A term of European origin, pan-Islamism denotes the intellectual and institutional trends toward Islamic unity that emerged among Muslim peoples, starting in the mid–nineteenth century and continuing throughout the twentieth century. The need for a unified Islamic identity was a product of the challenges posed by Western intervention in and domination of Muslim societies during the colonialist period. Leaders throughout the Muslim world appealed to the Islamic tradition to solidify public opposition to foreign occupation and thereby gain political independence. Like its European namesakes pan-Hellenism and pan-Slavism, pan-Islamism used cultural ideas to achieve nationalist political ends. Unlike the ethnic identities emphasized in European nationalisms, however, pan-Islamism emphasized the religious heritage and symbols that both united all Muslims and set them apart from their Western Christian colonialist occupiers. The nationalist purposes to which pan-Islamism was primarily directed may seem at odds with the universal principles on which it rests, but this tension was largely resolved in the practical drive for political, economic, and social progress that enveloped Muslim societies. Nowhere is this resolution more clearly defined than in the life and work of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897), a Muslim reformer and key advocate of pan-Islamism.
Born in Persia, not Afghanistan as his name suggests, al-Afghani led the life of an itinerant scholar and activist. After his initial education in Persia, he studied in India and then worked in Afghanistan, Istanbul, Egypt, and Paris. Al-Afghani's travels provided him with a unique insight into the modern condition affecting all Muslim peoples, a condition he believed was characterized by political weakness, social instability, and cultural ignorance. Contact with the West did not cause this condition, according to al-Afghani, but it did bring it into high relief; it also alerted Muslims to an essential but long-dormant element of their own tradition: rational thought. For al-Afghani, the power and success of the modern West rested on its rejection of the stultifying restrictions of Christianity and its turn toward reason; since Islam, by contrast, was rooted in rationalism, Muslims need only return to the essence of their faith to overcome the developmental asymmetry that had come to differentiate Western and Muslim societies.
Arguing for the rational nature of Islam was a common strategy among Muslim reformers, who wanted to facilitate change while maintaining cultural identity. It was a strategy that recognized the Western orientation of modern development and the threat this orientation posed to cultural authenticity in the Muslim world. Indeed al-Afghani believed that social and political change could only be brought about if Muslims had a firm sense of the civilization to which Islam had given birth. By civilization, al-Afghani meant the intellectual and moral achievements that contributed to the unity and greatness of a people—a notion he borrowed from the French statesman-historian François Guizot (1787–1874) and employed to foster a usable Islamic past. This past did not lead inexorably to the unification of the entire Muslim community (the umma ) under a single Islamic state. Instead, al-Afghani viewed Islamic civilization, the foundation of pan-Islamism, as a common cultural stream that fed the national political aspirations of such distinct countries as India, Persia, and Egypt. Here the logical appeal of Islam as universal glue for all Muslim peoples was subordinated to the practical realities of a world where nation-states had become the political norm. Pan-Islamism, however, had served a very different political purpose under the Ottomans.
Late Ottoman Politics
If al-Afghani was the father of pan-Islamist thought, Ottoman sultans were the first to implement pan-Islamism as official state policy, a policy with imperialist, not nationalist, goals. As early as the 1860s, the then-sultan, Abdul Aziz (r. 1861–1876), tried to extend his political authority beyond the Ottoman Empire by casting himself as the caliph, the designated ruler of all Muslims and the defender of the faith. His successor, Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909), adopted the same mantle of authority. This pan-Islamic appeal was tied to the growing Western influence in the Muslim world that the Ottomans themselves had facilitated through their efforts to reform. The need to reform had become apparent as European peoples began to win back territory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had been lost to the Ottoman expansion into Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The same rising tide of technological advancement that had allowed European nations to defeat the Ottomans in Europe also permitted them to project their power abroad. This new political reality was made clear to the Ottomans when, in 1798, one of their autonomous possessions, Egypt, was invaded and occupied by the French under Napoléon Bonaparte.
Conscious of their declining power, the Ottomans embarked on a series of military, educational, social, and governmental reforms throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and they sought technical assistance and advice from the very European nations that threatened the empire's territorial sovereignty. While dramatic and far-reaching, the reforms came too late to prevent the Ottomans from becoming known as the Sick Man of Europe, an inefficient and weakened empire whose lands in the Middle East and Central Asia looked ripe for the picking. The competition to take control of Ottoman possessions was widespread in Europe in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, but it was played out on a grand scale—referred to as the Great Game—by two imperialist powers bent on world domination, Great Britain and Russia. For the Ottomans, pan-Islamic propaganda seemed a viable means of reasserting its sway over Muslim subjects whose loyalty was being tested by new ideas like nationalism and undermining the progress of European influence among Muslim peoples in places such as India. Ultimately unsuccessful as an imperialist ideology, pan-Islamism did serve the nationalist desires of Muslim peoples trying to break free from both Ottoman and European rule. It failed, however, to take hold in modern Turkey, the nation that arose out of the heartland of the defeated and dismembered Ottoman Empire.
The Khilafat Movement
The first popular pan-Islamist political movement, the Khilafat movement (1919–1924), emerged in India after World War I, though support for the caliphate locally among Indian Muslims had been gaining momentum throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Chafing under British occupation and mindful of the glory days of Mogul rule, Indian Muslims directed their spiritual and later political longings toward the remaining seat of independent Muslim rule: the Ottoman caliphate. With the Ottoman Empire in ruins after World War I and the office of the caliph, the caliphate, under threat of extinction, Indian Muslims organized to preserve what many viewed as the last vestige of Islamic unity and power. In 1919 activist groups like the Association of Servants of the Ka'ba and the Council of the All-India Muslim League convened a Khilafat Conference, during which the movement took official form as the All-India Central Khilafat Committee.
The politics of the Khilafat movement were clearly anti-imperialist and pro-independence, which accounts for the popular support it received across Muslim sectarian lines in India and across the Muslim world. Activists within the movement spread their message through publications at home and abroad. Delegations were sent to England, France, and Switzerland to shape public attitudes and government policy regarding the caliphate and the future of Muslim societies. In the end, however, it was not European leaders but the new leaders of Turkey who decided the fate of the movement by adopting a secular path for the nation based on a narrowly conceived ethnic identity—a path that mirrored European strains of nationalism—and then abolishing the office of the sultan in 1922 and that of the caliph in 1924. The Khilafat movement protested Turkey's actions, but with no power to impose its will and with its reason for existence eliminated, the movement had gradually faded from public view by the late 1920s. Pan-Islamism in India, however, continued to play a part in Muslim cultural and political life, especially the communal debates that resulted in the formation of Pakistan in 1947.
A World of Nation-States
The division of the Muslim world into nation-states has given rise to new strands of pan-Islamism. First, transnational organizations like the Organization of Islamic States (OIC) have been formed to express the collective sentiments and concerns of Muslim peoples. It remains to be seen whether the OIC or similar organizations can be effective in a world of nation-states, a question made more serious in light of the events following September 11, 2001. Like the United Nations, the OIC depends on its integrity and moral authority to effect change unless it has the backing of a strong state. Second, Islamism, or Muslim fundamentalism, has laid claim to the pan-Islamic heritage in order to remake, if not undermine, the modern system of nation-states that divides Muslim societies. While pan-Islamism advocates Muslim unity and strength, it is not conducive to the totalizing agenda espoused by Islamists who wish to (re-)Islamize every aspect of society. Lastly, pan-Islamism remains a current of feeling and thought—typically associated with calls for justice and hope—that runs throughout Muslim societies and also minority Muslim communities in the West. Like religion itself, there is a certain ambiguity and ambivalence about the purposes to which it is put and the events that evoke it. The only certainty surrounding pan-Islamism is its perennial nature.
See also Cultural Revivals ; Empire and Imperialism: Middle East ; Ethnicity and Race: Islamic Views ; Fundamentalism ; Islam ; Nationalism: Middle East ; Pan-Africanism ; Pan-Arabism ; Pan-Asianism ; Pan-Turkism ; Westernization: Middle East .
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Jeffrey T. Kenney
Pan-Islam is the ideology that calls for the unity and cooperation of Muslims worldwide on the basis of their shared Islamic identity. Apart from this general description, the idea of pan-Islam has been formulated in myriad ways and used for various political ends during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The term "pan-Islam" is of nineteenth-century European origin and was used primarily to describe Ottoman attempts at promoting Muslim unity to counter European imperialism. Yet, the central premise of pan-Islam, that all Muslims form a single community of believers (umma) that ideally should be united politically as well as spiritually, may be traced to the very origins of Islam itself. Several Qur˒anic verses refer to the Muslims as constituting a single community (e.g., 2:143, 3:110). Others warn against the dangers of fragmentation and internal strife (e.g., 3:103, 105). The prophet Muhammad clearly tried to forge a sense of Muslim communal solidarity that transcended the traditional tribal loyalties of the Arabs, as in the famous example of the "Constitution of Medina," in which the migrants from Mecca and the newly converted tribes of Medina are described as "a single umma apart from all other men." Although the political unity of the umma was shattered soon after the Prophet's death, the ideal continued to linger for several centuries afterwards, as best demonstrated in the reluctance of political theorists to accept the legitimacy of multiple, simultaneous caliphs.
Numerous attempts to unite Muslims through a revival of Islamic faith may be found in Islamic history. But given the far expanse of Islamic civilization, all of these were confined geographically. Many factors converged in the nineteenth century to allow a far more universal scope for attempts to unite Muslims: the steady loss of Ottoman territories in Europe, the advance of European colonialism into Muslim states in Africa and Asia, and the spread of mass communication media. Pan-Islam developed primarily as a defense mechanism to counter the military and political advance of European powers, primarily Britain, France, and Russia. The Ottoman Empire, the largest and most centrally located Sunni state, and the guardian of the holy sites of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, was best suited to exploit rising concerns with European imperialism and to initiate pan-Islamic responses.
Two men, more than any others, shaped the development of pan-Islam during the late nineteenth century: the Ottoman sultan ˓Abd al-Hamid II (1842–1918) and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897). ˓Abd al-Hamid cultivated the pan-Islamic sentiments that had emerged during the 1860s and 1870s under the impact of German and Italian unification during the reign of his predecessor, ˓Abd al-˓Aziz (1830–1876), and gave them the status of an official ideology. As it did for ˓Abd al-˓Aziz, pan-Islam provided ˓Abd al-Hamid a rallying cry against both European powers and internal modernizers and critics of the sultanate.
Central to ˓Abd al-Hamid's pan-Islam was the claim that the Ottoman sultan was the caliph of Islam, or at least of Sunni Islam. The Ottoman claim to the caliphate dated back centuries, but under ˓Abd al-Hamid the title was asserted with far greater vigor than it had been before within the empire, and for the first time serious attempts were made to win the loyalty of Muslims beyond the Ottoman realm. Inside the empire, the sultan's pan-Islam meant the cultivation of Muslim interests over those of Christian and other non-Muslim minorities as well as increased state support for Islamic courts, schools, and religious orders. Outside the empire, a propaganda campaign was launched, using print media and emissaries or spies, to spread an image of the sultan as a pious Muslim ruler, the only one capable of effectively uniting Muslims against Christian colonizers.
˓Abd al-Hamid's claims to the caliphate were challenged immediately, and the general failure of his pan-Islamic campaign partly contributed to his deposition following the Young Turk revolt of 1908. Still, the fruits of ˓Abd al-Hamid's propaganda may be seen in the Indian Muslim agitation over the fate of the Ottoman caliphate following the First World War.
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani's early career emphasized the need for reform within particular Muslim countries, under the leadership of their own rulers. By the 1870s, Afghani's activism had assumed a decidedly pan-Islamic emphasis. He suggested that the only way to ameliorate the weakness of individual Muslim states was to form a bloc of semi-autonomous states, all recognizing the suzerainty of the Ottoman caliph. Afghani thus sought to combine nationalism and pan-Islam, apparently seeing no contradictions between the two.
Afghani proposed to ˓Abd al-Hamid as early as the late 1870s that he be sent as an emissary to Afghanistan to rally support for the sultan's claims to the caliphate. The sultan, suspicious of Afghani's motivations, responded by encouraging him to continue his agitation from abroad but doing little to assist him. In 1892, ˓Abd al-Hamid invited Afghani to settle in Istanbul. Afghani would die there four years later, disillusioned and complaining that he was a prisoner of the sultan.
Pan-Islamic appeals continued to be heard in the period before and immediately after the First World War, as in the Ottoman jihad proclamation of 1914, but increasingly they were made in the service of Turkish, Arab, or Indian Muslim nationalism. The issue that most stirred pan-Islamic loyalties was the fate of the Ottoman caliphate, particularly among the Muslims of British India. Ulema of the Deoband school led Indian Muslim opposition to the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, seeing in it a British ploy to seize control of the central Islamic lands. When Constantinople was occupied by the Allies at the end of the war, Indian nationalist leaders, chief among them the journalist Muhammad ˓Ali, launched the Khilafat Movement to lobby the British government for the Ottoman caliph's retention of sovereignty over the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Iraq, and Anatolia, the "spiritual heartland" of Islam. Meanwhile, in 1919, groups of Indian ulema organized the hijra (migration) of Muslims from the subcontinent to Afghanistan, arguing that Muslims could no longer remain in a territory ruled by Great Britain while it was attempting to destroy the caliphate. Approximately 18,000, mostly poor, Muslims trekked to the Afghan border, only to be denied entry by the Afghan government. Thousands lost their lives to disease and hunger in the process. By the time the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, the Khilafat agitation had already diminished because of disillusionment and internal squabbles. Hopes that a reconstituted caliphate might reinvigorate pan-Islamic sentiments died when two conferences held in 1926, one in Cairo, the other in Mecca, ended in bitter disagreements over who should assume the title. A third conference held in 1931 in Jerusalem called only for solidarity and cooperation among Muslim peoples.
Muslim solidarity and international cooperation, rather than any supranational unity, is the way pan-Islam has generally been articulated in the years since the Second World War. Even those Muslim intellectuals who challenge the legitimacy of separate Muslim nation-states according to Islamic values do not propose any meaningful political union of Muslim states and in fact generally focus their activism on gaining control of a particular state.
The most prominent manifestation of pan-Islam today is in the host of transnational nongovernmental and intergovernmental Islamic organizations. During the 1950s, Pakistan initiated the creation of the Mu˒tamar al-˓Alam al-Islami, but disagreements with secular Arab governments over the organization's purpose led to its failure. During the 1960s, the campaign to create pan-Islamic organizations was revived by King Faysal of Saudi Arabia. With his backing, the Rabitat al-˓Alam al-Islami was created in 1962 to provide a nongovernmental forum for the discussion and dissemination of Islamic viewpoints on issues facing Muslims around the world. In 1969, following Israel's capture of Jerusalem in the Six Day War, twenty-four Muslim states voted to form the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). In 2003 the OIC consisted of fifty-seven members, and though it is frequently criticized for its ineffectiveness, it remains the most important and universal expression of pan-Islamic political aspirations since the abolition of the caliphate.
Landau, Jacob. The Politics of Pan-Islam. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Sohail H. Hashmi