Article on Mashriqi by Markus Daechsel

C 2006 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History , 3, 3 (2006), pp. 443–472  doi:10.1017/S1479244306000874 Printed in the United Kingdom

scientism and its discontents: the indo-muslim “fascism” of inayatullah khan al-mashriqi* markus daechsel daechsel School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh

This essay offers a detailed reconstruction of the thought of Inayatullah Khan alMashriqi, a camp-follower of fascism in inter-war India who sought to reformulate Islam as a “Religion of Science” according to the precepts of Darwinian evolutionism. Mashriqi has so far been neglected because his political impact was only short-term and did not contribute to the larger story of decolonization in India and Pakistan. But far from being marginal, Mashriqi’s philosophical ruminations actually provide a window for a much-needed re-evaluation of the meaning of colonial modernity. While there was much in Mashriqi’s writing that conforms to the usual picture of anticolonial nation-building—his obsession with the truth of science, for instance, and his emphasis on disciplinary political methodologies—the by now standardized critique of such features in the “postcolonial” literature no longer suffices. Behind a fa¸cade cade of contin continuit uities ies with ninetee nineteenth nth-ce -centu ntury ry “Enli “Enlighte ghtenme nment” nt” tradit traditio ions ns stood stood a much much darker darker vision of modernity that no longer had any recourse to the certainties of a grand narrative of modernization. Instead, it was a vision that fluctuated between mystical exuberance and deep pessimism. The only sense of certainty was provided by a radical notion of emotional authenticity and a related belief in quasi-religious leadership figur figures. es.The The larger larger conclu conclusio sion n to be drawn drawn from from the dualis dualistic tic andcon and contra tradic dictory torystru structu cture re of Mashriqi’s “fascism” is that the intellectual history of inter-war South Asia needs to be given relative autonomy from the standard nationalism–modernization narrative, for rather than the continuation of an earlier modernity, it should be interpreted as the starting point of a new and much darker formation that arguably continues into the present.

Inay Inayat atul ulla lah h Khan Khan (1888–1963), “al-M al-Mas ashr hriq iqi” i”,, wa wass a camp camp-f -foll ollow ower er of European fascism who stood out from similarly inclined South Asians by virtue of his serious ideological engagement. He was most famous for the Muslim paramilitary movement he created in direct correspondence, or rather (as he *

I am deeply grateful to the critical input of Peter Hartung, Francis Robinson, Rajarshi Dasgupta and the members of the seminar at CSSSC (Kolkata); to the three anonymous readers whose comments were most helpful in revising an earlier draft; and most of all to the steady encouragement and critical prodding of Nick Phillipson without whom this article would have probably never been finished. 443

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would put it with his characteristic sense of self-importance) in anticipation, of the Nazis. But there was more to his “fascism” 1 than uniformed displays and spectacular militarism—features that were actually rather common in the political culture of the late colonial period. Mashriqi also produced a corpus of writings2 in which he laid out a deeply troubled Weltanschauung that Weltanschauung that combined elem elemen ents ts of Darwi Darwini nian an evol evolut utio iona nary ry “sci “scien ence ce”” with with a cult cult of the the will will to powe powerr. His His cent centra rall conc concer ern n wa wass to rein reinte terp rpre rett Isla Islam m in such such a wa wayy that that it beca became me acce accept ptab able le to the likes of Adolf Hitler, from whom, incidentally, he claimed to have personally received an endorsement of his most important book.3 Although Mashriqi’s contemporaries noted his “fascism” with fascination—and in the case of the colonial government and some Islamic scholars with considerable disquiet—this fame did not last.4 Mashriqi’s political movement collapsed with the demise of

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I use the term in inverted inverted commas to bypass an ultimately sterile debate amongst scholars of European fascism about whether fascism can indeed exist in the non-West. The often ill-informed and tautological consensus appears to be that it cannot. An exception is Roger Roger Eatw Eatwell ell,, “Tow “Towar ards ds a New New Model odel of Generi Genericc Fas Fascis cism” m”, Journ Journal al of Theoret Theoretica icall Polit Politics ics 4 (1992), 161–94. Arguing for an “Italy only” approach is Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology—from Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Both Roger Griffin (The (The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, Routledge, 1993), 157) 1945 (London: and and Stan Stanle leyy Payne ayne (A Hist History ory of Fascis ascism, m, 1914– 1945 (London: UCL Press, Press, 1995) 353) includ includee Nazism but are categorical about the impossibility of “proper” fascism in the non-West. Micha Michael el Mann Mann (Fascists (Cam Fascists (Cambridg bridge: e: CUP 2005), 371–4) keeps keeps this possibil possibility ity theoret theoreticall ically y open (it appears possible from his course of argument, but only in order not to disallow the denunciatory use of “Islamo-Fascism” for the enemies of the US and Israel) but ends up dismissing the fascist character of all potential existing contenders. The following items have been extensively used in this article: al-Tazkirah, al-Tazkirah, his magnum opus , originally published in Amritsar in 1924; here quoted from the first two of the three-volume 12th edition of Lahore, 1980, containing a reprint of the original as well as substantialexplanato substantial explanatory ry material—henceforth material—henceforth TK Iand TK Iand TK II; TK II; his mainpolit main political icalexpo expositi sition on Qaul-e Fais al (Lahore: al-Tuzkiva Publ. 1935)—henceforth QF ; articles in his journal al. al (Lahore: Is ah., collected in Maq¯ al¯ at (Lahore at (Lahore 1938)—henceforth M ; finally one of his late works in . l¯ English, Human Problem—A Message to the Knowers Knowers of Nature ( Nature (1952), henceforth HP . All translations into English, unless otherwise noted, are my own. See note 29 below for references. The colonial government compiled numerous files about his activities amongst which the following are useful for quick reference. NAI: Files (Home Political) 92/39; 4/1/40; OIOC: L/P&J/ L/P&J/5 series, series, Fortnight Fortnightly ly Reports Reports for Punjab Punjab and U.P U.P., 1938–1944. Clerical Clerical 28/5/46. OIOC: responses to Mashriqi are included in NAI, File (Home Political) 4/1/40; also in Martin 1868– 1948 1948) und die Ahl-i-Hadis im Punjab Riexinger, Sanaullah Amritsari ( 1868 Punjab unter Britischer Britische r Herrschaft (W¨ (Wurzburg: u¨ rzburg: Ergon, 2005), 315–18. The two pioneers of the study of modern Islam in South Asia, W. C. Smith and J. M. S. Baljon, both dedicated a substantial part of their work to Mashriqi and placed him on a par with figures that have stood the test of time much better. See W. C. Smith, Modern Islam in India (London: Gollancz, 1944) 235–45; J. M. S. Baljon, Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation (Leiden: Brill 1961), 10–13,

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would put it with his characteristic sense of self-importance) in anticipation, of the Nazis. But there was more to his “fascism” 1 than uniformed displays and spectacular militarism—features that were actually rather common in the political culture of the late colonial period. Mashriqi also produced a corpus of writings2 in which he laid out a deeply troubled Weltanschauung that Weltanschauung that combined elem elemen ents ts of Darwi Darwini nian an evol evolut utio iona nary ry “sci “scien ence ce”” with with a cult cult of the the will will to powe powerr. His His cent centra rall conc concer ern n wa wass to rein reinte terp rpre rett Isla Islam m in such such a wa wayy that that it beca became me acce accept ptab able le to the likes of Adolf Hitler, from whom, incidentally, he claimed to have personally received an endorsement of his most important book.3 Although Mashriqi’s contemporaries noted his “fascism” with fascination—and in the case of the colonial government and some Islamic scholars with considerable disquiet—this fame did not last.4 Mashriqi’s political movement collapsed with the demise of

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I use the term in inverted inverted commas to bypass an ultimately sterile debate amongst scholars of European fascism about whether fascism can indeed exist in the non-West. The often ill-informed and tautological consensus appears to be that it cannot. An exception is Roger Roger Eatw Eatwell ell,, “Tow “Towar ards ds a New New Model odel of Generi Genericc Fas Fascis cism” m”, Journ Journal al of Theoret Theoretica icall Polit Politics ics 4 (1992), 161–94. Arguing for an “Italy only” approach is Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology—from Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Both Roger Griffin (The (The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, Routledge, 1993), 157) 1945 (London: and and Stan Stanle leyy Payne ayne (A Hist History ory of Fascis ascism, m, 1914– 1945 (London: UCL Press, Press, 1995) 353) includ includee Nazism but are categorical about the impossibility of “proper” fascism in the non-West. Micha Michael el Mann Mann (Fascists (Cam Fascists (Cambridg bridge: e: CUP 2005), 371–4) keeps keeps this possibil possibility ity theoret theoreticall ically y open (it appears possible from his course of argument, but only in order not to disallow the denunciatory use of “Islamo-Fascism” for the enemies of the US and Israel) but ends up dismissing the fascist character of all potential existing contenders. The following items have been extensively used in this article: al-Tazkirah, al-Tazkirah, his magnum opus , originally published in Amritsar in 1924; here quoted from the first two of the three-volume 12th edition of Lahore, 1980, containing a reprint of the original as well as substantialexplanato substantial explanatory ry material—henceforth material—henceforth TK Iand TK Iand TK II; TK II; his mainpolit main political icalexpo expositi sition on Qaul-e Fais al (Lahore: al-Tuzkiva Publ. 1935)—henceforth QF ; articles in his journal al. al (Lahore: Is ah., collected in Maq¯ al¯ at (Lahore at (Lahore 1938)—henceforth M ; finally one of his late works in . l¯ English, Human Problem—A Message to the Knowers Knowers of Nature ( Nature (1952), henceforth HP . All translations into English, unless otherwise noted, are my own. See note 29 below for references. The colonial government compiled numerous files about his activities amongst which the following are useful for quick reference. NAI: Files (Home Political) 92/39; 4/1/40; OIOC: L/P&J/ L/P&J/5 series, series, Fortnight Fortnightly ly Reports Reports for Punjab Punjab and U.P U.P., 1938–1944. Clerical Clerical 28/5/46. OIOC: responses to Mashriqi are included in NAI, File (Home Political) 4/1/40; also in Martin 1868– 1948 1948) und die Ahl-i-Hadis im Punjab Riexinger, Sanaullah Amritsari ( 1868 Punjab unter Britischer Britische r Herrschaft (W¨ (Wurzburg: u¨ rzburg: Ergon, 2005), 315–18. The two pioneers of the study of modern Islam in South Asia, W. C. Smith and J. M. S. Baljon, both dedicated a substantial part of their work to Mashriqi and placed him on a par with figures that have stood the test of time much better. See W. C. Smith, Modern Islam in India (London: Gollancz, 1944) 235–45; J. M. S. Baljon, Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation (Leiden: Brill 1961), 10–13,

scientism and its discontents

its foreign role models; after the 1950s virtually nobody amongst historians has seen a need to take the man or his thought very seriously.5 This essay is meant to demonstratethatthisisanoversightfarmoreimportantthanthesimpleneglectof a figur figuree that that on mora morall term termss perh perhap apss dese deserv rves es to remai emain n in the the dust dustbi bin n of hist histor oryy. Mashriqi’s philosophy—if one can call it that—requires attention from the intellectual historian because it opens up new questions about the relationship between metropolitan and colonial discourses of modernity that have not been seriously explored. The colonial and postcolonial perspective on the first half of the twentieth century has so far precluded a serious engagement with fascism in the non-West. The story of how the people of South Asia managed to throw off foreign rule and how they struggled to create a modernity of their own design does not permit the same sense of fundamental unease that the experience of Auschwitz and the Second World War brought for many Europeans. The issue here is not so much that the South Asian literature lacks a critical engagement withmodernityassuch—itmostcertainlydoesnot 6 —butthatitassumeswithout 37, 52, 55, 73, 76–7, 85, 91–2, 97, 100–4. Baljon also exchanged letters with Mashriqi. For

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anothe anotherr excel excellen lentt sket sketch ch of Mash Mashriq riqi’ i’ss move moveme ment nt writt written en by one of his conte contemp mpora orarie riess see Phillips Talbot, “The Khaksar Movement”, Indian Journal of Social Work 2, 2 (Sept. 1941), 185–202. Most standard histories of twentieth-century Indian history mention Mashriqi only in passing or not at all. More problematically, there is also no reference to him in the standard history of modern Islam in South Asia: Aziz Ahmad, Islamic Modernism in India 1 964 (London: OUP, 1967). Leaving aside a number of other minor and Pakistan 1857 – –1964 personalities such as Ghulam Jilani Barq and Khalifa Abd al-Hakim (ibid., 205–7, 233–7), Ahmad dedicates full chapters to both Abu’l Kalam Azad (chap. 9) and G. A. Parvez (chap. 13). Both were creative and important thinkers, but neither was any more relevant than Mashriqi in terms of long-term intellectual legacy or political influence. The two most extensive studies on Mashriqi—both primarily concerned with his politics—are Amalendu De, The History of the Khaksars in India , 2 vols. (Kolkata: Parul Prakashani, 2006), which is an English translation and revision of his much earlier work in Bengali; and the more recent Muhammad Muhammad Aslam Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi—A Political Biography (Karachi: Biography (Karachi: OUP, OUP, 2000) These aside there are some sporadic articles, for instance Iftikhar Malik, “Regionalism and Personality Cult? Allama Mashriqi and the Tehreek-iKhaks Khaksar ar in prepre-1947 Punjab Punjab””, in I. Talbotand albot and Gurharpal Gurharpal Singh, Singh, eds., eds., Regionand Region and Partition Partition— — Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Karachi: Subcontinent (Karachi: OUP, 1999), 42–9; as well as a number of writings in Urdu and English produced by the remnants of his long-defunct moveme movement—fo nt—forr a bibliograp bibliography hy see their their website website at http://w http://www ww.all .allamam amamashri ashriqi.i qi.info. nfo. Finally there is a Magister Artium dissertation on Mashriqi by Jamal Malik, University of Bonn, which I have not seen for this article, but some of whose content was verbally communicated to me by its author. The literature is too substantial to provide more than a few classic works here: Ashis Nandy, The Intimat Intimatee Enemy Enemy (Delhi: (Delhi:OUP OUP,, 1983);theongoing Subaltern Subaltern Studies Studies series series (Delhi: (Delhi: OUP, 1982); Partha Chatterjee, Chatterjee, Nationalism in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London:ZED (London: ZED,, 1986); TheNa The Natio tion n anditsFragm and itsFragment ents s (Delhi: (Delhi: OUP, OUP, 1993); GauriVis Gauri Visvanat vanathan, han,

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much questioning that this modernity is essentially a continuation of what is often called “Enlightenment rationality”. There exists an unbroken narrative that leads from the foundation of the colonial regime to the catch-up modernization of the immediate postcolonial era; in personal terms, from Macaulay to Nehru, or—in the Muslim Pakistani case—from the liberal reformist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan to the benevolent dictatorship of General Ayub Khan. In consequence, political andintellectual critiques of coloniality and postcoloniality typically draw from a body of theories reliant on nineteenth-century paradigms: Foucaldian governmentality, Marxian critiques of capitalist oppression or a Saidian play with cultural imperialism and subalternity. What the study of a person like Mashriqi can demonstrate is that this type of modernity—with its belief in state, science, discipline and bourgeois society—was not the only one that counts in the late colonial context. From the inter-war period onwards, there was another modernity, which operated with radical ideas of auto-poetic selfhood and a fundamental unease about the certainties of Enlightenment progress. Like other fascists, Mashriqi was not entirely at home in either form of modernity. In fact, he frantically tried to reconcile the older Enlightenment legacy with thenew modernity of self-expression through a cult of political activism.The main purpose of this essay is to demonstrate—by means of a reconstruction of the different and ultimately fundamentally contradictory strands in his thinking— that “dark” modernity had cast a shadow even over the most determined attempts to appropriate “light” modernity in the context of anti-colonial nation-building. The exposition falls into four sections: the first offers an overview of Mashriqi’s life and the political and intellectual context of his time; the second contains a reconstruction of his main idea of Islam as a “religion of science”; the third identifies a hidden dualism and a mystical methodology in Mashriqi’s selfacclaimed belief in science; the fourth, finally, argues that behind Mashriqi’s fascism stood a world view of radical self-expression that had in fact broken all links to the Enlightenment project of national self-strengthening, which so dominated the surface of Mashriqi’s thought.

hitler’s indo-muslim schoolmaster Inayatullah Khan was born in 1888 near Amritsar, a trading city in the British Indian province of Punjab. One contemporary remembered his family as one of silk merchants;7 according to another (and not necessarily contradictory)

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Masks of Conquest (Delhi: OUP, 1998); Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 2 (1990), 383–408; idem, Another Reason (Princeton: Publisher, 1999); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Riexinger, Sanaullah Amritsari , 315.


account, his father was a medium-level government employee and petition writer who also received a moderate income from agricultural land. He was also a man of letters, publishing political poetry and a local newspaper, as well as entertaining relationships with several important literati of his day.8 As was common amongst educated and urban Muslims in North India, the family claimed noble ancestry going back to the reign of the seventeenth-century emperor Aurangzeb. Such pretensions were part and parcel of a peculiarly Muslim ethos of middle-class selffashioning. Whilethe present waslamented as a catastrophic cultural andpolitical decline, new generations were saddled with the burden of recapturing lost ground—not necessarily by rebuilding Muslim Imperialism in South Asia, but by competing successfully with an emerging Hindu elite that was widely perceived to have overtaken Muslims in making the most of changed political circumstances. These were the days when the British Raj in India appeared “permanent”, when local elites and ambitious intermediate sections of society were tempted into adopting a loyalist or gradualist political outlook in exchange for the increasing educational and employment opportunities offered by the colonial regime. The rapid expansion of the government machinery at all levels of administration created a rising demand for anglophone civil servants, accountants, engineers, teachers and lawyers. As a spin-off, the non-state sector—particularly the fields of banking and publishing—underwent similar processes of growth that soon led to the establishment of a new white-collar stratum.9 All religious communities—Muslims, as well as Hindus and Sikhs—developed new forms of religious ideology that sought to make their respective traditions compatible with some measure of westernization. The central concern was to advocate the benefits of modern education—based on the new social and natural sciences and conveyed in English medium—while simultaneously safeguarding some sense of cultural autonomy and authenticity.10 Amongst Muslims, the most important voice of reformism was that of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98). A 8

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M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi , 1–3; Syed Shabbir Hussain, ed., Inayat Ullah Khan al-Mashriqi, Quran and Evolution (Islamabad: al-Mashriqi Foundation, 1987), “Introduction”, 13–15. Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu of Mid- 20th Century India and Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2006) 31–5. Richard G. Fox, “Urban Class and Communal Consciousness in Colonial Punjab: The Genesis of India’s Intermediate Regime”, Modern Asian Studies 18, 3 (1984), 159–89. Ian Kerr, “Social Change in Lahore 1849–1875”, Journal of Indian History 57, 2–3 (1979), 281–302; “Urbanization and Colonial Rule in 19th Century India: Lahore and Amritsar 1849–1881”, Punjab Past and Present 14, 1 (1980). Kenneth W. Jones, Arya dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab (Delhi: Manohar, 1976); Harald Fischer-Tin e` , Die Gurukul Kangri oder die Erziehung der Arya Nation (Würzburg: Ergon, 2003); Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi: OUP, 1994) C. H. Heimsath, Indian NationalismandHindu Social Reform(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

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Delhi notable of towering influence, he had been knighted for his advocacy of political loyalism and his efforts at establishing educational institutions in which a new modern Muslim middle class could be bred.11 Sir Sayyid’s reformulation of religious doctrine along rationalist lines developed in correspondence with similar attempts elsewhere in the Muslim world, most importantly the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abduh and his al-Manar circle.12 The basic assumption of nineteenth-century reformism was that the Holy Scripture of Islam was as absolutely true as the “book of nature”—shorthand for the discoveries of the natural sciences. Since any contradiction between the two was ruled out per definition, wherever one appeared to exist it had to be resolved through better methods of textual exegesis. Anything miraculous and apparently “unscientific” was explained away. The Prophet Muhammad’s nocturnal journey to heaven was reinterpreted as a dream sequence, for instance, while accounts of spirit beings ( jinn) transmuted into prescientific descriptions of microbes. At the same time every attempt was made to prove that any new scientific doctrine emerging in the West was actually already anticipated in the Holy Book. This included often superficial and ill-digested references to the doctrines of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and other evolutionists.13 The young Inayatullah Khan proved a role model for the kind of educational advancement that both the British and the religious reformers had advocated. After doing exceedingly well in a number of well-regarded missionary and government schools and colleges in the Punjab, he was sent to Cambridge on a government scholarship. There he took, for reasons unknown, no less than four tripos (oriental languages, mathematics, engineering, sciences), which brought him the admiration of the British press.14 On his return to India before the First World War he joined the colonial education establishment, climbing to the upper-medium ranks of vice-principal, Islamia College Peshawar; junior assistant secretary for education, government of India; and finally headmaster of Government High School, Peshawar.

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David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation (Delhi: OUP, 1996), Francis Robinson, Separatism amongst Indian Muslims (Cambridge: CUP, 1974), 84–133. Hafeez Malik, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muslim Modernization in India and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge: CUP 1983), 130–244. Ignaz Goldziher, Die Richtungen der Islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden: Brill, 1920), 351– 60. J. M. S. Baljon, The Reforms and Religious Ideas of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Leiden: Brill, 1949) 50–7, 89. Christian W. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978) chap. 5. Najm A. Bezirgan, “The Islamic World”, in Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Chicago 1988), 375–86. M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi , 4.


Inayatullah’s education was in many ways formative for his subsequent career as a thinker and political activist. First, it gave him an academic, but strongly anticlerical, grounding in the classical sources of Islam. His was the knowledge of the orientalist, not that of the traditional religious specialists (c ulam¯ a’ ) with whom Inayatullah entertained a relationship of mutual dislike until his death. Second, it is not difficult to see cross-references between Mashriqi’s later social Darwinism and a number of popular European books that were published and discussed during the time he was in Britain. The years between 1907 and 1912 coincided with a period of transition in evolutionist thinking within the European context: an individualistic, liberal, positivist and sometimes pacifist belief in science— epitomized by Herbert Spencer—mutated into a melange of social Darwinist and post-Darwinist doctrines.15 Often drawing on a strong sense of cultural unease and anticipating the catastrophe of the coming world war, authors such as W. M. Flinders Petrie, Arnold White and the (much-translated) German General Friedrich von Bernhardi stressed collective warfare and metahistorical tragedy. On the opposite end of the political and emotional spectrum stood Henri Bergson’s seminal work The Evolution of Creation, published and translated during Inayatullah’s first year at Cambridge. Bergson offered a critique as well as an extension of Darwinian evolutionism into some form of philosophical mysticism that was to become one of the main elements in Mashriqi’s own oeuvre.16 Only a few years older—and, thanks to its antic-clericalism and positive appreciation of Islam, especially attractive to somebody like the student Inayatullah—was Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe , which also combined a fervent belief in scientism with some form of mysticism.17 The third and perhaps most important consequence of Inayatullah Khan’s academic training was that he maintained the mindset of a science student. The discipline that he thought described him best was mathematics. Although often referring to history and philosophy in his writings, he was never really an intellectual in the humanities tradition. References to English literature and culture—so common in the diction of foreign-educated Indians—are conspicuous by their absence. Most peculiar for a man with such an educational track record, he never became entirely comfortable with articulating himself in 15

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As argued for the first time in the US context in Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860– 1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945); a more nuanced interpretation is in Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the “Origin of Species” to the First World War (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 200–6. Mashriqi took up the Bergsonian notion of a “science of life” as opposed to a “science of matter,” for instance. HP , 9–10; Leszek Kolakowski, Henri Bergson (Oxford: OUP, 1985), 8–9, 53–71. Haeckel is directly mentioned in TK II, 8, 18.

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the colonizer’s language. The vast majority of his subsequent publications were written in an often overly erudite Urdu, while his few tracts in English betray a halting and formulaic style.18 It is not difficult to link Inayatullah’s intellectual preferences to his origins in the upwardly mobile service stratum. He may have been a brilliant student who did better than could ever have been expected of somebody of his background, but he was also an upstart who had to make up for his lack of westernized sophistication with a fierce belief in the superiority of objective scientific knowledge. The mastery of science became the pillar of his sense of self-worth—something that is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that he attached no less than fourteen lines of degree abbreviations, awards and fellowships in international learned bodies to his name when he introduced himself in writing.19 Inayatullah Khan’s first appearance in the political and religious arena of Muslim India came with the publication of the first volume of al-Tazkirah, his self-ascribed magnum opus , in 1924. This book already contained all the main points of his religious doctrine that were to remain remarkably constant until the end of his life: evolutionary biology provided a key to a correct interpretation of the Qur’an, which—if translated into political action—would safeguard the historical future of mankind in general and the Muslim community in particular. This was also the time when Inayatullah adopted the pen name “al-Mashriqi”— “the Orientalist” or “the Sage of the East”—by which he was to be known until his death. As a sign of his overwhelming ambition right from the beginning of his intellectual career, Mashriqi attempted to submit his book for the Nobel Prize for Literature, as he saw it as a recipe for the prevention of all future bloodshed.20 Mashriqi’s real breakthrough occurred a decade later, after he had changed his primary role from intellectual writer to political activist. Directly inspired by world events, he began to emphasize a militant social Darwinist reading of his evolutionist theology. The paramilitary movement that he founded upon his retirement from government service in 1931—the Kh¯aks¯ars—created a stir

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Most of Mashriqi’s “books” in English are actually translations of excerpts from his Urdu writings. The list attached to his name in Human Problem beginsas follows: “M.A.(Pun. 1906), M.A. (Cantab.), B.Sc., B.E., B.O.L. FRSA, F.G.S. (Paris), F.S.A. (Paris), F.Ph.I, I.E.S., Wrangler Foundation Scholar, Bachelor Scholar, (Christ’s), Four (Class 1 etc [sic ]) Triposes; broke records of Punjab and Cambridge Universities, Principal Islamia College . . .” The submission was rejected, reportedly on the grounds that al-Tazkira was not in an eligible European language. M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi , 9–11. The two submissions translating and summarizing the contents of the Arabic introduction to alTazkirah were submitted, one by Berthe Proskauer, one of Mashriqi’s German friends whose language abilities are doubtful, the second by Sahibzadu Aftab Ahmad Khan. Reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi .


in late colonial politics and received widespread admiration in middle-class and petty bourgeois circles all over Muslim North India. Clad in khaki uniforms and following strict military discipline, Mashriqi’s organization appeared in many ways to be theIndianequivalent of Mussolini’s Fascisti ortheNazi Sturmabteilung . The distinctive symbol by which they became famous was the spade, which the activists presented like a rifle in parades and used as a weapon in street fights with the police. The heydays of the movement was the years between 1935 and 1940, when they got involved in several carefully orchestrated stand-offs with government power. The essence of Kh¯aks¯ar political action was the creation of public spectacles in which both participants and bystanders could experience sensations of collective empowerment. On more concrete political questions they tended to remain vague.21 Mashriqi’s social Darwinism, its political manifestation in a paramilitary volunteer movement and his pronounced leadership pretensions were hardly unique within the context of post-First World War India. This was a time of unprecedented political mass mobilization, of unbound promise as well as great uncertainty, when a whole generation of new political leaders was made. By the time of the Second World War paramilitary volunteer movements had proliferated to such an extent in India that there was hardly any political party or constituency without one.22 Despite some ideological differences, there were immediate similarities between the Kh¯aks¯ars and the extreme Hindu nationalists of the Rashtriyya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as well as with the Bengali radical Subhas Chandra Bose, who left the Indian National Congress to organize military resistance to the British during the Second World War.23 Within the context of Muslim politics, Mashriqi was arguably the most coherently social Darwinist voice, but his concern with militaristic self-strengthening and his rhetoric of Islamic glory continued a tradition that had become well established since the early 1910s.24 By the 1930s the ideological pull of fascism—and of “great dictators”

21 22

23

24

More on Kh¯ aks¯ ar politics can be found in De, History of the Khaksars . NAI, File (Home Political) 4/50/46; also see Daechsel, Politics of Self-Expression, 67–81; Ian Talbot, Popular Dimensions of the Pakistan Movement (Karachi: OUP, 1998) 59–80; Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement (Delhi: OUP, 1982), 120, William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 234–64. See Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (London: Hurst, 1996), 11–79; Leonard Gordon, Brothers against the Raj (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). In particular associated with the early career of Abu’l Kalam Azad—a man directly connected to a newspaper edited by Mashriqi’s father. On Azad’s role as a journalist see Ian Douglas, Abu’l Kalam Azad , ed. Gail Minault and Christoph Troll (Delhi: OUP, 1993); for the wider context see Minault, The Khilafat Movement .

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more generally—was so strong that people like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Pilsudski received more attention in Urdu glossy magazines than the British functionaries whoactually wieldedpower over India.25 Various formsof scientism and historical evolutionism not only filled countless pages in the press, but also cropped up in various unexpected places in academic discourse. 26 Arya Samaj Hindus and Tamil nationalist publicists (amongst others) resorted to ideas of ancient prehistoric origins and the dynamic battle of civilizations to buttress their identities.27 Mashriqi’s ideological and organizational project developed in conscious reference to European models, particularly National Socialism in Germany. Not only did Mashriqi translate the standard abridged version of Mein Kampf , then commonly available, from English into Urdu, he also travelled to Germany where he claimed to have met the Fu¨ hrer in person. Recounting the encounter (which took place in 1926 and therefore some years before Hitler became world famous), Mashriqi wrote, If I had known that this was the very man who was to become Germany’s saviour I would have fallen around Hitler’s neck, but on the occasion I was engaged in small talk and tried to find out what he understood about Germany’s weakness at the time. Professor [Weil, the host] said, introducing Hitler to me: “This is also a very important man, an activist from the Worker’s Party.” We shook hands and Hitler said, pointing to a book that was lying on the table: “I had a chance to read your al-Tazkirah.” Little did I understand at that time, what should have been clear to me when he said these words! 28

What Mashriqi meant by the last sentence was that he believed that he had in fact inspired Hitler’s own programme of national self-strengthening. His account continued, The astonishing similarities—or shall we say the unintentional similarity between two great minds—between Hitler’s great book and the teachings of my Tazkirah and Ish¯ ar¯ at embolden me, because the fifteen years of “struggle” of the author of “My Struggle” have now actually led his nation back to success. But only after leading his nation to the intended goal, has he disclosed his movement’s rules and obligations to the world; only after fifteen years has he made the means of success widely known. It is possible that he has arrived at those means and doctrines by trial and error, but it should be absolutely clear that Mashriqi [referring to himself in the third person] has identified those means

25 26 27

28

Daechsel, Politics of Self-Expression, 133–4. An example is Brij Narain, India in the Crisis (Allahabad: Publisher, 1934); for examples in newspapers and magazines see Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, 139–41. For examples in theUrdu milieu see Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, 139–41.Foran example from the Tamil Lands see Sumathi Ramaswamy, Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Al-Is ah. (31 May 1935). M , 221. . l¯


and doctrines in al-Tazkirah a full nine years and in the Isharat a full three years before the success of the Nazi movement, simply by following the shining guidance of the Holy Qur’an.29

This statement sums up the very heart of Mashriqi’s Muslim “fascism”: he suggested that Islam—if only properly understood from a social Darwinist framework—would reveal itself to be identical to the most successful national self-strengthening programme of the inter-war era—Nazism; he also believed that this grand discovery was entirely his own, and would enable him to lay claim to extraordinary powers of religious and political leadership. Mashriqi’s political prominence did not survive the Second World War. The growth of the All India Muslim League as a collective platform for Muslim nationalism in British India eroded the Kh¯aks¯ar support base. By the time an independent Muslim homeland (“Pakistan”) was founded in 1947 Mashriqi and his movement had become all but irrelevant politically. Attempts at a revival during the troublesome early years of independence largely failed. Although Pakistan’s first military government sometimes tried to invoke Mashriqi’s ideas of a military Islam, he died in relative obscurity in 1963.30 This decline was due to the fact that Mashriqi did not supply persuasive answers to the concrete political problems of the day; it was not a comprehensive rejection of his wider intellectual ideas, which were eagerly soaked up as well as reinterpreted by others—most immediately by later proponents of a “scientific Islam” such as J. A. Parvez and Ghulam Jilani Barq, but also in a more diffused form amongst the new Islamicist right. 31

prophet of a “scientific” islam Mashriqi’s problematic—as laid out in al-Tazkirah—was defined by the realization that religious knowledge was by definition contentious and fragmentary, while “scientific knowledge” (c ilm al-abd¯ an)32 represented undisputed “fact” (waqi c al-amr ).33 If religion was not to be written off as mere superstition—an option that would effectively leave human beings in a world without sense or morality—then it had to be reconstructed in such a way that it acquired the same absolute truth-claim that science itself enjoyed. In proving

29 30 31

32 33

Ibid. emphasis in the original. Bio-sketch attached to Al-Tazkirah. TK I, 30–1. On Parwez see Aziz Ahmad, Islamic Modernism, chap. 13; on Barq see ibid., 205–7; also Markus Daechsel, “The Civilizational Obsessions of Ghulam Jilani Barq”, in Harald Fischer-Tine´ and Michael Mann, eds., Colonialism as a Civilizing Mission (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 270–90. TK I, 10. TK I, 24.

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that Darwinian biology, as well as modern astronomy and physics, were already contained in the pages of the Holy Qur’an,34 Mashriqi hoped that Islam could be turned into a “science of religions” (c ilm al-ady¯ an)—a formulation directly modelled on Ernst Haeckel’s famous “religion of science”.35 Islam would thus be transformed from a religious tradition threatened by extinction under conditions of colonial modernity into an unassailable universal truth for humankind. 36 This meant that science and religion were located on the same ontological plane. The realm of the sacred was purged of all transcendental elements and entirely reconfigured in the empirical here and now. Such a move was not entirely alien to Islamic self-understanding. Tradition had always at least partially tied the validity of Muhammad’s message to world-historical success, and thus made it hostage to changing empirical circumstances. In a key passage of the Qur’an which came to preoccupy many modern revivalist thinkers, God promises that the Muslim community will be the “best of all communities” as long as it follows the righteous path and avoided dissensions within (Surah 3:110). The experience of the breathtaking worldwide expansion of Islam within a generation of its foundation provided ample reason for reading this passage as a reference to political dominance. The continuing political decline since the eighteenth century, in contrast, was bound to raise existential questions about the nature of Islamic belief and practice. Mashriqi strengthened the importance of world history as proof for religious truth by employing a somewhat hackneyed technique of textual interpretation. Taking as his starting point another passage of the Qur’an—the ayyat al-istikhl¯ af (24:55), promising divine favour to the rightly guided—he deliberately (mis)translated key concepts of evolutionary biology into an Islamic moralistic vocabulary. The key phrase “survival of the fittest” 37 was rendered as baq¯ a-e as . lah. —which literally means the “everlastingness of the most righteous.” Standard Arabic terminology could thus acquire a secondary and “scientific” meaning. The biologically “fit” were equated with those who understood God’s message most correctly, and the degree of such “fitness” or “righteousness” could be proven by real success or failure in world history. While for most other Muslim observers world-historical success or failure was a sign of God’s favour or wrath, and correspondingly of the umma’s moral rectitude, for Mashriqi it constituted the kernel of being Muslim itself. Whenever

34 35

36 37

TK I, 21; TK II, footnote, 11–27. TK I, 7. Mashriqi used this formulation as well, suggesting that the identification of the two concepts constituted the highest possible form of human knowledge. TK I, 29. On Haeckel see Niles R. Holt, “Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion”, Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1972), 265–80. TK II, 3–5, 20. TK I, 12; TK II, 7–8.


he referred to the “true” Islam that he sought to reconstruct in the political tracts of the 1930s, he used a longish designation that not only contained a conventional reference to God’s revelation and the Prophet Muhammad’s exemplary conduct, but also—as some form of quasi-scripture—an invocation of the historical experience of Islam during its first two hundred years. 38 As he pointed out time and again in his pamphlets, the truth of Islam could be measured by the rate by which cities and castles were conquered in the glorious early decades after the Prophet’s death (his straight-faced total estimate is “36.000 castles in 9 years, or 12 per day”).39 This historical ideal was quite different from the golden age of early Islam as invoked by orthodox Muslims. What mattered to the latter was immediate access to divine guidance in all aspects of life, an ideal that was most perfectly realized during the lifetimes of the Prophet and his closest companions. ForMashriqi,incontrast,eventhemissionoftheProphetwasprimarilyhistorical, and almost paled into secondary significance as compared to the conquests that took place after his death. As he pointed out, But, fellow Muslims, the exemplary life of your Prophet has manifested itself on one sheet of supreme importance; even the smallest of your Prophet’s actions is clearly inscribed in the sheet of history ; the action-oriented lifestyle of the Muslims of the first centuries is written in Golden Letters right in front of your eyes. You know that the Muslims have gone out to the entire world after the demise of our Messenger. They have vowed that after some centuries, they would be victorious over all nations in the world. 40

The flipside of this historicist rendition of religion was that the present appeared to Mashriqi as a period of catastrophic and unadulterated failure that could no longer be explained within the context of conventional religious morality. The Muslim’s manifest lack of political power in the age of imperialism was not only some form of divine punishment for moral misconduct, it was nothing less than complete devalidation which, in due course and according to the law of evolution, would lead to physical annihilation. The Islam of “ritually observant” Muslims was as profoundly mistaken as any of the other world religions that failed to stand up to the superior truth-claims of science and to the industrial and military might of the secular West.41 Interpreting the unfolding of political history as the self-manifestation of the ultimate “scientific” truth, Mashriqi was forced to conclude that the most powerful nations of his day—Britain and particularly Germany—were in the possession of the only really valid code of human conduct as demanded by

38 39 40 41

QF , 23, 9, 17. QF , 13; M , 393–4. M , 399; emphasis in the original. TK I, 8–9, 19–20.

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the law of evolution. The thin thread with which Mashriqi tied this realization to his Islamic identity was a radical tautological assumption that few of his contemporaries were prepared to make.42 If the claim to absolute truth inherent in Islam as the “science of religions” was to be maintained, he argued, then the imperial powers and the Nazis had to be regarded as true Muslims, while the real-existing Muslims had in fact ceased to be the carriers of truth altogether. If Napoleon and Bismarck were perfect incarnations of the spirit of Islam, then the latter could only be an anticipation of the “lessons of history”. 43 Mashriqi produced such a reinterpretation by reducing the message of Islam to a set of “Ten Principles” enshrining the ideals of militaristic nation-building 44 while simultaneously dismissing most other aspects of religiousmoral conduct. “Nearly three-quarters” of the Qur’an,45 the Cambridge-educated schoolmaster asserted, are about conquest, holy war and related themes. The Qur’an promises hellfire to all those who do not take part in Jih¯ ad bi-l-saif (lit. “religious effort with the sword”) or who object to it; on the other hand, God regards participation in battle as a self-sufficient sign of righteousness. In short, “To leave the martial way of life is tantamount to leaving Islam.”46 The famous five pillars of Islam—the confession of the oneness of God and Muhammad’s prophetic mission, the ritual prayer five times a day, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the giving of alms and the fast in the month of Ramadan—were in Mashriqi’s eyes all elements of military exercise: the confession of faith really meant that the true Muslim had to forsake all worldly gains in the interest of military revival, prayer (to be performed in uniform and in a regimented way) was a form of military drill, the haj was something like a grand counsel of Muslim soldiers where plans against enemies could be hatched, the fast was a preparation for the deprivations of siege warfare, the giving of alms, finally, was a way of raising funds for Muslim re-armament. 47 Mashriqi’s radical reinterpretation of Scripture targeted much the same customary modes of religious observance that also attracted the ridicule of

42

43 44 45 46 47

The only other instance when a similar argument was proposed related to the victory of Japan over Russia in 1905, when in Turkey the “Young Turks” relabelled Buddhists as Muslims in order to appropriate a sense of strength for themselves. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Modern Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), 342. Later, the Punjabi scholar Ghulam Jilani Barq—a man who resembled Mashriqi in many respects and appears to have widely borrowed from him—again repeated the idea that Westerners could be better Muslims than the Muslims themselves. Ghulam Jilani Barque, Islam—The Religion of Humanity (Lahore: Publisher, 1956), 31–5. M , 391; TK II, 5, 6, 35. TK II, 57–8 (272–3). M , 400. M , 401; emphasis in the original. M , 396.


more mainstream middle-class Muslims in South Asia—religiously sanctioned dress and toilet etiquette, the veneration of mystic saints as miracle-workers or interlocutors between mankind and God, the participation in certain community festivals with their associated customs.48 But Mashriqi’s wrath was not confined to traditional Islam. In almost all of his writings the most powerfully articulated sections invariably contained an absolute rejection of any other source of knowledge and guidance that the Muslim community of India may find itself compelled to rely on: recipients of torrents of abuse are the Muslim religious establishment—the c ulam¯ a’ —whom Mashriqi routinely accused of being completely ignorant of modern science and hence incapable of understanding thehiddencentre of God’s revelation to mankind;49 otherswhoare severely criticized include liberal reformists, educationists, nationalist politicians, cultural activists and poets.50 Mashriqi revelled in his self-styled role as a “hard” taskmaster who would fearlessly and tirelessly point out the momentous failings of the Muslim community, and who like other prophets would gladly endure the hostility of an ignorant majority who could not help being provoked by his tirades.51 Mashriqi’s “scientific” understanding of Islam led to a far-reaching attack on religious mores that breached the limits of even the most reformist thinkers. Building on the assumption that the Qur’an essentially contained an ethics of radical nation-building,Mashriqisuggestedthat theusual cardinal sins of Islam— neglect of prayer, drinking alcohol, adultery and so on—were in fact minor in character and should, more or less, be considered private misdemeanours.52 Mashriqi’s reinterpretation effectively disregarded the example of prophetic conduct (the sunnat ) as a source of Islamic law, while simultaneously elevating the evidence gained from a “scientific” interpretation of history into a new source of divine guidance. In the end, Islam and social Darwinism could be conflated into a vision that sounded almost identical to sections of Hitler’s Mein Kampf —at least in the following paraphrase from al-Tazkirah prepared by some of Mashriqi’s friends for foreign consumption: A persistent application of, and action on these Ten Principles is the true significance of “fitness” in the Darwinian [sic ] principle of “Survival of the Fittest”, and a community of people which carries action on these lines to the very extremist limits has every right to remain a predominant race on this Earth forever, has claim to be the ruler of the world for

48 49 50 51 52

M , 408. QF , 18–20; M , 396; TK I, 36, 52–3. QF , 20, M , 396. QF , 27–8. M , 408–9.

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all time. As soon as any or all of these qualities deteriorate in a nation, she begins to lose her right to remain and Fitter people may take her place automatically under the Law of Natural Selection.53

Despite a great deal of conscious cross-references, Mashriqi’s social Darwinism remained quite distinct from its Nazi counterpart, however. Mashriqi did not employ race-biological arguments in his rendition of the struggle for survival. His units of analysis are religious civilizations or religiously defined nations, not races. Although references to biology and biological evolution do occur in Mashriqi, there is only a tenuous link between the universe of constant warfare he depicts and typical Darwinian arguments of population pressure and shortage of resources.54 For Mashriqi, perennial warfare was the result of materialistic greed and religious disunity, both of which he accepted as historically given, but emphatically not insurmountable. Conflict theory as espoused by Friedrich von Bernhardi or Heinrich von Treitschke55 was only one side of Mashriqi’s theoretical edifice; the other was a curious form of what Paul Crook has called “peace biology”. This essentially optimistic interpretation of organic and social evolution saw war not as the driving force of the struggle for existence, but as an increasingly obsolete and harmful leftover from a less civilized past. 56 Mashriqi’s al-Tazkirah and his postSecond World War writings often speak of the promise of a glorious future of humankind unified. It was the ultimate mission of the “Science of Religions” to make [Man] fit to live on this Earth forever, not to let him be swept away in his latest struggle for existence. In fact to make him progress in the scale of Evolution in such a way as to make him even a more perfect creation than man. Nay, to let him work so in this theatre of endless struggle as to make him as omnipotent, as omnipresent, as powerful, as merciful, as Just, as Knowing, as Seeing and as Hearing as God himself. 57

The very first sentence of the Arabic Introduction (Iftitah.iyyah) of al-Tazkirah is a powerful invocation, in imitated Qur’anic diction, of the truthfulness of the optimistic vision of the world: “al-h.amdu li-llah al-c az¯ım—al-b¯ar¯ı’ al-f a¯ t.ir al-laz¯ı fat.ara l-sam¯aw¯at wa-l-ard. f ¯ı ah. san tanz.¯ım”—“Praise to the most exalted God— the Great Creator who created the Heavens and the Earth as a perfectly ordered 53 54 55

56 57

Reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah, 243; compare to Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf , trans. R. Mannheim (London: Pimlico, 1992), 88. There is a reference to the ill effects of medicine creating population pressure by keeping the least fit humans artificially alive and thereby hindering natural selection. TK I, 31. The influence of these Germans on Mashriqi is hypothetical, but made very plausible by the fact that Mashriqi himself expressed opinions about the destructive nature of pacifism in Germany that echo these sources very closely. M , 221–2. Crook, Darwinism, War and History , 2, 6–28. “Nobel Peace Prize Dossier”, Reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi , 224.


structure.”58 In “Human Problem: A Message to the Knowers of Nature” (1952)— an open letter that was published and, with typical self-importance, also sent to several of the world’s leading scientists—Mashriqi went further to illustrate his optimistic vision of the evolutionary process. A combination of scientific progress and continuous struggle would lead to a gradual biological evolution of the human race. In his own time, he claimed, it could already be observed that Americans were as a rule healthier and more intelligent than Europeans because they were the descendants of the most disadvantaged section of European society that consequently had to struggle the most.59 In the future, the very shape of all human beings would change. As was proven by recent research at high altitudes and in polar regions, many human organs were in fact unnecessary; they could be cast off in the process of evolution and replaced with scientific inventions. The first to go would be the limbs, followed by the sexual organs: By radical changes in physical organs Man shall have to chose a much neater, much quicker, all-pervading and overwhelming way of self-production, perhaps akin to that of the original animal when life started, i.e. by constant and interminable fission in order to become as overwhelming and as near to the “Divine” way of existence possible. 60

Evolution, in other words, would lead to a gradual self-disembodiment and unification of the collective human spirit, which would enable human kind to conquer more and more aspects of the universe around them. The conquest of nature by technology would and should be pursued to the very end of outer space,61 Mashriqi observed, under the impact of the beginnings of a human space programme as well as the UFO scares of the time.62 His vision of the culmination of history deserves to be quoted at some length: It is conceivable—nay, NATURAL and INEVITABLE—that at this stageof the development of this “Man”, the SUPREME DIVINE INTELLIGENCE that originally created this Universe in millions and millions of years with a PURPOSE and finally ended with HUMAN EYE, HUMAN EAR, and HUMAN BRAIN with a set AIM . . . throws open with a terrific Universe-wide Quake the ETERNAL CURTAIN and burst into a UNIVERSEWIDE HANDSHAKE with MAN, greeting HIM with the words WELL DONE!—the TWO SPIRITS then UNITE INTO ONE with a terrific CRASH in which the whole Universe disappears into complete nothingness—the Divine Trumpeteers announcing that PURPOSE OF CREATION HAD COME TO A SUCCESSFUL END and THE GREAT EXPERIMENT NOBLY FULFILLED!—THE TWO PORTIONS OF ONE SOUL THAT

58 59 60 61 62

TK I, 217; the vocabulary is taken from Qur’an 35:1, also 6:14, 12:101, 14:10, 39:46, 42:11. HP , 9. HP , 13–14. HP , 4. Baljon, Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation, 89.

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HADSEPARATEDNUMBERLESSMILLIONSOFYEARSBACKHADATLASTUNITED TO BECOME ONE TILL EVERLASTING ETERNITY.63

Although there are clear references to Qur’anic eschatology here—the trumpet, the curtain—this vision had little to do with Islam as conceived by the orthodox consensus; the divine is no longer seen as the transcendent creator and law-giver, but split into a world-immanent and a world-transcendent aspect whose ultimate purpose is mystical union. Morality, by implication, is no longer a question of individuals being judged for their action after the rupture of time, but the inner logic of a world-historical process of collective evolution within time. Some of these elements can be traced back to Islamic mysticism, particularly to the highly influential doctrine of “unity of Being” (wah.dat al-wuj¯ ud ) attributed to the thirteenth-century scholar Ibn c Arabi.64 Another potential source (or parallel) is the Neoplatonism of the “Brotherhood of Purity” (ikhw¯ an as-s a’ ), a tenth. af¯ century Islamic sect which was much discussed in orientalist circles and whose epistles formed a standard part of the Persian education of Indian officials. 65 None of these culturally specific precedents are really necessary to account for Mashriqi’s monist vision, however, as some of his openly acknowledged European sources proposed something very similar. Ernst Haeckel—arguably the most influential of Darwin’s popularizers in the late nineteenth century—wrote in the context of his own semi-religious project that “Pantheism is the world-system of the modern scientist”.66 Mashriqi’s imagery oscillated between two visions of the world. On the one hand was the social Darwinist universe of fear—the realization that Muslims had no special place in the merciless game of survival of the fittest, and ultimately that there was no moral meaning in the unfolding of history at all; on the other hand there was his boundless optimism that the world was inherently good, and—once

63 64

65

66

HP , 15; all capitals in the original; in part also quoted in Baljon, Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation, 97. On c Ibn Arabi see Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 263–73. Such parallels have sometimes given rise to the conclusion that Mashriqi was really a proponent of Islamic mysticism operating under the then fashionable garb of fascism (e.g. the magisterial dissertation of Jamal Malik, University of Bonn, which the author discussed with me in a personal communication). I remain sceptical about such explanations because they not only ignore more immediate sources of Mashriqi’s monism, but also fail to acknowledge the explicitly anti-Sufi stance that he took in his writings, and which is typical of the wider views in his social milieu. For more on their philosophical position see Goldziher, Die Richtungen der Islamischen Koranauslegung , 186–96. A translation for the use of colonial officials is The Ikhwan-ussuffa; A Translation into English by Joseph Wall (Lucknow: Newul Kishore Press, 1889), OIOC, Printed Books 14112.a.37. Ernst Haeckel, Riddles of the Universe (London: Publisher, 1901), 102.


its inner working was properly understood—could be completely mastered for the ultimate purpose of human redemption. Even when invoking redemption as the ultimate goal of the evolution of human consciousness through science, Mashriqi was never quite able to silence his doubts about the inevitability of this glorious process. His closing chapter of “Human Problem” continued on a decidedly darker note than the gushing vision of mystical world-union: If the above [his vision of the end of history] is not the true and logical picture of what MUST happen SOME DAY, this world is a mockery of the joking DEVIL, an exhibition of the INSANE and a replica of the ABSURD. If this wonderful drama of the Universe is not going to end in this CEREMONY, this world is a TRAVESTY OF FACTS and a PARODY of TRUTH, POWER and INFINITY.67

The switch between the two aspects of the future was in Mashriqi’s eyes entirely within human control; if they accepted his vision of scientific Islam the worldwide community of Muslims was guaranteed to lead the rest of mankind to Paradise; if they did not, they were guaranteed to be banished to world-immanent hell. Mashriqi’s stark “might-is-right” vision of a collective and martial struggle for existence had a precise rhetorical function. By proposing to be somebody who could lead the Muslim community back to the world-conquering power of their early centuries, Mashriqi effectively bracketed off his social Darwinist reading of history as some form of cautionary tale. As self-appointed harsh taskmaster, Mashriqi could use the “iron law of evolution” in order to demonstrate that the crisis of the Muslim community was no longer amenable to gradualist reform or moralist solutions. The idea that the Nazis may be better Muslims than the Muslims themselves was a way of forcing the community to stare into the abyss that in Mashriqi’s eyes had opened up before them. But by continuing to equate the law of evolution with what he understood as true Islam, Mashriqi effectively promised a way out of the frightening universe of social Darwinism and back into the comfortable realm of religious certainty and divine election. In stark contradiction to his assertion that Nazis or Americans could be better Muslims than the Muslims themselves, Mashriqi never tired of pointing out that being a world-dominating power was actually the birthright of the Muslim community; in his own words, “We Muslims emerge ready to be emperors from our mothers’ wombs”.68 As an ex-post-factum legitimization of the existing empirical state, social Darwinism could be used to open up a space for radical historical voluntarism. If the Muslim community was steeped in radical determination, self-belief and hope against hope, it could once again muster the power that—after its successful application—would appear as a confirmation of

67 68

HP , 15. QF , 15.

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the laws of science. Mashriqi’s social Darwinism was thus a vehicle for a decidedly un-scientific and un-evolutionist politico-religious ethics.

social darwinism as religious MYSTERIUM Mashriqi’s reconciliation of religion and science was as much guided by ideological and political needs as it was the response to a genuine crisis of sensemaking.ItisimportanttonotethatMashriqi’sequationofIslamandevolutionary science was far from immediate or easy. He always rejected the idea—common to both Christian“crisis theology” and Muslim theologians like Abu’l KalamAzad— that matters of reason and matters of faith should be placed on entirely different epistemological planes and, therefore, that they could not really contradict each other.69 Although he replicated many of their arguments, Mashriqi was also very sceptical about the naive belief in a direct correspondence between the Words of God and the Works of God that guided the late nineteenth-century Muslim reformist thinkers. If such a correspondence was as unproblematic as Sir Sayyid or Abduh made it out to be, Mashriqi would not have had a role as the “Sage of the East” out to save the world, nor would he have to engage in a lifelong publishing effort that took him to the very edge of religious acceptability. Unlike many Darwinian scientists operating in Victorian Britain, Mashriqi did not want to play down the clash between his own vision and established religiosity.70 Like Ernst Haeckel—German prophet of evolutionary monism and one of Mashriqi’s sources—he preferred the impact of science on religious certainty to be as stark as possible, since this helped him to legitimize his own self-acclaimed status as visionary leader and thinker.71 There was indeed a way out of the depths of religious doubt, there was indeed some higher truth that brought science and religion together, but this path of truth was hidden and only accessible through the guidance of a mystical leader—who for Mashriqi was, of course, none other than himself. In Mashriqi’s eyes, “science” had the power of uncovering the universe as a perfectly ordered structure. The perception of the miraculous beauty of “God’s programme” 72 would not only transform the apparent brutality of natural 69

70 71 72

Crook, Darwinism, War and History , 202; James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870– 1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 1979); with reference to Azad see Douglas, Abu’l Kalam Azad , 230–2. Robert M. Young, “The Impact of Darwin on Conventional Thought”, in Anthony Symondson, ed., The Victorian Crisis of Faith (London: SPCK, 1970), 13–35. Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany , 1860– 1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 22–4, 75–8. QF , 20.


law into ultimate justice, it would also once and for all resolve the riddle of divine revelation. The truth that lay buried under the apparent ambiguities and contradictions of the world’s greatest texts—the scriptures of the world religions, as well as the monuments of philosophy and literature—was one and the same as the truth that the ongoing advance of science would reveal.73, In Mashriqi’s own words, the ultimate perfection of the Holy Qur’an can, if at all, only be put together only in those minds who have got to see every nook and corner of this magnificent cosmos, who have acquired substantial knowledge of the mysteries of the Book of Nature, who have been elevated by the majestic heights of knowledge and the grand vistas of ultimate reality to the higher horizon of the heavens and the stars; who, unperturbed by the technicalities of lowly logic, are pursuing the finality of absolute truth; who are aware of the secret tunes of acceptability in this supreme music of condition and consequence, cause and effect, basis and outcome; who know the hidden melody of the Providential decisions; who, in this apparently unshapely, unguided, unarranged, and tyranneous world of contradictions, find an amazing balance, surprising justness and harmony, supreme equlibrium and arrangement. 74

For Mashriqi, “science” was essentially some form of esoteric knowledge, as the proliferation of aesthetic metaphors in this passage already indicates; truth is seen from the “majestic heights of knowledge” (c ilm k¯ı buland-nig¯ ah¯ı ) and “the great vistas of ultimate reality” (haq¯ıqat k¯ı was¯ı c -naz . ar¯ı ); it constitutes “supreme music” (c az an m¯ us¯ıq¯ı ) and a “hidden melody” ( posh¯ıdah naw¯ a’¯ un). . ¯ım ul-sh¯ There are countless other expressions in al-Tazkirah with a similar flavour: “deep knowledge” is likened to “an ocean without shore” (muh.¯ı.t or bah.r-e bekar¯ an);75 the “electric candle of scientific knowledge” (c ilm k¯ı .s ah.¯ıh. barq¯ı mash c al ) would reveal “the veiled, courage-destroying, beauty-laden, brilliant and elusive bride of reality” (haq¯ıqat k¯ı pardah nash¯ın aur t¯ ab gusil h.usn se muzayyan aur tajall¯ı be niy¯ az c ur¯ us ) lying “hidden . . . behind [the] ugly and closed windows [of apparent reality]”.76 More revealing still, the secret truth of Scripture and science was a “coy beloved” (sharms¯ ar ma c sh¯ uqah), an established term from Indo-Persian poetry denoting both an object of sexual desire and God.77

73 74

75 76 77

TK I, 71–2, 40–41; TK I, 59. TK I, 41, translation partially based on the excerpt reprinted in Syed Shabbir Hussain, ed., Allama Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, Man’s Destiny—A Mathematician’s View of the Breath-Taking Climb that Awaits Man to Reach his Ultimate Destiny (Islamabad: elMashriqi Foundation, 1993), 72. TK I, 39, 85. TK I, 58, 40–41. TK I, 41; for more on the use of the ghazal form as expression of the ideal of unrequited love see Ralph Russell, The Pursuit of Urdu Literature (London: ZED Books, 1992), 26–52.

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This language points to an epistemology that is different from the conventions of science. The seeker is driven by a desire for the absolute—or, as Mashriqi often enough put it, echoing the Bible, by the wish to meet God “face to face”.78 The capricious lover, Truth, remains unresponsive, unless and until God Himself grants the seeker the grace of ultimate fulfilment. The discovery of the beautiful and harmonious universe behind a façade of misery is only ostensibly the result of an evolutionary growth of factual knowledge; what Mashriqi really had in mind was an instant switch from ignorance to knowledge that had its cause outside the process of knowledge production itself. His truth “appears” or is suddenly and mysteriously “illuminated”.79 Al-Tazkirah was always much more than a “modern” commentary on the Qur’an; it was an attempt to update fundamentally the revelation of Islam itself. Although Mashriqi was careful to deny any prophetic ambitions in several disclaimers both in al-Tazkirah itself and later publications, no careful reader was going to be fooled about the extent of his self-importance.80 One key section of his magnum opus was the lengthy introduction (Iftitah.iyyah) written in Arabic. The diction throughout the piece is not standard prose language, but based on a rhythmic and poetic succession of verses that are meant to resemble the language of the Qur’an itself. Throughout the text actual quotes from the Qur’an are interwoven with Mashriqi’s own writing, creating the impression of a unitary divinely inspired text. Mashriqi was getting very close to denying the most fundamental elements of the Islamic faith here: that the Qur’an was the unadulterated word of God and that the Prophet Muhammad was the recipient of the final divine revelation meant to guide mankind until the day of judgment. Mashriqi never questioned any of these tenets, but he created a space for his own world-historical mission by suggesting a continuous prophetic tradition that included not only Muhammad and the Semitic prophets, but also Buddha, Krishna, Aristotle, Bacon and other non-Islamic wise men. 81 Mashriqi’s insistence that the laws of evolution and the lessons of science would lead back to the doorstep of Islam, in other words, was not something

78

79 80 81

For a rare statement of this idea originally written in English see Syed Shabbir Hussain, Allama Inayatullah Khanal-Mashriqi, Man’s Destiny , 176–97; moreextensively in Mashriq¯ı, H an (extended reprint, Islamabad: Allama Mashriqi Publishers, 2000 (1952)), . ad¯ıt al-Qur’¯ ¯ 135–7. “Nobel Peace Prize Dossier”, reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi ; also TK I, 42. Disclaimers in TK I, 59; QF , 131. For reaction of the c ulam¯ a’ see Riexinger, Sanaullah Amritsari , as quoted in footnote 5; M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi , 40–51. TK I, 40.


that he could effectively argue. This problem was intricately connected to his dual vision of the world. The analysis of world history with the methodology of straightforward exoteric science would only lead to the damming insight of a world without purpose, a battlefield of all against all.82 For a colonized people— evenatatimewhennationalistmobilizationwasbeginningtobearfruit—anytalk about “survival of the fittest” had to be seen as a threat. Not only was the doctrine itself associated with norms and values imported under duress, there was also little question that the European countries, Japan and the US had to be seen as the “fittest” nations in a time of great and much-admired technological progress. At the same time there was no longer any guarantee that “fitness” would ultimately lead to something good and morally justified. The world of the inter-war period was a dog-eat-dog affair. The struggle against competitors as well as against one’s own aspirations for upward social mobility had become all but hopeless after the Great Depression, which hit the salaried middle classes of India particularly hard and led to a skyrocketing of “educated unemployment”.83 Indian politics, meanwhile, came to be ever more dominated by religious violence, which was eagerly mopped up by newly emerging mass media. Then there was the everpresent danger of another world war—which many Indians anticipated from the mid-1930s onwards and associated with the possibility of a physical annihilation of their world.84 In such a context, only the select few who shared in the secret code of social Darwinism were in a position to see that a perfect world of infinite order existed behind the turmoil of everyday injustice. It is only after the devotee has accepted the existence of a perfect and hidden reality that he or she becomes susceptible to allegedly “scientific” strategies of interpretation, which demonstrate that everything was indeed sensibly and causally connected to everything else. Mashriqi’s “science” was therefore the exact opposite of what it actually claimed to be: not a step-by-step deduction of rules from empirical evidence but the ex post facto rationalization of a prophetic vision that turned fear into a source of supreme power for its originator. The worse the world appeared through the looking glass of social Darwinism, the more it required a saviour like Mashriqi who could prove against all the odds that there really was divine intelligence in all the apparent madness. All this has to be seen in context. Mashriqi’s claim to leadership short of full prophethood touched a raw nerve amongst mainstream Muslim opinion, but only because it seemed to go further than other common examples of egomania 82 83 84

TK I, 3–5. Narain, India in the Crisis , 365–71; Dietmar Rothermund, India in the Great Depression 1929– 1939 (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 82–4, 119–20. Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, 141–4.

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at the time. Abu’l Kalam Azad—from whom Mashriqi had plagiarized both the title al-Tazkirah as well as the stylistic habit of writing Arabic introductions with a heavy dose of Qur’anic quotations85 —had believed in his twenties and early thirties that he was a divinely chosen renewer of Islam. Abul’ Ac la Mawdudi, the founding father of Islamicism, and Hasan Ali Nadwi, the spokesman of the Indian c ulam¯ a’ , entertained similar pretensions, while the Punjabi publicist Mirza Ghulam Ahmad—to the great detriment of the community he founded— actually went all the way to assuming full prophetic status.86 As was the case with so many other aspects of his work, Mashriqi’s megalomania was only an extreme example of a wider and very common sociological type of late colonial South Asia: the middle-class child prodigy turned schoolmaster, turned autodidactic scholar, turned saviour of the nation.

mashriqi’s “fascism”: redemption through suffering The validating power of scientific discourse could not generate acceptance for Mashriqi’s vision of a perfectly ordered universe. The believer first had to glimpse this universe—or at the very least trust Mashriqi’s vision as truthful—before the latter’s arguments could turn into esoteric wisdom, and thus furnish the belief in cosmic harmony with an apparent rational foundation. This raises the crucial question about the source of the personal legitimacy—the personal ability to see—of both prophet and devotee. Mashriqi was not particularly successful in generating conventional means of prophetic self-legitimization. As far as such a judgement is possible in retrospect, his personal charisma seems to have been limited. He took a conscious decision not to give public speeches—ostensibly on the ground that speeches only led to idle talk, not action.87 Attempts to use his personal political pulling power in order to revive the faltering fortunes of the Kh¯aks¯ar movement in the mid1940s failed miserably, and according to contemporary observers made Mashriqi look ridiculous.88 The obsession about contacts with the outside world—a much publicized visit to Einstein, the meeting with Hitler, the proud quotations from the replies he received from leading scientists to his correspondence—were

85 86

87 88

Douglas, Abu’l Kalam Azad , 103, 162–6. For more on the Ahmadiyya sect see Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). QF , NN. Som Anand, Lahore—Portrait of a Lost City (Lahore: Vanguard, 1998), 153–66. OIOC, File L/P&J/5/248. Fortnightly Report for Punjab for First Half of September 1945; also interview with Dr Kaniz Fatima Yusuf, a Muslim League youth leader who witnessed such an incident in 1945 (Islamabad 1999).


desperate means of appropriating the charisma of others. At the same time Mashriqi rejected alternative religious means of legitimization, as they were employed by Hindu holy men and Islamic mystics. There are no stories about Mashriqi’s spiritual powers, about any signs of election from early childhood, nor are there any accounts of a dramatic experience of awakening later in his life. His obsessive insistence on his scientific erudition foreclosed the self-image of the childlike saint who speaks not on his own behalf but as a vehicle of God’s message. No observer could ever get past Mashriqi, the self-appointed harsh taskmaster, who revelled in his own arrogance. In order to generate trust for the validity of his mission, Mashriqi chose to rely on an ethics of redemption through suffering that remained radically different from his much emphasized insistence on the validity of “science”. There was, in other words, a transit point at the very centre of Mashriqi’s intellectual edifice, which connected two altogether different world views.89 Their juxtaposition seems to echo Mashriqi’s alternation between a good and a bad universe, but there is something more fundamental at stake here. A social Darwinist ethics based on the assumption of inexorable Laws of Nature—merciless or benign as a matter of choice—was transformed into an ethics of personal authenticity, which can be summarized as follows: when the proclaimer of truth is principally unable to use the power of argument to persuade others of his calling, he has to turn rejection itself into a surrogate proof of his righteousness. The very fact that he sticks to his message in the face of hostility—and, most importantly, visibly suffers terrible mental and physical hardship as a consequence of his convictions—generates a sense that his message must at least be genuine, and therefore in a certain sense true. It was this very logic that stood behind Gandhi’s doctrine of Satyagraha or “truth-force”,90 and which the towering poet and philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) employed to produce his celebrated reconstruction of Islamic identity as a case of unrequited love for God and his Messenger.91 In his long poem Shikw¯ a (“Complaint”), first recited in front of an ecstatic crowd of several tens of thousands Punjabi Muslims in 1908, Iqbal compared God to the precocious and unresponsive object of desire in traditional Indo-Persian love poetry. The Muslims of the world had been genuine in their commitment 89

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It is highlypossible that a similar switch exists in all forms of socialDarwinism, which must place a question mark behind Mike Hawkins’s recent attempt to define social Darwinism with reference to a unitary world view. M. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860– 1945 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 30–5. David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Times and Ours (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 39–65; Joe Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 28–52. On Iqbal see Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wing (Leiden: Brill, 1963).

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to Islam, and yet He had not rewarded them with political or civilizational strength in the world.92 Under these circumstances, rejection is reinterpreted as a source of self-validation. The fact that Muslims continue to love God despite his unresponsiveness actually gives them a sense of pride in the strength and moral authenticity of their own emotions. I would argue that Inayatullah Khan’s “fascism” was of crucial importance to his intellectual project because it represented an ideological rendition of that crucial transit point between his belief in science and his belief in salvation through suffering. While incanting the inevitability of success in the language of Darwinian evolutionism, fascism was first and foremost about creating a practical organizational structure that could institutionalize and aestheticize an ethics of emotional authenticity. Although the Kh¯aks¯ars certainly saw themselves as the stormtroopers ready to save the Muslim nation, they did not really tie their role to the ability to do battle; rather they wanted to constitute a visible body of Muslims who hadcultivated a sense of moral superiority through their experience of paramilitary organization. The secret of their success lay in their ability to produce public spectacles, which encapsulated the fruits of their methodologies of self-purification and made them immediately consumable to members of the public. When Kh¯aks¯ars participated in public Friday prayers they would do so en masse and dressed in identical outfits, performing their obligatory prayer movements with the deliberate jerkiness and precision of a military exercise. On the streets Kh¯aks¯ars would be seen as a marching column, spades on their shoulders like rifles; when holding public meetings or organizing training camps, therewouldbeparades,inspectionsby“officers”aswellasmilitarystreetfurniture such as watchtowers and gates.93 As the colonial authorities understood only too well, it was not actual Kh¯aks¯ar actions that were politically dangerous, but the Kh¯aks¯ars’ ability to project the image of a militarized Islam that had successfully appropriated the government’s own insignia of power.94 The wearing of uniform and the regular conduct of military training sessions was meant to subject the activists to a rigid form of self-discipline that turned ordinary members of the public into initiates into Mashriqi’s social Darwinist mysterium. True to any mystical or ascetic tradition, an element of physical chastisement was emphasized. One practice that made the Kh¯aks¯ars famous was the public flogging of latecomers at their training sessions.95 For Mashriqi,

92 93 94 95

Muhammad Iqbal, Shikwa and Jawab-i-shikwa = Complaint and Answer: Iqbal’s Dialogue with Allah, trans. Kushwant Singh (Delhi: OUP, 1981). Map reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi , 1806. NAI, File (Home Political) 75/3/40 and OIOC: L/P&J/5/243 Fortnightly Report for Punjab, Second half of May, 1940. M , 406; Talbot, “The Khaksar Movement”, 199.


the main characteristics of the early Islam that he wanted to resurrect in his paramilitary movement were the willing suffering of physical pain, of forgoing food and travelling long distances on foot, of never giving in to the “ease-giving” life of the normal everyday.96 The real enemy is not outside but inside, Mashriqi argued in a striking echo to his contemporary, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.97 IftheKh¯aks¯a rs have to do battle, it is a battle with the un-martial instincts in their own souls, and with the individual incarnations of vice in Muslim community life: the dandy, the rich politician, the Mullah without dignity or taste.98 As Mashriqi pointed out with great venom, the greatest danger to national survival came from family commitments, career interests and stakes in business 99 —all areas of life where radical readiness to suffer was a hindrance rather than an asset. Mashriqi’s blood-curdling glorification of violence and his incantation of the need to conquer the world were strangely juxtaposed against an ethics of victimhood. The favourite image of the Prophet Muhammad in Mashriqi’s Qaul-e Fais . al is not Muhammad the successful statesman and general, as would logically follow from the Kh¯aks¯ar goal of world domination, but the Prophet as marginalized anddejected figure who nevertheless holds fast to his commitments. Mashriqi invokes the abuse that Muhammad had to suffer, the fact that he was spat at by the people of Mecca and showered in dirt and stones, that his wives were denigrated and his grandsons Hasan and Husain brutally killed (normally an altogether separate episode especially associated with Shic a Islam).100 The chapter about the enemies of Islam in the same tract also combined an ethics of non-violence with a dashing rhetoric of the Kh¯aks¯ars’ willingness to sacrifice their lives in war. After invoking once again the ideal of the Muslim born to rule, the conqueror of countless cities and castles, Mashriqi exhorted his followers to offer selfless and unrewarded service to all creatures, and not to respond to those who malign Islam in their presence. 101 In some sense, this emphasis on the positive role of suffering could still be justified within the wider logic of social Darwinism. Suffering producedhardness, and hardness was the cardinal virtue in the game of survival of the fittest, as Mashriqi himself often argued. But belief in ultimate victory was in reality always undercut by a fear of failure—the same fear that made Mashriqi proclaim that

M , 402–3; QF , 29. For Gandhi’s classic statement see M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Ahmadabad: Navajivan Publ., 1927); also Alter, Gandhi’s Body , 3–27. 98 QF , 18–20. 99 M , 395. 100 QF , 26–7. 101 QF , 25. 96 97

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Germans were better Muslims than the Muslims themselves, or that the universe may be nothing but a purposeless slaughterhouse. Within this context the cult of suffering led towards an ethics of emotional authenticity: no matter whether the Muslims were successful in restoring their former position of glory, the very fact that they sacrificed everything when trying to do so had to be seen as some form of redemption in itself. More importantly—and in a striking logical loop back into social Darwinism—the purifying power of suffering prepared the soul of both Mashriqi the prophet and the Kh¯aks¯a r devotee to have the kind of vision of a perfectly good world that made their belief in “science” emotionally sustainable. The meaning of survival of the fittest could be changed into the doctrine that suffering could never go unrewarded in this world. In some sense, this belief was some form of afterglow of a desperate trust in God’s justice and mercy that had been secularized into an ethics of hard work and being true to oneself. The genius of Mashriqi’s formulation, however, lay in its ability to turn radical doubt into the building material for a new certainty. The more the exoteric message of social Darwinism pointed to a universe without justice and without order, the more moral currency the mystic believer could gain from holding fast to belief in an underlying good. The discrepancy between ultimate truth and an illusory present created potential for suffering, which by itself would diminish the power of the latter and strengthen the former. Before concluding, it is worthwhile noting not only that all this was typical of South Asian nationalisms eager to overcome their position of colonization, but also that a very similar argument could be made about various aspects of European fascism. In both the Italian and German cases there was this strange juxtaposition between scientific determinism and a cult of radical voluntarism, the celebration of the machine versus the cult of a New Man, race biology versus “the Triumph of the Will”, the iron law of “Providence” versus the cult of leadership and genius. All this was connected to a crucial shift in what constituted an “ideology”. The relationship between content and form was marked by the striking predominance of the latter over the former. As Giovanni Gentile put it, fascism was not a “thinking” but an “acting” ideology—something that Mashriqi repeatedly said about his scientific rendition of “Islam” as well.102 What mattered most was the spectacle of “action” itself, not any concrete political outcomes that could be achieved by such action.103 Mashriqi may have placed more emphasis on victimhood and suffering than his European equivalents, but this was only a

o ln and Stuttgart: Deutsche 102 Giovanni Gentile, Grundlagen des Faschismus (K¨ Verlagsanstalt, 1936), 33. 103 Walter Benjamin famously identified the “aestheticization of politics” as the core of fascism. W. Benjamin, Das Kunstalter im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), 42–4.


difference of degree that is easily explained by local political constraints (as well as by the need to get his pamphlets past the colonial censors). Mussolini constantly spoke about Italy as the quintessentially wronged of world history, while the Nazis attached greatest importance to commemorative cults of the “martyrs of the movement”.104

conclusion Inayatullah Khan Mashriqi’s self-validation—and his legitimacy as a political and religious leader in the eyes of his followers—only partially depended on the dozens of academic qualifications and memberships of scientific bodies that he so proudly listed on every occasion. Mashriqi could no longer be a believer in the merits of educational advancement and upward social mobility as had been the religious reformers of the late nineteenth century. For Mashriqi the supreme truth of “science” posed an existential and painful challenge, but one that he learnt to utilize in order to construct an often exaggerated sense of worldhistorical leadership. Social Darwinism, in other words, provided Mashriqi with a universally accepted question, not with a universally accepted answer. From the point of view of a colonized people, the doctrine of survival of the fittest was a threat rather than a promise. Mashriqi’s role lay precisely in his ability to turn this threat into a promise once again. In order to do so, he did not resort to the powers of the scientist, but to the powers of the prophet. Social Darwinism could be a force of consolation only after it had been reformulated as esoteric vision, as a religious mysterium. Mashriqi’s real trump card was the idea that any belief could be legitimate as long as it was held with passionate conviction. The ultimate evil was not scientific ignorance or religious misguidedness, but personal inauthenticity that manifested itself in the inability to endure suffering and hardship. This was no longer a kind of self-fashioning anchored in some form of belief in the laws of progress, as had been the case with more conventional projects of nationalist self-discipline. There was no grand narrative that could underwrite the success of the modernization project. All that was left was the possibility to establish some sense of security from within oneself, by embarking on the never-ending struggle to connect with some nebulous notion of being true to one’s inner essence. Where the older reformers wanted to produce frugal workers, model citizens or diligent pupils, the likes of Mashriqi only replicated such ideals at a rhetorical level; what they really, and entirely unreasonably, wanted was to create a class of activists udiger Sünner, Schwarze Sonne (Freiburg: Herder, 2001), 118–24; Benito Mussolini, Der 104 R¨ Faschismus: philosophische, politische und gesellschaftliche Grundlehren (München: Beck, 1933).

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