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ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of the First World War, British officials were forced to contend with a threat that seemed to undermine their empire from India to Egypt. The anti-colonial revolts that spread across the world in this moment were caused by many factors from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to far more local concerns. However, many British officials imagined these contemporaneous revolts to be caused by a pan-Islamic conspiracy. The threat of pan-Islam was inflated in the minds of these officials in large part because it fundamentally contradicted their conception of how politics should be ordered on a global scale. This article suggests that the spectre of pan-Islam helped to crystallise a methodological nationalism in imperial policies over Muslim populations. The amorphous spatiality of pan-Islam redoubled a growing commitment to bounded national spaces as a natural unit of political activity. To those officials obsessed with pan-Islam, it was so frightening precisely because it questioned the spatial paradigm through which they understood the world. Other officials saw pan-Islam as a minor nuisance, because they believe that such transnational politics could not possibly survive in a world inherently ordered into contiguous nations. The threat of pan-Islam helped to push both sets of officials into a methodological nationalism, but some saw nationalism as inevitable while others feared that Islam was a compelling threat to a European-dominated inter-national order.
Acknowledgements
This article has been through many incarnations and has benefited from the insights of Engseng Ho, Maya Jasanoff, Mary Lewis, Gyan Prakash, Julia Stephens and the participants in the Middle East and Islamic Frontiers Workshop, and the Scope of History graduate seminar, both at Harvard University. I would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History for their comments and suggestions. I also want to acknowledge the helpful suggestions from the editors and anonymous reviewers at Past & Present where this was previously submitted.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Simon, ‘The Middle East's Durable Map’.
2 The section of the border that extends south-west from the Euphrates to Jordan in a straight line was originally drawn in the Sykes-Picot Treaty. At this point ISIS controlled only parts of the border at the Euphrates and northwards. Given that this border post was a remote desert post it was not near the Euphrates and hence was unlikely to be on the original Sykes-Picot line.
3 Burman, ‘ISIS WARNING’; for an incisive critique of the public discourse on ISIS and Sykes Picot, see Pursley, ‘Lines Drawn on an Empty Map’.
4 Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 25–26, 43.
5 Wimmer and Glick Schiller, ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond’.
6 Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.
7 Darwin, Britain, Egypt, and the Middle East; Darwin, ‘An Undeclared Empire’; Darwin, ‘Imperialism in Decline?’.
8 Pedersen, ‘Getting out of Iraq’; Pedersen, The Guardians; see also articles by Hyam and Darwin in Brown, ed., The Oxford History, vol. 4.
9 Maier, Leviathan 2.0; Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History’.
10 Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System’.
11 Goswami, ‘Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms’; Sinha, Specters of Mother India; Manjapra, Age of Entanglement; Bose and Manjapra, eds, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones.
12 Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam; Özcan, Pan-Islamism; Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains; Esenbel, Japan, Turkey and the World of Islam.
13 See, for example, Sevea, ‘“Islamist” Intellectual Space’; Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism; Willis, ‘Debating the Caliphate’; Jalal, ‘Striking a Just Balance’; Crews, ‘Empire and the Confessional State’; Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism.
14 Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 66–68, 192–95.
15 A possible exception is Priya Satia's Spies in Arabia which does discuss colonial paranoia but not particularly in relation to Islam; see also Wagner, ‘Treading upon Fires’.
16 From a cursory review of available resources, the first reference I can find of the use of the word ‘pan-Islamism’ is from The Times of London on 5 June 1876. Incidentally, this instance specifically uses pan-Islamism in contrast to pan-Slavism. ‘Pan-Islamism’.
17 Moazzam, Jamāḷ Al-Dīn Al-Afghāni; Kedourie, Afghani and ‘Abduh; Jalal, Partisans of Allah.
18 Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘The Formula of the “Self-Determination of Peoples” and the Muslim World’, Department of Information, 11 Jan. 1918, L/P&S/11/144/5072, India Office Records (hereafter IOR), British Library (hereafter BL); see Özcan, Pan-Islamism; Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam.
19 Özcan, Pan-Islamism; Wasti, ‘Muhammad Inshaullah’; Ochsenwald, The Hijaz Railroad.
20 Stephens, ‘The Phantom Wahhabi’; Metcalf, ‘Islam and Power’; Dale, Islamic Society.
21 Papers of Sir Arthur Hamilton Grant, No. 19, Grant to Balfour, 7 July 1919, IOR Eur. D. 660, BL; Consul-Genl. Kashgar to Government of India, 23 May1922, FO 371/8074–7134/6, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA).
22 See Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation; Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims; Devji, ‘Apologetic Modernity’.
23 Kedourie, Afghani and ‘Abduh.
24 Beverley, Hyderabad, British India; Datla, Language of Secular Islam; Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects; Zutshi, Languages of Belonging.
25 Onley, The Arabian Frontier; Willis, Unmaking North and South.
26 Harper and Amrith, Sites of Asian Interaction, ch. 1; Tarling, ‘The Merest Pustule’; Davis, Ends and Means.
27 Hirtzel Minute, 15 Sept. 1916, IOR L/PS/10/633m BL; Cleveland Note on Silk Letter Case, 28 Sept. 1916, FO 686/149, TNA, quoted in Kelly, ‘Crazy in the Extreme?’.
28 See Schayegh, ‘Many Worlds of ’Abud Yasin’.
29 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest (hereafter IDCEU Report), 13 Dec. 1922, 1, FO 371/7790–E14032/402, TNA.
30 Preliminary Report on the Causes of Unrest in Mesopotamia, IOR L/PS/18 B 348; Causes of Unrest in Mesopotamia—Report No. II, IOR L/PS/18 B 350, BL; Director of Intelligence B. Thomson to Graham, 4 July1919, FO 371/3718–98498/24930, TNA.
31 See Fisher, ‘Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest’; Fisher, ‘Major Norman Bray and Eastern Unrest’; Macfie, ‘British Intelligence and the Causes of Unrest’; Macfie, ‘British Intelligence and the Turkish National Movement’.
32 IDCEU Report, 1, FO 371/7790–E14032/402, TNA.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 15
35 Ibid., 8
36 First Interim Report—Turkish Nationalist Activities of Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, 15 Feb. 1922, FO 371/7790–E 1867/402, TNA.
37 Ibid., 6
38 Situation in Transcaspia, 14 Nov. 1919, IOR L/PS/18 C198; Central Asia: the Pan-Turanian Movement, May 1918, IOR L/P&S/18 C 181 Central Asia etc., Jan. 1920, IOR L/P&S/18 A186, BL.
39 The charts are from N. N. E. Bray, Preliminary Report on Causes of Unrest, 14 July 1920, IOR L/P&S/18 B348; N. N. E. Bray, Causes of Unrest—Report II, IOR L/P&S/18 B360, BL.
40 Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power, ch. 4.
41 M. D. Altekar, ‘The Present Situation: Nationality and Religion’, The Times of India, 30 Jan. 1922; Dale, Islamic Society.
42 Khan, Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration, 44, 88.
43 Letter from Viceroy, Army Dept., 27 May 1919, 223, IOR L/PS/10/836 P2902/19; Memo on Central Asia: The Pan-Turanian Movement by P.T. Etherton, Consul in Kashgar, May 1918, IOR L/PS/18 C181, BL.
44 Bamford, Histories of the Khilafat, 144–45, 150–51.
45 See Ali, Select Writings and Speeches, 256; Pandey, The Construction of Communalism, 211–13, 228.
46 IDCEU Report, 9, FO 371/7790–E14032/402, TNA.
47 Viceroy, Home Department, 3 Feb. 1920, FO 371/4155–E 177792/275, TNA.
48 P. C. Bamford, Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, History of the Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements, 1925, no. 43, IOR L/PJ/12/129, BL; Ansari, ‘Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali's Transnationalism’.
49 IDCEU Report, 2, FO 371/7790–E14032/402, TNA.
50 IOR L/PS/11/183/8792; IOR L/PS/18 B 360, BL.
51 IDCEU Report, 3, FO 371/7790–E14032/402, TNA.
52 Arab Bulletin Supplementary Papers no. 6, ‘A Plea for a Moslem Bureau’, 1 July 1919, IOR L/PS/10/576/P4865, BL.
53 Ibid.; Arthur Hirtzel, Malcolm Seton et al., re ‘A Plea for a Moslem Bureau’, 26 Aug. 1919, 18-19, IOR L/P&S/10/576/5011; Mark Sykes, Appreciation of the Situation in Syria, 27 Jan. 1919, IOR L/P&S/11/4937/1171, BL.
54 Arthur Hirtzel, 26 Aug. 1919, 18, IOR L/P&S/10/576/5011, BL.
55 See generally Devji, Muslim Zion.
56 See, for example, Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs; Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought; Pandey, Construction of Communalism.