In September 1870, Nasir al-Din Shah (r.1848-1896), the reigning king of the Iranian Qajar Empire, embarked on a seven-month-long journey to Ottoman Iraq. Significantly, Nasir al-Din Shah himself wrote a detailed account of his travels, which was published in Tehran shortly after his return. Ottoman Iraq in the nineteenth century was a site of Ottoman centralization, intense activity by both Qajar population and state, as well as British colonial ambitions in the Gulf region. Apart from geographical proximity, the existence of four main Shi'a shrine cities of Karbala, Najaf, Kazemeyn, and Samarra, collectively referred to as 'Atabat ('thresholds') resulted in considerable movement of people, goods and ideas between Iran and Ottoman Iraq. Situating Nasir al-Din Shah's 'Atabat travelogue in the intersect of historiography on Ottoman Iraq, Qajar historiography, and historiography of nineteenth-century Muslim travel-writing, I analyze how the travelogue itself was utilized as a method of asserting sovereignty. Through comparative analysis of the two extant versions of the travelogue, I will argue that in the 'Atabat travelogue, Ottoman Iraq is represented as a space where Ottoman and Qajar sovereignties are projected upon through both early modern and modern ways of asserting authority in a multi-layered system of competing and hierarchical sovereignties. The paper thus attempts to highlight a moment in history of the changing conception of sovereignty from a more fluid claim to authority to self-determination and supreme authority in a confined territory. I argue that at this time modern notions such as territoriality, citizenship and "scientific" modes of geographic knowledge production were utilized simultaneously in conjunction with more classical patronage and reinvention of historical heritage to claim sovereignty over Ottoman Iraq. This will serve as a window to the complex relationship between the two independent Qajar (1785-1925) and Ottoman (1453-1923) empires, where both empires had to deal with various pressures and intrusions of European colonial powers and function within an overbearing colonial discourse. Highlighting the constant tension between ideas of friendship and Muslim unity with conflicting claims to sovereignty, my attempt is to break away from the preoccupation with the West in historiography of inter-state and international relations of non-European states in the nineteenth century.

In 1904, an Ottoman aide-de-camp embarked on a trip that would take him by sea to Marseille, then to Port Said, and from there south to Djibouti and on land to Harar and Addis Ababa. This Ottoman gentleman and officer by the name of Sadik al-Moayyad Azmzade, was no stranger to long trips to the southern frontiers of the empire. A few years before his trip to East Africa, he took dangerous journeys to the Libyan Desert, and a few years later to Central Africa and the Hijaz. All of his trips had one thing in common; he was representing Sultan Abdülhamid II on sensitive missions that had empire wide implications in the age of inter-imperial competition in Africa and the Red Sea Basin. The journey to Addis Ababa was no different, taking this itinerant Ottoman officer to meet with Emperor Menelik II to discuss ways that the two empires can cooperate to beat encroaching European colonialism in Africa. While he was on these journeys, he kept detailed travelogues, some of which were published and survived till today. These travelogues provide fascinating insight into the mental geography of an Ottoman man who finds himself forced to question his position in the world. Azmzade occupied an interesting subject position: Azmzade was born and raised in Damascus and Aleppo; lived most of his adult life in Istanbul; was educated in Beirut, Istanbul and Berlin; and traveled extensively in Europe, Anatolia and Arabia. At this point in his life he found himself forced to come to terms with a rapidly changing world with encroaching European colonialism, the rise of ethno-religious nationalism inside the empire, and was conflicted by various models of “modernity.” On his journey to East Africa and through Ethiopia, he encountered peoples and cultures that allowed him the opportunity to reflect at what was “self” vs. “other” in a world where he, as an “Arab” Ottoman found himself increasingly in liminal identiterian position. Using this travelogue in the context of his life, for this paper, I will discuss the place that travelogues occupied in the journey of soul searching at the end of the Age of Empire and their use in the righting of history of the late Ottoman Empire.

How does one know the ummah? How one senses its presence and represents its actuality? The late 19th-century thematics of awakening, revival and reform in the Muslim world made the question of ‘civilization’ the central problematic of a new social question. Whether it is Tanzimat, Nahda or Aligarh, these movements sought to address the gap between their belatedness and the domain of the contemporary. Travel was indeed the practice of traversing this vertical gap back and forth, and it happened to be experienced not only as a translocation but, indeed, as a time travel. Muslim travellers of the 19th century had West as their telos both in their travels and intellectual labors, and both were marked by the lack of coevalness (Fabian 1983). Yet, towards the end of the century a new itinerary, contra the verticality of the West, started to gain precedence. Muslim travellers started to navigate the forgotten waters of Ummah. In this paper, I will look into this reorientation through Ottoman travellers and their journeys to India. My focus will be on S. M. Tevfik’s serialized journalistic reports from India for the leading Islamist journal Sebilürreşad (1913-4). Indian Muslims, especially after 1897 victory against the Greeks, became a curiosity of Ottomans for their Islamic transnationalism. Tevfik’s voyage was a reconnaissance survey for novel sensibilities and potentialities of an unprecedented future. Placing it among a number of travelogues written earlier, I will show how an aesthetics of pan-Islamism is mobilized to resignifiy daily encounters, objects and histories towards materializing the referent that is Ummah. Making things speak for Ummah, ventriloquizing them, I argue, is the constitutive moment of an Islamist sovereignty for it renders the speaker the authority over intentions unknown to things themselves. Tevfik’s travelogue unjams the ummah by positing a subject who can speak for it and thus opens the possibility for it to be heard. Rather than fixating on the question of Caliphate vis-a-vis Great Powers, a horizontal perspective embodied in Tevfik’s narrative can help us in rethinking the sidelined alternative of a civic bond interlacing anti-imperialism with an Islamic cosmopolitanism.

Why would a seventy year old retired Parsi judge of repute living in Bombay choose to spend a holiday in a war torn Mesopotamia in 1916? When Cursetjee Manockjee Cursetjee travelled from Bombay to Basra and back between 1916 and 1918, Basra was the base of British operations against the Ottoman Empire and the war in Mesopotamia had not yet turned conclusively in favour of the British. Yet, Cursetjee wrote confidently about the “capture and possession by our arms of practically all Mesopotamia”, emphasizing both British and Indian participation in the Mesopotamian arena of the First World War. Cursetjee’s travelogue is not simply a description of the ports and customs of the Persian Gulf, but a vivid characterization of “the Arab nature” as he sees it, leading up to a justification for why the next rulers of the Shat el Arab, recently liberated from the yoke of “Turkish misrule”, should be the British. I study Cursetjee’s travelogue, The Land of the Date: A recent Voyage from Bombay to Basra and back, fully descriptive of the ports and peoples of the Persian Gulf and the Shat’- el- Arab, their conditions, history and customs, as a text that encapsulates emergent twentieth century ideas about self determination and older nineteenth century ideas about empire as an ideal form of organizing trade and sovereignty in an awkward combination. As a language of interests begins to be employed as a precondition for effective governance, the best interests of the Arab population of the former Ottoman lands co mingles with British as well as Indian interests in Cursetjee’s evaluation. Importantly, Cursetjee’s representation of Indian claims to Mesopotamian lands is not imagined, and is echoed by the British Foreign Ministry as well, which attempts to strategically divert Indian attention away from Mesopotamia. This paper is an analysis of the political networks that shape routes of travel, the political purposes that a simple “holiday” of an imperial subject can be harnessed for, and the expansionary claims of Indians who earnestly entered the fray as the borders of the Ottoman empire came under question and the political geography of a region was sought to be altered.