Nationalism in the Muslim community

While the Congress was calling for swaraj in Calcutta, the Muslim League held its first meeting in Dacca. Though the Muslim
minority portion of India's population lagged behind the Hindu majority in uniting to articulate nationalist political demands, Islam
had, since the founding of the Delhi sultanate in 1206, provided Indian Muslims with sufficient doctrinal mortar to unite them as a
separate religious community. The era of effective Mughal rule (c. 15561707), moreover, gave India's Muslims a sense of martial
and administrative superiority to, as well as a sense of separation from, the Hindu majority.
In 1857 the last of the Mughal emperors had served as a rallying symbol for many mutineers, and in the wake of the mutiny most
Britons placed the burden of blame for its inception upon the Muslim community. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (181798), India's greatest
19th-century Muslim leader, succeeded, in his Causes of the Indian Revolt (1873), in convincing many British officials that Hindus
were primarily to blame for the mutiny. Sayyid had entered the company's service in 1838 and was the leader of Muslim India's
emulative mainstream of political reform. He visited Oxford in 1874 and returned to found the Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College
(now Aligarh Muslim University) at Aligarh in 1875. It was India's first centre of Islamic and Western higher education, with
instruction given in English and modeled on Oxford. Aligarh became the intellectual cradle of the Muslim League and Pakistan.
Sayyid Mahdi Ali (18371907), popularly known by his title Mohsin al-Mulk, had succeeded Sayyid Ahmad as leader and convened
a deputation of some 36 Muslim leaders, headed by the Aga Khan III, that in 1906 called upon Lord Minto (viceroy from 190510) to
articulate the special national interests of India's Muslim community. Minto promised that any reforms enacted by his government
would safeguard the separate interests of the Muslim community. Separate Muslim electorates, formally inaugurated by the Indian
Councils Act of 1909, were thus vouchsafed by viceregal fiat in 1906. Encouraged by the concession, the Aga Khan's deputation
issued an expanded call during the first meeting of the Muslim League (convened in December 1906 at Dacca) to protect and
advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India. Other resolutions moved at its first meeting expressed Muslim
loyalty to the British government, support for the Bengal partition, and condemnation of the boycott movement.
Turkish Nationalism (Ottoman empire)
The basic ideologies of the state remained Ottomanism and Islm, but a new sense of Turkish identity began to develop. This new
concept was fostered by educational work of the Turkish Society (formed 1908) and the Turkish Hearth (formed 1912). A political
twist was given by the adherents of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanianism. Pan-Turkism, which aimed at the political union of all
Turkish-speaking peoples, began among Turks in the Crimea and along the Volga River. Its leading exponent was smail Bey
Gasprinski (Gaspirali), who attempted to create a common Turkish language. Many Pan-Turkists migrated to Ottoman lands,
especially after 1905. One of them, Yusuf Akuraolu, argued in tarz- siyaset (1903; Three Kinds of Policy) that Turkism
provided a better basis for the Ottoman Empire than either Islm or Ottomanism. Pan-Turanianism developed from a much-disputed
19th-century theory of the common origin of Turkish, Mongol, Tungus, Finnish, Hungarian, and other languages; some of its
advocates envisioned a great political federation of speakers of these languages, extending from Hungary eastward to the Pacific
Ocean.
These ideas, however, found little support within the Ottoman government. The accusation that the Young Turks pursued a deliberate
policy of Turkification within the empire in order to alienate non-Turks and promote the rise of Arab and Albanian nationalism is an
oversimplification. The extension of government activity inevitably brought with it the Turkish language, as it was the language of
government. This produced some reaction from speakers of other languages, but the evidence suggests that it did not override basic
feelings of Muslim solidarity, except among some small minorities. It was among the Christian groups that distinct separatist ideas
were developed.
The rise of nationalism
For the Islamic countries, the 19th century marks the beginning of a new epoch. Napoleon's conquest of Egypt, as well as British
colonialism, brought the Muslims into contact with a world whose technology was far in advance of their own. The West had
experienced the ages of Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, whereas the once-flourishing Muslim civilization had for a
long while been at a near stagnation point despite its remarkable artistic achievements. The introduction of Muslim intellectuals to
Western literature and scholarshipthe Egyptian a-ahw (died 1873), for example, studied in Franceushered in a new literary
era the chief characteristic of which was to be more matter, less art. The literatures from this time onward are far less Islamic than
those of the previous 1,000 years, but new intellectual experiences also led to the liberation of the whole creative impulse within the
Islamic peoples (Kritzeck). The introduction of the printing press and the expansion of newspapers helped to shape a new literary
style, more in line with the requirements of the modern times, when the patron prince has been replaced by a middle-class reading
public (Badawi). Translations from Western languages provided writers with the model examples of genres previously unknown to
them, including the novel, the short story, and dramatic literature. Of those authors whose books were translated, Guy de Maupassant,
Sir Walter Scott, and Anton Chekhov were most influential in the development of the novel and the novella. Important also was the
ideological platform derived from Tolstoy, whose criticism of Western Christianity was gratefully adopted by writers from Egypt to
Muslim India. Western influences can further be observed in the gradual discarding of the time-hallowed static (and turgid) style of
both poetry and prose, in the tendency toward simplification of diction, and in the adaptation of syntax and vocabulary to meet the
technical demands of emulating Western models. Contact with the West also encouraged a tendency toward retrospection. Writers
concentrated their attention on their own country and particular heritage, such as the pharaoic myth of Egypt, the Indo-European
roots of Iran, and the Central Asian past of Turkey. In short, there was an emphasis on differentiation, inevitably leading to the rise of
nationalism, instead of an emphasis on the unifying spirit and heritage of Islam.
Ideology Introduction
Ideology based on the premise that the individual's loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpass other individual or group interests.
Nationalism is a modern movement. Throughout history people have been attached to their native soil, to the traditions of their
parents, and to established territorial authorities; but it was not until the end of the 18th century that nationalism began to be a

generally recognized sentiment molding public and private life and one of the great, if not the greatest, single determining factors of
modern history. Because of its dynamic vitality and its all-pervading character, nationalism is often thought to be very old; sometimes
it is mistakenly regarded as a permanent factor in political behaviour. Actually, the American and French revolutions may be regarded
as its first powerful manifestations. After penetrating the new countries of Latin America it spread in the early 19th century to central
Europe and from there, toward the middle of the century, to eastern and southeastern Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century
nationalism flowered in the ancient lands of Asia and Africa. Thus the 19th century has been called the age of nationalism in Europe,
while the 20th century has witnessed the rise and struggle of powerful national movements throughout Asia and Africa.
Identification of state and people
Nationalism, translated into world politics, implies the identification of the state or nation with the peopleor at least the desirability
of determining the extent of the state according to ethnographic principles. In the age of nationalism, but only in the age of
nationalism, the principle was generally recognized that each nationality should form a stateits stateand that the state should
include all members of that nationality. Formerly states, or territories under one administration, were not delineated by nationality.
Men did not give their loyalty to the nation-state but to other, different forms of political organization: the city-state, the feudal fief
and its lord, the dynastic state, the religious group, or the sect. The nation-state was nonexistent during the greater part of history, and
for a very long time it was not even regarded as an ideal. In the first 15 centuries of the Christian Era, the ideal was the universal
world-state, not loyalty to any separate political entity. The Roman Empire had set the great example, which survived not only in the
Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages but also in the concept of the res publica christiana (Christian republic or community) and
in its later secularized form of a united world civilization.
As political allegiance, before the age of nationalism, was not determined by nationality, so civilization was not thought of as
nationally determined. During the Middle Ages civilization was looked upon as determined religiously; for all the different
nationalities of Christendom as well as for those of Islm there was but one civilizationChristian or Muslimand but one language
of cultureLatin (or Greek) or Arabic (or Persian). Later, in the periods of the Renaissance and of Classicism, it was the ancient
Greek and Roman civilizations that became a universal norm, valid for all peoples and all times. Still later, French civilization was
accepted throughout Europe as the valid civilization for educated people of all nationalities. It was only at the end of the 18th century
that, for the first time, civilization was considered to be determined by nationality. It was then that the principle was put forward that a
man could be educated only in his own mother tongue, not in languages of other civilizations and other times, whether they were
classical languages or the literary creations of other peoples who had reached a high degree of civilization.
Cultural nationalism
From the end of the 18th century on, the nationalization of education and public life went hand in hand with the nationalization of
states and political loyalties. Poets and scholars began to emphasize cultural nationalism first. They reformed the mother tongue,
elevated it to the rank of a literary language, and delved deep into the national past. Thus they prepared the foundations for the
political claims for national statehood soon to be raised by the people in whom they had kindled the spirit.
Before the 18th century there had been evidences of national feeling among certain groups at certain periods, especially in times of
stress and conflict. The rise of national feeling to major political importance was encouraged by a number of complex developments:
the creation of large, centralized states ruled by absolute monarchs who destroyed the old feudal allegiances; the secularization of life
and of education, which fostered the vernacular languages and weakened the ties of church and sect; the growth of commerce, which
demanded larger territorial units to allow scope for the dynamic spirit of the rising middle classes and their capitalistic enterprise. This
large, unified territorial state, with its political and economic centralization, became imbued in the 18th century with a new spiritan
emotional fervour similar to that of religious movements in earlier periods. Under the influence of the new theories of the sovereignty
of the people and the rights of man, the people replaced the king as the centre of the nation. No longer was the king the nation or the
state; the state had become the people's state, a national state, a fatherland. State became identified with nation, as civilization became
identified with national civilization.
That development ran counter to the conceptions that had dominated political thought for the preceding 2,000 years. Hitherto man had
commonly stressed the general and the universal and had regarded unity as the desirable goal. Nationalism stressed the particular and
parochial, the differences, and the national individualities. Those tendencies became more pronounced as nationalism developed. Its
less attractive characteristics were not at first apparent. In the 17th and 18th centuries the common standards of Western civilization,
the regard for the universally human, the faith in reason (one and the same everywhere) as well as in common sense, the survival of
Christian and Stoic traditionsall of these were still too strong to allow nationalism to develop fully and to disrupt society. Thus
nationalism in its beginning was thought to be compatible with cosmopolitan convictions and with a general love of mankind,
especially in western Europe and North America.