In the study of everyday nationalism, one productive area of debate has focused on how people understand the nation and what are the mental schemas they associate with when connecting their self with the nation. Specifically, this literature has revolved around the older ethnic vs. civic nationalism binary developed through an earlier generation of sociological investigation into the history of nationalism within Europe. The literature on everyday nationalism shows that the connection of the self and nation is ambivalent and contradictory as it oscillates between or is a mixture of the two notions of nationalism (civic and ethnic). I engage in this debate by asking how the participants of my study conceive of themselves as national subjects. Within a regime of truth and power varied from Europe, I inquire how might the conception of nationness change within the participants. Specifically, this paper is based on an ethnographic study of Hindus and Muslims in two neighborhoods of Karachi, Pakistan where I spent time at the homes and worship spaces of the participants of this study. I interviewed eighty participants in total. Through this study I present the idea of “terric nationhood” which conceives of the nation as a collective embodiment of the earth it is placed on. Unlike previous studies of landscape and nationalism, my participants did not conceive of land as a resource to be acquired or a signifier of nation external to them like monuments and the landscape but saw the land and self-connecting through the act of eating and of nourishing oneself. According to this idea the individual and his or her ancestors belong to the earth through the act of ingesting food which comes from the soil. This is where he or she connects with the nation which is one with the earth it is placed on.

This paper looks at the impact of the Pan-Islamic movement on nationalist politics and imperial policymaking in Mandatory Palestine. The study is built around three moments of tension between the colonial authorities and the country’s Islamic institutions: the controversy over the reintroduction of the Ottoman Sultan’s name in the Friday prayer (khutba) at the al-Aqsa mosque in October 1920; the convening of two international Islamic conferences by the Supreme Muslim Council in 1928 and 1931; and the decision by the mufti of Jerusalem to bury two prominent Muslim leaders, Sharif Husayn of Mecca and Muhammad Ali, one of the leaders of the Pan-Islamic Indian Khilafat movement, in the precincts of the Haram al-Sharif in 1931. Each moment raised fears for the Palestine government about the power of Pan-Islam to motivate Muslims to take action against the colonial state, while at the same time raising important questions among the Arab population about the place of Islam within the nationalist movement. For the colonial authorities, Pan-Islam threatened to radicalize Muslims from the outside; for Palestinian nationalists, Pan-Islam threatened to divert attention away from the Palestinian cause. In both cases, it was the transnational nature of Pan-Islam that represented a challenge to their vision of the country. Based on extensive research at the Israel State Archives, the Central Zionist Archives, the British National Archives, the British Library, and the Middle East Center Archives at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, this paper argues that while the threat of Pan-Islamism was exaggerated by the imperial authorities, particularly in the 1920s, it had a profound impact on the direction of Palestinian nationalism after the 1929 Western Wall Riots. Rather than building upon the momentum of the events of 1929 to push for a mass-based uprising against the British, I show how the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, courted the support of Pan-Islamic groups in India, Egypt, and elsewhere for personal and institutional reasons. This would have a debilitating effect on Palestinian nationalism, dividing Muslims and Christians and alienating a younger generation of activists who demanded greater action from their nationalist leadership. The paper ends by considering how Pan-Islamism helped internationalize the Palestinian issue, tying the nationalist movement into a larger anti-colonial movement that was a precursor to the Third World Internationalism of the 1950s, while at the same time connecting British intelligence in Palestine into an empire-wide network of colonial surveillance of Islam.

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the British capture of Baghdad during World War One. This development had a profound impact on the city’s Jewish community. During the late Ottoman period Baghdadi Jewish elites had come to accept Ottoman political identities. In the aftermath of the CUP Revolution, many Jews had welcomed the new government’s promise to allow religious minorities to more fully integrate into local and imperial political life. Unfortunately the Ottoman government’s harsh treatment of Baghdadi Jews during the war, especially in late 1915 and 1916, led many members of the community to welcome the arrival of their new British masters in early 1917. Over the next decade of British and Hashemite rule, Baghdadi Jews re-oriented their political and social identities away from Ottomanism and towards Iraqi nationalism. In addition to its impact on members of the Jewish community, the onset of British rule also had a profound impact on Baghdad’s Jewish institutions. This was certainly the case with with Albert Sassoon School for Boys, which had been founded in 1864, and the Laura Kadoorie School for Girls, which had been founded in 1895. These schools, which had flourished during much of the first decade and a half of the twentieth century before closing about a year after the Ottoman entry into World War One, were the flagship institutions of the French Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in Ottoman Iraq. Founded in 1860 the AIU was a philanthropic French Jewish organization dedicated to spreading, via its network of schools ranging from Morocco to Iran, French Republican values and modern education to Jewish communities in North Africa, the Middle East, and southeastern Europe. This paper utilizes the correspondence archive of the AIU to examine how the teachers and administrators of the Albert Sassoon and Laura Kadoorie Schools worked to rebuild their previously shuttered institutions following the British capture of Baghdad while adapting to both British rule and Jewish communal needs. In doing so it also aims to show how the AIU fit into Jewish communal life and British colonial goals in the four and a half year period bookended by the British arrival in Baghdad in March 1917 and King Faisal I’s ascension to the Iraqi throne in August 1921. Notably this is the first study to address the AIU’s activities in Baghdad in the direct aftermath of World War One.