Kuyper On Islam

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68359-027-9
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Reihe: Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology

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

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a leading Dutch figure in education, politics, and theology. He was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, was appointed to Parliament, and served as prime minister. Kuyper also founded the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam, a political party, and a denomination, in addition to writing on a dizzying array of subjects.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kuyper, Abraham

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION THE WESTERN ISLAMIC WORLD AT THE DAWN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Third-class passengers on one of the Ottoman Empire’s new railroads, 1908 Just as Abraham Kuyper arrived at the Mediterranean shores in August 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth was being negotiated in New Hampshire, putting an end to the Russo-Japanese war; simultaneously in Saint Petersburg, Count Sergei Witte was announcing the Russian constitution. Inspired by these events, anti-government protests erupted in Iran while Kuyper was celebrating Christmas in the Holy Land. By the time Kuyper returned to the Netherlands in the summer of 1906, the first Russian state duma had met and the unrest in Iran had escalated into a full-blown constitutional revolution. As Kuyper set to writing, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, the British consul-general of Egypt, with whom Kuyper met on his visit there, resigned amid Egyptian demands for a constitution, and Young Turk revolutionaries forced restoration of the 1876 constitution in the Ottoman Empire, where Kuyper had spent several months. These extraordinary events, and the existence of broadly similar circumstances across northern Africa during Kuyper’s tour there, set the daily context of his great trek around the Mediterranean and the deeper context of his reflections and writing back at home. He had a lot of company in wondering whether a general uprising of the Islamic world was at hand, in acknowledging that European imperialism had a prime part in stoking it, and in fearing that the rebellion would take a religious form—“Pan-Islam.” THE DESCENT OF COLONIALISM The revolutionary changes of Kuyper’s time were set in motion by events stretching back nearly fifty years. Russia had overrun Iran’s Caucasus provinces and Central Asia, and Russian excavators had turned the port city of Baku, on the Caspian Sea, into the world’s first oil boom town in the 1850s. Meanwhile Britain purchased from Iran’s ruler, the shah, the rights to build telegraph lines there, the first of several such “concessions” arranged between that government and European powers. Britain and Russia competed for concessions in fishing, railroad building, banking, a lottery (later rescinded), and mineral rights. Iranians watched in consternation as the country’s economic wealth was sold off to Europeans while its national debt nonetheless remained insurmountably high. The most infamous concession was a grant for oil exploration in Iran, awarded in 1901 to William Knox D’Arcy, a British subject. However, at Kuyper’s time the 1890 concession for tobacco seemed the more onerous. It threatened thousands of Iranians’ livelihoods, and seemingly everyone joined a boycott and nationwide protests that finally got it canceled. While aspects of this story were peculiar to Iran, they were not wholly unique. The country’s general financial and political weakness, the demands for limited monarchy and constitutionalism, and the inspiration taken from the victory of little Japan over powerful Russia galvanized the Iranian protesters, who finally brought down the shah in the revolution of 1906. Similar scenes played out across the whole western Islamic world at this time—even in its most powerful states, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. Once the Ottoman Empire became a debtor in European financial markets in the 1850s, its huge volume of international trade, seventy percent of which was with central and Western Europe, made the empire vulnerable to major market fluctuations. It had taken on its first foreign debts during the Crimean War (1853–56), using as collateral highly liquid assets such as the annual tribute from Egypt and the customs revenues of the major ports of Izmir and Salonika. Additional debt incurred thereafter was secured against general revenues. The crisis came when the Vienna stock market crashed in May 1873 and global wheat prices collapsed; the empire’s revenue contractors could not meet their obligations to the Ottoman government. At the same time the government had no access to further credit and no means to relieve the pressure when drought and a bad harvest followed the next year. One thing led to another. The Ottoman government defaulted on its foreign debt. Violence broke out between villagers and landlords in Bosnia in the summer of 1875. There was Serbian and Bulgarian meddling in Bosnia, violence against Muslims in Bulgaria, a massacre of Bulgarians by Ottoman forces, and a short but disastrous Ottoman war with Russia (1877–78) that led to shocking losses of imperial territory on both the western and eastern rims of the Black Sea. The international Congress of Berlin (1878) settled the war and began sorting out the massive problem of Ottoman debt. Agreement was reached in December 1881 to create an international consortium called the Ottoman Public Debt Administration.1 Egypt, meanwhile, had its own separate arrangements with European financial powers. These dated from the same era, a boom period in Egypt, especially in cotton. Fueled by the search for alternate sources of raw cotton during the American Civil War, Egypt’s revenues from cotton exports at the end of the 1860s were ten times what they had been at the beginning of the decade. Formally still an Ottoman province paying an annual tribute to Istanbul, Egypt had been virtually autonomous for decades, under a hereditary viceroy called the khedive. Even the cotton boom, however, could not keep up with Egypt’s modernizing projects and Khedive Ismail’s extravagant lifestyle. The most ambitious project was the Suez Canal. Built under abysmal conditions by conscripted Egyptian labor and financed partly by the Egyptian government and partly by French and British investors, the canal opened to great fanfare in 1869. By 1875 Ismail had sold off Egypt’s 44-percent share and its 15 percent of eventual profits, yet even this was not enough to satisfy the country’s creditors. As in the Ottoman Empire a debt commission was established, a consortium run by European creditors; on-site comptrollers were appointed by Britain and France as well to supervise the budget. When Khedive Ismail challenged the commission, it deposed him in 1879. Three years later a revolt erupted, led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi with broad support among the army, urban notables, and agrarian villagers. Brought into the government as minister of war, Urabi strove for far-reaching reforms, including creation of a national assembly to manage Egypt’s finances and make political decisions. As conditions deteriorated, European creditors used the pretext of a riot in Alexandria (which Kuyper casts as an anti-Christian pogrom) to intervene in June 1882. Great Britain landed troops, seized the Suez Canal, and defeated Urabi’s resistance forces by the end of the summer. Thus began a British occupation of Egypt that was to last more than seventy years.2 Across North Africa similar circumstances prevailed.3 France had invaded and colonized Algiers as of 1830, and European rivalries spilled over into neighboring Morocco. In Tunis, the rulers (called beys) struggled to balance French, English, Italian, and Ottoman demands with their own wishes to develop the country’s communications and public works infrastructure. A constitution, the first in the Muslim world, was issued by the Bey of Tunis in 1860, who hoped to bring local notables into consensus on funding modernizing projects. Many opposed it, however, for the limits it placed on their own authority, and some also for religious reasons; it was withdrawn three years later when a rebellion brought Ottoman intervention. Instead the bey raised funds by issuing bonds and contracting loans with European financial institutions. Given local political restraints, it was impossible for him to collect adequate revenues to make the payments. With Tunis deep in arrears, in 1869 an international finance commission was created, dominated by representatives of British, French, and Italian creditors. French-Italian rivalries brought a French invasion and occupation of Tunis in 1881, support having been secured at the Berlin Congress as quid pro quo for the British occupation of Ottoman Cyprus and a free hand for Italy on the North African coast of Libya. As Kuyper observed, these colonial arrangements did accomplish some good, and they were not a simple matter of European control and native subservience. In Egypt, even if higher-paid British officials made the decisions, the colonial civil service was substantially staffed by native Egyptians. In Turkey, the Public Debt Administration staff was larger than the Ottoman finance ministry, and many native Ottoman civil servants built their careers working in it. In every case the various debt commissions negotiated more favorable terms with lenders, enabling lower payments and extended credit. In Egypt, payments on the debt declined from 60 percent of annual revenues before 1882 to roughly 25 to 33 percent of the budget after the British occupation. The budget even showed a surplus.4 The conditions of village life improved under British administration. Forced labor and corporal punishment ended. Public education suffered because Lord Cromer did not wish to feed nationalism, yet newspapers were published and a healthy level of public discussion of issues prevailed, a noteworthy contrast to the situation in...