268 DESTINY DISRUPTED
an army. He had no official position in any government. He never founded
a political party or headed up a movement. He had no employees, no
subordinates, no one to whom he gave orders. What's more he didn't leave
behind some body of books or even one book encapsulating a coherent po-
litical philosophy, no Islamist Das Capital This man was purely a gadfly,
rabble-rouser, and rebel-that's what he was.
Yet he had a tremendous impact on the Muslim world. How? Through
his "disciples." Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan operated like a prophet, in a
way. His charismatic intensity lit sparks everywhere he went. His protege
Mohammed Abduh became the head of Al Azhar University and the top
religious scholar in Egypt. He did write books elaborating on and system-
atizing Jamaluddin's modernist ideas.
Another of Jamaluddin's disciples, Zaghlul, did found a political party,
the Wafd, which evolved into the nationalist movement for Egyptian in-
dependence. Yet another of his disciples was the religious leader in the
Sudan who erupted against the British as "the Mahdi." In Iran, the To-
bacco Boycott that he inspired spawned the generation of activists who
forged the constitutionalist movement in the twentieth century.
Jamaluddin inspired an Afghan intellectual named Tarzi living in
Turkey who returned to Afghanistan and, following in Jamaluddin's foot-
steps, tutored Prince Amanullah, Afghanistan's heir apparent. Tarzi shaped
the prince into a modernist king who won full Afghan independence from
the British and declared Afghanistan a sovereign nation just twenty-two
years after the death of Jamaluddin.
And his students had students. The credo and the message changed as
it was handed down. Some strands of it grew more radically political, some
grew more nationalist, some more developmentalist-that is, obsessed
with developing industry and technology in Muslim countries by whatever
means. Mohammed Abduh's student, the Syrian theologian Rashid Rida,
elaborated ways for Islam to serve as the basis for a state. Another of Ja-
maluddin's intellectual descendants was Hassan al-Banna, who founded
the Muslim Brotherhood; more about him later. In short, the influence of
this intense, mercurial figure echoes in every corner of the Muslim world
he roamed so restlessly.