Around the world, various sites of armed conflict involving Muslim populations – from the Philippines to Kashmir to Somalia – have witnessed the arrival of foreign, and often Arab, volunteers seeking to wage “jihad.” Notwithstanding their simplistic labelling as “terrorists,” these armed transnational non-state groups engender a rich variety of cross-cultural interactions, fighting alongside, proselytizing among, and intermarrying with local populations as part of a project that is universalist in scope and Islamic in idiom. This paper explores the challenges to regnant forms of legality in the global nation-state order posed by transnational jihads, with a focus on the mujahidin battalion that fought in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mujahidin battalion – composed primarily of Arab and Bosnian Muslims – fought under the aegis of the nascent Bosnian nation-state and as part of its army, but also in the name of a global Muslim community with its own autonomous leadership and structures. These “foreign fighters” also functioned at times in competition, cooperation, and confrontation with other foreigners, namely western peacekeeping forces acting in the name of a different universalist project, liberal in idiom (“the international community”). In their complex relationships with both the Bosnian state and the “international community,” the mujahidin presented an alternative to the global juridical order and its logic of ultimately grounding political violence in the nation-state or institutions authorized by it. This paper also demonstrates that the persistence of this alternative to the nation-state order draws from long-standing circuits of mobility linking different regions of the Muslim world, later reshaped by modern European empires and the nation-state system, including the Non-Aligned Movement. By tracing the trajectory of a Hyderabad-born mujahid leader of Yemeni origin who left Afghanistan for Bosnia in the 1990s, this paper ties together both the historical conditions of possibility for transnational jihads as well as imperial attempts to police transnational Muslim mobility.

Often overlooked in discussions of the recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the peculiarity of one of its concentration camps: Omarska camp was created in southeastern Europe’s richest iron mine, by the mine’s own employees. Many of the employees’ technical skills (knowledge of organic compounds, terrain, ability to operate machinery) as well as social networks (kin and colleague relations) were put to use in the location, concentration and execution of prisoners, the creation of mass graves, and the disintegration and disarticulation of human remains. Some of northwestern Bosnia’s most well-regarded citizens, industrial elites and middle-class labourers ran this camp and were also imprisoned within it. Miners’ participation in this violence certainly needs to be located within the ethos of the production process and miners’ training, as well as the larger political processes of the late 20th century. However, the usage of older mining knowledges and established genealogical and social structures to sustain acts of violence indicates an alternative analytic path than one suggested by referring to an opportunistic ethnonationalist labour class or the concurrent construction of atavism by regional politicians. This paper suggests that the contemporary moment cannot be divorced from either a longer historical perspective on the region or the varieties of cosmopolitan sociality that have emerged in this transregional extractive space. The centuries-old Balkan mining industry, sustained by the incessant departures and arrivals of labourers and investors, has carved out this space differently that previously imagined. These extractive mobilities – sometimes individual, sometimes family-based and sometimes imperial – have created and reproduced industrial structures, classes and their possibilities relentlessly. Fanning outwards from sites of extraction, one finds archival evidence of the rich geographical and temporal span of family networks of mining elites that often collaborated with religious and political officials from various imperial centres in order to sustain their livelihood. They inevitably influenced the shape of regional politics in remarkable, enduring ways. This paper will especially focus on the historical formation of metals as an idiom through which people understand themselves, their relations to others, to governors and to land and earth, in times of plenty and in times of depletion. Drawing on historiographic, auto/biographic, financial and religious texts from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, this paper suggests that the proto-capitalist imperial economies of the period provided fertile ground for the emergence of a Balkan personhood distinctly understood through the configuration of territory, people and natural resources.

In this paper, I argue that in order to fully understand the early rise of Saudi Arabia, and the development of the modern state that followed, one needs to examine Saudi history not only as it is written from Arabia, but from other lands as well, such as Java. The conquest of the Hejaz in the nineteen twenties by the Saudi king `Abd al-`Aziz provoked alarm across the Muslim world. Concerned over their ability to practice rituals associated with the pilgrimage to Mecca, Javanese Muslims sent missives and missions to the Saudi king to secure their continuing ability to enact pilgrimage in the ways they were accustomed to and valued. There were similar responses from other Muslim regions as well. The ensuing negotiations between the new Saudi ruler and his international interlocutors –both doctrinal and practical-- shaped the way in which Saudi Arabia assumed custodianship of the Holy Places. To the same degree, they also shaped the ways in which religion and state interpenetrate in Saudi Arabia today, ideologically and institutionally. In the other direction, the Javanese party to these international, inter-Muslim negotiations, known collectively as “the Hejaz Committee”, developed to become the largest mass Muslim organization in Indonesia today, the Nahdlatul Ulama. In sum, this paper argues that international, inter-Muslim relations have been and continue to be important in shaping the nature of national Muslim states and institutions, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This paper explores emergent relationships between and among European Muslim converts, Muslim immigrants, and non-Muslim Spaniards in Andalusia (southern Spain). Andalusian identities have long been shaped by ideas about the region’s historical entanglements with North Africa and the “Muslim legacy” of al-Andalus, codified in politics, Muslim-themed tourism, and myriad cultural institutions. Today, Spain’s growing Muslim minority must contend with a context of widespread ambivalence about the place of Islam in Spain, as competing historical narratives alternately celebrate and rue the region’s Moorish past. Some Andalusians herald the supposedly peaceful coexistence of medieval Muslims, Jews, and Christians as an enduring model for multicultural tolerance in today’s plural Europe. Others downplay historical ties with North Africa and argue that a renewed Muslim presence threatens Spain’s newly formed democratic modernity and secular European status. This ambivalence conditions the social and political possibilities for new Muslim residents in the region. Based on ethnographic field research in the city of Granada, this paper asks how relationships between various Muslim communities map onto prevalent historical narratives that presuppose or deny linkages between Spain and North Africa. It argues that convert and immigrant Muslims are not positioned equally within any of the competing Spanish imaginaries of Islam: they are differently able to access, sustain, or benefit from celebratory narratives of Spain’s Muslim history, they are differently interpelated by anti-Muslim sectors as racial and religious outsiders, and they have unequal resources with which to confront discrimination. These inequalities produce tensions and debates among Muslims who disagree about local Muslim history, religious authenticity, and representational authority. By examining how structural inequalities between convert and immigrant Muslims are exacerbated by their different placement within historical discourses about Andalusia as a semi-European, semi-North African space, the paper demonstrates the importance of a transregional approach to scholarship on Muslim minorities in southern Europe.

This paper starts with the historical fact that Ben-Ali, the recently deposed ruler of Tunisia, came to rule the country after in 1985 the governments of Italy and Algeria had developed doubts as to President Bourguiba’s ability to secure the gas pipeline that has been under construction from Algeria, through Tunisia and Sicily, to the Industrial centers in Northern Italy. The pipeline was projected as an artery in the social and cultural body that was to be created across the Sea. In talking about the pipeline, its promoters went further and invoked the long history of exchange that, so they hoped, would be reborn by the pipeline’s construction. And since such organic vision for the connection of members of the NATO and Soviet blocs met fervent objection, a debate ensued in Italy regarding the terms of connection that country should have with Algeria and Tunisia. Rather than an instance of the rise and fall of the influence of Empire in North Africa, the last thirty years in Tunisian history should be therefore regarded through the prism of cross-Mediterranean connections. Moreover, once we locate gas infrastructure projects in the longer history of exchanges between Sicily and Tunisia, we can see both the ways in which this transregional geography has informed the recent history and the specific shape such conditions took since World War II.