THE REFORM MOVEMENTS 265
ics and despots had done the same in other religions too, includ-
ing Christianity. In France, at this time, a philosopher named
Ernest Renan was writing that Muslims were inherently incapable
of scientific thinking {Renan also said that the Chinese were a
"race with wonderful manual dexterity but no sense of honor,"
that Jews were "incomplete," that "Negroes" were happiest tilling
soil, that Europeans were natural masters and soldiers, and that if
everyone would just do what they were "made for" all would be
well with the world.^1 ) Jamaluddin engaged Renan in a famous de-
bate at the Sorbonne {famous among Muslims, at least) in which
he argued that Islam only seemed less "scientific" than Christian-
ity because it was founded later and was therefore in a somewhat
earlier stage of its development.
Here in Paris, Jamaluddin and one of his Egyptian proteges, Mo-
hammed Abduh, started a seminal journal called The Firmest Bond.
They published only eighteen issues before they ran out of money
and into other difficulties and had to shut the journal down, but in
those eighteen issues, Jamaluddin established the core of the credo
now called pan-Islamism. He declared that all the apparently local
struggles between diverse Muslim and European powers over vari-
ous specific issues-between the Iranians and Russia over Azerbai-
jan, between the Ottomans and Russia over Crimea, between the
British and Egyptians over bank loans, between the French and Al-
gerians over grain sales, between the British and the people oflndia
and Afghanistan over borders etc., etc. were not actually many dif-
ferent struggles over many different issues but one great struggle
over one great issue between just two global entities: Islam and the
West. He was the first to use these two words as coterminous and
of course historically conflicting categories. Sometime during this
period Jamaluddin also, it would seem, visited ...
- the United States, but little is known about his activities there,
and he certainly dipped in and out of ...
- London a few times, where he argued with Randolph Churchill,
the father of Winston Churchill, and with other British leaders
about British policies in Egypt. He also traveled in Germany, as
well as spending some time in Saint Petersburg, the capital of
