With this stimulating book, Seema Alavi adds to her impressive and wide-ranging body of scholarship on South Asian history of the colonial period. Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire contributes to at least three productive approaches that have emerged in historical work in recent years. One is to transcend the restrictive limitations imposed by nation-state boundaries in favor of recognizing the importance of cultural and physical connections across borders. As Alavi points out, other scholars recently have studied the interconnectedness of the British Empire; yet others have productively taken up the larger Indian Ocean area. She, in contrast, takes as her arena what she deftly coins “the imperial assemblage,” not only the British Empire, but also the Ottoman along with minor extensions to the Russian Empire. These connections were decisively facilitated in the late nineteenth century by such innovations as steam travel and inexpensive print facilities, as well as by the British shipping and consular presence in Ottoman lands and beyond.

Secondly, Alavi writes about little-known individuals whose lives, she argues, at once encapsulate and move beyond central historical themes of the era. Successive chapters set out the stories of five men, all South Asian and Muslim in origin. There is extensive British documentation on all five, since each was closely tracked as a potential fomenter of disorder and sedition.

Sayyid Fadl was a second-generation Hadrami Arab from Hyderabad who claimed spiritual charisma in his political maneuvering among western Arabian tribes on the ill-defined imperial borders of the era. He sought leverage with British and Ottoman officials alike. In contrast to the other figures, he seems not to have been much of a writer; Alavi cites one tract briefly (in two of the 228 footnotes in a chapter of seventy-six pages about him). As the latter two numbers suggest, each story is based on dense research and provides ample detail.

The next two chapters focus on Islamic scholars, both heirs of the eighteenth-century Delhi reformist tradition, who escaped to Mecca during the extensive anti-Muslim violence following the 1857 revolt. Rahmatullah Kairanawi specialized in anti-Christian polemics. In Mecca, he successfully opened a madrasa that served the Indian expatriate community and others. He acquired caliphal patronage and spent time in Istanbul, although as late as 1883, he was pleading for permission to return to India. Haji Imdadullah made his base in Mecca, writing extensively on spiritual guidance and interacting with his devoted and extensive range of disciples, among them ùlama associated with the celebrated north Indian madrasa at Deoband. Among those linked to Deoband, he was among the most sympathetic to the Sufi customary practices that other reformers deemed suspect.

The fourth figure, Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan, was married to the Begum of Bhopal (r. 1868–1901), whose mother had presciently thrown in her lot with the British in 1857. Siddiq Hasan forged expansive geographic networks through his many scholarly publications, many of which reflected his position as a leader of the (anti-Deobandi) Ahl-i Hadith. (Many of his Arabic writings in such fields as philology, not discussed here, also linked him to literary figures of the Arabic nahda.)

The fifth figure, Jaf`ar Thanesri, allegedly involved in anti-British activity on the northwest frontier as well as in the Mutiny, spent eighteen years exiled to the Andamans. In a clerical position there, thanks to his earlier role as a government munshi, he collaborated with a British official on an ethnographic study of the island. He also wrote against colonial assumptions of Muslim disloyalty, denying an anti-colonial motive to Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, leader of the 1830s anti-Sikh jihad on the frontier, whom he claimed as an exemplar of the Prophet's teachings of universal spiritual achievement and peace. It is this global vision associated with Sayyid Ahmad, Alavi argues, that puts him in the company of these other trans-imperial subjects. Thanesri's critiques of the British, I would suggest, are much in the style of early nationalists who called the British to account for what they deemed violations of Britain's own standards of the rule of law and the rights of subjects; he praised the colonial “uplift” of subjects like the Andaman islanders. On release, Thanesri resumed an official position.

What I identify as a third approach of Alavi's study is an ambitious attempt to identify a unified cultural world that, though facilitated by imperial structures, is constituted by the participants and used to their own ends. Alavi describes this as “transnational cosmopolitanism” characterized by a “universalist Muslim public conduct based on consensus in matters of belief, ritual, and forms of devotion” (p. 6). This “cosmopolis,” she posits, is “Arabicist” in religious outlook and “modern” thanks to the influence of liberal Ottoman reforms (pp. 43–44, 402). She often describes it as “anti-colonial” (p. 403), even as actors seek official patronage. Alavi makes an important contribution in foregrounding the cultural worlds beyond official control. Moreover, to show, as she does, the expanding networks of Muslim intellectuals (and in Fadl's case, of a political manipulator) is a valuable contribution in itself.

Alavi, however, sees too much homogeneity and far too much intellectual influence flowing from Arab Wahhabis and Ottomans.Footnote ¹⁷ And she forces even this limited sample of figures into a shared Procrustean bed that belies profound differences. These five differ profoundly in their styles of legal and devotional Islamic practice, their activities, and their relationships of “loyalty” or otherwise to these empires. Alavi's absorbing stories yield themselves far more to mid-level generalizations than to overarching ones.

With all due respect to Harvard University Press, the work surely required a more activist editorial hand. The book's conclusion, for example, has over thirty pages on Maharaja Dalip Singh, which could readily have been reduced to a few paragraphs, since so much of Alavi's account is about British colonial fantasies. The five core chapters are repetitive, in part because they require a more chronological presentation. Dates and spellings are inconsistent (e.g., “Daly” of the British Indian army becomes at times, including in the index, the incorrect “Dayly”). The book is too long. And the expert readers needed to weigh in on a standard, not idiosyncratic, transliteration of Urdu passages as well as literal translations, not glosses. They should also have picked up on some too-trusting readings of the primary sources, both British and Indian (easy as it is to do, given how persuasive they often are).

To give one example, of fact not interpretation, a person identified as “Obaidullah,” son of the Begum of Bhopal, is described as based in Delhi institutions with ties to Deoband before and during World War I (pp. 320–27). Alavi makes him the conduit between “traveling maulas and Bhopal,” energizing and politicizing Deoband's links beyond India as he “flaunted his own transimperial contacts” that mapped onto those of his “step-father Siddiq Hasan.” Begum Sultan Jahan (r. 1901–26) did have a son named Obaidullah (1878–1924) who was at best a tyrant and at worst a psychopath. Siddiq Hasan, however, was her mother's husband; she loathed him and severed all contact for herself and her family. With mistaken information from informants and officials, erroneous deductions multiply. `Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872–1944) was the Deobandi who built links to English educated Muslims and founded the Delhi institutions attributed to Obaidullah. He was an anti-colonial global figure who spent long years in exile. Grounded in the thought of Shah Waliu'llah, his “Muslim cosmopolitanism” aspired to universal ethical standards transcending religious traditions beyond the respective Muslim-specific cultural worlds—at times intellectually anti-Christian or anti-Hindu—of the figures studied here. Sindhi's life thus underlines that there are indeed many strands to the suggestive theme of “Muslim cosmopolitanism” that Alavi has so richly introduced here.