The Indian-Muslim poet Muhammad Iqbal is often considered a philosopher and poet of temporality, of the dynamic and vital processes of time over space. This is no surprise in light of his obvious indebtedness to the thought of Henri Bergson and, in particular, his argument that the creative process of infinite change could only be accounted for in pure duration (durée) rather than the static spatialization of time as sequence. For Iqbal, pure duration explained time as a form of infinite becoming, of multiplicity, and evolution, which in religious terms, constituted Islam’s “principle of movement.” However, if geographers have more recently demonstrated the immanent compatibility between Bergson’s concept of duration and the critical evaluation of space, then it behooves us to reconsider Iqbal in the same light. This paper is reconsideration of the spatiality of Iqbal’s thought as it emerged in the context of his own travels through the Middle East. Drawing on the field of critical mobilities, my contention is that Iqbal’s concept of the “Islamic World” and especially his understanding of its possibility for dynamic change was shaped by three exemplary encounters with the Arab Middle East. The first was his initial journey to London in 1908 during which he spent time in Aden and Port Suez. The second was his participation in the 1931 World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem. The third was his meeting with the al-Azhar mission to India in 1937, which he had encouraged for several years. Drawing on sources in Urdu and Arabic, my goal to is to show the inseparability of his idealist formation that “all is a constant mobility” and the material conditions of travel, movement, and associational politics in the interwar period.

My paper resituates the Italo-Turkish War (1911-1912) as the opening battle of a decade of warfare in the Ottoman territories that culminated in the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Histories of the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) abound, especially those that render this war as a “National Struggle” (Millî Mücadele), reproducing an overtly nationalist narrative that continues to dissociate this war from the Ottoman Empire’s earlier conflicts. Further, such narratives elide the significant contribution of a global Muslim community and the Ottoman contours of Mustafa Kemal’s ultimate victory. Analyzing this conflict in conjunction with the preceding Ottoman struggle in North Africa against Italian aggression demonstrates that the participants of both conflicts expressed an identical anticolonial ideology and relied on similar configurations of power to defend their embattled territories. In fact, the majority of the generals and officers that would bolster Mustafa Kemal’s defenses in 1919 cut their military teeth fighting against the Italians. An acute analysis of these two conflicts, while rarely investigated in parallel, illustrates their similar mechanisms of resistance and the global reach of Ottoman ideology in its final years. This paper, therefore, examines the means by which Ottoman officers responded to the threat of invasion by deploying an efficacious appeal for contributions from local volunteers and entreating the broader global Islamic community for aid. In so doing, these Young Turk officers infused Hamidian pan-Islamism with an anticolonial ethos that yielded significant results on the battlefield. Abdülhamid’s overtures to Islamic unity and his subvention of tribal elites in North Africa and Anatolia provided the groundwork for the alliances erected by Ottoman officers in Tripolitania in 1911 and by Mustafa Kemal in Anatolia in 1919. My analysis also extends to the volunteer irregulars that made up the bulk of the resistance in North Africa and Anatolia. Because of the strategic flexibility of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk anticolonialism, the Ottoman Army could elicit the support of thousands of volunteers from the local population and even encourage Muslims of distant lands to take part in these conflicts. In both wars, Ottoman alliances were maintained with local leaders to ensure their support in battle and Ottoman officers and parliamentary deputies preached Muslim solidarity and anticolonial warfare to prospective volunteers. The initial success of the Ottoman insurgency in Libya was thus replicated in Anatolia a decade later.

In the early 1920s, after coming to power, the Bolsheviks tried to completely change the organization of governance in the North Caucasus. When organizing the judicial sphere, instead of subjecting the indigenous Muslim population to the Soviet legal system, they established a number of independent judicial forums that relied on the local legal tradition. A rather broad judicial-administrative autonomy was allowed for the Muslim subjects of Soviet Russia. While the Soviet government was still weak, the Bolsheviks tried to win over the local Muslim people, supporting the Sharia over the Adat, the local customary law, which they termed a “subjugating colonial law”. Therefore, they announced the replacement of Adat courts, which had operated under the regulations of the Tsarist rule, with Sharia courts in the North Caucasus. This measure, however, did not signify the disappearance of Adat. In Dagestan, there was no clear distinction between the Sharia and Adat. The Sharia courts continued to implement fiqh and Adat in their proceedings. At the same time, the Bolsheviks established secular courts, whose activities were based on the legal framework of the Soviet state. The Bolsheviks initiated judicial reforms in the North Caucasus with the objective of destroying the local legal structure of the Tsarist government. However, this paper argues, in so doing they unintentionally preserved and reproduced the most significant legal characteristic of the Tsar's rule, namely Legal diversity. This diversity privileged the native Highlanders as it enabled them to choose among legal institutions operating under different legal systems, as they saw fit. In other words, the Soviet judicial reform maintained a situation of legal pluralism in which each Muslim could pick the venue most suitable to his interests. Using unexplored archival materials from the Central State archive of the Republic of Dagestan, together with protocols originating from Sharia courts throughout the Soviet Republic of Dagestan, I will argue that while the Dagestani highlanders remained (colonial) subjects of one rule after another, they maintained their legal-cultural traditions. Furthermore, I will demonstrate the various ways and means by which the Muslim highlanders maneuvered between different bodies of law and took advantage of official and unofficial channels during the first decade of the Soviet Revolution.

Six decades ago Clifford Geertz wrote perhaps the most famous work on heterogeneity in Islam. As Islam evolved in two distinct "civilizations" (to use his term) in Morocco and Indonesia, it developed quite distinct characteristics and practices. For Geertz, while Islam was still identifiable as a single religious tradition, its practices in Morocco and Indonesia diverged significantly, almost to the point of being different religions. Islam Observed has been the gold standard ever since for arguments about heterogeneity among diverse Muslim communities. Globalization and the information revolution of recent decades have reversed some of the trends Geertz pointed to and, indeed, have been forces for greater homogenization across diverse Muslim landscapes. For example, Salafism, which is a historically foreign form of Islam in Southeast Asia, is now a growing trend, fed by forces of globalization and information flows from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. This paper begins to outline some of the important forms of recent homogenization in Islam, focusing on the importation to Southeast Asia of some practices and beliefs from the Middle East, Saudi Arabia in particular. The paper argues that while Geertz was accurate in his assessments from 60 years ago, important globalization dynamics have reversed his findings in important ways ever since. The paper is based on fieldwork in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei during four months in 2019.

In a 1924 communiqué from the British High Commission in Constantinople to London, the author expressed concern about a Turkish newspaper article and accompanying illustration. He noted: “It is a significant fact that the Ileri of February 5th, 1924 published an attack on the Caliphal House of a kind more insidious and at the same time rather more gross than any which has hitherto come to my notice.” Indeed, the published piece in question caricatured the Ottoman caliph as a corpulent elderly gentleman indulging in carnal pleasures and other excesses while the common man endured heavy taxation. In response, the India Office expressed alarm over this type of visual rhetoric and its potential to rouse pro-caliphal segments of India’s Muslim population already voicing dissent through the Khilafat Movement. In this paper, I examine select Turkish and South Asian print media coverage, particularly satirical visual material, critical of Ottoman autocracy and of British political hegemony within the context of the failing Ottoman Empire, the emergent Turkish Republic, and the Indian struggle for independence. I explore the complexities and nuances the images (and texts) reveal about the Khilafat movement’s anti-colonial stance, its connections to other colonies still in the British Empire but aggressively pulling on the reins, its implications for the larger Muslim world as Turkey unmoored itself from the anchorage of political Islam, and British interventions to curb its growing appeal using heavy censorship.