In November 1911 half a dozen international students gathered at the Edinburgh University Student Union to write a letter to the Muslims of the world. The resulting Edinburgh Declaration called on “our Muslim brothers” to organize charitable collections in aid of the Ottoman Navy League as part of their celebration of Eid al-Adha. The declaration presented Italy's September 1911 invasion of Ottoman territory in North Africa as an assault “not only against the Ottomans or against a single Islamic government” but as an attack on Islam itself.Footnote ¹

The declaration was signed by six young men who were otherwise not notables, except in terms of class: sending sons to study abroad was not cheap, and was only possible for parents who had already invested large sums in their sons’ prior school and college education. None were political exiles or intellectuals. None (so far as we can discover) went on to attempt any other political act of note, hold any significant public office, or publish anything else.

Whereas one gave Istanbul as his hometown, the rest hailed from across what Isa Blumi has dubbed “the Ottoman proximate world”: Alexandria, Cairo, Heraklion, Hyderabad, and Kabul.Footnote ² All these areas were under some sort of British control, which may have motivated their decision to study in Britain rather than another European country. But what did they think they were doing? And were their aims different from those of the exiles, clerics, and intellectuals historians have traditionally focused on when discussing Pan-Islamism and “Muslim cosmopolitanism” in this era?Footnote ³

Founded in 1909, the Ottoman Navy League collected funds inside and outside the empire to pay for much-needed renewal of the Ottoman fleet, particularly dreadnoughts (British battleships) similar to those the Hellenic, Russian, and other navies already possessed. Although the league printed the declaration in its own periodical, Donanma (Navy), hailing the students’ patriotism, there is nothing to suggest that this initiative came from the league or the ruling Unionist regime, who also printed it on the front page of their newspaper, Tanin (Echo).Footnote ⁴

As an example of “organized spontaneity,” the league has drawn attention from a number of scholars interested in late Ottoman history and pre–World War I efforts to mobilize public opinion.Footnote ⁵ Although recent research indicates that the sums raised were small, the fact remains that the league was a highly successful exercise in public relations: by 1911 there were 122 branches worldwide.Footnote ⁶ The only precedent was the Ottoman campaign to fund the Hijaz railway linking Damascus and Medina (1900–1908).Footnote ⁷

The declaration's rhetoric resembles that of other Ottoman-, English-, and Arabic-language appeals issued during the Italo-Turkish war, a conflict that ended in Ottoman defeat in 1912.Footnote ⁸ But it refused to join in the pessimism of Muhammad Iqbal's famous April 1911 poem Shikwa (Complaint to God) or follow the Islamic reformer Rashid Rida in speaking of a new crusade.Footnote ⁹ As Feroz Ahmad notes, Tanin's editor feared that official Ottoman support of such Pan-Islamist rhetoric might alienate Britain, with whom grand vizier Said Paşa sought an alliance.Footnote ¹⁰ Ottoman diplomats nonetheless used the specter of ructions in “le monde musulman” (hinting at unrest among Indian Muslims) to lobby for British intervention on their side.Footnote ¹¹

In calling for the faithful to make donations for Ottoman rearmament as a Bairam sacrifice, however, the declaration was more unusual, if not controversial. Almost all other campaigns of late 1911 called for donations to the Red Cross/Red Crescent Society.Footnote ¹² The Ottoman ‘Ulama' Association (Cemiyet-i İlmiye, located in Istanbul) had opposed the idea of Ottoman Navy League donations as a Bairam sacrifice when proposed by the Islamic modernist and sufi intellectual Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi in 1910.Footnote ¹³ The resulting controversy ran into early 1911, culminating in Sheikh ül-Islam Musa Kâzım issuing a fatwa against the initiative.Footnote ¹⁴

Finding information on the declaration's six authors is a challenge, rendered easier by the coincidence that 1911 was a census year, giving us a demographic snapshot of the night of Sunday, 2 April 1911. The records of the University of Edinburgh as well as the city's medical colleges also were checked.Footnote ¹⁵ Even making allowances for alternative transliterations of their names, no trace could be found of Mirza Zamir Bey (of Kabul) or Halil ‘Ali (Istanbul).

The youngest of the signatories, medical student Husayn Nusrat (Cairo) matriculated at the university in 1909 at age sixteen, having previously attended Bromsgrove, a public school in Worcestershire. He would leave the university in 1912 without a degree. The next oldest, twenty-year-old engineering student Hassan Mustafa ‘İbadi, had been born in Alexandria, where he attended the Ras al-Tin government secondary school. He also had attended school in England. ‘İbadi matriculated at Edinburgh in 1908 and would graduate with a bachelor's degree in Engineering in 1913. Although he gave an address in Alexandria to the university authorities, he signed the declaration as a resident of Heraklion.Footnote ¹⁶ By 1919 he was working as an irrigation engineer for the Egyptian Public Works Department.

Twenty-four-year-old medical student Mustafa Mahir was also from Alexandria, where he took his Egyptian secondary certificate exams in 1907. He may already have known ‘İbadi, as an “H. M. Ibadi” (Hassan's father?) of the “Ministry of the Public Works, Cairo,” is listed as his guardian. Fellow medical student Abdüllatif Said had matriculated at Madras University in 1902, studying Persian and Urdu before switching to medicine. He matriculated at Edinburgh in 1907 and graduated in 1915.

All students must have felt the weight of parental investment in their studies. The son of the assistant revenue secretary in Hyderabad, in 1911 Said was going through something of a crisis. He had failed a number of exams and was struggling with stress brought on by imagining the effect any report of his performance would have on his father's “extremely sensitive nature.” As he noted in an appeal to the dean of the medical school, “my whole future is at stake and with the ruin of career will come the ruin of my whole life, besides destroying the happiness of a whole family at home.” The case drew the attention of famed Orientalist T. W. Arnold, then acting as London-based educational adviser to Indian students. Making a bad situation worse, in July 1911 Said was discovered smuggling notes into an exam, narrowly avoiding a term's suspension.Footnote ¹⁷

Establishing how integrated these students were in the student community at Edinburgh is difficult. Although the university had several distinguished Orientalists on the faculty, not least the brothers William and John Muir, reforms intended to attract candidates for the Indian Civil Service faltered in the 1890s.Footnote ¹⁸ An unofficial “color bar” excluding non-whites from Edinburgh restaurants and dance halls was well established in 1927, but it is unclear if this existed in 1911.Footnote ¹⁹ Those captured by the census were all in boarding houses rather than student halls, but that was traditional at Edinburgh, a nonresidential university (at least for male students).Footnote ²⁰ ‘İbadi was one of three lodgers at 23 Gillespie Crescent, alongside a single female of similar age, recorded as “companion” to the third lodger, a widow. A handful of female medical students attended the same medical courses as Nusrat, ‘İbadi, and Mahir. Muslim students in Edwardian Britain were overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, male.Footnote ²¹

Once numbers achieved critical mass foreign-born students could and did form their own societies, such as Edinburgh's Indian Association, founded in 1883. By 1907 it had eighty-four members, seventy-four of whom were studying medicine, and was fundraising to build its own “habitation” (which never appeared). Its members, who likely included Said, were also complaining of obstacles to participation in the University Volunteers.Footnote ²² By 1911 the Edinburgh student union had affiliated societies catering to “Australasian,” Irish, French, German, and South African students as well.

Opened in 1889 as the first purpose-built student union building in the United Kingdom, Teviot Row House had been extended in 1905 and was architecturally imposing, housing a library, debating hall, dining hall, and refreshment rooms. The declaration's four matriculated signatories were proud of their union, preferring to list it as their address on university forms rather than their lodgings and using its letterhead on personal correspondence. Yet their declaration went unnoticed by the student representative council.Footnote ²³ Edinburgh students were far from disengaged politically: the union-affiliated Celtic and Philomathic Societies took a lively interest in current affairs.Footnote ²⁴ The declaration signatories wrote on union letterhead but not, it would seem, on behalf of or even with the knowledge of their fellow non-Muslim students.

Whereas a similar protest by a group of Ottoman students at Lausanne University was titled “Un Appel à l'Opinion Publique Européene” and distributed to the editors of European newspapers, the Edinburgh Declaration was directed at Muslim opinion.Footnote ²⁵ Although the British government had investigated reports of anti-British sentiment among students attending British universities from the Indian subcontinent in 1907, there is no evidence that the British authorities took notice of the declaration.Footnote ²⁶ There is also no evidence that the initiative was reported in the mainstream British press, compounding the difficulty of dating it. A report in the London weekly The Near East provides us with a terminus post quem: Wednesday, 8 November 1911. Assuming the meeting at the student union was held a few days before, it came several weeks after groups of Muslims, international lawyers, pacifists (including the campaigning editor W. T. Stead), and socialists had mobilized elsewhere, organizing meetings and subscriptions.Footnote ²⁷ The earliest London meetings were convened on 5 and 7 October 1911, the first by the National Peace Committee and the second by “Orientals residing in England, professing various creeds.” President of the Egyptian Nationalist Party Muhammad Farid was among those to address the latter, who collectively called on the sultan and caliph to “uphold the prestige of Islam and the dignity of the East.”Footnote ²⁸ Such meetings were also reported by Ottoman newspapers: like the Ottoman Unionist government, so the Istanbul newspaper Ikdam's hopes of foreign intervention against Italy were pinned on Britain.Footnote ²⁹

Ottoman diplomats covertly supported similar protests across Europe and the British Empire.Footnote ³⁰ At mosques from Mauritius and Zanzibar to Johannesburg and Durban, the Ottoman consul general (an Armenian Christian) “played on their religious sentiments and their attachment to the caliphate,” organizing collections for the Red Crescent as well as telegrams to London urging British intervention—taking care all the while to maintain a facade of complete detachment.Footnote ³¹ At the London embassy, the financial counselor, another Ottoman Armenian (Calouste Gulbenkian), paid for the distribution of a pamphlet denouncing Italian war crimes.Footnote ³²

“Their scheme undoubtedly denotes sincerity of purpose,” The Near East remarked of the declaration signatories, “and its details show considerable forethought and organising ability.”Footnote ³³ Other issues of The Near East reported on resolutions deploring “the savage and inhuman atrocities committed by the Italian troops in Tripoli” passed by “the Moslem Members of Cambridge University,” as well as a protest meeting held at Whitefield's Tabernacle (in London) on 7 November 1911.

The Near East readers were of two minds about such protests. Some, including Mark Sykes (who wrote in to the paper), warned that modern communications had given “compact, yet international” Islam, “always . . . liable to sudden simultaneous movements,” a means of international coordination. The declaration thus seemed to support a vision of imminent “terrible catastrophe,” similar to that underlying John Buchan's wartime thriller Greenmantle (1916).Footnote ³⁴ Behind such visions lay a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of jihad, such as that declared by Ahmad Sharif al-Sanussi and by Shaykh al-Shari`a Isfahani in early 1912.Footnote ³⁵ Appeals for donations to the Ottoman cause in Cairo and other Egyptian cities were dismissed by The Near East as having “nothing to do with the Egyptian people”: the organizers’ rhetoric of a new crusade was dismissed as being in poor taste.Footnote ³⁶

The declaration supports the view that, although “today largely forgotten,” the Italo-Turkish War “disturbed the European and international system in significant ways,” as Christopher Clark has noted.Footnote ³⁷ It was the point at which educated Ottoman opinion finally achieved consensus on the hypocrisy of international law and humanitarianism. Here was a situation that, had the positions been reversed, might have justified multilateral humanitarian interventionism of the Western European powers, of the sort surveyed by Ozan Ozavcı and Davide Rodogno.Footnote ³⁸ Instead Italy was allowed to proceed largely unchallenged.

The declaration suggests that, for educated nonintellectuals across the empire and beyond, patriotic and religious duties sat easily together. Although intellectually baggy, in Edinburgh in 1911, the declaration's vision of a glorious Islamic past, manly duty, and a crudely Darwinistic model of international relations offered something six students drawn from across the Muslim world could unite behind. Their reluctance to invoke the language of caliphate, crusade, jihad, or even anti-colonialism suggests that they understood this global struggle as one in which Muslims had to use the tools of “civilization” to retain honor and influence.Footnote ³⁹