1838–1897 · Iran / Afghanistan; India, Egypt, Ottoman Empire · Political activist, journalist, philosopher, pan-Islamist
Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī was born in 1838 or 1839. He presented himself as an Afghan, but most historians now accept that he came from Asadābād near Hamadan in Iran and received a Shiʿi religious and philosophical education there and in the shrine cities of Iraq. He travelled to India as a young man and then to Afghanistan, where he briefly advised the Amir.
His most influential period was spent in Egypt (1871–79), where he gathered a circle of students, among them Muḥammad ʿAbduh, and encouraged political journalism. Expelled in 1879, he went to Hyderabad and Calcutta, where he wrote his Persian treatise against the Indian ‘naturalists’ associated with Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, later translated into Arabic by ʿAbduh as al-Radd ʿalā al-dahriyyīn. In Paris in 1884 he and ʿAbduh published the journal al-ʿUrwa al-wuthqā, which called on Muslims to unite against European, and above all British, domination. In 1883 he also published a French reply to Ernest Renan’s lecture on Islam and science.
His later years took him to Russia, back to Iran, where he opposed the Qajar tobacco concession of 1890–91, and finally to Istanbul at the invitation of Sultan ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd II. He died there of cancer in 1897, living under close surveillance.
Al-Afghānī left relatively few writings, and his religious views remain debated, but his message that Muslims should recover the rational and scientific spirit of their civilisation and unite politically against imperialism shaped pan-Islamism, Islamic modernism and anti-colonial nationalism. Through ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā his influence reached the reform movements of the twentieth century.
