264 DESTINY DISRUPTED
group Khalifa Omar appointed to pick his successor. That shura
had to present its nominee to the Muslims of Medina and get their
approval. Of course that community numbered in the low thou-
sands and its leading members could all fit in the main mosque
and its surrounding courtyard, so shura democracy was the direct
democracy of the town hall meeting. How that model could be ap-
plied to a whole huge country such as Egypt was another question.
Ijma means "consensus." This concept originated in a saying
attributed to the Prophet: "My community will never agree on an
error." The ulama used the saying as a justification for asserting
that when they all agreed on a doctrinal point, the point lay be-
yond further questioning or dispute. In short, they co-opted ijma
to mean consensus among themselves. Jamaluddin, however, rein-
terpreted the two concepts and expanded their application. From
shura and ijma, he argued that in Islam, rulers had no legitimacy
without the support of their people.
His ideas about democracy made the king of Egypt nervous,
and his harangues about the decadence of the upper classes of-
fended everyone above a certain income level. In 1879, Jamalud-
din was evicted from Egypt, at which point he backtracked to ...
- India. There, the "liberal" Aligarh movement, founded and led by
Sir Sayyid Ahmad, had evolved into a force to be reckoned with. But
Jamaluddin saw Sir Sayyid Ahmad as a fawning British lapdog, and
said so in his only full-scale book, Refutation of the Materialists. The
British, however, liked Sayyid Ahmad's ideas. When a rebellion broke
out in Egypt, British authorities claimed that Jamaluddin had incited
the eruption through his followers and they put him in prison for a
few months. When the rebellion died down, they released him but
expelled him from India, and so, in 1882 he went to ...
- Paris, where he wrote articles for various publications in English,
Persian, Arabic, Urdu, and French {in all of which languages he
was not merely fluent but articulate and even capable of elo-
quence). In his articles he developed the idea that Islam was at
core a rational religion and that Islam had pioneered the scientific
revolution. He went on insisting that Muslim ulama and despots
had retarded scientific progress in the Muslim world but said cler-
