On Islam

By Abraham Kuyper, James D. Bratt and Douglas Howard

At the beginning of the twentieth century, famed theologian Abraham Kuyper toured the Mediterranean world and encountered Islam for the first time.

Part travelogue, part cultural critique, On Islam presents a European imperialist seeing firsthand the damage colonialism had caused and the value of a religion he had never truly understood. Here, Kuyper's doctrine of common grace shines as he displays a nuanced and respectful understanding of the Muslim world. Though an ardent Calvinist, Kuyper still knew that God's grace is expressed to unbelievers. Kuyper saw Islam as a culture and religion with much to offer the West, but also as a threat to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Here he expresses a balanced view of early twentieth-century Islam that demands attention from the majority world today as well. Essays by prominent scholars bookend the volume, showing the relevance of these teachings in our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781683590279

Abraham Kuyper

Abraham Kuyper (1937-1920) was a prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian, politician, educator, and writer. His thinking has influenced the Neo-Calvinist movement in the United States and Canada. Many of his writings, including Pro Rege, have never been translated into English.

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ON ISLAM

ABRAHAM

KUYPER

Edited by James D. Bratt with Douglas A. Howard

Translated by Jan van Vliet

Introductions by Douglas A. Howard and George Harinck

Afterword by Diane B. Obenchain

On Islam

Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology

Copyright 2017 Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail].

Originally published as Om de Oude Wereldzee, door Dr. A. Kuyper. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1907–08

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781577996743

Digital ISBN 9781683590279

Lexham Editorial: Brannon Ellis, Joel Wilcox

Cover Design: Christine Gerhart

ABRAHAM

KUYPER

Collected Works in Public Theology

GENERAL EDITORS

JORDAN J. BALLOR

MELVIN FLIKKEMA

ABRAHAMKUYPER.COM

CONTENTS

General Editors’ Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Volume Introductios

Chapter 1: The Asian Danger

Chapter 2: Constantinople

Chapter 3: Asia Minor

Chapter 4: Syria

Chapter 5: The Holy Land

Chapter 6: The Enigma of Islam

Chapter 7: Egypt and Sudan

Chapter 8: Algeria and Morocco

Chapter 9: Spain

Chapter 10: Conclusion

Afterword

Bibliography

About the Contributors

List of Illustrations

Subject/Author Index

GENERAL EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Ornate cover of Kuyper’s Om de Oude Wereldzee, 1907

In times of great upheaval and uncertainty, it is necessary to look to the past for resources to help us recognize and address our own contemporary challenges. While Scripture is foremost among these foundations, the thoughts and reflections of Christians throughout history also provide us with important guidance. Because of his unique gifts, experiences, and writings, Abraham Kuyper is an exemplary guide in these endeavors.

Kuyper (1837–1920) is a significant figure both in the history of the Netherlands and modern Protestant theology. A prolific intellectual, Kuyper founded a political party and a university, led the formation of a Reformed denomination and the movement to create Reformed elementary schools, and served as the prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. In connection with his work as a builder of institutions, Kuyper was also a prolific author. He wrote theological treatises, biblical and confessional studies, historical works, social and political commentary, and devotional materials.

Believing that Kuyper’s work is a significant and underappreciated resource for Christian public witness, in 2011 a group of scholars interested in Kuyper’s life and work formed the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society. The shared conviction of the society, along with the Acton Institute, Kuyper College, and other Abraham Kuyper scholars, is that Kuyper’s works hold great potential to build intellectual capacity within the church in North America, Europe, and around the world. It is our hope that translation of his works into English will make his insights accessible to those seeking to grow and revitalize communities in the developed world as well as to those in the global south and east who are facing unique challenges and opportunities.

The church today—both locally and globally—needs the tools to construct a compelling and responsible public theology. The aim of this translation project is to provide those tools—we believe that Kuyper’s unique insights can catalyze the development of a winsome and constructive Christian social witness and cultural engagement the world over.

In consultation and collaboration with these institutions and individual scholars, the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society developed this 12-volume translation project, the Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology. This multivolume series collects in English translation Kuyper’s writings and speeches from a variety of genres and contexts in his work as a theologian and statesman. In almost all cases, this set contains original works that have never before been translated into English. The series contains multivolume works as well as other volumes, including thematic anthologies.

The series includes a translation of Kuyper’s Our Program (Ons Program), which sets forth Kuyper’s attempt to frame a Christian political vision distinguished from the programs of the nineteenth-century Modernists who took their cues from the French Revolution. It was this document that launched Kuyper’s career as a pastor, theologian, and educator. As James Bratt writes, This comprehensive Program, which Kuyper crafted in the process of forming the Netherlands’ first mass political party, brought the theology, the political theory, and the organization vision together brilliantly in a coherent set of policies that spoke directly to the needs of his day. For us it sets out the challenge of envisioning what might be an equivalent witness in our own day.

Also included is Kuyper’s seminal three-volume work De gemeene gratie, or Common Grace, which presents a constructive public theology of cultural engagement rooted in the humanity Christians share with the rest of the world. Kuyper’s presentation of common grace addresses a gap he recognized in the development of Reformed teaching on divine grace. After addressing particular grace and covenant grace in other writings, Kuyper here develops his articulation of a Reformed understanding of God’s gifts that are common to all people after the fall into sin.

The series also contains Kuyper’s three-volume work on the lordship of Christ, Pro Rege. These three volumes apply Kuyper’s principles in Common Grace, providing guidance for how to live in a fallen world under Christ the King. Here the focus is on developing cultural institutions in a way that is consistent with the ordinances of creation that have been maintained and preserved, even if imperfectly so, through common grace.

The remaining volumes are thematic anthologies of Kuyper’s writings and speeches gathered from the course of his long career.

The anthology On Charity and Justice includes a fresh and complete translation of Kuyper’s The Problem of Poverty, the landmark speech Kuyper gave at the opening of the First Christian Social Congress in Amsterdam in 1891. This important work was first translated into English in 1950 by Dirk Jellema; in 1991, a new edition by James Skillen was issued. This volume also contains other writings and speeches on subjects including charity, justice, wealth, and poverty.

The anthology On Islam contains English translations of significant pieces that Abraham Kuyper wrote about Islam, gathered from his reflections on a lengthy tour of the Mediterranean world. Kuyper’s insights illustrate an instructive model for observing another faith and its cultural ramifications from an informed Christian perspective.

The anthology On the Church includes selections from Kuyper’s doctrinal dissertation on the theologies of Reformation theologians John Calvin and John a Lasco. It also includes various treatises and sermons, such as Rooted and Grounded, Twofold Fatherland, and Address on Missions.

The anthology On Business and Economics contains various meditations Kuyper wrote about the evils of the love of money as well as pieces that provide Kuyper’s thoughts on stewardship, human trafficking, free trade, tariffs, child labor, work on the Sabbath, and business.

Finally, the anthology On Education includes Kuyper’s important essay Bound to the Word, which discusses what it means to be ruled by the Word of God in the entire world of human thought. Numerous other pieces are also included, resulting in a substantial English volume of Kuyper’s thoughts on Christian education.

Collectively, this 12-volume series will, as Richard Mouw puts it, give us a much-needed opportunity to absorb the insights of Abraham Kuyper about God’s marvelous designs for human cultural life.

The Abraham Kuyper Translation Society along with the Acton Institute and Kuyper College gratefully acknowledge the Andreas Center for Reformed Scholarship and Service at Dordt College; Calvin College; Calvin Theological Seminary; Fuller Theological Seminary; Mid-America Reformed Seminary; Redeemer University College; Princeton Theological Seminary; and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Their financial support and partnership made these translations possible. The society is also grateful for the generous financial support of Dr. Rimmer and Ruth DeVries and the J. C. Huizenga family, which has enabled the translation and publication of these volumes.

This series is dedicated to Dr. Rimmer DeVries in recognition of his life’s pursuits and enduring legacy as a cultural leader, economist, visionary, and faithful follower of Christ who reflects well the Kuyperian vision of Christ’s lordship over all spheres of society.

Jordan J. Ballor

Melvin Flikkema

Grand Rapids, MI

August 2015

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

On August 5, 1905, the noted Dutch Calvinist leader Abraham Kuyper embarked upon a great trek around the Mediterranean Sea. By the time it was over, he had visited more than eighty sites and cities across (on our map) some twenty different countries. Back home for good in June 1906, he proceeded to write up his impressions and reflections on all he had seen. The result was equal to the journey: a massive two-volume work, beautifully bound, printed, and illustrated, and entitled Om de Oude Wereldzee—Around the Old World-Sea.¹

His trip fulfilled a lifetime dream; Kuyper could finally visit the lands of the Bible and Greco-Roman antiquity in whose literature and heritage he had been so thoroughly schooled. But he also came in touch for the first time with Muslims—in a wide variety of roles, settings, ethnicities, and ritual practices. The book before you collects the parts of Kuyper’s work that record these many encounters, as well as his reflections on Islam as a whole. It aims to show how an outstanding thinker from a century ago spoke to a now-pressing issue in our own age: how Christians ought to regard Islam and its many adherents in all their variety.

KUYPER’S TRIP

Kuyper brought to his observations the prejudices and preconceptions of his age, plus some fixed mental habits of his own. At the same time he was well prepared to engage his subjects. On the one hand, he was seeing things for the first time, and we can watch him pushing back against various stereotypes with eyewitness accounts and data collected in the field. On the other hand, he had behind him a sterling education and a lifetime of leadership in church, state, and academia. In all three domains, furthermore, he had worked simultaneously as an organizer, an activist, and a theoretician. In short, Kuyper was something of a Renaissance man, and on his trip he pressed his nose and eyes into everything: theology and political administration, family life and worship practices, universities and elementary schools, the arts and architecture. Religion ran through them all as a unifying thread. Thus Kuyper examines Islam in its universally accepted core teachings but also across its rival schools of legal interpretation, political contentions, mystical orders, rituals, as well as the course of historical development that lay behind them all. He probes this faith in its social relations, aesthetic principles, gender arrangements, and cultural patterns. He notices furthermore how these are refracted across different ethnic lines, including Turkish, Arab, Persian, and Berber. What we read in the pages below, in sum, amounts to a wide-ranging travelogue through the world of Islam as it existed a hundred years ago, told from a consciously Calvinist and sometimes unconsciously Northern European point of view.

To help understand Kuyper’s journey, the present volume includes two essays that detail different aspects of its context. Douglas Howard, an Ottoman specialist, surveys the political and economic conditions of the western Islamic world at the dawn of the twentieth century. George Harinck, an eminent Dutch scholar of Kuyper’s neo-Calvinist tradition, analyzes the major role that the colonial Dutch East Indies plays in Kuyper’s writing. A third essay, by Diane Obenchain, a scholar of religion in intercultural context, offers some suggestions for how Kuyper’s commentary might inform our approach to Christian-Muslim relations today. To this background we can add a little more detail about Kuyper’s personal situation as he undertook his trip.

Put briefly, this sixty-seven-year-old veteran of many battles in church and state had just endured one of the most grueling episodes of his life.² In June 1905 the Netherlands held its regular quadrennial elections, with Kuyper running for re-election as prime minister. He had seen success on major points of his educational agenda in his first term, and he dearly wanted a second to push through his program of social reforms. The campaign was one of the bitterest in Dutch history. Kuyper’s record and future intentions were savaged by the country’s classical liberals because of his educational reforms and by the upstart socialists over his suppression of a general strike two years before. Kuyper fought back hard but, in the end, did not prevail; though his party coalition won the popular vote, the vagaries of electoral districting left it short of a Parliamentary majority. Kuyper was out, and his opponents gleefully shouted the news in the streets just as he plunged into mourning in seclusion. He then violated protocol by leaving town before the next government was installed. If his country did not want him, he would visit more interesting places.

The first month of his tour, August 1905, served as a prelude spent taking the waters at the renowned health spa of Bad Kissingen in Germany.³ In September it was on to Munich, Innsbruck, and northern Italy for further recuperation. In mid-October Kuyper started his great circle proper, beginning in Romania. From there he moved into Russia. He hoped to visit the historic Orthodox center of Kiev but could get no further than the Crimea because of the 1905 Revolution that had erupted in the wake of Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan. Kuyper would give the latter considerable attention in his reflections. From Sebastopol he took ship for Constantinople, where the record in this volume begins. To date the rest of his itinerary briefly: Kuyper spent November 1905 in present-day Turkey, arrived in Beirut in early December, and passed the rest of that month exploring present-day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel-Palestine. January 1906 he traveled the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum and back. February and the first half of March he revisited classical antiquity in Greece and Italy. Islam came back into view when he alighted in Tunis on March 21, only there his plans were disrupted by an emergency call to return home, where his eldest daughter, Henriëtte, had taken ill. Once the crisis had passed, Kuyper returned to the Mediterranean by way of Spain, touring Morocco and Algeria from mid-April into May, followed by three weeks in southern Spain. The end of May found him in Portugal, but ten days of rising temperatures there proved enough. He returned to the Netherlands by way of Paris and Brussels and was back home in The Hague on June 16.

Kuyper would soon re-enter the political lists, but first he resumed his writing program. That included editing his daily newspaper and weekly church magazine, as he had done for thirty-five years; composing his travel narrative came on top of that. The project was nearly aborted when the cleaning lady tossed his materials into the trash, but he was happily able to rescue most of them from the city dump.⁴ The writing then proceeded in Kuyper’s usual methodical way. The first chapter was completed by the end of that November; volume II was finished nearly two years—and 1064 pages—later, on October 28, 1908. The next day he celebrated his 71st birthday. Meanwhile, in February 1908, his party enjoyed some political revenge in being returned to power, but for Kuyper the occasion was bittersweet. Younger men now ran things, and one of his acolytes—not he himself—was the new prime minister.⁵

RELIGIOUS THEMES

While his trip came at a crucial turn in Kuyper’s career, it also called up some of his deepest theological convictions. Anyone who has read much of Kuyper and then turns to these pages will experience enough jolts of recognition to start wondering whether Kuyper was seeing Islam clearly or projecting his own ideals upon it. The answer probably lies in the resonance between the two. That raises interesting implications. Given Kuyper’s conviction that Christianity was the one true religion, and Reformed Protestantism the best version of it, what does it mean that he found in Islam such strong resemblances to his own Calvinist program? He asserted repeatedly that Islam does not segment religion off as one sphere separate from the others; rather, the faith permeates everything—politics and culture, education and the arts, domestic life and public affairs—animated by a single driving conviction. Just that was his lifelong dream for Reformed Christianity. Kuyper envied Islam’s freedom from the Modernist erosions in European Christianity. He admired its ecumenical unity across a vast diversity of ethnic, geographical, and historical contexts. He could have been repeating the main points of his old campaign for Dutch church reform when he described Islam as a religion of freedom par excellence, dependent on the commitment of the faithful and unthrottled by bureaucracy. His loving description of Fez could stand in for his dream for Amsterdam—organic architecture and street design, its university lending a learned tone to the whole, a city rich in its own culture instead of imitating European chic. He might even have been describing his own younger self-conception when he ascribed Muhammad’s powerful leadership to a perfect conjuncture in him of religion, personality, and the historical moment under the command of an uncompromising monotheism. The latter most of all: Islam honored, said Kuyper, everywhere and at all times, the sovereignty of God. Kuyper’s next massive theological commentary, the three-volume Pro Rege (1911–12), began with a rueful calculation of how many times per day, per week, per year all Muslims offered up their praise and prayers to Allah, and how far short of that mark even the most devout Christians fell.⁶

Portrait of Kuyper as Prime Minister of the Netherlands, 1905

For all these similarities, Kuyper was not hesitant to elaborate upon the faults he sees in Islam. Its legalism does not satisfy the soul, and the mystical spirituality which fills that void is prone to ethical lapses and political fanaticism. It treats women badly and suffers from the scourge of polygamy. Its sterling scholarship had long ago stagnated. It had never gotten over its cult of jihad, understood as holy war against infidels and triggering assaults against Christians in the neighborhood. Without trying to determine how fair this list might be, we can make four observations about it. First, Kuyper never did capture the essence of jihad as primarily a battle or quest within the self to purge all that is not of God/Allah.⁷ Second, he periodically notes how the intrusion of European imperialism had exacerbated inter-religious conflict. Third, his picture of Islam is more nuanced in the chapters treating particular countries, where he is immersed in the local scene, than in the grand overview chapters which begin the two volumes of his original publication.⁸ Finally, the very presence of nuance and counterpoint in Kuyper’s presentation deserves emphasis. To him Islam has defects and virtues. It poses threats here and opportunities there. It brings to light both the merits and the defects of Christendom—and especially of Christians. It is, admirably, all of a piece in its core convictions but not all of a piece in its local articulations, and these invite—indeed, require—any outsiders, Christians included, to take historical, cultural, and political context seriously. That is a word to be heeded in our own tense and heated times.

CULTURE AND EMPIRES

Kuyper was traveling not just as a theologian and culture critic but as a prominent politician. He enjoyed the courtesies he received in that role at every port, especially in comparison to his recent defeat back home. He regularly notes the achievements or shortcomings of local governance, whether native or imperial. Native rule, he thought, too often suffered from lack of government initiative in promoting development. This opinion is at some variance with Kuyper’s reputation as an advocate of small government, but it reflects his recent responsibilities as prime minister at the end of a half century in which the Netherlands had taken remarkable strides in building up its technical, human, and social capital.⁹ The state had provided significant leadership in these endeavors, with highly beneficial consequences. Kuyper’s worries were about the government’s ongoing micromanagement of and ideological bias in these efforts, not the efforts themselves. For their part, the European empires in the Mediterranean, particularly the British in Egypt and the French in the Maghreb, had begun similar efforts to good effect. Kuyper’s pages show his fascination with the newly constructed railroads, telegraph lines, irrigation systems, and so on. But these achievements would be fleeting, he warned, unless they were deeply integrated into the culture of the country. He repeatedly faults the presumptions of technological determinism that he saw too many Europeans carrying into their colonies. He faulted even more their spiritual bearing, a combination of arrogance and emptiness. If Christianity were to gain traction in the rest of the world it would have to come by far more winsome witnesses than the agents of empire Europe had put in place. Kuyper joined the chorus that criticized infamous incidents like the Dinshawai episode in Egypt and wrong-headed systems like France’s civilizing mission in North Africa. But imperialism via peaceful penetration he found just as flawed, perhaps more so for all its quieter working.

In this connection some of the most striking prose in all of Kuyper’s writing occurs in his Conclusion to this work. Very ominously to our ears he takes up the notion of history being a contest for leadership between Semitic and Aryan peoples. Granted, this trope was common in his day; after Nazism it triggers alarm bells in our own. In precisely the opposite of the Nazi application, however, Kuyper calls for the productive interplay of the two legacies, not for the purgation of the one. Human life would reach its peak, he said, only by blending Semitic spirituality with Aryan intellect and technical craft. In that mix the Semitic—and that includes the Islamic—element would be the redeeming factor; the Nazi proposal to purge it instead spelled the formula for hell.

On this point and over his entire tour, religion for Kuyper remained the core of culture, and culture the heart of any people. He insisted that no lasting change occurred unless religion at least concurred. And even more often it was the lever and engine of change. That raises the question with which Kuyper opens his book: did Japan’s recent victory over Russia foretell a clash of civilizations between Asia and the West, and if so would that come to a religious war between Christianity and Islam? Kuyper’s ruminations sometimes seem to answer that question with a yes, sometimes with a no. His grand dialectics pitting polytheistic vs. monotheistic civilizations can seem strange to us and certainly underplay the importance of material forces in history. Even in the possible clash he envisioned, however, Islam was potentially an ally on the Christian side—indeed, the decisive weight, worth gold. In that light Kuyper urges that Christian policy throw off the mentality of the Crusades and instead respect the virtues of the Islamic world, virtues which the West tended to sorely lack. Each side should honor the other’s gifts and strengths and so come to a richer harmony and better balance, both between them and within themselves. But even if that happy outcome did not come about and Islamic militancy broke out against them, he adds, Christians should do everything in their power now to ensure that they could endure that assault with a clear conscience.

Some of Kuyper’s forebodings proved accurate. The dangerous diplomatic game that France and Germany were playing over Morocco in the very year that he visited there helped trigger the catastrophe of World War I. He sketches out in a few sentences the developing lines of force in the Pacific that would converge in World War II. He did not see the dire results that would be brought about in our day by the British encouragement of Wahhabism in his time. But for our world, chronically gripped by the fear, and occasionally assaulted by the reality, of Islamic militancy, Kuyper’s mode of grappling with the issue and his hopes for a workable conciliation between powerful religious forces offers a beacon for people who wish to take their faith very seriously and yet live at peace with their neighbors.

TECHNICAL NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume aims to be readily usable for present-day readers and therefore does not pretend to be a critical edition. Some of Kuyper’s baroque, contrapuntal style has been smoothed out. His extremely long paragraphs and many of his sentences have also been broken up to aid comprehension. Names and spellings of persons, places, and technical religious terms have also often been updated to reflect current usage.

This volume was translated by Jan van Vliet. Excerpts were selected, edited, and annotated by James D. Bratt with the assistance of Douglas Howard. Kate van Liere provided crucial help in annotating chapter 9. Jordan Ballor and Melvin Flikkema served as general editors, and Joel Wilcox did the copy editing. Funds for this and other translated volumes in the Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology have been generously provided by Rimmer de Vries, as well as other partners and supporters noted in the general editors’ introduction.

James D. Bratt

INTRODUCTION

THE WESTERN ISLAMIC WORLD AT THE DAWN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Third-class passengers on one of the Ottoman Empire’s new railroads, 1908

Just as Abraham Kuyper arrived at the Mediterranean shores in August 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth was being negotiated in New Hampshire, putting an end to the Russo-Japanese war; simultaneously in Saint Petersburg, Count Sergei Witte was announcing the Russian constitution. Inspired by these events, anti-government protests erupted in Iran while Kuyper was celebrating Christmas in the Holy Land. By the time Kuyper returned to the Netherlands in the summer of 1906, the first Russian state duma had met and the unrest in Iran had escalated into a full-blown constitutional revolution. As Kuyper set to writing, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, the British consul-general of Egypt, with whom Kuyper met on his visit there, resigned amid Egyptian demands for a constitution, and Young Turk revolutionaries forced restoration of the 1876 constitution in the Ottoman Empire, where Kuyper had spent several months. These extraordinary events, and the existence of broadly similar circumstances across northern Africa during Kuyper’s tour there, set the daily context of his great trek around the Mediterranean and the deeper context of his reflections and writing back at home. He had a lot of company in wondering whether a general uprising of the Islamic world was at hand, in acknowledging that European imperialism had a prime part in stoking it, and in fearing that the rebellion would take a religious form—Pan-Islam.

THE DESCENT OF COLONIALISM

The revolutionary changes of Kuyper’s time were set in motion by events stretching back nearly fifty years. Russia had overrun Iran’s Caucasus provinces and Central Asia, and Russian excavators had turned the port city of Baku, on the Caspian Sea, into the world’s first oil boom town in the 1850s. Meanwhile Britain purchased from Iran’s ruler, the shah, the rights to build telegraph lines there, the first of several such concessions arranged between that government and European powers. Britain and Russia competed for concessions in fishing, railroad building, banking, a lottery (later rescinded), and mineral rights. Iranians watched in consternation as the country’s economic wealth was sold off to Europeans while its national debt nonetheless remained insurmountably high. The most infamous concession was a grant for oil exploration in Iran, awarded in 1901 to William Knox D’Arcy, a British subject. However, at Kuyper’s time the 1890 concession for tobacco seemed the more onerous. It threatened thousands of Iranians’ livelihoods, and seemingly everyone joined a boycott and nationwide protests that finally got it canceled.

While aspects of this story were peculiar to Iran, they were not wholly unique. The country’s general financial and political weakness, the demands for limited monarchy and constitutionalism, and the inspiration taken from the victory of little Japan over powerful Russia galvanized the Iranian protesters, who finally brought down the shah in the revolution of 1906. Similar scenes played out across the whole western Islamic world at this time—even in its most powerful states, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt.

Once the Ottoman Empire became a debtor in European financial markets in the 1850s, its huge volume of international trade, seventy percent of which was with central and Western Europe, made the empire vulnerable to major market fluctuations. It had taken on its first foreign debts during the Crimean War (1853–56), using as collateral highly liquid assets such as the annual tribute from Egypt and the customs revenues of the major ports of Izmir and Salonika. Additional debt incurred thereafter was secured against general revenues. The crisis came when the Vienna stock market crashed in May 1873 and global wheat prices collapsed; the empire’s revenue contractors could not meet their obligations to the Ottoman government. At the same time the government had no access to further credit and no means to relieve the pressure when drought and a bad harvest followed the next year. One thing led to another. The Ottoman government defaulted on its foreign debt. Violence broke out between villagers and landlords in Bosnia in the summer of 1875. There was Serbian and Bulgarian meddling in Bosnia, violence against Muslims in Bulgaria, a massacre of Bulgarians by Ottoman forces, and a short but disastrous Ottoman war with Russia (1877–78) that led to shocking losses of imperial territory on both the western and eastern rims of the Black Sea. The international Congress of Berlin (1878) settled the war and began sorting out the massive problem of Ottoman debt. Agreement was reached in December 1881 to create an international consortium called the Ottoman Public Debt Administration.¹

Egypt, meanwhile, had its own separate arrangements with European financial powers. These dated from the same era, a boom period in Egypt, especially in cotton. Fueled by the search for alternate sources of raw cotton during the American Civil War, Egypt’s revenues from cotton exports at the end of the 1860s were ten times what they had been at the beginning of the decade. Formally still an Ottoman province paying an annual tribute to Istanbul, Egypt had been virtually autonomous for decades, under a hereditary viceroy called the khedive. Even the cotton boom, however, could not keep up with Egypt’s modernizing projects and Khedive Ismail’s extravagant lifestyle. The most ambitious project was the Suez Canal. Built under abysmal conditions by conscripted Egyptian labor and financed partly by the Egyptian government and partly by French and British investors, the canal opened to great fanfare in 1869. By 1875 Ismail had sold off Egypt’s 44-percent share and its 15 percent of eventual profits, yet even this was not enough to satisfy the country’s creditors. As in the Ottoman Empire a debt commission was established, a consortium run by European creditors; on-site comptrollers were appointed by Britain and France as well to supervise the budget. When Khedive Ismail challenged the commission, it deposed him in 1879. Three years later a revolt erupted, led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi with broad support among the army, urban notables, and agrarian villagers. Brought into the government as minister of war, Urabi strove for far-reaching reforms, including creation of a national assembly to manage Egypt’s finances and make political decisions. As conditions deteriorated, European creditors used the pretext of a riot in Alexandria (which Kuyper casts as an anti-Christian pogrom) to intervene in June 1882. Great Britain landed troops, seized the Suez Canal, and defeated Urabi’s resistance forces by the end of the summer. Thus began a British occupation of Egypt that was to last more than seventy years.²

Across North Africa similar circumstances prevailed.³ France had invaded and colonized Algiers as of 1830, and European rivalries spilled over into neighboring Morocco. In Tunis, the rulers (called beys) struggled to balance French, English, Italian, and Ottoman demands with their own wishes to develop the country’s communications and public works infrastructure. A constitution, the first in the Muslim world, was issued by the Bey of Tunis in 1860, who hoped to bring local notables into consensus on funding modernizing projects. Many opposed it, however, for the limits it placed on their own authority, and some also for religious reasons; it was withdrawn three years later when a rebellion brought Ottoman intervention. Instead the bey raised funds by issuing bonds and contracting loans with European financial institutions. Given local political restraints, it was impossible for him to collect adequate revenues to make the payments. With Tunis deep in arrears, in 1869 an international finance commission was created, dominated by representatives of British, French, and Italian creditors. French-Italian rivalries brought a French invasion and occupation of Tunis in 1881, support having been secured at the Berlin Congress as quid pro quo for the British occupation of Ottoman Cyprus and a free hand for Italy on the North African coast of Libya.

As Kuyper observed, these colonial arrangements did accomplish some good, and they were not a simple matter of European control and native subservience. In Egypt, even if higher-paid British officials made the decisions, the colonial civil service was substantially staffed by native Egyptians. In Turkey, the Public Debt Administration staff was larger than the Ottoman finance ministry, and many native Ottoman civil servants built their careers working in it. In every case the various debt commissions negotiated more favorable terms with lenders, enabling lower payments and extended credit. In Egypt, payments on the debt declined from 60 percent of annual revenues before 1882 to roughly 25 to 33 percent of the budget after the British occupation. The budget even showed a surplus.⁴ The conditions of village life improved under British administration. Forced labor and corporal punishment ended. Public education suffered because Lord Cromer did not wish to feed nationalism, yet newspapers were published and a healthy level of public discussion of issues prevailed, a noteworthy contrast to the situation in Turkey under Sultan Abdul Hamid’s paranoid censorship. All over the region, foreign investment poured into communications infrastructure, especially railroad building and port facilities. Kuyper enjoyed the effects of this (and gave ample space to describing it) during his travels, taking the train from the brand-new Haydar Pasha Station, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus across from the old city of Constantinople, to Konya in November 1905. A few weeks later he sailed between two of the empire’s great harbors, from Smyrna to Beirut, and then took the train from Beirut to Damascus via Baalbek. Several other rail lines operated too, as he noted, from Smyrna up the Meander Valley and from Istanbul to Ankara in Asia, and from Istanbul to Salonika and Manastir in Europe, as well as the famous Orient Express route through Sofia, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, and ultimately to Paris.

Yet there was a downside, as Kuyper observed as well. Development was uneven, since construction inevitably prioritized investor profits over national needs. National sovereignty was compromised. Railroads worked to commercialize agriculture by bringing produce and raw materials to market, but even though grain exports increased, production did not; Istanbul still imported flour. Manufacturing capacity did not improve either. The Public Debt Administration took about 13 percent of Ottoman revenues in 1903–04,⁵ including among other things the annual tribute from Bulgaria, the revenues of the province of Eastern Rumelia, the state monopolies of tobacco and salt, taxes on alcohol, and in certain provinces, taxes on fish and silk.

The circumstances exacerbated existing tensions over class, ethnicity, and religion. At the time of Kuyper’s visit to Algeria, Muslims outnumbered European settlers there eight to one but owned only 37 percent of the wealth. Muslims could not even leave their districts in Algeria without official permission.⁶ Although the cotton boom dramatically increased raw cotton exports from Turkey and Egypt to Europe, it did nothing to make local textile industries more competitive. Investors in international trade became rich, and landowners did too as rural real estate values rose, but the boom made a much more modest impression on the Egyptian and Turkish laborers who worked the fields and took the product to market. In Tunis, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire old treaty agreements known as the Capitulations gave European citizens limited extraterritoriality, which included exemption from local taxation and, in most places, the right to settle legal matters in their own courts under their own laws. These rights were extended to the European companies and merchants’ native clients too. In concrete terms this meant that a very large percentage of Ottoman, Egyptian, and Tunisian Christians—since that was who the Europeans preferred to work with—escaped the fiscal sovereignty of their own governments. Thus local Armenians, Greeks, and other Christian minorities became associated with the unfair advantages gained by European powers. There was great resentment, and there would be hell to pay.

As Kuyper observed, these changes exacted serious human costs as well. He related the Dinshawai incident, which took place in the Nile Delta as he was returning to Europe. British soldiers went hunting in that village’s pigeon coops, and were set upon by the angry villagers whose birds they killed. In the ensuing scuffle some villagers were shot and one was beaten to death, while one of the soldiers collapsed and died. Lord Cromer’s administration tried and hanged four of the villagers and flogged dozens of others.⁷

Tobacco offers another case in point.⁸ The Ottoman Public Debt Administration received a monopoly on tobacco production in the Empire, an enormous windfall in a society where virtually everybody smoked. Indeed, tobacco accounted for 35 percent of all Public Debt Administration revenues. This monopoly was subcontracted to a multinational corporation, called for short the Régie Company, in a profit-sharing arrangement with the Ottoman government. Within the Empire the Régie Company controlled all aspects of tobacco production, from planting to sale. It even outlawed growing tobacco for personal use. Ottoman merchants could, however, sell tobacco abroad—provided they had a license granted by the Régie Company—except to Egypt, where the British administration monopolized sale. The Régie Company destroyed local Ottoman producers, who either went out of business or moved to the Nile Delta. It also destroyed thousands of jobs, even if it also employed thousands of Ottoman laborers. Ninety percent of its workforce was local (management was mostly European). Many of these jobs were in its vast security apparatus. Predictably, tobacco prices rose, and predictably also, smuggling thrived. The Régie Company’s private militia did battle with smugglers and protesters in a brutal thirty-year civil war that took a toll of more than twenty thousand lives.

ISLAM AND OPPOSITION

Opposition to colonialism took a variety of forms in the lands Kuyper visited. The term Pan-Islam became popular in European languages in the 1880s after a French journalist used it in reporting on Muslim outrage at the French occupation of Tunis in 1881. It came to mean any anti-colonial political attitudes that were expressed in an overtly Islamic idiom. The term more or less matched the Ottoman Turkish concept of Muslim unity, a political movement of anti-colonialism whose program was rooted in ideals, however illusory, of the unity of world Muslims under a caliph.⁹ In fact, much more than Kuyper thought, the Pan-Islam movement was made up of groups and activists who expressed diverse ideological views, had divergent practical aims and methods, and held varying levels of commitment to specific religious aims.

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani is an example of an influential international figure often identified with Pan-Islam.¹⁰ An Iranian-born Shiite who advertised himself as being from Istanbul, and then as an Afghan Sunnite, Afghani became a kind of international free-agent provocateur. He acquired his distaste for imperialism, especially British, while in India at the time of the Sepoy Rebellion (1857–58). Denounced by conservative religious scholars in Istanbul for his rationalism, he spent most of the decade of the 1870s teaching and publishing in Egypt. His was a classic, progressive Islam, rooted in an understanding of the Qur’an as a dynamic text of positive spiritual and social change. He deeply influenced modernist thinkers—for example, through his student Muhammad Abduh, a future chief mufti in Egypt. Afghani used traditional Islamic philosophy to denounce fanaticism and tyranny and to support constitutional republicanism. For Afghani, Pan-Islamic did not mean reactionary or even conservative. He was deported by the British, made his way to India, and then went to Paris, where he put out an influential journal. He published (in the socialist paper L’Intransigent) a widely read analysis of the Sudanese Mahdi, the messianic anti-colonial leader of the war against Britain. Afghani’s essay seems to have been aimed at frightening the Europeans into conciliating the Muslim world through the threat of a mass Muslim uprising and thus made Pan-Islam a term pundits liked to conjure with.¹¹ After some time in Russia, Afghani was back in Iran agitating during the tobacco protests of 1890–92, only to be deported again. He spent the last several years of his life teaching in Istanbul, where he died in 1897, but not before instigating the assassination of the Shah of Iran.

A very different kind of figure shaping the Pan-Islam movement was the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. One of the few remaining independent Muslim sovereigns in the world, the Ottoman sultan revived and increasingly made use of the classical Islamic title of caliph. The Ottoman dynasty laid claim to the title through its conquest of Mecca and Medina centuries earlier. During his 32-year reign (1876–1909), Abdul Hamid II turned the caliphate into a source of pride and an important emblem of Muslim solidarity and political aspirations. Yet despite the projection of a sometimes stridently Islamic Ottoman identity, and Abdul Hamid’s deep personal piety, the Ottomans showed little official resistance to colonialism, merely quibbles about means, pace, and who would lead it. Far from contesting colonialism within their borders, the sultan and his government accepted the fundamental premise that global progress toward modernity was inevitable and necessary. They benefited from the international fiscal regime and tried to use it to advance their own vision of Ottoman development. As Abdul Hamid’s regime participated in the European order and adopted its modernizing assumptions, it wooed Germany, whose colonial interests lay outside Muslim lands, and it astutely promoted itself in Asia as the defender of Islam.¹²

Population data help explain why Abdul Hamid’s use of religion was appealing. While unfortunately we can know little for sure about the population of Egypt and the rest of North Africa at the time of Kuyper’s visit, the Ottoman Empire that Sultan Abdul Hamid ruled was a more Muslim place than it had ever been before. A census conducted there in autumn 1905 through spring 1906, while Kuyper was in the region, captured the demographic revolution that had taken place over the previous fifty years. The original Ottoman Empire had been created in the fourteenth century by Turkish conquests in the river valleys of the Aegean and Marmara coasts and in the southern Balkan peninsula, lands inhabited overwhelmingly by Orthodox Christian Greeks and Slavs. Surviving government real-estate surveys and poll-tax records from the time are not easy to interpret, but support the impression that despite considerable emigration and conversion to Islam the empire’s population remained probably half Christian long after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The conquest of the Galatian and Cappadocian plateau, Syria, and Egypt in 1514–17, and of Iraq and Hungary in 1526–41, brought not only large numbers of Muslims but also substantial new Christian populations—Armenians, Copts, and Arabic-speaking Orthodox and non-Chalcedonian groups—under the sultans’ rule. Only with the Russian wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did the religious balance in the Empire shift, due to the Ottomans’ territorial losses and massive cross-border migrations. As Russia conquered the Caucasus and the northern Black Sea, and independent nations were created in the Balkans, Muslim refugees poured into the empire from the Crimea, Ukraine, and the Caucasus—so many that the Ottoman government created a Department of Tribes and Refugees, the first of its kind in the world, to cope with the flood. In the human cataclysm of the 1870s, half the Muslim population of Bulgaria and thirty percent of the Muslims of Bosnia either perished, were expelled, or fled to Turkey.

As a result, Ottoman census figures reveal that by Kuyper’s time nearly three-fourths (74 percent) of the Ottoman population were now Muslims. Of the non-Muslim Ottoman population just over half (13.5 percent of the total) was Greek Orthodox and 5 percent Armenian; about 3.6 percent of the population was Bulgarian Orthodox, and about 1.2 percent was Jewish.¹³ The census did not distinguish between kinds of Muslims, whether Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Albanians, or others, which serves as a reminder that the census numbers conceal aspects of the Ottoman population as much as they reveal. Ottoman Muslims were quite diverse, and not just ethnically. Significant portions of the Muslim population rejected an overtly Islamic identity in favor of a more secularized sense of self, and thought of themselves as a Muslim community living within a multi-faceted Ottoman mosaic. When clandestine opposition groups formed against Abdul Hamid’s regime, they included Muslims and Christians of many different perspectives: not just conservatives, but also liberals, Alevis, Masons, atheists, socialists, anarchists, and more. When Abdul Hamid’s repression made it difficult to express dissatisfaction within the Ottoman Empire, opposition groups organized and published outside its borders—in Paris and Geneva, and in British-occupied Cairo and Alexandria. By the mid-1890s, at the time of the horrific pogroms against Ottoman Armenians, a loose organization eventually called the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) was functioning as an umbrella under which the disparate elements of the Ottoman opposition could talk to each other. The collective name Young Turks was used for the movement in European circles, but the various groups had little in common except wanting to overthrow Abdul Hamid. A general congress of the Ottoman opposition in Paris in 1902 ended in failure and infighting among the factions.

The Japanese military victory over Russia and the Russian revolution of 1905 roused the Committee of Union and Progress from its slumbers and invigorated opponents of the Ottoman regime just as they had galvanized the opposition in Iran. A seemingly invincible European colonial power whose armies had advanced across Eurasia, crushed the independence of venerable old Muslim dynasties, and sent hundreds of thousands of Muslims into exile, had been defeated by allegedly backward Asiatics. Just as importantly, Japan was Asia’s only power with a constitution currently in force—the Meiji Constitution of 1890—while Russia was Europe’s only non-constitutional power.¹⁴ Revolutionary groups and secret societies began to organize, including inside the Ottoman military. In the overheated circumstances the rumor spread via press outlets in the Muslim parts of the Russian Empire that the Japanese emperor had converted to Islam. Abdullah Djevdet, a radical secularist and one of the founding figures of the Committee of Union and Progress, opined that perhaps the emperor should be made caliph. Others reminded him that the caliph should certainly be a Turk, while Arabs had their own view about who might rightfully claim the caliphate.¹⁵ Kuyper reported all this; bizarre as the rumors strike us in retrospect, they were there to be heard and pondered.

CONCLUSION

As Kuyper sat to pen his reflections, revolution seemed to have gripped the Muslim world. The parliamentary regimes created by the revolutions enjoyed broad support even if people differed about ultimate aims. Though it never came close to being a well-organized or unified force, Pan-Islam was one dimension of the dissident activity that brought down the ancien régime. Perhaps