PRINCE FAYSAL OF SAUDI ARABIA IN BERLIN (MAY 1932) (ARCHIVE ZEKI KIRAM)

Arabic and Islamic Studies

In collaboration with

KADOC

(Documentation and

Research Center on

Religion Culture and

Society)

This conference is generously funded

by the ERC Starting Grant:

“Neither visitors, nor colonial victims: Muslims in Interwar

Europe and European Trans-cultural History”

(Project Reference: 336608)

ABOUT THE PROJECT

“NEITHER VISITORS, NOR COLONIAL VICTIMS: MUSLIMS IN INTERWAR EUROPE AND

EUROPEAN TRANS-CULTURAL HISTORY” (Horizon 2020 - ERC-2013-STG – 336608)

No comprehensive attempt has yet been made to cover the history of Muslims in interwar Europe.

Historians of the modern Middle East underestimate the role of interwar Muslim actors in writing a

history of Islam, whereas historians of Europe underestimate their role in intra-European

developments. Existing works focus either on the nineteenth-century Muslim travelers, diplomats,

students and residents or on the later post-World War II influx of Muslim immigrant workers.

Based on personal and official archives, memoirs, press writings and correspondences, this project

analyses the multiple aspects of the global Muslim religious, political and intellectual affiliations in

interwar Europe, broadly defined. How did Muslims in interwar Europe act and interact among each

other; and within the European socio-political and cultural context? The project answers this question

by studying the intellectual and religio-political roles played by Muslim “intellectual agents” during the

interwar years and up until the rest of World War II (1918-1946).

We hypothesize that histoire croisée (entangled history) is the most appropriate approach to study the

encounters and experiences of Muslim actors in interwar Europe from within. By exploring the

complex relationship between the historical data and the social, political, theological and cultural

patterns of Muslims as a new social structure in interwar Europe, the study represents a step towards

a systematic global approach of Muslim connections in interwar Europe.

The project contributes to our historical conceptualization of Europe itself as much as to our

understanding of the contemporary scene of Islam in Europe and the world today, without resorting

to a neatly tailored hypothesis. Many Muslim groups in the West nowadays still trace their heritage to

the ideas of the great reformers of the early 20th century. More historical reflection on Islam in Europe

can put the present “fear"" for Islamization of the West into perspective.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

GLOBAL ISLAM IN THE INTERWAR WORLD

As the ERC Starting Grant Project “Neither visitors, nor colonial victims: Muslims in Interwar Europe

and European Trans-cultural History” nears its end, the conference invites speakers to place the

position of Muslims in interwar Europe in a wider historical context by focusing on the religious,

political, intellectual and social roles played by “global” Muslim actors in world history during the two

world wars and the interwar period. Like their historical peers, Muslims had their sense of shared

global goals which led transnational Muslim intellectuals and activists to create their networks; and

draw on their own political, religious, social and cultural aspirations that frequently crossed their

national borders in this crucial period of time. Considering Muslim “transnationalism”, even by

necessity and not primarily by design, is a well-suited tool to understand the transformation of Muslim

identities and their imagined collective past in world history before the decolonialization and the

building of nation- states.

The period under investigation between 1914-1945 was characterized by tensions, military turmoil,

political unrest, monumental sterling balances and revolts, but also by the rise of various kinds of

internationalisms that aimed to foster relations and exchanges across national and regional

boundaries. This conference will zoom in on various Muslim practices and responses to such major

world events which had a great impact on the Muslim world in the human global history as well. Take

for example, the Muslim military participation in both world wars, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire

and abolishing the Caliphate, the dominance of pan- Arabist and pan-Islamist movements, the

emergence of new national borders, as well as the consolidation of Islamic congresses and new

institutions. On another level, in order to achieve their goals, pan-Islamists were keen on associating

themselves with their counterpart pan- Asianists in India, China and of course Japan.

Scholars are invited to look at how global Muslim collective and individual actions cut across national

boundaries in the interwar world; and how Muslim historical actors could be legitimately placed in

world “transnational history”. How were the Muslim political, religious, social and intellectual forms of

activism shaped and varied? In what way were Muslim global figures, networks and institutions

affected by the changing international world order of the war times and interwar eras? The conference

aims to discuss new methodological perspectives about how intellectual Muslim networks and figures

(including minor or less prominent figures) tried to position themselves and their actions in the world

history of that era.

VENUES:

KU Leuven Arts Faculty

- Main Building - Erasmushuis (Blijde Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven)

- Building Mgr. Sencie Instituut, MSI: (Erasmusplein, 2, 3000 Leuven)

KADOC-KU Leuven (Vlamingenstraat 39, 3000 Leuven)

ORGANIZER

Umar Ryad (KU Leuven)

ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Hussam Eldin Ahmed (University of Cambridge), Kim Christiaens (KU-Leuven - KADOC), Idesbald

Goddeeris (KU Leuven), Martin Kohlrausch (KU Leuven), Patrick Pasture (KU Leuven), and Mehdi Sajid

(University of Utrecht)

PROGRAM

WEDNESDAY 27 MARCH 2019

9:15 - 9:45 COFFEE & REGISTRATION (7TH FLOOR)

9:45 -10:00 WELCOME & OPENING (JUSTUS LIPSIUS ROOM, 8TH FLOOR)

Jo Tollebeek (Dean Faculty of Arts)

10:00 - 10:30 INTRODUCTION (JUSTUS LIPSIUS ROOM, 8TH FLOOR)

Umar Ryad (KU Leuven): The ERC Project: General Outputs and Results

10:30 - 12:00: SESSION 1 - NEITHER VISITORS NOR COLONIAL VICTIMS? MUSLIM ACTIVISM IN INTERWAR EUROPE

(JUSTUS LIPSIUS ROOM, 8TH FLOOR)

Chair: Kim Christiaens (KADOC – KU Leuven)

Sophie Spaan (KU Leuven – Belgium): French Islam policy in the interwar period: shaping a propaganda

oeuvre

Andrei Tirtan (KU Leuven – Belgium): Enlisting transnational support: Jean Longuet and Shakib Arslan

and the French Socialist- Arab nationalist-cum-pan-Islamist relations in interwar Europe

Mehdi Sajid (Utrecht University – The Netherlands): Seven years of research on the history of Islam and

Muslims in interwar Europe - retrospect and to-dos for future research

12:00 – 13:00 LUNCH (HALL ERASMUSHUIS)

13:00-14:00: SESSION 2 - INTERNATIONALIST POLITICS IN INTERWAR EUROPE (MSI 02.08 )

Chair: Valeria Zanier (KU Leuven)

David Motadel (London School of Economics and Political Science - UK): Alimjan Idris and Islam in Four Germanys,

1916-1959

Sarah Khayati (University of Basel - Switzerland): Between opportunities and limitations: Muslim émigrés in interwar

Switzerland

14:00-14:30: COFFEE BREAK (HALL ERAMUSHUIS)

14:30-15:30: SESSION 3 - THE CALIPHATE AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION (MSI 01.12)

Chair: Umar Ryad (KU Leuven)

Alp Yenen (University of Leiden – The Netherlands): Bazaar of Revanchists and Revolutionaries: Muslim Political

Networks in Post-Versailles Berlin

Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill - USA): Between the Imperial Caliphate and Cold

War Islamism: Interwar Era Muslim Political Visions in Global Context (Via Skype)

16:00-17:15: VISIT TO THE ISLAM EXPO: ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAM BETWEEN FASCINATION AND AVERSION (KADOC:

Documentation and Research Center on Religion Culture and Society - Vlamingstraat 39, 3000

Leuven). The Expo is organized in collaboration with the ERC Project.

17:30-19:00: FILM SCREENING: ERC DOCUMENTARY: KARLSTRAßE 10: IN SEARCH FOR MUSLIMS IN INTERWAR

EUROPE (Venue: Audtiorium Vesalius - Andreas Vesaliusstraat, 3000 Leuven)

COMMENT AND PUBLIC DISCUSSION: Angela Liberatore (Head of Unit - Social Sciences and Humanities at

the European Research Council Executive Agency)

19:00 DINNER (FOR PARTICIPANTS ONLY): Mykene - Muntstraat 44, 3000 Leuven

THURSDAY 28 MARCH 2019

9:00 - 9:30 COFFEE & TEA (HALL ERASMUSHUIS)

9:30-11:00 - SESSION 4: MONARCHY, WARS, AND REFORM (MSI 02.08)

Chair: Jan Schmidt (KU Leuven)

Adam Mestyan (Duke University - USA): The Throne of Syria Monarchy and Islam, 1928-1933

Roy Bar Sadeh (Columbia University, NYC - USA): Constructing Indian Muslims as a ‘Revolutionary

Minority’: Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872-1944) and the Soviet Project of Managing Difference

Ulrich Brandenburg (University of Zurich – Switzerland): Decentering the Second World War: The Middle East and

the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-45

11:00-11:30 COFFEE BREAK (HALL ERAMUSHUIS)

11:30-13:00 - SESSION 5: GLOBAL TRANSLATION, PRINT AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES (MSI 02.08)

Chair: Mehdi Sajid (Utrecht University)

Scott S. Reese (Northern Arizona University- USA): Small Print: Publishing, Print, and Islamic Intellectual Community

in the Interwar Indian Ocean

Johanna Pink (Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg - Germany): Qur’an translation in the interwar

period: between globalisation, colonialism and the emergence of nation states

Emad Mohamed (University of Wolverhampton – UK): Global Interwar Muslim Periodicals and Digital

Humanities: Al-Manar as a case study?

13:00 -14:00 LUNCH BREAK ((HALL ERASMUSHUIS)

14:00-15:30: SESSION 6 - GLOBAL MUSLIM REFORM (MSI 02.08)

Chair: Idesbald Goddeeris (KU Leuven)

Jakob Krais, (Freie Universität Berlin - Germany): Beyond Flirting with Fascism: Writing the History of Muslim Reform

at the Global Moment of Youth Movements

A.M. Lyklema (Utrecht University – The Netherlands): The Call to God (al-daʿwa ilā Allāh) in the interwar world

Serafettin Pektas (Leuven - Belgium): An Unusual Muslim at Interwar Period: Said Nursi

15:30-16:00 COFFEE BREAK (HALL ERASMUSHUIS)

16:00-17:30 SESSION 7 - “EUROPEAN” AND MUSLIM: EASTERN EUROPE (MSI 02.08)

Chair: Patrick Pasture (KU Leuven)

Agata S. Nalborczyk (University of Warsaw - Poland): Polish Muslim Tatars on Global Islam issues

1918-1939. Articles in Interwar Polish Tatar Periodicals

Galina M. Yemelianova (Centre for Eurasian Perspectives, UK): Eurasian Muslims in the Interwar Period: A

Communist-Islamic Synthesis?

H. Esra Almas (Istanbul Şehir University – Turkey & Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies, The

University of Pennsylvania): The Life and Letters of Ayaz Ishaki: A Portrait of a Muslim Cosmopolitan at

the Ends of Europe and Beyond

18:30: DINNER (FOR PARTICIPANTS ONLY): Al Parma Leuven -Tiensestraat 68, 3000 Leuven

FRIDAY 29 MARCH 2019

10:00-11:00: SESSION 8 – (CONTINUED )“EUROPEAN” AND MUSLIM: EASTERN EUROPE (KADOC: Vlamingstraat

39, 3000 Leuven)

Chair: Martin Kohlrausch

Dženita Karić (Oriental Institute in Sarajevo): Transformations of Discourse on Hajj in the interwar Yugoslavia

Emily Greble (Vanderbilt University - USA): From Minority Protections to Islamic Revivalism: The Case of Yugoslavia

11:00-11:30 COFFEE BREAK (KADOC)

11:30-13:00: SESSION 9 - CULTURAL TIES IN EUROPE AND IDENTITY (MSI 01.23)

Chair: Maher Hamoud (KU Leuven)

Hussam R. Ahmed (University of Cambridge - UK): Egyptian Cultural Expansionism in Europe and the

Mediterranean (1936-1952)

Yehia Mohamed Mahmoud Ahmed (UAE University – United Arab Emirates): Egyptian Students in

Britain in the interwar period

Giovanna Lelli (KU Leuven – Belgium): The question of cultural identity in Ṭaha Ḥusayn’s On Pre-Islamic

Poetry (1926) and The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938)

13:00 LUNCH AND FAREWELL (KADOC)

ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES

WEDNESDAY 27 MARCH 2019

10:30 - 12:00: SESSION 1 - NEITHER VISITORS NOR COLONIAL VICTIMS? MUSLIM ACTIVISM IN INTERWAR EUROPE

(JUSTUS LIPSIUS ROOM, 8TH FLOOR)

Sophie Spaan (KU Leuven – Belgium): French Islam policy in the interwar period: shaping a

propaganda oeuvre

This paper will examine French Islam policy, which was embodied in the three entities of the Muslim

hospital and cemetery, the surveillance agency SAINA (Service des Affaires Indigenes Nord Africaines)

and the Paris Mosque. We shall examine how this propaganda oeuvre represented the goals to

segregate and control the North African population through surveillance and the creation of a French

Islam, as well as to compete within these Muslim propaganda spaces with Britain and Germany for the

position of most influential Muslim power and benefactor of Islam. How did the creation of French

state Islam lead to controlling Muslims and their religious expressions in the French capital as well as

the colonies? We shall also see how the ornate mosque in the center of Paris emphasized France’s

desire to be an important Muslim power and exemplified the French attempt to define Muslim spaces

in the capital. In what ways did the Paris Mosque represent a reclaimed orientalist space?

Sophie Spaan is a doctoral researcher and a team member of the ERC Starting Grant project “Neither

visitors, nor colonial victims: Muslims in Interwar Europe and European Trans-cultural History.” Her

PhD dissertation deals with “Religious identity and institutionalisation of Muslims and Islam in Interwar

Western Europe”. She completed her undergraduate degree in History and Classics at the University

of Edinburgh (2011) and her MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and

African Studies at the University of London (2012). In 2012-2014 she worked as a research associate at

the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies in Beirut, Lebanon. She is a junior member in the Netherlands

Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS).

Andrei Tirtan (KU Leuven - Belgium): Enlisting Transnational Support: Jean Longuet and Shakib

Arslan and the French Socialist- Arab nationalist-cum-pan-Islamist Relations in interwar Europe

In interwar Europe the ideological and tactical evolution of Arab political activists and pan-Islamists

underwent various phases. The paper will examine the aims, methods of action, intellectual output of

Muslim activists in the cultivation and exploitation of their relations with European institutions,

political groups and individuals. We shall see that the early interwar years were marked by attempts

to support the Bolshevik revolutionary efforts as means to defend the Ottoman state and Caliphate;

and later in the late 1930s networks of anti-colonial Muslim activists were pushed to a pro-Axis turn.

We shall study this by focusing on the attempts of the well-known pan-Islamist and Arab Nationalist

exile Druze Emir Shakib Arslan and his Syrian-Palestinian delegation in Geneva at League of Nations

throughout the 1920s. Based on hitherto unidentified correspondences between French Socialist Jean

Longuet (1876–1938) and the main members of the Syrian-Palestinian Congress in the late 1920s, the

paper sheds new light on the Muslim activists’ transnational links to the Section Française de

l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) and the Second International. It highlights the evolution and

implications of such a relationship as well as the limits of French socialist support towards Syro-

Palestinian, Arab and Muslim causes. Touching upon themes such as the weaknesses of the League of

Nations, attitudes towards Zionism as well as the Muslim activists’ drawing between rival French and

international political factions and organisms, the study assesses their role in ultimately driving figures

such as Arslan closer towards the Axis powers in 1930s.

Andrei Tirtan is a doctoral researcher and a team member of the ERC Starting Grant project “Neither

visitors, nor colonial victims: Muslims in Interwar Europe and European Trans-cultural History.” His

PhD dissertation focuses on Muslim political activism in the Europe of the interbellum and the

ideological evolutions of pan-Islamist figures, groups and networks. He got his BA degree in Political

Science - English Section (2011) from the University of Bucharest and his MA in Area Studies at the

University of Leiden (2013). He is a junior member in the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic

Studies (NISIS).

Mehdi Sajid (Utrecht University – The Netherlands): Seven years of research on the history of

Islam and Muslims in interwar Europe - retrospect and to-dos for future research

My paper is the summary of the seven years I have spent studying the history of Islam and Muslims in

Interwar Europe. I will address a variety of topics: the importance of trans-cultural and trans-national

approaches; the relevance of this historical episode for our understanding of the present of Islam and

Muslims in Western societies; the lessons learned from studying conversions from and to Islam; and,

last but not least, the impact of images of the Self and the Other in shaping perceptions and discourses

that are translated into political actions. In the last part of my presentation, I would like to share some

thought about certain areas that could be explored more in depth in future research.

Mehdi Sajid is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies. He is a former postdoctoral researcher

at the ERC Starting Grant project “Muslims in interwar Europe” during its time at Utrecht University

(2015-2017). His research has dealt with various aspects of Islamic intellectual history, modern

encounters between East and West, and the transformation of Islamic religious and intellectual

traditions in the modern era. His current project investigates the revival of Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrines in

North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

13:00-14:00: SESSION 2 - INTERNATIONALIST POLITICS IN INTERWAR EUROPE (MSI 02.08 )

David Motadel (London School of Economics and Political Science - UK): Alimjan Idris and Islam in Four

Germanys, 1916-1959

This paper explores the life of the Islamic scholar Alimjan Idris. Born in Central Asia, Idris studied

theology and philosophy in Bukhara, Istanbul and Lausanne, and during the First World War was

employed by the Ottoman War Ministry. In early 1916 he was sent to Germany, where he became

involved in German propaganda towards the Islamic world and was made responsible for Muslim

prisoners of war in special Muslim prisoner of war camps near Berlin. He stayed in Berlin after the war

and became a key figure in the organization of the Muslim community in Weimar Germany. After the

Nazis came to power, Idris became heavily involved in propaganda activities again, first for the Foreign

Office, later for other branches of the regime. During the Second World War he was once more

responsible for Muslim prisoners of war and Muslim volunteers in the Wehrmacht. In 1944 he became

director of the so-called ‘SS-Mullah School’ in Dresden, which trained military imams for service in the

German army. After 1945 Idris was a key figure in the organization of the first post-war Muslim

community in Germany, based in Munich. His story provides a unique lens through which to view

Muslim life in four German states. Indeed, no person shaped the history of Islam in early twentieth-

century Germany more than him. Interweaving the biography of Idris with broader questions about

exile, religious minorities and the politics of Islam, the paper will shed new light on the history of Islam

in Europe’s age of extremes.

David Motadel is an Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics

and Political Science (LSE). He studied in Germany, Switzerland, and England. He completed his MPhil

(2006) and PhD (2010) in History at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar. He

subsequently took up a Research Fellowship in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of

Cambridge (2010-15), and a Chancellor’s Fellowship in History at the University of Edinburgh (2015-

16). Motadel has held visiting positions at Harvard (2007-8), Yale (2009-10), and Oxford (2011-12). He

is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author of Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Harvard

University Press, 2014), which was awarded the Fraenkel Prize, and the editor of Islam and the

European Empires(Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2018, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for

History.

Sarah Khayati (University of Basel - Switzerland): Between opportunities and limitations: Muslim émigrés

in interwar Switzerland

Historical research still grapples with the problem of how to conceptualize nation and space, while

often fails in perceiving the ‘national space’ as a product of transnational entanglements. The History

of Switzerland is a case in point. Over the past decade revisionist studies on Swiss economic and

‘colonial’ history questioned the self-image of an ‘innocent’ nation by revealing Swiss political

complicities with the European colonial regimes. Switzerland’s ostensible image as a neutral state and

non-imperial actor as well as the fact that she was the host country of the League of Nations was hence

a convenient choice for political asylum; and remained a stamping ground for transnational activists

also in the interwar period. In popular perception, Switzerland’s involvements in colonialism, its

support of imperialism, and its political climate of the xenophobia and racism–commonly expressed in

term of ‘Überfremdung’ (over-foreignisation) during the interwar years–remains mostly unknown, if

not ignored or trivialized.

The paper carefully revisits the transnational Swiss history of the interwar years, especially by focusing

on Middle Eastern and Muslim émigré communities and networks. We shall see that interwar

Switzerland was a venue for education and a safe haven for a small number of both unknown and

prominent Middle Eastern émigrés, who dedicated themselves to the cause of liberating their

homelands from colonial regimes.

This paper deals with the experience of a community from the Middle East, facing on the one hand the

hostile socio-political climate of a xenophobic administration and on the other hand a cosmopolitan

and liberal segment of Geneva’s society that provided them a transnational political forum. This dual

involvement had an impact on the opportunities and limits of their transnational political activism but

also on their social and private life in abroad in Switzerland. By analyzing and linking cases of individuals

and circles, such as the well-known pan-Islamic figurehead Shakib Arslan (1869–1946), the little-known

Lebanese women’s rights activist Nour Hamada (1897−1962), the Syrian-Arab and the Egyptian

nationalist students’ association ‘Misr’, and the long-life Swiss habitant Zaki Ali (1905-1999), who

constantly lectured on the Arab-Muslim civilization and co-published books on Islam with Aga Khan

(1877–1957), I will illustrate the yet unexplored significance of Muslim political activism and social life

in Switzerland. The experience of Swiss-based Middle Eastern émigrés will contribute to the narrative

of Muslims in interwar Europe as well as to a reconsideration of the Swiss exceptionalism in the

historiography. The surveillance activities and the administration’s perception of the Arab-Muslim

networks on Swiss territory and their alliance with liberal Swiss activists, as I will argue, rather

illustrated the Swiss authorities’ increasingly duplicitous attitude. By challenging the popular discourse

of constituting a humanitarian nation and a neutral state, this paper will embed Swiss national history

in transnational biographies and vice versa.

Sarah Khayati is a PhD candidate and a research associate in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the

University of Basel. Currently, she is a visiting research student in the Department of International

History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2011, she completed her M.A. in

Islamic Studies at the University of Münster with her thesis on the Lebanese communist intellectual

Hussein Mroué. She also holds a degree in Social Science (Dipl.-Soz.Wiss.), specialized in Political

Sciences and European Studies (2012) from the University of Münster in cooperation with the Faculty

of European Studies at the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj Napoca. Between 2009 and 2014 she mostly

lived and worked in Lebanon.

14:30-15:30: SESSION 3 - THE CALIPHATE AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION (MSI 01.12)

Alp Yenen (University of Leiden – The Netherlands): Bazaar of Revanchists and Revolutionaries: Muslim

Political Networks in Post-Versailles Berlin

Although there has been a great deal of scholarly interest in the political networks of Muslim activists

in Wilheminite, Weimar, and Nazi Germany, most studies treat them as a proxy of German foreign and

military policies. In most studies, political agency of Muslim activism is connected to world affairs

through the intermediary of Wilhelmstrasse. However, especially in the aftermath of the First World

War, Muslim political networks in Berlin developed a transnational agenda that clearly went beyond

the circumcized control and capacity of post-Versailles Germany. If Moscow was the Mecca of

revolutionary pilgrims after 1917, cosmopolitan-revanchist milieu of post-Versailles Berlin constituted

a global bazaar of dissident foreign émigrés and embittered German militarists and socialists

exchanging radical and reactionary ideas with one another. Established in Berlin in 1919, a movement

of Muslim anticolonialism was led by the exiled Young Turk leaders of the Committee of Union and

Progress with the “Orient Klub” as its civil society organization and the Union of Muslim Revolutionary

Societies as its overarching revolutionary federation. Although, this movement ambitiously constituted

an “Islamic International” in alliance with Moscow, it was already failed and dissolved in the summer

of 1922.

The paper will focus on how this transnational movement distinctively embodied the hopes and

anxieties of a global moment of Muslim anti-colonialism and its complex struggle in international

affairs, in which post-Versailles Berlin provided not only a safe haven but also a dynamic marketplace

for transnational anti-establishment movements. Through a study of the internal documents and

private correspondence of this movement as well as archival documents, this paper will map out the

remarkable political network of Muslim activism in post-Versailles Berlin that remained close ties with

Germany but went also beyond the means of Wilhelmstrasse.

Alp Yenen is a university lecturer in Modern Turkish History and Culture at the University of Leiden.

Previously he was university lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Social Sciences at

the University of Basel. In December 2016, he completed his PhD from the University of Basel with his

dissertation “The Young Turk Aftermath: Making Sense of Transnational Contentious Politics at the End

of the Ottoman Empire, 1918-1922”, which is currently under revision for publication. He holds an MA

degree in Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science, and Economic Geography from the University of

Munich. He is working on a project on the international history of the Turkish civil war in 1970s and

the end of the Cold War order in the Middle East. He is interested in the comparative and international

history of contentious politics in the modern Middle East.

Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill - USA): Between the Imperial Caliphate

and Cold War Islamism: Interwar Era Muslim Political Visions in Global Context (Via Skype)

Interwar period Muslim political imagination after the abolishment of Caliphate lacked any dominant

unitary pattern and direction. Contested idea of the Muslim World that characterized the mobilization

and struggles for rights within European empires never disappeared, but lost the unitary focus on the

symbolism and the legitimacy of the Ottoman Caliphate as the unitary center of the ummah. In the

post-caliphate period, Muslim populations under the rule of various European empires put their hopes

in a diverse range of projects, from progress within the existing empires to the self-strengthening of

existing Muslim-majority states and monarchies in order to redeem Muslim masses from a perceived

sense of under-development, disempowerment and decline. Muslim societies were politically divided,

embracing competing ideological projects and state building methods ranging from authoritarian

modernization reforms in Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan or the totalitarian Soviet secularism to anti-

imperial nationalism and pro-imperial loyalism.

The paper will examine how within such chaotic diversity of Muslim political projects and identities an

intellectual imagination of Muslim civilization and Islam as a universal world religion emerged through

the global circulation of key texts and concepts about Muslim reform and decline, as well as

geopolitical talk on the inter-connected destiny of Muslim populations in relation to an illegitimate

hegemony of Western-Christian empires. The paper argues that understanding the polyvocality of

Muslim political visions and narratives during the interwar period may help us the threads of continuity

and dramatic ruptures from the imperial era Pan-Islamism to the cold war period Islamism.

Cemil Aydin is professor of international/global history courses at the University of North Carolina-

Chapel Hill's Department of History. He studied at Boğaziçi University, İstanbul University, and the

University of Tokyo before receiving his Ph.D. degree at Harvard University in 2002. Cemil Aydin’s

publications include his book on the Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (Columbia University Press,

2007), “Regions and Empires in Political History of the World, 1750-1924” in A Emerging Modern

World, 1750-1870 (A History of the World, Book 4) Ed. by Jurgen Osterhammel and Sebastian Conrad

(Harvard University Press, May 2018), pp: 33-277, and The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global

Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, Spring 2017).

THURSDAY 28 MARCH 2019

9:30-11:00 - SESSION 4: MONARCHY, WARS, MINORITY (MSI 02.08)

Adam Mestyan (Duke University - USA): The Throne of Syria Monarchy and Islam, 1928-1933

Instead of the short-lived Hashemite monarchy in Damascus in 1920, this presentation deals with a

debate about the government type of the would-be Syrian state in the late 1920s. After 1926, the

French mandatory power decided to unite the fragmented small polities into one state. In 1928, the

High Commissioner, A.H. Ponsot, supported by some ‘ulama’, proposed that monarchy should be the

regime form of this new state. Between 1928 and around 1933 thus heated debates occurred time to

time in the Arabic press: should this new state be a republic or a monarchy? There was no shortage of

candidates for the throne of Syria from the Hashemites to the Sa‘udis (the later French Commissioner

G. Puaux even in 1939 preferred a monarchy in Syria) but finally the local notables decided firmly for

a republic. The paper will discuss how the public propaganda war in Arabic included the theoretical

question of whether monarchy is the best form for a Muslim state. Based on archival sources and the

Arabic press, this paper surveys this debate and its implications about what came to be called political

Islam.

Adam Mestyan is Assistant Professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the History Department of

Duke University. At the moment he is working on his second monograph, Modern Arab Kingship. His

first monograph was Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt

(Princeton University Press, 2017) and his most recent publication is Primordial History, Print

Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Ifao, 2019). A graduate of Central European

University and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he was a recipient of various research

grants and fellowships, most recently at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris, 2018-2019.

Roy Bar Sadeh (Columbia University, NYC - USA): Constructing Indian Muslims as a ‘Revolutionary

Minority’: Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872-1944) and the Soviet Project of Managing Difference

In the aftermath of World War I Britain and its Western European allies made “minority rights” into an

international legal category. Yet, as historians have shown, this category was not “international” at all.

The upkeep of “minority rights” was restricted, for the most part, to several nation states in Eastern

Europe, while the European colonial powers, most notably Britain and France, remained uncommitted

to this new legal category. As Britain and France deepened their colonial involvement in post-Ottoman

Arab nation states, Islamic thinkers, in countries where Muslims constituted a numerical “minority”,

searched for alternatives to challenge the Western category of “minority rights.” Nowhere was this

more prevalent than in British India. Home to the world’s largest number of Muslims, who were

simultaneously a minority to Hindus, the Indian subcontinent was a space from which some of the

most important challenges to colonial policies have emerged. If Muslim participation in the Gandhian

non-cooperation movement is well-researched, a less appreciated moment of anti-colonial

mobilization is the collaboration of Indian Muslims in the Soviet state building project of the early

1920s. By rejecting majority/minority relations of power, the early Soviet state provided colonized

peoples worldwide with a framework to challenge “minority rights,” advocating national-self-

determination within a federative union.

My preliminary research in Russian archives suggests that the Indian Muslim and Russian Jewish

questions came together at this particular moment. Just like the Jews in the 1920s, who Bolshevik

officials considered a global revolutionary people whose immigration to the “East” should be

encouraged, Muslims were also seen as a threat to Soviet politics. By focusing on this ambivalent and

unexamined relationship between the early Soviet government and Indian Muslim thinkers who

traveled to Moscow, Tashkent, and Kabul in these years, I ask how such thinkers continued to redefine

what it meant to be a Muslim minority in light of the new geopolitical realities ushered in by WWI and

the October revolution? To illustrate this, I explore the Urdu writings of and unknown Soviet archival

document on the Punjabi-born globetrotter, Ubaidullah Sindhi. Converted from Sikhism to Islam during

his youth, Ubaidullah became one of the most notable teachers in Deoband’s theological seminary

(est. 1866). During World War I He left India to Afghanistan due to his objection to the British colonial

rule, forging close connections with the Afghan King and govern and then travelling in the early 1920s

to the Soviet Union. Seeking to promote ideas of religious difference and social justice for Indian

Muslims and non-Muslim, the story of Ubaidullah Sindhi sheds new light on the interwar’s Soviet-

Indian Muslim and how that relationship created new ways to think about managing social difference.

Roy Bar Sadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history at Columbia University in the city of

New York. His research focuses on notions of Muslim minority and their intellectual and socio-political

histories that link Islamic modernists throughout Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. Drawing on Arabic,

Urdu, Russian, Persian, Hebrew, and English sources, Roy explores how these Muslim intellectuals

connected with and contributed to ongoing global debates about minority and emancipation. Roy

published on Gandhi in Al-Manar and Al-Manar's Intellectual Circles and Aligarh's Mohammedan

Anglo-Oriental College in India.

Ulrich Brandenburg (University of Zurich – Switzerland): Decentering the Second World War: The Middle

East and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-45

Until recently, research about the Second World War has remained surprisingly Eurocentric. The paper

intends to contribute to more globalized view of the war by focusing on repercussions of Japan’s

invasion of China in the Middle East, showing that Middle Easterners were not only affected by the

European and African theaters of war, but also by events in East Asia. By introducing Japan and China,

the paper aims at presenting a more complex picture of pro-Axis and pro-Allied sympathies in the

Middle East and offering an additional viewpoint to rethink the role of Islam in negotiations of

transnational solidarities.

We shall see that in writing, through symbolic gestures, and by showcasing of Muslim allies, partisans

of China as well as Japan claimed to represent not only narrow national interests but those of the

worldwide Muslim community. The analysis will focus on publications by Chinese Muslim students at

al-Azhar University and writings by supporters of Japan, such as Abdülhay Kurban Ali, head of the

Russian Muslim community in Tokyo. The texts to be discussed were mainly published in Egypt in the

late 1930s and early 1940s, either as books/pamphlets or articles in the Islamist journal al-Fatḥ.

Directed towards a Middle-Eastern readership, these writings tended to Islamicize the conflict

between the warring parties by discussing, for example, the opening of a mosque in Tokyo or the role

of Muslim generals in the defense of China. Notably, Chinese Muslim statements about jihad and holy

war (ḥarb muqaddasa) were intermingled with ideas of patriotism (waṭaniyya) or humanitarianism

(insaniyya), stressing that Muslims in China identified with the Chinese nation and that they were

fighting a just war for the good of humanity. The paper highlights how many of these writings not only

connected the events of the war in the Far East to the future of Islam in Asia and worldwide, but also

they offered conflicting arguments for pan-Islamic solidarities.

Ulrich Brandenburg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Islamic Studies, Institute of Asian

and Oriental Studies, of the University of Zurich. He holds M.A. degrees in Middle Eastern as well as

Japanese Studies, both from the University of Bonn, Germany. In his yet unpublished PhD thesis (in

German), which he defended in 2017 at the University of Zurich, he has provided a re-evaluation of

relations between Japan and the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Based on research about alleged Japanese interests to make Islam into Japan’s state religion or about

the possibilities of conducting Muslim missionary work in Japan, his upcoming monograph will be a

contribution to the histories of Asian interconnections, pan-Asianism, and religious modernism. Ulrich

is currently developing a postdoctoral project around the figure of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī (1807/08-

1883).

11:30-13:00 - SESSION 5: GLOBAL TRANSLATION, PRINT AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES (MSI 02.08)

Scott S. Reese (Northern Arizona University - USA): Small Print: Publishing, Print, and Islamic Intellectual

Community in the Interwar Indian Ocean

In 1920, after four years of self-imposed exile in Egypt, the Somali `alim Abdullahi al-Qutbi returned to

his natal home carrying 500 copies of his magnum opus, al-Majmu’a al-Mubaraka (The Blessed

Collection). Written during his years at al-Azhar in Cairo, the book was in fact a set of four pamphlets,

published as a single volume covering various religious topics. Composed by an obscure scholar from

the Horn of Africa–al-Qutbi; printed by one of Cairo’s oldest family publishing houses–Mustafa al-Babi

al-Halabi & Sons and; endorsed by a prominent Lebanese cleric–Yusuf Isma’il Nabhani, the Majmu’a is

exemplary of an important shift in Muslim learning and scholarly interactions that gained momentum

during the years between the two world wars. The so-called Arabic print revolution, is generally talked

about as an innovative new medium made possible through European developments in lithography

and moveable type, as well as, imperial networks of transport and communication. But, less recognized

is the fact it was also an extension of an Islamic written manuscript tradition that dated back more

than a thousand years. This paper begins to examine the social, intellectual and material ramifications

of the print’s development. However, in doing so, it challenges the idea that mechanical print

represented a sharp break with the past naturally and inevitably displacing handwritten texts.

Drawing on the networks of intellectual exchange between the Muslims communities of East Africa

and Egypt, my presentation will examine the world of textual production from the mid-19th through

mid-20th centuries as a case study in the written Islamic tradition. Using works such as al-Qutbi’s, from

range of textual genres (hagiographies, theological texts and legal sources), produced in various locales

(East Africa, the Horn as well as the wider Red Sea region) for diverse audiences (religious scholars, lay

people and, on occasion, the colonial state), the talk will illustrate how print created new sets of

discursive webs that entangled Muslims across various physical and conceptual spaces. Equally

important, this paper also considers the continuing influence of the Arabic manuscript tradition. Taking

up material issues such as layout and format as well as less tangible matters such as discursive tropes

and concepts regarding the proper form of knowledge and discursive authority, I also explore the

continuing significance and presence of the manuscript tradition in the age of print.

Scott Reese (PhD in African and Islamic History, University of Pennsylvania, 1996; MA in African

Studies, Ohio University, 1990) is a historian of Islam in Africa and the western Indian Ocean and

currently Professor of Islamic History at Northern Arizona University. He focuses specifically on

comparative history aimed at breaking down many of the regional and geographic categories currently

in use across the academy. His main research interests are comparative Sufism, modern Muslim

discourses of reform, and the construction of world systems both in fact and imagination since 1500.

His most recent book, Imperial Muslims (Edinburgh, 2018) explores the role of Muslim religious

discourse in mediating the social consequences of empire. He has recently embarked on a new project

that explores the emergence of Arabic print in the Indian Ocean as not only a result of European

technological innovations and imperial networks of communication, but as an extension of the

centuries old Islamic written tradition.

Johanna Pink (Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg - Germany): Qurʾān translation in the

interwar period: between globalisation, colonialism and the emergence of nation states

Between the 1910s and 1930s, a number of scholars such as Rashīd Riḍā in Egypt and Sayyid ‘Uthman

in the Dutch East Indies heavily criticised Qurʾān translations because they felt these translations

threatened the status of the Arabic Qurʾān as a beacon of Muslim unity. The reason for these scholars’

vehement opposition has to be understood in light of the fact that Qurʾān translations emerged as a

new genre of text in the interwar period, starting to supersede older methods of transferring the

meaning of the Qurʾān into other languages. For the first time, Muslims produced texts that were

meant to represent the meaning of the Qurʾān in a coherent form, not as a commentary or gloss, but

as a stand-alone text that was modelled after the Arabic Qurʾān and could be read without knowledge

of Arabic. Such translations, produced by Muslim intellectuals and scholars, were printed across the

world. Muhammad Ali’s English Qurʾān translation, first published in 1917, is but one prominent

example. The 1920s saw the first complete Qurʾān translations into Chinese and Bahasa Indonesia as

well as the first, albeit unpopular, efforts of translating the Qurʾān into Turkish. By the late 1930s,

opposition to translating the Qurʾān had all but broken down and been reduced to the level of

semantics: the question remained whether a Qurʾān translation should be called a translation or rather

a tafsīr or a translation of the meanings of the Qurʾān .

This paper aims to take a global perspective on the emergence of Qurʾān translations and the debates

on their legitimacy in the interwar period. The genre was clearly, albeit maybe not always consciously,

modelled after that of Bible translations. At the same time, Qurʾān translations were expressions of a

new sense of local Muslim identity, connected to the emergence of nationalist ideas. But just as much,

they were the result of a global quest for educating Muslims in their faith and for performing daʿwa

among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. This latter aspect converged with the aims of Muslim

modernists, such as Rashīd Riḍā, to an extent that rendered their opposition against this new genre of

religious text not only ineffective but also paradoxical. The paper will trace the global trajectories of

the genre of Qurʾān translations in the first four decades of the 20th century, discussing the role of

actors on various spatial levels: locally, within colonies or newly-founded nation states, within regional

and transregional networks as well as in the global arena. It will shed light on how new methods of

communication, travel and publication as well as the political developments of the time affected

Muslim religious text production, resulting in fundamental transformations or religious literature and

religious learning.

Johanna Pink is professor of Islamic Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.

She taught at Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Tuebingen. Her main fields of interest are

the trans-regional history of tafsīr in the modern period and Qurʾān translations with a particular focus

on Indonesia. Her publications include a monograph on Sunni tafsīr in the modern Islamic world, a

guest-edited volume of the Journal of Qurʾānic Studies on translations of the Qurʾān in Muslim

majority contexts and a volume on tafsīr and Islamic intellectual history, co-edited with Andreas Görke.

Her latest monograph is entitled “Muslim Qurʾānic Interpretation Today“ (Equinox, 2019).

Emad Mohamed (University of Wolverhampton, England, UK): Global Interwar Muslim

Periodicals and Digital Humanities: Al-Manar as a case study?

Al-Manār Magazine, published by the well-known Muslim reformist Muhammad Rashīd Ridā from

1898 until 1935 in Cairo, was a global print-medium in various fields, including Qurʾānic studies,

Islamic reform, fatwās, politics, as well as a host of other topics that rose and fell with the ebb and flow

of political, religious, and social events in Egypt and the wider Muslim world of Ridā’s age. The paper

will discuss methods that help us computationally track, quantify, and explain the development of

Rashid Ridā’s interests, with a special focus on countries, events, and people. The project also

illustrates the use of morphological analysis, topic modeling, and word embeddings in Arabic and

Islamic Studies.

Emad Mohamed is a senior lecturer in Computational Linguistics and Digital Humanities at the

Research Institute of Information and Language Processing, University of Wolverhampton, England,

UK. Emad graduated with a PhD in Computational Linguistics from Indiana University in 2010, and

previously with a BA in linguistics and translation from Al-Azhar University in Egypt in 1998. Emad’s

main interests include Arabic Corpus and Computational Linguistics, Cultural Analytics, and Islamic

Studies.

14:00-15:30: SESSION 6 - GLOBAL MUSLIM REFORM (MSI 02.08)

Jakob Krais, (Freie Universität Berlin - Germany): Beyond Flirting with Fascism: Writing the History of

Muslim Reform at the Global Moment of Youth Movements

The interwar years witnessed the emergence of new youth movements, sports clubs, educational

initiatives, and charitable associations across the Arab world. One major research focus regarding

Middle Eastern youth movements in this period has been their borrowings from European Fascism.

This perspective usually concentrates on the paramilitary aspects of radically nationalist groups and

the question of their aesthetic and ideological proximity to fascism. Here, bodily practices and imagery

play crucial roles, whereas the study of Muslim reform during the interwar period remains often

limited to an intellectual history approach, as far major thinkers are concerned. But Muslim reformist

movements were also very active in establishing their own boy scout troops and sports clubs, in

addition to private schools and charities. These youth movements were inspired not so much by radical

political groups, but rather by the organizations of Christian missionary societies.

The paper aims to develop a framework for the study of Islamic reformist youth movements at a

historical moment, when notions and practices of life reform and healthy communities, the

organization of modern leisure and sports, and new pedagogies were mushrooming on a global scale.

It adopts a perspective that perceives them, first of all, as movements in their own right, not as mere

affiliates of political parties. Islamic groups were in close contact with Western influences, but they

also heavily influenced each other. The paper examines the ways activists and intellectuals developed

ideas about a reinvigorated faith which, by way of modern education, discipline, physical activity, and

a “return” to nature, was supposed to overcome Muslims’ perceived weakness. Based on examples

from Algeria, Egypt, and Lebanon, the contribution will try to situate the “muscular Islam” of reformist

youth clubs in the transnational history of Islamic activism at the global moment of youth movements

beyond the monocausa explanation of fascist influences.

Jakob Krais is currently a researcher at the Department of Islamic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He

has been a fellow with the special program “Islam, the Modern Nation-State and Transnational

Movements” at the Gerda Henkel Foundation with a project on sports and modernity in colonial

Algeria. He obtained his PhD in Islamic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 2014 with a

dissertation on historiography and nation-building in Qaddafi’s Libya. He published on “motor racing

in French Algeria and Italian Libya” and on “youth movements and generational conflicts in late

colonial Algeria.”

A.M. Lyklema (Utrecht University – The Netherlands): The Call to God (al-daʿwa ilā Allāh) in the interwar world

This paper sets out to examine the historical background of what anthropologists today refer to as the daʿwa or

piety movement. While this daʿwa-movement is mostly associated with the “Islamic revival” of the 1960s and

1970s, Rashīd Riḍā’s pre-war dār al-daʿwa wa-l-irshād (1912-1914) has been sometimes identified as an early

predecessor. This paper highlights the daʿwa associations, congresses, institutions and, last but not least, the duʿa

themselves that laid much of the groundwork in the interwar years for the global institutionalisation of daʿwa after

the Second World War. By comparing early monographs on daʿwa, we trace how of the concept of “daʿwa” was

appropriated by a wide range of actors as a new method for religious activism in the twentieth century. Activities

ranging from public lectures, the publication of pamphlets, books and journals, the establishment of daʿwa

associations, to the establishment of a section (qism) for “al-waʿẓ wa-l-irshād” within al-Azhar in 1918 by ʿAlī Maḥfūẓ

(d. 1942), served as precursors to the development of “daʿwa” as a new science ( iʿlm al-daʿwa) and institutionalised

discourse in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the final section of the paper, a reexamination of the 1931

General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem, where Rashīd Riḍā was criticized for his “clear tendency towards Wahhābi

religious practice”, offers an opportunity to examine the politics of daʿwa in the interwar world. If, from 1925

onwards, Rashīd Riḍā and his disciples played a crucial role in the alleged “rehabilitation of the Wahhabis”, his

modern conception of daʿwa did not align with Wahhābi sentiments on this subject which had been shaped by the

eighteenth-century daʿwa of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb. These tensions would continue to afflict post-war

efforts to organise daʿwa, despite the universal agreement on the necessity of doing daʿwa.

Melle Lyklema is a PhD-candidate at the University of Utrecht, Department of History, History of

International Relations. His PhD research, “The Call to God: Wahhābi daʿwa and its enemies”,

examines and contextualises the emergence and subsequent development of the Wahhābi “call to

God”. As part of his research, he developed a project for Arabic text mining. In December 2018 he also

co-organised an international conference, “Whither Islamicate Digital Humanities”, held in

Amsterdam.

Serafettin Pektas (Leuven - Belgium): An Unusual Muslim at Interwar Period: Said Nursi

The end of WWI sealed triumph of European colonialism in the Muslim lands whereas the end of the

WWII paved the way for decolonization followed by post-colonial nation-states. The time in between

was the incubation period of ideas that would set the terms of future debate in modern Islamic thought

and activism.

This paper provides an evaluation of this critical period through the life and writings of Said Nursi

(1876-1960), the late Ottoman scholar, activist and the initiator of the Nur Movement. Nursi lived in a

remarkably transitional period of Ottoman and Turkish modernization. He personally witnessed the

collapse of the last Muslim empire and caliphate and its replacement by the republican, nationalist

and secularist Turkey. Moreover, he suffered under warfare, survived war captivity, many years of

trials and imprisonments, was exiled and had to live in strict surveillance. Amid this hardship, Nursi

was yet able to develop a peculiar career whereby he has emerged not only as a renowned scholar,

but also an opinion and spiritual leader of an influential “faith movement”. The interwar era

corresponds to his self-designated New Said period in which the bulk of his voluminous Epistles of Light

was written. It was New Said who denounced his former political activism and instead devoted himself

to maintain the integrity of Islamic faith in the wake scientific and political challenges, who prioritized

existential interpretation of faith and adopted a civil and peaceful opposition.

This paper, first, briefly analyzes the transformation of Old Said to New Said. It secondly explores how

New Said responded to key challenges of the interwar period: the Muslims’ defeat at the WWI; the

abolishment of the caliphate, the rise of Wahhabism in Hijaz with a puritanist agenda, the huge

destruction of the WWII, and his vision of future Muslim-Christian dialogue. In the light of his

responses, the paper thirdly tries to demonstrate that Nursi’s ideas developed in this period

exemplifies his attempt to develop an alternative way to three trends which would later shape the

debate in modern Islamic thought and action.

Serafettin Pektas is an interdisciplinary researcher and holds a PhD degree in Islamic Studies from KU

Leuven, Belgium. He received his MA degree in Sociology from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He was

awarded a research grant by the pontifical Nostra Aetate Foundation which enabled him to conduct

research in Rome for two years on interfaith dialogue and comparative theology at the Pontifical

Gregorian University. Between 2008 and 2016, he has been, both professionally and voluntarily,

involved in various interfaith and intercultural initiatives in Brussels. He was also a postdoc fellow at

the Faculty of Theology at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in 2017. His research interests

include Islamic extremism, comparative theology, contemporary Muslim thought and interfaith

engagement.

16:00-17:30 SESSION 7 - “EUROPEAN” AND MUSLIM: EASTERN EUROPE (MSI 02.08)

Agata S. Nalborczyk (University of Warsaw - Poland): Polish Muslim Tatars on Global Islam

issues 1918-1939. Articles in Interwar Polish Tatar Periodicals

In the period of 1918-1939, the only Muslims in Poland were Polish-Lithuanian Tatars. Their ancestors

came to the lands of the historic Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Most of them gained the status of nobility. In the sixteenth century they lost their native language and

began to speak Polish. In 1795 the lands inhabited by Tatars were incorporated into the Russian Empire

and Polish Muslims fell under Russian authority.

When Poland regained independence after World War I in 1918, the population of Polish-Lithuanian

Tatars amounted to about 5,500. In the independent Polish state they were able to conduct free

organizational and cultural activities and to do it in Polish language. In 1926, Polish Tatars established

a cultural association – the Union of Culture and Education of Tatars in the Republic of Poland (Pol.

Związek Kulturalno-Oświatowy Tatarów Polskich Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej). The association started to

publish its own magazines – in 1932 the academic “Tatar Yearbook” (Pol. “Rocznik Tatarski” – 3 issues

until 1939) and in 1934 the monthly “Tatar Life” (Pol. “Życie Tatarskie” – 69 issues until 1939), more

popularizing in character. Both periodicals published articles concerning the functioning of Islam

outside Poland – Tatars travelling to Muslim countries (e.g. to Egypt, Palestine, Algeria) described their

journeys and others commented on current political events in the Muslim world (e.g. Arab nationalism,

Arab struggle for independence, situation of Islam in the USSR, independence of Crimea). Among the

authors were prominent figures such as mufti Jakub Szynkiewicz, imam Ali Woronowicz, Leon Najman-

Mirza Kryczyński but also less prominent and less known authors such as Stefan Bazarewski, Mustafa

Aleksandrowicz or Ali Murza-Murzicz.

The paper will present main religious, political and social issues related to the Muslim world discussed

and commented on in these periodicals. With this presentation, the author will try to show how the

Tatars perceived themselves on the one hand as members of the global umma of this period, and on

the other hand as European Muslims, commenting on the Muslim world from outside.

Agata S. Nalborczyk is associate professor and head of the Department for European Islam Studies,

Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Warsaw. She holds an MA in Iranian Studies, and in Arabic

and Islamic Studies (University of Warsaw, Damascus University and Saarland University), Ph.D. in

Arabic Studies, habilitated Dr. in Religious Studies – Islamic Studies. Her research focuses on Islam in

Europe (esp. Poland, Central and Eastern Europe), legal status and history of European Muslim

minorities, Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, gender issues in Islam, Christian-Muslim relations, the image of

Islam and Muslims in Europe, Arabic sociolinguistics. He a member of many boards committees

including, among others, the Editorial Board of the series Annotated Legal Documents on Islam in

Europe (Leiden: Brill), Sociology of Religion (Oxford University Press, and the Association for the

Sociology of Religion and of the International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe

Association (ISORECEA).

Galina M. Yemelianova (Centre for Eurasian Perspectives, UK): Eurasian Muslims in the Interwar

Period: A Communist-Islamic Synthesis?

The paper is concerned with Islam and Muslims in Eurasia. It begins by examining the Bolsheviks’

approach towards Muslims of the Russian Empire which confronted the Muslim Ottoman Empire at

the outset of the First World War in 1914. It analyses the theological and political essence of ‘Muslim

communism’ and its role in securing considerable support for the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917

by various Muslim peoples of the former Russian Empire. It then proceeds to explore the Islamic

component of the Stalinist nationalities policy which sought to dissolve Islamic beliefs and practices

within various national cultures, to create an apolitical ‘Soviet Islam’ and to forge new Sovietised

Muslim nations of Tatars and Bashkirs in the Volga-Urals, of Daghestanis, Chechen-Ingush, Kabardino-

Balkars, Karachaevo-Cherkess and Adyghey in the North Caucasus, of Azerbaijanis in the South

Caucasus and of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Turkmen in Central Asia. The paper analyses the

impact of the Second World War, which turned into the USSR-wide Great Patriotic War (1941-5), on

the comprehensive socio-economic and political integration of various Muslim peoples within the

Soviet system and their further distancing from their co-ethnic and co-religious brethren abroad. It

examines the activities of the four regional Soviet muftiates - in Ufa (Baskhortostan), Buynaksk

(Daghestan), Baku (Azerbaijan) and Tashkent Uzbekistan) - which were established in 1944. It pays

special attention to the role of Soviet muftis in adapting Islam to Soviet political realities while retaining

a considerable degree of autonomy from the Soviet state. The paper argues that the interwar period

had transformative and lasting implications on state-Muslims relations across post-Soviet Muslim

Eurasia. Its legacy continues to define state-Muslim relations in present-day Soviet Central Asia, the

Muslim Caucasus and the Volga-Urals.

Galina M.Yemelianova holds a PhD in the History of the Middle East (IAAS, MGU, 1985). For over thirty

years she has researched and taught on various aspects of Middle Eastern and Eurasian history and

contemporary Muslim politics. Between 1996 and 2017 she was Associate Professor in Eurasian Studies

at the University of Birmingham (UK) and since 2018 she has headed the internet-based inter-

disciplinary Centre for Eurasian Perspectives (UK). Among her books are Yemen during the Period of

the First Ottoman Conquest, 1538-1635 (Nauka, 1988), Russia and Islam: A Historical Survey (Palgrave,

2002), Islam in post-Soviet Russia: Private and Public Faces (Routledge, 2003), Radical Islam in the

former Soviet Union (Routledge, 2010), Many Faces of the Caucasus (Routledge, 2014), Muslims of

Central Asia: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), She is co-editor of Caucasus Survey,

a member of the National Advisory Board of Europe-Asia Studies (Routledge) and a member of the

Editorial Board of Oriens (Nauka, Moscow).

H. Esra Almas (Istanbul Şehir University – Turkey & Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies, The

University of Pennsylvania): The Life and Letters of Ayaz Ishaki: A Portrait of a Muslim

Cosmopolitan at the Ends of Europe and Beyond

The concurrent dismemberment of the Russian and the Ottoman Empires at the end of World War

One initiated major flux in the territories over which these centurial powers stretched. For many

Muslim subjects of the Russian Empire, or the self-designated Turkish-Tatars, the 1917 Revolution

initiated a worldwide diaspora, with destinations ranging from Japan to the U.S, Poland and Turkey.

This relatively untold refugee crisis, spearheaded by a group of Muslim cosmopolitans also meant an

intellectual search for a locus of cultural identity. The life and the career of the Tatar-Turkish man of

letters, activist, and ideologue Ayaz Ishaki (1878-1954) showcase the scope and range of this particular

diaspora. A critic of Russian domination and an advocate of Islamic reformism at odds with both the

Tsarist regime and the Bolsheviks, Ishaki spent most of his life exiled from his native Kazan. Following

the 1917 Revolution, he crisscrossed Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Poland, France and Turkey to

network and orientate the diaspora around an idiosyncratic blend of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism as

means of cultural survival and prospect of a new homeland. Ishaki’s international political activities,

mostly based in Warsaw, Berlin and Istanbul, ranged from participation to Paris Peace Talks in 1920-

21 to joining the Muslim Congress in Jerusalem in 1931, and organizing the 1st Far East Congress of the

Idil-Ural Cultural Organization in Mukden. Ishaki’s major output was literary, ranging from editing Milli

Yol and Milli Bayrak, Panturkist journals based respectively in Berlin (1928-1939) and in Mukden (1935-

1945), to publishing plays and novels on Tatars, all aiming to promote a common culture and a common

idea of home.

The paper will examine how Ishaki’s trajectories showcase the workings of an international group of

Muslim émigrés in Europe and in East Asia, an unlikely group of cosmopolitans, during the interwar

years. Tracing Ishaki’s cultural journeys, and through him this forgotten refugee crisis of interwar years

bring to foreground the silenced voices, the hidden trajectories and traditions beneath the patina of

unities that mark early twentieth-century politics.

H. Esra Almas is an Assistant Professor in Translation Studies at İstanbul Şehir University, Istanbul.

Almas completed PhD on Istanbul’s literary cityscape in Orhan Pamuk’s work at the Amsterdam School

for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, where she also taught in the department of Literary

Studies. She has published extensively on Orhan Pamuk’s work and on modern Turkish literature. She

worked as a translator, moderator and organizer for PEN International, Amsterdam University Cities

Project, and for the Netherlands Institute in Turkey, where she is a research affiliate. Her research

interests include memory, diaspora, exile narratives, auto/biography, modern Turkish literature, urban

imaginary, and Sufism. In the 2018-2019 Academic year, Almas is a Research Fellow at the Katz Center

of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

FRIDAY 29 MARCH 2019

10:00-11:00: SESSION 8 – (CONTINUED )“EUROPEAN” AND MUSLIM: EASTERN EUROPE (KADOC: Vlamingstraat

39, 3000 Leuven)

Dženita Karić (Oriental Institute in Sarajevo): Transformations of Discourse on Hajj in the interwar

Yugoslavia

This paper will look into the transformation of ideas on Hajj in the modern context. With tumultuous

turn of the 20th century, Bosnian Muslim intellectuals started realizing the need to engage in debates

concerning religion in general and Islam in particular. The rise of these debates is related to

interconnected layers of Orientalism that had pervaded the public discourse since the mid-19th

century, including both Western and Serb/Croat Orientalist discourse. However, following increasing

contacts with Egyptian reformists and intensive translating activity, Bosnian Muslim ‘ulama and

intellectuals began participating in the public discourse on Islam that went beyond simply apologetic.

Comparable to trends in other intellectual traditions, Islam as religion was reified, and so were its

constitutive rituals, including Hajj. This meant that Hajj underwent a significant change in

conceptualization, from critical religious practice that distinguished a pious and capable believer to a

political activity with wider social consequences. This shift, however, did not imply eradication of Hajj

as a foremost religious duty. To the contrary, it implied the urgency imposed on individual members

of the society (widely conceived as the ummah) to combine piety with activism.

Bosnia did not stay isolated from these trends in global Islam. Situated in the interwar Bosnia, this

paper will look at writings of Bosnian ‘ulama and intellectuals. The writings include travelogues,

journalistic reportages, as well as polemical pieces which Bosnian Muslim intellectuals led on the pages

of burgeoning press. It can be argued that the intention of public exposition of new conceptions of Hajj

was at least threefold: it was intended to educate the readership, dispel misconceptions on the

pilgrimage and the way it is performed under the auspices of the newly formed Saudi Kingdom, and

strongly indicate a connection of Bosnian ‘ulama and scholars with a wider network of scholars and

public figures from other Muslim societies. In this regard, a special attention will be given to the way

Hajj was conceived in relation to the transnational network of Muslim intellectuals, and the manner in

which Bosnian intellectuals transposed terminology of socio-religious unification and political

consciousness onto Hajj imaginary. And finally, the paper will address what happens with new

reformulations of the idea of Hajj in the local contexts, beyond the possibility of political and social

unification.

Dženita Karić is a research associate at the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo. She obtained her PhD on

Bosnian Hajj literature at SOAS in 2018. Her research interests include intellectual history of the

Ottoman Empire, religious transformations at the end of the 19th century and women and gender in

the Eastern Mediterranean. Dzenita Karic has contributed articles to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam

and Women, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, as well as to edited volumes on Islam in Europe

(University of Cambridge, Center of Islamic Studies, 2015) and Pilgrimage in Europe (Routledge, 2017).

Emily Greble (Vanderbilt University - USA): From Minority Protections to Islamic Revivalism: The Case of

Yugoslavia

In 1921, under pressure from Muslim leaders, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia)

enshrined a state-sponsored Shari’a judiciary in its first constitution. Throughout the state’s short life,

Muslims were legally required to abide by Shari’a law in their socio-religious and family matters. In

theorizing this provision, which combined new languages of minority protections with imperial

discourses of differentiated rights and confessional protections, Yugoslavia’s Muslims became

understood differently from other minorities in the Wilsonian moment: instead of operating as a

linguistic, national, cultural, or even religious minority, Muslims were formulated as a distinct

European legal minority. This would have profound consequences on the ways that Muslims would

respond to the secularizing, modernizing, liberalizing Yugoslav state. Because minorities won rights

based on their collective goals, Yugoslavia’s Muslim leaders felt pressure to create a centralized legal

framework with standardized laws and practices. This was incredibly difficult. Islamic law was not

positive law, and the new country had been formed from many different regions with discrete Islamic

religious, cultural, and legal structures. Within the state’s upper echelon of Islamic muftis, qadis, and

Islamic scholars, different legal schools of reformist and conservative thinkers vehemently disagreed

about schooling, law, dress, gender norms, and the relationship between Islam and politics. By the

1930s, an Islamic legal revivalist movement, inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, took root

in Yugoslavia. The movement sought to impose a narrower interpretation of Islamic law on Yugoslavia’s

Muslims and use the state’s Shari'a judiciary to limit who could participate in the Muslim minority

community. Drawing from a range of sources from archives in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro,

and Macedonia, this paper explores the evolution of this mass movement, calling attention to the ways

that it reflected global discourses of both minority rights and legal revivalism.

Emily Greble is Associate Professor of History and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University. She

is the author of Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Cornell

University Press, 2011), which has been translated into Turkish, Italian, and is forthcoming in

Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and is currently completing a monograph, entitled, Europe’s First Muslim

Citizens: Law, Society, and State-building in post-Ottoman Europe (1878-1941). Greble’s research has

been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, IREX, and ACLS.

11:30-13:00: SESSION 9 - CULTURAL TIES IN EUROPE AND IDENTITY (MSI 01.23)

Hussam R. Ahmed (University of Cambridge - UK): Egyptian Cultural Expansionism in Europe

and the Mediterranean (1936-1952)

Following the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1936, which gave Egypt more control over its

foreign policy, successive Egyptian governments started to formulate and pursue an active Egyptian

cultural diplomacy that sought to position Egypt as the guardian of Arabic and Islamic Studies, not

only in the Arab World, but also in Europe. As a result, Egypt created institutes and university chairs

for Arabic and Islamic Studies in London, Madrid, Nice, Athens, and even came to an open conflict

with the French authorities over the creation of one such institute in French-controlled North Africa.

Using these cultural institutes, Egypt tried to fund and support research in various topics pertaining to

the history and literature of the Arab-Islamic world, create libraries, send Egyptian professors to give

lectures, copy old manuscripts and send them back to Cairo, as well as encourage scientific cooperation

and exchange between research centers in Egypt and Europe. While the historiography has explored

the role of Egypt’s educational missions in the Arab Mashriq, this paper draws on primary sources from

the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaiq) and the Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign

Affairs (AMAE) in order to tell the story of Egypt’s growing interest in expanding its cultural influence

in Europe and French-controlled North Africa before Nasser came to power.

I will show that for Egyptian negotiators at the time, like the renowned intellectual and then minister

of Public Instruction Taha Hussein (1889-1973), downplaying the political implications of building these

institutes while promoting their “cultural” nature was a supremely political strategy that became the

cornerstone of negotiations with European governments, such as the French and Spanish

governments. Such a negotiating strategy ensured that European governments studied and responded

to the Egyptian projects in a very serious way and did not dismiss them offhandedly. The paper also

explores the reaction of these European governments, which feared the impact of growing cultural

ties between Egypt and Muslims not only in Europe but also in the colonies and protectorates under

European control.

Hussam R. Ahmed is a social and cultural historian of the modern Middle East. He is currently a

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of

Cambridge. In 2017-218 he has been a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “Muslims in interwar

Europe”. He holds a PhD from McGill University.

Yehia Mohamed Mahmoud Ahmed (UAE University – United Arab Emirates): Egyptian Students

in Britain in the interwar period

This paper explores the transcultural consequences of the visit and stay of Egyptian students in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Egyptian scientific missions to Europe started in the first decades of the 19th century when Egyptian students were located in a boarding school in Paris for the first time. The mission was led Sheikh Rifa’a al-Tahtawi who had been authorized to be an Imam performing Islamic rituals and giving spiritual guidance. The students returned after the end of their mission to take tasks identified by Muhammad Ali Pasha according to his vision. The situation differed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the militant Muslim scholar Sheikh ‘Ulaysh (1802-1882) prohibited travel to Europe (as the lands of the Christians), in a religious fatwa by which he banned Muslims to wear European clothes and learning western sciences.

When King Fouad took the throne of Egypt, educational missions were dispatched to Europe that allowed Egyptian students to study medicine and engineering in the first place. The new delegation of students ignored the previous fatwas by such religious scholars as the late Sheikh Ulaysh. In Britain Egyptian students began to easily mingle with the British society. Drawing on the official records about this group of pioneers, that are preserved since 1935, the study will see how such Egyptian students had the opportunity to influence the Egyptian society in the post WWII-period when six of them became ministers in the aftermath of the 1952 Revolution. For example, Isma’il al-Qabbani took over the Ministry of Education expanding free education and made religious education a success. After the army officers took over the ministry in 1950s, the pioneers returned to their universities to carry out their activities away from power.

Yehia Mohamed Ahmed is professor in History/Archeology department at College of

Humanities and Social Sciences of UAE University. He got His BA in History and his MA degree

in Modern History from Cairo University. He got his PHD in Modern history on 1996 from

Helwan University Cairo - Egypt. He has worked as Instructor for modern history from 1990 to

1996 in the college of education Tanta University. He extensively published on modern social

economic history of the Middle East.

Giovanna Lelli (KU Leuven – Belgium): The question of cultural identity in Ṭaha Ḥusayn’s On

Pre-Islamic Poetry (1926) and The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938)

We shall expound the most relevant features that Ṭaha Ḥusayn attributed to cultural identity in his

books On Pre-Islamic Poetry (1926) and The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938). From On Pre-Islamic

Poetry emerges a secular conception of Arab identity, shaped by a common literary and religious

textual heritage. Ṭaha Ḥusayn analyzes this heritage by a modern philological and philosophical

method. Apparently, he does not consider modernity as an apanage of the Europeans, but as a reserve

of universal values for the use of all peoples. This book, though unique, fits in the cultural vitality of

Egypt and Europe in the interwar period. In The Future of Culture in Egypt Ṭaha Ḥusayn does not

mention Arab culture, but focuses on Egyptian culture, which he cuts away from the common Arab-

Persian-Turkish historical context of classical Islam. Instead, he argues that Egypt has belonged to the

European culture since the time of the Pharaohs. This book, published on the eve of the 2nd world war,

was influenced by contemporary nationalist ideologies in Europe. Relying upon comparisons with later

Arab intellectuals of the 20th-21st centuries, the paper argues that Ṭaha Ḥusayn’s shift is symptomatic

of some major impasses of the Arab Nahḍa (Renaissance).

Giovanna Lelli is since 2017 a visiting professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of

Leuven (KUL), where she is teaching Arabic and Iranian Studies. She studied Arabic and Persian

Languages and Civilisations at the Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in

Paris and she obtained her Ph.D. in Iranian Studies at the University of Naples - l'Orientale in 2000 by

writing a thesis on classical Persian literature. She has been a visiting professor of modern and classical

Arabic at the University of Gent (2009-2017). Her research interests include, among others, classical

Arab-Islamic thought, literary theory, aesthetics, philosophy and science and relationship between the

classical heritage and modernity in the Arab-Islamic and the Western world.