266 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Russia. Once his journal folded, he had nothing to keep him in
Europe anymore, so he moved to ...
- Uzbekistan. There, he talked czarist authorities into letting him
publish and disseminate the Qur' an to Muslims under czarist
rule, and to translate, publish, and disseminate other Islamic lit-
erature, which had been unavailable in Central Asia for decades.
His efforts led to a revival of Islam throughout the region. Here,
Jamaluddin also fleshed out an idea he had long been pushing,
that Muslim countries needed to use the rivalry among European
powers to carve out a zone of independence for themselves, by
aligning with Russia against British power, with Germany against
Russian power, with Britain and France against Russian power,
and so on. These ideas would emerge as core strategies of the
global "non-aligned movement" of the twentieth century. In 1884
he moved to ...
- Iran where he worked to reform the judiciary. This brought him
head to head with the local ulama. Things got hot and he had to
return to Central Asia in a hurry. In 1888, however, Iran's King
Nasiruddin invited him back to the country as its prime minister.
Nasiruddin was locked in a power struggle with his country's
ulama, and he thought Jamaluddin's "modernism" would help his
cause. Jamaluddin did move to Iran, not as its prime minister but
as a special adviser to the king. This time, however, instead of at-
tacking the ulama, he attacked the king and his practice of selling
economic "concessions" to colonialist powers. The most striking
example of this during Jamaluddin's stay in Iran was the no-bid
tobacco concession awarded to British companies, which gave
British interests control over every aspect of tobacco production
and sale in Iran.^2 Jamaluddin called for a tobacco boycott, a strat-
egy later taken up in many lands by many other political activists,
including the Indian anticolonialist leader Mahatma Gandhi
(who famously called on Indians to boycott English cotton and
instead spin their own). Jamaluddin's oratory filled the streets of
Iran with demonstrators protesting against the Shah, who was
probably sorry he had ever set eyes on the Afghan (Iranian?) re-
former. Jamaluddin even talked one of the grand ayatollahs into
