Modern Intellectual History, 3, 3 (2006), pp. 443–472 C© 2006 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S1479244306000874 Printed in the United Kingdom

scientism and its discontents:the indo-muslim “fascism” ofinayatullah khan al-mashriqi*

markus daechselSchool of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh

This essay offers a detailed reconstruction of the thought of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, a camp-follower of fascism in inter-war India who sought to reformulateIslam as a “Religion of Science” according to the precepts of Darwinian evolutionism.Mashriqi has so far been neglected because his political impact was only short-termand did not contribute to the larger story of decolonization in India and Pakistan.But far from being marginal, Mashriqi’s philosophical ruminations actually providea window for a much-needed re-evaluation of the meaning of colonial modernity.While there was much in Mashriqi’s writing that conforms to the usual picture of anti-colonial nation-building—his obsession with the truth of science, for instance, and hisemphasis on disciplinary political methodologies—the by now standardized critiqueof such features in the “postcolonial” literature no longer suffices. Behind a facade ofcontinuities with nineteenth-century “Enlightenment” traditions stood a much darkervision of modernity that no longer had any recourse to the certainties of a grandnarrative of modernization. Instead, it was a vision that fluctuated between mysticalexuberance and deep pessimism. The only sense of certainty was provided by a radicalnotion of emotional authenticity and a related belief in quasi-religious leadershipfigures. The larger conclusion to be drawn from the dualistic and contradictory structureof Mashriqi’s “fascism” is that the intellectual history of inter-war South Asia needs tobe given relative autonomy from the standard nationalism–modernization narrative,for rather than the continuation of an earlier modernity, it should be interpreted asthe starting point of a new and much darker formation that arguably continues intothe present.

Inayatullah Khan (1888–1963), “al-Mashriqi”, was a camp-follower ofEuropean fascism who stood out from similarly inclined South Asians by virtueof his serious ideological engagement. He was most famous for the Muslimparamilitary movement he created in direct correspondence, or rather (as he

* I am deeply grateful to the critical input of Peter Hartung, Francis Robinson, RajarshiDasgupta and the members of the seminar at CSSSC (Kolkata); to the three anonymousreaders whose comments were most helpful in revising an earlier draft; and most of allto the steady encouragement and critical prodding of Nick Phillipson without whom thisarticle would have probably never been finished.

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would put it with his characteristic sense of self-importance) in anticipation,of the Nazis. But there was more to his “fascism”1 than uniformed displaysand spectacular militarism—features that were actually rather common in thepolitical culture of the late colonial period. Mashriqi also produced a corpus ofwritings2 in which he laid out a deeply troubled Weltanschauung that combinedelements of Darwinian evolutionary “science” with a cult of the will to power. Hiscentral concern was to reinterpret Islam in such a way that it became acceptable tothe likes of Adolf Hitler, from whom, incidentally, he claimed to have personallyreceived an endorsement of his most important book.3 Although Mashriqi’scontemporaries noted his “fascism” with fascination—and in the case of thecolonial government and some Islamic scholars with considerable disquiet—thisfame did not last.4 Mashriqi’s political movement collapsed with the demise of

1 I use the term in inverted commas to bypass an ultimately sterile debate amongst scholarsof European fascism about whether fascism can indeed exist in the non-West. The oftenill-informed and tautological consensus appears to be that it cannot. An exception isRoger Eatwell, “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism”, Journal of Theoretical Politics 4(1992), 161–94. Arguing for an “Italy only” approach is Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of FascistIdeology—from Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1994). Both Roger Griffin (The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), 157)and Stanley Payne (A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (London: UCL Press, 1995) 353) includeNazism but are categorical about the impossibility of “proper” fascism in the non-West.Michael Mann (Fascists (Cambridge: CUP 2005), 371–4) keeps this possibility theoreticallyopen (it appears possible from his course of argument, but only in order not to disallowthe denunciatory use of “Islamo-Fascism” for the enemies of the US and Israel) but endsup dismissing the fascist character of all potential existing contenders.

2 The following items have been extensively used in this article: al-Tazkirah, his magnumopus, originally published in Amritsar in 1924; here quoted from the first two of thethree-volume 12th edition of Lahore, 1980, containing a reprint of the original as well assubstantial explanatory material—henceforth TK I and TK II; his main political expositionQaul-e Fais.al (Lahore: al-Tuzkiva Publ. 1935)—henceforth QF; articles in his journal al-Is. lah. , collected in Maqalat (Lahore 1938)—henceforth M; finally one of his late works inEnglish, Human Problem—A Message to the Knowers of Nature (1952), henceforth HP. Alltranslations into English, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

3 See note 29 below for references.

4 The colonial government compiled numerous files about his activities amongst whichthe following are useful for quick reference. NAI: Files (Home Political) 92/39; 4/1/40;28/5/46. OIOC: L/P&J/5 series, Fortnightly Reports for Punjab and U.P., 1938–1944. Clericalresponses to Mashriqi are included in NAI, File (Home Political) 4/1/40; also in MartinRiexinger, Sanaullah Amritsari (1868–1948) und die Ahl-i-Hadis im Punjab unter BritischerHerrschaft (Wurzburg: Ergon, 2005), 315–18. The two pioneers of the study of modernIslam in South Asia, W. C. Smith and J. M. S. Baljon, both dedicated a substantial partof their work to Mashriqi and placed him on a par with figures that have stood the testof time much better. See W. C. Smith, Modern Islam in India (London: Gollancz, 1944)235–45; J. M. S. Baljon, Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation (Leiden: Brill 1961), 10–13,

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its foreign role models; after the 1950s virtually nobody amongst historians hasseen a need to take the man or his thought very seriously.5 This essay is meant todemonstrate that this is an oversight far more important than the simple neglect ofa figure that on moral terms perhaps deserves to remain in the dustbin of history.

Mashriqi’s philosophy—if one can call it that—requires attention from theintellectual historian because it opens up new questions about the relationshipbetween metropolitan and colonial discourses of modernity that have not beenseriously explored. The colonial and postcolonial perspective on the first half ofthe twentieth century has so far precluded a serious engagement with fascism inthe non-West. The story of how the people of South Asia managed to throw offforeign rule and how they struggled to create a modernity of their own designdoes not permit the same sense of fundamental unease that the experience ofAuschwitz and the Second World War brought for many Europeans. The issuehere is not so much that the South Asian literature lacks a critical engagementwith modernity as such—it most certainly does not6—but that it assumes without

37, 52, 55, 73, 76–7, 85, 91–2, 97, 100–4. Baljon also exchanged letters with Mashriqi. Foranother excellent sketch of Mashriqi’s movement written by one of his contemporaries seePhillips Talbot, “The Khaksar Movement”, Indian Journal of Social Work 2, 2 (Sept. 1941),185–202.

5 Most standard histories of twentieth-century Indian history mention Mashriqi only inpassing or not at all. More problematically, there is also no reference to him in thestandard history of modern Islam in South Asia: Aziz Ahmad, Islamic Modernism in Indiaand Pakistan 1857–1964 (London: OUP, 1967). Leaving aside a number of other minorpersonalities such as Ghulam Jilani Barq and Khalifa Abd al-Hakim (ibid., 205–7, 233–7),Ahmad dedicates full chapters to both Abu’l Kalam Azad (chap. 9) and G. A. Parvez(chap. 13). Both were creative and important thinkers, but neither was any more relevantthan Mashriqi in terms of long-term intellectual legacy or political influence. The twomost extensive studies on Mashriqi—both primarily concerned with his politics—areAmalendu De, The History of the Khaksars in India, 2 vols. (Kolkata: Parul Prakashani,2006), which is an English translation and revision of his much earlier work in Bengali;and the more recent Muhammad Aslam Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi—A PoliticalBiography (Karachi: OUP, 2000) These aside there are some sporadic articles, for instanceIftikhar Malik, “Regionalism and Personality Cult? Allama Mashriqi and the Tehreek-i-Khaksar in pre-1947 Punjab”, in I. Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, eds., Region and Partition—Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Karachi: OUP, 1999), 42–9; as well asa number of writings in Urdu and English produced by the remnants of his long-defunctmovement—for a bibliography see their website at http://www.allamamashriqi.info.Finally there is a Magister Artium dissertation on Mashriqi by Jamal Malik, Universityof Bonn, which I have not seen for this article, but some of whose content was verballycommunicated to me by its author.

6 The literature is too substantial to provide more than a few classic works here: AshisNandy, The Intimate Enemy (Delhi: OUP, 1983); the ongoing Subaltern Studies series (Delhi:OUP, 1982); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalism in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse(London: ZED, 1986); The Nation and its Fragments (Delhi: OUP, 1993); Gauri Visvanathan,

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much questioning that this modernity is essentially a continuation of what is oftencalled “Enlightenment rationality”. There exists an unbroken narrative that leadsfrom the foundation of the colonial regime to the catch-up modernization ofthe immediate postcolonial era; in personal terms, from Macaulay to Nehru,or—in the Muslim Pakistani case—from the liberal reformist Sir Sayyid AhmadKhan to the benevolent dictatorship of General Ayub Khan. In consequence,political and intellectual critiques of coloniality and postcoloniality typically drawfrom a body of theories reliant on nineteenth-century paradigms: Foucaldiangovernmentality, Marxian critiques of capitalist oppression or a Saidian playwith cultural imperialism and subalternity. What the study of a person likeMashriqi can demonstrate is that this type of modernity—with its belief in state,science, discipline and bourgeois society—was not the only one that counts inthe late colonial context. From the inter-war period onwards, there was anothermodernity, which operated with radical ideas of auto-poetic selfhood and afundamental unease about the certainties of Enlightenment progress.

Like other fascists, Mashriqi was not entirely at home in either form ofmodernity. In fact, he frantically tried to reconcile the older Enlightenment legacywith the new modernity of self-expression through a cult of political activism. Themain purpose of this essay is to demonstrate—by means of a reconstruction of thedifferent and ultimately fundamentally contradictory strands in his thinking—that “dark” modernity had cast a shadow even over the most determined attemptsto appropriate “light” modernity in the context of anti-colonial nation-building.The exposition falls into four sections: the first offers an overview of Mashriqi’slife and the political and intellectual context of his time; the second contains areconstruction of his main idea of Islam as a “religion of science”; the thirdidentifies a hidden dualism and a mystical methodology in Mashriqi’s self-acclaimed belief in science; the fourth, finally, argues that behind Mashriqi’sfascism stood a world view of radical self-expression that had in fact brokenall links to the Enlightenment project of national self-strengthening, which sodominated the surface of Mashriqi’s thought.

hitler’s indo-muslim schoolmaster

Inayatullah Khan was born in 1888 near Amritsar, a trading city in the BritishIndian province of Punjab. One contemporary remembered his family as oneof silk merchants;7 according to another (and not necessarily contradictory)

Masks of Conquest (Delhi: OUP, 1998); Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-orientalist Historiesof the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography”, Comparative Studies inSociety and History 32, 2 (1990), 383–408; idem, Another Reason (Princeton: Publisher,1999); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2000).

7 Riexinger, Sanaullah Amritsari, 315.

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account, his father was a medium-level government employee and petition writerwho also received a moderate income from agricultural land. He was also a manof letters, publishing political poetry and a local newspaper, as well as entertainingrelationships with several important literati of his day.8 As was common amongsteducated and urban Muslims in North India, the family claimed noble ancestrygoing back to the reign of the seventeenth-century emperor Aurangzeb. Suchpretensions were part and parcel of a peculiarly Muslim ethos of middle-class self-fashioning. While the present was lamented as a catastrophic cultural and politicaldecline, new generations were saddled with the burden of recapturing lostground—not necessarily by rebuilding Muslim Imperialism in South Asia, but bycompeting successfully with an emerging Hindu elite that was widely perceived tohave overtaken Muslims in making the most of changed political circumstances.These were the days when the British Raj in India appeared “permanent”, whenlocal elites and ambitious intermediate sections of society were tempted intoadopting a loyalist or gradualist political outlook in exchange for the increasingeducational and employment opportunities offered by the colonial regime. Therapid expansion of the government machinery at all levels of administrationcreated a rising demand for anglophone civil servants, accountants, engineers,teachers and lawyers. As a spin-off, the non-state sector—particularly the fieldsof banking and publishing—underwent similar processes of growth that soonled to the establishment of a new white-collar stratum.9

All religious communities—Muslims, as well as Hindus and Sikhs—developednew forms of religious ideology that sought to make their respective traditionscompatible with some measure of westernization. The central concern was toadvocate the benefits of modern education—based on the new social and naturalsciences and conveyed in English medium—while simultaneously safeguardingsome sense of cultural autonomy and authenticity.10 Amongst Muslims, the mostimportant voice of reformism was that of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98). A

8 M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi, 1–3; Syed Shabbir Hussain, ed., Inayat UllahKhan al-Mashriqi, Quran and Evolution (Islamabad: al-Mashriqi Foundation, 1987),“Introduction”, 13–15.

9 Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu of Mid-20thCentury India and Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2006) 31–5. Richard G. Fox, “Urban Classand Communal Consciousness in Colonial Punjab: The Genesis of India’s IntermediateRegime”, Modern Asian Studies 18, 3 (1984), 159–89. Ian Kerr, “Social Change in Lahore1849–1875”, Journal of Indian History 57, 2–3 (1979), 281–302; “Urbanization and ColonialRule in 19th Century India: Lahore and Amritsar 1849–1881”, Punjab Past and Present 14, 1(1980).

10 Kenneth W. Jones, Arya dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab (Delhi:Manohar, 1976); Harald Fischer-Tine, Die Gurukul Kangri oder die Erziehung der AryaNation (Wurzburg: Ergon, 2003); Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries:Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi: OUP, 1994) C. H. Heimsath,Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

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Delhi notable of towering influence, he had been knighted for his advocacy ofpolitical loyalism and his efforts at establishing educational institutions in whicha new modern Muslim middle class could be bred.11 Sir Sayyid’s reformulationof religious doctrine along rationalist lines developed in correspondence withsimilar attempts elsewhere in the Muslim world, most importantly the Egyptianscholar Muhammad Abduh and his al-Manar circle.12 The basic assumptionof nineteenth-century reformism was that the Holy Scripture of Islam was asabsolutely true as the “book of nature”—shorthand for the discoveries of thenatural sciences. Since any contradiction between the two was ruled out perdefinition, wherever one appeared to exist it had to be resolved through bettermethods of textual exegesis. Anything miraculous and apparently “unscientific”was explained away. The Prophet Muhammad’s nocturnal journey to heaven wasreinterpreted as a dream sequence, for instance, while accounts of spirit beings(jinn) transmuted into prescientific descriptions of microbes. At the same timeevery attempt was made to prove that any new scientific doctrine emerging inthe West was actually already anticipated in the Holy Book. This included oftensuperficial and ill-digested references to the doctrines of Charles Darwin, HerbertSpencer and other evolutionists.13

The young Inayatullah Khan proved a role model for the kind of educationaladvancement that both the British and the religious reformers had advocated.After doing exceedingly well in a number of well-regarded missionary andgovernment schools and colleges in the Punjab, he was sent to Cambridge on agovernment scholarship. There he took, for reasons unknown, no less than fourtripos (oriental languages, mathematics, engineering, sciences), which broughthim the admiration of the British press.14 On his return to India before theFirst World War he joined the colonial education establishment, climbing tothe upper-medium ranks of vice-principal, Islamia College Peshawar; juniorassistant secretary for education, government of India; and finally headmaster ofGovernment High School, Peshawar.

11 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation (Delhi: OUP, 1996), Francis Robinson,Separatism amongst Indian Muslims (Cambridge: CUP, 1974), 84–133. Hafeez Malik,Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muslim Modernization in India and Pakistan (New York:Columbia University Press, 1980).

12 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge: CUP 1983), 130–244.

13 Ignaz Goldziher, Die Richtungen der Islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden: Brill, 1920), 351–60. J. M. S. Baljon, The Reforms and Religious Ideas of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Leiden:Brill, 1949) 50–7, 89. Christian W. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of MuslimTheology (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978) chap. 5. Najm A. Bezirgan, “The Islamic World”, inThomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Chicago 1988), 375–86.

14 M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi, 4.

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Inayatullah’s education was in many ways formative for his subsequent careeras a thinker and political activist. First, it gave him an academic, but strongly anti-clerical, grounding in the classical sources of Islam. His was the knowledge of theorientalist, not that of the traditional religious specialists (culama’) with whomInayatullah entertained a relationship of mutual dislike until his death. Second, itis not difficult to see cross-references between Mashriqi’s later social Darwinismand a number of popular European books that were published and discussedduring the time he was in Britain. The years between 1907 and 1912 coincidedwith a period of transition in evolutionist thinking within the European context:an individualistic, liberal, positivist and sometimes pacifist belief in science—epitomized by Herbert Spencer—mutated into a melange of social Darwinistand post-Darwinist doctrines.15 Often drawing on a strong sense of culturalunease and anticipating the catastrophe of the coming world war, authors suchas W. M. Flinders Petrie, Arnold White and the (much-translated) GermanGeneral Friedrich von Bernhardi stressed collective warfare and metahistoricaltragedy. On the opposite end of the political and emotional spectrum stoodHenri Bergson’s seminal work The Evolution of Creation, published and translatedduring Inayatullah’s first year at Cambridge. Bergson offered a critique as wellas an extension of Darwinian evolutionism into some form of philosophicalmysticism that was to become one of the main elements in Mashriqi’s ownoeuvre.16 Only a few years older—and, thanks to its antic-clericalism andpositive appreciation of Islam, especially attractive to somebody like the studentInayatullah—was Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe, which also combineda fervent belief in scientism with some form of mysticism.17

The third and perhaps most important consequence of Inayatullah Khan’sacademic training was that he maintained the mindset of a science student.The discipline that he thought described him best was mathematics. Althoughoften referring to history and philosophy in his writings, he was never reallyan intellectual in the humanities tradition. References to English literatureand culture—so common in the diction of foreign-educated Indians—areconspicuous by their absence. Most peculiar for a man with such an educationaltrack record, he never became entirely comfortable with articulating himself in

15 As argued for the first time in the US context in Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinismin American Thought 1860–1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945); amore nuanced interpretation is in Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debateover the Biology of War from the “Origin of Species” to the First World War (Cambridge:CUP, 1994), 200–6.

16 Mashriqi took up the Bergsonian notion of a “science of life” as opposed to a “science ofmatter,” for instance. HP, 9–10; Leszek Kolakowski, Henri Bergson (Oxford: OUP, 1985),8–9, 53–71.

17 Haeckel is directly mentioned in TK II, 8, 18.

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the colonizer’s language. The vast majority of his subsequent publications werewritten in an often overly erudite Urdu, while his few tracts in English betray ahalting and formulaic style.18 It is not difficult to link Inayatullah’s intellectualpreferences to his origins in the upwardly mobile service stratum. He may havebeen a brilliant student who did better than could ever have been expected ofsomebody of his background, but he was also an upstart who had to make upfor his lack of westernized sophistication with a fierce belief in the superiorityof objective scientific knowledge. The mastery of science became the pillar ofhis sense of self-worth—something that is most clearly demonstrated by thefact that he attached no less than fourteen lines of degree abbreviations, awardsand fellowships in international learned bodies to his name when he introducedhimself in writing.19

Inayatullah Khan’s first appearance in the political and religious arena ofMuslim India came with the publication of the first volume of al-Tazkirah, hisself-ascribed magnum opus, in 1924. This book already contained all the mainpoints of his religious doctrine that were to remain remarkably constant untilthe end of his life: evolutionary biology provided a key to a correct interpretationof the Qur’an, which—if translated into political action—would safeguard thehistorical future of mankind in general and the Muslim community in particular.This was also the time when Inayatullah adopted the pen name “al-Mashriqi”—“the Orientalist” or “the Sage of the East”—by which he was to be known untilhis death. As a sign of his overwhelming ambition right from the beginning ofhis intellectual career, Mashriqi attempted to submit his book for the Nobel Prizefor Literature, as he saw it as a recipe for the prevention of all future bloodshed.20

Mashriqi’s real breakthrough occurred a decade later, after he had changedhis primary role from intellectual writer to political activist. Directly inspiredby world events, he began to emphasize a militant social Darwinist reading ofhis evolutionist theology. The paramilitary movement that he founded uponhis retirement from government service in 1931—the Khaksars—created a stir

18 Most of Mashriqi’s “books” in English are actually translations of excerpts from his Urduwritings.

19 The list attached to his name in Human Problem begins as follows: “M.A. (Pun. 1906), M.A.(Cantab.), B.Sc., B.E., B.O.L. FRSA, F.G.S. (Paris), F.S.A. (Paris), F.Ph.I, I.E.S., WranglerFoundation Scholar, Bachelor Scholar, (Christ’s), Four (Class 1 etc [sic]) Triposes; brokerecords of Punjab and Cambridge Universities, Principal Islamia College . . .”

20 The submission was rejected, reportedly on the grounds that al-Tazkira was not in aneligible European language. M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi, 9–11. The twosubmissions translating and summarizing the contents of the Arabic introduction to al-Tazkirah were submitted, one by Berthe Proskauer, one of Mashriqi’s German friendswhose language abilities are doubtful, the second by Sahibzadu Aftab Ahmad Khan.Reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi.

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in late colonial politics and received widespread admiration in middle-class andpetty bourgeois circles all over Muslim North India. Clad in khaki uniforms andfollowing strict military discipline, Mashriqi’s organization appeared in manyways to be the Indian equivalent of Mussolini’s Fascisti or the Nazi Sturmabteilung.The distinctive symbol by which they became famous was the spade, which theactivists presented like a rifle in parades and used as a weapon in street fightswith the police. The heydays of the movement was the years between 1935 and1940, when they got involved in several carefully orchestrated stand-offs withgovernment power. The essence of Khaksar political action was the creationof public spectacles in which both participants and bystanders could experiencesensations of collective empowerment. On more concrete political questions theytended to remain vague.21

Mashriqi’s social Darwinism, its political manifestation in a paramilitaryvolunteer movement and his pronounced leadership pretensions were hardlyunique within the context of post-First World War India. This was a timeof unprecedented political mass mobilization, of unbound promise as well asgreat uncertainty, when a whole generation of new political leaders was made.By the time of the Second World War paramilitary volunteer movements hadproliferated to such an extent in India that there was hardly any political partyor constituency without one.22 Despite some ideological differences, there wereimmediate similarities between the Khaksars and the extreme Hindu nationalistsof the Rashtriyya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as well as with the Bengali radicalSubhas Chandra Bose, who left the Indian National Congress to organize militaryresistance to the British during the Second World War.23 Within the context ofMuslim politics, Mashriqi was arguably the most coherently social Darwinistvoice, but his concern with militaristic self-strengthening and his rhetoric ofIslamic glory continued a tradition that had become well established since theearly 1910s.24 By the 1930s the ideological pull of fascism—and of “great dictators”

21 More on Khaksar politics can be found in De, History of the Khaksars.

22 NAI, File (Home Political) 4/50/46; also see Daechsel, Politics of Self-Expression, 67–81;Ian Talbot, Popular Dimensions of the Pakistan Movement (Karachi: OUP, 1998) 59–80;Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement (Delhi: OUP, 1982), 120, William Gould, HinduNationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2004),234–64.

23 See Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (London: Hurst, 1996),11–79; Leonard Gordon, Brothers against the Raj (New York: Columbia University Press,1990).

24 In particular associated with the early career of Abu’l Kalam Azad—a man directlyconnected to a newspaper edited by Mashriqi’s father. On Azad’s role as a journalistsee Ian Douglas, Abu’l Kalam Azad, ed. Gail Minault and Christoph Troll (Delhi: OUP,1993); for the wider context see Minault, The Khilafat Movement.

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more generally—was so strong that people like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin andPilsudski received more attention in Urdu glossy magazines than the Britishfunctionaries who actually wielded power over India.25 Various forms of scientismand historical evolutionism not only filled countless pages in the press, but alsocropped up in various unexpected places in academic discourse.26 Arya SamajHindus and Tamil nationalist publicists (amongst others) resorted to ideas ofancient prehistoric origins and the dynamic battle of civilizations to buttresstheir identities.27

Mashriqi’s ideological and organizational project developed in consciousreference to European models, particularly National Socialism in Germany. Notonly did Mashriqi translate the standard abridged version of Mein Kampf, thencommonly available, from English into Urdu, he also travelled to Germany wherehe claimed to have met the Fuhrer in person. Recounting the encounter (whichtook place in 1926 and therefore some years before Hitler became world famous),Mashriqi wrote,

If I had known that this was the very man who was to become Germany’s saviour I would

have fallen around Hitler’s neck, but on the occasion I was engaged in small talk and tried

to find out what he understood about Germany’s weakness at the time. Professor [Weil,

the host] said, introducing Hitler to me: “This is also a very important man, an activist

from the Worker’s Party.” We shook hands and Hitler said, pointing to a book that was

lying on the table: “I had a chance to read your al-Tazkirah.” Little did I understand at

that time, what should have been clear to me when he said these words!28

What Mashriqi meant by the last sentence was that he believed that he had infact inspired Hitler’s own programme of national self-strengthening. His accountcontinued,

The astonishing similarities—or shall we say the unintentional similarity between two

great minds—between Hitler’s great book and the teachings of my Tazkirah and Isharat

embolden me, because the fifteen years of “struggle” of the author of “My Struggle”

have now actually led his nation back to success. But only after leading his nation to the

intended goal, has he disclosed his movement’s rules and obligations to the world; only

after fifteen years has he made the means of success widely known. It is possible that he

has arrived at those means and doctrines by trial and error, but it should be absolutely

clear that Mashriqi [referring to himself in the third person] has identified those means

25 Daechsel, Politics of Self-Expression, 133–4.

26 An example is Brij Narain, India in the Crisis (Allahabad: Publisher, 1934); for examples innewspapers and magazines see Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, 139–41.

27 For examples in the Urdu milieu see Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, 139–41. For anexample from the Tamil Lands see Sumathi Ramaswamy, Lost Land of Lemuria: FabulousGeographies, Catastrophic Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

28 Al-Is. lah. (31 May 1935). M, 221.

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and doctrines in al-Tazkirah a full nine years and in the Isharat a full three years before

the success of the Nazi movement, simply by following the shining guidance of the Holy

Qur’an.29

This statement sums up the very heart of Mashriqi’s Muslim “fascism”: hesuggested that Islam—if only properly understood from a social Darwinistframework—would reveal itself to be identical to the most successful nationalself-strengthening programme of the inter-war era—Nazism; he also believedthat this grand discovery was entirely his own, and would enable him to lay claimto extraordinary powers of religious and political leadership.

Mashriqi’s political prominence did not survive the Second World War. Thegrowth of the All India Muslim League as a collective platform for Muslimnationalism in British India eroded the Khaksar support base. By the time an in-dependent Muslim homeland (“Pakistan”) was founded in 1947 Mashriqi and hismovement had become all but irrelevant politically. Attempts at a revival duringthe troublesome early years of independence largely failed. Although Pakistan’sfirst military government sometimes tried to invoke Mashriqi’s ideas of a militaryIslam, he died in relative obscurity in 1963.30 This decline was due to the fact thatMashriqi did not supply persuasive answers to the concrete political problems ofthe day; it was not a comprehensive rejection of his wider intellectual ideas, whichwere eagerly soaked up as well as reinterpreted by others—most immediately bylater proponents of a “scientific Islam” such as J. A. Parvez and Ghulam JilaniBarq, but also in a more diffused form amongst the new Islamicist right.31

prophet of a “scientific” islam

Mashriqi’s problematic—as laid out in al-Tazkirah—was defined bythe realization that religious knowledge was by definition contentiousand fragmentary, while “scientific knowledge” (cilm al-abdan)32 representedundisputed “fact” (waqic al-amr).33 If religion was not to be written off as meresuperstition—an option that would effectively leave human beings in a worldwithout sense or morality—then it had to be reconstructed in such a way thatit acquired the same absolute truth-claim that science itself enjoyed. In proving

29 Ibid. emphasis in the original.

30 Bio-sketch attached to Al-Tazkirah. TK I, 30–1.

31 On Parwez see Aziz Ahmad, Islamic Modernism, chap. 13; on Barq see ibid., 205–7; alsoMarkus Daechsel, “The Civilizational Obsessions of Ghulam Jilani Barq”, in HaraldFischer-Tine and Michael Mann, eds., Colonialism as a Civilizing Mission (London:Anthem Press, 2004), 270–90.

32 TK I, 10.

33 TK I, 24.

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that Darwinian biology, as well as modern astronomy and physics, were alreadycontained in the pages of the Holy Qur’an,34 Mashriqi hoped that Islam couldbe turned into a “science of religions” (cilm al-adyan)—a formulation directlymodelled on Ernst Haeckel’s famous “religion of science”.35 Islam would thus betransformed from a religious tradition threatened by extinction under conditionsof colonial modernity into an unassailable universal truth for humankind.36

This meant that science and religion were located on the same ontologicalplane. The realm of the sacred was purged of all transcendental elementsand entirely reconfigured in the empirical here and now. Such a move wasnot entirely alien to Islamic self-understanding. Tradition had always at leastpartially tied the validity of Muhammad’s message to world-historical success,and thus made it hostage to changing empirical circumstances. In a key passageof the Qur’an which came to preoccupy many modern revivalist thinkers, Godpromises that the Muslim community will be the “best of all communities”as long as it follows the righteous path and avoided dissensions within (Surah3:110). The experience of the breathtaking worldwide expansion of Islam withina generation of its foundation provided ample reason for reading this passageas a reference to political dominance. The continuing political decline since theeighteenth century, in contrast, was bound to raise existential questions aboutthe nature of Islamic belief and practice. Mashriqi strengthened the importanceof world history as proof for religious truth by employing a somewhat hackneyedtechnique of textual interpretation. Taking as his starting point another passage ofthe Qur’an—the ayyat al-istikhlaf (24:55), promising divine favour to the rightlyguided—he deliberately (mis)translated key concepts of evolutionary biologyinto an Islamic moralistic vocabulary. The key phrase “survival of the fittest”was rendered as baqa-e as. lah.

37—which literally means the “everlastingness of themost righteous.” Standard Arabic terminology could thus acquire a secondaryand “scientific” meaning. The biologically “fit” were equated with those whounderstood God’s message most correctly, and the degree of such “fitness” or“righteousness” could be proven by real success or failure in world history.

While for most other Muslim observers world-historical success or failurewas a sign of God’s favour or wrath, and correspondingly of the umma’s moralrectitude, for Mashriqi it constituted the kernel of being Muslim itself. Whenever

34 TK I, 21; TK II, footnote, 11–27.

35 TK I, 7. Mashriqi used this formulation as well, suggesting that the identification of thetwo concepts constituted the highest possible form of human knowledge. TK I, 29. OnHaeckel see Niles R. Holt, “Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion”, Journal of the History ofIdeas 32 (1972), 265–80.

36 TK II, 3–5, 20.

37 TK I, 12; TK II, 7–8.

scientism and its discontents 455

he referred to the “true” Islam that he sought to reconstruct in the political tractsof the 1930s, he used a longish designation that not only contained a conventionalreference to God’s revelation and the Prophet Muhammad’s exemplary conduct,but also—as some form of quasi-scripture—an invocation of the historicalexperience of Islam during its first two hundred years.38 As he pointed outtime and again in his pamphlets, the truth of Islam could be measured by therate by which cities and castles were conquered in the glorious early decades afterthe Prophet’s death (his straight-faced total estimate is “36.000 castles in 9 years,or 12 per day”).39 This historical ideal was quite different from the golden ageof early Islam as invoked by orthodox Muslims. What mattered to the latter wasimmediate access to divine guidance in all aspects of life, an ideal that was mostperfectly realized during the lifetimes of the Prophet and his closest companions.For Mashriqi, in contrast, even the mission of the Prophet was primarily historical,and almost paled into secondary significance as compared to the conquests thattook place after his death. As he pointed out,

But, fellow Muslims, the exemplary life of your Prophet has manifested itself on one sheet

of supreme importance; even the smallest of your Prophet’s actions is clearly inscribed

in the sheet of history; the action-oriented lifestyle of the Muslims of the first centuries

is written in Golden Letters right in front of your eyes. You know that the Muslims have

gone out to the entire world after the demise of our Messenger. They have vowed that after

some centuries, they would be victorious over all nations in the world.40

The flipside of this historicist rendition of religion was that the present appearedto Mashriqi as a period of catastrophic and unadulterated failure that could nolonger be explained within the context of conventional religious morality. TheMuslim’s manifest lack of political power in the age of imperialism was not onlysome form of divine punishment for moral misconduct, it was nothing less thancomplete devalidation which, in due course and according to the law of evolution,would lead to physical annihilation. The Islam of “ritually observant” Muslimswas as profoundly mistaken as any of the other world religions that failed to standup to the superior truth-claims of science and to the industrial and military mightof the secular West.41

Interpreting the unfolding of political history as the self-manifestation ofthe ultimate “scientific” truth, Mashriqi was forced to conclude that the mostpowerful nations of his day—Britain and particularly Germany—were in thepossession of the only really valid code of human conduct as demanded by

38 QF, 23, 9, 17.

39 QF, 13; M, 393–4.

40 M, 399; emphasis in the original.

41 TK I, 8–9, 19–20.

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the law of evolution. The thin thread with which Mashriqi tied this realizationto his Islamic identity was a radical tautological assumption that few of hiscontemporaries were prepared to make.42 If the claim to absolute truth inherentin Islam as the “science of religions” was to be maintained, he argued, then theimperial powers and the Nazis had to be regarded as true Muslims, while thereal-existing Muslims had in fact ceased to be the carriers of truth altogether.If Napoleon and Bismarck were perfect incarnations of the spirit of Islam, thenthe latter could only be an anticipation of the “lessons of history”.43 Mashriqiproduced such a reinterpretation by reducing the message of Islam to a setof “Ten Principles” enshrining the ideals of militaristic nation-building44 whilesimultaneously dismissing most other aspects of religious moral conduct. “Nearlythree-quarters” of the Qur’an,45 the Cambridge-educated schoolmaster asserted,are about conquest, holy war and related themes. The Qur’an promises hellfireto all those who do not take part in Jihad bi-l-saif (lit. “religious effort with thesword”) or who object to it; on the other hand, God regards participation inbattle as a self-sufficient sign of righteousness. In short, “To leave the martial wayof life is tantamount to leaving Islam.”46 The famous five pillars of Islam—theconfession of the oneness of God and Muhammad’s prophetic mission, the ritualprayer five times a day, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the giving of alms and the fast inthe month of Ramadan—were in Mashriqi’s eyes all elements of military exercise:the confession of faith really meant that the true Muslim had to forsake all worldlygains in the interest of military revival, prayer (to be performed in uniform andin a regimented way) was a form of military drill, the haj was something like agrand counsel of Muslim soldiers where plans against enemies could be hatched,the fast was a preparation for the deprivations of siege warfare, the giving of alms,finally, was a way of raising funds for Muslim re-armament.47

Mashriqi’s radical reinterpretation of Scripture targeted much the samecustomary modes of religious observance that also attracted the ridicule of

42 The only other instance when a similar argument was proposed related to the victoryof Japan over Russia in 1905, when in Turkey the “Young Turks” relabelled Buddhists asMuslims in order to appropriate a sense of strength for themselves. Niyazi Berkes, TheDevelopment of Secularism in Modern Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964),342. Later, the Punjabi scholar Ghulam Jilani Barq—a man who resembled Mashriqi inmany respects and appears to have widely borrowed from him—again repeated the ideathat Westerners could be better Muslims than the Muslims themselves. Ghulam JilaniBarque, Islam—The Religion of Humanity (Lahore: Publisher, 1956), 31–5.

43 M, 391; TK II, 5, 6, 35.

44 TK II, 57–8 (272–3).

45 M, 400.

46 M, 401; emphasis in the original.

47 M, 396.

scientism and its discontents 457

more mainstream middle-class Muslims in South Asia—religiously sanctioneddress and toilet etiquette, the veneration of mystic saints as miracle-workersor interlocutors between mankind and God, the participation in certaincommunity festivals with their associated customs.48 But Mashriqi’s wrathwas not confined to traditional Islam. In almost all of his writings the mostpowerfully articulated sections invariably contained an absolute rejection ofany other source of knowledge and guidance that the Muslim community ofIndia may find itself compelled to rely on: recipients of torrents of abuse arethe Muslim religious establishment—the culama’—whom Mashriqi routinelyaccused of being completely ignorant of modern science and hence incapable ofunderstanding the hidden centre of God’s revelation to mankind;49 others who areseverely criticized include liberal reformists, educationists, nationalist politicians,cultural activists and poets.50 Mashriqi revelled in his self-styled role as a “hard”taskmaster who would fearlessly and tirelessly point out the momentous failingsof the Muslim community, and who like other prophets would gladly endurethe hostility of an ignorant majority who could not help being provoked by histirades.51

Mashriqi’s “scientific” understanding of Islam led to a far-reaching attack onreligious mores that breached the limits of even the most reformist thinkers.Building on the assumption that the Qur’an essentially contained an ethics ofradical nation-building, Mashriqi suggested that the usual cardinal sins of Islam—neglect of prayer, drinking alcohol, adultery and so on—were in fact minor incharacter and should, more or less, be considered private misdemeanours.52

Mashriqi’s reinterpretation effectively disregarded the example of propheticconduct (the sunnat) as a source of Islamic law, while simultaneously elevatingthe evidence gained from a “scientific” interpretation of history into a new sourceof divine guidance.

In the end, Islam and social Darwinism could be conflated into a vision thatsounded almost identical to sections of Hitler’s Mein Kampf—at least in thefollowing paraphrase from al-Tazkirah prepared by some of Mashriqi’s friendsfor foreign consumption:

A persistent application of, and action on these Ten Principles is the true significance of

“fitness” in the Darwinian [sic] principle of “Survival of the Fittest”, and a community of

people which carries action on these lines to the very extremist limits has every right to

remain a predominant race on this Earth forever, has claim to be the ruler of the world for

48 M, 408.

49 QF, 18–20; M, 396; TK I, 36, 52–3.

50 QF, 20, M, 396.

51 QF, 27–8.

52 M, 408–9.

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all time. As soon as any or all of these qualities deteriorate in a nation, she begins to lose

her right to remain and Fitter people may take her place automatically under the Law of

Natural Selection.53

Despite a great deal of conscious cross-references, Mashriqi’s social Darwinismremained quite distinct from its Nazi counterpart, however. Mashriqi did notemploy race-biological arguments in his rendition of the struggle for survival.His units of analysis are religious civilizations or religiously defined nations,not races. Although references to biology and biological evolution do occur inMashriqi, there is only a tenuous link between the universe of constant warfare hedepicts and typical Darwinian arguments of population pressure and shortageof resources.54 For Mashriqi, perennial warfare was the result of materialisticgreed and religious disunity, both of which he accepted as historically given, butemphatically not insurmountable.

Conflict theory as espoused by Friedrich von Bernhardi or Heinrich vonTreitschke55 was only one side of Mashriqi’s theoretical edifice; the other wasa curious form of what Paul Crook has called “peace biology”. This essentiallyoptimistic interpretation of organic and social evolution saw war not as thedriving force of the struggle for existence, but as an increasingly obsolete andharmful leftover from a less civilized past.56 Mashriqi’s al-Tazkirah and his post-Second World War writings often speak of the promise of a glorious future ofhumankind unified. It was the ultimate mission of the “Science of Religions”

to make [Man] fit to live on this Earth forever, not to let him be swept away in his latest

struggle for existence. In fact to make him progress in the scale of Evolution in such a way

as to make him even a more perfect creation than man. Nay, to let him work so in this

theatre of endless struggle as to make him as omnipotent, as omnipresent, as powerful, as

merciful, as Just, as Knowing, as Seeing and as Hearing as God himself.57

The very first sentence of the Arabic Introduction (Iftitah. iyyah) of al-Tazkirahis a powerful invocation, in imitated Qur’anic diction, of the truthfulness of theoptimistic vision of the world: “al-h. amdu li-llah al-cazım—al-barı’ al-fat.ir al-lazıfat.ara l-samawat wa-l-ard. fı ah. san tanz. ım”—“Praise to the most exalted God—the Great Creator who created the Heavens and the Earth as a perfectly ordered

53 Reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah, 243; compare to Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf,trans. R. Mannheim (London: Pimlico, 1992), 88.

54 There is a reference to the ill effects of medicine creating population pressure by keepingthe least fit humans artificially alive and thereby hindering natural selection. TK I, 31.

55 The influence of these Germans on Mashriqi is hypothetical, but made very plausible bythe fact that Mashriqi himself expressed opinions about the destructive nature of pacifismin Germany that echo these sources very closely. M, 221–2.

56 Crook, Darwinism, War and History, 2, 6–28.

57 “Nobel Peace Prize Dossier”, Reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi, 224.

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structure.”58 In “Human Problem: A Message to the Knowers of Nature” (1952)—an open letter that was published and, with typical self-importance, also sentto several of the world’s leading scientists—Mashriqi went further to illustratehis optimistic vision of the evolutionary process. A combination of scientificprogress and continuous struggle would lead to a gradual biological evolution ofthe human race. In his own time, he claimed, it could already be observed thatAmericans were as a rule healthier and more intelligent than Europeans becausethey were the descendants of the most disadvantaged section of European societythat consequently had to struggle the most.59 In the future, the very shape of allhuman beings would change. As was proven by recent research at high altitudesand in polar regions, many human organs were in fact unnecessary; they couldbe cast off in the process of evolution and replaced with scientific inventions. Thefirst to go would be the limbs, followed by the sexual organs:

By radical changes in physical organs Man shall have to chose a much neater, much

quicker, all-pervading and overwhelming way of self-production, perhaps akin to that of

the original animal when life started, i.e. by constant and interminable fission in order to

become as overwhelming and as near to the “Divine” way of existence possible.60

Evolution, in other words, would lead to a gradual self-disembodiment andunification of the collective human spirit, which would enable human kind toconquer more and more aspects of the universe around them. The conquest ofnature by technology would and should be pursued to the very end of outerspace,61 Mashriqi observed, under the impact of the beginnings of a human spaceprogramme as well as the UFO scares of the time.62 His vision of the culminationof history deserves to be quoted at some length:

It is conceivable—nay, NATURAL and INEVITABLE—that at this stage of the development

of this “Man”, the SUPREME DIVINE INTELLIGENCE that originally created this

Universe in millions and millions of years with a PURPOSE and finally ended with

HUMAN EYE, HUMAN EAR, and HUMAN BRAIN with a set AIM . . . throws open with

a terrific Universe-wide Quake the ETERNAL CURTAIN and burst into a UNIVERSE-

WIDE HANDSHAKE with MAN, greeting HIM with the words WELL DONE!—the

TWO SPIRITS then UNITE INTO ONE with a terrific CRASH in which the whole

Universe disappears into complete nothingness—the Divine Trumpeteers announcing

that PURPOSE OF CREATION HAD COME TO A SUCCESSFUL END and THE GREAT

EXPERIMENT NOBLY FULFILLED!—THE TWO PORTIONS OF ONE SOUL THAT

58 TK I, 217; the vocabulary is taken from Qur’an 35:1, also 6:14, 12:101, 14:10, 39:46, 42:11.

59 HP, 9.

60 HP, 13–14.

61 HP, 4.

62 Baljon, Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation, 89.

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HAD SEPARATED NUMBERLESS MILLIONS OF YEARS BACK HAD AT LAST UNITED

TO BECOME ONE TILL EVERLASTING ETERNITY.63

Although there are clear references to Qur’anic eschatology here—the trumpet,the curtain—this vision had little to do with Islam as conceived by the orthodoxconsensus; the divine is no longer seen as the transcendent creator and law-giver,but split into a world-immanent and a world-transcendent aspect whose ultimatepurpose is mystical union. Morality, by implication, is no longer a question ofindividuals being judged for their action after the rupture of time, but the innerlogic of a world-historical process of collective evolution within time. Some ofthese elements can be traced back to Islamic mysticism, particularly to the highlyinfluential doctrine of “unity of Being” (wah. dat al-wujud) attributed to thethirteenth-century scholar Ibn cArabi.64 Another potential source (or parallel)is the Neoplatonism of the “Brotherhood of Purity” (ikhwan as-s.afa’), a tenth-century Islamic sect which was much discussed in orientalist circles and whoseepistles formed a standard part of the Persian education of Indian officials.65

None of these culturally specific precedents are really necessary to account forMashriqi’s monist vision, however, as some of his openly acknowledged Europeansources proposed something very similar. Ernst Haeckel—arguably the mostinfluential of Darwin’s popularizers in the late nineteenth century—wrote in thecontext of his own semi-religious project that “Pantheism is the world-system ofthe modern scientist”.66

Mashriqi’s imagery oscillated between two visions of the world. On the onehand was the social Darwinist universe of fear—the realization that Muslims hadno special place in the merciless game of survival of the fittest, and ultimately thatthere was no moral meaning in the unfolding of history at all; on the other handthere was his boundless optimism that the world was inherently good, and—once

63 HP, 15; all capitals in the original; in part also quoted in Baljon, Modern Muslim KoranInterpretation, 97.

64 On cIbn Arabi see Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1975), 263–73. Such parallels have sometimes given rise to theconclusion that Mashriqi was really a proponent of Islamic mysticism operating underthe then fashionable garb of fascism (e.g. the magisterial dissertation of Jamal Malik,University of Bonn, which the author discussed with me in a personal communication).I remain sceptical about such explanations because they not only ignore more immediatesources of Mashriqi’s monism, but also fail to acknowledge the explicitly anti-Sufi stancethat he took in his writings, and which is typical of the wider views in his social milieu.

65 For more on their philosophical position see Goldziher, Die Richtungen der IslamischenKoranauslegung, 186–96. A translation for the use of colonial officials is The Ikhwan-us-suffa; A Translation into English by Joseph Wall (Lucknow: Newul Kishore Press, 1889),OIOC, Printed Books 14112.a.37.

66 Ernst Haeckel, Riddles of the Universe (London: Publisher, 1901), 102.

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its inner working was properly understood—could be completely mastered forthe ultimate purpose of human redemption. Even when invoking redemptionas the ultimate goal of the evolution of human consciousness through science,Mashriqi was never quite able to silence his doubts about the inevitability ofthis glorious process. His closing chapter of “Human Problem” continued on adecidedly darker note than the gushing vision of mystical world-union:

If the above [his vision of the end of history] is not the true and logical picture of what

MUST happen SOME DAY, this world is a mockery of the joking DEVIL, an exhibition of

the INSANE and a replica of the ABSURD. If this wonderful drama of the Universe is not

going to end in this CEREMONY, this world is a TRAVESTY OF FACTS and a PARODY

of TRUTH, POWER and INFINITY.67

The switch between the two aspects of the future was in Mashriqi’s eyes entirelywithin human control; if they accepted his vision of scientific Islam the worldwidecommunity of Muslims was guaranteed to lead the rest of mankind to Paradise;if they did not, they were guaranteed to be banished to world-immanent hell.

Mashriqi’s stark “might-is-right” vision of a collective and martial struggle forexistence had a precise rhetorical function. By proposing to be somebody whocould lead the Muslim community back to the world-conquering power of theirearly centuries, Mashriqi effectively bracketed off his social Darwinist readingof history as some form of cautionary tale. As self-appointed harsh taskmaster,Mashriqi could use the “iron law of evolution” in order to demonstrate thatthe crisis of the Muslim community was no longer amenable to gradualistreform or moralist solutions. The idea that the Nazis may be better Muslimsthan the Muslims themselves was a way of forcing the community to stareinto the abyss that in Mashriqi’s eyes had opened up before them. But bycontinuing to equate the law of evolution with what he understood as trueIslam, Mashriqi effectively promised a way out of the frightening universe ofsocial Darwinism and back into the comfortable realm of religious certainty anddivine election. In stark contradiction to his assertion that Nazis or Americanscould be better Muslims than the Muslims themselves, Mashriqi never tired ofpointing out that being a world-dominating power was actually the birthrightof the Muslim community; in his own words, “We Muslims emerge ready to beemperors from our mothers’ wombs”.68 As an ex-post-factum legitimization ofthe existing empirical state, social Darwinism could be used to open up a space forradical historical voluntarism. If the Muslim community was steeped in radicaldetermination, self-belief and hope against hope, it could once again muster thepower that—after its successful application—would appear as a confirmation of

67 HP, 15.

68 QF, 15.

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the laws of science. Mashriqi’s social Darwinism was thus a vehicle for a decidedlyun-scientific and un-evolutionist politico-religious ethics.

social darwinism as religious MYSTERIUM

Mashriqi’s reconciliation of religion and science was as much guided byideological and political needs as it was the response to a genuine crisis of sense-making. It is important to note that Mashriqi’s equation of Islam and evolutionaryscience was far from immediate or easy. He always rejected the idea—common toboth Christian “crisis theology” and Muslim theologians like Abu’l Kalam Azad—that matters of reason and matters of faith should be placed on entirely differentepistemological planes and, therefore, that they could not really contradict eachother.69 Although he replicated many of their arguments, Mashriqi was also verysceptical about the naive belief in a direct correspondence between the Wordsof God and the Works of God that guided the late nineteenth-century Muslimreformist thinkers. If such a correspondence was as unproblematic as Sir Sayyidor Abduh made it out to be, Mashriqi would not have had a role as the “Sageof the East” out to save the world, nor would he have to engage in a lifelongpublishing effort that took him to the very edge of religious acceptability.

Unlike many Darwinian scientists operating in Victorian Britain, Mashriqidid not want to play down the clash between his own vision and establishedreligiosity.70 Like Ernst Haeckel—German prophet of evolutionary monismand one of Mashriqi’s sources—he preferred the impact of science on religiouscertainty to be as stark as possible, since this helped him to legitimize his ownself-acclaimed status as visionary leader and thinker.71 There was indeed a wayout of the depths of religious doubt, there was indeed some higher truth thatbrought science and religion together, but this path of truth was hidden and onlyaccessible through the guidance of a mystical leader—who for Mashriqi was, ofcourse, none other than himself.

In Mashriqi’s eyes, “science” had the power of uncovering the universe as aperfectly ordered structure. The perception of the miraculous beauty of “God’sprogramme”72 would not only transform the apparent brutality of natural

69 Crook, Darwinism, War and History, 202; James R. Moore, The Post-DarwinianControversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in GreatBritain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 1979); with reference to Azad seeDouglas, Abu’l Kalam Azad, 230–2.

70 Robert M. Young, “The Impact of Darwin on Conventional Thought”, in AnthonySymondson, ed., The Victorian Crisis of Faith (London: SPCK, 1970), 13–35.

71 Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 22–4, 75–8.

72 QF, 20.

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law into ultimate justice, it would also once and for all resolve the riddle ofdivine revelation. The truth that lay buried under the apparent ambiguities andcontradictions of the world’s greatest texts—the scriptures of the world religions,as well as the monuments of philosophy and literature—was one and the same asthe truth that the ongoing advance of science would reveal.73, In Mashriqi’s ownwords, the ultimate perfection of the Holy Qur’an

can, if at all, only be put together only in those minds who have got to see every nook

and corner of this magnificent cosmos, who have acquired substantial knowledge of the

mysteries of the Book of Nature, who have been elevated by the majestic heights of

knowledge and the grand vistas of ultimate reality to the higher horizon of the heavens

and the stars; who, unperturbed by the technicalities of lowly logic, are pursuing the

finality of absolute truth; who are aware of the secret tunes of acceptability in this supreme

music of condition and consequence, cause and effect, basis and outcome; who know the

hidden melody of the Providential decisions; who, in this apparently unshapely, unguided,

unarranged, and tyranneous world of contradictions, find an amazing balance, surprising

justness and harmony, supreme equlibrium and arrangement.74

For Mashriqi, “science” was essentially some form of esoteric knowledge, asthe proliferation of aesthetic metaphors in this passage already indicates; truth isseen from the “majestic heights of knowledge” (cilm kı buland-nigahı) and “thegreat vistas of ultimate reality” (haqıqat kı wasıc-naz. arı); it constitutes “suprememusic” (caz. ım ul-shan musıqı) and a “hidden melody” (poshıdah nawa’un).There are countless other expressions in al-Tazkirah with a similar flavour: “deepknowledge” is likened to “an ocean without shore” (muh. ıt. or bah. r-e bekaran);75

the “electric candle of scientific knowledge” (cilm kı s.ah. ıh. barqı mashcal) wouldreveal “the veiled, courage-destroying, beauty-laden, brilliant and elusive brideof reality” (haqıqat kı pardah nashın aur tab gusil h. usn se muzayyan aur tajallı beniyaz curus) lying “hidden . . . behind [the] ugly and closed windows [of apparentreality]”.76 More revealing still, the secret truth of Scripture and science was a “coybeloved” (sharmsar macshuqah), an established term from Indo-Persian poetrydenoting both an object of sexual desire and God.77

73 TK I, 71–2, 40–41; TK I, 59.

74 TK I, 41, translation partially based on the excerpt reprinted in Syed Shabbir Hussain,ed., Allama Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, Man’s Destiny—A Mathematician’s View ofthe Breath-Taking Climb that Awaits Man to Reach his Ultimate Destiny (Islamabad: el-Mashriqi Foundation, 1993), 72.

75 TK I, 39, 85.

76 TK I, 58, 40–41.

77 TK I, 41; for more on the use of the ghazal form as expression of the ideal of unrequitedlove see Ralph Russell, The Pursuit of Urdu Literature (London: ZED Books, 1992), 26–52.

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This language points to an epistemology that is different from the conventionsof science. The seeker is driven by a desire for the absolute—or, as Mashriqioften enough put it, echoing the Bible, by the wish to meet God “face to face”.78

The capricious lover, Truth, remains unresponsive, unless and until God Himselfgrants the seeker the grace of ultimate fulfilment. The discovery of the beautifuland harmonious universe behind a facade of misery is only ostensibly the result ofan evolutionary growth of factual knowledge; what Mashriqi really had in mindwas an instant switch from ignorance to knowledge that had its cause outside theprocess of knowledge production itself. His truth “appears” or is suddenly andmysteriously “illuminated”.79

Al-Tazkirah was always much more than a “modern” commentary on theQur’an; it was an attempt to update fundamentally the revelation of Islamitself. Although Mashriqi was careful to deny any prophetic ambitions in severaldisclaimers both in al-Tazkirah itself and later publications, no careful readerwas going to be fooled about the extent of his self-importance.80 One keysection of his magnum opus was the lengthy introduction (Iftitah. iyyah) writtenin Arabic. The diction throughout the piece is not standard prose language, butbased on a rhythmic and poetic succession of verses that are meant to resemblethe language of the Qur’an itself. Throughout the text actual quotes from theQur’an are interwoven with Mashriqi’s own writing, creating the impression ofa unitary divinely inspired text. Mashriqi was getting very close to denying themost fundamental elements of the Islamic faith here: that the Qur’an was theunadulterated word of God and that the Prophet Muhammad was the recipientof the final divine revelation meant to guide mankind until the day of judgment.Mashriqi never questioned any of these tenets, but he created a space for hisown world-historical mission by suggesting a continuous prophetic traditionthat included not only Muhammad and the Semitic prophets, but also Buddha,Krishna, Aristotle, Bacon and other non-Islamic wise men.81

Mashriqi’s insistence that the laws of evolution and the lessons of sciencewould lead back to the doorstep of Islam, in other words, was not something

78 For a rare statement of this idea originally written in English see Syed Shabbir Hussain,Allama Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, Man’s Destiny, 176–97; more extensively in Mashriqı,H. adıt

¯al-Qur’an (extended reprint, Islamabad: Allama Mashriqi Publishers, 2000 (1952)),

135–7.

79 “Nobel Peace Prize Dossier”, reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi; alsoTK I, 42.

80 Disclaimers in TK I, 59; QF, 131. For reaction of the culama’ see Riexinger, SanaullahAmritsari, as quoted in footnote 5; M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi, 40–51.

81 TK I, 40.

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that he could effectively argue. This problem was intricately connected to hisdual vision of the world. The analysis of world history with the methodologyof straightforward exoteric science would only lead to the damming insight of aworld without purpose, a battlefield of all against all.82 For a colonized people—even at a time when nationalist mobilization was beginning to bear fruit—any talkabout “survival of the fittest” had to be seen as a threat. Not only was the doctrineitself associated with norms and values imported under duress, there was alsolittle question that the European countries, Japan and the US had to be seen as the“fittest” nations in a time of great and much-admired technological progress. Atthe same time there was no longer any guarantee that “fitness” would ultimatelylead to something good and morally justified. The world of the inter-war periodwas a dog-eat-dog affair. The struggle against competitors as well as against one’sown aspirations for upward social mobility had become all but hopeless afterthe Great Depression, which hit the salaried middle classes of India particularlyhard and led to a skyrocketing of “educated unemployment”.83 Indian politics,meanwhile, came to be ever more dominated by religious violence, which waseagerly mopped up by newly emerging mass media. Then there was the ever-present danger of another world war—which many Indians anticipated from themid-1930s onwards and associated with the possibility of a physical annihilationof their world.84

In such a context, only the select few who shared in the secret code ofsocial Darwinism were in a position to see that a perfect world of infiniteorder existed behind the turmoil of everyday injustice. It is only after thedevotee has accepted the existence of a perfect and hidden reality that he orshe becomes susceptible to allegedly “scientific” strategies of interpretation,which demonstrate that everything was indeed sensibly and causally connectedto everything else. Mashriqi’s “science” was therefore the exact opposite of whatit actually claimed to be: not a step-by-step deduction of rules from empiricalevidence but the ex post facto rationalization of a prophetic vision that turned fearinto a source of supreme power for its originator. The worse the world appearedthrough the looking glass of social Darwinism, the more it required a saviourlike Mashriqi who could prove against all the odds that there really was divineintelligence in all the apparent madness.

All this has to be seen in context. Mashriqi’s claim to leadership short of fullprophethood touched a raw nerve amongst mainstream Muslim opinion, butonly because it seemed to go further than other common examples of egomania

82 TK I, 3–5.

83 Narain, India in the Crisis, 365–71; Dietmar Rothermund, India in the Great Depression1929–1939 (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 82–4, 119–20.

84 Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, 141–4.

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at the time. Abu’l Kalam Azad—from whom Mashriqi had plagiarized both thetitle al-Tazkirah as well as the stylistic habit of writing Arabic introductions witha heavy dose of Qur’anic quotations85—had believed in his twenties and earlythirties that he was a divinely chosen renewer of Islam. Abul’ Acla Mawdudi,the founding father of Islamicism, and Hasan Ali Nadwi, the spokesman ofthe Indian culama’, entertained similar pretensions, while the Punjabi publicistMirza Ghulam Ahmad—to the great detriment of the community he founded—actually went all the way to assuming full prophetic status.86 As was the case withso many other aspects of his work, Mashriqi’s megalomania was only an extremeexample of a wider and very common sociological type of late colonial SouthAsia: the middle-class child prodigy turned schoolmaster, turned autodidacticscholar, turned saviour of the nation.

mashriqi’s “fascism”: redemption through suffering

The validating power of scientific discourse could not generate acceptance forMashriqi’s vision of a perfectly ordered universe. The believer first had to glimpsethis universe—or at the very least trust Mashriqi’s vision as truthful—before thelatter’s arguments could turn into esoteric wisdom, and thus furnish the beliefin cosmic harmony with an apparent rational foundation. This raises the crucialquestion about the source of the personal legitimacy—the personal ability tosee—of both prophet and devotee.

Mashriqi was not particularly successful in generating conventional means ofprophetic self-legitimization. As far as such a judgement is possible in retrospect,his personal charisma seems to have been limited. He took a conscious decisionnot to give public speeches—ostensibly on the ground that speeches only ledto idle talk, not action.87 Attempts to use his personal political pulling powerin order to revive the faltering fortunes of the Khaksar movement in the mid-1940s failed miserably, and according to contemporary observers made Mashriqilook ridiculous.88 The obsession about contacts with the outside world—a muchpublicized visit to Einstein, the meeting with Hitler, the proud quotations fromthe replies he received from leading scientists to his correspondence—were

85 Douglas, Abu’l Kalam Azad, 103, 162–6.

86 For more on the Ahmadiyya sect see Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects ofAhmadi Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1992).

87 QF, NN.

88 Som Anand, Lahore—Portrait of a Lost City (Lahore: Vanguard, 1998), 153–66. OIOC,File L/P&J/5/248. Fortnightly Report for Punjab for First Half of September 1945; alsointerview with Dr Kaniz Fatima Yusuf, a Muslim League youth leader who witnessed suchan incident in 1945 (Islamabad 1999).

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desperate means of appropriating the charisma of others. At the same timeMashriqi rejected alternative religious means of legitimization, as they wereemployed by Hindu holy men and Islamic mystics. There are no stories aboutMashriqi’s spiritual powers, about any signs of election from early childhood,nor are there any accounts of a dramatic experience of awakening later in his life.His obsessive insistence on his scientific erudition foreclosed the self-image of thechildlike saint who speaks not on his own behalf but as a vehicle of God’s message.No observer could ever get past Mashriqi, the self-appointed harsh taskmaster,who revelled in his own arrogance.

In order to generate trust for the validity of his mission, Mashriqi chose to relyon an ethics of redemption through suffering that remained radically differentfrom his much emphasized insistence on the validity of “science”. There was, inother words, a transit point at the very centre of Mashriqi’s intellectual edifice,which connected two altogether different world views.89 Their juxtapositionseems to echo Mashriqi’s alternation between a good and a bad universe, butthere is something more fundamental at stake here. A social Darwinist ethicsbased on the assumption of inexorable Laws of Nature—merciless or benignas a matter of choice—was transformed into an ethics of personal authenticity,which can be summarized as follows: when the proclaimer of truth is principallyunable to use the power of argument to persuade others of his calling, he hasto turn rejection itself into a surrogate proof of his righteousness. The very factthat he sticks to his message in the face of hostility—and, most importantly,visibly suffers terrible mental and physical hardship as a consequence of hisconvictions—generates a sense that his message must at least be genuine, andtherefore in a certain sense true.

It was this very logic that stood behind Gandhi’s doctrine of Satyagraha or“truth-force”,90 and which the towering poet and philosopher Sir MuhammadIqbal (1877–1938) employed to produce his celebrated reconstruction of Islamicidentity as a case of unrequited love for God and his Messenger.91 In his longpoem Shikwa (“Complaint”), first recited in front of an ecstatic crowd ofseveral tens of thousands Punjabi Muslims in 1908, Iqbal compared God tothe precocious and unresponsive object of desire in traditional Indo-Persianlove poetry. The Muslims of the world had been genuine in their commitment

89 It is highly possible that a similar switch exists in all forms of social Darwinism, which mustplace a question mark behind Mike Hawkins’s recent attempt to define social Darwinismwith reference to a unitary world view. M. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European andAmerican Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 30–5.

90 David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Times and Ours (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 39–65;Joe Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 28–52.

91 On Iqbal see Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wing (Leiden: Brill, 1963).

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to Islam, and yet He had not rewarded them with political or civilizationalstrength in the world.92 Under these circumstances, rejection is reinterpreted asa source of self-validation. The fact that Muslims continue to love God despitehis unresponsiveness actually gives them a sense of pride in the strength andmoral authenticity of their own emotions.

I would argue that Inayatullah Khan’s “fascism” was of crucial importanceto his intellectual project because it represented an ideological rendition of thatcrucial transit point between his belief in science and his belief in salvationthrough suffering. While incanting the inevitability of success in the language ofDarwinian evolutionism, fascism was first and foremost about creating a practicalorganizational structure that could institutionalize and aestheticize an ethics ofemotional authenticity. Although the Khaksars certainly saw themselves as thestormtroopers ready to save the Muslim nation, they did not really tie theirrole to the ability to do battle; rather they wanted to constitute a visible body ofMuslims who had cultivated a sense of moral superiority through their experienceof paramilitary organization. The secret of their success lay in their ability toproduce public spectacles, which encapsulated the fruits of their methodologiesof self-purification and made them immediately consumable to members of thepublic. When Khaksars participated in public Friday prayers they would do soen masse and dressed in identical outfits, performing their obligatory prayermovements with the deliberate jerkiness and precision of a military exercise.On the streets Khaksars would be seen as a marching column, spades on theirshoulders like rifles; when holding public meetings or organizing training camps,there would be parades, inspections by “officers” as well as military street furnituresuch as watchtowers and gates.93 As the colonial authorities understood only toowell, it was not actual Khaksar actions that were politically dangerous, but theKhaksars’ ability to project the image of a militarized Islam that had successfullyappropriated the government’s own insignia of power.94

The wearing of uniform and the regular conduct of military training sessionswas meant to subject the activists to a rigid form of self-discipline that turnedordinary members of the public into initiates into Mashriqi’s social Darwinistmysterium. True to any mystical or ascetic tradition, an element of physicalchastisement was emphasized. One practice that made the Khaksars famouswas the public flogging of latecomers at their training sessions.95 For Mashriqi,

92 Muhammad Iqbal, Shikwa and Jawab-i-shikwa = Complaint and Answer: Iqbal’s Dialoguewith Allah, trans. Kushwant Singh (Delhi: OUP, 1981).

93 Map reprinted in M. A. Malik, Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi, 1806.

94 NAI, File (Home Political) 75/3/40 and OIOC: L/P&J/5/243 Fortnightly Report for Punjab,Second half of May, 1940.

95 M, 406; Talbot, “The Khaksar Movement”, 199.

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the main characteristics of the early Islam that he wanted to resurrect in hisparamilitary movement were the willing suffering of physical pain, of forgoingfood and travelling long distances on foot, of never giving in to the “ease-giving”life of the normal everyday.96 The real enemy is not outside but inside, Mashriqiargued in a striking echo to his contemporary, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.97

If the Khaksars have to do battle, it is a battle with the un-martial instincts in theirown souls, and with the individual incarnations of vice in Muslim communitylife: the dandy, the rich politician, the Mullah without dignity or taste.98 AsMashriqi pointed out with great venom, the greatest danger to national survivalcame from family commitments, career interests and stakes in business99—allareas of life where radical readiness to suffer was a hindrance rather than an asset.

Mashriqi’s blood-curdling glorification of violence and his incantation ofthe need to conquer the world were strangely juxtaposed against an ethicsof victimhood. The favourite image of the Prophet Muhammad in Mashriqi’sQaul-e Fais.al is not Muhammad the successful statesman and general, as wouldlogically follow from the Khaksar goal of world domination, but the Prophet asmarginalized and dejected figure who nevertheless holds fast to his commitments.Mashriqi invokes the abuse that Muhammad had to suffer, the fact that he wasspat at by the people of Mecca and showered in dirt and stones, that his wiveswere denigrated and his grandsons Hasan and Husain brutally killed (normallyan altogether separate episode especially associated with Shica Islam).100 Thechapter about the enemies of Islam in the same tract also combined an ethicsof non-violence with a dashing rhetoric of the Khaksars’ willingness to sacrificetheir lives in war. After invoking once again the ideal of the Muslim born to rule,the conqueror of countless cities and castles, Mashriqi exhorted his followers tooffer selfless and unrewarded service to all creatures, and not to respond to thosewho malign Islam in their presence.101

In some sense, this emphasis on the positive role of suffering could still bejustified within the wider logic of social Darwinism. Suffering produced hardness,and hardness was the cardinal virtue in the game of survival of the fittest, asMashriqi himself often argued. But belief in ultimate victory was in reality alwaysundercut by a fear of failure—the same fear that made Mashriqi proclaim that

96 M, 402–3; QF, 29.

97 For Gandhi’s classic statement see M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or, The Story of MyExperiments with Truth (Ahmadabad: Navajivan Publ., 1927); also Alter, Gandhi’s Body,3–27.

98 QF, 18–20.

99 M, 395.

100 QF, 26–7.

101 QF, 25.

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Germans were better Muslims than the Muslims themselves, or that the universemay be nothing but a purposeless slaughterhouse. Within this context the cult ofsuffering led towards an ethics of emotional authenticity: no matter whether theMuslims were successful in restoring their former position of glory, the very factthat they sacrificed everything when trying to do so had to be seen as some formof redemption in itself. More importantly—and in a striking logical loop backinto social Darwinism—the purifying power of suffering prepared the soul ofboth Mashriqi the prophet and the Khaksar devotee to have the kind of vision of aperfectly good world that made their belief in “science” emotionally sustainable.The meaning of survival of the fittest could be changed into the doctrine thatsuffering could never go unrewarded in this world. In some sense, this beliefwas some form of afterglow of a desperate trust in God’s justice and mercy thathad been secularized into an ethics of hard work and being true to oneself. Thegenius of Mashriqi’s formulation, however, lay in its ability to turn radical doubtinto the building material for a new certainty. The more the exoteric message ofsocial Darwinism pointed to a universe without justice and without order, themore moral currency the mystic believer could gain from holding fast to beliefin an underlying good. The discrepancy between ultimate truth and an illusorypresent created potential for suffering, which by itself would diminish the powerof the latter and strengthen the former.

Before concluding, it is worthwhile noting not only that all this was typicalof South Asian nationalisms eager to overcome their position of colonization,but also that a very similar argument could be made about various aspects ofEuropean fascism. In both the Italian and German cases there was this strangejuxtaposition between scientific determinism and a cult of radical voluntarism,the celebration of the machine versus the cult of a New Man, race biologyversus “the Triumph of the Will”, the iron law of “Providence” versus the cult ofleadership and genius. All this was connected to a crucial shift in what constitutedan “ideology”. The relationship between content and form was marked by thestriking predominance of the latter over the former. As Giovanni Gentile put it,fascism was not a “thinking” but an “acting” ideology—something that Mashriqirepeatedly said about his scientific rendition of “Islam” as well.102 What matteredmost was the spectacle of “action” itself, not any concrete political outcomes thatcould be achieved by such action.103 Mashriqi may have placed more emphasison victimhood and suffering than his European equivalents, but this was only a

102 Giovanni Gentile, Grundlagen des Faschismus (Koln and Stuttgart: DeutscheVerlagsanstalt, 1936), 33.

103 Walter Benjamin famously identified the “aestheticization of politics” as the core offascism. W. Benjamin, Das Kunstalter im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1963), 42–4.

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difference of degree that is easily explained by local political constraints (as well asby the need to get his pamphlets past the colonial censors). Mussolini constantlyspoke about Italy as the quintessentially wronged of world history, while theNazis attached greatest importance to commemorative cults of the “martyrs ofthe movement”.104

conclusion

Inayatullah Khan Mashriqi’s self-validation—and his legitimacy as a politicaland religious leader in the eyes of his followers—only partially depended onthe dozens of academic qualifications and memberships of scientific bodies thathe so proudly listed on every occasion. Mashriqi could no longer be a believerin the merits of educational advancement and upward social mobility as hadbeen the religious reformers of the late nineteenth century. For Mashriqi thesupreme truth of “science” posed an existential and painful challenge, but onethat he learnt to utilize in order to construct an often exaggerated sense of world-historical leadership. Social Darwinism, in other words, provided Mashriqi witha universally accepted question, not with a universally accepted answer. From thepoint of view of a colonized people, the doctrine of survival of the fittest was athreat rather than a promise. Mashriqi’s role lay precisely in his ability to turnthis threat into a promise once again. In order to do so, he did not resort to thepowers of the scientist, but to the powers of the prophet. Social Darwinism couldbe a force of consolation only after it had been reformulated as esoteric vision, asa religious mysterium.

Mashriqi’s real trump card was the idea that any belief could be legitimateas long as it was held with passionate conviction. The ultimate evil was notscientific ignorance or religious misguidedness, but personal inauthenticity thatmanifested itself in the inability to endure suffering and hardship. This was nolonger a kind of self-fashioning anchored in some form of belief in the laws ofprogress, as had been the case with more conventional projects of nationalistself-discipline. There was no grand narrative that could underwrite the success ofthe modernization project. All that was left was the possibility to establish somesense of security from within oneself, by embarking on the never-ending struggleto connect with some nebulous notion of being true to one’s inner essence. Wherethe older reformers wanted to produce frugal workers, model citizens or diligentpupils, the likes of Mashriqi only replicated such ideals at a rhetorical level; whatthey really, and entirely unreasonably, wanted was to create a class of activists

104 Rudiger Sunner, Schwarze Sonne (Freiburg: Herder, 2001), 118–24; Benito Mussolini, DerFaschismus: philosophische, politische und gesellschaftliche Grundlehren (Munchen: Beck,1933).

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who had completely severed all ties to such societal institutions and devoted theirentire lives to internal transformation.

This quest—as I have pointed out elsewhere—was anchored in far-reachingchanges at the level of socio-economic infrastructure: instead of some surrogateof a nineteenth-century “bourgeoisie” with its norms of frugality and educationalachievement, we see the emergence of a highly amorphous middle classcommunicating its identity through consumer choice. In the place of a “publicsphere” we find a plethora of mass media more concerned with the selling ofspectacles than with the communication of arguments.105 As could be expectedin the colonial context, this transformation was riddled with a multitude ofcontradictions and ideological distortions, and it is precisely here that we needto situate somebody like Mashriqi. It is important to note once again that his“fascism” was not the product of simply endorsing the new modernity of self-expression hook, line and sinker, but of seeking to reconcile the certainties of theold—now reformulated as the will to belief in the truth of nineteenth-centuryscience—with the challenges of the new. The Khaksar cult of violence and actiondrew its energy from the transitional and contradictory character of its underlyingworld view.

What the historiography of South Asia needs is more engagement with boththe socio-economic and the discursive aspects of the coming of a twentieth-century modernity, and, in order really to come to grips with it, it has to startwith the battleground between old and new that was the era of fascism.106 It isonly then that we no longer need to be surprised about—and struggle to findshort-term explanations for—some late twentieth-century developments suchas an allegedly “sudden” espousal of consumerism in South Asia going hand inhand with the creation of new radical ideologies, be they the “Hindu fascism” incontemporary India or the rise of al Qaida-style “neo-fundamentalisms” in theIslamic world.

105 Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, chaps. 3, 4, 5.

106 A similar enquiry into the cultural politics of mid-twentieth-century communism isalready producing interesting results: many Indians espoused Marxism as a new anchor ofcertainty to bypass the vicissitudes of twentieth-century modernity. See remarks in SudiptaKaviraj, “Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-Ironical Tradition in Bengali literature”,Modern Asian Studies 34/2 (2000), 379–406. As Rajarshi Dasgupta has pointed out, therewas a strong tendency in official Marxism to purge all forms of cultural productionthat took the troubling aspect of the new modernity seriously, thereby propping upsome hollow form of nineteenth-century certainty well into the late twentieth century.R. Dasgupta, “Rhyming Revolution: Marxism and Culture in Colonial Bengal”, Studies inHistory 21 (January–June 2005), 79–98. This fossilization ultimately led to the more or lessrapid decline of genuine Marxist politics in South Asia.