Imperial Paradoxes: A Caliphate for Subaltern Muslims

Author(s): Cemil Aydin

Source: ReOrient , Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 2016), pp. 171-191
Published by: Pluto Journals
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/reorient.1.2.0171

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 IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR
SUBALTERN MUSLIMS
Cemil Aydin

Abstract: This article deals with the imperial dilemmas of the globalized racial Muslim
identity in the 1870s and the 1880s. While Pan-Islamic public opinion across multiple
European empires singled out the Ottoman Caliphate as the voice and representative of
the global Muslim community, the Ottoman Caliph-Sultan was the monarch of millions
of Christian citizens of the Ottoman Empire. The article discusses the complex imperial
politics of the Ottoman Caliphate from the perspectives of Ottoman and British govern-
ments, as well as from the perspective of Indian Muslim publics. It argues that the global-
ization of the ideas of Caliphate and Muslim solidarity in the late nineteenth century need
to be understood in the context of the racialization of Muslims via their religion.

Keywords: Pan-Islamism, race, geopolitics, Caliphate, nineteenth-century globalization,

imperial world order

A ten-month long war between the Ottoman and Russian empires in 1877-1878 is
often overlooked in modern world history. Yet, it was a war with the largest num-
ber of causalities during the 40 years between the American Civil War and Russo-
Japanese War of 1905. The war occurred in the context of ostensibly the only
major wave of decolonization between the Atlantic Revolutions and the end of
World War I (WWI), and resulted in the independence of Romania, Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Montenegro as Christian majority kingdoms. More importantly, the
process leading to the war witnessed a major outbreak of Christian minority rights
discourses and Christian humanitarianism in Europe in the name of protecting
Christians in the Ottoman Empire. A discourse of Pan-Christian solidarity associ-
ated with either Russian Pan-Slavic ideals or the name of British politician William
Gladstone aimed to liberate “oppressed Christian populations” from “despotic”
and “tyrannical” Ottoman Muslim rulers. At the same time, the war resulted in the
mass emigration of more than a million Muslims from the Balkans and Caucasia
to Ottoman-controlled territories, prompting a narrative of victimization of the
Muslim ummah by Crusading Christian forces, accompanied by the birth of
Muslim humanitarianism associated with Red Crescent Association.

Cemil Aydin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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172 REORIENT

Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878 presents a puzzle for the history of the Pan-
Islamic thought, modern Muslim identity, and the Ottoman Empire’s great power
status. Why was it that the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II became universally
recognized as a legitimate Caliph among the Muslim subjects of the European
empires after the 1880s, despite the trauma of military defeat in the beginning of
his reign in 1878? How can we explain the fact that an empire can lose a major
battle and large territories, but its monarch’s popularity would increase outside of
his imperial domains? Initially, the shock of the Ottoman defeat was reflected in
the emergence of failure narratives for both the Ottoman Empire and the broader
imagined Muslim ummah. Wilfred Blunt noted that the moment was rife for a
European monarch to convert to Islam and fulfill the dream of Napoleon, uniting
Muslim lands from China to Europe under European leadership. There was some
British discussion of creating a new Caliphate in Mecca, with Sherif Hussein of
Mecca as the new Caliph (not to be confused with his grandson carrying the same
name and actually collaborating with the British; Kara 2002: 65-7). Some French
officers discussed the idea of a Caliphate led by Algerian leader Abdulkader (their
former enemy living in Damascus), if the Ottoman dynasty lost control of its
empire and its protection of Muslim holy cities. How was it that the Ottoman
Sultan Abdulhamid could not only emerge from this crisis but also create an image
of the global leader and spiritual sovereign of the imagined Muslim world? How
can we explain the paradox of the Ottoman Caliphate that it became globalized in
the 1880s just when the Ottoman Empire seemed militarily most vulnerable, being
called the sick man of Europe? The answer to these questions can help us better
understand the relationship among the modern notions of race, empire, and the
Caliphate.

A Post-Chinggis Khan Ummah: Politically Divided Muslim

Commonwealth

Before the nineteenth century, Muslims were never politically united. The idea of
a menacing Muslim world expanding upon Christendom is a modern Islamophobic
invention, rather than historical reality. Especially after the experience of the
Mongolian Empire in the thirteenth century, and later synthesis of Mongolian
imperial tradition with Muslim legal and political culture, major Muslim dynasties
embraced multiple traditions of political legitimacy. Thus, the Ottoman Sultans in
the sixteenth century utilized titles such as Khan, Shah, and even Caesar to indi-
cate their reign and sovereignty over diverse populations and large lands. This did
not mean that there was no usage of the title Caliph, or the theory of Caliphate was
removed from the classical texts of Muslim politics. The Ottoman political elite
did use the word “Caliph” in different contexts with different meanings. Sometimes,

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 173

this title was used in mystical ways which were radically different from the
Abbasid Sultans in the ninth century (Yılmaz, 2016). In some occasions, it was
used to create alliances in the Indian Ocean zone against Portuguese forces during
the sixteenth century. Muslim societies were not stagnant, and their political prac-
tices changed over time. We have to be aware of the reinterpretations of the same
political terms such as Caliphate in different geographic and chronological con-
texts (Balabanlılar 2012; Moin 2012; Arjomand 2013).
Theory of the Caliphate evolved over centuries, but there was never a full affin-
ity between theory and the reality of multiple and competing Caliphs and sultans
across the Islamicate societies, especially after the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in
1258. Even before the Mongol invasion of Baghdad, there were multiple claims to
be the legitimate Caliph, shattering the vision of a single Caliph ruling over a sin-
gle ummah, and some of the scholars such as Ghazali and Mawardi partly recog-
nized this fact. As long as a just ruler protected the security of his subjects and
allowed the implementation of Muslim law, the Caliphate and sultanate theory did
not mind how a Sultan came to power. Thus, Mongols who destroyed the Caliphate
could be accepted as just Muslim rulers after their conversion. The Mamluk
Sultanate in Egypt protected a grandchild of the last Abbasid Caliph killed by
Mongols in Baghdad as a legitimate Caliph in Cairo, and for some time they
claimed to be the most prestigious Muslim rulers because of their rule of Mecca
and Madina. Yet this did not prevent the Ottomans, Tunisian Hafsids, or Timurid
Dynasty in South Asia to comfortably use the Caliph titles in different geogra-
phies. When the Ottoman Empire conquered Mamluk Egypt in 1517, they brought
the last Abbasid Caliph to Istanbul with them. Somehow that line of Abbasid
Caliphs faded away in importance, and the Ottoman Sultans began to use the
Caliphate title concurrent with many other titles they assumed such as Caesar,
Shah, and Khan.
During the eighteenth century, when there was an increase in world travel and
trade in what scholars call “an era of proto-globalization,” we see disparate yet
loosely connected trends of religious reform and renewal in various Muslim socie-
ties ruled by different empires or kingdoms. Although there was an increased den-
sity of networks, these did not result in a global vision of ummah or a narrative of
single-world civilization and religion. Muslims were ruled by empires, and the late
eighteenth-century Muslim rulers were not interested in any faith or civilization-
based strategy of imperial foreign policy.
Observing the Russian expansion over Muslim-majority Persian territories in
Caucasia, for example, the Ottoman Empire did not feel the need to support
Muslim dynasty rule in the neighboring empire (Aksan 2007). When the British
East India Company was at war with the Muslim sultanates, it could rely on the
support of other Muslim-dynasty-ruled kingdoms (Özcan 1991; Aksan 1993;

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174 REORIENT

Brittlebank 1997; Özcan 2007). There have always been occasional references to
a general Muslim, or Sunni solidarity, especially under circumstances in which a
basic Muslim sense of religious freedom was perceived as being threatened. Thus,
Indian Muslim scholars began to refer to the Sultan of Ottoman Empire in the late
eighteenth century as a potential Muslim protector of their rights. Similarly, there
were links between some of the Central Asian Muslim khanates and the Ottoman
Sultanate, referring to the ideals of Muslim solidarity (Karpat 2001: 48-67). Yet
these examples of discourses on Muslim cooperation against a common, mostly
Christian, imperial enemy in the mid-eighteenth century are much rarer compared
with the late nineteenth-century discourses of Pan-Islamic solidarity, and not nec-
essarily higher compared with those of the sixteenth century.
In the mid-eighteenth century, Muslim networks of culture, education, trade,
and human mobility continued to be active, without the need for protection by one
single Muslim empire or an alliance of various Muslim polities. This politically
unintegrated Muslim cultural order facilitated the intrusion and expansion of
European maritime and land empires in different Muslim-majority areas, such as
Southeast Asia (Malacca and Java), South Asia (Bengal), Crimea, Caucasia, and
East Africa. Eighteenth-century European expansion in Muslim societies, how-
ever, did not lead to a global Muslim Pan-Islamic response, or raise any need for
a Caliphal representative of Muslim identity and demands.
Upon the Russian annexation of the Muslim Crimean Khanate in the 1770s,
Muslim jurists begin to debate the religious and legal obligations of a Muslim liv-
ing under a Christian ruler (Fisher 1968). The Küçük Kaynarca Treaty of 1774
offered a diplomatic solution to the problem of Crimean Muslims living under the
rule of Christian monarchs by giving Ottoman Sultans the right to protect and
represent Crimean Muslims in religious issues in return for giving rights to the
Russian sovereigns to protect the interests of the Orthodox Christians within the
Ottoman Empire. Even then, however, this debate on Muslim practice under a
Christian ruler was not globalized and inter-connected. In fact, it was the Russian
Tzar who referred to his position as a protector of Orthodox Christians living
under the Muslim Sultan more often than the Ottoman Sultan who used his Caliph
title to intervene in the affairs of Russian Muslims. In some sense, the emergence
of an idea of Orthodox solidarity under Russian leadership preceded the emer-
gence of the idea of the Muslim solidarity, as this notion of Pan-Slavic ummah
was a tool for Russia’s imperial competition with the Ottoman Empire.
The absence of globalized Muslim discourses on Caliphate in the eighteenth
century did not mean that there were no significant networks of Muslims across
imperial domains. On the contrary, educational and Sufi networks prospered during
the era of early European maritime expansion. During the eighteenth century, for
example, Naqshbandi Sufi order extended its networks from India to Ottoman

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 175

Arabia and Anatolia, and from Central Asia to Africa. There were other Sufi orders
such as Khalwatiyya, Tijaniya, Sammaniyya, Sanusiya, and Salihiyya, spreading
both in Ottoman North Africa and in Sub-Saharan Africa ruled by different Muslim
sultans. Overlapping with these Sufi networks, and sometimes in tension with
them, there emerged puritanical renewal movements. Three scholars who led this
renewal movement, namely, Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (1702-1763, India),
Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792, Najd), and Uthman dan Fodio (1755-
1816, Nigeria), are still remembered as pioneers of modern Muslim thought. As
Ahmad Dallal argued, however, ideas of reform and renewal in the eighteenth cen-
tury put forward by Abd al-Wahhab or Uthman dan Fodio had similarities to other
attempts at renewal in previous centuries in the history of Muslim religious thought.
These movements did not exhibit any rupture with early tradition of Muslim reform
and did not concern itself with the arrival of European empires in the Indian Ocean
area and African coasts. Similar ideas of reform could have occurred in the fif-
teenth century, and their nature and impact should primarily be understood in the
regional contexts. In addition to the absence of the concern with the challenge of
European political hegemony and European ideas, eighteenth-century Muslim
notions of political and spiritual reforms showed openness and flexibility in their
regional context without the urge to formulate an essentialist global Islam.
Compared with the big “Western” question in the late nineteenth century, we do not
see any overwhelming intellectual concern about the Christian Western imperial
threat and imagination of a transnational Muslim world community in various
Muslim publics in the eighteenth century (Dallal 2010).
Even Napoleon’s unexpected invasion of Egypt in 1798 did not lead to a Pan-
Islamic response around the idea of Caliphate. Napoleon did not announce himself
in Egypt as a Christian and white monarch bringing “Western modernity” to back-
ward Muslim societies. His expedition to the Ottoman province of Egypt in 1798
exhibited several new departures and projects different from the earlier European
imperial imagination (Jabarti 2004; Cole 2007). He was the first monarch who
tried to appeal to an abstract notion of Islam and presented himself as the friend of
Muslims as well as the Ottoman Sultan, claiming to eliminate the tyranny of
Mamluk aristocracy as a basis of his legitimacy. Napoleon’s refrain from making
proclamations of cultural superiority of Europe over Egypt and his attempt to
endear himself to Muslim population illustrate a French Republican vision that
was not arrogant toward Egyptians. Napoleon could claim to be the protector of
Muslims of Egypt while being a revolutionary French general. In fact, when his
short rule faced resistance from Egyptians, officers of Napoleon tried to negotiate
his legitimacy by discussing with Muslim clerics if his conversion to Islam would
make him acceptable to Egypt’s population (Jasanoff 2006). It seems that, from
the perspective of a segment of Egyptian Muslim ulama, a Muslim Napoleon

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176 REORIENT

could be a legitimate ruler of Egypt. Given the fact that the public spheres in Paris
and Cairo were disconnected from each other, Napoleon could claim to be the
protector of Muslims in Cairo and Republicans in Paris, and would not need to
argue for the compatibility between the two. In fact, a group of several hundred
Arabs who went to France with Napoleon did not have to make a choice between
their Arab/Muslim and French identity until the moment of France’s new imperi-
alism in Algeria in the 1830s (Coller 2011).
The Ottoman Empire’s response to French invasion of Egypt was equally
imperial, without creating any discourse of a clash between Islam and the Christian
Europe. In addition to making an alliance with the British Empire against France,
the Ottoman government formed an alliance with the Russian Empire, despite the
frequent wars with Russia in the eighteenth century. There were successful joint
Ottoman-Russian naval operations against France in Ionian Islands (Sakul 2009).
When Napoleon tried to support Tipu Sultan in India against the British Empire,
the Ottoman Sultan urged Tipu to avoid war with the British. In fact, the diplo-
matic correspondence between Indian Sultanate of Mysore and the Ottoman
Empire exemplifies the complexity of eighteenth-century imperial Muslim cos-
mopolitanism. Tipu Sultan’s letters to the Ottoman Sultan, asking for his support
against the British Empire, illustrate his own synthesis of hybrid legitimacy as a
Muslim ruler, firmly grounded in a Muslim political vocabulary but equally com-
fortable with Turco-Persian imperial traditions and aware of European monarchies
and their global maritime presence (Brittlebank 1997). Tipu Sultan’s connection
with Revolutionary France against the British Empire did not mean the denial of
his Muslim legitimacy and universalism. Tipu Sultan could employ both Hindu
and French soldiers in his army, for example. In his delegations to Istanbul, Tipu
Sultan utilized various key values of the Muslim cultural commonwealth, noting
his struggle against the British infidels, which, for Tipu, did not respect the reli-
gious values and traditions of Muslim populations. Tipu Sultan was respectful of
the Ottoman Sultan, which he once called Caliph, partly because a major Muslim
emperor’s endorsement of Tipu would have empowered him against other Muslim
Sultans in South Asia, such as Nizams of Hyderabad. In his response to Tipu
Sultan, the Ottoman Sultan urged him to prefer peace over war in his diplomatic
dealings with the British East India Company. The Ottoman letters to Tipu Sultan
further emphasized that the French Republic should be considered the enemy of
Muslims, not the British Empire, because of the French violation of international
law and respect for other countries, such as French invasion of Venetian Republic
(Özcan 1991).
Within 75 years of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, however, there would emerge
a transnationally connected Muslim public opinion. But this development itself
went through a crooked line and should not be seen as a natural response

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 177

to a foreign European invasion. The 1870s constitute a global turning point in

reorienting and globalizing a transnational Muslim identity that began to express
itself with reference to the imagined representative power of the Ottoman Caliphate
in Istanbul.

Recalling of an Imperial Caliphate in the 1870s

In 1873, just four years before the Russo-Ottoman war, Sultan of Aceh in Southeast
Asia, Mahmud Syah, sent a delegation to Sultan Abdulaziz in Istanbul, requesting
Ottoman Empire’s protection and military aid against the Dutch military attacks.
Aceh’s diplomatic delegation, led by Aceh’s Hadrami Arab emissary Sayyid
Habib Abdurrahman al-Zahir, arrived at Istanbul on April 27. Aceh’s demand for
Ottoman diplomatic protection against the Dutch attacks, just on the eve of pro-
tracted Acehnese-Dutch War (1873–1906), relied on at least two decades of previ-
ous correspondence and exchanges between this Muslim Sultanate and the
Ottoman Empire, which was considered a member of the concert of civilized
European empires since the Crimean Wars. In the same summer of 1873, Istanbul
also hosted representatives from Muslim sultanates of Hiwa, Buhara, and Kashgar,
similarly asking for diplomatic recognition and military advice against Russian or
Chinese empires.
From May to December 1873, Aceh’s diplomatic initiative led to conversations
among Istanbul’s educated elite on the role of religious ties in inter-imperial diplo-
macy and the political role of public opinion created by print media and commu-
nication technologies. Some Ottoman newspapers began to advocate an Ottoman
mission to protect weaker Muslim states and help them uplift their level of civili-
zation. An exaggerated press account of Istanbul sending a fleet of military advi-
sors was picked up by Reuters agency, and when the news reached Southeast Asia,
it led to excited expectations (Gökay 2011).
Abdurrahman al-Zahir’s success in making a case for Ottoman protection over
Aceh led to reactions from Dutch, Russian, and other European embassies and gov-
ernments. What would happen if the Ottoman Sultan starts offering protection to
small Muslim sultanates in Asia based on his status as the Caliph? Would not this
Ottoman move damage Istanbul’s relationship with its European imperial partners?
The Ottoman authorities had to emphasize that their earlier ties and future ones
with Aceh had to be limited to religious domain and not be political. But even this
statement implied a set of contradictions. What did it mean for a Sultan who ruled
over millions of Christians to have religious ties with a Sultanate far away from his
territorial domains? Why were Muslims of Southeast Asia making an unprece-
dented move to request the support from Ottoman Muslim Sultan in the name of a
notion of Muslim solidarity?

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178 REORIENT

Answers to these questions lie in the global synchronicity in the assertion and
implementation of racial identities for the existing world empires. Even though the
political map of the world was determined by the primacy of empires from 1815
to 1875, a new geopolitical conceptualization dividing the world into racial and
religious blocks became important by the 1870s. In 1875, a Protestant black intel-
lectual in West Africa, Edward Blyden, wrote a pamphlet titled “Mohammedanism
and the Negro Race” (Blyden 1875) discussing the future destiny of Muslims and
blacks in Africa, indicating the early seeds of geopolitical and racial visions that
will soon turn into a debate on Pan-Islamism and Pan-Africanism. Blyden’s text
already indicates a conception of Mohammedan race as a term comparable to
Negro race within and beyond the British Empire.
Racialization of Muslim identity under the rule of and from the gaze of
European empires did not automatically create a vision of Pan-Islamic solidarity
and assertion of political and spiritual ties to the Ottoman Caliphs. It would have
been difficult to imagine the onset of a Pan-Islamic global public opinion when
one looks at the direction and spirit of Ottoman reforms since the 1820s. The
Ottoman reforms emphasized the universalist and inclusive nature of Sultan’s rule
over both Muslims and non-Muslims. The possibility of universalized imperial
visions became most obvious during the 1867 visit of the Ottoman Sultan
Abdulaziz to Europe. He was welcomed with utmost ceremonial respect by the
monarchs of the French, British, Austrian-Hungarian empires, and Belgian and
Prussian Kingdoms. There were even intentions about matchmaking between the
Ottoman Crown Prince Murad and a British royal princess on the part of Queen
Victoria to cement the strong ties between the two empires (Kutay 1977). There
were other Muslim monarchs visiting Europe in the long nineteenth century,
asserting an inter-imperial cooperation based on mutual respect and recognition.
In 1846, Ahmad Bey of Tunis went to Paris as the first Muslim ruler to do so;
Egypt’s Khedive Ismail made a visit in 1867, while Qajar Shahs made trips in
1873 and 1878; in 1879, Sultan of Johor Abu Bakar made a visit to England.
Both Sultan Abdulaziz and Qajar Shah Nasiruddin received membership to the
Most Noble Order of the Garter in London, confirming the presence of a world
order composed of emperors who contribute to each other’s global legitimacy by
bestowing medals and honors. In a special ceremony of initiation into the Order of
the Garter in a parish, Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz asked that he be exempted from
the rituals of wearing a wig and handing over his sword but followed the rest of the
rituals. Some of the Muslim monarchs would proudly wear medals decorated by
crosses given to them by European monarchs, without any inhibitions. In fact, the
early twentieth-century civilizational duality of “(Muslim) Crescent versus
(Christian) Cross” did not exist in popular imagination in the first half of the nine-
teenth century.

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 179

In 1869, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, one of the most influential reformist Muslim
intellectuals of the Indian subcontinent, visited London, as part of his efforts to
strengthen his commitment to a British-Indian Muslim identity (Ahmad 1960).
For Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who introduced the Ottoman Fez to his Indian Muslim
students at Anglo-Muhammadan College, an Ottoman Muslim monarch ruling
over mixed Christian-Muslim populations could be a good ally of the British
Queen ruling over equally diverse populations of Muslims, Hindus, and Christians.
A de facto Ottoman-British alliance in international affairs could mean that Indian
Muslims could be loyal to Queen Victoria while respecting the Ottoman Sultan for
protecting the Muslim holy cities in Arabia and for his title of Caliph. The Ottoman
delegation in London in 1867 likewise noted the presence of Indian Muslims loyal
to the Queen in a reception hosted by East India Company in their honor. The
Ottoman Sultan’s own ambassador in London and one of his favorite bureaucrats,
Musurus Pasha, was a Greek from Orthodox faith tradition (Şafak 2006).
This cosmopolitanism of Ottoman Empire, or Ottoman Empire’s Tunisian and
Egyptian province during the 1860s, should not be seen as pro-Western illusions
of alienated Muslim elites. There was no questioning of the Muslim credentials of
the Ottoman Sultan, Tunisian Dey, Sayyid Ahmad Khan of India, or the Egyptian
Khedive. They were not weak or non-practicing Muslims who diverged from their
faith, nor were they misled and misguided by any promises of membership to
European imperial club. There was rarely any religiously grounded Muslim cri-
tique or opposition to the self-civilizing reform policies of the Ottoman Sultan or
Egyptian Khedive. Attributing an early twentieth-century geopolitical discourse
that perceives international relations as a clash between colonizing Christian West
versus subaltern Muslim World to pre-1880s reformist Muslim elites would be an
anachronism. The period from the 1810s to the 1870s represented a now forgotten
period of imperial universalism in the political history of Muslim societies. Certain
dramatic changes that occurred from the 1880s to the 1920s and later nationalist
narratives of Muslim victimhood in the face of Christian-Western imperialism led
to amnesia about this period. Yet development in this period needs to be under-
stood in its own context, partly to revise current dominant notions of Western
expansion and Muslim response, and partly to better grasp the process that led to
later emergence of the Muslim world identity.
Thus, what is remarkable about the expansion of European empires in Muslim
societies of Africa and Asia was not rise of ethnic nationalism or Pan-Islamic or
Pan-European regionalism, though seeds of some of these ideas could be seen, but
rather the formulation of an imperial universalism culminated in ideas of “civi-
lized empire” as the new global norm. Crimean War in 1853, which involved an
alliance between the Ottoman, British, and French empires against the Russian
Empire, became a symbol of this imperial universalism. When the Indian War of

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180 REORIENT

Independence occurred in 1857, the Ottoman imperial elite did not hesitate to sup-
port the British Empire against the Muslim and Hindu rebels without considering
any notion of Pan-Islamic solidarity.
After Ottoman Istanbul, Egypt became the seat of second most powerful
Muslim dynasty, while legally tied to the Ottoman imperial system, under the
hereditary governorship of Muhammad Ali Pasha. Muhammad Ali could make
drastic reforms, combining European fiscal and military methods with examples
from Muslim and Ottoman experiences. With stronger military power, for exam-
ple, Muhammad Ali managed to expand in the South, and in 1822, he put Sudan
nominally under the rule of the Ottoman Empire (Powell 2003).
In addition to Egypt’s expansion in Sudan, another Muslim dynasty in Oman
expanded into Zanzibar in 1829, illustrating the fact that there was still no single
pattern of Western domination in the early nineteenth century. Until his death in
1856, the Omani Sultan traveled back and forth as the actual Sultan of Muscat and
Zanzibar (Nicolini 2012). Self-strengthening projects of Zanzibari Sultans or
Egyptian Khedives were in line with Tanzimat Muslim reformist vision and
included telegraph stations, public clocks, and tram system. Zanzibar established
the Sultanate Press in 1880, and later on promoted publications of a journal, thus
contributing to the connection of Zanzibari Muslim public to other Muslim publics
as well as to global public opinion (Prestholdt 2014).
Another autonomous region of the Ottoman Empire, Tunisia, showed remark-
able reform initiatives, including a constitutional contract, under the leadership of
a Circassian-born grand vizier Hayreddin Pasha (Khayr al-Dīn 1967; Brown
1974). He implemented liberal reform ideas with the strong conviction that a par-
liamentary government and modern European ways were compatible with the
Islamic tradition (Wasti 2000). Similarly, Persia under the Qajar dynasty initiated
its own reforms. The Moroccan dynasty, as well as Central Asian Khanates and
Indian princely states, was involved in various self-strengthening projects (Keddie
1991; Amanat 1997; Bennison 2004). In all of these reforms, priority was given to
centralization of power and creating wealth and prosperity for the subjects. These
rulers did not see themselves as the Muslim “victims” of European expansion but
as beneficiaries and active agents of new practices of political governance in the
nineteenth century. The results and the speed of reforms varied in each case, but
Muslim dynasties were aware of the need to revise their political systems accord-
ing to new demands of the globalizing age and mostly accordingly to refashioned
adaptations of new European practices. The Ottoman Empire was ahead of them
in terms of its reform achievements and its diplomatic prestige in world affairs,
and it was also setting an example to emulate by other existing Muslim dynasties.
Thus, the Ottoman Fez, as well as the Crescent in its flag, began to be adopted as
symbols of modernist Muslim identity in a large geography.

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 181

In short, by the early 1870s, cosmopolitan reformism of Muslim elites across

multiple empires seemed to show important achievements and became well
entrenched. Muslim political elites did not see any contradiction between their
Muslim-ness and imperial cosmopolitanism. Primary concern of various Muslim
kingdoms, empires, and emirates was still focused on self-strengthening and legit-
imacy in the eyes of fellow monarchs and diverse subjects. Internal diversity and
cosmopolitanism of each political unit were taken for granted. When the Ottoman
government reformed its legal system to abolish jizya tax on non-Muslims, for
example, Muslim public opinion did not see this as a betrayal of the Islamic legal
tradition. Muslim elites saw Ottoman Reform Edict’s declaration of Muslim,
Christian, and Jewish equal citizenship as a legitimate interpretation of Muslim
law in harmony with the changing conditions of the time and the needs of the
Ottoman Empire. There were disagreements with the content and direction of the
Tanzimat and Reform Edict by some Muslim scholars or publics. But these cri-
tiques were not made in the name of the destiny of the Muslim world, since the
polyvocality of Muslim intellectual tradition was accepted. More importantly, a
wide ranging set of Ottoman reforms that included abolishment of slavery and
jizya were implemented under the rule of a Muslim sultan, who also carried the
title of Caliphate. In the political theology of Ottoman Muslim public, the sultan
can take the initiative to reinterpret the legal system on behalf of the safety, secu-
rity, and common good of his subjects. Legal pluralism was an accepted practice
in early modern and modern imperial governance. In Tunisia, for example, reform-
ist rulers allowed recourse to diverse legal practices, ranging from embassy courts
to Jewish Talmudic law and Shariah, by their subjects depending on the merits and
parties of each case (Clancy-Smith 2010).
As a natural result of their imperial vision, the Ottoman elites were not con-
cerned about the Afghani Muslim’s war with the British Empire during the
early 1840s (Dalrymple 2012). Even for the resistance of Caucasian Muslims
against the Russian Empire, which was happening just across the Ottoman-
Russian borders, there was no direct Ottoman support for the Muslim forces.
The Ottoman public opinion would know more about the Caucasian Muslim
resistance than the Afghani war due to their networks, and upon his defeat by
Russian forces and surrender, Caucasia’s Muslim leader Shaikh Shamil was
asked to be exiled to Ottoman territories to live in holy cities in Arabia. The
followers of Shaikh Shamil also immigrated to Ottoman-controlled territories
en masse after their incorporation into the Russian Empire. This was one of the
most vivid examples of a late nineteenth-century genocide and ethnic cleans-
ing, resulting in the spread of Circassian Muslims in various parts of the
Ottoman Empire. Yet millions of Muslims continued to live under the rule of
Russian Tzars.

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182 REORIENT

Racialization Through Religion: Birth of a Global Muslim Identity

Despite the attempt of existing Muslim monarchs and dynasties to prioritize their
self-strengthening and try to be a member of a Eurocentric imperial world order,
there emerged a debate on Muslim-ness both within and across empires during the
1870s. The first major debate started in India, where Muslims became categorized
as a distinct religio-political unity, in relation to British imperial project and as a
civilization in decline. Coinciding with the imperial categorization of Muslims
and Hindus in India, there was also the beginning of a conversation on Muslim
educational decline or reform, as Muslim families were relatively less inclined to
send their children to British-run colonial education institutions. A more important
question for the British Empire and its Indian subjects was the reconciliation of the
religious, cultural, and racial identities of England and the people of India. British
colonial officers themselves asked whether “Mohammedans” could be equal and
loyal subjects of the British Empire. Muslim intellectuals debated the same ques-
tion. The association of the 1857 Rebellion by the majority of British newspapers
with Muslims led to books such as William Wilson Hunter’s (1871) The Indian
Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen? and sus-
tained a strain of colonial thought radically suspicious of Muslim loyalty. It is in
this context that Sayyid Ahmad Khan emerged as one of the most influential lead-
ers of Muslims in India, formulating a modernist Muslim identity embracing the
British imperial rule in India. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s attempts were partly about
making the British Empire a universalist empire like the Mughals by allowing the
incorporation of Muslims into the administration without any racial distinction
(Ahmad 1960: 71, 72). Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s struggle to reject racial otherization
of the Muslim subjects of the British Empire by insisting on the compatibility
between Muslim faith and loyalty to the Queen indicates a strategy of using reli-
gious arguments to defeat racial categorization and rejection, and became a theme
of Muslim modernism in the age of high imperialism.
Racialization of Muslim-ness can also be seen in British response to the seces-
sionist demands from the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire in
Southeast Europe. Despite Ottoman-British alliance, nationalisms in Southeast
Europe received the sympathy of liberal groups in England represented by William
Gladstone in the name of saving Christian populations from Muslim oppression
(Gladstone 1876). Gladstone’s anti-Muslim agitation on behalf of Orthodox
Bulgarian Christians reflected a kind of irrationality from the perspective of
British imperial identity, because there were more Muslims living under British
rule than Christians. It would have made sense for him to equally argue for the
rights of Bulgarian Muslims, for example. There was a different imperial policy
vision in England represented by Benjamin Disraeli, who was sympathetic to the

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 183

idea of the territorial sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire as long as the empire
granted liberty to its Christian subjects (Kovic 2011). Gladstone’s claim to liberate
the Christian subjects of a “Muslim empire” was occurring at the same time when
more and more Muslim societies were being subjected to the rule of European
empires with Christian rulers. More important, however, was the fact that the
staunchly anti-Muslim and Christian discourse of Gladstone, who described the
Ottoman Muslim elite as an “anti-human specimen of humanity,” reflected a
broader trend in nationalizing European public opinion and a turn toward Christian
regional identities.
Both the Bulgarian nationalist rebellion and the Ottoman-Russian Wars of the
late 1870s were followed closely by new European journalism. During this war,
there were segments of British public opinion that wanted the British imperial alli-
ance to continue with the Ottoman Empire against Russia and celebrated certain
Ottoman battle victories. There occurred an unprecedented level of mobilization
of humanitarian emotions, financial donations, and political activism among
Indian Muslims in support of the Ottoman war effort against Russia. Indian
Muslims asked for the British Empire to intervene in the war to make sure that the
Ottoman Empire was not defeated and divided. In their demands, they were mak-
ing the argument that there is a special relationship between the Muslim subjects
of the Queen and the Ottoman Caliph, and it is in the interests of the British Empire
to stop Russia and protect the Caliph’s empire. There were many British officers,
including Ambassador to Istanbul Henry Layard and India’s Viceroy Lytton, who
agreed with this Muslim demand for British intervention against Russia. In fact,
they facilitated an Ottoman mission to Afghanistan, asking Afghan forces to join
the Ottoman fight by declaring war against Russia. The Afghan King refused this
request, noting that it was the British Empire that just occupied one of his cities
(Quetta), not Russia, and that the Caliph should not trust the British (Özcan 1991).
Overall, however, the British policy toward the Ottoman Empire changed to
neutrality in the late 1870s, partly under the influence of Evangelical Christian
propaganda. It was Gladstone’s emphasis on oppressed Christians of the Muslim
Sultan, which argued that the Ottomans were not worth the alliance and should be
abandoned to Russian military punishment. But, it was during the 1877-1878
Russo-Ottoman war that financial donations of Indian Muslims, as well as their
failed pressure on British policy-making, reminded the Ottoman elite that the
Muslim subjects of the British Empire could be their allies in difficult times.
Upon the Ottoman defeat, the Muslim-ness of the Ottoman Empire almost
became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once the Ottoman Empire lost the war, and all
the Christian majority Balkan provinces of Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and
Montenegro gained independence, a Muslim-majority Ottoman Empire began to
emphasize the Muslim identity of the Ottoman Sultan as a more viable option to

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184 REORIENT

consolidate its internal solidarity and made Islam as the core national identity of
the empire, parallel to the nationalization of European empires. In the aftermath of
the Ottoman defeat in the Balkans, the ratio of Christian populations of the empire
was down to twenty percent (Weitz 2008). Thanks to the Ottoman defeat in the
war between 1877 and 1878, a Muslim-majority Ottoman Empire could now com-
fortably use Islam as a force of imperial nationalism within, though this empire
still had millions of Armenian and Greek subjects.
During 1881-1882, when two major Muslim areas of North Africa, Tunisia and
Egypt, came under the imperial rule (in the name of protectorates) of the French
and British empires, the global unevenness of Christian empires versus Muslim
subjects was more openly discussed in the Muslim public sphere and the press.
Eventually, the empires gained the upper hand, and by the turn of the twentieth
century, various Muslim societies were more or less settled in their lives under the
rule of European empires. Yet following the invasions of Egypt and Tunisia by the
British and French empires, global consciousness of Muslim populations subju-
gated by Christian empires created a new vision of Pan-Islamism outside of the
Ottoman Empire as well. The first Pan-Islamic magazine, al-‘Urwat al-Wuthqa,
was published in Paris in 1884 by Jamal ad-Din Afghani (1838-1897) and
Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) immediately after Britain’s invasion of Egypt
and contained highly anti-British and anti-imperial themes (Keddie 1968).
As al-Afghani and ‘Abduh lived through the period of an ambivalent coexist-
ence of imperial and geopolitical visions of modern Muslim identity, their biogra-
phies do not fit any neat categorization of anti-imperialist Pan-Islamists or
empire-collaborating Muslims. Their Pan-Islamic magazine was published in
Paris at the heart of the French Empire, which had conquered another North
African Muslim area. France found it politically convenient to host this Pan-
Islamic magazine in Paris, while Britain banned its circulation in its colonies.
Al-Afghani and ‘Abduh often self-censured their critique of the French Empire in
North Africa in this anti-British publication. Pan-Islamic ideas of Afghani and
‘Abduh did not prevent them from joining consultations with the British imperial
officers with regard to the rebellion of Mahdi in Sudan. Al-Afghani could both
claim that he had connections to al-Mahdi’s rebellion in Sudan and praise the anti-
imperialist Pan-Islamic implications of this rebellion while offering his mediation
with Mahdi to the British government. In reality, al-Afghani was much less Pan-
Islamic before the moment of the mid-1880s. In Egypt, he was close to Khedive
Tawfiq until the late 1870s, and without the turn to high imperialism in Africa, he
may have remained as committed to the self-strengthening of Egypt as a Muslim-
dynasty-ruled empire. Even after the publication of their Pan-Islamic magazine in
1884, al-Afghani continued to search for a monarchical sponsor to his ideas, like
a political entrepreneur, visiting Persia, Russia, India, and Egypt, eventually

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 185

becoming a guest of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul. Meanwhile, Muhammad

‘Abduh worked under the wings of the British protectorate in Egypt, illustrating
the harmony between his Muslim modernism and Pan-Islamism with British-led
imperial world order. When ‘Abduh died in 1905, the only obituary about his life
published in Istanbul at that time was from the pro-British social Darwinist maga-
zine of Abdullah Cevdet, not from anti-imperialist circles. Both Al-Afghani and
‘Abduh remained close to British aristocrat Wilfred Blunt, who exhibited some
affinity to Egyptian claims to independence from the British protectorate but was
a firm believer in the British Empire in India as well as Britain’s status as the
greatest Mohammedan power in the world (Blunt 1882). In the case of ‘Abduh and
al-Afghani, geopolitical and racial ideas of Muslim world solidarity could coexist
in complex ways with the reality of the imperial governance, including those
empires governed by Christian monarchs.
Despite the assertion of an imperial vision throughout the nineteenth century,
the nature of imperial globalization in the Muslim societies of Africa and Asia led
to a modern form of racialization of Muslims by the early 1880s, giving birth to
the idea of “the Muslim World.” This idea of the Muslim world represented the
entanglement and linkages among different Muslim experiences in disparate
imperial contexts, forming simultaneity of ideas and identities significantly differ-
ent than the religious networks and imperial imaginations of Islamicate societies
in the mid-eighteenth century. The theaters of the otherization of Muslims and
their racialization patterns seemed to be in disparate parts of the globe. Russia had
its Muslim subjects with varied legal status from Tatar inlands to Caucasia and
Central Asia, yet all were defined and treated as Muslims. Dutch and French
empires also put legal distinctions between white metropole citizens and Muslim
imperial subjects and made the full equality of a Muslim imperial subject almost
impossible to achieve. The British Empire practically gave a modern name and
legal status to forty percent of the world’s Muslim populations within its imperial
domains in South Asia. All of these imperial practices were contested by Muslim
actors and populations, in relation and observations with each other. In that con-
text, the Ottoman Empire’s reforms and membership into the European concert of
empires, as well as its response to the rebellions of its Christian populations in
Europe, became ironically relevant to British, Dutch, French, and Russian-ruled
imperial Muslims’ lives, equality, and destiny. Even though the Ottomans were
representing as much of a Mongolian and modern European imperial universal-
ism, their image became identified with racial Muslim-ness both in European
metropoles and in Muslim colonies.
There was no single brain or hub of the entanglements among disparate Muslim
experiences in the age of racialized empires, but affirmation of connections from
both the European metropoles and Muslim reformists eventually turned into a

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186 REORIENT

synchronized and truly global conception of Muslim experience and identity by

the 1880s. Bulgarian Christians’ demands of autonomy, which led to both Russian-
Ottoman imperial wars and British evangelical campaigns against Bulgaria’s
Muslim rulers (then prompting Indian Muslim mobilization of financial and politi-
cal aid to Istanbul), illustrated the complex global web of identity and empire.
Sometimes, an uprising by a small group of Christian Greeks on the island of
Crete could turn into an occasion of imperial and racial battle lines across the
globe. There were no hegemonic and monolithic narratives of Islam versus the
West in the first half of the century, as seen in the fact that powerful British voices
supported the Ottoman Muslim rule over Christians (Yılmaz, 2012). Yet by the
1880s, the narratives of Islam versus the West as well as racial-religious conflict
began to appear too hegemonic and powerful to ignore, prompting imperial elites
to adjust and align their political projects and legitimacy in harmony with the per-
ceived reality of racial and civilizational fault-lines in the world. Imperial visions
were not fully defeated but needed to accept the reality of race and to develop a
new repertoire and tools to deal with its political power.
It is after the racialization of the globalized Muslim identity that the Ottoman
Sultan’s title as a Caliph and protector of holy cities of Mecca and Madina became
a popular reference point as the representative of the Muslim world. How could
the world of European empires deal with the fact that the monarch of one of the
empires is also the Caliph of their Muslim subjects, whose names began to be
mentioned in weekly Friday prayers all over the world? Why were Muslims living
under the rule of various European great power empires choose to assert their
spiritual, intellectual, and political ties to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, even
though that empire just lost a big war against Russia in 1878? This question
became one of the important puzzles of the age of high imperialism.
The most significant aspect of late nineteenth-century Pan-Islamism and dis-
courses of Caliphate is the now overlooked British imperial elephant in the global
ummah room. The main actor of the post-1880s appeal of the Ottoman Caliphate
was the dynamism as well as intellectual and economic power of the majority of
world’s Muslims living in and around Indian Ocean zone under British rule. It
was the infrastructure grid that the European empires, especially the British
Empire, built around Indian Ocean zone via steamships, telegraph lines, and
trains that maximized connectivity among distant Muslim societies (Alavi, 2015).
More Muslim individuals began to travel in steamships, or wrote and read articles
in Muslim journals published cheaply in new printing technologies, receiving
instant news via globalized telegraph networks. In many ways, it was the
European empires, led by the British Empire ruling half of world’s Muslims at
the turn of the century, which created the conditions producing the synchronous
imagination of the Muslim world.

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 187

While imperial globalization of the late nineteenth century made Muslims

aware of the experiences and destinies of other Muslims, European racial thinking
and their anti-Muslim discourses created hierarchies among superior white
Christians and inferior Muslims of colored race. Different discriminatory European
imperial practices prevented legal equality of Muslim subjects living under the
rule of European empires, encouraging them to look up to the Caliph in Istanbul to
articulate their discontents as well as aspirations about the existing racialized
imperial world order. In this context, Indian Muslim leaders emphasized their ties
to the Ottoman Caliphate not to gain independence from British imperial rule but
to improve their political position within the British Empire.
The Ottoman elites and the Caliph himself found new diplomatic opportunities
in the global Muslim links to Caliphate. As the Ottoman Empire sought the alli-
ance of the British to neutralize the Russian threat, they could refer to the British
Empire’s status as the greatest Muslim power in the world to make a case for an
alliance. If the Queen or King in London was the empress or emperor of about half
of world’s Muslim populations, they needed a special relationship with the Caliph
in Istanbul, who protected Muslim holy cities and had special spiritual sovereignty
over them. Thus, the globalization of the idea of the Caliphate could turn into a
case for a British-Ottoman alliance and special relationship in creating stability
and progress in a geopolitical zone imagined as “the Muslim World,” extending
from Morocco and Senegal to Central Asia, China, and Philippines.
It is in this context that a Muslim proposal for a British-Ottoman alliance was
put forward. Rulers of the Ottoman Empire, aware of its military weakness and
own legitimacy problems in the eyes of its non-Muslim subjects, favored an alli-
ance with the British Empire to receive Britain’s assurances for territorial sover-
eignty and economic development. Ottoman leaders argued that their Caliph-Sultan
would encourage Muslims of the British Empire to be loyal to the Queen (or the
King), as long as the British Empire supports the Ottoman geopolitical interests
and its imperial rule over diverse populations in Anatolia and the Balkans, includ-
ing Christians. Muslims of the British Empire embraced this idea, because it gave
an empowering argument for the interests of their community and made their loy-
alty to empire a topic of negotiation, contract, and bargain. They would be loyal to
the Queen/King as long as the British respect and protect their Caliph, which, in
practice, would mean elimination of Islamophobia that influenced their lives.
Moreover, having a Caliph Protector in Istanbul gave Indian Muslims a repre-
sentative who could speak on behalf of newly emerging global Muslim commu-
nity about shared questions of Islamophobia, educational improvements, and
political dignity, a representation that the Hindus in India did not have before the
rise of Indian National Congress around WWI. Many Muslims could be proud to
be loyal to both Queen and the Caliph, and hoped that the British and Ottoman

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188 REORIENT

Empire would remain in a de facto alliance (Ahmad 1960; Wasti 1998). From
Disraeli and Queen Victoria to Winston Churchill, there was a strong group among
the ruling elite of the British Empire who agreed with this proposition. Churchill,
who has the reputation of leading the British campaign in Gallipoli during WWI,
was initially against a war with the Ottoman Empire, because he saw Ottoman
Caliph’s encouragement for Muslim loyalty to British Empire as an insurance of
the stability and legitimacy of the empire in Asia.
If it was the Indian Muslims and the British Empire in particular, and racialized
European imperial rule over Muslims in general, the main theater for the rise of
Pan-Islamism and recalling of Caliphate in the 1880s, a counter-factual on
Ottoman defeat against Russia would not have changed this outcome (Sayyid
2014). Given the set of contradictions that Abdulhamid II had to reconcile between
his sovereign title as Khan in his own domains and his Caliphate image outside of
Ottoman territories, a counter-factual exercise on the lost futures of the Ottoman
victory in the 1877-1878 war tells us more about the impossibility of the project of
universal empires in the age of empowered active publics. Abdulhamid II of the
Ottoman Empire, like Tzar of Russia and Queen Victoria of England, was trying
to perfect the craft of empire in the age of steamships, trains, and mass printing,
when their diverse subjects became more empowered, mobile, connected, and
articulate. Thus, they could all be called Chinggis Khan with a Telegraph, or
steamship, with better technologies of transportation and communication that can
make imperial governance easier and more efficient. Yet these very technologies
were empowering the subaltern publics and making the mission of universal
empire a difficult task to achieve.
In reality, Queen Victoria did become that Mohammedan ruler once imagined
by Napoleon or Wilfred Blunt without converting to Islam. Throughout the 1880s
and the 1890s, Queen Victoria was the empress of close to half of the Muslims in
the world (90 million Muslims out of about 200 million Muslim population in
1900). Yet Queen Victoria’s image as the mother of Muslim subjects does not
represent the full picture of the experience of the British Empire in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. She was also a pious Christian queen in metropole and
a head of the Anglican Church, and colonial empire was run by white elites with
strong Islamophobic ideas. It was impossible for the Queen to reconcile her role as
a Christian white monarch with her status as the empress of Muslims (and Hindus)
whose population was bigger than the Christians of the empire.
There was a similar imperial dilemma in the Russian Empire, in the Tzar’s
image as a Pan-Slavic global leader and protector of Orthodox Christianity still
asking for the loyalty of his Muslim subjects. Caliph Abdulhamid was no different
in his relationship with the Armenian and Greek subjects. Proud spiritual sover-
eign of the Alem-i Islam (the Muslim World) had to make sure that Armenian

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IMPERIAL PARADOXES: A CALIPHATE FOR SUBALTERN MUSLIMS 189

populations in Eastern Anatolia are loyal to him and recognize him as their legiti-
mate ruler. In some ways, the loyalty of Armenians in Anatolia was more impor-
tant for him than the Caliph’s spiritual links with Indian Muslims. Abdulhamid’s
predecessors in the seventeenth century found it easier to rule a religiously diverse
empire. Similar to other post-Mongolian paternalistic imperial models, they could
rule over diverse expansive geographies of Eurasia with minimal political coopta-
tion and assimilation.
Irrespective of their defeat or victory in 1878, the Ottomans had to respond to
the challenge of universal legitimacy over an inter-connected and active modern
public spheres globally empowered by print and steam technologies, and thus able
to articulate their competing demands and discontents. It was the same problem
faced by European empires that actually made their Muslim subjects to link with
each other and form a global political identity battling and countering their vic-
timization, discrimination, and Islamophobia. It was this very dilemma of modern
empires and racial ideologies of the 1880s that made the Ottoman Sultan a global
Caliph. The aggravation of European racism on the eve of WWI made the Ottoman
Caliphate even more indispensable for modern Muslim political imagination.
Victory or defeat of Ottoman armies in 1877-1878 was perhaps secondary to the
most important turning point in the nineteenth century world history, namely, the
racialization of the Muslim identity in an imperial world and the formation of
modern Muslim subjectivity.

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