Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani

“Do not cut the head of religion except with the sword of religion” – Jamal ad-Din al Afghani

It's always fascinating to tease the threads of the past from ‘contemporary’ ideas. From Iran’s reformist Islamic thinkers of today like Abdul Karim Soroush and Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, we can draw a line to Ali Shariati, 40 years ago. If we follow it further, it will ultimately lead to Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (born 1838/39) , the charismatic, indefatigable Iranian who packed several lifetimes into his nearly six decades on earth.

Jamal ad-Din was as creative a self-inventor as he was a thinker. His biography has always been a challenging tangle of facts and fabrication. A sayyed (descendant of the Prophet) who donned the black turban at the age of twelve, Jamal ad-Din rewrote his life story to serve whatever his needs were at the moment, so in Afghanistan he claimed to be from Istanbul, and in Istanbul he took the name 'Afghani', which concealed the fact he was Shia in a largely Sunni world. (Jamal ad-Din himself rejected the Sunni/Shia split, believing it was a tool used by kings to divide people.)

Although his place of birth is still contested, Keddie says, with some documentation, that he was from Iran. No place seems to have served as his home for long: “I am like a royal falcon for whom the wide arena of the world, for all its breadth, is too narrow for flight."

His anti-imperialist message (which at this time meant being largely anti-British) , was not, essentially, anti-Western. He recognized that the west had surpassed the Islamic world in teaching, science and reason and urged that its model be followed but in an Islamic context.

"My brothers: Open the eyes of perception, and look in order to learn a lesson. Arise from the sleep of neglect. Know that the Islamic people were the strongest in rank, the most valuable in worth. They were very high in intelligence, comprehension, and prudence. They faced up to the most difficult things with respect to work and endeavor. Later this people sank into ease and laziness..."


Jamal ad-Din doesn't blame Islam, the Prophet or the Quran for the plight of Muslims, but rather felt that the religion had been twisted into a tool of oppression by monarchs and a means of control by mullahs who hewed to a blind, narrow and flawed interpretation.

The meanings of the Quran are infinite, he argued, and encompass all of philosophy. He scolded clerics for spending their time immersed in trifling, “imaginary essences”, adding, “…you spend no thought on this question of great importance, incumbent on every intelligent man, which is: What is the cause of poverty, indigence, helplessness, and distress of the Muslims…”

Nikki Keddie's 1972 book, "Jamal ad-Din 'al-Afghani', A Political Biography" is the most comprehensive account we have of this fascinating figure whose intelligence, charisma and theatricality quickly won him followers and audiences with powerful figures wherever he went.

His ideas helped give rise to Arab nationalism, the pan-Islamic movement and, it could be argued ultimately, to the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Yet a reading of Keddie's book reveals that 20th century Islamic thinkers who draw inspiration from Jamal ad-Din may be reading him selectively. In fact, Afghani comes across as the too unorthodox for most, animated both by a profound skepticism about religion and a conviction that Islam is the only means of uniting the people of the Muslim world in the face of western encroachment. In Keddie’s words, “It was Afghani’s genius to be able to adapt Islam to radically new needs and conditions and to introduce modern ideas without renouncing or breaking with those with a more traditional outlook.”

Afghani was never entirely successful. He had difficulty staying his tongue, and an uncanny knack for stepping beyond what his powerful patrons would countenance, turning them against him. He was expelled from India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt and Iran.

In Keddie’s portrayal, Afghani is a man in constant motion: In his writings and speeches he exhorted Muslims to resist taking refuge in traditionalism and arm themselves with knowledge in order to rise up against imperialism.

He was Zelig-like in his approach to those in power, claiming connections and influence where he had none, in order to gain audiences with state leaders – Yet his reputation as a speaker and writer was such that no one could be dismissive of him. He adapted his message to suit his audience. In Britain he spoke as a modernist, downplaying his anti-British tone. In the East, he spoke as an Islamist, railing against imperial England.

Afghani’s message also changed with time and circumstance. In his early travels in Muslim countries he emphasized nationalism over pan-Islamism. In fact, in India and Egypt he encouraged people to draw inspiration and strength from their pre-Islamic history.

His embrace of science and his liberal, rational approach to Islam as a means to independence from foreign powers appealed to intellectuals, his emphasis first on nationalism and, eventually, on pan-Islamism appealed to a more religious and conservative populous.

“After Jamal ad-Din,” Keddie writes, “the practice of reinterpretation of koranic texts by modernist intellectuals became very popular.”

But Afghani saw religion – any religion – as only a necessary stop along the way in man’s development: A way station between barbarism and enlightenment. Syrian writer Salim al-Anhuri who knew Afghani wrote that Jamal ad-Din had studied religion until he was no longer a believer, having concluded, "that the belief in an omniscient Prime Mover was a natural delusion that arose when man was in a primitive state of evolution...man's intellection capacities progressed after that, however, until they reached the knowledge that all these [beliefs] are kinds of delusions and confused dreams, originating from man's fear of death and his desire for immortality."

There were many who thought Jamal ad-Dean an atheist or heretic, but Keddie concludes that while he took an evolutionary view of religion, he was not a non-believer: "There is evidence that Jamal ad-Din saw himself as something of an Islamic Luther, and was moved by a conviction that religious reform was the only way to introduce material reform and self-strengthening into the Islamic world.

After he left Iran as a young man Jamal ad-Din returned on two brief occasions and his appeal and reputation was such that here, as elsewhere, his visits attracted a circle of like-minded modernizers. It’s ironic that after all his exertions in India, Afghanistan and Egypt to mount an opposition to Britain, he would be most successful in Iran.

He tried at first to win favor with Nasir ad-Din Shah, who ruled Iran for the latter half of the 19th century. But Afghani’s anti-British fervor unnerved the Shah. In the early 1890s when Nasir ad-Din secretly granted the British government complete control of all Persian tobacco, Jamal ad-Din’s supporters in Iran, at his urging, circulated placards denouncing the Shah and making threats on his life.Jamal ad-Din stirred the pot, but the mullahs and merchants brought it to a boil and in early 1891 there were mass demonstrations throughout Iran.

Afghani wrote a famous and impassioned call to action addressed to a leading cleric who had been banished by the Shah to Iraq for his opposition to the tobacco concession: “…if thou wilt not arise to help this people, and wilt not unite them in purpose, and pluck them forth, by the power of the Holy Law, from the hands of this sinner, verily the realms of Islam will soon be under the control of foreigners…”

It was this mullah, Hajji Mirza Hasan Shirazi, who called for Iranians to boycott tobacco (“In the name of God, the Merciful, the Forgiving, today the use of tonbaku and tobacco in any form is reckoned as war against the Imam of the Age…” which led to the cancellation of the concession to the British.

Keddie writes that the tobacco movement was a decisive victory for Jamal ad-Din’s approach to resisting the west. It showed that reformers could recruit clerics to their cause and arouse the masses. Keddie adds, “Thus an alliance of ulama, merchants, modernizers, and the city populace had for the first time in modern Iranian history engaged in a coordinated movement that shook the foundations of the government and forced it to change course.”

Jamal ad-Din barely took the time to draw a breath from his fiery tirades against the British tobacco concession before he was off to England and pleading with the government there to help the oppressed Iranian people. He wrote feverishly, publishing articles denouncing Nasir ad-Din and composing letters to the ulama of Iran exhorting them to rise up and depose him. By now Jamal ad-Din was perhaps more interested in overthrowing the Shah than he was of ridding Iran of the British, and the Shah complained bitterly to the English that they should silence him.

On May 1, 1896 a follower of Jamal ad-Din shot and killed the Shah of Iran. Jamal ad-Din was to live less than a year longer.

Despite his exertions, it seems Jamal ad-Din was not optimistic that his views could prevail. He wrote, “Science, however beautiful it is, does not completely satisfy humanity, which thirsts for the ideal and which likes to exist in dark and distant regions which the philosophers and scholars can neither perceive nor explore.”

Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr

Even in condensed form, Louis Massignon's (1883-1962)description of the 10th century milieu that produced Al Husayn Ibn Mansur al Halla, known as Hallaj - 'the carder of consciences', is exhaustive and exhausting. But I was fascinated by this story of the man some regarded as a saint and others considered a heretic or madman.

Herbert Mason's "Hallaj - Mystic and Martyr" (1982, Princeton University Press)is an abridged English translation of French Islamologist Massignon's landmark four volume, 1500 page, five- decades-in-the-writing work "The Passion of al-Hallaj".

The book requires more interest about this period of Islamic history and more patience for long, abrupt departures from the narrative than many readers possess.

Massignon's prose is at turns ponderous and breathless. People...events...ideas pass by in feverish half-page sentences littered with parenthetical and bracketed asides. Explanations about arcane and esoteric aspects of religious life mix with details of the Caliphate's annual budget. Over this backdrop Massignon's Hallaj moves like a bright comet.


For all it's scholarship, this is a very personal work. It was a verse attributed to Hallaj that first captivated Massignon: "Two moments of adoration suffice in love, but the preliminary ablution must be made in blood." It was Hallaj, Massignon contended, who helped guide him in his darkest hours, leading him from agnosticism to, of all things, Catholicism.

Hallaj was born in the Arabicized south of Iran at a time when Islam was still spilling across Asia. His grandfather, in fact, had been a Zoroastrian. He was drawn at a young age to the mystics and to 'the spiritual exile' of Sufism - which he would later abandon, "worn out by spiritual dryness and by the hypocritical fraternal correctness of those hermits who cultivate their perfection sealed off from reality."

After spending time in prayer and self denial in Mecca, Hallaj began to write and preach publicly, wandering and gaining followers. In each region he visited, he was called by a different name: "The aesthetic", "the nourisher", "the enraptured", "the dazed".

His travels took him through much of Iran, to India and into the Turkish areas where he is credited with helping to introduce Islam. He drew crowds by performing what many considered to be miracles (producing food out of thin air, increasing his physical size, etc). Apparently Hallaj made no claim to being a miracle worker. He said he performed his tricks in order to attract people to his message.

Hallaj's home was in Baghdad and Massignon creates a fascinating picture of the city teeming with the sacred and the profane: preachers holding forth in front of mosques and markets and vying for influential converts in high society, slave traders with troupes of performing women, "dream-like creatures, supposed to stimulate people's desire for aesthetic diversion...only to destroy through the lure of the feminine face..."

The rivalries of Islamic sects, the economic discontent of the masses and the political intrigues of the court combined to make Baghdad a city thrumming with tension. It was into this atmosphere that Hallaj stepped.

In Massignon's description, Hallaj preaches like a man possessed: "He cries out his joy at having reached, and having in his possession, 'the One who is at the heart of ecstasy'..."

Hallaj tears the veil of secrecy from the Sufi's lonely communion and shows the masses a man who has lost himself in God. What others preached as theory, Hallaj made real. He aroused awe and excitement among the displaced people who lived in the squalid margins of Baghdad life.

He interpreted Quranic verse and Islamic traditions in a way that puzzled some and infuriated others. Despite his denials, his followers believed he could raise the dead. His ecstatic behavior, was, to them, a sign that God spoke through him. He himself said, "Who is it but God who writes, since I am no more than the hand that serves him as an instrument?"

Hallah's most dramatic and famous proclamation was "Ana'l Haqq" - "I am the truth" (or "I am God") - a statement meant to express his oneness with the creator.

For his accusers this was enough to condemn him for "encroaching on the rights of God."

Religious leaders considered his popularity a threat and political leaders saw him as a catalyst for the people's discontent and a threat to the social order. Others withheld judgment: "What should I say about a man who in jurisprudence knows more than I do, and who in mysticism speaks a language I do not understand?"

As Reynolds Nicholson wrote in "Studies in Islamic Mysticism", Hallaj's crime was, "in actively asserting a truth which involves, religious, political and social anarchy."

Hallaj sought not adulation but condemnation and death at the hands of those who disagreed with him: "A man who is zealous for his religion is dearer to me, and dearer to God also, than a man who venerates a creature," he said. "What will you say to yourself...on the day when you see me hanging on the gibbet and killed and burned? Yet that will be the happiest day of my life."

Despite this claim, Hallaj fled when he was first ordered arrested. Later captured, he was imprisoned for eight years - but still allowed to write and receive followers.

Massigon describes how Hallaj's fate was decided in the "piestic riot" of his religious detractors and the political machinations of the Caliph's court. In a brief retrial, "this same aesthetic who had preached in vain that God must be loved first and foremost, that the holy war of the Law against idolatries must be waged against our own consciences, making us abandon all of our riches" was sentenced to death by lashing, dismemberment and decapitation and finally burning - his ashes scattered.

His execution in 922 AD was a public event accompanied by much interest and tumult. It's said he was led laughing to his death. Near the end he uttered the words: "Here I am now in the dwelling place of my desires."

There are two lives intertwined in this book: Hallaj and Massignon. After a half century of delving into his subject's story, Massignon wrote, "Not that the study of Hallaj's life yielded to me the secret of his heart. Rather, it is he who fathomed mine and who probes it still."

Shariati - An Islamic Utopian

Ali Rahnema's excellent biography of Ali Shariati (An Islamic Utopian, 1998, I.B. Tauris) deftly portrays the fascinating and complex man who is often called the intellectual father of Iran's Islamic revolution.

Shariati grew up religious and poor. His political development began in Iran, but his time as a scholarship student in Paris helped to crystallize his world view. He condemned the excess and materialism of the west, but he also sensed that there were ideas in play that were absent in his own country. "I wish I had never come here and tasted the meaning of freedom," he wrote, "I should have stayed back there and read about it only in books."

Events in his own country, like the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 and the 'westoxication' of Iran under the Shah also shaped his thinking.


It's clear from Rahnema's book that there was much spirited debate and political activity among Iranian students and intellectuals even under the Shah's repressive hand. Among those groups and individuals, Shariati was a religious star in a largely secular universe. His faith tended toward Sufi mysticism, seeking annihilation of self and union with God. Among his claims at one point in his life were visions and the ability to summon spirits. But Shariati eschewed the quietest style of Sufism for an activist approach that permitted him to express himself politically.

Shariati often seems not so much anti-western, as someone who wanted people to think for themselves - without uncritically accepting either the values of the west or those of Iran's religious hierarchy. He felt exiled between "the two barren deserts of mullahs and modernists." Shariati's deepest instincts were religious, but westerners influenced his philosophy and he creatively bent their ideas and those of Shi'ia Islam to fit his own beliefs. In the case of French Islamologist Jacques Berque, Shariati learned how the meaning of words can be adapted to reflect time and circumstance. Rahnema writes, "Berque had ignited something in Shariati. He [Shariati] took each commonly used term in the vocabulary of every Muslim and reinterpreted it until gentle lullabies became electric currents. Words and concepts resonating with resignation, fatalism and self-pity in the historical memory of Iranian Shi'i, were suddenly transformed into forceful and dynamic concepts for action."

Shariati achieved notoriety as an unorthodox and brilliant lecturer at Mashhad University, but it was in a series of lectures in Tehran at Hosseiniyeh Ershad that his vision of an Islamic Democracy came into focus. Initially he was convinced that no nation could be just, classless and free unless it's people were intellectually and politically mature. At one point he espoused an interim 'guided democracy', led by an enlightened and virtuous individual: an Imam chosen by religious leaders.

Rahnema tells us that Shariati's militancy grew in the early 1970s in response to the armed struggle of the Mojahadin in Iran. Shariati moved away from his belief that enlightenment of the people had to precede revolution. In his final lectures at Ershad, he maintained that 'a group of responsible intellectuals' or a 'conscious and alert individual' could accelerate the revolutionary process. He no longer believed that popular awareness must precede actions - he wanted to wield the message and the sword together. He still believed that a new government must be led by a deeply inspirational and religious figure, but now he contended that this person should be popularly elected.

Shariati's writings and lectures excoriated religious leaders as 'polytheists' and oppressors who legitimized the monarchy. At one point he wrote, "I feel more distant from them than from enlightened atheists." He saw them as adherents to what he termed "Safavid Shi'ism", subverting the religion of Imam Ali. In his view they had replaced the religious concepts of justice, protest and personal belief and interpretation with empty ritual, blind imitation and unquestioning subservience - rendering people resigned and harmless.

His lectures and writing elicited condemnation and alarm from the mullahs. (Interestingly Khomeini, at the time exiled in Iraq, refused to back his religious brethren in Iran. "I studied the cases referred to," he said in response to requests to read and condemn Shariati, "none of the reprobations or criticisms were valid.") Eventually some progressive members of the clergy came to Shariati's defense.

Shariati increasingly armed traditional religious concepts with revolutionary significance. It was the language of empowerment in a form all Iranians, even the least politically aware and engaged, could understand. For example, he used the traditional Islamic commandment to do good deeds to exhort people to political action. Shariati said that action, not longing and mourning was the proper religious response to Iranians' plight - and it was the only response that was true to the example and spirit of Imam Hossein's uprising at Karbala. It was, Rahnema writes, "the magic wand, awakening the dormant, subjugated and the unenlightened."

Rahnema tries to answer critics who accuse Shariati of lacking the courage of his convictions when brought before SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. In Rahnema's view the government saw Shariati as a religious figure and a helpful counter to the secular Marxist movement in Iran. Eventually it became clear that Shariati was calling for armed overthrow of the government and he was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months.

Afterward, in a series of controversial articles published in the government newspaper Kayhan, Shariati made critical revisions in some of his ideas. He retreated from his call for armed struggle. He returned to his belief that personal development and popular enlightenment, not resistance and struggle, were necessary to bring about change. He took up the cause of nationalism, which he had previously equated with Iran's dynastic rulers. For the first time he declared that a capitalist system was inevitable, but it must be tempered by a moral, Islamic system of government.

In Rahnema's view, whether Shariati's change of heart was due to a genuine evolution in his thinking (perhaps a product of 'conditions on the ground' and the deaths of close friends who had joined the Mojahedin and taken up arms against the government - or the closing of Ershad and his absence from it's charged atmosphere), or pressure and threats from the SAVAK, will never be known.

Interestingly the name of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei crops up a number of times in Rhanema's book. Khamenei was 6 years Shariti's junior. Both came from Mashad. Rhanema never gives us any details about the relationship between the two men, but they continued to see each other and it seems reasonable to think that Khamenei must have been in agreement with the basic tenets of Shariati's philosophy.

Shariati's death in England in 1977 was officially ruled a heart attack. Rhanema makes no mention of the theory that Shariati was murdered by SAVAK after he had slipped out of Iran. He died just over a year short of the beginning of Iran's Revolution. Rhanema doesn't dwell on how Shariati would view the Iran of today, simply writing that 'Shariati was a romantic, not a practitioner of revolutions'.

In an eloquent summary of his subject's life, Rhanema writes,in part, "Shariati was the unexpected rooster who took pride and pleasure in his own nocturnal crowing...He woke up the inquisitive, the inquisitors and the executioners..."