Jamal al-Din al-Afghani

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) was one of the most influential political activists and modernist thinkers of the nineteenth-century Muslim world. He is best known for "pan-Islamism" — the call for the world's Muslims to unite politically and reform their societies in order to resist European colonial domination.

His very identity is disputed. He presented himself as an Afghan Sunni, born at Asadabad near Kabul. Most modern scholars, following the historian Nikki Keddie, hold instead that he was born into a Twelver Shia family at Asadabad near Hamadan in Iran, and that he concealed this to gain a wider hearing among Sunnis and to avoid Iranian government pressure. Which account is correct remains genuinely contested; for that reason his sect is left unresolved here.

By tradition he studied in Qazvin, Tehran, and the Shia shrine cities of Iraq, and travelled in India. He served briefly as an adviser amid Afghanistan's civil wars (around 1866-1868), then moved through Istanbul and Cairo, where he gathered reformist disciples — most famously the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abduh. Expelled from Egypt in 1879, he later co-published the militant pan-Islamic journal al-Urwa al-Wuthqa ("The Firmest Bond") from Paris. After stays in London and Russia he returned to Iran, agitated against Nasir al-Din Shah, and was forcibly expelled in 1891. He spent his last years in Istanbul under the Ottoman sultan's watchful patronage, dying there in 1897.