AT LOWOOD SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, in the reign of King George III of England, an ill used, orphaned teacher called Jane Eyre lies abed thinking about her future.
‘I have served here eight years; now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so much of my own will? Is not the thing feasible? Yes—yes—the end is not so difficult; if only I had brain active enough to ferret out the means of attaining it.’
I sat up in bed by way of arousing this sad brain: it was a chilly night; I covered my shoulders with a shawl, and then I proceeded to think again with all my might.
‘What do I want? A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new circumstances … How do people do to get a new place? They apply to friends, I suppose: I have no friends. There are many others who have no friends, who must look for themselves and be their own helpers; and what is their resource?’
I could not tell: nothing answered me; I then ordered my brain to find a response, and quickly … as I lay down it came quietly and naturally to my mind:- ‘Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the — shire Herald.’
‘How? I know nothing about advertising.’ Replies rose smooth and prompt now:-
‘You must inclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a cover directed to the Editor of the Herald; you must put it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed to J. E. at the post-office there: you can go and inquire in about a week after you send the letter, if any are come, and act accordingly.’
This sleepless hour is the corner that Jane Eyre turns in order to fall into the arms of Mr Rochester, for her decision to place an advertisement in the county newspaper will lead to her moving many miles from Lowood and taking up a new position, as governess of Mr Rochester’s ward at Thornfield Hall. The passage here determines the path that a much loved novel will follow, and yet it is possible to think of it in a bigger, socially more significant way: as an avenue into a new world.
Jane’s urges need no introduction: variety and movement are what she seeks, and the education she has received is her means of achieving it, for the instruction she has received at one of a burgeoning number of English girls’ schools has not only lent purpose to an excellent mind, but also raised her above any sense of inadequacy. Jane is independent of spirit and this will allow her to be independent of means. Jane Eyre is modern.
Her modernity extends to the rational way she sees the world and her place in it. Jane is a Christian but in her hour of indecision she does not finger a wooden cross or leverage the Gospels—far less seek signs in the stars. Faith guides and gives her strength in the moral and emotional crises of her life; however, in times of functional dilemma—when she is in search of the ‘clear practical form’ that will set her fluttering brain to rest—Jane interrogates not God but Jane.
And yet, for Jane to see her scheme to its conclusion, she needs the help of certain features of modern England.
Without the provincial newspaper, the post office and finally, when it comes to making the journey to Thornfield Hall, a wheeled conveyance trundling along one of the turnpike roads, safe enough for a woman to take on her own, she will be able to do nothing.
Perhaps more important than any of these things, Jane will need society to agree that she is sovereign over her own destiny—an unmarried woman free to climb aboard a post-chaise and go wherever she pleases, at no risk to her reputation.
Now I want to take up this picture of Georgian England and put it into a quite different setting. Imagine that the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte’s novel has been transposed to a non-European situation. By the standards of nineteenth-century “globalisation this new environment is not very distant—to get there merely involves crossing the Mediterranean. There one meets the close sibling of the Judaeo-Christian world inhabited by Jane, a civilisation built on the third and most recent of the Hebraic monotheisms and influenced by Greek patterns of thought.
This is the civilisation of Islam. How would this civilisation have dealt with Jane Eyre and the vistas of personal fulfilment preventing her from closing her eyes at night? Would it approve or wrinkle its nose? Would Islam ‘get’ Jane Eyre?
Were I able to answer this question in the affirmative, it is likely that you would not be holding this book, or you would be holding a very different book. Islamic civilisation in the first decades of the nineteenth century would neither have appreciated nor understood Jane Eyre, because it hadn’t the wherewithal to do so.
First consider the vehicle by which Muslim audiences would have met her: the printed book. This would have been a non-starter at the time in which Jane Eyre is set, because almost four centuries after Gutenberg revolutionised intellectual and religious life in Europe with the invention of movable type, the printing press continued to be regarded by Islam as an unwelcome and alien innovation, and had not been admitted to general use. Then there was the matter of translating Bronte’s prose into the local languages. The number of Turkish, Arabic and Persian speakers who knew good English was minuscule and there was no market in the Middle East for translated works from abroad.
Even if these constraints had been somehow overcome, and the trusty copyists were induced to inscribe large quantities of a translated Jane Eyre, audiences would have remained tiny for another reason. The latest scholarship puts the literacy rate in Turkey, Egypt and Iran—the three most important intellectual and political points in the region—at roughly 3 per cent at the turn of the nineteenth century, compared to more than 68 per cent for men and 43 per cent for women in England. In Amsterdam, the world’s capital of literacy at the time, the figures were 85 per cent and 64 per cent respectively. There can be no reading public when no one can read.
Still, ploughing doggedly on, supposing we could wave aside these considerations and imagine that through public storytellers large numbers of Muslims were exposed to the life and times of Jane Eyre, what would their reaction have been?
The notion of newspapers and a postal service would have caused bemusement in lands where neither existed, no less than the fantasy of wheeled traffic between towns. Then there was the moral Pandora’s box opened by Jane’s behaviour. It was scandalous that a heroine should gad about the country without a chaperone, fall in love with one man, attract the attentions of another—and after this wanton display be presented by the author as a model of virtue.
The very systems of society were completely different in Jane’s England: where was the harem, the protected, female-only sanctum within the family, and why did Mr Rochester not have slaves? And don’t even mention Mr Rochester’s dissipated female guests at Thornfield Hall, playing airs on the fortepiano and riding horses and showing off their bosom and long flowing hair.
Perhaps the kindest thing that could have been said about the plot of Jane Eyre is that it illustrated the superiority of Muslim doctrine. Under Muslim law Mr Rochester would have been able to take Jane as his second wife (being permitted a maximum of four) and he would have been able to save what remained of her virtue without all that nonsense about the madwoman in the attic.
In short, from the perspective of a Muslim at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the character of Jane Eyre was a rank impossibility accessible to almost no one and the story of her life so preposterous as to approach derangement.
*
With the invention of the steamship, possible destinations multiplied in number. Getting around became easier.
Following that, with railways, travel became easier still. In the same way that travel was accelerated through this means, so was communication, by means of the telegraph.
News that would have taken a year to arrive from a distant land now took an hour. The world was poured into a different mould.
In this paragraph from 1891, the Turkish woman of letters Fatma Aliye conveyed the immensity of the technological changes that had been agitating and inspiring the Ottoman Empire over the preceding decades. Her last sentence is deliciously unresolved: the meaning of life and the onus of interpreting it trickle from the certain past to a future that is soft and impressionable. It’s all so different from Aliye’s rigid and compartmentalised childhood in the 1860s, with the secluded and rarefied world inhabited by Aliye—daughter of a renowned Ottoman grandee—seemingly designed to maintain distinctions.
Aliye went into purdah aged fifteen, was married off four years later and learned French in secret in order not to outrage her mother, for whom the infidel tongue was a flag of apostasy. But no one—not even the frowning and despotic sultan, Abdulhamid II—could stop modernity, and the effect of the “inventions that were seeping into the empire was to increase the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual.
What Aliye wrote in seclusion the newly embraced institution of the press enabled her to diffuse among a rapidly expanding audience of literate Ottomans that was coming into existence thanks to the spread of education. Fatma Aliye’s was a distinctive voice in the young universe of newspapers in Turkish; she wrote on girls’ education and kicked against the stock male denigration of women. Her early literary output appeared under pseudonyms such as ‘a woman’, and when she eventually summoned the courage to publish novels under her own name, cynics of both sexes attributed them to her father or her brother.
The Bronte sisters had also published under pseudonyms—male-sounding ones in their case—because they had doubted whether anyone would want to read the work of unknown young women from Yorkshire. Strange to say, similar questions concerning the capacity of women would shortly be raised half a world away in Istanbul, where as early as 1869 a contributor to one of the new women’s magazines, the weekly Terakki-i-Muhadderat (‘Muslim Women’s Progress’), declared irately, ‘men were not made to serve women any more than women were made to be kept by men … are we not capable of gaining knowledge and dexterity? What is the difference between our legs, eyes and brains—and theirs? Are we not humans? Is it only our different sex that has condemned us to this condition? No one possessed of common sense accepts this.’
As the Ottoman Empire modernised over the nineteenth century the world view of a growing number of assertive Turkish women grew substantially closer to that of their Western counterparts—to the point where the story of a young woman like Jane Eyre, taking decisions for herself, falling in love, making her living, making her way, wasn’t so outlandish after all.
One of the things that make the life of Fatma Aliye so poignant is the productive relationship she had with the changing world around her. She was a true modern, formed by modernisation and forming it back again; and she advanced without fear into the new and dangerous fields of women’s rights and public opinion.
Among her best-known works is a novel comprising letters by upper-class women speaking of their lives and their loves, a storyline that would have been nonsensical without an Ottoman postal service to draw on—this had been established in 1840. Aliye wrote about women who discussed philosophy with strange men aboard the steamships that plied the Bosporus dividing historic Istanbul from Asia; this service that had been introduced to great acclaim in 1854.
Fatma Aliye assumed the same philanthropic functions as many prominent women in the West, setting up a charity to help the families of soldiers who had fallen in the 1897 war between Turkey and Greece. Her works were translated into French and Arabic, and she was honoured with inclusion in the Women’s Library of the World’s Fair, in Chicago, in 1893.
She spent her declining years pursuing her errant younger daughter Zubeyda, who had to her mother’s chagrin converted to Catholicism and taken holy orders at Notre-Dame de Paris. In this lugubrious quest Aliye travelled around Europe—a Muslim woman alone (or with another of her daughters) in an infidel land. For a woman of her background to exercise this degree of autonomy would have been unthinkable in her youth. To travel to France and there hold intercourse with the natives would have been considered defiling of her morals, and she would have been shunned on her return. No longer.
What are we to make of the statement by Zubeyda that her mother had been ‘haunted’ by the question of the ‘equality of the sexes in society and the struggle to achieve it’? In the Turkey of Fatma Aliye’s childhood there had been no question of ‘equality of the sexes’. There had been no ‘struggle’. Now there were both.
We do not have to rely on a novel like Jane Eyre to have an idea of the strides that were made by women in the Western world in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Many history books and biographies have been written about women educating themselves and entering the workplace while a constellation of laws and attitudes changed around them. On the other hand, the story of their later Muslim counterparts—the story of Fatma Aliye, so to speak—is much less known in the West, and this cannot simply be ascribed to the natural inclination of people to interest themselves in stories close to home. Nor does this blind spot in the Western historical understanding relate solely to Muslim women; the West has traditionally refused to see in any aspect of Muslim culture and life the possibility—indeed, the inevitability—of regeneration and modernity. This black spot has existed for hundreds of years, but recently it has got bigger and darker.
It dissuades us from trying to understand the past, encouraging us, instead, to go off on tangents, enter blind alleys and credit the claims of demagogues and simplifiers. It is an impediment to a balanced and coherent vision of world history.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take “insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God—just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex—for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to “Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Closer to home it suffices to open our eyes to see millions of people of Muslim faith or origin in the Western world who lead lives that have successfully incorporated the modern values of tolerance, empiricism and the internalisation or dilution of faith. They are not being paid much attention—and why should they be? They do not behead, rampage or try to convert their non-Muslim neighbours. But they are all around us, inhabiting the modern world and regarding themselves as Muslim.
How they arrived at this accommodation is the story I am going to tell, through the lives and adventures of the Muslim pioneers we never thought existed. My intention is to demonstrate that non-Muslims and even some Muslims who urge an Enlightenment on Islam are opening the door on a horse that bolted long ago. Through the characters in this book we will see that for the past two centuries Islam has been going through a pained yet exhilarating transformation—a Reformation, an Enlightenment and an Industrial Revolution all at once. The experience of these places has been one of relentless yet vitalising alteration—of reforms, reactions, innovations, discoveries and betrayals.
But how did we in the West miss all the changes taking place in the Middle East at a time when the region was becoming a more popular destination for travellers, from Herman Melville, who visited Jerusalem in 1857—finding arid rocks’ fixing on him ‘a cold grey eye’—to Queen Victoria’s twenty-year-old son Bertie (the future Edward VII), who toured the Holy Land in 1862 and came alive only when shooting quail on Mount Carmel? The answer is that few Westerners came to the East with very open minds, whoever they were. It is amazing how seldom one comes across a convincing nineteenth-century acknowledgement of the tense, volatile and ultimately highly breakable societies that were forming across the Middle East, or the possibility that their inhabitants constituted a dynamic, even revolutionary force. For those whose idea of progress was so narrow as to consist only of what they themselves had experienced, and who were disposed to see repose and decay in unfamiliar societies, repose and decay was indeed what they saw.
Excerpt From the Introduction of The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason - 1798 to Modern Times by Christopher de Bellaigue, 2017
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