No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
THE FUTURE OF ISLAM, 1672–1924
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2018
Abstract
This article examines the ways in which defining the character of early Islam has been instrumental to contemporary political debates at distinct moments in time. It looks in particular at Restoration-era England and the last decades of the Ottoman Caliphate. In the latter period, European and Muslim scholars alike reappraised Islamic history in the context of the often polemical discourse surrounding pan-Islamism and the future of Islam. Indian Muslim writers especially moved into new and inventive historical territory. They took up the vocabulary of modern politics in their histories and in doing so pluralized the heritage of certain ideas and concepts, including democracy, constitutionalism, republicanism, and socialism. The result was the articulation of a usable, progressive Islamic past.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018
References
1 Stubbe, Henry, An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism with the Life of Mahomet, ed. Shairani, Hafiz Mahmud Khan (London, 1911)Google Scholar. Shairani based his print edition on a copy transcribed by Charles Hornby, from c.1705, which he regarded as the earliest and most complete version available. Another manuscript likely also copied by Charles Hornby and dated 1701 forms the basis of a 2013 edition of the text. See Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism, ed. Nabil Matar (New York, 2013), particularly 49–64 for a discussion of all known copies and their various discrepancies. References herein are to Shairani's 1911 edition, which is a hybrid of work by Stubbe, “variations and additions” by Hornby, and editorial interventions by Shairani.
2 For a recent survey of the historiography of the Prophet see Ali, Kecia, The Lives of Muhammad (Cambridge, MA, 2016). See also discussion belowGoogle Scholar.
3 Stubbe, Rise and Progress, 151, 72.
4 Hafiz Shairani, “Introduction,” in Stubbe, Rise and Progress, vii–xvii, at xiv.
5 Bevilacqua, Alexander, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 75–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dew, Nicholas, Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford, 2009), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Toomer, G. J., Eastern Wisedome: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; and Matar, Nabil, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Shairani, “Introduction,” xii. Shairani was aware that other manuscript copies contained annotations and citations.
7 For the breadth of Stubbe's citations see Champion, Justin, “‘I remember a Mahometan story of Ahmed Ben Edris’: Freethinking Uses of Islam from Stubbe to Toland,” Al-Qantara 31/2 (2010), 443–80, esp. 464 n. 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, 17–43. On “orientalism” before empire and Enlightenment see also Dew, Orientalism, esp. 1–40.
9 Stubbe, Rise and Progress, 146, 15–16, 31. For more on the way radical anti-Trinitarians drew a historical genealogy from early Ebionite Christianity, through Islam, to the present, see Muslow, Martin, “Socinianism, Islam and the Radical Uses of Arabic Scholarship,” Al-Qantara 31/2 (2010), 549–86Google Scholar. On the comparative reasoning of Richard Simon, Adriaan Reland, George Sale, and others see Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, 75–107. Shairani likened the Roman Empire's imposition of Trinitarianism on primitive Christians to the work of English missionaries proselytizing among the Muslims of the world today—see Shairani, “Introduction,” xiii.
10 Stubbe, Rise and Progress, 35, 189–90, quoting Grotius.
11 Ibid., 190.
12 Ibid., 180.
13 Ibid., 87–117. Shairani describes Stubbe's account of ‘Ali as showing affection “not unworthy of a Muslim.” See Shairani, “Introduction,” xiv.
14 Ibid., 143–5; Muir, William, The Life of Mahomet and History of Islam, 4 vols. (London, 1858–61), 2: 277–317, espGoogle Scholar. at 314–17.
15 Birchwood, Matthew, “Vindicating the Prophet: Universal Monarchy and Henry Stubbe's Biography of Mohammed,” Prose Studies 29/1 (2007), 59–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Garcia, Humberto, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore, 2012), 5, 11Google Scholar.
17 Jacob, James R., Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), 64–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Ibid., 72, 75.
19 Ibid., 139–60; Muslow, “Socinianism,” 580.
20 Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, 167–99.
21 Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005), 77–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 73–125.
24 Pitts, Jennifer, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2018), particularly 28–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (forthcoming).
25 Pitts, A Turn to Empire; Mehta, Uday, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2007; first published 2000), 3–23Google Scholar; Ansari, K. H., “The Muslim World in British Historical Imaginations: ‘Re-thinking Orientalism’?” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 38/1 (2011), 73–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7.
27 Who's Who Year-Book for 1908 (London, 1908), 121; Who's Who Year-Book for 1912–13 (London, 1912), 134.
28 Shairani, “Introduction,” ix.
29 The only reference to this library that I have seen is in Ashrafi, Wahab, “Shirani, Hafiz Mohammad Mahmood [sic],” in Lal, Mohan, ed., Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature: Sasay to Zorgot, 6 vols. (New Delhi, 2001), 5: 4020Google Scholar.
30 Shairani, “Introduction,” v–vi.
31 Ibid., n.p.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., v–vi.
34 Ibid., xv–xvi, xiv.
35 Ibid., v.
36 Shairani, “Appendix Containing Early Christian Legends and Notions Concerning Islam,” in Stubbe, Rise and Progress, 195–238.
37 Ibid., 228–34.
38 Ibid., 222.
39 This practice saw one of its earliest and most influential iterations in Indian Shi‘a theologian Rahmatullah ibn Khalil al-‘Uthmani al Kairanawi's Izhar al-Haqq (Demonstration of Truth), first published in 1867. See Powell, Avril A., Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond, 1993)Google Scholar.
40 Shairani, “Appendix,” 195.
41 George Sale (d. 1736), best known for his 1733 English translation of the Qur'an, which included a substantial preface on the Prophet and Islam.
42 Shairani, Hafiz Mahmud Khan, Early Christian Legends and Fables Concerning Islam (London, 1911), 6–7, emphasis addedGoogle Scholar.
43 See Landau, Jacob M., Pan-Islam: History and Politics (Oxford, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar; first published 1990), for an overview of the history of pan-Islamism.
44 Arsenault, J. C., “Community,” in Bowering, Gerhard, ed., The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Islamic Political Thought (Princeton, NJ, 2013), 107–8Google Scholar.
45 This was another term of relatively recent origins—see Aydin, Cemil, “Globalizing the Intellectual History of the Idea of the ‘Muslim World’,” in Moyn, Samuel and Sartori, Andrew, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013), 157–86Google Scholar; and Aydin, , The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Landau, Pan-Islam, 185; Qureshi, M. Naeem, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924 (Leiden, 1999), 9–87Google Scholar.
47 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, The Future of Islam (London, 1882)Google Scholar.
48 Hurgronje, Christiaan Snouck, “Les confréries religieuses, la Mecque et le panislamisme,” Revue de l'histoire des religions 44 (1901), 262–81, at 280–81Google Scholar.
49 Browne, Edward G., “Pan-Islamism,” in Kirkpatrick, F. A., ed., Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1902), 306–30Google Scholar.
50 Ibid. Arabic and Turkish phrases approximating to pan-Islamism did exist in this period, most notably al-jamia al-islamiyya, which was articulated in Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh's Parisian journal al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa (The Firmest Bond), published from 1884. See Keddie, Nikki R., Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn “al-Afghani”: A Political Biography (Berkeley, 1972)Google Scholar.
51 Aydın, Cemil, “The Ottoman Empire and the Global Muslim Identity in the Formation of Eurocentric World Order, 1815–1919,” in Dallmayr, Fred, Kayapınar, M. Akif and Yaylacı, İsmail, eds., Civilizations and World Order: Geopolitics and Cultural Difference (Lanham, 2014), 117–44Google Scholar. For the postwar period see Mathew, Johan, “Spectres of Pan-Islam: Methodological Nationalism and British Imperial Policy after the First World War,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45/6 (2017), 942–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 Harper, Tim, “Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground,” Modern Asian Studies 47/6 (2013), 1782–1911CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Chirol, Valentine, Pan-Islamism: November 14, 1906 (London, 1906), 1Google Scholar.
54 The Indian Rebellion, apparently the product of Muslim “fanaticism,” was repeatedly recalled in commentary on pan-Islamism. See, for example, Edwards, Albert, “The Menace of Pan-Islamism,” North American Review 197/690 (1913), 645–57Google Scholar.
55 Kidwai, Pan-Islamism (London, 1908), n.p.
56 Shairani, Early Christian Legends, 6.
57 Margoliouth, David S., Mohammed and Rise of Islam (London, 1905), viiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
58 Khalidi, Tarif, Images of Muhammad: Narratives of the Prophet in Islam across the Ages (New York, 2009), 18Google Scholar.
59 Green, Nile, “Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the ‘Muslim World’,” American Historical Review 118/2 (2013), 401–29, at 409CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Bahador, Syed Ahmed Khan, A Series of Essays on the Life of Muhammad and Subjects Subsidiary Thereto (Lahore, 1968), prefaceGoogle Scholar; Ali, Syed Ameer, A Short History of the Saracens (London, 1899), v–viiiGoogle Scholar.
61 Green, “Spacetime,” 409, 411.
62 Ahmad, Aziz, Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan 1857–1964 (London, 1967), 54–64, at 57Google Scholar.
63 Numani, Shibli, ʿ Allamah Shibli's Sirat al-Nabi, trans. Fazlur Rahman, 2 vols. (Karachi, 1970), 1: 90–93, and 1–101Google Scholar more generally for his “science of history.” Shibli died before completing this mammoth project; the task was taken up by his student, Sulaiman Nadvi, who was himself deeply invested in establishing the historicity of Islam—see Nadvi, Sulaiman, Muhammad—The Ideal Prophet: Translation of Khutabat-i-Madras, trans. Mohiuddin Ahmad (Lahore, 1979), 21–31, 39–68Google Scholar. For further discussion of this project see Zaman, M. Q., “A Venture in Critical Islamic Historiography and the Significance of Its Failure,” Numen 41/1 (1994), 26–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
64 Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London, 1840), 51–90Google Scholar.
65 Renan, Ernest, Mahomet and les origins de l'islamisme (Paris, 1851), 3Google Scholar. Renan was included in Shibli's aforementioned list.
66 Green, “Spacetime,” 401, 428, 405.
67 Ibid., 411. The technologies of empire are connected to both the “processes of racialization and resistance” by Aydin in The Idea of the Muslim World, at 6–7, 57. Of the many recent works complicating the spatial and temporal ontologies of technology in this period see particularly On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, 2013).
68 Green, “Spacetime,” 403, 414. Green argues the modernists only looked to the past to search for the source of divergence with Europe. He seeks by this argument to distinguish the modernists from the backward-gazing “fundamentalists” of the late twentieth century.
69 Ahmad, Islamic Modernism, 39–40.
70 Rahman, Fazlur, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago, 1982), 85Google Scholar; Devji, Faisal, “Apologetic Modernity,” Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 61–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On seeing contradiction as fundamentally Islamic see Ahmed, Shahab, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 Goswami, Manu, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 113/2 (2008), 1461–85Google Scholar.
72 Aydın, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aydin, “Globalizing,” particularly at 171; Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World, particularly 79–81; Bose, Sugata, “Different Universalisms, Colorful Cosmopolitanisms: The Global Imagination of the Colonized,” in Bose, Sugata and Manjapra, Kris, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke, 2010), 97–112Google Scholar; Ramnath, Maia, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, 2011)Google Scholar, particularly chap. 6; Mishra, Pankaj, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London, 2012)Google Scholar.
73 Goswami, “Imaginary Futures,” 1465. Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York, 2004)Google Scholar, has been a theoretical touchstone for much revisionist history of this period.
74 Kidwai, Mushir Hosain, Islam and Socialism (London, 1912), 10Google Scholar; Wasti, Syed Tanvir, “Mushir Hosain Kidwai and the Ottoman Cause,” Middle Eastern Studies 30/2 (1994), 252–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
75 Kidwai, Pan-Islamism, 5.
76 Ibid., 5.
77 Kidwai, Islam and Socialism, 67.
78 Ibid., 17; Ali, Lives of Muhammad, esp. 79–113.
79 Kidwai, Islam and Socialism, 43, 50.
80 Ibid., 21.
81 Ibid., 22.
82 Ibid., 70.
83 Ibid., 79.
84 Kidwai, Pan-Islamism, 70.
85 Kidwai, Islam and Socialism, ix. Two years later, Kidwai would help found a society for the collective physical protection of the Holy Places—see Zaman, Faridah, “Beyond Nostalgia: Time and Place in Indian Muslim Politics,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 27/4 (2017), 627–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
86 Kidwai, Islam and Socialism, 75; Devji, “Apologetic Modernity,” 70.
87 Kidwai, Mushir Hosain, Pan-Islamism and Bolshevism (London, 1937)Google Scholar.
88 He was rather clearer about points of difference between pan-Islamism and socialism in this text, too—see ibid., 349–471. On the complicated relationship between Indian pan-Islamism and socialism in this period more broadly see Ramnath, Haj to Utopia; and Ansari, K. H., “Pan-Islam and the Making of the Early Indian Muslim Socialists,” Modern Asian Studies 20/3 (1986), 509–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
89 Kidwai, Islam and Socialism, 51.
90 Ibid., 10, 36. See Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an overview of these changes.
91 This is, of course, not to say that Islam lacked a well-developed tradition of political thought regarding the caliphate prior to the Young Turk era—for the briefest of introductions, see Wadad Kadi and Aram A. Shahin, “Caliph, Caliphate,” in Bowering, The Princeton Encyclopaedia, 81–6.
92 On Turkey see Turnaoğlu, Banu, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (Princeton, 2017)Google Scholar. On the Young Turk Revolution and the Iranian Revolution of 1905 in a global intellectual context see Kurzman, Charles, Democracy Denied: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2008)Google Scholar.
93 Ahmad, Islamic Modernism, 41–54, 32.
94 Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 52.
95 Ahmad, Islamic Modernism, 55–6.
96 Ibid., 48.
97 Ali, Moulavi Cheragh, The Proposed Political, Legal, and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and other Mohammadan States (Bombay, 1883), iiGoogle Scholar.
98 Ibid., iii.
99 Ali, Proposed. . . Reforms, 3-4.
100 Lewis, Bernard, “The Concept of an Islamic Republic,” Die Welt des Islams 4/1 (1955), 1–9, at 5Google Scholar.
101 Ali, Proposed . . . Reforms, iii, 3.
102 Ibid., viii.
103 Ibid., xi.
104 Ibid., xii–xiii.
105 Ibid., xxxi.
106 Blunt, The Future of Islam, esp. 88–9, 190. Blunt believed that the caliphate must eventually revert to Arab hands in Cairo.
107 Shairani, “Introduction,” v–vi.
108 Wasti, S. Tanvir, “Halil Halid: Anti-imperialist Muslim Intellectual,” Middle Eastern Studies 29/3 (1993), 559–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
109 See particularly Halid, Halil, The Diary of a Turk (London, 1903), 186–99, 207–10Google Scholar.
110 Ahmad, Islamic Modernism, 87–8, 130–31. See also Devji, Faisal, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 212–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For doubts on the reach of Ameer Ali's ecumenicalism see Jones, Justin, Shi‘a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge, 2012), 172–83Google Scholar; and Mukherjee, Soumen, Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia (Cambridge, 2016), 132Google Scholar.
111 Ali, Syed Ameer, The Spirit of Islam: A History of the Evolution and Ideals of Islam, with a Life of the Prophet, amplified and revised edn (London, 1922), 122–33Google Scholar. For an overview of the Khilafat movement see Minault, Gail, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; and Qureshi, Pan-Islam. The most influential theorization of the Indian Khilafat movement was arguably Abul Kalam Azad's Maslah-i Khilafat wa Jazirah-i-Arab (1920).
112 Ali, Syed Ameer, The Life and Teachings of Mohammed; or, The Spirit of Islam (London, 1891), 427–530Google Scholar.
113 See ibid., 470 nn. 1, 2, 471 n. 2.
114 Chirol, Pan-Islamism, with Ameer Ali's rejoinder at 20–23.
115 Margoliouth, David S., Pan-Islamism (London, 1912)Google Scholar, with Ameer Ali's rejoinder at 17–21.
116 Chirol, Pan-Islamism, 21.
117 Ibid., 23; Ali, Syed Ameer, “The Caliphate: A Historical and Juridical Sketch,” Contemporary Review, 107 (1915), 681–94, esp. 694Google Scholar.
118 Margoliouth, Pan-Islamism, 3, 16. A reading of the particular article Margoliouth cites, published in 1907 (1310 AH) in Rida's journal, indicates Margoliouth was hardly a faithful reader of the original. See Al-Manar, 35 vols. (Cairo, 1898–?), 10: 583–9. Al-Manar was often the sole Muslim authority consulted in British attempts to understand pan-Islamism. See The Rise of Islam and the Caliphate: The Pan-Islamic Movement, handbook prepared under the direction of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, L/PS/20/G77 (1919), Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library (OIOC), at 72.
119 Margoliouth, Pan-Islamism, 3–4.
120 Ibid., 5–6.
121 Margoliouth, David S., Mohammedanism (London, 1911), 75–6Google Scholar.
122 Ibid., 76, emphasis in the original.
123 Ibid., 76, 98.
124 Ibid., 93; Margoliouth, Pan-Islamism, 10.
125 Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, 111–12.
126 Margoliouth, Pan-Islamism, 10; Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, 93, 56.
127 Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, 97–8.
128 Ali, A Short History of the Saracens, 20–60.
129 Ibid., vii.
130 Ali, The Life and Teachings of Mohammed, 418–20, 429–30, quotation at 420.
131 Ibid., 412. See also 435, 441.
132 Margoliouth, Pan-Islamism, 20.
133 Ali, “The Caliphate,” 686 on the term “election.”
134 Ibid., 694.
135 Ali, The Spirit of Islam (1922), 132-3.
136 Ali, “The Caliphate,” 687. Azad later took pains to counter the idea in Maslah-i Khilafat too.
137 The most significant wartime advocate of a Qurayshi Caliphate was the aforementioned Rashid Rida. See Haddad, Mahmoud, “Arab Religious Nationalism in the Colonial Era: Rashīd Ridā’s Ideas on the Caliphate,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117/2 (1997), 253–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
138 Margoliouth, Pan-Islamism, 17.
139 “Memorandum on the Rebellion of the Grand Sherif of Mecca against the Rule of the Young Turk,” L/PS/10/599 (1916), OIOC.
140 Watt, Katherine, “Thomas Walker Arnold and the Re-evaluation of Islam, 1864–1930,” Modern Asian Studies 36/1 (2002), 1–98, at 73–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
141 Ali, Syed Ameer, “The Caliphate and the Islamic Renaissance,” Edinburgh Review 237/483 (1923), 180–95, at 183Google Scholar. The portion on Abu Bakr can be found in Ali, A Short History of the Saracens, 21–2.
142 Ali, “Caliphate and the Islamic Renaissance,” 185.
143 Ibid., 191–3. In a similar vein, M. A. Ansari, president of the All-India Khilafat Conference of December 1922, welcomed the deposition of Mehmed VI as an act intended to preserve the prestige of the caliphate and to create a constitutional monarchy. See Sadiq, Mohammad, The Turkish Revolution and the Indian Freedom Movement (Delhi, 1983), 104–18Google Scholar.
144 Ali, “Caliphate and the Islamic Renaissance,” 195.
145 Ameer Ali's immediate reaction is captured in an article of 8 April 1924 in the Times of India (Bombay), 8. On Indian Muslim responses to the abolition of the caliphate more widely see Sadiq, The Turkish Revolution, 118–30.
146 Jacob, Henry Stubbe, 3, 127.
147 Stubbe, Rise and Progress, 93–4, 128.
148 Ahmad, Islamic Modernism, 138; Minault, Khilafat Movement, 202–4.