Wilson Chacko Jacob's always rewarding, sometimes challenging new book For God or Empire is a lively addition to several emergent historiographies. These include forays into global intellectual history, works that position Islamic history as imperial history, and studies on changing regimes of temporality. If sovereignty has been an equally attractive topic for historians of the Islamicate world of late—though largely at the level of the state—then nowhere else is that term given a richer treatment than here. In Jacob's telling, sovereignty crucially encompasses those vernacular, subjective experiences and conceptions of power that the author calls “the unity of life,” borrowing the famous theological concept of waḥdat al-wujūd (usually translated as ‘unity of being’) elaborated by the followers of Ibn `Arabi. Though long neglected by political scientists and postcolonial scholars alike as a consequence of their objectification of the state, the alternative forms of sovereignty that the “unity of life” embodies persist within the carapace of modern sovereignty and disrupt its universalizing pretenses (p. 16).
Both in its means of expression and method of analysis, Jacob's work is demonstrative of the tension the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once identified as that existing between “Derry and Derrida,” that is the friction generated when social scientists using “theory speak” attempt to get at the “real thing” of religion. Straddling these two realms, Jacob's undertaking is all the more praiseworthy because he succeeds in stitching together diverse disciplines and methodologies in a tangled bricolage suitable to the biography of his restless protagonist: Sayyid Fadl Ibn Alawi (1824–1900). A Ba ʿAlawi Sufi whose life traversed colonial Malabar, the Ottoman capital, and parts of what Jacob appealingly calls the “Arabian subcontinent,” Sayyid Fadl was forcibly exiled to the Hijaz in 1852 by British authorities for his purported role in a series of rebellions undertaken by “Mappila” (a term Jacob usefully historicizes) Muslims in southern India. For the remaining half-century of his life, Sayyid Fadl was an Ottoman functionary in various guises, which included a brief stint as Emir of Dhofar and a long period as adviser to Abdülhamid II. To date, he has been examined in the works of Anne Bang and Seema Alavi, but never the subject of a full-length study. And although Sayyid Fadl is typically seen as yet another successor in the storied ʿAlawiyya lineage, Jacob makes the convincing case that his protagonist's life exemplifies a rupture in the forms of sovereignty attendant to 19th-century empire.
Because neither Sayyid Fadl himself nor Jacob's methodology are easily pigeonholed, and since the author conceives his project as one integrating the Middle East and South Asia, the book's texture is of a type not typically found in works of modern Middle Eastern history. Indeed, this is a book—replete as it is with theoretical and empirical flair—that seems more at home in South Asian Studies. That reality makes it an even more imperative read for scholars of the Middle East. Given his peripatetic life, Sayyid Fadl is someone who frequently slipped through the cracks of competing imperial projects, even if the documentary dragnets of both the Ottoman and British archives reveal the dedicated attempts by bureaucrats in both empires to keep their tabs on him. It is therefore fitting that the historical figure of Sayyid Fadl also periodically gets lost in the mix of Jacob's narrative, engulfed in the author's rich reflections on topics running the gamut from internet Salafism to biopolitics.
Among the many aspects that makes Jacob's book so productive is his centering of sources—theological treatises especially—that specialists of the modern Middle East overlook to their detriment, dismissing them as quaint artifacts to be mined for “cultural” attitudes, but never hard “facts.” Meriting equal praise is his integration of heterogeneous archival materials, non-documentary sources, and his own ethnographic observations. Only such an approach could adequately capture the traces Sayyid Fadl left behind in a geographical zone running from Istanbul to Mampuram. If most academic monographs tend to follow a predictable three-chord progression, then some readers may grumble about aspects of Jacob's writing style, which has a syncopated, improvised feel. Yet the evasive quality of the prose is a suitable companion to Jacob's argument that Sayyid Fadl's intersection with clashing visions of sovereignty meant that his life was “irreducible to the emergent politics of the state”(p. 100); nor, it might be added, to the strictures of conventional biography.
A couple additional comments, some more mundane than others. For one, on page 97, when examining a letter sent by Sayyid Fadl to Ottoman authorities, Jacob contrasts his protagonist's employment of the terms akhdh (conquest) and al-tadakhul (incursions)—used to describe foreign intervention in the empire—with Ottoman-directed istilāʾ against the Arabs, which Jacob defines as “acquisition of sovereignty.” However, istilāʾ in the Ottoman period—and indeed in modern Turkish—typically carried the meaning of “invasion” or “seizure by force” and does not necessarily signify a kind of sovereignty that merely “[establishes] symbolic and affective relations.” As a cheerleader of the Ottoman imperial project, Sayyid Fadl's notion of Ottoman sovereignty did not preclude the use of violence, especially towards frontier peoples he saw as semi-civilized and, in league with many Tanzimat and Hamidian bureaucrats, the would-be beneficiaries of Ottoman power.
Likewise, while Jacob ably positions Sayyid Fadl in the contemporary political and intellectual scene—including drawing attention to the humorous insults leveled at him in the Egyptian press—one potentially useful addition might be an analysis of Sayyid Fadl's Füyūzat-ı İlahiyye ve Envar-ı Nebeviyye, a biography of the Ahl-i Bayt and the Ottoman sultans’ reverence for, and descent from, them. This was translated from Arabic into Ottoman in 1893, where the author's name was rendered “Devletlü Siyādetlu Fażl ʿAlevî Başā Hażretlerī,” reaffirming yet again Jacob's positioning of him as both “imperialist agent” and “sufi-sayyid.” Evidently, the Ottoman translator of Füyūzat-ı İlahiyye found Sayyid Fadl's text germane to propping up Ottoman claims to the caliphate, though he took some editorial privilege and moved the conclusion of Sayyid Fadl's work to the introduction. It was in this section, after all, where Sayyid Fadl stressed most fulsomely the Ottomans’ descent from the Ahl-i Bayt.
In these pages Sayyid Fadl argued that the family of Osman's connection to the bloodline of the Prophet passed through the line of the “honorable Alawi sayyids.” We can follow Jacob's cue in his analysis of Sayyid Fadl's other writings and resist the temptation to see this as a cynical, self-interested ploy by Sayyid Fadl to boost his status at Abdülhamid II's court, where he was held “in a veritable golden cage” in his final decades. As Jacob stresses throughout his book, an instrumental reading of Sayyid Fadl's writings, one that reduces them to sycophantic eulogies to Ottoman rule, precludes far more compelling questions about how irreconcilable notions of sovereignty converged in his person and his writings. What is more, the Ottoman translator clearly saw the text as something loftier than an exercise in vanity, and was convinced enough by its argument to print it, along with ḥarakāt (short vowels), rare enough for a late Ottoman printed text. Even after his death in 1900, Fadl's memory lived on in the empire's intellectual life, with his son Sayyid Ahmad Fadl translating one of his father's texts into Ottoman Turkish and publishing it along with the Arabic original in 1911. Future work will have to follow Jacob's lead and follow glimpses of Sayyid Fadl in the contemporary intellectual debates from the contemporary Hijaz to north India.
These empirical recommendations only speak to the richness of Jacob's book, which rewards repeat visits. Historians and scholars from other disciplines will gain much from this book. If assigned in a classroom setting, the book is best reserved for graduate students, but Chapters 4 through 6 would be excellent additions to undergraduate syllabi. In the final pages of For God or Empire, Jacob remarks that this project marked a “leap of faith” for him, maybe a reference to how its style and geography departed from his earlier excellent study of masculinity in Egypt. That leap—which brought the author to Istanbul, Oman, and Kerala, and further afield—was well worth it.
