|
Revised and republished under the OUP banner, M. Naeem Qureshi explains how the Ottoman Empire declined and its impact on the Muslim World. This book is published by the Oxford University Press. Its timing could not have been better as the parallels between the world in which the Khilafat movement took shape and the contemporary era offer much material for reflection. The work itself revolves on three principal thematic axes - the imperial, the domestic political situation of India and the historical.
Title: ‘Pan-Islam in British India: The Politics of the Khilafat Movement, 1918-1924 Author: M. Naeem Qureshi Publisher: Oxford University Press, Pakistan Price: Rs 995 Pages: 572 At first glance Pan-Islam in British India is a tale of two empires. The empires in this case being the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire as they struggled to cope with the consequences of the First World War. The Ottoman Empire, shorn of its non-Turkish territories would be reborn after a fierce and protracted struggle as Kemalist Turkey. The British Empire, having secured a Pyrrhic victory in the First World War would stagger on for another generation before being finally being rendered unsalvageable by the combined assault of the Axis powers in the Second World War. It is here that the ideological pretensions of the Ottoman Empire and the arrogation of the Caliphal title by its exceedingly worldly and, until the 1700s, enviably successful dynasts interfaced with what would today be called the ‘global security interests' of the British Empire. Qureshi explains with characteristically lethal meticulousness how, as the secular power of the Ottoman Empire declined its spiritual rhetoric and outreach to win, in the contemporary parlance, the ‘hearts and minds' of the Muslims in other parts of the Muslim world grew. The dialectic between Ottoman imperial propaganda and Western imperial paranoia interacted with the domestic politics and structure of the Muslims of British India. These Muslims, living under British rule since the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, regarded the Ottoman Empire as the final bastion of Muslim political power. The polyglot and émigré nature of the Muslim elite of India, their experience of having been displaced by the British as the ruling class and their growing need to reach out to the broader Indian Muslim demographic as constitutional reforms and educational modernization gathered momentum, all contributed to a psychological dependence on the Ottoman Empire as the residual symbol of Islamic unity, brotherhood and historical greatness. With the war in Europe coming to an end and a post-war settlement on the cards, the Indian Muslims expected that their sentiments would be kept in mind by British policy makers and that Ottoman Turkey would be treated generously. The sheer scale of the sacrifices borne by the British and their allies during the war, the inglorious defeat suffered by imperial armies at Gallipoli, the ambitions of allied governments and the Arab revolt against Turkish rule, however, all indicated that along with manpower, food and fuel, generosity was also in short supply in London, Paris and Athens. The imperial plan was to carve up the Middle East into complaisant British or French controlled mandates (a term used as a sop to Wilsonian sensitivities) and reduce Turkey to an Anatolian rump state. The consequences of imperial decision-making were felt in British India. Mainstream opinion was disappointed by the slow movement on domestic reforms after the substantial contribution made by India to the imperial war effort. The continuation of repressive measures enacted during wartime further stoked national sentiment against the British. The dire terms meted out to the Ottoman Empire inflamed Muslim opinion against Western imperialism and its resident representative in the form of the British Raj. Qureshi's discussion of the domestic political scene, the Khilafat Movement, the Non-Cooperation Movement and the Hijrat Movement, comprises the bulk of the historical narrative. Time and again, the idealism of followers who packed their bags and left their homes and headed to Afghanistan or made donations for the Turkish resistance to the Allies after the war ended are placed alongside the compulsions of domestic political actors and imperial machinations aimed at appeasing the Greeks at the expense of the Turks while mollifying Muslim opinion in India. The Khilafat-Non-Cooperation Movement was the first mass movement in Indian history. A new generation of leaders, including some of independent India's founding fathers such as M. K. Gandhi and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, rose to national prominence during this struggle. At the historical level Pan-Islam in British India offers many lessons. It is a story of imperial hubris, popular idealism, the persistence of theoretic identities and practical folly. The scheming of the unrepentant imperialists in London ultimately came to naught as the Turks rallied to the defence of their homeland and established a new national polity. The Arab territories, in particular the Mesopotamian territories of the Ottoman Empire (Mosul, Baghdad and Basra) rose in rebellion against their British liberators who tried, with limited success, to foist medieval dynastic autocracies on their new Arab subjects. To keep India and its Muslims in check as this Project for a New British Century unfolded, the repressive measures enacted sapped the prestige and credibility of the Raj. The British imperial steel frame became inextricably and perhaps fatally entangled in Ottoman silken cords. The failure of the Khilafat movement to save the Ottoman dynasty from the reforming zeal of Mustafa Kemal and his self-consciously modernizing nationalist Turkey determined to build a new post-Enlightenment order dealt a hard blow to the universalistic delusions of the Indian Muslims. The harsh treatment meted out to the migrants who streamed out of India and into Afghanistan (upon India being pronounced an un-Islamic land or Dar-ul Harb by the local ulema) by their Afghan Muslim brothers was an eye opener. Evidently, the Muslim countries were brothers in the spirit of Cain and Abel. These lessons would in time render the Indian Muslims more susceptible to the demand for a separate sovereign state in which they constituted a majority. Indeed, one can be tempted to see the demand for Pakistan as a sort of South Asian Pan-Islam. At present, history appears to have come full circle. The sovereign states that emerged from Western imperial domination found their legitimacy challenged by militant ideologues of both left and right. Although leftist regimes came to power in many parts of the Muslims while others experienced direct military rule and abortive experiments with democracy, the vast majority of these states failed to deliver on their promises. Moreover, during the Cold War many became pawns in the Soviet-US struggle for global domination further discrediting their ruling cliques and fuelling social and political discontent. Eventually, the Islamist opposition gained considerable ground and benefited enormously from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Though these radical ideas did not and probably cannot, become mainstream, they have succeeded in mobilizing a section of Muslim society whose general sense of victimization has been aggravated by the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, Israeli aggression against its neighbours, the tragic fate of the Palestinian people, direct Western military intervention in the Muslim world, Russian repression in Chechnya, the excesses of the post-Soviet dispensations in Central Asia and the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir. Qureshi wisely asserts that if the West is to draw meaningful conclusions from history it must understand that resolving disputes in the Middle East, eschewing the use of force against Muslim countries and aligning itself with popular movements for reform, democracy and economic development within the Muslim world, are in the enlightened self-interest of the US-led alliance itself. Pan-Islam in British India is the authoritative account of the Khilafat movement and merits being read by scholars of the period for its exemplary mobilization of documentary sources and detailed narrative. It also merits being read by a much wider audience including Western analysts of the Middle East and South Asia, students of modern Islamic and South Asian history and those interested in studying Islam as a historical religion.
Ilhan Niaz is the author of ‘The Culture of Power and Governance of Pakistan, 1947-2008’ and ‘An Inquiry into the Culture of Power of the Subcontinent’ He is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
|
Show/hide comments
Show/hide comment form
