In 1911, the Indian linguist, philologist, and manuscript collector Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shairani (1881–1946) published the first—and, until recently, only—printed edition of An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, with the Life of Mahomet. The text was attributed to the seventeenth-century physician, author, Unitarian polemicist, and sometime second keeper of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Henry Stubbe (1632–76). With Stubbe's original manuscript, penned c.1672, already long lost, Shairani's printed edition was based on the “best and earliest dated” surviving copy of which he knew, dating to the early eighteenth century.Footnote 1 That this early modern English account of the origins of Islam should have entered the world of print through the efforts of a young man born in the princely state of Tonk in north India, who was educated in Lahore and London, and is best remembered for his research into the origins of Urdu, is something of a curiosity. The world of Henry Stubbe was in so many ways unrecognizable to the world that Hafiz Shairani would come to occupy some two and a half centuries later. And yet, as this article argues, through Rise and Progress we might in fact bridge these two seemingly distant ecumenes.
The political and intellectual world in which Rise and Progress was printed—broadly the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—is taken up in greater depth in the second half of this article. Among the diverse individuals who financially underwrote the 1911 publication, we find a series of writers and activists who were in their own writings also concerned with the Islamic past. Much of their work has been categorized as apologia, both by their European contemporaries and by scholars since. It is a term replete with connotations of defensiveness and, in this particular context, historical anachronism. But cumulatively these varied writings—from booklets on early Islamic history, to multivolume lives of the Prophet (a genre known as sira) and the first four caliphs (Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, and ‘Ali, known collectively as the Rashidun, or the Rightly Guided), to treatises on the development of Islamic law—represented a departure in the very way that history and historical writing were conceived of in this period.
The work of reappraising the Muslim past took place against the backdrop of fervent debate within European empires around the question of “pan-Islamism.” A neologism of the late nineteenth century, the term referred to the movement for political unity among the world's Muslims first championed by the peripatetic political thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97). While semantically related to other movements born of the same period—such as pan-Slavism, pan-Turkism, and pan-Turanianism—pan-Islamism implied a religious solidarity that transcended linguistic or ethnic difference, and did not accord easily, if at all, with burgeoning ideas of nationality. European discussion of pan-Islamism, particularly in the years around the First World War, was on the whole deeply alarmist about the potential dangers that Muslim unity posed, though some who claimed expertise on the subject were also skeptical about the existence and practical viability of such a project.
While Hafiz Shairani and his peers consistently denied the existence of a worldwide pan-Islamic conspiracy, they understood the instrumental role that historical scholarship on Islam played in the realms both of public commentary on the subject and—much less transparently—of imperial policy making. Broadly, those concerned about a malignant pan-Islamism presented Islam as a fanatical ideology that had historically spread by means of violence and compulsion, while those who were dismissive about pan-Islamism's potential presented Islam as a divided religion with no history of working in common sympathy or toward a common purpose. Few modern commentators believed that Islamic history demonstrated that the faith had bequeathed any particular system of government or social organization to the world, commendable or otherwise.
By contrast, the erudite Muslim milieu explored below was engaged in producing alternative accounts of what the prophetic model and the Islamic experience in world history represented. Despite the urgency imparted upon their works by debates surrounding pan-Islamism and the politics of the contemporary Muslim world, many of these writers moved, often in counterintuitive ways, into new and inventive territory. They took up a particular political vocabulary in their histories and as a consequence pluralized the heritage of ideas and concepts—including democracy, constitutionalism, republicanism, and socialism—critical to modern politics. The publication of Stubbe's text was well suited to this wider endeavor of narrating not simply an intelligible past commensurable with Europe's own, but one that was in fact distinctive and fundamentally progressive. Through a reappraisal of what resources history offered, such an endeavor made it in turn possible in this period to articulate strikingly different visions for the political future of Islam too.
HENRY STUBBE AND HAFIZ SHAIRANI
Stubbe's Rise and Progress was a text unusual even in its own time. In prevailing depictions of Muhammad written by both medieval and early modern European writers, the Prophet was variously a heretic, an imposture or false prophet, a popish ally, or even the Antichrist. The religion he founded was correspondingly either a cunning sham, fostered by the use of fake miracles; a Christian heresy; or, as was largely believed into the modern period, a violent faith that was spread by the sword.Footnote 2 Stubbe's own estimations of both the Prophet and Islam were diametrically different. Stubbe found “little integrity in the Christian narratives,” which had transformed by their “great untruths” “the Wisest Legislator that ever was” into “the vilest Imposter.”Footnote 3 In Shairani's words, Stubbe had produced instead an image of “a Prophet-monarch, something like King David.”Footnote 4 Indeed, the Muhammad of Rise and Progress is not simply in the mould of a king of the Hebrew Bible, but something of a direct legatee.
Stubbe was privy to a transformative moment in early modern scholarship. A close reader of John Selden (1584–1654) and other scholars of the “Hebrew Republic,” he was attuned to their concern to show how Jewish history could inform contemporary politics and religious debate. Their interest was not confined to Judaism. In the late sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries, Protestant and Catholic scholars alike learnt Arabic in order to better understand the Hebrew Bible, and believed that early Islam, as much as early Judaism, possessed an analogical value critical to the deeper understanding of the history of Christianity—an understanding that might, in turn, shed light on the biblical account of human origins and universal history; in sum, this was a parallel “Republic of Arabic Letters.”Footnote 5 Stubbe's text evinces a particularly strong debt to the work of Edward Pococke (1604–91), chaplain of the English Levant Company in Aleppo, whose prodigious scholarship and collecting of Arabic manuscripts for the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, in the 1630s earned him the inaugural Laudian Chair of Arabic at the University of Oxford. The manuscript of Rise and Progress which Shairani consulted was missing the copious marginal annotations evident in other early copies but it was nevertheless clear to him, based on Stubbe's references, that a wider intellectual climate had produced this text.Footnote 6 Besides Selden and Pococke, Stubbe demonstrated his familiarity with the writings of Dutchmen Hugo Grotius and Joseph Scaliger, and Swiss scholar Johann Heinrich Hottinger, among many others.Footnote 7 Such scholars propelled seventeenth-century Europe's enormous appetite for acquiring Arabic manuscripts to house in its newly established oriental libraries.Footnote 8
Stubbe likely did not study any Arabic manuscripts himself. He also took the arguments of the men of the Republic of Arabic Letters in a much more polemical direction. While several influential scholars posited a comparative, analogical, and even genealogical connection between Islam on the one hand and Judaism and Christianity on the other in this period, Stubbe made a particularly heterodox argument in insisting that Muhammad had derived certain Islamic doctrines and practices from among “Judaising Christians,” specifically the Nazarene Christians and Arians, and the earlier Ebionites. The latter believed that Jesus was the Messiah but did not believe that he was the son of God, nor did they believe in the Holy Ghost, and regarded such ideas as blasphemous and polytheistic.Footnote 9 These groups represented, for Stubbe, the “true and Simple Piety which flourished amongst the Christians during their Oppressions & Persecutions,” which gave way to the Christianity of the Emperor Constantine and the Nicene Council.Footnote 10 As Christianity became more and more corrupted by Trinitarianism and by the emphasis on “bodily Gestures & Humiliations,” “God justly permitted Mahomet to sow a new doctrine in Arabia which was directly opposite to the Christian Religion, yet did in words contain a great part of the Christian practise.”Footnote 11 Islam was thus positioned as a result of the decline of true Christian belief and practice.
Stubbe selectively used the scholarship on biblical antiquity—particularly Selden's De Diis Syris (1617)—to demonstrate that certain laws promulgated by Muhammad corresponded to an equivalent tenet in Judaism, or an evil social custom attributed to Islam was consistent with a practice that had prevailed among the early Christians. As for the cause and character of Islam's subsequent expansion, Stubbe vigorously refuted the contention that “Mahomet propagated his doctrine by the sword.”Footnote 12 The sagacious and pious character of Muhammad and the exemplary conduct of his companions, particularly his cousin and son-in-law “Aly” (the fourth caliph, ‘Ali (c.599–661)), made the attraction of Islam to the tribes of Arabia during the Prophet's own lifetime perfectly intelligible.Footnote 13 In further addressing the character of Muhammad, Stubbe devoted several pages disputing the then prevailing idea that Muhammad was an ignorant man who had two “assistants,” a Jew and a Nestorian monk, who filled him with their beliefs and helped him write the Qur'an; he was, rather, a learned man who used his familiarity with Christian and Jewish doctrines to shape Islam, claimed Stubbe. This is likely to have intrigued readers such as Shairani even in the early twentieth century; the idea of the ignorant Prophet and unreliable Jewish informants, whose recitations became “the inspirations of the Almighty,” was still to be found in relatively recent accounts, such as William Muir's controversial Life of Mahomet (1858-61).Footnote 14
Rise and Progress has been variously described as revolutionary, exceptional,Footnote 15 subversive,Footnote 16 and a founding moment of English deism that demonstrates Stubbe's admixture of Thomas Hobbes with Selden's ideal of a minimal natural religion based on the precepts of Noah.Footnote 17 But it is also true to say that most scholars read its nature and concerns as very much tied to confessional disputes and its Restoration-era context—Muhammad was being suggested as a model for Charles II, and the civil religion of Islam for the government and church of England.Footnote 18 Precisely because its historical arguments held such radical religious and political implications, Stubbe's text was not widely disseminated. Manuscript copies did, however, circulate in clandestine circles until the late eighteenth century, supporting anti-Trinitarian and pro-republican arguments among radical Protestants—indeed, for many, it serves as a link between the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century and the evolving “radical Enlightenment” of the eighteenth.Footnote 19
Even “high” Enlightenment accounts of Islam owed much to seventeenth-century scholarship on the origins of religions. The most famous example and one noted by Shairani—the fifth volume of Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788)—was deeply reliant on this earlier scholarship on Islam, not only for its empirical material but also for its insights and philosophical outlook. Gibbon went further by definitively writing Islam into the history of antiquity and Christianity—he compared the Rashidun, for instance, to the virtuous emperors of classical Rome, though he was also harsher regarding the civilizational achievements of Islam since that age.Footnote 20
A notion of Islamic “republicanism” was simultaneously being developed in a more immediate political project of the second half of the eighteenth century—a project that bridges the geographies that Stubbe and Shairani occupied. In the wake of the dramatic expansion of its territorial power in the Mughal province of Bengal, the British East India Company, an imperium in imperium, fashioned an understanding of its own sovereignty with reference to a so-called Mughal “ancient constitution.”Footnote 21 The concept in turn animated the Whig Edmund Burke in his trenchant critique of the company's conduct in India, which he claimed was contemptible under “the Mahometan law” by which the company claimed to govern and under the laws of Britain, as well as under a universal natural law.Footnote 22 In Burke's attempted impeachment of company governor-general Warren Hastings between 1788 and 1795, he presented the Mughal constitution in the likeness of Britain's own “ancient constitution,” with sweeping portraits of the virtuous Islamic republics of the emperors Tamerlane and Akbar in particular.Footnote 23
Notwithstanding Gibbon's appraisal of early Islam, or Burke's long public campaign against British crimes committed in India under the cover of “oriental despotism,” what interest in and even admiration for Islam there had been in early modern European thought waned precipitously over the course of the eighteenth century. Indeed, as recent scholarship has argued, the very concept of oriental despotism, whose most influential theorist was Montesquieu, reflected the relocation of Islam and particularly the Ottoman Empire into the realm of the antipolitical in this period.Footnote 24 By the time Enlightenment interests in civilizational hierarchy, difference, and relative historical development had found expression in a liberal justification for European imperial expansion in the nineteenth century, Asian and Islamic Empires had already been deemed beyond political comprehension for some time.Footnote 25 The majority of the world's Muslims now found themselves in lands designated temporally backward and in need of the tutelary benefits of colonialism; “historicism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century.”Footnote 26
This domination was still in place when Shairani produced the first print edition of Rise and Progress under the auspices of the Pan-Islamic Society of London in the early twentieth century. The society was founded in 1903 as a revival of the Anjuman-i-Islam (Society of Islam), founded in London in 1886; Shairani served as its joint secretary between 1908 and 1913.Footnote 27 Shairani offered a brief history of the peregrinations of the manuscript of Rise and Progress that he was publishing: after passing through at least three private libraries, it had ended up in the possession of one Bertram Dobell, from whom the present owner bought it in 1907.Footnote 28 It is likely that Shairani came upon the text in the course of his employment by Luzac and Company as a collector of rare books and manuscripts on Islamic science, theology, and literature; his own collection of some two thousand volumes was donated to an oriental library that he established at the Pan-Islamic Society.Footnote 29
Shairani stated at the outset that Rise and Progress was not an official publication of the society, but nor was it a solitary venture.Footnote 30 It was financially underwritten by an array of subscribers: two publishers, “very handsome and substantial support” from two newspapers in Constantinople (Sabah and Sirat-i-Mustaqim), and almost forty private individuals.Footnote 31 Among the latter were Sayyid Ameer Ali (1849–1928), an eminent Indian jurist and historian; Mushir Hussein Kidwai (1878–1924), an Indian barrister and joint secretary of the Pan-Islamic Society; and Thomas Walker Arnold (1864–1930), arguably the most influential British authority on Islam following the publication of his own broadly sympathetic book, The Preaching of Islam (1896). Worth noting, too, is the appearance of Enver Effendi (1881–1922), a leader of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.Footnote 32
Why did this constellation of figures undertake a complex transnational fund-raising endeavor to publish a little-known seventeenth-century English work on Islam in this moment? Shairani claimed that no “explanation or apology” for the publication was required; the “antiquarian value” of this unusual text spoke for itself. Yet he also articulated the rather more present-minded concern to acquaint “ourselves with the early Western notions of Islam” that “still exercise a great influence on the writers of modern times.”Footnote 33 Shairani regarded Rise and Progress as a masterly and fearless work; Stubbe deserved “to rank with [Edward] Gibbon and [Thomas] Carlyle,” whose own works had done so much “to combat the prejudices which warp the judgment of England with regard to the Prophet.”Footnote 34 In his estimation, Stubbe's was the “earliest known sympathetic composition in English” on Islam.Footnote 35
Shairani added a lengthy appendix to the text in which he charted European attitudes towards Islam and the Prophet up to the mid-seventeenth century, with reference to the works of travellers and geographers, playwrights and poets, diplomats and historians.Footnote 36 He observed wryly, for instance, that in Reformation-era Europe, Muhammad was variously compared to the Pope, the Devil, and Henry VIII.Footnote 37 The Prophet was afforded suitable company on only one occasion: in the Tribus Impostoribus, which “accounts Moses, Jesus and Mohammed as three impostors.”Footnote 38 Shairani was able to demonstrate how inconstant Christian writers had been about Islam as well as their own faith. Instrumental uses of European biblical criticism by Muslims had antecedents in mid-nineteenth-century India, but what Shairani was doing here was acutely historiographical and largely free of theological polemic.Footnote 39 The appendix also allowed Shairani to correct some of the most pernicious errors about Islam presented in these European works—those “early germs of the prejudices, which, like a nightmare, still haunt the imagination of Europeans.”Footnote 40
That “nightmare” was nowhere more clearly apparent than in the feverish discussion then taking place around pan-Islamism. Indeed, the importance of this discursive environment is borne out by a second publication of the same year: a standalone version of his appendix, titled Early Christian Legends and Fables Concerning Islam. Its rather more acerbic preface read,
Things have little improved since the days of [George] Sale,[Footnote 41] Islamic study being seldom permitted to rise above the horizon of controversy. The voice of honest scholars is drowned out in the hum of general ignorance and noise of the alarmists and pious enthusiasts, whose cry of Muslim fanaticism and Pan-Islamism holds Christendom in a state of constant fear and awe. The demeanour of England is most appalling, after all these centuries! the empire that rules a greater number of Muslims than any caliph of yore; whose libraries are filled with the greatest jewels of Muslim intellectualism, still remains under the spell of the Middle Ages.Footnote 42
As noted above, pan-Islamism was the object of vociferous debate from the late nineteenth century onwards.Footnote 43 Its parameters were ill-defined both in Europe, where the term had been coined, and among Muslim interlocutors who were forced increasingly to respond to it. It was clear to all that the principles of unity and universality were central tenets of Islam, captured by the very concept of the umma (the community of believers), thereby rendering pan-Islamism somewhat tautological. But whether unity should be extended to matters of political life was unclear—it was, as scholars pointed out, not a notion that had moved Muslims in past times. Indeed, as scholars have noted, the unity of the umma had been more often than not used in political texts to justify caliphal power and forestall radicalism.Footnote 44 And yet it was undeniable, too, that contemporary Muslims appeared increasingly to be aware of, to reference, to be inspired by, and to decry the experiences of their co-religionists dwelling in other, sometimes far-flung, parts of “the Muslim world.”Footnote 45 In accounting for this development, many looked both to the influence of charismatic figures such as the aforementioned Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and to Constantinople. Although the Ottoman Sultan had simultaneously held the title of caliph (khalifa, vice regent of God) since the early sixteenth century, during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1842–1918) the caliphate and a broader project of global Muslim unity assumed greater religio-political importance, both within and beyond the empire. In India, for instance, where the largest population of the world's Muslims lived, there did not appear to be much interest in the politics of the Ottoman Empire until the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8.Footnote 46 It was partly confusion about the caliphate's historical development and contemporary significance that brought so many scholars of the Orient into conversations about pan-Islamism.
These scholars, along with journalists and colonial officials, increasingly sallied forth on the subject of “the future of Islam,” particularly after the publication in 1882 of a collection of essays by Wilfrid S. Blunt bearing that title.Footnote 47 Many of these figures occupied multiple roles. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), for instance, was both professor of Arabic at Leiden University and a long-time political agent for the government of the Dutch Indies. He claimed that most Muslims did not much approve of a caliphate held by a dynasty not related to the Prophet's tribe, the Quraysh. He argued that pan-Islamism was a tool of Abdülhamid II's statecraft, and that most Muslims viewed the Ottoman Caliphate as a purely political rather than spiritual office because the religious heart of Islam would always lie in Mecca.Footnote 48 When his contemporary in Britain, Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926), scholar of Persian and professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge, was asked to give a lecture on pan-Islamism in 1902, he was rather more ambivalent. He was reluctant to broach the subject at all: “in the first place (and this you will admit is a serious objection), I am not sure what it means; and, in the second place, I am still less certain whether any such thing really exists.”Footnote 49 He could find no straightforward translation of the term in Arabic, Turkish, or Persian, which tended to confirm for him that it was an entirely Western invention.Footnote 50
Notwithstanding Browne's reticence, the two decades that followed witnessed sustained discussion of pan-Islamism's apparently sinister and conspiratorial dimensions. Historians have read this as a marker of political anxiety: pan-Islamism named the potential threat of political alliances among a vast, dispersed global Muslim population undermining a world order dominated by European empires.Footnote 51 It was a recognition by European powers of the contagiousness of ideas in this age of movement and communication—a realization of the radical synchronisms that their own world-spanning empires had created.Footnote 52 As such, it foreshadowed the crisis of the interwar world order. Those speaking from within the British Empire spoke of the meaning, reality, and future of pan-Islamism with the certainty that any concerted political movement among Muslims could be the undoing of the empire they referred to, only half ironically, as “the greatest Mahomedan power in the world.”Footnote 53 British fears around pan-Islamism were given a distinct color by a range of related factors, including the long shadow cast by the Indian Rebellion of 1857–8 and rising tides of Turcophobia from the 1870s.Footnote 54
Given this context, it is hardly surprising that the patrons of the Pan-Islamic Society—whose high-minded objectives included the promotion of the religious, moral, social, and intellectual advancement of the Muslim worldFootnote 55—would have thought it a worthwhile endeavor to fund publications on the history of the Muslim world. It must have seemed an added boon that the text that Shairani had discovered was by a European, and one seemingly forgotten by his own compatriots. Indeed, Shairani's publication of Stubbe's Rise and Progress might be best read as a provocation. Clearing the detritus of Europe's accumulated misconceptions about Islam, including those that even the sympathetic Stubbe was guilty of, allowed Shairani to reveal the fallibility and contingency of its historical tradition. Although admiring of Stubbe's erudition and unusual degree of open-mindedness, Shairani's introductory remarks, appendix, and biographical note on Stubbe's career situated Stubbe as a product of his time—an author of an exceptional text that was nonetheless part of a broader environment. As he put forward in the preface to Early Christian Legends, the seventeenth-century pioneers of orientalism “were not men of science, they were Christian enthusiasts, who sought above all to establish the truth of their faith. With this glorious dream they entered into the field of oriental history.”Footnote 56 But Shairani also established sympathy and common purposes with Stubbe and, with the establishment of an oriental library at the Pan-Islamic Society, he arguably confirmed the seventeenth-century project of understanding the past through the systematic accumulation of “jewels of Muslim intellectualism,” not divine revelation.
The Indian and Turkish individuals involved in publishing Stubbe's “antiquarian” history likely also thought that it stood a greater chance of drawing the positive attention of scholars in Britain than even the most magisterial of new histories authored by Muslims in this period. The latter seemed never to rise much above the accusations that they were highly sophisticated works of apology. David S. Margoliouth (1858–1940), who was Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford from 1889 to 1937, probably did not think he was being unkind when he described Ameer Ali's The Spirit of Islam (1891) as “probably the best achievement in the way of an apology for Mohammed that is ever likely to be composed in a European language.”Footnote 57 Histories written by Muslims, even if they followed every convention of European historical writing, appeared compromised by their religious attachments and to display little genuine historical sensibility.
The term “apology” masks more than it reveals in this “age of the polemical sira.”Footnote 58 The intellectual climate of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empire produced both the reasons and the resources by which to defend Islam and the Prophet against infamy. It was not all that uncommon, for instance, for Indian Muslims to travel to England to conduct research—the Indian modernist thinker, historian, and founder of the Aligarh reform movement, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), for instance, spent seventeen months immersed in the libraries and literary scene of London from 1869 to 1870, preparing a history of the Arabs and life of Muhammad that would refute Muir's Life of Mahomet. Ahmad Khan's work was drafted in Urdu as Khutbat-e Ahmadiyya (Sermons on the Prophet) but published in London, in English, as A Series of Essays on the Life of the Muhammad (1870), an indication of the possibilities of Muslim historical production in European cities in this period.Footnote 59 At the outset, Ahmad Khan details at some length which European writers on Islamic history he had read, and which works he knew of but had not been able to access; Ameer Ali did the same in the preface to A Short History of the Saracens (1899).Footnote 60 As Nile Green has observed, the transformation of Muslim historical writing in this period paralleled the modernist histories of the Jewish people being written in German by figures such as Heinrich Graetz.Footnote 61
Muslims also learnt languages for their endeavors: Ahmad Khan, who wrote an exegesis of the Bible, had some knowledge of Hebrew (though he likely relied on a Persian translation); his younger associate, Chiragh Ali (1844–95), had a more scholarly knowledge of Hebrew and the Old Testament and went further in his attempts to judge the historicity of the Bible and its implications for a broader natural theology.Footnote 62 Developments in print technologies meant that changes in historical practices were widely felt. When the historian, theologian, and poet Shibli Numani (1857–1914) sat down in north India to write his multivolume Urdu Sirat al-Nabi (Life of the Prophet) in the early 1900s, he made a “brief list” of thirty-seven notable works by European writers that he had consulted, including works published in German, French, Dutch, and Italian, encompassing histories of Arabia and the rise of Islam, lives of the Prophet, and studies of religion.Footnote 63 Gibbon was a mainstay in bibliographies but Muslim writers also looked approvingly towards Thomas Carlyle, who had devoted a whole lecture to Muhammad in his six-part series on the heroes and the heroic in world history, delivered in 1840.Footnote 64 Muslim writers generally proceeded from the assumption that Ernest Renan was correct to have declared in 1851 that, contrary to other religions, “l'islamisme [est] naît en pleine histoire”; that is to say, that the early history of Islam could be written with some empirical certainty and understood by the rational mind, without recourse to tales of miracles and the supernatural.Footnote 65
The world no doubt appeared dramatically more interconnected in this period, and figures such as Ahmad Khan, Ameer Ali, and Hafiz Shairani were each more mobile than their forebears, but it goes too far to suggest that Islam was undone and remade, and “radically reconceived as a temporal and spatial object” by the westward “mechanized movement of bodies and minds” suffering from dislocation and “experiential collapse.”Footnote 66 The narrative of a converging temporal consciousness formed in cosmopolitan imperial spaces by world-knitting processes of industrialization is one that risks affording too much agency to material change in the history of ideas. Muslims did not see European cities as mere manuscript repositories of their past, but they were not straightforward “technological sites for transforming their future” either.Footnote 67 Modernist Muslim authors could observe and inhabit the standardized time of trains, steamships, and the telegraph and simultaneously discern that European histories written from within this apparently universal temporality were in fact deeply subjective narratives of relative development, difference, and decline. It particularly does not hold that the modernist Muslim intellectual of this period—enchanted by historicism's corollary, progress (terakki/taraqqi in Turkish and Urdu respectively)—looked only to the future, and not to the age of the Prophet, for his social vision.Footnote 68 As demonstrated below, the early Islamic past would in fact come to be deeply imbricated in certain visions of the future.
For all its connotations, “apology”—a term that bridges Stubbe's defence of Unitarianism and the work of Ahmad Khan, Ameer Ali, and Hafiz Shairani—is at least an insistent reminder that these were all texts written with specific interlocutors and purposes in mind, ranging from the inter-confessional to the intra-imperial in nature. Those purposes inspired—perhaps required—intellectual departures and novel ways of thinking about the Islamic past. This took modernist Muslim writing beyond a narrow concern to demonstrate Islam's commensurability or compatibility with European thought. The result was “partly scientific and partly speculatively apologetic.”Footnote 69 From that interstitial, speculative space, new forms of thought could emerge. Indeed, defensiveness could lend these writings a certain curiousness. Fazlur Rahman has argued that the nineteenth-century Indian Muslim modernists’ partial, unsystematic style was the result of a lack of urgency, itself the corollary of wielding little real political power or influence; Faisal Devji, proceeding further, has argued that such a condition afforded Muslim thought a measure of intellectual autonomy from European understandings of modernity itself.Footnote 70 Such autonomy arguably helped sustain a prior, transhistorical Islamic imaginary into and beyond the age of global industrialization.
As the second half of this article elaborates, rethinking the Islamic past also allowed writers to present new answers to the fundamental question of the proper relationship between religion and politics in Islam. In presenting alternative ways of thinking about the historical political and social organization of Islam in particular, such works opened up other ways of thinking about the present and proffered resources—most importantly a vocabulary—for future political thought. Recovering these responses brings to the fore ways of imagining the world in the early twentieth century that did not hew to the temporal logic of historicism and liberal imperialism and, by that very fact, were full of possibility.Footnote 71
We ought to be cautious, all the same, about overstating the utopian character of these alternative imaginaries. The history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pan-Islamism has in recent scholarship been described variously as a profound anti-Western critique, a forerunner of “anticolonial internationalism,” a “colorful cosmopolitanism,” one arm of a complex, interconnected story of early twentieth-century global radicalism, and even as offering a counterhegemonic universalism of its own.Footnote 72 While movement, circulation, and connectivity cannot alone indicate the existence of an expansive, inclusive political project, however, we might also recognize that the recent interest in “futures past”—of lost “long-distant . . . dream worlds” that preceded the coming to dominance of the nation-state in the mid-twentieth century—is in part propelled by the impulse to stretch our historical horizons and to find departure points that could have, under a varying set of contingencies, led to a radically different present.Footnote 73 Such an approach echoes certain early twentieth-century pan-Islamic approaches to the past, too, which were ultimately concerned with creating interpretive space between the past, present, and future of Islam.
ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
Mushir Hussain Kidwai was likely very much interested and involved in the publication of Rise and Progress in 1911. He was secretary of the Pan-Islamic Society, which he had cofounded with Abdullah al-Mamoon Suhrawardy in 1903, and listed as a subscriber of Hafiz Shairani's publication. Kidwai, a barrister from the north Indian town of Lucknow, received the Order of Osmania from the Ottoman Sultan in 1905 for his services to the faith and had travelled to Constantinople several times.Footnote 74 He was the author of several works, largely about the contemporary Muslim world and its political predicaments, ranging from booklets to full-length works. As an Indian Muslim who was based for many years in London and was familiar with the late Ottoman world, and as someone involved with self-styled pan-Islamic organizations in London and India, he offers us an intriguing example of a figure trying to reconcile the tensions latent in the early twentieth-century discussion of pan-Islamism.
In 1908 and 1912, Kidwai published two texts that focused on the principles and practices of Muhammad and the early caliphs, and the models of rule they exemplified. Pan-Islamism appeared in 1908, followed four years later by Islam and Socialism. The earlier text made a claim that the second developed at greater length; that is, that Muhammad had founded a movement and established a set of practices that had as their essential object the advancement of “Pan-Islamism and a true Socialism.”Footnote 75 The two ideas are referred to almost always synonymously by Kidwai—for instance, Muhammad is referred to in Pan-Islamism as “that great and true Socialist” who sought to put into practical effect “the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God,” the germ of pan-Islamism.Footnote 76 In 1912, Islam and Socialism offered a more detailed history of so-called Islamic socialism, from the life of Muhammad to the moment when the socialist structure of Islam was “shatter[ed]” by the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750), Mu‘awiya (602–80), who, through the appointment of his son Yazid as his successor, introduced the principle of hereditary rule in Islam.Footnote 77
Muhammad was the Messiah who transformed Arabia beyond recognition, wrote Kidwai, but he did so as one who was “essentially human and thoroughly Social,” a view that accorded with a wider shift in historical writing about Muhammad since the nineteenth century.Footnote 78 Muhammad obliterated distinctions of color and country, race and rank; he introduced a spirit of representative government; he united the clans of Arabia. ‘Umar, the second caliph, continued this work—his “socialist genius” used the annual pilgrimage, for instance, to bring rulers together and make them accountable to the people. ‘Umar build a magnificent empire upon Muhammad's foundation. When Islam arrived in India, it unified the people and through “masterful imperialism” brought into existence for the first time in a six-thousand-year history an Indian nation.Footnote 79
Kidwai made several references to “modern political theories” in Islam and Socialism: Muhammad's administration of the peninsula laid down a guiding principle “accepted by the thinkers of the 20th century as the best principle of administration;”Footnote 80 Rousseau agreed.Footnote 81 This was not a simple rejection of historicism, where “modern” thought found its origins in the early history of Islam; the fortunes of Islam were also projected forwards, tied to the fortunes of liberalism in particular. “With the progress of liberalism,” he writes, “the chances of the reglorification of the Musalmans are drawing near.”Footnote 82 “May it be that every step that a Musalman either of Turkey or Persia, of Egypt or India, of Afghanistan or Central Asia, of New world or of the Old takes, be towards real Liberalism.”Footnote 83 In 1908’s Pan-Islamism, Kidwai had argued that the form of Islam “best suited for an advanced age and progressive nations is Sufism,” the mystical tradition of Islam, which he claimed was truer to “Islam's liberal spirit.”Footnote 84 In Islam and Socialism, published in the midst of tenser geopolitical times, Kidwai mentioned a rather more detailed schema for righting the ills afflicting Muslim societies, which included the striking suggestion that the “first step of Musalmans should be towards the nationalisation of the Turkish Empire in general and their sacred places in particular.”Footnote 85
Though Kidwai's perspective positioned Islam as a religion that had pioneered socialism, he had a complicated relationship with the history of the concept. In his gloss on socialist thought, he rejected Comte de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, Karl Marx, and Ferdinand Lasalle, not to mention “modern socialist authorities,” thereby demonstrating an unwillingness to dialogically or dialectically engage with and integrate European thought, a tendency he shared with earlier modernist thought.Footnote 86 But Kidwai did construct a history for pan-Islamism that brought it into the tangible realm of twentieth-century politics. Indeed, it seems likely that as formative as it must have been to witness the progress of the Young Turk revolution in person on his visits to Constantinople, the steady but sure growth of the labor movement in England in the early 1900s was the more proximate inspiration behind Kidwai's attempt to meld the languages of pan-Islamism and socialism. And it was certainly a topic of lasting interest to him; his later publications included the much weightier Pan-Islamism and Bolshevism (1937), framed as a continuation of Islam and Socialism.Footnote 87 Both texts emphasize the importance of some form of collectivism, democratic accountability in political organizations, and the cultivation of higher human faculties over a narrow materialism, ideas he found common to both pan-Islamism and socialism.Footnote 88
The interwar Pan-Islamism and Bolshevism makes more stark a feature that is present in Kidwai's writings of the 1910s: while he was a vigorous defender of Islam against European aggression, he was as willing, if not more so, to challenge the activities of his fellow Muslims, past and present. In Islam and Socialism, for instance, he describes how the socialistic spirit of Islam had diminished with Islam's expansion, and admits that state organization in India under Muslim rulers was despotic.Footnote 89 In more recent times, he marks out Abdülhamid II as a gross lover of absolutism, while praising the ardor of the Young Turks—who had restored the Ottoman Constitution of 1876—and the sweeping “democratic changes” that were now permeating the atmosphere of Turkey.Footnote 90
Although the existential dangers faced by the Ottoman Empire loomed large among many writers’ and activists’ concerns, Kidwai was not the only pan-Islamist who simultaneously defended the empire and critiqued the Sultan–Caliph's abuses of power. Indian pan-Islamists, generally speaking, did not perceive a conflict between championing the nationalist-minded revolutionary movement of the Young Turks and at the same time supporting the institution of the caliphate, since they regarded better political rule in the Ottoman Empire as a means by which to restrain particular individuals from abusing the office of the caliphate, which in turn would help safeguard it for the good of the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim world at large. Early twentieth-century pan-Islamism, by investing the caliphate with greater temporal significance, also brought greater political scrutiny of Constantinople from Muslims as well as Europeans, inspiring attempts such as Kidwai's to attach a progressive political language to the office.Footnote 91
In arguing that Islam's past did not preclude politically liberal, egalitarian, collectivist, or democratic futures—indeed, that it might inspire them—these texts were part of a wider republican moment in Muslim thought, one epitomized by the Young Turks but certainly not limited to them.Footnote 92 In the Indian context, the aforementioned Chiragh Ali, a scholar, civil servant and young associate of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, was arguably the first to definitively show that Islamic history did not preclude modern forms of government. Ahmad Khan's own theology had borne the “unmistakeable influence of Unitarianism,” and established that the essence of religion was truth rather than faith, and truth, “in so far as it is cognizable by human reason, is identical with nature and its laws.” These natural laws then formed the basis of the ethics that organized human society.Footnote 93 Ahmad Khan's thought was almost deist in character; he tried to distinguish what was immutable natural law and what had accreted within Islam because of the historical context of its revelation and in subsequent times.Footnote 94 In his commentary on the Bible, Ahmad Khan claimed he could find no trace of Trinitarianism in the New Testament.Footnote 95 Chiragh Ali took forward the idea of Islam as a natural theology, as well as Ahmad Khan's efforts to demonstrate the historicity of the Old and New Testaments, and of the Qur'an—efforts which had taken Ahmad Khan, at times, into the realm of “untenable historical hypotheses.”Footnote 96 To these, Chiragh Ali added an interest in the contemporary Ottoman Empire.
In his 1883 work The Proposed Political, Legal, and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other Mohammadan States, Chiragh Ali argued at length that Islam “possesses sufficient elasticity to enable it to adapt to the social and political revolutions going on around it.”Footnote 97 Among Chiragh Ali's most interesting claims was that “the Mohammadan law” was “democratic” and “republican” in origin and nature:
The Mohammadan States are not theocratic in their system of government, and the Mohammadan law being based on the principles of democracy is on this account a great check on Moslem tyrants. The first four or five Khalifates were purely republican in all their features. The law, when originally framed, did not recognize the existence of a king, of a nobility, or even of a gentry in the sense in which the term was first understood.Footnote 98
And, again:
The first four or five khalifates were of a republican nature, and after them the system of government was changed with the Ommiade [Umayyad] dynasty into monarchy and despotism. The early khalifas were appointed by election. Moávia [Mu‘awiya], the sixth khalifa, made the succession hereditary amongst his own descendants. All the khalifas, sultans, and malicks after the republican period are accepted as monarchs and despots. The first four or five khalifas are called the Khulafai-Rashedeen. Those following them are termed Moolkan Azoozan, the tyrannous kings or despots, and the Khulafai-jour, the oppressive khalifas.Footnote 99
“Republican” in this context thus refers to two distinct qualities of the early caliphates: that they were bound by a law that was in itself in some measure “democratic”—that is to say, the fruit of consensus—and secondly that neither were the polities they ruled aristocratic nor was the caliphate a hereditary office. These two aspects became touchstones in reformist Muslim thought—they both feature in Kidwai's histories—and indicate why this discussion of republicanism was more systematic and consistent than the label “romantic apologetic” would suggest.Footnote 100
Such an interpretation was used to underline the central contention of Chiragh Ali's work: that “the Government of Turkey does not and cannot claim or profess to be theocratic” and that “Mussalman states” were not simply “branches of a cosmopolitan theocracy . . . all bound by one common code of civil and religious rules and dogmas which are essentially and eternally unchangeable.”Footnote 101 “The characteristics of each of the four orthodox schools [of jurisprudence] now in force,” referring to the Hanafites, Malikites, Shafites, Hanbalites, “would show that they were never intended to be either divine or finite.”Footnote 102 For instance, the founder of the Hanbali school, Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal, when confronted by the “licentious passions of Khalifs and Ameers” of his age, resorted to prophetic traditions then current to check “this great evil.” “Though most of these traditions were unauthentic fabrications, they contained the principles of the Republican form of Government, and hence were well suited to check the profligacies of the despotic Khalifs.”Footnote 103 Every new system was necessarily incomplete and changeable to suit the wishes of the people and the political and social circumstances of the day; “every new school of jurisprudence made legislation experimental and inductive, while the former systems of speculative and deductive legislation were shelved into oblivion.”Footnote 104 In this manner, Chiragh Ali defended Islam from claims of stagnation and moribundity.
Chiragh Ali perhaps felt bound to give the government of early Islam a name since he was writing specifically against those who accused Islam of being theocratic and in need of a Reformation of its own. Theocracy, he said, was a term used to try to condemn the prospects of either the Ottoman Empire, or indeed any Muslim state, undertaking comprehensive internal reform. He denied that a religious revolution must necessarily precede political reforms in a Muslim state.Footnote 105 As to who was going to put in effect the wide-ranging reforms in Islam proposed in this text, Chiragh Ali was clear that the only legal authority was His Imperial Majesty, the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph. His account, which bore an elaborate dedication to Abdülhamid II, stands most clearly opposed to Blunt's The Future of Islam, published a year earlier, in which the Englishman combined a sympathetic account of the contemporary Muslim world with a damning indictment of the history and legitimacy of the Ottoman Caliphate. Blunt argued that while there were hopeful signs of a progressive, liberal spirit among reformist Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere, so long as there was an Ottoman Caliphate at the headship of Islam there could be no viable Islamic future.Footnote 106
Although Chiragh Ali purported to uphold the Ottoman Empire as an agent of change in the future, he unavoidably also conveyed that it was precisely under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Caliphs that Islam had seemingly collapsed into social and political decay, straying both from the scripture of the Qur'an and from the principle of conscientious, progressive legal reform. In the very proposal of a such a series of comprehensive reforms, this text was an implicit critique of the political rule of the Ottomans. But, unlike Ahmad Khan, who was ambivalent at best about the prospect of India's Muslims seeking political inspiration abroad, Chiragh Ali was able to meld a modernist approach to Islamic history, law, and theology with support for a broader Ottoman-centred pan-Islamism; indeed, the Ottoman Empire was the natural locus of his reformist aspirations.
Chiragh Ali's thought was not revivalist in the sense that it sought a return to a lost golden age; indeed, little of pan-Islamic thought more broadly can be described in such terms. Chiragh Ali posited republicanism as closer to the true spirit of Islam than anything that had been seen since and upheld it as an ideal. In so doing, it augured the work of subsequent writers, such as Mushir Kidwai, whose support for pan-Islamism demanded radical political change within the Ottoman Empire. This was even more apparent in the work of Turkish scholar and political activist Halil Halid (1869–1931), whom Shairani singled out for particular thanks for his help in raising money for the publication of Rise and Progress.Footnote 107 Halid spent much of the early 1900s in Britain, where he taught Turkish at the University of Cambridge and was friends with Edward Browne.Footnote 108 In his own writings before the First World War, Halid combined a trenchant critique of the Sultan's systematic persecution of Turkish reformers with a restatement of the clear historical foundations and religio-political legitimacy of the Ottoman Caliphate for the benefit of those foreign forces that sought to undermine it.Footnote 109
* * *
Among the other subscribers to Shairani's 1911 publication was one particularly notable writer: the aforementioned Ameer Ali, arguably the most significant Muslim historian of his age. Ameer Ali served as a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council from 1909 until his death in 1928, during which time he was an active organizer of Muslim political and social life, founding, for instance, the British Red Crescent Society after the Italian invasion of Tripoli in 1911. He was of a piece with the kind of historical modernism pioneered by Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Chiragh Ali but over the course of a long public career—much of which was spent in England—developed a greater degree of intimacy with British intellectual circles. His two most influential works were A Short History of the Saracens (1899) and another that exists in three distinct iterations produced over half a century: A Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mahomet (1873), significantly expanded and republished as The Life and Teachings of Muhammad; or, The Spirit of Islam in 1891, which was in turn further expanded for a 1922 edition, titled The Spirit of Islam: A History of the Evolution and Ideals of Islam.
It has often been said that Ameer Ali's particular contribution as far as pan-Islamism is concerned was his reformulation of the Shi‘a position on the history of the caliphate. By elaborating a distinction between an “apostolical” imamate (leadership) and an elected “pontifical” caliphate in Islam, his historical works allowed for Indian Shi‘a recognition of the first three caliphs and investment in the contemporary (Sunni) Ottoman Caliphate without erring from the tenets of Shi‘ism, which held that only members of the Prophet's family through his cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali had received divine designation for the religious and political leadership of Islam. Ameer Ali's reassessment of Shi‘a belief therefore lent pan-Islamism—which very much depended upon the symbolism of Ottoman power—some of its ecumenical purchase. Scholars have recently cast some doubt on the impact of Ameer Ali's thought on actual attitudes towards pan-Islamism among Shi‘as in India itself.Footnote 110 It bears noting, too, that while the apostolical/pontifical distinction appeared in his earlier writings, Ameer Ali carved out an entire chapter on “The Apostolical Succession” for the 1922 edition of The Spirit of Islam, just as the Indian Khilafat movement (1918–24)—the postwar Indian campaign to save the Ottoman Caliphate—was reaching its apogee.Footnote 111
The 1891 edition shows Ameer Ali to be altogether disinterested in the question of the contemporary caliphate. He does state that ‘Ali “had never refrained from giving to the first two Caliphs his help and advice in the governance of the Caliphate”—an important point in itself since it is a central element of Shi‘a belief that the Prophet had indicated that ‘Ali ought to be the first vice regent after him. Ameer Ali holds the weakness of the third caliph, ‘Uthman, and the ambitions of the Umayyad dynasty responsible for introducing division and schism into Islam.Footnote 112 Of the Ottomans, however, who had held the most widely accepted claim to the caliphate since the sixteenth century, there is only scattered mention in glancing remarks and footnotes—one of which, tellingly, is about how the Ottoman Turks provide examples in recent Islamic history of popular revolts against vicious or incapable sovereigns.Footnote 113 Ameer Ali seems to have had little to say at this time about the “spirit of Islam” in the Ottoman Empire.
In the years between 1891 and 1922, Ameer Ali was, perhaps more than any other Muslim contemporary, called upon to discuss pan-Islamism in Britain's literary circles. In 1906, for instance, he responded to a lecture on the subject by journalist and historian Valentine Chirol (1852–1929), delivered at the Central Asian Society,Footnote 114 and he offered a rebuttal to a lecture—suggestively titled “Is Pan-Islamism a Power?”—delivered in front of the same society by the Laudian Professor of Arabic, D. S. Margoliouth, in 1912.Footnote 115 After the 1906 lecture, he took issue with Chirol for suggesting that pan-Islamism was stirred up by the Ottoman Sultan and acquit the latter of any active role in fomenting Muslim hostility towards non-Muslims.Footnote 116 Ameer Ali admitted to being no admirer of Abdülhamid II, but stated that his spiritual headship was perfectly acknowledged among Sunnis—a point Ameer Ali made repeatedly in his writings.Footnote 117
Margoliouth was likely a greater challenge than Chirol. He was a self-avowed friend of Islam, who claimed familiarity with Muslim writers as well as wielding academic authority over Islamic history. In his 1912 lecture in particular, he employed, somewhat misleadingly, the words of Syrian thinker and editor of the Arabic journal al-Manar (The Lighthouse), Rashid Rida (1865–1935), whom many regarded as the intellectual heir to al-Afghani's pan-Islamism, to support his contention that interests so differed among the sects and populations of the Muslim world that the very idea of pan-Islamism was a “phantasm”: “Pan-Islamism is a futile remedy for a disease which has no existence.”Footnote 118 Margoliouth, seemingly developing Rida's own thoughts, argued that pan-Islamism was a fiction because the principle of unity was unknown in the history of Islam—heresy and schism had commenced even before the Prophet's death and multiplied every century thereafter.Footnote 119 Indeed, Muslims were less united now than they had ever been because so many lived under, and enjoyed the boons of, European rule: no Muslim who had experienced such good government could possibly hope to be ruled by an “Oriental despot” instead.Footnote 120
Margoliouth was a scholar of a wide range of subjects and languages; he had established himself as a particular authority on Islam with the publication of Mohammed and the Rise of Islam in 1906, and ensuing works including Mohammedanism in 1911. In the latter text, he devoted a chapter on the idea of the Islamic state. Margoliouth thought that one could fairly attribute to the Prophet “the theory of the Platonic Republic, according to which the members of a community should share pain and pleasures to the same extent as the members of one body.”Footnote 121 But as to the Prophet's statecraft, Margoliouth argued that “his legislation followed an end similar to that ascribed to Lycurgus, viz. to create a military state,” where every Muslim was a soldier–priest.Footnote 122 Otherwise, Margoliouth denied Muhammad any particular political ambitions or innovations: “The Prophet's plan was so far as possible to leave the older system of government unaltered.”Footnote 123
The subsequent history of Islam knew nothing other than autocracy up until the nineteenth century, “when the wave set in motion by the French Revolution reached Turkey in Europe and then Asia”; even then, it was hardly felt in what he called the “Heat-Belt,” where the “widespread intellectual activity which constitutional government” demands could hardly have been sustained.Footnote 124 The “physical conditions” also militated against a European-style experimental jurisprudence; it was “absolutely beyond man's capacity” to engage in such energetic labors.Footnote 125 Margoliouth speculated that there might be some connection between Christianity and constitutionalism, democracy, and even socialism, for the “earliest Christian community was socialistic almost to a degree that would have satisfied Plato.” Islam, by contrast, knew nothing of any of these ideas: “It began in absolute monarchy and contemplated the continuance of the institution.”Footnote 126
Revolutions in the sense of changes of the form of Government never occurred till European ideas had circulated in Islamic countries . . . Where men fought for ideas, as they sometimes did, the ideas never took the form of modification to be applied to the constitution; it was only to substitute one ruler for another. This is why Oriental history is so dreary and uninstructive.Footnote 127
Ameer Ali had, from his earliest historical works, referred to the Rashidun as the “Republic of Islam.” In A Short History of the Saracens, first published in 1899, he set out this narrative of the Republic of Islam from its founding under Abu Bakr, whom he presented as having commanded the commonwealth of Islam with justice, to its demise with the death of ‘Ali and the coming to power of the Umayyads.Footnote 128 The eponymous Saracen (Arab) kingdoms of the Middle Ages achieved varying measures of wise, liberal, and just government, too, though they were undone by their racial pride.Footnote 129 The 1891 edition of Spirit of Islam described the end of “the halcyon days of the Republic of Islam” in similar terms.Footnote 130 In both works, Ameer Ali presented early Islamic government as a democratic, self-governing commonwealth of equal rights, bookended by oligarchical rule: “An examination of the political condition of the Moslems under the early Caliphs brings into view a popular government administered by an elective chief with limited powers.”Footnote 131
It ought not to be surprising, then, that in response to Margoliouth's 1912 lecture, Ameer Ali stridently denied the Laudian Professor's claim that Islam had no history of constitutionalism—“if constitutional government is intimately associated with any creed it is that of Islam . . . It is more socialistic and democratic than any other system I know of, and under it constitutional Government flourished in old times.”Footnote 132 He cited the use of advisory councils by Islamic monarchies of the past, councils which were “in some respects . . . as representative as the systems which have been evolved by 600 years of democracy in this country.” Republican, constitutional, and egalitarian were becoming all but synonymous for Ameer Ali. He took this further in a 1915 essay published in the Contemporary Review which, though disavowing the language of “election,” referred much more directly to the careful process of “induction” or “appointment” to the office of caliph throughout Islamic history.Footnote 133 Most recently, in the early sixteenth century, the great Ottoman ruler Selim I, he argued, undertook well-established rituals which both sacralized his sovereignty and established his lawful government—and thereby “perfected the Ottoman Sultan's title to the Caliphate.” Thus, according to the Sunnis, the caliphate became the heritage of the House of Othman, and one it had enjoyed for four centuries with popular assent and “without challenge or dispute.”Footnote 134 This portion of Ottoman history was later used to close out the chapter on the apostolical succession added to the 1922 edition of The Spirit of Islam.Footnote 135 Ameer Ali was emphatic that it had never been a problem for Sunnis that the House of Othman were not Qurayshi: “The idea that according to the Sunni doctrines there is some sacramental value attached to Koreishite blood” was “of purely foreign origin.”Footnote 136 Ameer Ali was no doubt aware that the question of Qurayshi lineage was now becoming foundational to calls for an “Arab Caliphate” among certain Muslim thinkers who were disillusioned by the government of the Young Turks and who anticipated the Ottoman Empire's temporal defeat in the war.Footnote 137
Ameer Ali never suggested that Shi‘as recognized the spiritual legitimacy of the Ottoman Caliphate, but neither did he aver that the lack of such recognition was a source of intolerance or conflict, or an obstacle to political sympathy among contemporary Muslims. For his part, Margoliouth opined that religions were better when they allowed denominationalism and variety, and accommodated differences among climates, races, and individual minds. But this was only possible when religious and political authority was distinct, “as in the British dependencies and Protectorates.”Footnote 138 Nor was he privately consistent in his belief in the wonders of spiritual disunity. In 1916 Margoliouth was called upon to lend his historical expertise on events then unfolding in wartime Arabia. Margoliouth threw his weight behind British plans to support the Hashemite potentate, the Sharif of Mecca, in a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Margoliouth did not discuss here the weakness of Islam's corporate ties—indeed, quite the contrary. Though the headship of Islam had been “usurped” by other dynasties, he wrote in a confidential note to the government, “the Moslem mind” felt a “powerful attachment to the family of the Prophet.” They would welcome the Hashemites taking control of the Sanctuaries of Islam (Mecca and Medina) from the Ottomans; any lingering loyalty to the Turkish Caliph would vanish, in turn leading to the “speedy elimination of the Turk as a combatant” in the war.Footnote 139 Margoliouth thereby joined the ranks of those prominent British historians of Islam who became “agents of empire” during and after the war, deploying their expertise to undermine the claims of the Ottoman Empire and the postwar Khilafat movement in particular—Thomas Walker Arnold, author of The Preaching of Islam (1896) and a subscriber to Shairani's 1911 publication, was one of the more striking examples.Footnote 140
With the Ottoman Empire increasingly embattled after its defeat in the war, Ameer Ali wrote more and more of the long tradition of good government in Islam. In a 1923 essay, he returned to the language of “election” which he had previously jettisoned, and to certain episodes that appeared to show Abu Bakr and ‘Umar asking for their powers to be checked by fellow Muslims: “counsel me,” asks Abu Bakr; “see that I do not misuse the income of the State,” warns ‘Umar.Footnote 141 Where in earlier writings Ameer Ali had emphasized the degeneration of “the perfect Caliphate” under the Umayyads, this began increasingly to be framed as a discreet nadir; with the transfer of the mantle to the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) in Baghdad in the mid-eighth century, “the rules enunciated by the Prophet that everything connected with the commonwealth should be transacted in consultation with the people” were once again “more strictly observed.”Footnote 142
Ali was committed to the idea of Islam's reformist potential. Writing in the aftermath of the deposition of Mehmed VI and the abolition of the sultanate by the Turkish National Assembly in 1922, effectively stripping the caliphate of its worldly powers, Ali wrote counterintuitively of the wisdom of such a move. It rid the caliphate of its association with the inherently absolutist office of the sultanate, and therefore would allow for the rules and regulations that sanctified the constitutional head of the Islamic commonwealth to become important once again.Footnote 143 He hoped that the new caliph, Abdülmecid II, who was elected to the office by the Turkish National Assembly in November of 1922, would work with the representatives of the people to promote the public weal and thus revive the memory of earlier days.Footnote 144 This was, however, not to be; Turkey was declared a Republic in October 1923, and in March 1924, under the rule of the first president of the republic, Mustafa Kemal, Abdülmecid II was deposed and exiled, and the Ottoman Caliphate abolished entirely.Footnote 145
CONCLUSION
Concerned as Hafiz Shairani was to counter the negativity surrounding pan-Islamism, he did not derive from Henry Stubbe's account of early Islam any normative conclusions about Islamic government today. This ought not to be surprising; the text itself espouses a Restoration-era “crypto-republican” sentiment on “Prophetical Monarchy”—that is to say, it did not disavow absolutism, only tyranny.Footnote 146 Stubbe is clear throughout the text that while Muhammad promulgated a system of civil laws (“Civil Constitutions”), he also wielded absolute sovereignty: it was the fact that he did so with justice and sagacity that marked him as an exceptional historical figure, or, “the Wisest Legislator that ever was.” He governed not as an emperor but as a Prophet, the very embodiment of virtue: “The Prophet shew'd that the prudent may be absolute without Tyranny or without regretting their subjects or enfeebling their spirits . . . It is not arbitrary Power, but the ostentation and abuse of it, that renders it odious and tyrannical.”Footnote 147
It was others in the constellation around Shairani who took up the mantle and fostered a connection between the history of Islam and a useful and progressive political present and future. Together, they demonstrate the ways in which history could be pressed into service in the context of growing pan-Islamic debate in Britain. In looking to the past, these writers were not just interested in accounting for Islam's “divergence” from the West. The fact that Sunni and Shi‘a writers alike attributed to the actions of Mu‘awiya and the Umayyads a similar significance—that they wrought an irreparable political violence upon the history of Islam—produced an immanent history of decline as well as a cautionary tale regarding the perennial threat that injustice and tyranny posed to the Muslim body politic. Such a history required no reference to the rise of European power and, by the same token, it implied that political renewal was within the grasp of Muslims today too. This bears emphasizing particularly when discussing Indian pan-Islamism, which occupies a curious space in broader histories of pan-Islamism. The sheer scale of the Khilafat movement and its claims—that India's Muslims would save the defeated Ottoman Empire and Caliphate from the postwar predations of European powers—has tended to obscure the fact that the caliphate itself was understood to be part of a wider discussion about political reform in Islam from the nineteenth century.
That the Khilafat movement was essentially brought to a halt not by any direct European action but by developments within the Ottoman Empire itself has also been all too suggestive. Indian interest in the Ottoman Caliphate appears with hindsight to have been at odds with the wishes of the Turkish people, or at least those of Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish National Assembly. Indeed, a great irony often pointed out is that it was precisely the advocacy of men such as Ameer Ali for the future of the caliphate—expressed through a particularly fateful letter that he and fellow Indian Shi‘a leader, the Agha Khan, sent directly to the prime minister of Turkey in 1923—that finally convinced the Assembly that the continued existence of the Ottoman Caliphate, with its transnational Muslim constituency, could not be reconciled with the formation of a modern Turkish state.Footnote 148 Indian pan-Islamism is read, then, as, at best, naive about the reality of political developments in the Ottoman Empire. At worst, Turkish republicanism functions to highlight the retrograde nature of global religious politics in an age of emerging nation-states. The Khilafat movement appears undone by the desire among other, more nationalist-minded, Muslims for a secular system of government. This article has suggested that that view does not do justice to all that might be described as Indian pan-Islamic thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such thought contained multitudes, including meditations on the democratic, republican and socialist pasts of Islam and its capacity for a progressive political future.
