Gentlemen of the Press: Sayyid al-Afghānī, Journalistic Genre and Creation of an

Islamic Enlightenment

Pádraig Belton
M.A., Near and Middle Eastern Studies

This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements

for the degree of Master of Arts in Near and Middle Eastern Studies
of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)

15th September, 2009

word count: 10,336

 Page 2

Gentlemen of the Press: Sayyid al-Afghānī, Journalistic Genre and Creation of an Islamic
Enlightenment

I. Plain Facts for Circle-Squarers: debates, source material and a field guide for the
historiography of Afghānī and disciples (p. 3)

II. Transitions between literary genres, Bakhtin and the birth of journalism and literary
genre in the context of shifting sensibility and political reality at the moment of Empire
(p. 10)

III. Afghānī’s circle compared with the Aligarh movement in North India to glean what is
distinctive in the Cairene case, and what structural in that which they share (p. 19)

IV. The Renan and Blunt correspondences: Afghānī’s interpretations of West and East, and
defence of the latter. Precursors and historical interpretation of present debates between
Tariq Ramadan and Melanie Philips. (p. 23)

Abstract: This essay advances a new interpretation of the writings of Jamāl ad-Dīn Afghānī as
progenitor of Arab journalism, suggesting previously unposed conundrums and possible answers
in the linked rises of journalistic and novel genre at the precise moment of Empire. It argues a
Bakhtinian reading for the aperture of new genre forms amongst Afghānī and his journalists
during a moment of sharply disjoined political reality, demonstrating close analogues with the
contemporaneous North Indian Aligarh movement and tracing the process of translation and
adaptation of European genre into a colonised local context. This essay then suggests a new
reading of Jamāl ad-Dīn’s journalism in ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā, proposing that in an author capable of
such %ux to &t moment and interlocutor, precisely his weakest arguments then have potential to
demonstrate his spaces of strongest invariate commitment. It then situates the Afghānī-Renan
debate as opening a vein of apologetic and critique in the European discussion of Islam which
persists with only slight modi&cation up to the present day of Tariq Ramadan and Melanie Philips.
 Page 3

I. Plain Facts for Circle-Squarers:1 debates, source material and a field guide for the

historiography of Afghānī and disciples

Afghānī Studies as a university discipline has rested somewhat since the halcyon days of 1972.

That Keddie did not an industry spawn perhaps does not surprise:2 Jamāl ad-Dīn Afghānī’s

would-be biographer must after all &nd and pursue a quarry across Afghanistan (1866-68),

Ottoman Turkey (1869-71, 1892-97), Egypt (1871-79), India (1879-82), France (1883-84) and

Iran and Russia (1886-91). Nonetheless, like the shaykhist pure ʿImām3 whom Sayyid Jamāl ad-

Dīn seems to have felt must arise in each generation, there are three reasons his biographer

likewise should renew itself rather than disappearing into occultation.

1
An inexpiable pun on the Circle, the section title alludes to the slipperiness of the subject, and the volume of
academic work poured forth against it, at times of variable quality. It plagiarises the title of a book the Victorian
Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, recognised better in his pseudonym Lewis Caroll, had hoped to write
according to one of his diary entries for 1855. See Martin Gardner’s delightful The Universe in a Handkerchief:
Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles and Word Plays (New York: Springer, 1996).
Dispiritingly for present purposes, Ferdinand von Lindemann proved the impossibility of the circle’s quadrature in
‘Über die Zahl π’, Mathematische Annalen 20 (1882): pp. 213–225.

2
i.e., with Sayyid Jamal ad-Din 'al-Afghani': a political biography. Berkeley, University of California Press. Juan
Cole has called it ‘magisterial’; admittedly, in Keddie’s festschrift. Most reviewers, Hourani included, would agree;
scholars’ reluctance to soldier in after her provides eloquent testimony.

3
Cole includes the Shaykhy school as a possible youthful in%uence on Jamāl ad-Dīn alongside the Babi movement, in
New perspectives on Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in Egypt, pp. 13-34 in Rudi P. Matthee and Beth Baron, Iran
and beyond : essays in Middle Eastern history in honor of Nikki R. Keddie, p. 13.
 Page 4

For one (and a droll point), we cannot preconceive just which materials lurk not yet traipsed

upon in the archives. Each scholar dipping recreationally into those waters for sport has landed a

quarry to generate rogue waves: for Keddie, India O(ce &les pregnant as to Jamāl ad-Dīn’s

circumspectly obscured true origins; Davison, an Ottoman biographical entry discovered out of its

alphabetical order; Cole, a dossier of papers con&scated from Jamāl ad-Dīn’s house at the time of

his August 1879 Cairene arrest and deportation, and surviving in the Egyptian National Archives.4

For another, even surviving archival caches we know of include much not yet translated, not

merely from Arabic but from Persian, Turkish and Urdu; and many simmering interpretative

questions have not been settled, just as others go unraised. The researchers named in previous

lines each confess their inability exhaustively either to access or translate portions of their troves

in the circumstances.5 For a third, there are novel uses, and needs, under whose colours to recall

4
Davison, (he cites from the Sicill-i Osmani composed by the career Ottoman o(cial Mehmed Sureyya), Jamal al-
Din al-Afghani: a note on his nationality and on his burial. Middle Eastern Studies 24: 1988: 110-12. Cole, New
Perspectives p. 14, and also his Colonialism and revolution in the Middle East: social and cultural origins of Egypt’s
ʿUrabi movement, for which the dossier constitutes a primary source.

5
For a %avour of the opulence of the unpursued leads which a very small amount of &eldwork in a few cities might
assay, see Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din at pp 7-8, and this passage from Roderic Davison: ‘In addition to some
published materials in Turkish, Keddie found in the Başbakanlik Arşivi in Istanbul one document relating to Afghani,
in the Yildiz category: ibid., pp. viii, 384-85. She gives it in English, pp. 444-7. This document is catalogued in the
register of the Yildiz category as Kisim 14, evrak 1103, zarf 126, karton 9. It is worth noting that the same register
lists at least one other document on Afghani: Kisim 18, evrak 553/586, zarf 93, karton 38. It is described there as a
memorandum on the cause of Afghani's expulsion from Istanbul [in 1871] - his mention of prophecy as a craft in a
lecture at the Valide Mekteb, next to Sultan Mahmud's tomb. I have not seen the document itself, which is among the
papers of Cevdet Paşa. There may well be other documents relating to Afghani, both catalogued and uncatalogued, in
the Yildiz Tasni& or in other categories in the Başbakanlik Arşivi. Roderic H. Davison, Jamal al-Din Afghani: A
Note on His Nationality and on His Burial, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 1988), p. 112.

This essay also begins the task of cataloguing, at back, a bibliography of the several archives and repositories, as well
as original language materials, upon which a full study of the subject ought draw.
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the wily old conspirator to service. Afghānī has a bit to say about, inter alia: religion’s

congeniality with rationalism; regional rede&nition against the West, coupled with &ltering and

assimilating from amongst its modernities; and the political serviceability of modernist religion,

both in the Islamic world and in the West for subverting discourses of religious inferiority. In fact,

these are his themes, precisely.

To these three ends, aiding and abetting his next biographer, this essay is a &eld guide; with a

particular glance at Afghānī’s role in the inception of Arab journalism, and the precursors - here,

at the dawning both of the Arab press and of Empire - of our own day’s critique and apology of

Islam. It identi&es: which broad sets of Afghānī questions have been, to di*ering extents,

disposed of by researchers; questions they have peered at but on which there remains vigorous

debate; and ones at which researchers have looked, but new material has come to view since.

This trawling is to prepare ground for provocations on a fourth point, constituting the latter three

sections and bulk of this essay: questions which have not yet been raised for addressing. Some

particular reference here will be reserved to points of historiography concerning disciples of

Afghānī’s who began newspapers, as well as measuring his in%uences, direct and at a remove,

within Arab letters. Wholly by happenstance, it selects two thematic conundrums from the

Cairene phase of Afghānī’s life, and one from his Parisian years. The &eld guide for explorers

will then conclude with a brie%y-annotated inventory addendum of European-language and

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Arabic, Persian and Urdu primary and secondary sources useful for the fashioning of answers

towards these questions, and where they might be found.

There are sects in Afghānī Studies. A marked tendency in more recent historiography has been

lately to seek to curtail judgements as to Jamāl ad-Dīn’s in%uence, a corrective against earlier

moments of confusion between hagiography and historiography preceding the rush of scholarship

of the 1960s and 1970s. In Keddie, this hagiographic tradition has its photographic negative.6

Exegetically, readings of Afghānī have also spanned a spectrum from those approaches that

preferring to see in their subject no variation, beneath all his malleabilities between contexts

(Keddie is an exemplar; Hourani also may be, markedly in his reading of the Renan debate) 7, and

those preferring again to see no constancy (Shaykh-ul-Azhar Mustafa ʿAbd al-Raziq, for one, in

6
There is an almost delicious malevolence towards their subject limned in the titles: ‘Sayyid Jamal ad-Din’s &rst 27
Years: The Darkest Period,’ Nikki Keddie, Middle East Journal, Autumn 1966, 517-533; ‘Culture Traits, Fantasy, and
Reality in the Life of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani.’ Iranian Studies IX, nos 2-3 (1976): 89-120; and ‘Sayyid
Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani: A Case of Posthumous Charisma?’ In Philosophers and Kings edited by D. Rustow,
148-179. New York: Braziller, 1970. Less so, Sayyid Jamal Ad-Din ‘Al-Afghani’: A Political Biography.

7
Also, reviewers suggested that in her approach to Afghānī, Keddie may have overexerted herself to &nd constant
themes in the work of a man capable of great self-contradiction. Thus Abdul-Hadi Hairi responded to Keddie’s
theory of Afghani’s ‘irreligiosity and indi*erence to the truth of religion’--a reading according to which ‘even the
writings that defend Islam have very little content that can justly be called religious’ (p. 195)-- by pointing out its
inconsistency with Chirā Islam Za'if Shud (which by happenstance, Hairi translated in Die Welt des Islams). This is
the assertion for which Keddie is perhaps best known, and it has occasioned the most dissent from her otherwise
respectful body of reviewers.
 Page 7

Rašīd Riḍā’s account.8) There is the further question of how frequently he indulged in

esotericism: Adīb Isḥāq, in particular, depicts the sage as in his Egyptian years ‘revealing to some

of his disciples ... his full opinions, while from others he hid his liberal opinions but tried to help

them out of superstition and ignorance’. 9

Several debates may now be considered settled. Afghānī now has a birthplace - he is Asadābādī

from the Asadābād near Hamadān, Iran; and not the Asadābād of Kunar Province, Afghanistan.10

It is also worth noting that (as with T. E. Lawrence within Britain 11) historiographic trends with

regard to someone of Jamāl ad-Dīn’s stature have often re%ected broader social trends: the seismic

rumbles from Louis ʿAwad’s reappraisal of his role in 1983 here a key example.12

8
ʿAbd al-Raziq reported after Jamāl ad-Dīn’s arrival in Paris 1883, Afghānī su*ered a change in belief: ‘(He) became
a rebel against religion, and came to believe it was the enemy of science, reason and civilization so much so that he
gladly and deferentially acquiesced in Renan’s attack on Islam’ (Rašīd Riḍā’, al-Manār vol XXIV (1923), p 311). By
happenstance, the Afghānī-Renan debate is analysed at some length in section IV.

One cannot neatly group his biographers on this axis. Hourani upbraids Keddie in a review for calling Afghānī an
‘Islamic deist’ which, protests Hourani, is ‘to make what he privately believed, and stated only to a few friends,
simpler, ore consistent and more stable than it really was’. He then comments that ‘other philosophic Muslims have
lived with this tension, but Jamal al-Din seems rather to have wandered between the two poles of it, now clinging to
one and now to the other.’ Albert Hourani. Review of An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious
Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din 'al-Afghani' by Nikki R. Keddie, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol.
1, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), pp. 90-91.

9
Rašīd Riḍā, Taʿrīḥ, p. 40.

10
Roderic H. Davison, Jamal al-Din Afghani: A note on his nationality and on his burial, Middle Eastern Studies,
24:1 (January 1988), pp. 110-112, for one.

11
‘Critics observed that [Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: a biographical enquiry] revealed more about
psychological problems of Aldington than about Lawrence.’ Eugene Rasor, Winston S. Churchill, 1874-1965: a
comprehensive historiography and annotated bibliography, Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 2000, p. 230.

12
Rudi Matthee, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and the Egyptian National Debate, International Journal of Middle East
Studies 21 (1989):151-169.
 Page 8

Far more are the questions that are still open. Juan Cole, whose work on the social history of

the ʿUrabī revolt more than establishes his credentials in this period, reminds us that amongst the

questions that still are open are whether his message was solely secularist, or if he played a role as

a speci&cally Muslim leader; and whether he developed any of his pan-Islamic ideas during his

Egyptian period, or if these date only to the early 1880s.13 Hairi opens questions of manufacture

and production, whether Afghānī &rst wrote all the articles of ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā &rst in Persian, and

then ʿAbduh parsed them into Arabic? (And if so, then what has become of the originals?)14

If one opts in favour of Keddie’s reading, then it is with Afghānī that the instrumental use of

religion in anti-imperialist politics receives its modern form and focus. There is, perhaps as a

result, an inclination often to belittle the fact that Afghānī was also a thinker. For this reason,

after due examination of aspects of his more political and historical roles, the present essay will

devote its fourth section to a close examination of Jamāl ad-Dīn’s writings from his Parisian

period.15 First, though, it will attempt two tasks as prologemena, both related. Thus, section II

will present arguments relating to Afghānī’s career as chancellor of an uno(cial Cairo school of

journalism (which raises two questions, why journalism, and why Afghānī); it also will examine

13
Juan R. I. Cole, New Perspectives on Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in Egypt, in Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron,
eds., Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, Costa Mesa, Calif..: Mazda
Publishers, 2000, pp. 13-34.

14
Abdul-Hadi Hairi, Review of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn ‘al-Afghānī’: A Political Biography by Nikki R. Keddie, Die
Welt des Islams, New Series, Vol. 15, Issue 1/4 (1974), pp. 261-262.

15
Not wholly to neglect the orthodox, i.e. pre-1960 historiography, which begins with C.C. Adams, Islam and
Modernism in Egypt (London, 1933), and carries through to Sir Hamilton Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (Chicago,
1947), and Hourani.
 Page 9

the relationships linking colonisation, the rise of journalism and the rise of the novel. Section III

will follow Afghānī to North India, where he passed the three years after his Cairene sojourn, and

present arguments comparing the latter relationships with those analogous ones within the

contemporaneous British Indian context. Section IV then goes with Jamāl ad-Dīn to Paris, and

treating with due seriousness the above injunction to regard Afghānī as an intellectual as well as a

political &gure, follows closely the texture of argument in his ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā contributions and

debate with Renan within the French Journal des débats; the analysis thus extends both to the

substance of Jamāl ad-Dīn’s journalism and to its form.

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II. Transitions between literary genres, Bakhtin and the birth of journalism and literary

genre in the context of shifting sensibility and political reality at the moment of Empire

The recognisable roster of Jamāl ad-Dīn’s Circle could also be presented in an alternate format:

by the Arab region’s earliest newspapers which they edited, with Afghānī’s advice and inspiration,

and on occasion his assistance in accessing printing licences through government patronage

channels: Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʿ (Abu Naẓẓāra zarqaʿ, under its several titles), Adīb Isḥāq 16 (Miṣr al-

Fatāt, with a half-dozen others), the Beiruti Salīm al-Naḳḳāsh (Āthār al-adhār, and several

others), Salīm ʿAnḥūrī from Syria (Mirʿāt ash-Sharq), ʿAbd Allāh al-Nadīm (al-Tankīt wa-l-Tabkīt,

al-Taʿif and al-Ustādh), Ibrāhīm al-Laqqānī (taking over Mirʿāt ash-Sharq from ʿAnḥūrī and, with

Nadīm, an important contributor in the pages of Isḥāq’s al-Tijāra) and obviously Muḥammad

ʿAbduh (al ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā).

In urging his younger disciples towards resisting colonialism with the written word,

interestingly, Afghānī seems both to have inaugurated the Muslim Arabic press, and to have done

16
Kedourie takes an appealingly dim view of the Damascene Isḥāq: ‘Adib Ishaq showed remarkable elasticity in
changing sides and patrons, and great ability in justifying each turn and twist with elevated reasons and lofty
principles. His private life seems to have left somewhat to be desired: he was a habitual drunkard, and a discreet
obituary declared that his health was impaired and his death hastened by his promiscuous behaviour (tasāhuluhu fī
ṭuruq muʿāsharatihi) and indulging youthful passion (iṭlāq hawā al-nafs fīma tasūq ilayhi al-shabība).’ The death of
Adib Ishaq, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 9 No. 1 (Jan. 1973), pp. 95-109, at 96. Afghani and ʿAbduh, pp. 32 and 36.
(citing Abd al-Latif Hamza, Adab al-maqala al-suhu&yya & Misr, vol. II, Cairo 1950, p. 15.) More edifyingly for the
theme of crossover amongst journalism, drama and translation, Rizzitano notes that by the age of 18 he was editing a
newspaper in Beirut and trying his hand at a translation of Racine’s Andromaque-- at the suggestion of the French
consul in Beirut. Another piece of juvenalia involved translation from French of an historical play called
Charlemagne.
 Page 11

so with his &ve principal journalist-disciples encompassing two Christians and one Jew.17 In

doing so, his role seems principally to have been as mentor - encouraging Adīb Isḥāk in founding

the review Miṣr, then the daily al-Tidjāra, aiding and abetting ʿAnḥūrī in inaugurating Mir`͑͑āt al-

Sharḳ - he at times took a turn as professor-practitioner, especially as contributor to Ḍiyā’ al-

Khā&ḳayn, a bilingual Arabic and English monthly review he helped in 1892 to establish, and

more famously his collaborative project with ʿAbduh, Urwa al-Wuthḳā, to which we will return in

Section IV.

These newspapers had the broad subject matter shared by the great British Reviews, and a quick

argument from economics explains why. If (Hafez’s estimate18 ) one single copy of a monthly

review sold for fully one to two per cent of per capita anual income, that each might try to cover

17
Further statements of Afghānī’s support for new journalistic projects are provided by ʿAnḥūrī in Riḍā, Tārīkh, pp
45-46, 48-49.
With regard to Ṣannūʿ’s religious practice, Gendzier &nds him a sort of theological dual national: ‘Brought up in
both Muslim and Jewish traditions, Sanua seems to have been able to reconcile both without abandoning either. In the
strictest terms, the fact that he was born of Jewish parents, that he married in a Jewish synagogue, and that he was
buried in a Jewish cemetery, make him a Jew in the eyes of his fellow men, and in the less personal eyes of the law.
But there is no doubt that his devotion to the Muslim cause was any less sincere, and his works con&rm the fact that
he identi&ed himself completely with the Muslim nation of which he was a part. It is interesting and not irrelevant to
note that although Sanua's personal and even his publicly a(rmed religious beliefs were open to some doubt, almost
all references to him describe him as an Egyptian Jew.’ (James Sanua and Egyptian nationalism, p. 18.)

18
Sabry Hafez, The genesis of Arabic narrative discourse, 84.
 Page 12

as much ground carries a certain logic. The equivalent cost relative to the 2008 UK per capita

income of £28,000 would be £560 for a magazine.19

It is worth spending just a moment to look further at Ṣannūʿ and Isḥāq, since these members of

the Circle and early Arab newspaper editors both spanned journalism and the theatre, a pattern not

atypical within the early Egyptian press. Given a theme of this section will be the relationship

between the rise of journalism and narrative genre, and the linkages between both and the coming

of empire, the biographies of both are evocative of the sort of man of letters who would be most

exposed both to imported new forms of literary genre from Europe, and likely to play a role in its

translation and local acclimatisation.

Isḥāq had achieved some renown in Lebanon before coming in 1876, at the age of twenty, to

Alexandria, being known as a writer, editor and translator. Joining Salīm Naqqāsh in presenting

plays under the Khedive’s patronage, he does not seem to have met with great success, and was

sent to Cairo and Afghānī with an introduction from Ḥusayn al-Khūrī, an historian. Isḥāq duly

began to attend his lectures at al-Azhar, and fell enthusiastically into the Circle. Afghānī

encouraged him in beginning a newspaper and assisted him in securing the necessary concessions

19
One could play further with the economics underlying the early Arab press. Advertisements are a rich source of
information into readers, their wealth and their snobberies. Rizk &nds adverts treating for ‘sale at exceptional prices
of great quantities of sturdy British-made shoes for men, women and children. An opportunity for those who care
about economising.’ It’s all there: the emerging middle classes with their insecurities, exposure to Europeanised
tastes, fashions and pasttimes, and the substitution of factory-made items for ones which were domestically produced,
resolute perhaps to emulate those of higher status in spite of economic di(culties involved; Hyacinth Bucket. Dr
Yunan Labib Rizk, Al-Ahram: A diwan of contemporary life (351). Al-Ahram Weekly. Issue No. 495. 17-23 August,
2000.
 Page 13

to begin publication in July 1877 of what became his weekly journal Miṣr. 20 Published from

Cairo and subsequently from Alexandria, Miṣr enjoyed a measure of celebrity, and was a principle

vehicle of Afghānī’s own thoughts. He seems to have preferred to dictate, and some resulting

articles appear under a pseudonym. The move to Alexandria in 1878 nodded to its standing as a

hub of commerce and diplomacy. On Afghānī’s suggestion, there Isḥāq began to collaborate with

Naqqāsh, both on Miṣr and on the new daily al-Tidjāra, for which Afghānī assisted them in

gaining a permit and which began publication thereafter in June of that year. Broadening its

coverage from matters &nancial and commercial to encompass also the political, the daily

newspaper subscribed to the Reuters agency’s wire, the &rst Egyptian newspaper so to do, and

attracted the editorials of Nadīm, Laqqānī and ʿAbduh, as well as Afghānī himself. It grew

controversial at the Gezirah Palace with strong pillories of the ‘European Ministry’ of Wilson and

de Blignières, endured a fortnight’s suspension in early 1879, and this experience only sti*ening

the necks of the editors, drew the ire of Khedive Tawfīq later that year. 21 Suppressed in 1880,

and Isḥāq &nding himself banished from Egypt on charges of subversion of the regime and

20
Kudsi-Zadeh, Legacy, p. 134. Ḥusayn al-Khūrī’s letter of introduction of Isḥāq to Afghānī is in the Majils Library
collection, in Documents, p. 70, doc. 232, dated 16 Jumādā al-ūlā, 1294/May 29, 1877. After praising the recipient
and describing the subject of the introduction, Khūrī’s writes when ‘Adīb E*endi prepared to leave, he asked me to
supply him with a letter to you. He desires to meet you because of the many things that charmed him in the
description of your qualities. He was bent on presenting this letter, and I gave it to him with pleasure. Your slave still
laments separation, and envies the bearer for the great luck he will &nd in being near to the leader of intellects and
eloquence, until, please God, I make the pilgrimage to the Kaʿba of your eloquence and the abode of your imamate.’

21
Kudsi-Zadeh, Legacy, 136-7, citing Ibrāhīm ʿAbduh (who had occasion to observe the existent issues) at Taṭawwir
aṣ-ṣaḥāfa al-miṣriyya, 1798-1951 (Cairo, 1951). Ibrāhīm ʿAbduh attributes the daily newspaper’s closure to a
revolutionary tone traceable directly to Afghānī.
 Page 14

revolutionary extremism, he went also into exile in Paris and from there published Miṣr al-

Ḳāhira.22

By comparison, the question is more unsettled just how much direct in%uence Afghānī might

have brought to bear upon his disciple Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʿ when, two years subsequently, that

playwright instituted in all events the &rst journal established by a member of the Circle, Abū

Naẓẓāra Zarqā. Ṭarrāzī indicates during this period Ṣannūʿ was providing Afghānī and ʿAbduh

with French language instruction, a talent ironically useful to both Ṣannūʿ and Afghānī in later

years.23 On Ṭarrāzī’s account, the decision to found a journal to satirise the misdoings of the

Khedive Ismāʿil was taken by the three jointly, Ṣannūʿ then being decided most suitable to serve

as editor; the sobriquet in the journal’s title then resulting from Ṣannūʿ’s journey home from his

two companions. In two respects Abū Naẓẓāra Zarqā seems to bear rather more the maker’s mark

of the disciple than the master - in its somewhat pioneering use of the coloquial register of the

language, and in its advocacy of Prince Ḥalīm. Its espousal of that cause, coupled with satirical

22
Kedourie takes an appealingly dim view of the Damascene Isḥāq: ‘Adib Ishaq showed remarkable elasticity in
changing sides and patrons, and great ability in justifying each turn and twist with elevated reasons and lofty
principles. His private life seems to have left somewhat to be desired: he was a habitual drunkard, and a discreet
obituary declared that his health was impaired and his death hastened by his promiscuous behaviour (tasāhuluhu fī
ṭuruq muʿāsharatihi) and indulging youthful passion (iṭlāq hawā al-nafs fīma tasūq ilayhi al-shabība).’ The death of
Adib Ishaq, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 9 No. 1 (Jan. 1973), pp. 95-109, at 96. Afghani and ʿAbduh, pp. 32 and 36.
(citing Abd al-Latif Hamza, Adab al-maqala al-suhu&yya & Misr, vol. II, Cairo 1950, p. 15.) More edifyingly for the
theme of crossover amongst journalism, drama and translation, Rizzitano notes that by the age of 18 he was editing a
newspaper in Beirut and trying his hand at a translation of Racine’s Andromaque-- at the suggestion of the French
consul in Beirut. Another piece of juvenalia involved translation from French of an historical play called
Charlemagne.

23
Ṭarrāzī vol. I, p. 39, and vol. II, p. 283. Ṣannūʿ, taking leave of Afghānī and ʿAbduh, attracted the cry ‘You with
the blue glasses, please hire my donkey,’ which given the frequency with which later employed, it may be conjectured
pleased him. Moosa, p. 403.
 Page 15

treatment of the Khedive, contributed to the journal’s suppression following its &fteenth number

in only its second month.24 In proceeding then in June of 1878 to Parisian exile, it would be more

Ṣannūʿ preparing the way for Afghānī, where the latter would join him in 1883.25

Kendall sees in Abū Naẓẓāra a direct continuation of Ṣannūʿ’s dramaturgic writings, and credits

him for winning popular support for a rudimentary literary journalism in Egypt: in exemplifying

muḥāwarāt, luʿbāt, and rusūmāt tamthīliyya, they were essentially theatrical sketches incorporating

narrative and satirical elements.26 Badawi describes them as rather crudely shaped and ‘too

directly political to be works of art’; others have seen in them a link joining journalism with short

24
Ibrāhīm ʿAbduh states in the &rst &ve issues of the journal, Ṣannūʿ lambasted circumstances in Egypt, such as the
employment of coercive methods in exacting taxation from peasants, but drew back from provoking the Khedive
Ismāʿil. Ṣannūʿ is meant to have indicated in his elusive autobiography (a document Ibrāhīm ʿAbduh paraphrases but
does not translate) that the triumphs of his journal encouraged him to ‘remove the mask from my face and
courageously attack the Khedive Ismāʿil, who looted his own subjects by imposing numerous taxes and duties, which
broke their backs.’ (The relevant text is ʿAbduh, p. 54.)

25
See Irene Gendzier, The practical visions of Yaʿqub Sanuʿ, 49-65; Kudsi-Zadeh, Legacy, p. 133; and especially
Matti Moosa, Yaʿqub Sanuʿ and the rise of Arab drama in Egypt, pp. 401-33. The contemporary observer Hartmann
in his catalogue of newspapers in Egypt attributes the cause of Sanuʿ’s exile rather to his attacks upon Britain, perhaps
displaying the common impression of the time, or possibly the gloss placed upon it by Afghānī and his disciples,
when the Khedive was no more but in his stead was Lord Cromer: ‘Abu Nazzara, the well-known comic paper,
established in Cairo, by the Egyptian Jew, James Sanua. Because of his violent attacks on the English Government he
was prosecuted, and he settled in Paris.’ (p. 82) Sanuʿ' intermittently continued its publication from Paris after 1879
under a succession of rather comparable names (Abu Sa*ara, Abu Zummara, al-Haun) until in 1882 reverting to the
original.
As for the circulation of the newspaper, Gendzier gives credence to ʿAbduh’s estimate that a total of 2,000 copies
circulated cumulatively of the various issues; Blanchard recorded its weekly circulation at the unlikely &gure of
50,000; whilst de Baignières cites this as the total number of copies of the several issues which had appeared during
its Egyptian publication. Blunt remarked simply it had a great popularity ‘among the people of the streets’.
Gendzier, James Sanua and Egyptian nationalism, p. 25; Paul de Baignières, L’Egypte satirique, p. 15; Blanchard
Jerrold, The Belgium of the East, London, 1882, p. 88; Wilfrid Blunt, Gordon at Khartoum, p. 46.

26
p. 218; Badawi at p. 34.
 Page 16

&ctional forms that in others’ hands (such as Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī) would gestate into the

fully-%edged Arabic short story.27

In this way it was the newspaper which bore forth the novel: Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s Ḥadīth

ʿĪsā b. Hishām aw Fatra min al-Zamān (1898-1900), serialised in the newspaper of his father

Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq seven years before appearing in book form; Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal's

Zaynab (1914) appeared in serial in Luṭfī al-Sayyid's al-Jarīda in rejoinder to its call for a

national Egyptian literature; Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's al-Ayyām (1926) and Lāshīn's Ḥawwā’ bi-lā Ādam

(1934) both appeared &rst in al-Hilāl; and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm's Yawmiyyāt Nā’ib fī l-Aryāf (1937)

in al-Riwāya.28

There is a logic to the associations amongst these several genres: the newspaper in a manner of

speaking must evolve into the novel to permit itself to focus data from a number of di*erent areas

that--without such a prism--would be hopelessly di*used.29 Whilst focus on individual experience

in Wattian terms characterises the novel,30 Bakhtin seeks to substitute the concepts of

27
One could speculate about the role of sketches in connecting the genre of maqāmāt with the modern short story.

28
‘[J]ournals displaced books and created them’: at least the latter part of the sentence is true. Walter E. Houghton,
‘Periodical literature and the articulate classes’, in J. Shattock and M. Wol* (eds.), The Victorian periodical press:
sightings and soundings (Leicester and Toronto, 1982). These examples are drawn from Kendall at p. 222.

29
Kendall hints at another mechanism also: ‘In all cases, the transference from journal to volume signals the rescuing
of the text, for an issue is always a date, a(rming at the same time both the modernity of the work published and its
ephemerality. It is by implication a denial of the journal as a separate literary form.’ (p. 217)

30
The novel form's ‘primary criterion was truth to individual experience’ (p. 13). Ian Watt’s The rise of the novel:
studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London, 1957) inaugurates a literary genre dedicated to the exporation of
the rise of the novel in English; ensuing works include Lennard Davis, Factual &ctions: the origins of the English
novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and Paul Hunter's Before novels: the cultural contexts of
eighteenth-century English &ction (New York: Norton, 1990), and two volumes of Eighteenth Century Fiction under
the title Reconsidering the rise of the novel (January-April 2000, and 2009).
 Page 17

heteroglossia, chronotope, un&nalisability, polyphony and carnival. Curiously, none is found

elsewhere in quite such degree as the newspaper. To draw further on the language of Bakhtin,31

newspapers, like novels, create chronotopes. They are polyphonous, not only capturing a

multitude of voices in a carnival of engagement with the editorial voice noted above, but

enmeshed in a dialogue of utterances connecting the newspaper and the responses of the

readership - which can take the form of market decisions (purchase of the newspaper and products

advertised in it), formal response through editorial channels (letters to the editor) or others yet

again. Uniquely amongst genres, they need not have a point of termination or &nalisation. They

both draw the authoritative into question, and allow that which was before considered certain to

be become con%icted and open to interpretation. Newspapers and novels not only function through

heteroglossia, but must promote it; to do otherwise is failure by their own genre’s literal terms.

31
For which a quick glossary may be in order. By heteroglossia (разноречие), Bakhtin denotes perspective,
evaluation, and ideological positioning, each binding every word inextricably with its context; by chronotope, the
intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that literature artistically expresses, with the real world
supplying the categories for imagined ones and &ctive worlds thus engaging reality; un&nalisability, seeming to re%ect
the in%uence both of Neo-Kantianism and the religious concept of the soul, is the possibility a person can change, and
the certitude a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world; polyphony is the fact of mutual
addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from
untruth; and carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, %ourish and interact together,
creating ‘threshold’ situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed and genuine dialogue becomes
possible. Introduced in his essays, respectively, Discourse in the novel (Слово в романе, 1934), Forms of time and of
the chronotope in the novel (Формы времени и хронотопа в романе, 1938), Problems of Dostoyevsky’s art
(Проблемы творчества Достоевского, 1929, both un&nalisability and polyphony). There is after all a certain
pleasure in adducing a Bakhtinian reading of Afghānī. As with Jamāl ad-Dīn, many details of the Russian’s life are
false or skewed by the subject himself, due doubtless in part to the odd political ties through which they both lived.
Both were subject to o(cial exile (Bakhtin ultimately--and after appeal from Siberia--to six years in Kazakhstan, on
ostensible charges of crypto-Orthodoxy, Jamāl ad-Dīn on charges rather of the opposite, on at least three occasions).
 Page 18

Whether the digestive response be the piqued spurning of Jabarti or the assimilative keenness of

Taw&q al-Hakim,32 once uttered, the Western Question blots up all other discourses into its own

gastric solvent. Speech genres are ‘relatively’ stable; but because the spheres in which they are

uttered are stable also.33 Their relative stability belies that they are also non-standard, fluid and

constantly evolving in form. In the moments when genres open up to recrystalise into new

patterns, we might expect to detect such jarring events as reshaping of power and social structure,

and transformations of mentalités.

Happily, tracing these relationships between the 32-pounder guns of Nelson’s HMS Vanguard,

Ṣannūʿ’s copy and Muwayliḥī’s quill to British North India to see if they hold there, we may also

follow our elusive quarry - who departs Cairo for the Raj in 1879.

32
See here the extravagant metaphorical landscape of acquisition, manacle and digestion which Taw&q al-Hakim so
evocatively clutches: ‘It is incumbent upon us to stretch out our hands, unshackled by custom, tradition or belief, to
take everything and digest everything.’ Young contrasts this with Mahmud al-Masʿadi who employs digestion as a
motif to make a rather contrasting point: ‘We do not wish to decry the mingling of culture, nor the excellent and
creative results which may accrue from this ... the question is one of digestion.’ (Taʿsila li-kiyan, Tunis, 1979, p.
124). Ibrahim Abu Lughod, Arab rediscovery of Europe, 1963, Chs. II and III); Louis Awad, The literature of ideas
in Egypt, Pt. I, Atlanta, Scholars Press, 1986 (the quote from Taw&q al-Hakim is drawn from p. 201), and its review
by M. J. L. Young in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Jul., 1988), pp. 373-376.

33
M.M. Bakhtin, The problem of speech genres, Speech genres and other late essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist, eds. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996. 60-102; reference here is to page 60. Mentalités references
Bloch.
 Page 19

III. Afghānī’s circle compared with the Aligarh movement in North India to glean what is

distinctive in the Cairene case, and what structural in that which they share

Leaving Egypt, Afghānī landed &rst in Karachi where he was promptly put under investigation

after the murder 34 of the Hiberno-Italian Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari KCB CSI, British

resident in Kabul who had refused to accede to the demands of mutinous members of the Corps of

Guides.

When last we met him, Jamāl ad-Dīn’s circle was pursuing a politically stirred journalism, which

began to accomplish minute refractive changes in the Arabic language. These then as quite

unforeseen consequence paved the eventual way into fresh forms of narrative fiction. Kendall

expresses it admirably:

[E]arly on, even such fundamentals as language were subject to the refractive index of journalism.
Regular issues necessitated rapid typesetting which in turn required a simpli&cation of language.
Moreover, the simpler the language, the wider the potential readership, especially in the early stages of
development of the educational system. The temporary nature of newspapers and journals (as opposed
to books) in addition to their initial function of communicating news, opinion, and ideas precluded the
use of excessively ornate prose. This paved the way for the emergence of the editorial which attempted
to develop and argue views and ideas more clearly and logically, in contrast to the at times tortuous
ramblings of earlier traditional writing. 35

Following him then by happy coincidence chronologically from Egypt to North India, we see here

much of the familiar mix: of expanding empire, fresh charismatic and modernist leadership rising

amongst those newly subjugated, and - at the start of the colonial experience in both countries -

34
And which Afghānī actually seems not to have caused.

35
Kendall, The marginal voice, p. 217.
 Page 20

language and political loyalties beginning to evolve together into the forms they currently hold. In

each case, the newspaper &rst occupies pride of place as a politically-driven refractor of language,

and the novel closely follows on its heels. In 1914, Zeinab was 37 years in coming after Abū

Naẓẓāra and 39 after al-Ahram. Compare with a closely matching 39 years between the Bengali

novel Aaler gharer dulal and the newspaper Samachar Darpan, and ten years in the case of

Mir’ātu ‘l-ʿUrūs and the Urdu Avadh Akhbār36 .

The last is the outlier; newspapers having come later to Urdu than to other languages of the

subcontinent. Exposure to British colonisation was much more thoroughgoing in British India in

1858 than in Egypt under Lord Cromer:37 on these two bases could lie an argument for a smaller

role of indigeous evolution from prior genre forms than colonial importation in the spread of the

novel. The path from the journalistic sketch essay with its richly descriptive conception of

characterisation and socially realist worldview to the novel is not a long one; and newspapers,

particularly within the Review tradition, were uniquely poised for mediating negotiations between

writers and readerships to open up of a new genre.

If in Cairo the Arabic language evolved at the dawning of colonisation through politically-

driven journalism orientated against the British Empire, then Urdu, within the North India of the

36
Ulrike Stark, Politics, Public Issues and the Promotion of Urdu Literature: Avadh Akhbar, the &rst Urdu daily in
Northern India, the Annual of Urdu Studies, 18:1, 2003, pp. 66-94.

37Cromer seems to have looked upon the Egyptian press at best as a safety-valve, at worst as mendacious and
mischievous, but incapable even so of brooking any true disruption to public order so long as the army remained in
Egypt. Lufti al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer: a study in Anglo-Egyptian relations. London, John Murray, 1968. 159-160.
 Page 21

Aligarh movement,38 evolved also through the colonial encounter into its present form. Yet in the

politicised evolution of language as elsewhere, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and those following him

believed British arbitration and protection in matters of communal con%ict was necessary for the

protection of India’s minority Muslim community. When in 1837 the East India Company

dispensed with Persian for o(cial purposes, in North India it chose to write Hindi-Urdu in the

Persian script rather than Devanagari. Communal pressure broke out in the United Provinces for

o(cial recognition of Nagari beginning in 1867; its granting brought the languages to diverge,

and largely due to Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s exertions, for Urdu to become central as a symbol of

Muslim identity to the political organisation of the All India Muslim League and Jamaat-e-Islami

and the new Muhammadan Anglo Oriental College (1875), driving the development of a two-

nation theory. It was in the context of institutions founded during the Aligarh movement that

Urdu underwent its own spurt of creative development as a politicised, literary and journalistic

language for the Muslims of India; due to India’s communal politics, it did so though veering

close to the Crown, rather than amidst organisation against it.

Present for this but unconvinced, Jamāl ad-Dīn picked his battle with ‘Sir Sayyid’ (as he was

conventionally referred to) in a dispute over Islamic authenticity and theological orthodoxy - the

latter a card frequently enough played against Afghānī. Attacking Sir Sayyid in language queerly

close to that deployed by his own critics against him, as an apostate and ‘Nechari’ (an Urduised

38
David Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton
University Press, 1978, and Disenchantment at Aligarh: Islam and the realm of the secular in late nineteenth century
India. Die Welt des Islams XXII (1982, published 1984).
 Page 22

form of Naturist),’ he published a refutation of their purported materialism - by which meaning, it

seems principally, their closeness to the Crown - in his 1881 Refutation of the Materialists,

together with a second merciless attack entitled ‘Tafsir Moufasir,’ against Sir Sayyid who, his

orientation towards Britain apart, Afghānī was in a great irony otherwise so very much like. After

penning a series of articles in Hyderabad which were published in the periodical Muallim-i-Sha&q

edited by Muhib Hussain, Jamāl ad-Dīn was asked by British authorities to live in Calcutta until

1882, when at the conclusion of the ʿUrabi revolt he was asked to leave.
 Page 23

IV. The Renan and Blunt correspondences: Afghānī’s interpretations of West and East,

and defence of the latter. Precursors and historical interpretation of present debates

between Tariq Ramadan and Melanie Philips.

If there has been a certain focus on the structural and formal aspects to Afghānī’s work in this

essay to this point, dwelling primarily on the genre and comparative dimensions of discourse, it

may be time to have a closer look at what he has actually got to say. Continuing to follow the

thematic stages of Jamāl ad-Dīn’s life in roughly chronological order, we come to him in Paris, in

the period in which he collaborated with Muḥammad ʿAbduh on al ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā, and engaged

in his correspondences with Renan and Blunt. Two particularly vexing puzzles arise when

pausing to regard Afghānī’s journalistic corpus in Paris. The &rst is dissection of his precise

interpretations, for Arab audiences, of the West and East, and his defence of the latter toward

audiences in the former; with the cognate question of how much his reader should view his

writings as a seamless whole, rather than capable of mutation depending on his interlocutor.

Second comes placing in the contexts of ensuing debates, this apology for and critique of a newly

subjugated Muslim world, at the historically crucial moment of Empire, by this very early and

almost prototypical Arabic-language practitioner of modern journalistic practise: how congenially

could Afghānī and his European interlocutors be read as precursors of that which would follow?
 Page 24

Jamāl ad-Dīn’s arrival in France was heralded in the Abu Naẓẓāra zarqaʿ of his disciple

Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʿ on 19th January 1883, under the notice ‘the great Jamāl ad-Dīn who passed his life

working for mankind and who loves the Egyptians has arrived in Paris.’ Defending and

addressing the Arab world from a position in Europe would become Afghānī’s emblematic

position during his concise fecund sojourn there of 1883-84.

His career as a journalist of the diaspora and Parisian bureau chief began tellingly with an

article, in Ṣannūʿ’s issue of 9th February, entitled ash-Sharq wa ash-Sharqiyyan (‘the East and

Easterners’). Interpreting the East for Easterners from a vantage outside it featured lucidly in the

programmatic statement (‘The Newspaper and its Programme’) of the first, 13th March, 1884 issue

of ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā. The journal would

[...] serve Easterners by explaining the causes of their decline and what must be done to
regain strength. The paper will refute those who say that Muslims cannot advance
toward civilisation as long as they follow their own principles and will show that they
must, in fact, follow the principles of their ancestors in order to be strong. It will be
sent free to all who wish to receive it. 39

Another feature discloses the designs of the imperialists, long recondite, have been unmasked.

Lest there be any real doubt as to the villain, an article in that issue displaying the title ‘British

Policy in the East’ dispels it somewhat (and exhumes a line of argument Jamāl ad-Dīn had

rehearsed shortly before for a duly sympathetic Gallic audience). These are the fugue notes

which will return to sound through the journal’s seven-month lifespan. Though it seems for us

wild-eyed optimism when Afghānī declares Britain will be unable to quench the Sudanese Mahdī

39
ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā, no. 1, 13th March, 1884. Extant copies in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in F.O.
78/3682, Baring to Granville, no. 1199, Secret, Cairo, 31st December 1884. Keddie, p. 219*.
 Page 25

movement, which portends to march forth beyond the Sudan and that only the arms of Istanbul or

a liberated Khedive would be able to suppress the green %ags of Mohammed Ahmad, General

Gordon’s reading was not dissimilar.40 Likewise, though Jamāl ad-Dīn’s analysis Turkomans and

Afghans will imperil British India by inclining towards Russia betrays his perennially blossoming

hopes that the nations of the globe will balance Britain and her Empire, there would be a Third

Anglo-Afghan War yet, after which the Wazir tribesmen were left truculently armed and the

Peace of Rawalpindi secured Afghan sovereignty, for a time.

Unlike in his Cairene guise, the Afghānī of his ʿUrwa period does not appeal to constitutional

reform within the Arab world, and would be content with authoritarian rulers were they only more

virtuous. Partly this is a classicism on his part - a return to the specula principum guide for

princes literature which appears in the Neoplatonist polymath Abū Naṣr al-Fārābi’s Ārā ahl al-

madīna al-fāḍila (‘The Virtuous City’), and spreads to Europe with the Via regia (813) of the

Byzantine Exarch Smaragdus.41 Partially though it may also hide a clue as to the &nancial patrons

of this epoch of Afghānī’s writing career. Pakdaman unearths letters of ʿAbduh indicating the

latter’s passage to Paris was &nanced by ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Pasha, bringing her to speculate that al-

40
When Gordon entered Khartoum in 1884, he solicited a regiment of Turkish soldiers though the proposal was
rejected by the Gladstone cabinet which refused to support his military intervention against the Mahdīst forces.
Stanley Monick, The Political Martyr: General Gordon and the Fall of Kartum, Military History Journal (Kengray,
South Africa), Vol 6 No 6, December 1985.

41
Macchiavelli is the genre’s most renowned inhabitant which has also a European precursor in the Irish De
duodecim abusivis sæculi (c. 630-700), the latter enjoying pan-European popularity in the early Middle Ages. The
great popularity of the speculum genre across both sides of the Mediterranean stemmed from its status as a forerunner
of the encyclopaedia, permitting encapsulation of a great expanse of knowledge into one text.
 Page 26

ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā may have been funded in order to espouse the claims of the latter to the Egyptian

khedivate.42 The muting of Jamāl ad-Dīn’s ardour for a constitutional convention in Egypt in this

period would, one suspects, &t in nicely with her hypothesis. (These letters also betray one of

Afghānī’s rather characteristic economies with candor: his declaration in ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā’s &rst

number notwithstanding. Jamāl ad-Dīn wished Abū Turāb, rather than ʿAbduh, to join him in

Paris.)

In light of observations sketched earlier about the connections between colonised Egypt and

the colonised subcontinent, the causal circuitries linking developments in the two lands never

seem remote from Afghānī’s thoughts. If these a(liations are at times burlesquely shambolic,43

this only more poignantly evinces the paramountcy of pan-Islamic unity in Jamāl ad-Dīn’s mind

as a theory of counter-imperialism to repel the conqueror’s advances - and possibly his subtle

cognition that to hope for such was to traipse into the aspirational.

We are led ineluctably by this into another ubiquitous theme of Afghānī’s: morale, and hope.

Its antithesis is fatalism, which indubitably is he now &nds it necessary to defend the Muslim

world against charges of fanaticism, for which he invokes a word taʿaṣṣub (cognate with ʿaṣabiyya,

solidarity),44 precisely a word which - as Keddie diligently, and delightfully, discovers in a 1879

42
Djamal-ed-Din Assad Abadi dit Afghani. Paris, G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1969.

43
He gives a bravura performance in the &nal issue of 16th October, 1884. An uprising is thought credible in Upper
Egypt due to the Mahdī’s advances; which would unleash uprisings in India, provoking the Russians thereby to
advance and free the people of British India, whilst also closing Great Britain’s era as a Power. After this, he really
could do no better.

44
Steingass gives the &rst de&nition ‘to wrap the turban tight round one’s head’.
 Page 27

speech in Alexandria - Jamāl ad-Dīn lists alongside despotism as twin engines of Islamic

decline.45

In a colonised Islamic world, the lesson is clearly that for Jamāl ad-Dīn fanaticism poses

much less a threat than the loss of hope. His argument is cunning: Westerners and westernisers

characterise fanaticism as the Islamic world’s radix malorum; but they attack Islamic fanaticism

whilst supporting their own missionaries, showing they are inconsistent and acting in bad faith.

Then the relentless, quintessential postulate in the logic of Jamāl ad-Dīn: any tie that binds people

and renders them able of self-defence and striving for improvement has equivalent value, be it

theological or patriotic. Those Europeans intent on the subjugation of Islamic territories have

cannily sought, with their attacks on fanaticism, to dissolve the one before the other could develop

to replace it. It is, all said, one of his cleverer arguments. (A pious approach, Hairi notes. 46)

At all times, it is unity of subjugated peoples, as a counterimperialist strategy, which is

crucial.47 Afghānī’s thought provides an antidote to fatalism 48 (and its political sequelae,

45
The 1879 speech appears in his disciple Adīb Isḥāk’s Miṣr, and appears in ch. 5 of Islamic Response (she credits
Marcel Colombe, who translated a series of Afghānī’s pieces into French in the 1960s in the journal Orient; Colombe
being, incidentally, Homa Pakdaman’s supervisor).

46
Afghāni on the decline of Islam: a prospect. Die West des Islams, XIV, 1973: 1-4.

47
A challenge the reader well might relish in Afghānī is his astounding skill in shaping his views to his interlocutor.
In ‘Nationality and the Muslim Religion’ he asserts Muslims had gone beyond the stage of tribalism that would award
primacy to nationality, and would unite principally on their religion. Addressing Indians, he had spoken before of
linguistic and national ties as more important and enduring than religious ones. ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā, no. 2, 20th March,
1884.

48
He develops his thought on fatalism in articles such as al-Qaḍā’ wa al-qadar (Divine Decree or Predestination),
contrasting predestination as a legitimate Islamic doctrine with what he conceives as a disastrous foreign accretion of
fatalism. ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā, No. 4, 3d April, 1884.
 Page 28

acquiescence as a colonial subject), the solidarity, taʿaṣṣub and perhaps fanaticism with which

religious devotion imbued the golden epoch of the Islamic world; crucially, all political virtues

rather than theological, sought for rendering unity and activism possible. 49 If he did not neglect

technological disparities wholly, he analysed them to be secondary to restoring the morale of an

Islamic world fallen into colonial subjugation. The uniquely politically motivated diagnosis of the

causes of Islamic decline to a falling away from Qur’ānic principles which might instil strength of

arms and unity of purpose, coupled with the example of corrupt rulers and ingestion of the false,

foreign and disingenuous doctrine of fatalism is a note that would infuse subsequent religious

politics.50

Circulation of ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā ended abruptly after seven months - incidentally, more in

keeping with the whimsy of a single patron - its last issue appearing on 16th October, 1884.51 Yet

in his near-contemporaneous debates in the Journal des débats with the Breton-born académicien

49
The - principally political - importance of resuscitating Islamic unity is stressed in ‘The Causes of the Decadence
and the Inertia of the Muslims’ and ‘Islamic Unity’. ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā, no. 5, 10th April, 1884. No. 9, 22nd May, 1884.

50
One lineage at least is as familiar as that from Socrates to Alexander: ʿAbduh with his gradualist concerns with
reform of judiciary and al-ʿAzhar; ʿAbduh’s disciple Riḍā whose magazine al-Manār, jointly edited with ʿAbduh,
o*ered similar diagnosis and antidote to that described here; Hassan al-Bannā, whose father was one of ʿAbduh’s
students and who intensi&ed the diagnosis to a rejection of all Western in%uences. Qutb certainly adopts the language
of disease and cure in his assessment of modernity (‘every Muslim is sick, and his only remedy is in the Qur’ān’; it
suggests also a context in which Yeats referred to modernity as ‘&lthy’) For Afghānī, one surmises, it is the preserved
independence of Islamic territories, whether through solidarity derived from adoption of secular or Islamic shared
values, which is of sole concern. Charles Wendell trans., Five Tracts of Hasan al-Bannā, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1978; Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers. London: Oxford University Press,
1969; Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement. Reading,
UK: Garnet, 1998.

51
It includes a piece cautioning that Britain’s ostensibly benevolent measures in Egypt are in her own self-interest,
and against the likelihood Britain will end its Egyptian presence quickly despite claims to the contrary. ʿUrwa al
Wuṭqā, no. 18, 16th October, 1884.
 Page 29

Ernest Renan we may glimpse a further tantalising window into Jamāl ad-Dīn’s thinking in this

period, particularly as he is here addressing a European audience, and in the medium of a

European language. 52 It pro*ers an ideal opportunity to assay generalisations above crafted with

ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā: granting Afghānī’s storied ability for self-adaptation to questioner and moment,

by altering all the capriciousnesses of context we may own our best prospect yet of discerning in

that which is nonetheless constant our true Jamāl ad-Dīn.

Hourani perceptively and perhaps correctly writes that, imbued with the zeal of the formerly

religious, Renan ‘of course was thinking of Catholicism...when he wrote of Islam.’ 53 There is

nonetheless something redolent of modern discourse when he commences by arguing,

Toute personne un peu instruite des chose de notre temps voit clairement l’infériorité
actuelle des pays musulmans, la décadence des États gouvernés par l’islam, la nullité
intellectuelle des races qui tiennent uniquement de cette religion leur culture et leur
éducation. Tous ceux qui ont été en Orient ou en Afrique sont frappés de ce qu’a de
fatalement borné l'esprit d’un vrai croyant, de cette espèce de cercle de fer qui entoure
sa tête, la rend absolument fermée à la science, incapable de rien apprendre ni de
s’ouvrir à aucune idée nouvelle.54

Renan then goes, perhaps, one step further than the customary critique - to contest even the

accomplishments of Islamic mediaeval civilisation. For him, Islamic science is but an appendix of

Greek learning, and the civilisation’s most noted scholars were Nestorians, Persians, Bukharans or

Andalucians, rather than Arab. To Persia he concedes a measure of glory, but the latter is ‘au

52
Journal des débats, 29 Mars and 18 Mai 1883.

53
Hourani, p. 121.

54
Journal des débats, 29 Mars 1883.
 Page 30

fond bien plus chiite que musulmane’.55 It is the religiosity of the Arab world which Renan &nds

most o*ensive: its viscosity absorbs space in the society that should go to the sciences (‘la

science seule peut améliorer la malheureuse situation de l'homme ici-bas’ 56). He may have

worried his views on the religion were unclear, so Renan noted also,

Là est la guerre éternelle, la guerre qui ne cessera que quand le dernier &ls d'Ismaël
sera mort de misère ou aura été relégué par la terreur au fond du désert. L'Islam est la
plus complète négation de l'Europe; l'Islam est le fanatisme, comme l'Espagne du
temps de Philippe II et l'Italie du temps de Pie V l'ont à peine connu; L'Islam est le
dédain de la science, la suppression de la société civile; c'est l'épouvantable simplicité
de l'esprit sémitique, rétrécissant le cerveau humain, le fermant à toute idée délicate, à
tout sentiment &n, à tout recherche rationnelle, pour le mettre en face d'une éternelle
tautologie: Dieu est Dieu...57

It is the stu* of blogging; only in French. Afghānī, interestingly, does not seek to refute Renan’s

principal axioms. (This provokes the dry quip from Hourani, ‘Afghānī had understated his

case.’58) What &rst seems a cowed response only unfolds gradually as a subtle closing of ground

with his interlocutor’s thesis - to a shared concern with Jamāl ad-Dīn’s own central problematic,

the causes of Islamic civilisational decline - and then, with no little genius, drawing antithetical

55
Ibid.

56
Ibid.

57
Ibid.

58
Hourani, p. 123; although in Hourani’s interpretation, Afghānī does truly believe Islam is ‘not only as true or false
as other religions, but the one, true, complete, and perfect religion, which could satisfy all the desires of the human
spirit.’ (ibid.) Hourani arrives at this certainty about Afghānī’s belief by privileging on this point the testament of
ʿAbduh.
 Page 31

conclusions. Science, for all its beauty, does not completely satisfy humanity that thirsts to hover

in distant and obscure regions the sciences can neither perceive nor explore. 59

Jamāl ad-Dīn has accomplished something mildly astonishing here: knowing no argument on

the point of cultural decline is winnable, or on the deleterious e*ects of dogmatism on scienti&c

progress,60 he has coaxed Renan instead to join him on his point that every religion is intolerant,

each in its own way. Having won from him this last point (‘Galilée n'a pas été mieux traité par le

catholicisme que ne l'a été Averroès par l'islamisme,’ Renan famously acquiesces), 61 he then is

free to observe that the Christian religion preceded the Islamic in the world by many centuries,

and so inhabitants in the lands of the younger religion may yet escape dogmatic clutches.

There is a moment of encounter, even of poetry; and then it is lost. Paying a parting

compliment, Renan, whose views on race were grotesque, avers Sheikh Jamāl ad-Dīn is an

Afghan divorced from the prejudices of Islam; he belongs to those energetic races of Iran, near

India,where the Aryan spirit lives still energetically under the super&cial layer of o(cial Islam.

It is a very di*erent Afghānī to the author, with ʿAbduh, of ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā: subtler, capable

of closing ground with the most venomous of opponents, someone to whom poetry comes easily.

It is di(cult to believe it is the same author of earnest, impassioned topical tracts about the Sudan.

59
‘La science, si belle qu'elle soit, ne satisfait pas complètement l'humanité qui a soif d'idéal et qui aime à planer dans
des régions obscures et lointaines que les philosophes et les savants ne peuvent ni apercevoir ni explorer.’ Ibid.

60
Thus Jamāl ad-Dīn: ‘tant que l'humanité existera, la lutte ne cessera pas entre le dogme et le libre examen, entre la
religion et la philosophie, lutte acharnée dans laquelle, je le crains, le triomphe ne sera pas pour la libre pensée parce
que la raison déplaît à la foule.’ Ibid.

61
Ibid.
 Page 32

The precipitous, jarring dénouement leaves one wishing Jamāl ad-Dīn to have carried on further

on the relationship in his thought between religion, philosophy and the natural sciences. But his

attractiveness as a character comes largely because he is elusive.

From a mildly di*erent interlocutor, Wilfrid Blunt, the anti-imperialist, eccentric traveller and

sometime diplomat and Lord Byron’s grandson-in-law, hailed Jamāl ad-Dīn as leader of an

Islamic Reformation - the term certainly did not displease Afghānī62 and possibly is the &rst

instance in the language of a phrase which, in western commentary upon the Islamic religion, has

not vanished from the argot.63 Little of their correspondence is extant, though it is known that they

rowed when in 1885 Afghānī visited Blunt in London64 though Blunt writes of him at length in his

Egyptian memoir.65 His summation is worth recording, in the context of preceding discussions:

Jemal-ed-din’s originality consisted in this, that he sought to convert the religious

intellect of the countries where he preached to the necessity of reconsidering the whole
Islamic position, and, instead of clinging to the past, of making an onward intellectual
movement in harmony with modern knowledge. His intimate acquaintance with the
Koran and the traditions enabled him to show that, if rightly interpreted and checked
the one by the other, the law of Islam was capable of the most liberal developments
and that hardly any bene&cial change was in reality opposed to it. [...] Their
consciences he was at pains to free from the chains in which thought had lain for so
many centuries, and to show them that the law of Islam was no dead hand but a

62
c.f. on this point Hourani, at 122 (‘ Islam needed a Luther: this indeed was a favourite theme of al-Afghani’s, and
perhaps he saw himself in the role’) and ʿAbd al-Qādir Maghribī, al Bayyinat Vol I, Cairo (1926), pp 48-49.

63
With inverted commas about it, the phrase returns 4,790 pages in an internet search, as a rough measure. Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt, The Future of Islam. London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1 Paternoster Square. 1882. Serialised also
in the Fortnightly Review.

64
(Precipitated, apparently, by two associates of the shaykh attacking each others’ heads with umbrellas in Blunt’s
residence)

65
Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, London, 1924.
 Page 33

system &tted for the changing human needs of every age, and so itself susceptible of
change. All this stood in close analogy to what we have seen of the re-awakening of
the Christian intellect during the &fteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe and its
adaption of orthodox doctrines to the scienti&c discoveries of the day.66

Having stalked our quarry through three continents, we might now permit him some moments’

rest. This essay’s ambition has been the laying bare of several new quarters in which to pursue

him, in archives which may still harbour mysteries, and interrogations and contexts which have

not been asked of him. Though given best for today, a broader course for hounding is adumbrated

in the coming pages.

66
Blunt, pp. 76-77.
 Page 34

Selected Bibliography of referenced literature

al-BANNĀ, Hassan. Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna, Charles Wendell trans., Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1978.

BLUNT, Wilfrid S. The Future of Islam. London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. 1 Paternoster
Square. 1882. Serialised also in the Fortnightly Review.

GENDZIER, Irene L. James Sanua and Egyptian nationalism. Middle East Journal. Vol. 15, No.
1 (Winter, 1961), pp. 16-28.

HAFEZ, Sabry. The genesis of Arabic narrative discourse. London, Saqi Press, 1993.

HAJJAR, Sami. The Middle East: from transition to development. Leiden, E.J. Brill. 1985.

HOURANI, Albert H. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939. Oxford University Press.
1962.

IQBĀL, Muẓa*ar. Science and Islam. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press. 2007.

KENDALL, Elisabeth. The marginal voice: journals and the avant-garde in Egypt. Journal of
Islamic Studies 8:2 (1997): pp. 216-238.

LELYVELD, David. Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India. Princeton,
New Jersey, Princeton University Press. 1978.

---. Disenchantment at Aligarh: Islam and the realm of the secular in late nineteenth century
India. Die Welt des Islams XXII. 1982, published 1984.

LIA, Brynjar. The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass
Movement. Reading, UK: Garnet. 1998.

MITCHELL, Richard P. The Society of the Muslim Brothers. London: Oxford University Press.
1969.

MONICK, Stanley. The Political Martyr: General Gordon and the Fall of Kartum, Military
History Journal (Kengray, South Africa). Vol 6 No 6. December 1985.
 Page 35

MOOSA, Matti, Yaʿqub Sanuʿ and the rise of Arab drama in Egypt, International Journal of
Middle East Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Sep.), 1974, pp. 401-433.

RASOR, Eugene. Winston S. Churchill, 1874-1965: a comprehensive historiography and

annotated bibliography. Westport, Ct., Greenwood Press. 2000.

al-SAYYID, Ahmad Lufti. Egypt and Cromer: a study in Anglo-Egyptian relations. London, John
Murray. 1968.

STARK, Ulrike. Politics, Public Issues and the Promotion of Urdu Literature: Avadh Akhbar, the
&rst Urdu daily in Northern India, the Annual of Urdu Studies. 18:1. 2003. pp. 66-94.

WATT, Ian. Rise of the novel: studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1957.
 Page 36

Comprehensive Bibliography of Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī

European-Language Sources

ADAMS, Charles C. Islam and modernism in Egypt: a study of the modern reform movement
inaugurated by Muhammad Abduh. London, Oxford University Press. 1933.

al-AFGHĀNĪ (or variantly, ASADĀBĀDĪ), Sayyid Jamāl-al-dīn. The truth about the Neicheri
sect and an explanation of the Neicheris. (Known traditionally in English as Refutation of
the materialists.) Translation from Persian to English of Nikki R. Keddie and Hamid Algar.
In KEDDIE, An Islamic response to imperialism, infra. 1881.

---. et Ernst RENAN. L’islam et la science, donnée à la Sorbonne, le 29 mars, publiée le 18 mai
1883, Journal des débats (Paris). Réponse, Afghānī, publiée sous forme de lettre au
directeur. L’islam et la science, avec la réponse d’al-Afghânî. Préface de François Zabbal,
Forcalquier (Hautes-Alpes), l’Archange Minotaure. 2005.

AHMAD, Aziz. Sayyid Ahmad Khān, Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muslim India. Studia
Islamica. XXVIII: 1968: 135-144.

---. Afghani’s Indian contacts. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 89 (3): July 1969:
476-504.

AURIANT. Un emir afghan, adversaire de l’Angeleterre en Orient; Djemmal ed Dine, ténébreux

agitateur. Mercure de France. 288: Dec. 1, 1938. pp. 316-330.

BADAWI, Shaikh Mohammed Aboulkhair Zaki. The reformers of Egypt : a critique of Al-
Afghani, 'Abduh and Ridha. London, Croom Helm. 1976.

BAIDAR, Abid Riza. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī: a bibliography of source materials. International
Studies: III (1): July 1961: 99-108.

BAKHTIN, M.M. The problem of speech genres, Speech genres and other late essays.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, eds. Austin, University of Texas Press. 1996.

BASETTI-SANI, G. Sayyid Jamâl el-Dîn al-Afghânî: saggio sul suo concetto della religione.
Orientalia Christiana Periodica. XXV (1-2): 1959: 5-43.
 Page 37

COLE, Juan R. I. Colonialism and revolution in the Middle East: social and cultural origins of
Egypt’s ‘Urabi movement. The American University in Cairo Press, 1992.

---. New perspectives on Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in Egypt. in MATTHEE, Rudi and
Beth BARON, infra, 13-34.

COLOMBE, Marcel. Pages choisies de Djamal al-din al-Afghani. Orient, 1962-1963: 21-25.
Keddie notes (225, Political Biography) that Colombe was in these pages able to translate
nearly all of the general and philosophical articles from al-’Urwa al-Wuthqā into French.

DAVISON, Roderic H. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani: a note on his nationality and on his burial.
Middle Eastern Studies 24. 1988. Pp. 110-12.

FEDERMANN, Robert. Scheik Djemaleddin el Afghan: ein Lebensbild aus dem Orient. Beilage
zur Allgemeinen Zeitung (Munich). 144: June 24, 1896.

GHEISSARI, Ali. Iranian intellectuals in the 20th century. Austin, University of Texas Press.
1998.

GOLDZIHER, Ignác (Yitzhaq Yehuda). ‘Djamāl al-Dīn al-Afghāni’. E. Van Donzel, B. Lewis
and Ch. Pellat, eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, II. Leiden, E.J. Brill. 1965 [1962 in fascicule].
416 - 419.

HADDAD, Mohamed. ʿAbduh et ses lecteurs: pour une histoire critique des ‘lectures’ de M.
ʿAbduh. Arabica, T. 45, Fasc. 1. 1998. Pp. 22-49.

HAIRI, Abdul-Hadi. Afghāni on the decline of Islam: a prospect. Die West des Islams, XIV,
1973: 1-4.

HANNA, Sami A. Al-Afghāni: a pioneer of Islamic socialism. Muslim World. 57 (1): Jan.,
1961: 37-55.

HODGSON, Marshall G. The gunpowder empire and modern times. Volume 3 in The venture of
Islam. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 1985.

KEDDIE, Nikki R. Religion and irreligion in early Iranian nationalism. Comparative Studies in
Society and History. IV: 3 (April). 1962. Pp. 265-295.
 Page 38

---. Symbol and sincerity in Islam. Studia Islamica. XIX. 1963. 27-63.

---. Afghani in Afghanistan. Middle Eastern Studies. I: 4 (July). 1965. 322-349.

---. Religion and rebellion in Iran: the Tobacco Protest of 1891-92. London, Frank Cass. 1966.

---. Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghāni’s &rst twenty-seven years: the darkest period. Middle East
Journal. XX: 4 (Autumn). 1966. 517-33.

---. The origins of the religious-radical alliance in Iran. Past and Present. 34 (July). 1966. 70-80.

---. The Pan-Islamic appeal: Afghani and Abdülhamid II. Middle Eastern Studies. III: 1
(October). 1966. 46-67.

---. Islamic philosophy and Islamic modernism: the case of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghāni.
Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies (Iran). VI. 1968. 53-56.

---. Pan-Islam as proto-nationalism. Journal of Modern History. 41: 1 (March). 1969. 17-28.

---. Sayyid Jamal ad-Din ‘al-Afghani’: a case of posthumous charisma? Dankwart A. Rustow,
ed, Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership. New York, Sage. 1970.

---. Sayyid Jamal ad-Din 'al-Afghani': a political biography. Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1972. The clear state of the discipline in Afghānī studies, even at 37 years of age.
See the review of Abdul-Hadi Hairi in Die Welt des Islams, 15 (1/4), 1974. 261-2. Hairi
&nds (as does Hourani below, of the Islamic response to imperialism volume) that Keddie
seeks stability in Jamāl ad-Dīn’s views and fails to recognise when they internally contradict
over time. Thus he is inattentive to constitutional plans on p. 112, actively opposed to them
on pp. 108 and 226, though on p. 124 they are the ‘logical’ cause of his expulsion ‘from
Tau&q’s viewpoint’. He also, like Hourani, thinks she goes to far in saying (p. 195) ‘even
the writings that defend Islam have very little content that can justly be called religious,’
o*ering in counterargument Chir̄ Islam Za'if Shud?, which he himself translated (Die Welt
des Islams, XIII, 1971, 121-25).

---. An Islamic response to imperialism : political and religious writings of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn
al-Afghāni. Los Angeles, California, 1983. See here the review of Albert Hourani in the
International Journal of Middle East Studies 1 (1, January) 1970: 90-1, who notes the
Persian original text of the Refutation of the Materialists which she translates di*ers in
 Page 39

several places from ʿAbduh’s Arabic version. Hourani objects the evidence is inconclusive
for her claims that he was not a fervent defender of Islam before 1881, and that he was at
most an ‘Islamic deist’--Hourani in particular suggests the latter claim ‘is to make what he
privately believed, and stated only to a few friends, simpler, more consistent and more stable
than it really was.’

---. The revolt of Islam 1700-1993: comparative considerations and relations to imperialism.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36 (3): July, 1994: 463-87.

KEDOURIE, Elie. Nouvelle lumière sur Afghânî et ‘Abduh. Orient. VIII: 2/30: 37-57 and 3/31:
83-106.

---. Further light on Afghani. Middle Eastern Studies. I: 2 (January). 1965. 187-202.

---. The elusive Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī: a comment. Muslim World. LX: 3-4 (July-October).
1969: 308-314.

---. The death of Adib Ishaq. Middle Eastern Studies. 9:1 (Jan.). 1973. pp. 95-109.

---. Afghani and ʿAbduh: an essay on religious unbelief and political activism in modern Islam.
London, Routledge, 1997.

KHOÉIRI, J. J. Théâtre arabe. Liban, 1847-1960. Louvain. 1984.

KRAMER, Martin. Islam assembled: the advent of the Muslim congresses. New York, Columbia
University Press. 1985.

KUDSI-ZADEH, A. Albert. Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani: a select list of articles. Middle Eastern
Studies. II: 1 (Oct.) 1965. 66-72.

---. The legacy of Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī in Egypt, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation
(Indiana University). 1968.

---. Les idées d’Afghânî sur la politique coloniale des Anglais, des Français et des Russes. Orient.
XII/3-4: 1968: 47-48, 197-206.

---. Iranian politics in the late Qājār period: a review. Middle Eastern Studies. V: 3 (October).
1969. 251-7.
 Page 40

---. Sayyid Jamāl alDīn al-Afghānī: an annotated bibliography. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1970.

---. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and the national awakening of Egypt: a reassessment of his role.
Actes de Ve Congrès d’Etudes Arabes et Islamiques. Bruxelles. 1970.

---. Islamic reform in Egypt: some observations on the role of al-Afghānī. The Muslim World.
LXI: 1 (Jan.). 1971. 1-12.

---. Afghani and freemasonry in Egypt. Journal of the American Oriental Society. XCII: 1 (Jan.-
Mar.). 1972.

---. The emergence of political journalism in Egypt. The Muslim World LXX: 1 (Jan.). 1980.
47-55.

LANDAU, Jacob M. Al-Afghani’s panislamic project. Islamic Culture. XXVI: 3 (July). 1952.
50-54.

---. Studies in the Arab theatre and cinema. Philadelphia. 1958. 61, 63, 64, 71.

MATTHEE, Rudi P., and Beth BARON. Iran and beyond : essays in Middle Eastern history in
honor of Nikki R. Keddie. Costa Mesa, California, Mazda Publishers. 2000.

MILSON, Menahem. The elusive Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī. Muslim World. LVIII, 4: October
1968: 295-307.

MOAZZAM, Anwar. Jamāḷ al-Dīn al-Afghānī: A Muslim intellectual. New Delhi, Concept
Publishing Company. Based on author’s Ph.D. thesis submitted at Aligarh Muslim
University in 1963. ‘My claim to be di*erent is based on an analysis of various aspects of
Afghani’s intellectual personality, with a focus on points either not noticed or inadequately
evaluated by others.’

MOOSA, Matti, Naqqāsh and the rise of the native Arabic theatre in Syria. Journal of
Arabic Literature, iii. 1972. 106-17.

---. Yaʿqub Sanuʿ and the rise of Arab drama in Egypt, International Journal of Middle East
Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Sep.), 1974, pp. 401-433.
 Page 41

MURTAZA, Muhammad Sameer. Die Sala&ya, Die Reformer des Islam:  eine Darstellung der
Biographien und des politischen Denkens von Ǧamāl Al-Din, Al-Afġānī, Muḥammad
ʿAbduh, Muḥammad Rašīd Riḍā und Ḥasan Al-Banna, sowie der Muslimbruderschaft in
ihrer formativen Phase 1928-1932, 2005.

NAGA, A. Abul. Les sources françaises du théâtre égyptien (1870-1939). Algiers 1972.

NAIJAR, Fauzi M . Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and the Egyptian Enlightenment movement. British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. 31: 2 (Nov.). 2004. pp. 195-213

PAKDAMAN, Homa. Notes sur le séjour de Djamâl al-dîn al-Afghânî en France. Orient. 35.
1965. 203-7.

---. Djamal-ed-Din Assad Abadi dit Afghani. Paris, G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1969.
Pakdaman is particularly noteworthy for having made close study of the documents and
correspondence kept in the Majils Library in Teherān, and obtaining Afghānī’s dossier from
the Préfecture de Police in Paris. Many of the documents she found are included in this
volume, at pp. 207-382. Pakdaman also uncovers evidence suggesting Afghānī wished Abū
Turāb, rather than ʿAbduh, to join him in Paris; ʿAbduh’s passage was paid for by ʿAbd al-
Ḥalīm Pasha, leading her to speculate that al-ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā may have been funded in
order to champion the latter’s claims to the Egyptian throne.

QURESHI, M. Naeem. Pan-Islam in British Indian politics: a study of the Khilafat movement,
1918-1924. Leiden, E.J. Brill. 1999.

RAMADAN, Tariq. Aux sources du renouveau musulman: D’al-Afghâni à Ḥassan al-Bannâ, un

siècle de réformisme islamique. Lyons, Tawhid, 2000.

RIZZITANO, Umberto. ‘Adīb Isḥāḳ.’ Encyclopaedia of Islam, ut supra, IV, 111-112. 1978
[1973 in fascicule].

SURŪR, Hāniʾ. Die Staatal- und Gesellschaftstheorie bei Sayyid Jamāladdīn "Al Afghānī" : als
Beitrag zur Reform der islamischen Gesellschaften in der zweiten Hälfte des 19.
Jahrhunderts. 1977.

ṬABĪBĪ, ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm. The political struggle of Sayid Jamal ad-Din Afghani: on the occasion
of 80th year of Jamal ad-Din demise. Summary of a lengthier study in Darī Persian. Kabul,
Baihaqi. 1977.
 Page 42

YŪSUF, Niḳūlā. Salīm al-Naḳḳāsh, rāʿid al-ṣihāfa wa ‘l-masraḥ, in al-Adīb, xxv (1 October
1966), 2-6.

ZOLONDEK, Leon. Ash-Shaʿb in Arabic political literature of the 19th century. Die Welt des
Islams (10, 1/2) 1965, pp. 1-16.

Sources in Persian

al-AFGHĀNĪ, Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn. Guzīdah- ʾi ās̲ār-i Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Afghānī. Selected
works published in connection with the 80th anniversary of Afghānī’s death, edited by
Sayyid Makhdūm Rahīn. Kabul, Bayhaqī. 1355 [1977].

---. Namih-ha-yi Tarikhi va Siyasi. Ed. Abu al-Hasan Jamali Asadabadi. Foreward by Muhammad
Muhit Tabataba'i. (Tehrān: Presto [Amir Kabir], 3rd edn., 1981). Digitally reprinted, East
Lansing, Mi.: H-Bahai, 2001. Made available electronically at http://www.h-net.org/~bahai/
areprint/afghani/namihha/namihha.htm. ‘Miscellaneous letters, including to Queen Victoria
and Nasiru'd-Din Shah, and one on the need for a uni&ed language to achieve national unity.
Some were published in contemporary journals or in the earlier collection, Maqalat-i
Jamaliyyih. Some of the book consists of later congratulatory letters from notables, or
translations into Persian of Arabic or English sources, which are less useful than the original
Persian letters. The last few pages are an index.’

___. Asnad-i Sayyid Jamalu’ d-Din, Teherān, Majlis Library. Also on micro&lm within the
University of California, Los Angeles, Resarch Library.

AFSHĀR, Iraj and Yaḥyā MAHDAVĪ, eds., Majmūʿa-yi asnād va madārik-e chāp nashuda dar
bāra-yi Jamāl al-Din mashhūr bi Afghāni. Teherān. 1963. This is in the British Library’s
collection, containing much of the Majils Library’s collection of documents and
correspondence.

AṢLĀNĪ, Muḥammad Riẕā. Murgh-i ḥaqq : sarguẕasht-i Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Asadʹābādī
Hamadānī : barā-yi naw javānān va javānān. Tihrān, Ẕikr. 1378 [1999].

HẠBĪBĪ, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy. Nasab va zādgāh-i Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī; nivīsandah, ʿAbd al-
Ḥayy Ḥabībī. Kabul, Bayhaqī. 1977. On the birthplace and family of Afghānī published in
connection with the 80th anniversary of Afghānī's death, held in 1355sh.
 Page 43

ṬABĪBĪ, ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm. Talāshhā-yi siyāsī-i Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Afghānī : yā, Mubāriz-i
buzurg-i siyāsī-i sharq dar qarn-i 19. Kabul, Bayhaqī. 1977.

Sources in Arabic

ʿABDUH, Ibrāhīm. Abu Nazzārah: imām al-sihāfah al-fukāhīyah al-masmūrah wa-za‘īm al-
masrah &̄ Misr 1839-1912; ta’līf Ibrāhīm ‘Abduh. al-Q°ahirah: Maktabah al-Ādāb bi-Darb
al-Jamāmīz, 1953. The Middle East Centre at Oxford possesses a copy of this biography of
Abū Nazzārah.

---. Aʿlām al-ṣaḥāfa al-ʿarabiyya, Cairo, 1948, 116-24. For Isḥāḳ.

al-AFGHĀNĪ, Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn. al-Aʿmāl al-kāmilah: dirāsah wa-taḥqīq Muḥammad

ʿUmārah. al-Qāhirah, al-Muʾassasah al-ʿArabīyah li-al-Dirāsah wa-al-Nashr. 1979. With a
lengthy introduction by ʿUmārah on Afghānī’s social and political thought.

---. Al-Radd ʿalá al-dahrīyīn. al-Qāhirah, Maktabat al-Salām al-ʿĀlamīyah. 1983.

---. Silsilat al-aʿmāl al-majhūlah: taḥqiq wa-taqdīm ʿAlī Shalash. London, Riyad El-Rayyes.
1987.

---. and Muḥammad ʿABDUH, al ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā. Keddie notes (at p. 220 and p. 226 in the
Political Biography) that complete sets are at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and within
London in F.O. 78/36682, Baring to Granville, no. 1199, Secret, Cairo, Dec 31, 1884. The
latter are due to Lord Cromer sending to London sets both of al-ʿUrwa al Wuṭqā and Abu
Naẓẓarah, introducing these as ‘seditious Arabic journals which have been stopped by the
Egyptian Postal Authorities in conformity with the order of the Egyptian Government
forbidding their introduction into this country’ and ‘hostile to the present Khedive and to the
English occupation’. This last leads Keddie to speculate that the Khedive Tau&q might have
been equally eager to see their publication halted, though responsibility would generally be
attributed to the British. A 2002 edition was brought forth (al-Qāhirah: Maktabat al-Shurūq
al-Dawlīyah, 1422 [2002]), which is in the Bodleian. Vatikiotis uses the text of al-maṭbaʿa
l-ahliyya, Beirut, 3d ed., 1933; and notes another text in Šayḥ Rašīd Riḍā, Taʿrīḥ al-ustāḍ al-
imām al-šayḥ Muḥammad ʿAbduh, vol. 1 (Cairo, 1931), pp. 290 *.

al-BUSTĀNĪ, Salīm. al-Riwāyāt al-ʿarabiyya al-miṣriyya, in al-Djinān, viii (1875), 442-4.

---. al-Riwāyāt al-khidīwiyya al-tashkhīyya, in ibid, xx (1875), 694-6.

 Page 44

DĀGHIR, Y.A. Maṣādir al-dirāsa al-adabiyya, Beirut 1342-5, iii.

ḤAMĀDA, Ibrāhīm. Āyida bayn Firdī wa ‘l-Naḳḳāsh, in al-Madjalla, vi (1962), 67-72,

ISḤĀḲ, Adīb. Miṣr. Cairo and subsequently Alexandria. From 1877. Keddie makes clear (p.
103-4, *., Political Biography) her frustration at not accessing no. 16, most likely from
October 1878. This number included Jamāl ad-Dīn’s maiden article, al-Bayān & al-Inglizwa
al-Afghān. She relied upon handwritten copies sent by a scholar working in Egypt.

---. al-Durar (The Gems), edited by his associate Jirjis Mikha’il Nahhas. Alexandria, 1886.
much enlarged 4th ed. Beirut, 1909, ed. by his brother ʿAwnī Isḥāḳ.

---. Adīb Isḥāḳ: al-kitābāt al-siyāsīyah wa-al-ijtimāʿīyah, jamaʿahā wa-qaddama lahā Nājī ʿAllūsh.
Bayrūt : Dār al-Ṭalīʿah lil-Ṭibāʿah wa-al-Nashr. 1978.

---. Nuzhat al-aḥdāḳ fī maṣāri` al-ʿushshāḳ, and several articles in Āthār al-adhār, edited by Salīm
al-Naḳḳāsh, dates uncertain but mentioned in Rizzitano. Possibly lost are his play Gharāʿib
al-ittikfāḳ and collection of biographies from his Parisian sojourn, Tarādjim Miṣr fī hādha ‘l-
ʿaṣr.

MAGHRIBĪ, ʿAbd al-Qādir. al Bayyinat Vol I, Cairo. 1926.

---. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī: dhikrayāt wa-aḥādīth. Miṣr, Dār al-Maʿārif. 1948.

al-MUḲTAṬAF. Fādjiʿa waṭaniyya bi-wafāt Salīm al-Naḳḳāsh. ix/4. January 1885.

NADJM, M. Y. Al-Masraḥiyya & ‘l-adab al-ʿarabī al-ḥadīth, 1847-1914. Beirut. 1956. 58, 100-1,
215-6.

al-NAQQĀSH, Salīm b. Khalīl. Fawāʿid al-riwāyāt aw al-tiyātrāt, in al-Djinān, v (1 August 1875),

517, 521-2. On his theatre and its mission.

RIḌĀ, Rašīd. Taʿrīḥ al-ustāḍ al-imām al-šayḥ Muḥammad ʿAbduh, vol. 1 (Cairo, 1931). He
discusses immediate and distant aims of al-ʿUrwa at pp. 283 and 306 *, says Vatikiotis
(1957: 4, fn. 1).
 Page 45

ṢANNŪʿ, Yaʿqūb. Abu Naẓẓarah zarqa'. The School of Oriental and African Studies library
possesses in its micro&lm holdings years 2 through 24 (1878-1900).

ṬARRĀZĪ, Philip, Tārīkh al-Ṣihāfa al-ʿArabiyya. Beirut, 1913.

YŪSUF, Niḳūlā. Salīm al-Naḳḳāsh, rāʿid al-ṣihāfa wa ‘l-masraḥ. In al-Adīb, xxv, 1 October
1966. 2-6.

ZĀʾIDĪ, Muḥammad Rajab. Muṣliḥūn thāʾirūn: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Kawākibī, Jamāl al-Dīn al-
Afghānī, Muḥammad ʿAbduh. Binghāzī, Dār al-Kitāb al-Lībī. 1972.

Sources in Turkish

Başbakanlik Arşivi archive, Istanbul, Yildiz Tasni& category and others. Keddie &nds (Political
Biography, 384-385; 444-7) a document catalogued in the register of the Yildiz category as
Kissim 14, evrak 1103, zarf 126, karton 9. A memorandum also catalogued on the same
register, but which has perhaps not yet been seen by a researcher, is on the cause of Jamāl
ad-Dīn’s expulsion from Istanbul (1871, due to referring to prophecy as a craft in a lecture
at the Valide Mekteb): namely, in the papers of Cevdet Paşa (Kisim 18, evrak 553/586, zarf
93, karton 38). There may well be others here lurking, both catalogued and uncatalogued.

Sources in Urdu

al-AFGHĀNĪ, Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn. Majmūʿah-yi Sayyid Jamāluddīn Afg̲ẖānī / murattabah,

Muḥammad Ikrām Cug̲ẖtāʾī. Arabic and Persian works of Afghānī; translated into Urdu by
‘Abdurraḥīm, Mubarezuddin Rafaat and ‘Abdulquddūs Hāshmī Nadvī. Compiled and edited,
with a substantial bibliography, by Muḥammad Ikrām Cug̲ẖtāʾī. Lāhaur, Sang-i Mīl
Pablīkeshanz. 2006.

---. Muntaab maqālāt, afkār-i tāzah Ḥamīd Nasīm Rafīābādī. Srīnagar, Je. Ke. Buk Shāp. 2004.

Source in Pashto

al-AFGHĀNĪ, Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn. Tatimmat al-bayān fī tārīkh al-Afghān. Edited and translated
by Yūsuf Manṣūr. Koʾiṭah, Puṣhto Akaiḍamī. 1979.
 Page 46

Regulation 17.9 declaration.

‘I have read and understood regulation 17.9 of the Regulations for students of the School
of Oriental and African Studies concerning plagiarism. I undertake that all material
presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in
part by any other person. I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from the
published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work
which I present for examination. I give permission for a copy of my dissertation to be held
for reference, at the School’s discretion.’

Pádraig Belton
Candidate 210364