This paper seeks to explore the role of a new form of communication in fostering transnational Islamic identities in the mid-20th century. From the late 19th-century onward, the development of the press and the influence of key reformist journals such as al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa in Paris, al-Manar in Egypt and al-Basa’ir in Algeria, generated greater awareness of Muslim interconnectedness across borders. This phenomenon may be seen as a prelude to what Olivier Roy has referred to as “the globalization of Islam.” Yet the impact of the press remained confined primarily to elite circles. In societies where literacy rates were limited, this proved to be a major impediment to the spread of reformist ideas. My paper argues that by the mid-1930s, Muslim reformers understood the potential of shortwave radio as a new technology capable of breaking the barrier of illiteracy and bringing their reformist message to a greater number of Muslims worldwide. This, in turn, nurtured these reformers’ tendency to think in transnational terms and to articulate an Islamic discourse valid for all Muslims everywhere, regardless of local conditions. Hence, this paper focuses on the epistemological rather than ideological significance of shortwave radio in the history of modern Islamic thought. Radio-Berlin—an Arabic-language station sponsored by the Nazis—was not merely as a crucible where elements of Nazism and Islamism came together, as the work of Jeffrey Herf suggests; it was also a medium that encouraged and facilitated the standardization of Islam and Islamic activism in the mid-20th century. To substantiate this claim, I use the experiences of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali, a Moroccan exile and Salafi activist in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1942, whose fascination for shortwave radio and collaboration with Radio-Berlin is documented. His story sheds light on the motivations and ideas of one of these “generally anonymous native Arabic-speaking announcers and writers” (Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, pp. 8-9) that Herf’s recent book does not examine. My paper revolves around three main questions: How did al-Hilali explain his fascination for shortwave radio? As a radio announcer, what could he do to further the Islamic reformist cause (as he understood it)? How did his experience at Radio-Berlin impact the rest of his career as an Islamic activist? Sources for this paper include relevant journal articles written by al-Hilali in the 1930s, al-Hilali’s memoirs, and French archival materials pertaining to the diffusion of Radio-Berlin in North Africa.

This paper analyzes Japan’s efforts to reach out to the Islamic world, particularly to the Middle East, in the first half of the twentieth century. It pays particular attention to the hajj by Japanese Muslims from the 1900s to the end of the 1930s because the hajj neatly captures the changing ways in which the Japanese interacted with state and non-state actors from various parts of the Islamic world including Central Asia, China, and Saudi Arabia. Through this focus, this study seeks to explain the nature of cross-cultural encounters between Japan and the Islamic world and contribute to the growing historiography of transnational and transregional history. The following is the narrative presented in previous studies. After the Russo-Japanese war, some Japanese pan-Asianists recognized the significance of gaining support among Muslim populations, while Muslim revolutionaries became aware of Japan’s potential as their sponsor against colonial powers, in particular tsarist Russia. Before long, the first Japanese Muslim accompanied a Tatar Muslim on a pilgrimage to Mecca. By the 1930s, under the pretext of uniting Asian peoples of color from East Asia to the Middle East against the materialistic white race in the West and the communist Soviet Union, winning Muslim hearts became a vital component of the official policy of the expansionist Japanese Empire. This perspective concentrates almost exclusively on Japan’s strategic and geopolitical interests in facilitating its interactions with Muslims. By using a variety of primary sources including memoirs of Japanese pilgrims, Japanese and British diplomatic documents, publications of Islam-related organizations in Japan, and Arabic and Persian periodicals, this work suggests that the driving force of Japan’s encounters with the Islamic world was not limited to strategic interests and geopolitics. Economic motives and the need to strengthen commercial ties also played an important role in the cross-cultural encounters. In fact, Japan’s economic motives in the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East, were closely intertwined with its strategic motives, and the two motives supplemented each other in fostering Japan’s desire to reach out to the Islamic world. Furthermore, this study suggests that the economic encounters were fairly interactive. Muslims in the Middle East were active participants in their interactions with Japan, just like Central Asian and Indian Muslims were.

Maritime space and its connecting ports and hinterlands can be looked upon as a cultural geography wherein ideas are exchanged and evolved. My paper will explore the politicization of the hajj surrounding the Arab Revolt of 1916. Looking at hajj records of the post-Ottoman period, I will focus on British imperial interests in the Red Sea region, while exploring how Indian Ocean travel made possible the connection of politics in the Hijaz to the political situation in India. More specifically, this paper will consider British propaganda efforts directed towards Indian pilgrims in order to distill anti-British agitation in India, in particular the Khilafat movement of 1919-1924. This study also suggests that British imperial interests across Indian Ocean space can be studied as a function of the Government of India’s increased interests in matters concerning the hajj in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While this paper will narrowly focus on the hajj as it is primarily related to Indian pilgrims and politics, such a study can also be extended to various other Indian Ocean ports from which Muslims embarked upon their journey to Mecca, and which also played an important role in British commercial and strategic interests. While the Hijaz has often been considered a political backwater in the history of the Middle East, I will demonstrate the political significance the region played in larger networks which were made possible by the advent of new technologies and travel. With Sugata Bose’s statement that “religious universalism in the form of the pilgrimage by sea had certainly not weakened as a bond across the ocean in the age of global empire,” in mind, I will demonstrate the failure of British attempts to persuade Indian pilgrims that Sherif Hussein could uphold Islamic universalism through his takeover of the hajj following the Arab Revolt of 1916.[1]

This paper interrogates the relationship between Islamic internationalism, empire, and the annual Hajj pilgrimage in the period after the Saudi occupation of Mecca in 1924. Contrary to Sugata Bose’s formulation of a “modernizing colonial state and an ultra-orthodox Islamic one” causing “rifts in the expressions of religious universalism” in the inter-war period, this paper proposes a more complicated reading of the Indian Muslim engagement with the Saudi regime and the British Empire in Mecca. The crisis of European state system and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following the First World created a space of possibility in which Muslims could actively imagine new forms of political community beyond empire and the nation form. In the absence of an Ottoman caliphate, Muslims in both the Middle East and South Asia organized to defend or redefine the Islamic umma. Scholars and activists of the salafi reformist movement in the Middle East and those of the Khilafat movement in India found common ground in their programs to translate the universal message of Islam into an effective counter-empire in the face of a resurgent British empire. In particular, both movements shared a geographical imagination that placed the holy city of Mecca at the center of a unified Muslim community, independent of European rule and a sanctuary for the world’s believers. The 1924 Saudi conquest of Mecca and the vigorous campaign against popular devotional practices brought to light the often conflicting visions of Islamic unity held by Arab and Indian activists: was it to be achieved through the salafi program of standardizing belief and practice according to the normative model of the Prophet or through an emphasis on religious universalism driven by personal ethics. The increasing harassment of Indian pilgrims by the Saudi authorities, suggested that at least at the level of the everyday, it was salafi reformism that mattered. It is ironic, then, that conditions for Indian pilgrims only improved once Britain asserted its duty to protect its imperial subjects in Mecca and the global depression forced the Saudi state to accommodate difference among a decreasing number of Muslim pilgrims, the state’s primary source of foreign revenue. This paper is based on British archival material and political and religious tracts in Arabic and Urdu.

This paper examines an aspect of the rise of Islamism so far have ignored: “World Muslim Congresses” held immediately following World War II at which delegates discussed the possibility of economic and even political union. For all that scholarship acknowledges that Islamism has some roots in earlier decades, typically it dates the origins of visible Islamist movements to the late 1960s. As such it neglects evidence for a much longer gestation of the Islamist movement that, I argue, reaches back at least to the early Cold War. At a time when colonial governments were dissolving, new states were being established and revolutions were overturning previous regimes, some Muslims were eager to explore the possibilities for cooperation to better protect shared interests in the face of emerging new global realities. At meetings in Karachi, Tehran and Jerusalem they considered how to respond to challenges facing their various countries, and they established organizations to coordinate the promotion of mutual interests. Significantly, these congresses were organized by non-state actors, and they were attended by prominent Muslim intellectuals from dozens of countries. After 1953, this congress movement would be eclipsed by individual states manipulating Islamic organizations for their own interests. It would be more than a decade before Islamism appeared as a transnational force, however already important groundwork had been laid for Muslim cooperation in the context of the increasingly rigid nation-state system. It is no coincidence that among the participants at these early congresses were individuals – such as Sayyid Qutb – who would later become prominent advocates of Islamism. Drawing on the Pakistani press as well as British and French archival materials, this paper documents these congresses and explores the factors that led to their short-lived activity between 1948 and 1953. At this time Muslims faced the very real question of “who speaks for Islam?” Unlike Pan-Islamic efforts to agree on a new Caliphate between the world wars, after 1945, emphasis was upon representatives from Muslim countries transcending national differences to work together to face the challenges ahead. In the 1960s a number of organizations would try to formalize this process, while still later Islamist movements that had emerged in specific national contexts began to organize on a transnational level. Our understanding of these two distinct aspects of international Islam depends in part on recognition that their origins date back to earlier efforts at Muslim unity in the early years of the Cold War.