India, Empire and the First World War - II

Continued from the post above

It isn’t quite possible to capture an hour’s lecture into a coherent report. What follows are some nuggets gleaned from his talk.  

According to Akbar, the birth of the modern world lies in the collapse of two major Muslim empires – the Ottoman and the Mughal. Both the empires started in the 13th century and ended the 19th century (although the Ottoman ended after World War I, Akbar termed the gap of 60-odd years between the end of the Mughal and the Ottoman Empires minor, meriting no more than three paragraphs in any conventional history book).

The World Wars were so termed not because the worlds were at war, but because these were wars for the control of the worlds, he said.  “At the end of the First World War, Muslims across the world were either defeated or colonized.”

However, unlike the Western paradigm of empires (as laid down by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire) which evolved in three stages – rise, decline and fall, the Islamic paradigm envisaged a fourth stage – renewal.

So, post-World War I, when there were no Islamic empires left in the world, the struggle continued within Islam for renewal. Hitherto, Muslims had never equated a change in ruler to a threat to faith. This happened only after World War I when the holy centres of Islam – Mecca and Medina – came under British control.   

There weren’t just two World Wars, there were, in fact, four – the first two, then the Cold War, which ended in with the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and then the War on Terrorism, which will end with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2015.

For the radical Muslims, within a period of a century – from 1914 to 2014 – Islam had successfully defeated three of the biggest powers that the world had ever seen – the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Akbar said it’d probably take a century more for the complexities in the Islamic world to work out. If the First World War ended two of the last Islamic Empires – the Ottoman and the Mughal, it also gave birth to two modern models of renewal – again in Kamal Ataturk’s Turkey and Gandhi’s India.

Congress view of Khilafat

Muslims had several options for renewal and among these were Gandhian nonviolence, the Intifada movement of insurrection, Pan Arab nationalism (socialism and Arab nationalism, which reduced itself to Naseerism),

The Khilafat movement that Gandhi launched was the first jihad where the leadership of the movement was in the hands of a non-Muslim. 

In Shades of Sword, Akbar has termed it the peaceful jihad. The unity that Gandhi forged during Khilafat was lost forever when he abruptly withdrew the movement. The Muslims of the subcontinent never went back to Gandhi.

Muslim view of Khilafat

In 1939 Jinnah changed the story – from the future of Muslims in the subcontinent, it became the story of the future of Islam. Pakistan was formed on the belief that religion could be the basis of nationhood. It failed.

India followed the path of modernism which involved following four broad principles – democracy, secularism, gender equality and economic equality. 

According to Akbar, Pakistan and China are not modern societies because they don’t fulfil these four prerequisites of modern statehood.

A video of his talks is going to be made available on Munk Centre's website.

Visuals: http://www.thehistory-project.org/book/index.html

Are we more peaceable?

I’m preparing for my Canadian citizenship test, and one of the important sections in the book Discover Canada is the important role that Canada and Canadians played in World War I. Over 600,000 Canadians served in the war, most of them as volunteers; 66,000 died. Canadian Corps captured Vimy Ridge in 1917. One Canadian officer said, “It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade…in those minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation.” April 9 is celebrated as Vimy Day.

In the past, I have found it paradoxical that for a country that has essentially been a pacifist for most of its history, and one that invented the concept of peacekeeping, Canada is richly proud of its military engagements.

In my 2011 column in the Canadian Immigrant, I wrote: “Like most sensible people, I’m opposed to war and to military intervention by one state or many states into another. Personally and ideologically I find Canada’s presence in Afghanistan unjustifiable. Many Canadians share this view. However, even when a majority remain opposed to Canadian presence in Afghanistan, an equal number or more love and respect the armed forces and especially those who are killed while serving the country.”

A senior journalist (Paul Hambleton) had explained about the Canadian tradition to recognise and respect the sacrifices of the armed forces – right from the World War I veterans to the young soldiers in Afghanistan. This veneration overrode ideological opposition to war and militarism. This was an issue of national consciousness and identity.

This year, the world will observe the centenary of World War I – the Great War that killed over nine million people, and (till WWII) was one of the worst wars in recorded human history.

I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature why violence has declined. It argues that despite the death, destruction and savagery that human beings inflicted upon each other in the 20th century, there has actually been a steady decline in war and violence. The contention is seemingly untenable, but Pinker’s marshalling of historical facts and his interpretation make for a compelling read.

He notes, “…in the West today public places are no longer named after military victories. Our war memorials depict not proud commanders on horseback but weeping mothers, weary soldiers, or exhaustive list of names of the dead. Military men are inconspicuous in public life, with drab uniforms and a little prestige among the hoi polloi. In London’s Trafalgar Square, the public across from the big lions and Nelson’s column was recently topped with a sculpture that is about as far from military iconography as one can imagine: a nude, pregnant artist who had been born without arms and legs. The World War I battlefield in Ypres, Belgium, inspiration for the poems ‘In Flanders Fields’ and the poppies worn in Commonwealth countries on November 11, has just sprouted a memorial to the thousand soldiers who were shot in that war for desertion – men who at the time were despised as contemptible cowards…Conspicuous pacifism is especially striking in Germany, a nation that was once so connected to martial values that the words Teutonic and Prussian became synonyms for rigid militarism…yet today German culture remains racked with soul-searching over its role in the world wars and permeated with revulsion against anything that smacks of military force.”

An interesting point of view was presented by Historian Niall Fergusson in his 1999 book The Pity of War. He termed World War I as the “greatest error of modern history,” and argued that had Britain not entered World War I, the course of history would’ve been very different. Germany would’ve taken control of Europe, “and Continental Europe could…have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today – but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars.”

For good measure, he adds, “with the Kaiser triumphant, Adolf Hitler could have eked out his life as a mediocre postcard painter . . . in a German-dominated Central Europe about which he could have found little to complain. And Lenin could have carried on his splenetic scribbling in Zurich, forever waiting for capitalism to collapse -- and forever disappointed.”

(quotes from The Pity of War taken from the book's review in The New York Times)

For a previous post on Niall Fergusson, click here: History as Opinion

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Image: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152817425065663&set=a.186987155662.160435.177183000662&type=1&theater