The essays in this volume are derived from a conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was sponsored by the Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies (Simon Fraser University, Canada) and the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (Aga Khan University, UK). The essays focus “on the typologies and contexts of Muslim or Islamicate cosmopolitanisms in the past and the possible tensions or conjunctions of these cosmopolitanisms with regional cultures, isolated enclaves, empires or modern nation-states”. The locations of study are the modern period on the Swahili coast and in the Ottoman, Arab, Iranian and Indo-Pakistani worlds. The volume hopes to make comparisons possible across individual Muslim contexts and that these might lead to substantial conclusions. In particular it seeks to answer the question: “is the concept of cosmopolitanism useful for the study of the Muslim world?”
Two contributors examine the subject in the context of the Swahili coast, where a “maritime cosmopolitanism” has constructed cultures on the coast which have reached into the hinterland. So Felicitas Becker explores the relationship between the cosmopolitan culture of the Swahili coast and the inland villages of Tanzania, finding that ideas do not just move one way from the coastal towns to the villages, but both ways, as villages engage with aspects of the Indian Ocean world. Kai Kresse addresses the major port town of Mombasa and demonstrates the way in which particular urban social groups work to incorporate outsiders.
Four contributions focus on West Asia. Thomas Kuehn demonstrates how the Ottomans consciously copied British strategies of indirect rule in establishing their empire in the North Yemen. Ariel Salzmann interprets Ottoman cosmopolitanism as inter-communal urbanity “practiced in complex and multifarious ways moving between the poles of dhimmitude and convivencia” in the environment of Istanbul. Skilfully using a Jewish Society lottery ticket of 1874, and the several languages and scripts which conveyed its message, she suggests how difficult the Ottoman world might be for the modern Istanbuli to understand. Will Hanley looks at the issue of cursing in cosmopolitan late-nineteenth century Alexandria. A merchant's cursing of a tax collector is considered in a cosmopolitan court run along French principles. The matter was managed and resolved at an elite level. This leads Hanley to reflect that this is not how the majority of the population would have dealt with the matter and that cosmopolitanism has a class dimension. Then Nile Green examines the subject in a Persianate context, exploring what he terms “face-to-face” cosmopolitanism of Britons and Iranians as they eat and drink together in Britain. Neither alcohol nor non-halal meat seemed to cause a problem, although what the two peoples really came to enjoy in common was tea.
The last two essays focus on South Asia. Iftikhar Dadi examines the Lahore-based artist, Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1897–1975) who drew on a Persianate Mughal aesthetic to produce paintings of both Hindu and Muslim content. We are told that in doing so he “ambivalently and uncertainly included aspects of South Asia's syncretistic culture”. Muhammad Khalid Masud rounds off the volume by examining the legal doctrine of tashabbuh bi'l khuffar (imitating the non-Muslims) and its application from the twelfth century to the present. He demonstrates that the modern concern for cultural authenticity in identity has undermined openness across cultures and compromised cosmopolitanism within Muslim societies.
In concluding the editors note: that their contributors are reluctant to give significant value to the Islamic dimensions of their cosmopolitanisms; that they are also reluctant to find a Muslim cosmopolitanism which works across space and time, indeed, those that emerge are not very different from those to be found in non-Muslim societies; that they have tended to focus on cosmopolitanisms formed within modern empires which are the legacies of imperial ruling classes rather than civilizations; and that in this light, while there is a concern amongst some to include subaltern classes within their cosmopolitan frame, there remains an interesting tension between Pan-Muslim cosmopolitanism and “locally-rooted communities with all their complexities”.
In his introduction Derryl MacLean declared: “no attempt has been made to determine our contributors' analyses of cosmopolitanisms within their Muslim contexts, to operate under a single definition of cosmopolitanism, or even to accept that it is a useful framework within which to view Muslim societies and cultures”. The outcome is that the volume's organizing frame of cosmopolitanism is stretched so far as to be without shape or meaning. I do have difficulty in seeing Ottoman borrowing of the British policy of indirect rule, or the sharing of food and drink between Iranian and Britons, or a Muslim artist embracing of Hindu themes as representing cosmopolitanism beyond an openness to some ideas from outside one's culture. If that's all it is, it is not worthy of particular note, and this volume does not take us very far in understanding cosmopolitanism, whatever it may have been, in Muslim contexts. Indeed, it raises more problems than it solves – not always, of course, a bad thing. This said, the volume does present some excellent individual essays and in the process reminds us that modernity has both closed down old cosmopolitanisms while it has opened up new ones.
