This aims to be the first part in a multi-part blog series on two Third World educators, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 and Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî ساطع الحصري. I have been reading William Cleveland’s biography of al-Ḥuṣrî alongside Tao Xingzhi’s book Education for Life, and am quite thunderstruck by the, as far as I know, substantial but solely serendipitous similarities between the two men. I am not aware from either of these two men’s biographies that they ever met each other, and I find it unlikely that the two of them had any direct exchanges of ideas or scholarly intercourse. But the similitude of the two men, in their biographies, in their temperaments and in their thought, I think deserves to be remarked upon.
I already get mostly-friendly ribbing on the Orthodox circles on social media for being a weeb (which, you know, fair enough). So here’s the ‘full disclosure’ from a personal standpoint. I am an Orthodox Christian largely because of Chinese and Arabic influences. Tao Xingzhi actually gives a really good voice to this, but to live in China is to live in a society where linear time has relatively little meaning, and where the most venerable traditions can live alongside and in the shadow of the gaudiest glass-and-steel high modernism; my attraction to Orthodoxy was likewise a pursuit of the traditional thread within my own culture. On the other hand, my first and strongest direct exposure to Orthodoxy was through the Antiochian tradition, through Saint Mary’s Church in Pawtucket – which is still my beloved ‘home away from home’ parish whenever I go to visit my parents. To this day, I still owe the Syrian-, Lebanese- and Armenian-American folks of that parish a great debt I can never truly repay, for legally reuniting me with my family when I came home from abroad.
I also came to an awareness of the gæopolitical, trade and cultural connexions between China and the Arab world through the Judge Dee novel Murder in Canton, and through the classes on Chinese religion and material culture at Capital Normal University taught by Dr An Yanming and Dr Ma Zhao. The Chinese Hui Muslims of today are the descendants of Persian traders along both overland and sea trade routes, as well as of Arabic cavalry sent by al-Mansûr to put down the An Lushan Rebellion, and the Nestorian Christians (including Tang general Guo Ziyi 郭子儀) who came to China to spread the Gospel, originated in the Persian and Assyrian communities of what is now Iraq. Nowadays, as I noticed when I was living next to and among Hui Muslim neighbours in Baotou, there is a conscious awareness of this history that may not have been there two or three generations ago.
The more modern connexions between China and the Arab world through the Non Aligned Movement, and the prominent friendship between Jamâl ‘Abd an-Nâsr and Mao Zedong 毛澤東, however, seem to have another basis. To explore that basis, a basis in the second-world ideology of Marxism-Leninism seems insufficient, since both Nâsr and Mao were revisionists, from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. This is why examining the similarities between the non-Marxist leftists Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî and Tao Xingzhi seems to be important. Both of them took a syncretic approach to pædagogy, œconomics and culture integrating (respectively) Islâmic and Confucian indigenous knowledge with Western methods. In al-Ḥuṣrî’s case, this involved a selective appropriation of historical and social concepts from Herder, Hegel and especially Fichte for use in a classicalist, solidarist pædagogy borrowed from ibn Khaldûn. In Tao Xingzhi’s case, this involved a selective appropriation of Dewey’s pædagogy, placed at the service of a Confucian reformism inspired by Ming dynasty neo-Confucian Wang Yangming 王陽明. More to the point, al-Ḥuṣrî’s ideas informed both Nâsrism and Ba‘athîyya; and the Mass Education Movement spearheaded by Tao Xingzhi and Jimmy Yen was a formative influence on Mao Zedong, who did a stint as a volunteer teacher.
To begin with, though, for this blog post I will note only a handful of the parallels in their biographies. The two men were contemporaries: Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî was born to wealthy Syrian parents in Yemen, in the Ottoman Empire, in 1880; Tao Xingzhi was born in Anhui to poor village schoolteachers in the Qing Empire in 1891. Both men were, for lack of a better word, cosmopolitans. Sâti‘ would always feel ‘out of place’ among his own people – his first language was Turkish and his parents had him tutored in French. He learnt Arabic later in life and always spoke with a heavy Turkish accent. He was deeply distrusted at first in Arab nationalist circles for his prior Ottoman associations and loyalties, and his later emphasis on ‘al-‘urubah’ gives credence to a certain degree of psychological compensation on his part. Xingzhi, like his Democratic League comrade Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, was educated in missionary schools and later sent to America for college at the University of Illinois and Columbia University. Like al-Ḥuṣrî to ‘al-‘urubah’, he felt ‘robbed of [his] Chineseness’ and thereafter revolted against the Western-looking elements in his own class.
Each of them also experienced a great political upheaval in his early life. Al-Ḥuṣrî lived through the constitutional upheavals, the First World War and the collapse and partition of the Ottoman Empire. The Qing Empire fell, too, when Tao Xingzhi was still a student; during much of his professional career, he lived in a country torn between various warlords in addition to the invading Japanese. The response of these two men to the social upheavals afflicting the Arab world on the one hand, and the Chinese world on the other, was to begin educating, with particular emphasis on popular self-respect, self-reliance and adoption of modern science. Both of them were committed pædagogues.
Neither of them was, to begin with, particularly political in orientation – like the Slavophils, they saw themselves not as political movers-and-shakers, but stewards and transmitters of culture. As such, even though both of them were committed at some level to egalitarianism, the cultivation of good civic habits and strident opposition to Western imperialism, neither of them was particularly attached to democracy as an ideology. Cleveland relates, in his discussion of Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî’s thought, that he is not concerned in his Arabist phase with ‘political liberties’, ‘the rights of individuals’, ‘constitutionalism’ or ‘democracy’, but instead with the historical forces that give rise to healthy polities. Likewise, even though Tao Xingzhi has deep democratic-socialist convictions about the educational potential of every student and the need for proportional œconomic outcomes, he nonetheless sharply rebukes (in a way which much more resembles the old Confucian conservatives like Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 rather than the other followers of John Dewey) the May Fourth intellectuals for their ‘lack of discipline’, their cultural deracination and their bourgeois fixation on policy-making procedure rather than content. (Tao Xingzhi’s scepticism of democratic ideology appears to be informed, interestingly enough, by both Plato and Confucius.)
Tao Xingzhi and Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, though they belong to a younger generation, can certainly be seen to stand in the same multifaceted tradition as the modernising Asian intellectuals highlighted by Pankaj Mishra in his recent book: Sayyid Jamâl ad-Dîn, Liang Qichao 梁啓超 and Rabindranath Tagore. But there’s a great more to the similitude here than simply a shared reaction against Western imperialism – and I suspect the answer has something to do with the fact that these two were more involved in education and pædagogical pursuits than directly in politics. Thus far I’ve explored only a few points in their biographies where their experiences run parallel; in future blog posts I hope to explore more of the substantive specifics of their comparative thought, as well as their contributions to the guiding principles of the Non Aligned Movement.
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