Why was Annie Besant so important: Who is Annie Besant?

Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne in 1837 and ruled Britain for 64 years until 1901, was in the twelfth year of her reign and was trying to strike a balance between religious movements that dreamed of building a truly Christian society and political movements that aimed to make Britain a democratic nation. On the one hand, there were the faith and the church, which were trying to legitimize themselves within the rationalist thought, and on the other hand, there were the social needs and the people in poverty, which the government privileges failed to meet.

Annie Besant was born around the same time, on 1 October 1847, in Clapham, London, to a family of Irish descent. Her father had a medical degree from Trinity College in Dublin and worked as a doctor in Dublin until the Great Irish Famine of 1845, but he died shortly after they moved to London due to the famine, leaving the responsibility of supporting the family to his wife, Emily Roche Morris.

Annie Besant (1 October 1847 – 20 September 1933) was a British socialist, theosophist, freemason, women's rights and Home Rule activist, educationist, and campaigner for Indian nationalism. She was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule.

Emily Roche Morris's only chance was to get herself accepted by one of the aristocratic circles and to provide for her family by finding an "honorable" job. Accepted into the community of Dr. Vaughan and his wife, Morris began working at Harrow School, one of England's leading schools. While Annie's brother was studying in Cambridge, Annie was sent to Dorset for education, next to Ellen Marryat, the sister of Frederick Marryat, one of the famous writers of the period.

However, despite her success in teaching, Ellen Marryat was one of the conservative Calvinists who considered humans to be devoid of free will, and this aspect of her was the main theme that deeply shaped Annie Besant's intellectual life. Annie, who grew up throughout her adolescence in a conservative environment where theater was viewed as evil and going dancing as immoral, says it all came naturally to her at the time. Since she was seven or eight years old, she had grown up with religious tales in which knights carrying large crosses saved princesses from evil dragons.

She returned to her mother and brother in 1864. She was sixteen years old, and her European travels with Miss Marryat not only increased the number of languages she learned but also introduced her to the "fascinating rituals" of the Catholic world, in her own words. While Besant was turning to Anglo-Catholic doctrine in the shadow of the gothic church architecture that was on her mind, the First International had just been established in London and Karl Marx, who was described as the heart of the organization, had prepared a series of declarations.

During the period until Easter of 1866, Besant's sole desire was to devote herself to Christianity and the service of the Church, but a sudden idea came to her mind and she decided to compare the occurrences and dates of the events in the four Gospels on paper.

But just like every believer before her who sought answers in the holy books, she came to the conclusion that the doubt she felt was equal to sin, and she was horrified when she realized that her sin was seen by God. In that fear and paranoia, Annie held on to the only idea that could calm her mind. Of course, God was aware of everything and designed such traps to test the faith of true Christians. Then, as if to atone for her doubts, she turned back to the Church.

In fact, her attitudes towards religion were so clear that convinced that she would never find the answers she was looking for on her own, she married Evangelical priest Frank Besant when she was nineteen.

The younger of her two children, born within eighteen months, caught whooping cough in 1871 and suffered a severe illness. Besant, who took care of her daughter for a long time, wondered for the first time whether the God she believed in was really as merciful as the Bible said when she saw the child coughing as if she was choking. And from the moment she asked this question, she confronted both her faith and her past for three years.

Then, she turned to very different sources regarding the dogmas of Christianity than those she had read until then and inevitably came closer to natural sciences with every question she asked. When she repeatedly examined the hundreds of miraculous events in the holy books, which were compatible with neither the experimentalism of the natural sciences nor the human sciences, and could not reasonably reconcile the two sides, she turned to science, which was more responsive to her needs, and completely rejected Christianity. Moreover, the issue was not only about the scientific nature of the narratives but also their morality, because the concept of atonement or eternal punishment was incompatible with this world created by a just and loving God herself.

In 1872, she attended a meeting of liberal Christians chaired by Charles Voysey and began reading the publications of both Voysey and leading Unitarians. Thus she found herself in the world of religious liberals, theists, and ethical communities. Because the exact answer to the reasons for rejecting Christianity was found in theism.

Her husband, a priest, gave her two options in 1873. She would either return to the communion life or leave home. Besant left the house. Thus, it shook both the religious institution and the family institution, the second pillar of the Victorian Era, and challenged everything that society believed - or at least pretended to believe -.

However, after a certain point, she realized that the answers she was looking for were not found in theism, and she actually began to question the existence of God. Thus, she turned to the works of positivist writers. She found Comte particularly inspiring. Her positivist readings taught her that the concept of God was man's alienation from her own potential and that the love of Jesus, which usually influenced her at an early age, was an expression of man's passion for love. But she never said that God does not exist. On the contrary, she stated that she knew nothing about God and that she could not imagine what God could or could not be, and pointed out that defining God as unknowable meant claiming to know something about God.

Although she was not an atheist, she applied to the Secular Community for membership in 1874 and was accepted. Over time, she moved away from the concern for social morality that would promote universal brotherhood, with the belief that the evil observed in society resulted from ignorance and vested interests turned into political radicalism. Besant, who rejected all the roles of daughter, wife, and mother gathered under the umbrella of submissiveness, became a well-known women's rights advocate by turning to groups that encouraged new lifestyles and especially led women to try new social roles and carried out many campaigns on women's rights.

But although she stayed away from feminist movements in Britain, she paved the way for the feminist movement with her public speeches on issues such as marriage law and voting rights, and with her clothing habits, such as trousers, which were considered too radical for the time. She was one of the first women admitted to the University of London in 1879. She majored in Botany and Animal Physiology and passed all the exams required for her bachelor's degree, but was prevented from receiving the degree by a member of the university review committee because of her freethinking and immoral attitudes.

Besant then adopted the characteristic demands of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF). In her public speeches, she argued that daily working hours should be limited to eight hours and that interest income from capital and income from renting land should be taxed.

Although the paths of Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx, and Annie Besant crossed in the Socialist Alliance, the relationship between Besant and Eleanor Marx's husband, Edward Aveling, did not allow the names of Marx and Besant to be mentioned side by side. Another issue on which they differed was the union movements. For Besant, socialism was not only a philosophy concerned with ending exploitation but also a moral ideal, an ethical positivism. Socialism grew out of a “deep moral impulse” of “unselfish brotherhood.” Therefore, she stood against the union movement because, according to her, the union movement was not interested in eliminating the class distinction, and although it advocated the protection of workers' rights, by doing so, it legitimized the distinction between employee and employer class and deepened the existing class distinction.

Over time, the ethical positivism within Besant's socialism came to the fore, and she began to have the same doubts about religion as she had years ago and to ask new questions about the thoughts of the communities she was in. Because most of her socialist friends focused only on the economic part of social reform and believed that nothing other than a socialist economy could build the ideal society.

Annie Besant joined the Theosophical Society on May 10, 1889, and once again proposed immanentism as a way to reconcile faith with science. For Besant, God was immanent in nature – God was in everything and everything was in God. Of course, the direction she chose was highly criticized by the environment she was in, and she was even accused of heresy and then of treason by both secularists and socialists, but as always, she only went in the direction she wanted, without being influenced by anyone.

Ultimately, Besant left England in 1893 and started living in India. However, unfortunately, there is no sufficient research on the path of Besant's thoughts from the early 1900s until her death in 1933, other than the lectures she gave. According to today's researchers, the most important reason for this information gap is that biographers focus on external activities and connections rather than thoughts.

During her stay in India, she not only developed the idea of Theosophy but also worked to liberate India from British colonialism and ensured that many steps were taken, especially for the education of women. The Central Hindu School, which she founded in 1898, developed over time and formed the nucleus of the Hindu University in Varanasi. She became the president of the Indian National Congress in 1917 and educated many thought leaders, including Jiddu Krishnamurti, until her death in 1933.