Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XVII

RELIGION

1825: B

ARODA

Late in the afternoon of 29 November, a British surgeon arrived on the banks of the Vishwamitri river, there to watch a young woman be burnt alive. Richard Hartley Kennedy was no idle gawper. He had a long and distinguished record of service in India. The improbable empire there that, over the course of the previous decades, the East India Company had succeeded in carving out for itself, and which by 1825 had come to span most of the subcontinent, depended for its smooth running on doctors no less than on soldiers. For years, Kennedy had been charged with maintaining the health of the Company’s employees; first in Bombay, and then, from 1819, in the city of Baroda, some three hundred miles to the north. This, on paper, was the capital of an independent kingdom. Paper, though, in British India, invariably worked to the Company’s advantage. By terms of a treaty it had signed with the Maharaja of Baroda, responsibility for the kingdom’s external affairs now rested with the Company. Its representative in the city – the resident, as he was known – was certainly no plenipotentiary; but nor was he merely an ambassador. British rule in Baroda, as in other princely states across India, functioned best by veiling itself. Kennedy, as a surgeon employed in the residency, perfectly understood this. Arriving that afternoon by the great bridge that spanned the Vishwamitri, he knew that no one in the procession he could see approaching the river would dare forbid him to watch it; but he knew as well that he had no authority to stop what was about to happen.

Some months earlier, when her husband was still alive, Kennedy had met Ambabai. He remembered her as a happy woman. Now, though, with her husband dead of fever, she looked very different: her hair dishevelled, her expression determined and severe. That afternoon, following in the dead man’s train and then watching as the pyre was built, it was Ambabai, not her husband, who was the centre of attention. The sun began to set. The funeral-bed was given the look of ‘the domestic couch of nightly repose’.¹ Ambabai washed herself in the shallows, poured out libations, raised her arms and looked up at the sky. Then, stepping out of the river, she exchanged her wet sari for clothes of a dull saffron colour. A crowd gathered round her. She handed out bequests. Soon there was nothing left for her to give away, and the crowd fell back again. Ambabai, after a brief pause, so momentary as barely to be observable, circled the pyre, her eyes fixed all the time on the body of her husband. A fire was lit in a great metal dish. Ambabai tended it, feeding it with sandalwood. She rose to her feet. She was handed a mirror. She looked into it; then gave it back, declaring that she had seen in it the history of her soul, which soon enough would be returning ‘into the bosom and substance of the Creator’.² For now, though, her husband was calling. Climbing onto the pyre, she made herself comfortable beside his corpse, and began to sing her own funeral song. Even as the pyre was lit, she continued to chant. Soon, the heat of the flames had forced the spectators back. Ambabai, though, never changed her position. Nor did she ever scream. Smoke billowed. The sun set. Beside the dark-flowing river, the embers glowed, then faded. By midnight, nothing was left of the pyre save a heap of grey and powdery ashes. Ambabai had become what she had set out to become: a ‘good woman’, a sati.

Here, in this exotic and shocking scene, was everything that a respectable British family might care to read about over the breakfast table. Reports of ‘suttee’ – as Kennedy termed Ambabai’s self-immolation – filled the pages of London newspapers and periodicals. The image of a beautiful widow consigning herself to fire combined titillation with all the evidence that was needed of Christianity’s invincible superiority to paganism. Looming behind Kennedy’s report was a horror of idolatry that reached back unbroken through Christian history. Cortés, confronted by racks of skulls in Tenochtitlan, and Boniface, venturing deep into the forests of Saxony, and Origen, scorning the blood-caked altars of Alexandria, had all borne witness to it. The venerable conviction that idols were raised to demons, witness to ‘the extent and power of Satan’s empire’,³ exerted a firm grip on British Evangelicals. Even Kennedy, watching Ambabai, found himself comparing her to a priestess of Apollo. The implication was clear. Whether in ancient Greece or in British India, idolatry always wore the same face. Paganism was paganism.

Except that Kennedy knew there was more to what he had seen on the banks of the Vishwamitri than that. Witnessing the courage with which Ambabai had embraced her fate, he had saluted ‘the heavenly aspirations and glowing enthusiasm of her mind’.⁴ He knew how far back the traditions of India reached. The very name used by the British to describe its inhabitants – ‘Hindoos’ – derived ultimately from the court of Darius. Hard-nosed though officials of the East India Company might be, the sheer antiquity of Indian civilisation could not help but inspire in many of them a sense of awe. Unsurprisingly, then – given that their own ancestors had been savages in forests at a time when India was already fabled for its wealth and sophistication – they were reluctant to dismiss ‘the Hindoo superstition’⁵ merely as superstition. Indeed, so one British officer declared, there was little need of Christianity ‘to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilised society’.⁶ While few Christians went quite that far, there was, even so, an increasing readiness to accept that Hindus could not simply be dismissed as pagans. They had scriptures as old as the Bible. They had temples that, in terms of scale and beauty, rivalled the cathedrals of Europe. They had an entire social class – ‘Brahmins’ – who appeared to Europeans much like priests. It was Brahmins who had accompanied Ambabai to the Vishwamitri; Brahmins who had built her pyre; Brahmins who had readied her for death. It seemed reasonable enough to reckon, then, that Hindus had a religion.

Yet British observers, when they sought to view India through this prism, faced an obvious challenge. Three hundred years had passed since the onset of the Reformation, and in that time the word religion had come to take on shades of meaning that would have baffled a Christian in medieval England. How much more foreign, then, was it bound to seem to a Hindu. No word remotely approximating to it existed in any Indian language. To Protestants, the essence of religion appeared clear: it lay in the inner relationship of a believer to the divine. Faith was a personal, a private thing. As such, it existed in a sphere distinct from the rest of society: from government, or trade, or law. There was the dimension of the religious, and then there was the dimension of everything else: the ‘secular’. That other societies too could be divided up in this manner might – to a people less self-confident than the British – have appeared far-fetched: for it was, in truth, a most distinctive way of seeing the world. Nevertheless, to officials in India possessed of a scholarly turn of mind, intrigued by the ancient land they found themselves administering, and forever conscious of just how different it was to their own, the conviction that such a thing as a ‘Hindoo religion’ existed was simply too useful to abandon. In ancient Greece, the story had been told of a robber named Procrustes, who, after inviting a guest to lie down on a bed, would then rack his limbs or amputate them, as required to ensure a trim fit. It was in a very similar spirit that British scholars, confronted by all the manifold riches, complexities and ambivalences of Indian civilisation, set to shaping out of them something that might be recognisable as a religion.

Inevitably, there was much stretching and editing of definitions. The most urgent need was to decide who ‘Hindoos’ actually were: people from India or people who practised the ‘Hindoo religion’? Increasingly, since talk of ‘Hindoo Muslims’ or ‘Hindoo Christians’ risked obvious confusion, the British found themselves opting for the second definition. This in turn facilitated another linguistic innovation. The more that British officials identified Hindus with a religion native to India, so the more they required a convenient shorthand for it. ‘Hindooism’, the word that came to fill the gap, had originally been coined back in the 1780s. The first man known to have used it was an Evangelical. Charles Grant, a Scot who had served the Company both as a soldier and on its board of trade, had initially felt little sense of Christian mission. He had travelled to India with the goal of getting rich. Accordingly, he had seen no reason to disagree with the settled policy of the Company: that its only business was business. Any attempt to convert Hindus to Christianity would risk the precarious foundations of its rule. Its purpose was the making of money, not the winning of souls. But then had come the great crisis in Grant’s life. Gambling debts had threatened his finances. Two of his children had died of smallpox within ten days of each other. Grant, in the depths of his agony, had found himself redeemed by grace. From that moment on, the great object of his life had been to win the Hindus for Christ. Convinced that they were lost in ignorance, he had pledged himself to saving them from all their idolatries and superstitions. These were what he had meant by ‘Hindooism’.

His mission, so he believed, was one of emancipation. This was why, returning to London in 1790, he had made common cause with the Abolitionists. Slavery, after all, came in many forms. If divine providence had bestowed upon Britain the chance to end the transportation of human chattels across the Atlantic, then so also had it granted to the East India Company an incomparable opportunity to abolish the practices that kept Hindus in servitude to superstition. In 1813, while the Company was embroiled in negotiations with the British government over a renewal of its charter, Grant had seized his chance. For decades, he had been demanding that its directors be legally obliged to work for the ‘religious and moral improvement’⁷ of the Hindus. Now, in a decisive moment, the campaign had come to the very heart of power. Evangelicals had enthusiastically rallied to the cause; 908 petitions had been delivered to Parliament. The British government – as it would the following year, when pressed to alter its policy on the slave trade – had bowed to public opinion. The charter had been amended. Yet even with this success under his belt, Grant had persisted in his activism. One Hindu practice more than any other had loomed in his nightmares. ‘If we had conquered such a kingdom as Mexico, where a number of human victims were regularly offered every year upon the altar of the sun, should we have calmly acquiesced in this horrid mode of butchery?’⁸ Grant’s question, addressed to the directors of the Company, was one that even after his death in 1823 continued to reverberate. As Kennedy, in distant Baroda, watched Ambabai performing the rituals required of a sati, so Britain was seized by one of its periodic fits of morality. Demands were becoming overwhelming for a ban on the self-immolation of widows.

All of which put the Company in a bind. Despite the change to its charter, it remained reluctant to interfere in the religious practices of its Hindu subjects. What, though, if it could be proven that suttee was not a religious practice? The question, of course, was one that would have made no sense at all before the coming of the British to India; but increasingly, after decades of rule by the Company, there were Indians who understood its implications well enough. Hindus who used words such as religion, or secular, or Hinduism were not merely displaying their fluency in English. They were also adopting a new and alien perspective on their country, and turning it to their advantage. Evangelicals were not alone in opposing the immolation of widows. There were Hindus who opposed it as well. For centuries, praise of the sati had alternated with forthright condemnation. A thousand years and more before the self-immolation of Ambabai, a Hindu poet had denounced deaths such as hers as ‘a mere freak of madness, a path of ignorance’.⁹ The British conviction that there existed in India a religion named Hinduism, comparable to Christianity, complete with orthodoxies and ancient scriptures, provided Hindus fluent in English with the perfect opportunity to shape what this religion should look like. Brahmins, because of their reputation for learning, enjoyed a particular advantage. In 1817, one of them had presented the government in Calcutta with a paper which insisted that it was purely optional for widows to incinerate themselves; a year later, another had gone even further, and demonstrated that there was no evidence at all for the practice in Hinduism’s oldest texts. Insisting on this to the British, Raja Rammohun Roy had known exactly what he was doing. Sufficiently intrigued by Christianity to have taught himself Hebrew and Greek, and familiar with the workings of the Company after years of working in its various departments, he understood precisely how to give its officials what they so desperately needed: a justification acceptable to Hindus for the banning of suttee.

The burning of widows on pyres, Roy assured the British, was a purely secular phenomenon. That there were Brahmins who officiated at such rituals was due solely to their ignorance of Hindu scripture. There was authentic Hinduism, and then there was a Hinduism that had been corrupted by the greed and superstition of malevolent priests. Bogus tradition was like the creepers that, left unchecked, would subsume an ancient temple, and swallow it up into the jungle. If this all sounded rather Protestant, then so indeed it was. Roy’s resentment of Christians as ‘persons who travel to a distant country for the purpose of overturning the opinions of its inhabitants and introducing their own’¹⁰ had not prevented him from recognising their usefulness. Each had much to offer the other. Roy was able to reassure the British that suttee was not a religious practice, and might therefore legitimately be banned; the British were able to back Roy in his efforts to prescribe how Hinduism should properly be defined. In 1829, the Governor-General of India issued a decree, forbidding ‘the practice of Suttee; or of burning or burying alive the widows of Hindoos’.¹¹ One year later, fearing that the British government might overturn the ban, Roy travelled to London. There, in the imperial capital, he secured a definitive victory. Brought to his grave soon afterwards by the inclemencies of the English climate, he was widely mourned. Evangelicals had been able to recognise him – Hindu though he was – as one of their own.

‘Christianity spreads in two ways,’ an Indian historian has written: ‘through conversion and through secularisation.’¹² Missionaries who dreamed of reaping a great harvest of Indian souls were destined to be disappointed. There was to be no humbling of the Hindu gods, no triumphant toppling of their idols into the dust. British officials continued to tread a delicate and careful path. Even so much as a rumour that the Company was working for the conversion of India had the potential to cripple its rule. In 1857, indeed, these would trigger an uprising so explosive that briefly, for a few blood-soaked months, the entire future of Britain’s empire in India would be left hanging by a thread. The shock of it would never be forgotten by the imperial authorities. Their determination not to risk the promotion of Christianity in India was left even more rock-solid. Nevertheless, they had no hesitation in fostering assumptions bred of Christian theology. That there existed a religion called Hinduism, and that it functioned in a dimension distinct from entire spheres of human activity – spheres called ‘secular’ in English – was not a conviction native to the subcontinent. Instead, it was distinctively Protestant. That, though, would not prevent it from proving perhaps the most successful of all British imports to India. In time, indeed – when, after two centuries, Britain’s rule was brought at last to an end, and India emerged to independence – it would do so as a self-proclaimed secular nation. A country did not need to become Christian, it turned out, to start seeing itself through Christian eyes.

Jew-ish

In 1842, the king of Prussia visited Europe’s oldest building site. Friedrich Wilhelm IV ruled a state that, over the course of the preceding century, had established itself as the most formidable in Germany. Humiliated by Napoleon, who had occupied its capital, Berlin, and sought to neuter it for good, Prussia had ended up playing a key role in his defeat. It was a Prussian army that had forced him from his throne in 1814, and a Prussian army that had sealed his fate at Waterloo. Napoleon’s empire, though, was not alone in having been ended. So too had an infinitely more venerable order. On 6 August 1806, barely noticed amid all the storm-tides of revolution and war, the line of Caesars founded by Otto the Great had been formally terminated. An empire that for almost a millennium had prided itself on being both holy and Roman was no more. Even with Napoleon’s defeat, there had been no bringing it back from the dead.

This was why, at the Congress of Vienna, the representatives of the great powers had devoted most of their time, not to discussions of the slave trade, but to redrawing the map of central Europe. Prussia had played its hand well. A state that had been shorn by Napoleon of many of its provinces had emerged from the Congress much expanded. It had absorbed almost half of Saxony. Wittenberg had become a Prussian possession. So too, on the western border of what had once been the Holy Roman Empire, had a great tranche of the Rhineland. Friedrich Wilhelm had first travelled there in 1814. The highlight of the young crown prince’s journey had been a visit to Cologne. The city – unlike Berlin, an upstart capital far removed from the traditional heartlands of Christendom – was an ancient one. Its foundations reached back to the time of Augustus. Its archbishop had been one of the seven electors. Its cathedral, begun in 1248 and abandoned in 1473, had for centuries been left with a crane on the massive stump of its southern tower. Friedrich Wilhelm, visiting the half-completed building, had been enraptured. He had pledged himself there and then to finishing it. Now, two years after his accession to the Prussian throne, he was ready to fulfil his vow. That summer, he ordered builders back to work. On 4 September he dedicated a new cornerstone. Then, in a spontaneous and heartfelt address to the people of Cologne, he saluted their city. The cathedral, he declared, would rise as a monument to ‘the spirit of German unity’.¹³

Startling evidence of this was to be found on the executive committee set up to supervise the project. Simon Oppenheim, a banker awarded a lifelong honorary membership of the board, was fabulously wealthy, highly cultured – and a Jew. Even within living memory his presence in Cologne would have been illegal. For almost four hundred years, Jews had been banned from the devoutly Catholic city. Only in 1798, following its occupation by the French, and the abolition of its ancient privileges, had they been allowed to settle there again. Oppenheim’s father had moved to Cologne in 1799, two years before its official absorption into the French Republic. Since France’s revolutionary government, faithful to the Declaration of Rights, had granted full citizenship to its Jews, the Oppenheims had been able to enjoy a civic equality with their Catholic neighbours. Not even a revision of this by Napoleon, who in 1808 had brought in a law expressly designed to discriminate against Jewish business interests, had dampened their sense of identification with Cologne – nor their ability to run a highly successful bank from the city. It helped as well that Prussia, by the time it came to annex the Rhineland, had already decreed that its Jewish subjects should rank as both ‘natives’ and ‘citizens’. That Napoleon’s discriminatory legislation remained on the statute book, and that the Prussian decree had continued to ban Jews from entering state employment, did nothing to diminish Oppenheim’s hopes for further progress. The cathedral was for him a symbol not of the Christian past, but of a future in which Jews might be full and equal citizens of Germany. That was why he agreed to help fund it. Friedrich Wilhelm, rewarding him with a house call, certainly had no hesitation in saluting him as a patriot. A Jew, it seemed, might indeed be a German.

Except that the king, by visiting Oppenheim, was making a rather different point. To Friedrich Wilhelm, the status of Cologne Cathedral as an icon of the venerable Christian past was not some incidental detail, but utterly fundamental to his passion for seeing it finished. Half-convinced that the French Revolution had been a harbinger of the Apocalypse, he dreamed of restoring to monarchy the sacral quality that it had enjoyed back in the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire. That he himself was fat, balding and short-sighted in the extreme did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for posing as a latter-day Charlemagne. ‘Fatty Flounder’, as he was nicknamed, had even renovated a ruined medieval castle, and inaugurated it with a torchlit procession in fancy dress. Unsurprisingly, then, confronted by the challenge of integrating Jews into his plans for a shimmeringly Christian Prussia, he had groped after a solution that might as well have been conjured up from the Middle Ages. Only Christians, Friedrich Wilhelm argued, could be classed as Prussian. Jews should be organised into corporations. They would thereby be able to maintain their distinctive identity in an otherwise Christian realm. This was not at all what Oppenheim wished to hear. Shortly before the king’s arrival in Cologne, he had gone so far as to write an open protest. Others in the city rallied to the cause. The regional government pushed for full emancipation. ‘The strained relationship between Christians and Jews,’ thundered Cologne’s leading newspaper, ‘can be resolved only through unconditional equalisation of status.’¹⁴ The result was deadlock. Friedrich Wilhelm – channelling the spirit of a mail-clad medieval emperor – refused to back down. Prussia, he insisted, was Christian through and through. Its monarchy, its laws, its values – all derived from Christianity. That being so, there could be no place for Jews in its administration. If they wished to become properly Prussian, then they had a simple recourse: conversion. All a Jew had to do to be considered for public office was to make ‘confession of Christianity in public acts’.¹⁵ This was why Friedrich Wilhelm had been willing to pay a social call on Oppenheim. What was a Jew prepared to fund a cathedral, after all, if not one close to finding Christ?

But the king had been deluding himself. Oppenheim had no intention of finding Christ. Instead, he and his family continued with their campaign. It was not long before Cologne, previously renowned as a bastion of chauvinism, was serving as a trailblazer for Jewish emancipation. In 1845, Napoleon’s discriminatory legislation was definitively abolished. Time would see a sumptuous domed synagogue, designed by the architect responsible for the cathedral, and funded – inevitably – by the Oppenheims, rise up as one of the great landmarks of the city. Well before its construction, though, it was evident that Friedrich Wilhelm’s dreams of resurrecting a medieval model of Christianity were doomed. In 1847, one particularly waspish theologian portrayed the king as a modern-day Julian the Apostate, chasing after a world for ever gone. Then, as though to set the seal on this portrait, revolution returned to Europe. History seemed to be repeating itself. In February 1848, a French king was deposed. By March, protests and uprisings were flaring across Germany. Slogans familiar from the time of Robespierre could be heard on the streets of Berlin. The Prussian queen briefly dreaded that only the guillotine was lacking. Although, in the event, the insurrectionary mood was pacified, and the tottering Prussian monarchy stabilised, concessions offered by Friedrich Wilhelm would prove enduring. His kingdom emerged from the great crisis of 1848 as – for the first time – a state with a written constitution. The vast majority of its male inhabitants were now entitled to vote for a parliament. Among them, enrolled at last as equal citizens, were Prussia’s Jews. Friedrich Wilhelm, appalled by the threat to the divine order that he had always pledged himself to uphold, declared himself sick to the stomach. ‘If I were not a Christian I would take my own life.’¹⁶

Nevertheless, as the king might justifiably have pointed out, it was not Judaism that had been emancipated, but only those who practised it. Supporters of the Declaration of Rights had always been explicit on that score. The shackles of superstition were forged in synagogues no less than in churches. ‘We must grant everything to Jews as individuals, but refuse to them everything as a nation!’ This was the slogan with which, late in 1789, proponents of Jewish emancipation in France had sought to reassure their fellow revolutionaries. ‘They must form neither a political body nor an order in the state, they must be citizens individually.’¹⁷ And so it had come to pass. When the French Republic granted citizenship to Jews, it had done so on the understanding that they abandon any sense of themselves as a people set apart. No recognition or protection had been offered to the Mosaic law. The identity of Jews as a distinct community was tolerated only to the degree that it did not interfere with ‘the common good’.¹⁸ Here – garlanded with the high-flown rhetoric of the Enlightenment though it might be – was a programme for civic self-improvement that aimed at transforming the very essence of Judaism. Heraclius, a millennium and more previously, had attempted something very similar. The dream that Jewish distinctiveness might be subsumed into an identity that the whole world could share – one in which the laws given by God to mark the Jews out from other peoples would cease to matter – reached all the way back to Paul. Artists in the early years of the French Revolution, commissioned to depict the Declaration of Rights, had not hesitated to represent it as a new covenant, chiselled onto stone tablets and delivered from a blaze of light. Jews could either sign up to this radiant vision, or else be banished into storm-swept darkness. If this seemed to some Jews a very familiar kind of ultimatum, then that was because it was. That the Declaration of Rights claimed an authority for itself more universal than that of Christianity only emphasised the degree to which, in the scale of its ambitions and the scope of its pretensions, it was profoundly Christian.

The price paid by Jews for their freedom was, then, a real one. Citizenship required them to become just that bit more Christian. This, perhaps, was more evident in Germany even than in France. Devout Lutherans – Luther’s own hatred for the Jews notwithstanding – were no less capable than Jacobins of making the case for Jewish emancipation. Some, indeed, had been doing so since before the fall of the Bastille. Their case was rich in the familiar rhetoric of Luther’s writings: that the Law of Moses, which was withered, and desiccated, and arid, still held all those who obeyed it in its corpse-like embrace; that the papacy, by persecuting the Jews throughout the Middle Ages, had left them so degraded in character that they had remained ever since in a backward and corrupted condition. Only liberate them from those two favourite objects of Lutheran obloquy, and all would be well. Judaism would reform itself. Jews would become productive citizens. This programme – no matter that it was shot through with Protestant assumptions – was one with which German Jews had generally been willing to ally themselves. While naturally offended by any suggestion that the Mosaic law might have been superseded by the law of Christ, they did not hesitate to promote it as compatible with the law of Prussia. The days of an independent Jewish state were long gone. In place of Israel, Jews now had Judaism. This word – Christian invention that it was – was one that they had never thought to use until the prospect of emancipation began to glimmer before them. Pressed by Protestant theologians to accept a status for Jewish law as something merely private and ceremonial, they were being pressed to accept something more: that they belonged not to a nation, but to a religion.

Many Jews had no problem with this concept. Some, indeed, found it liberating. In 1845, a group of Jewish intellectuals in Berlin issued a formal appeal for a Judaism that, transcending the written prescriptions of Torah, might be transformed into a religion ‘that corresponds with our age and the sentiments of our heart’.¹⁹ Already, even as Friedrich Wilhelm was attempting to re-erect the barriers between Jews and Christians, rabbis across the Lutheran heartlands of Germany had begun to proclaim the primacy of faith over law. Other Jews, meanwhile, appalled by any suggestion that the covenant revealed to Moses on Sinai might not have been definitive, condemned them as heretics. Two rival traditions – ‘Reform’ and ‘Orthodox’ – began to emerge. In time, the Prussian state itself would come to formalise these divisions. Jews insistent on the enduring authority of the Mosaic law would be given official licence to establish themselves as a separate community. ‘Judaism,’ its founder insisted, ‘is not a religion’²⁰ – and yet, for all that, he protested too much. Beliefs, privately and passionately held, were becoming the mark of Jewish as well as of Protestant congregations. Christians, it seemed, were no longer alone in bearing witness to the Reformation.

The great claim of what, in 1846, an English newspaper editor first termed ‘secularism’ was to neutrality. Yet this was a conceit. Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. That there existed twin dimensions, the secular and the religious, was an assumption that reached back centuries beyond the Reformation: to Gregory VII, and to Columbanus, and to Augustine. The concept of secularism – for all that it was promoted by the editor who invented the word as an antidote to religion – testified not to Christianity’s decline, but to its seemingly infinite capacity for evolution. Manifest in English, this was manifest in other languages too. When, in 1842, the word laïcité first appeared in French, it signified both a similar concept to ‘secularism’, and a similar pedigree: the laicus had originally been none other than the people of God. In Europe as in India, then, the process by which peoples who were not Christian came to be identified with a religion was inevitably a Procrustean one. For Jews – so similar to Christians, so profoundly different – the task of negotiating a new identity was, perhaps, especially delicate; and nowhere more so than in Germany. There, as the doomed efforts of Friedrich Wilhelm to resurrect medieval Christendom bore witness, Christians too were increasingly uncertain of their place in a fast-changing world. What, amid the ruins of the Holy Roman Empire, did it mean to be a German? Jews, by fashioning a religion that could take its place in a secular order alongside Christianity, had won the right to help solve this puzzle. Yet whether their fellow Germans would welcome their contribution, or resent them for making the attempt, remained an open question. Emancipation was not merely a solution; it was an ongoing challenge. The problem of how a defiantly distinctive culture that reached back millennia might best be squared with a secular order shot through with Christian assumptions was one that lacked a ready solution. The search for it, though, could hardly be ducked. Jews had little option, then, but to continue negotiating the boundaries of secularism, and to hope for the best.

A Crime against Humanity

For almost two and a half millennia, one of the inscriptions commissioned by Darius to justify his rule of the world – written in three distinct languages, and featuring a particularly imperious portrait of the king himself – had been preserved on the side of a mountain by the name of Bisitun. Carved into a cliff some two hundred feet above the road that led from the Iranian plateau to Iraq, its survival had been ensured by its sheer inaccessibility. The chance to risk life and limb in the cause of deciphering ancient scripts, however, was one that the odd adventurer might positively relish. One such was Henry Rawlinson, a British officer on secondment from India to the Persian court. He first scouted out Bisitun in 1835, scaling the cliff as best as he was able, and recording as much of the inscription as he could make out. Then, eight years later, he returned to the site properly equipped with planks and ropes. Balanced precariously on a ladder, he was able to complete his transcription. ‘The interest of the occupation,’ he later recalled, ‘entirely did away with any sense of danger.’²¹ By 1845 Rawlinson had completed a full translation of the section written in Persian, and sent it for publication to London. The Great King spoke once more.

The boasts recorded on the cliff-face of Bisitun were ones that an officer in the employ of the East Indian Company might well appreciate. Darius had combined ambition on a global scale with a mastery of all the various political arts required to satisfy it: ruthlessness, cunning, self-confidence. Rawlinson, as seasoned a spy as he was a soldier, knew perfectly well that empires did not magic themselves into being. British power, already securely established in India, depended for its maintenance on agents willing to fight dirty. Rawlinson did not devote all his time to hunting down ancient inscriptions. Whether sweet-talking the Shah of Persia, manoeuvring against the Russians, or winning medals for gallantry in Afghanistan, he was a talented player in what a fellow intelligence officer, writing to him in 1840, had termed the ‘great game’.²² Darius too, whose depiction at Bisitun showed him crushing a rival underfoot, had been a player in the great game of imperial advancement – a player, and a victor. Nine kings had thought to defy him; nine kings had been brought to defeat. The sculptor at Bisitun, obedient to his master’s commission, had portrayed them as dwarfs, tethered together by their necks and cowering before their conqueror. Here, for an officer such as Rawlinson, was timeless testimony to the brute realities of empire-building.

Yet Darius, when he set himself to the conquest of barbarous and fractious peoples, had claimed to be doing so for the good of the cosmos. His mission had been to combat the Lie. Here, in his conviction that evil needed to be opposed wherever it was found, and truth brought to the outermost limits of the world, had lain a justification for empire of such enduring potency that Rawlinson himself, two and a half thousand years on, bore witness to it. The ‘great game’ was not an end in itself. The duty of a Christian nation, so Rawlinson’s colleague had advised him, was to work for the regeneration of less fortunate lands: to play a ‘noble part’.²³ This, of course, was to cast his own country as the very model of civilisation, the standard by which all others might be judged: a conceit that came so naturally to imperial peoples that the Persians too, back in the time of Darius, had revelled in it. Yet the British, despite the certitude felt by many of them that their empire was a blessing bestowed on the world by heaven, could not entirely share in the swagger of the Great King. Pride in their dominion over palm and pine was accompanied by a certain nervousness. The sacrifice demanded by their God was a humble and a contrite heart. To rule foreign peoples – let alone to plunder them of their wealth, or to settle their lands, or to hook their cities on opium – was also, for a Christian people, never quite to forget that their Saviour had lived as the slave, not the master, of a mighty empire. It was an official of that empire who had sentenced him to death; it was soldiers of that empire who had nailed him to a cross. Rome’s dominion had long since passed away. The reign of Christ had not.

Every British Foreign Secretary – no matter how hard-nosed he might be, no matter how bluff – lived with the consciousness of this. Command of the oceans would be for nothing unless it served ‘the Hands of Providence’.²⁴ One sin more than any other weighed heavily on the conscience of the British: a sin that only recently had hung like a millstone about their necks, ready to sink them to their perdition. In 1833, when the ban on the slave trade had been followed by the emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire, abolitionists had greeted their hour of victory in rapturously biblical terms. It was the rainbow seen by Noah over the floodwaters; it was the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea; it was the breaking of the Risen Christ from his tomb. Britain, a country that for so long had been lost in the valley of the shadow of death, had emerged at last into light. Now, in atonement for her guilt, it was her responsibility to help all the world be born again.

Nonetheless, British abolitionists knew better than to trumpet their sense of Protestant mission too loudly. Slavery was widespread, after all, and had made many in Portugal, Spain and France exceedingly rich. A campaign against the practice could never hope to be truly international without the backing of Catholic powers. No matter that it was Britain’s naval muscle that enabled slave-ships to be searched and their crews to be put on trial, the legal frameworks that licensed these procedures had to appear resolutely neutral. British jurists, conquering the deep suspicion of anything Spanish that was an inheritance from the age of Elizabeth I, brought themselves to praise the ‘courage and noble principle’²⁵ of Bartolomé las Casas. The result was an entire apparatus of law – complete with treaties and international courts – that made a virtue out of merging both Protestant and Catholic traditions. In 1842, when an American diplomat defined the slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’,²⁶ the term was one calculated to be acceptable to lawyers of all Christian denominations – and none. Slavery, which only decades previously had been taken almost universally for granted, was now redefined as evidence of savagery and backwardness. To oppose it was to side with progress. To support it was to stand condemned before the bar, not just of Christianity, but of every religion.

All of which was liable to come as news to Muslims. In 1842, when the British consul-general to Morocco sought to press the cause of abolitionism, his request that the trade in African slaves be banned was greeted with blank incomprehension. It was a matter, the sultan declared, ‘on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of Adam’.²⁷ As proof, he might well have pointed to the United States, a nation that had proclaimed in its founding document that all men were created equal, and yet where the House of Representatives had only two years earlier ruled that it would no longer receive anti-slavery petitions. If this was testimony, on one level, to the sheer weight of abolitionist opinion, then it also reflected the obdurate determination of slave-owners in the south of the country never to relinquish their human property. American supporters of slavery scoffed at any claim that it might be incompatible with civilisation. Abolitionism, they pointed out, was a movement that had emanated from only a single small corner of the world. Against it was ranged the authority of Aristotle, and the jurists of ancient Rome, and the Bible itself. In the United States, there were still pastors convinced by a case almost totally abandoned by Protestants elsewhere: that the laws issued by God licensing slavery held eternally good. ‘He has given them his sanction, therefore, they must be in harmony with his moral character.’²⁸

A sentiment with which the sultan of Morocco would certainly have concurred. Missions by British abolitionists continued to be swatted aside. In 1844, the governor of an island off the Moroccan coast flatly informed one of them that any ban on slavery would be ‘against our religion’.²⁹ Such bluntness was hardly surprising. Wild claims that the spirit of scripture might be distinguished from its letter were liable to strike most Muslims as a foolish and sinister blasphemy. The law of God was not to be found written in the heart, but in the great inheritance of writings that derived from the lifetime of the Prophet. These, aflame with the divine as they were, brooked no contradiction. The owning of slaves was licensed by the Qur’an, by the example of Muhammad himself, and by the Sunna, that great corpus of Islamic traditions and practices. Who, then, were Christians to demand its abolition?

But the British, to the growing bafflement of Muslim rulers, refused to leave the question alone. Back in 1840, pressure on the Ottomans to eradicate the slave trade had been greeted in Constantinople, as the British ambassador in the city put it, ‘with extreme astonishment and a smile at the proposition of destroying an institution closely interwoven with the frame of society’.³⁰ A decade later, when the sultan found himself confronted by a devastating combination of military and financial crises, British support came at a predictable price. In 1854, the Ottoman government was obliged to issue a decree prohibiting the slave trade across the Black Sea; three years later the African slave trade was banned. Also abolished was the jizya, the tax on Jews and Christians that reached back to the very beginnings of Islam, and was directly mandated by the Qur’an. Such measures, of course, risked considerable embarrassment to the sultan. Their effect was, after all, to reform the Sunna according to the standards of the thoroughly infidel British. To acknowledge that anything contrary to Islamic tradition had been forced on a Muslim ruler by Christians was clearly unthinkable; and so Ottoman reformers instead made sure to claim a sanction of their own. Circumstances, they argued, had changed since the time of the Prophet. Rulings in Islamic jurisprudence that appeared to condone slavery were as nothing compared to those that praised the freeing of slaves as an act most pleasing to God. The Qur’an, if it were only to be read in the correct light, would open the eyes of the believer to the true essence of Islam: an essence that now, more than twelve centuries after the death of Muhammad, stood revealed as abolitionist through and through. Yet this manoeuvre, for all that it might seem to save the sultan’s face, threatened as well to infect Islam with profoundly Christian assumptions about the proper functioning of law. The spirit of the Sunna, it turned out, might after all trump its letter. Insidiously, among elite circles in the Islamic world, a novel understanding of legal proprieties was coming to be fostered: an understanding that derived ultimately not from Muhammad, nor from any Muslim jurist, but from Saint Paul.

In 1863, barely twenty years after the sultan of Morocco had declared slavery an institution approved since the dawn of time, the mayor of Tunis wrote a letter to the American consul-general, citing justifications drawn from Islamic scripture for its abolition. In the United States, escalating tensions over the rights and wrongs of the institution had helped to precipitate, in 1861, the secession of a confederacy of southern states, and a terrible war with what remained of the Union. Naturally, for as long as Americans continued to slaughter one another in battle, there could be no definitive resolution of the issue. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1863, the United States president, Abraham Lincoln, had issued a proclamation, declaring all slaves on Confederate territory to be free. Clearly, should the Unionists only emerge victorious from the civil war, then slavery was liable to be abolished across the country. It was in support of this eventuality that the mayor of Tunis sought to offer his encouragement. Aware that the Americans were unlikely to be swayed by citations from Islamic scripture, he concluded his letter by urging them to act instead out of ‘human mercy and compassion’.³¹ Here, perhaps, lay the ultimate demonstration of just how effective the attempt by Protestant abolitionists to render their campaign universal had become. A cause that, only a century earlier, had been the preserve of a few crankish Quakers had come to spread far and wide like the rushing wildfire of the Spirit. It did not need missionaries to promote evangelical doctrines around the world. Lawyers and ambassadors might achieve it even more effectively: for they did it, in the main, by stealth. A crime against humanity was bound to have far more resonance beyond the limits of the Christian world than a crime against Christ. A crusade, it turned out, might be more effective for keeping the cross well out of sight.

All of which promised great advantage to the empire that had first launched it. The British had not begun their campaign to stamp out the slave trade in any mood of cynicism. At odds with their immediate interests, both geopolitical and economic, it was also extremely expensive. Nevertheless, the more the tide of global opinion turned against slavery, so the more the prestige of the nation that had first recanted it was inevitably burnished. ‘England,’ exclaimed a Persian prince in 1862, ‘assumes to be the determined enemy of the slave trade, and has gone to an enormous expense to liberate the African races, to whom she is no way bound save by the tie of a common humanity.’³² Yet already, even as he was expressing his wonderment at such selflessness, the British were busy capitalising on the prestige it had won them. In 1857, a treaty that committed the shah to suppressing the slave trade in the Persian Gulf had also served to consolidate Britain’s influence over his country. Meanwhile, in the heart of Africa, missionaries were starting to venture where Europeans had never before thought to go. Reports they brought back, of the continuing depredations of Arab slavers, confirmed the view of many in Britain that slavery would never be wholly banished until the entire continent had been won for civilisation. That this equated to their own rule was, of course, taken for granted. ‘I will search for the lost and bring back the strays.’ So God had declared in the Bible. ‘I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy.’³³ Here – not just for Britain, but for any power that might plausibly lay claim to it – lay a licence for conquest that, in due course, would foster a headlong scramble for colonies. It was not the slavers who would end up settling Africa, and subjugating it to foreign rule, but – by an irony familiar from Christian history – the emancipators.