigue. Liveright. 432 pages. $35. ings in defense of logic and astrono- The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, by Cemil Aydin. my, enabled the first official dissec- Harvard University Press. 304 pages. $29.95. tion in Egypt; the polymath ˙Ibrahim The Story of Reason in Islam, by Sari Nusseibeh. Stanford University Press. 288 Sinasi,¸ who released Turkish poetry pages. $29.95. from its “dungeon of precedent”; Mir- Letters to a Young Muslim, by Omar Saif Ghobash. Picador. 272 pages. $22. za Saleh Shirazi, “bookworm and xenophile,” who put out Iran’s first arly in January 1989, a man who How do we talk about Islam? The newspaper; Besir¸ Fuat, “ardent Vol- Ehad led a revolution wrote to a ways are few and narrow. One in- tairian,” who penned a real-time ac- man who was trying to bury volves prefacing discussion of any as- count of his own suicide; Halide Edib one. “Mr. Gorbachev!” the letter pect of its civilization, however an- Adıvar, who wrote a futuristic novel said. “Reality must be faced.” Three cient or arcane, with caveats about about the rise of the Turkish nation emissaries were sent to Moscow, where present horrors committed by a few before helping to usher those visions for two hours they made the case that in its name. No doubt such remarks into reality; and Ali Shariati, “Iran’s Marxism had failed to meet “the real are an acknowledgment of confusion, space-age Luther.” needs of mankind.” The Western world, of the difficulty of thinking through Belying his simplistic subtitle (The on the other hand, offered nothing but a complex subject outside the terms Struggle Between Faith and Reason), de vulgar materialism. They proposed an set by the news cycle. But they are Bellaigue spins a web of tensions. One alternative, a way “to help fill up the also, I suspect, a shibboleth, a Ma- strand sets subtle minds such as these ideological vacuum of your system.” sonic handshake meant to convey against “Islam’s progressive autocrats,” After some thought, the secretary- that one is on the right side of dark- those “impatient transformers” who general of the Communist Party po- ness. I know of no other issue that re- sought to modernize by force. Tahtawi litely declined the Iranians’ invitation quires the affirmation of basic decen- spent much of his career “at the mercy to embrace Islam. Ayatollah Khomeini, cy before debate can take place. of viceregal whim.” Namık Kemal, on hearing the news, was disappointed. Four new books get this rhetorical whose vision for a parliament in Istan- He had wanted, he said, “to open a move out of the way early on. They bul would have a formative effect on door from the unseen world” to the also, by various means, attempt to his country’s politics, lost years to ex- Russian people. stretch the straitjacket. They speak ile. Reform-minded despots saw their In historical terms, this story is a in different voices—personal, popu- efforts thwarted in turn by recalcitrant footnote, but it, too, seems to open a larizing, academic—but have in mullahs: Amir Kabir, Iran’s merciless door from the unseen world. What if common a kind of restlessness, a side modernizer, “could no more than nib- Gorbachev had said yes? After his fall shuffle, a desire to take the way we ble at the clergy’s judicial powers.” from power, he expressed regret at not talk about Islam off-piste. And despite Sultan Mahmud’s persis- having given the offer more thought. tent efforts against the plague, it took In any case, the prospect of mass So- ith The Islamic Enlighten- the intervention of the highest- viet conversion is less interesting than Wment, Christopher de Bel- ranking cleric, around 1850, to con- the encounter itself. As an improba- laigue, the author of several vince the people of Istanbul of the ble meeting of two systems often fine books on Turkey and Iran, sets out benefits of quarantine, which, “with a thought to be rigid and unreformable, to correct a mistaken belief. “Islam suddenness that must have been stun- it warns us against thinking too rigid- needs its Enlightenment,” goes the ning,” eradicated the disease. ly ourselves. Khomeini was talking, of refrain; “Islam needs a Reformation, a We learn about changing attitudes course, about the hidden world of be- Renaissance and a sense of humour.” toward slavery and sex, the education lief. But more than that remains un- In fact, he writes in his introduction, of women and the dilution of faith seen today; the episode encourages us those who call for such reforms “are (“the human intellect was elbowing the to look for other doors. opening the door on a horse that bolt- divine Creator aside”). From the middle ed long ago.” of the nineteenth century, however, Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator What follows is an account of the “the promise inherent in Western based in Istanbul. horse’s journey: a stylishly written, knowledge was offset by the terrifying 82 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2017 advance of the European powers”— since the death of Queen Victoria can trast, Antoine Clot, the physician who the French into Tunisia in 1881, the a book have resorted so often to the set up a school of midwifery in Egypt, British into Egypt the following year, word “benighted.” The cosmopolitan is simply “the civilising Frenchman.” to say nothing of the Anglo–Russian inhabitants of Alexandria are “half- My larger complaint, however, is one contest that destabilized much of breeds,” Cairo “an untameable bazaar less of tone than of framing. For in that Asia—and the narrative homes in of ideas,” the political theory known as magical word, “modernity,” lies a shaky on the struggle for Muslim self- Ottomanism “an exotic big yurt ar- conceit shored up by a bewildering array determination against imperial en- rangement.” The following sentence of metaphors. “Jane Eyre is modern,” croachments. In other words, it be- would not have been out of place in a and so are “the potato, kerosene lamps, comes a story about the politics of piece of fin-de-siècle reportage: wire nails and sewing machines,” pianos resistance, which increas- and blotting paper, rifles and ingly involved the assertion bow ties. Modernity is some- of global Muslim unity thing you might “manipu- against colonial incursions. late” or “delay” but that “no This line of thought, known one” could “stop,” something as pan-Islamism, was at first you could “teeter on the edge scant on theology; later it of,” “miss out on,” or, if you would develop a fundamen- were lucky, be “smiled on by”; talist branch. it is a “wave,” a “race,” a In their use of new tech- “sprint,” an “animal,” a “call” nologies, mass mobilization, that “cannot be unheard” and concepts such as justice and “quivers in the air,” a and progress, these militant “contagion,” a “hothouse,” a movements were as modern “blast.” It has “many faces.” as the ideas they opposed This haziness leads to (“To its intense irritation, Is- some strange contortions. lamism itself was shot Coercive reformers “set up through with Enlightenment new, modern institutions values”), but the politicization but the ethos inside them of religion sits uneasily within was not always modern.” the terms de Bellaigue has set Rifaa al-Tahtawi was by any himself. The rise of pan- standards a remarkable Islamic thought is told with man, but was Egypt really care, but to call it a “counter- “a country whose modern Enlightenment” is mislead- meaning he can be said to ing. He writes that “from a have invented”? And then defensive starting point the there are the flights of raw modern Islamic world became enthusiasm: “Who could a poor producer of original resist the power of autono- ideas,” which is another way mous judgment encour- of saying that when your aged by the printed news- country is being occupied, sci- paper, or fail to hear in the ence and philosophy might tick of a modern watch the not be your first concerns. reordering of time itself?” Upheavals of thought Who indeed? I couldn’t have an austere drama, help but identify with the which de Bellaigue conveys illiterate porters who are with flair. In what might have been a It does not escape the attention of in- said to have accosted Rıza Tevfik, thicket of isms it is hard to find a dull quisitive Westerners who travel to Mus- one of the Young Turks who restored sentence. The Suez Canal was “a bone lim countries that for the people there the dormant Ottoman constitution with one end in France’s maw and the the challenge of modernity is the over- in their revolt of 1908. other in Britain’s,” Dolmabahce Palace whelming fact of their lives. in Istanbul “a neoclassical meringue “Tell us what the constitution means,” with all the mod cons.” This is history This affable condescension extends the porters yelled. Tevfik replied, “Constitution is such a great thing in the grand style: men “hurdle” seas, to physical descriptions: one ruler is that those who do not know it are “vault” mountains, and “sire” incredible “corpulent, generously moustachioed, donkeys.” “We are donkeys!” the por- numbers of children.

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