The second half of the nineteenth century is dubbed as the first age of globalization by social scientists. Steam-powered transportation and fast printing technology of this period brought distant populations closer to each other, a phenomenon that the Muslims of the world were not an exception. Social and intellectual production of the Muslim populations, either living under the colonial forces or under Muslim polities, began to circulate at an unprecedented rate. In the context of this larger phenomenon, this paper will examine the international activities and publications of Mushir Hosain Kidwai (1878-1938), an Indian Muslim activist/intellectual who devoted his life to the cause of Pan-Islam. Along with his other works and in the light of archival documents from Istanbul, I will examine a treatise Kidwai published in the fateful year of 1919. Titled The Future of the Muslim Empire, Turkey, this treatise was published in London both in English and in Turkish. In it, Kidwai presents myriad of arguments making a case for the political independence of the Ottoman Caliphate. This work mainly seeks answers to this question: What historical processes provided the conceptual background of a treatise that was written by a colonial subject from India in the metropole of the British Empire about the independence, not of his own homeland, but of a polity that he was not a citizen of? I argue that Kidwai’s work in the immediate aftermath of the war should be read at the conjunction of two processes. The first and longer process we must situate the treatise in is Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s quarter-century long Caliphate politics during the first age of globalization, which is directly connected with Kidwai’s own process of politicization. In 1906, he was invited to Istanbul at the age of 28 and presented with an Ottoman medal by the Sultan. The second historical process requires us to do a synchronic reading of the post-war period. Even a cursory reading of Kidwai’s treatise reveals the deep impact Woodrow Wilson’s self-determinism law had on his arguments. Both processes read in conjunction makes Kidwai’s activities and work culturally and politically legible to us. By connecting this treatise to the quarter-century caliphate politics emanating from the Ottoman center and to what historians call the “Wilsonian Moment,” we can see how an Indian anti-imperialist, in his attempt to restructure the post-war world, used the contemporary international ideologies selectively and differently for each geopolitical case.

Drawing on a broad range of primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English, such as governmental correspondence, memoirs, and journal articles this paper explores Ottoman practices of knowledge production and transmission in the Province of Yemen between the establishment of this province in 1872 and the end of Ottoman rule in early 1919. Historians of the late Ottoman period from the beginning of the Tanzimat in 1839 to the end of empire have equated the production of official knowledge about the political, social, cultural, and economic realities in the different regions of the empire (including Yemen) with acts of writing – be it that population figures were recorded in census documents or the “manners and customs” of local people detailed in the form of petitions, memoranda or book-length accounts. These documents, so the argument, were archived and thus became repositories of knowledge on which the Ottoman central government would draw for its efforts to build a modern, more intrusive state. While scholars have shown that orality retained a prominent role in the daily practices of Ottoman governance, these studies concentrate on the 1840s and 1850s and do not look at knowledge production. Building on this body of scholarship, I argue that during the period under study the spoken word was of crucial importance in the context of Ottoman knowledge production and transmission on Yemen. For example, governmental correspondence and the memoirs of governors-general such as Mahmud Nedim or Mehmed Tevfik suggest that it was common practice for the central government to interview individuals, deemed knowledgeable about Yemen, on issues, such as the influence of the Zaydi imams, without recording in writing the information they provided. Similarly, officials about to deploy to Yemen for the first time relied primarily on conversations with colleagues, who had served there before, to acquire local knowledge on a wide range of topics. This began to change during the early 1900s, when the near collapse of Ottoman rule in Yemen in 1905, the end of the Hamidian regime in 1908-09, and new notions of professionalism prompted officials to view existing practices of knowledge production and transmission as partly responsible for the government’s failure to control Yemen. Now, they increasingly associated knowledge with published accounts, while considering unrecorded knowledge unstable and, hence, unreliable. In introducing greater complexity into our understanding of Ottoman practices of knowledge production my paper adds to a growing literature on late Ottoman governance.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, millions of Muslims migrated from former Ottoman lands, fleeing an encroaching Russian Empire in the North Caucasus and Crimea and nationalist struggles in the Balkans. The financially strapped Ottoman state welcomed these newcomers as part of larger efforts to settle arable land, increase Muslim population density, broaden the tax base, and maintain its legitimacy as the Islamic caliphate. Historians have noted the demographic significance of these mass migrations, suggesting the influx of Muslims was essential in the political and demographic “Islamization” of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Although this demographic shift was an important component within the broader changes of the Ottoman reform era, immigration policies and outcomes of migrant integration remain understudied. The narrative of nineteenth century mass migration into the Ottoman Empire frequently focuses on migrant arrival and settlement, but medium and long-term processes are just as essential to understanding immigrant incorporation. This paper will consider those processes by examining migrants’ requests for religious and educational resources. Education policy in the late Ottoman Empire is frequently read as a social engineering tactic, with the extension state-sponsored education meant to assimilate newcomers into Ottoman state and society. Though new schools and religious institutions did increase migrant interaction with state officials and may have been intended to facilitate loyalty to the Ottoman state, this paper examines the allocation of religious and educational institutions as community-building efforts frequently driven by migrants themselves. This paper will rely on petitions and other evidence of migrant efforts to gain access to existing educational institutions and to fund religious and educational infrastructure in developing communities. Through a migrant-centric narrative, the paper considers how newcomers articulated claims for resources, why they saw the Ottoman state as a provider of those resources, and how they achieved their desired results. This paper offers insight into migrant interactions with the state, the process of migrant community building, and the role of mosques and schools in Ottoman immigrant integration.

This paper argues that the quasi-colonial conditions of the French Mandate for Syria encouraged the founding members of the Arab Academy of Science in Damascus to engage in language reform and the organization of a national canon (turath) as more secure activities than overt political expression. Drawing on the Academy’s journal, texts of Academy lectures, and members’ select published works, this paper revisits the complex relationship of cultural production to political struggles and suggests that, in the case of the Arab Academy, the former was in significant part a transmutation of the latter. “Liberal” intellectuals across the Ottoman Empire, and particularly in the Levant, were galvanized by the “Young Turk” Revolution of 1908 and the vision of a constitutional order based on citizenship and equality of rights and duties, the fulfillment of the state’s generational promotion of the ideology of Ottomanism. However, this constitutional process was “interrupted” by the bitterly received “Turkification” policies of the new regime in Istanbul, the Empire’s epochal defeat in the Great War, and the imposition of the Mandate System over the territories of its Arab heartland in 1920. Consequently, many Arab and Levantine thinkers seized on language as the most widely shared cultural asset which most clearly held out the cosmopolitan, ecumenical promise of late Ottomanism for the newly delimited national populations. At the same time, the reality of Mandate rule and the Mandate’s own ethos of gradualism inclined the Academy, a quasi-state institution, to adopt conservative visions of long-term education and acculturation of the population. The incantation of hurriyya (freedom, liberty) was replaced with the invocation of ‘ilm (science, learning.) The eight founding members of the Academy included committed Islamic reformers as well as three Christians who experimented in new methods of organizing knowledge and weighed in on each other’s work in a collegial, rarefied, and hopeful environment. They claimed to avoid political entanglements but also to serve vitally the Arab/Syrian nation. This paper explores the achievements and tensions of their endeavor in the first formative decade of their body’s career.

The presentation examines the Russian influence on the critical writing, poetry, prose and philosophy of Mikhail Naimy (1889-1988), the world renowned figure in modern Arabic literature. Together with Gibran Khalil Gibran, Naseed Aridah, Ameen al-Rihani and several other Arab-American men of letters he founded Pen Association, a literary group in New York in 1916 that lifted Arabic literature from the quagmire of stagnation, imitation and old classicism. Numerous researchers have studied the impact of British, American and French cultures and literatures on Pen Association’s creative writings. Meanwhile it was Russian literature that had the most important impact on Naimy, as well as partly on some other members of this literary association. This influence has still only been studied superficially aside from some Soviet era analyses. My presentation makes a much-needed contribution to this a blank spot, since the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinskiī (1811-1848) and the towering figure of Leo Tolstoī (1828-1910) contributed greatly to the foundation of the modern Arabic literary criticism and literature. My presentation traces Mikhail Naimy’s Russian Orthodox heritage in Lebanon, his education in Poltava, Ukraine, and his readings of Russian literature. It shows how he incorporates Russian literary criticism, critical social reform and anticlericalism into his important writings, as well as his broadening of Arabic literary genres and plots. It will also shed light on global literary processes, as Naimy was able to synthesize Russian, European and American literary traditions into his native Arabic heritage. This integration is an important part of the evolution of modern Arabic literature and an interesting phenomenon. My research has significant methodological value, as it will identify the typology and significance of cultural contacts, based on the example of influence mentioned above. It will also contribute to an important topic of the renewed interest in the academy-Russian influences and impacts in the Middle East and in Arabic culture and literature.