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I.

'slam Ass eThe Advent of t h e4 11 1 1 1 1 '

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MARTIN KRAMER


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ISLAMASSEMBLEDThe Advent of the Muslim Congresses

MARTIN KRAMER

New York Colum bia University Press 1 9 8 6


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To my parents, Anita and Alvin


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CONTENTS

Preface i xONE T H E COSMOPOLITAN MIL IEU.Pan-Islamic Ideals 1TWO A CHALLENGE TO AUTHORITY. Th e

Congress Idea 1 0THREE A N IDEA REFINED. Fi rst Proposals from

Cairo 2 6FOUR A PRACTICAL PLAN. Th e GasprinskiiInitiative of 1907 and Sequel 3 6

FIVE H O L Y WAR. The Wartime Initiatives 5 5SIX B E T W E E N BOLSHEVISM AND ISLAM.

The League of Islamic Revolutionary Societies,1 9 2 0-1 9 2 169

SEVEN K E M A L I S T TURKEY AND MUSLIMEMPIRE. Th e Society of Unitarians andAftermath, 1 9 1 9-1 9 2 373

EIGHT N E W CALIPH IN ARABIA. Th e PilgrimageCongress, 1924 8 0NINE T H E CALIPHATE GRAIL. Th e General

Islamic Congress for the Caliphate in Egypt, 1926 8 6TEN T H E FATE OF MECCA. Th e Congress of theIslamic World, 1926 1 0 6ELEVEN I N DEFENSE OF JERUSALEM. Th e General

Islamic Congress, 1931 1 2 3TWELVE S W I S S EXILE. Th e European Muslim Congress,

1935 1 4 2THIRTEEN CONGRESSES OF COLLABORATION.

Islam and the Axis, 1 9 3 8-1 9 4 51 5 4


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v i i i C O N T E N T SFOURTEEN CONCLUSIONS

Appendixes 1 7 1Abbreviations 1 9 5Notes 1 9 7Bibliography 2 2 7

Index 2 4 3

166


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PREFACE

"If a scheme on these principles could be carried into effect, it would bethe greatest event ever k nown in the annals of Mohamm edan hist ory."

Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi,on his congress proposal of 1915.

LATEINTHElastcentury,Muslims,separ

guage, and history, first thought to make their wor ld whole by assem-bling in congress. The expansion of the West into Muslim lands awak-ened within Muslims a shared sense of subjugation. Then steamer, rail,and telegraph made possible an animated discourse among Mus lim cen-ters linked in the past by tenuous ties. From this exchange emerged aloose network of Muslim cosmopolitans, men of common convictionwho shared a critique of the West, and a vision of a revitalized Islam.After numerous failed initiatives, they fi nally did meet in an irregularsuccession of Muslim congresses between the two world wars. Thesewere the earliest occasions on which Muslims, assembled from variousparts of the Muslim world, discussed and resolved on issues of commonconcern. They were perhaps the broadest attempt by a group of subjectpeoples to ward o ff the West.The uneasy first encounters made fi tful progress. The earliest practicalproposals, and then the congresses themselves, emerged and disappearedin rapid succession. They followed one another in no sequential order,and they bore no formal relationship to one another. Many hands wereat work , often at cross-purposes, and no renowned indiv idual made hisname synonymous with the broken string of congresses. The initiativemoved from continent to continent, and the action unfolded not onlyin Mecca, Cairo, and Jerusalem, but in the unlikely settings of Moscow,Geneva, and Tokyo. So scattered was the evidence that no attempt wasmade to study Muslim congresses in an integrated fashion, to weighthem against one another, and to measure their cumulative effects. Someof the leading contemporary IslamicistsMassignon, Gibb, Hartmannbelieved that the advent of the congresses was a significant development


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X P R E F A C Ein Islam, but the appreciations which they published were br ief andtentative.1T h ep a ss a geoftimehasmadepossibleacomprehensive

study, based upon sources which were beyond the reach of contem-poraries. My method has been to trace the congress idea through itsearly evolution, to examine the first and largely unsuccessful initiatives,and to assess the congresses convened between the two world wars.My purpose has been to establish the persistence of Mus lim attachmentto the political concept of a united Islam, even as Muslim empire andcaliphate waned.As the West began to divest itself of its Muslim possessions, andMuslim peoples achieved independence, the congress movement lostmuch of its appeal. I t is here that I have drawn the account to a close,with an examination of the activities of the leading Muslim cosmo-politans during the last world war. The later revival of the congressesas diplomatic arenas for independent Muslim states occurred in a verydifferent world, and warrants a very different approach. But here I amconcerned with how an idea circulated by Muslims of radical politicaland religious persuasions first won general acceptance, and how it faredwhen firs t put into practice, for the most part by statesmen withoutstates. It is a study of first encounters, of the moments when Muslimsfirst equated the sheer expanse of Islam with political power in themodern world.

I have striven to present a cosmopolitan appraisal, as informed aboutthe expansive world of Mus lim activism as were the Mus lim cosmo-politans themselves. For the congresses soon proved larger than theyappeared. Their effects were felt in parts of the Muslim world far re-moved from the center of initiative. To study those effects, I have hadto venture across the boundaries established to divide the Mus lim worldfor the convenience of foreign scholarship. This has led me at timesthrough unfamiliar terrain. And so I am particularly indebted to thosewhose own cosmopolitan knowledge of Muslim history served for meas a guide. I owe much to Professor Bernard Lewis, who supervised thisstudy through an earlier incarnation as a Princeton Univers ity doctoraldissertation. I have never succeeded in exhausting his store of knowl-edge, references, and anecdotes on this or any Muslim subject. And hehas given me ample opportunity to try.Parts of the manuscript were read and commented upon by ProfessorsBenedict Anderson, Shaul Bakhash, L. Carl Brown, Wil liam Cleveland,Charles Issawi, and Edward Lazzerini, and I thank them all. A constantcompanion of this work has been Professor Itamar Rabinovich, now mycolleague at Tel Aviv University, who first set my sights on the Muslimcongresses, and followed with countless encouragements. To the various


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PREFACE x iarchivists and librarians from whose collections I cite, I am most in-debted. For special courtesies, I wish to offer special thanks to the RightHon. Viscount Knebwor th for permission to examine the Oriental cor-respondence of Wilfred Scawen Blunt, at the West Sussex County andDiocesan Record Office; to the Mohamed Ali Foundation and the Keeperof Oriental Books at the Durham Univers ity Library, for permission toconsult the Abbas H ilm i II Papers; to Dr. Muhammed cAmira, ChiefLibrarian of the Azhar Mosque Library, for permission to study the filesof the Cairo caliphate congress; to Mr . Abu al-Futuh Hamid cAwda,Director of the Archives of the Presidency of the Republic in Cairo, forpermission to examine the Egyptian royal archives; to Mr. Daniel Bour-geois o f the Swiss Federal Archives, fo r his k ind assistance; to Mr .Yitzhak Oron, Director of Research at the Israeli Foreign Minist ry , forpermission to study the wartime papers of Hajj Amin al-Husayni; tothe French Embassy in Cairo, f or permission to consult the Embassypost records; to Dr. P. A. Alsberg, Director of the Israel State Archives,for providing Arabic documentation concerning the Jerusalem congress;and to the staff of the India Office Records, for exceptional efforts onmy behalf.The initial research was made possible through grants from the Prince-ton Program in Near Eastern Studies, the United States InformationService through the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Ben-Gurion Fund. For the opportunity to revise and publish the work, Iacknowledge with gratitude the support of the Bronfman Program forthe Study of Jewish-Arab Relations.I am also grateful for kind acts of hospitality to Professor ShimonShamir and the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo, and to Paulette andDavid Spiro of Princeton. It was my good fortune that Leslie Bialler ofColumbia University Press undertook to copy-edit the manuscript. EdnaLiftman guided the book past treacherous bureaucratic shoals. Thenthere is my wife Sandra, who learned that scholarship somehow doesqualify as work, and then made the decisive contribution.

Transliteration has proved a thorny problem in a work which includesnames and terms drawn from most major Mus lim languages. My ap-proach has been to avoid unsightly Arabicization in transliterating otherMuslim languages, and to omit diacriticals and vowel quantities. In thismanner, I hope to satisfy even readers who reach this book from oppositeends of the Mus lim world, with their own conventions of transliteration.Within each Muslim language, my method has been simplified butconsistent, and its principles will be readily evident to the specialist.


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NOTES

INTRODUCTION1. Louis Massi gnon, "L' entente i slamique internationale et les deux congres musulmans

de 1926"; H. A. R. Gibb, Whither Islam? 354-64; Richard Hartmann, "Zum Gedanken des'Kongresses' in den Reformbestrebungen des islamischen Orients."

1 . THE COSMOPOLITAN MILIEU1. The novel went thr ough many editions. I t is summarized by F. A. Tansel, ed. Namik

Kemalin mektuplan, 2: 177-79. For more details on the publication of the book, see OmerFamk Akan, "Namik Kemal'in Kitap Halindeki Eserlerinin Ilk Nesir leri." For NamikKemal's appeal for Musl im solidari ty i n his ow n era, see Mustafa Ozon, Namdc Kemal veIbret Gazetesi, 74-78.

2. The gathering was called a majlis; the dialogue, muhawara.3. 'Abdallah Efendi ibn Husayn al-Suwaydi, al-Hunaj al-qat 'iyya li-ittilaq al-firaq al-islamyya,2 2-2 7.Cf.L.Lockhart,NadirShah,233;andHa

Eighteenth Century, " 294-96.4. E. G. Browne, " Pan-Isl amism ," 323.5. Tex t of procl amati on i n Revue du monde musulman ( 19 14 13: 385- 86. Detail s o n t heattitudes of Iraq's Shl' i scholars to t he Ott oman state are provi ded by Abdul - Hadi Hairi ,Ski 'ism and Constitutionalism in Iran.6. E. G. Brow ne (Cambridge) to W il fr id Scawen Blunt, February 16,1911, i n Bl unt-Chichester, file 9, "Edward G. Browne."7. On the origins of this current of thought, see Dwight E. Lee, "The Origins of Pan-Islamism," and Nikki R. Keddie, "Pan-Islam as Proto-Nationalism."8. H. A. R. Gibb, " Lutfi Pasa on the Ottom an Cali phate," and Fritz Steppat, "Khal if at,

Dar al-Istam und die loyalitat der Araber zum osmanischen Reich bei Hanafitischen Juristendes 19. Jahrhunderts."9. See Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam, 1 4 1

-5 0 .10. Hali l i nalcik, " The Socio-Political Effects of the Di ffusi on of Fire-arms in the Mi ddle

E as t, " 2 0 2-1 0 .11. Antho ny Reid, "Si xteenth Century T urkish Infl uence in W estern Indonesia"; SeljukAffan, "Relations Between the Ottoman Empire and the Musl im Kingdoms in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago"; and documents publi shed b y Razaulhak Sah, " Ac i PadisahiSultan Alaeddin'i n KanunI Sultan Silleyman'a M ektubu."12. Aziz Ahmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment, 27-28.

13. B. G. Mar tin, " M ai Idris of Bor nu and the Ottom an Turks, 1576-78," 478-79. Amore complete set of documents was publi shed by Cengiz Or honlu, " Osmanli -Bornumiinasebetine aid belgeler."

14. This reassertion is described by Bernard Lewis, "Ottoman Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Review," 290-9 4 .15. For Alger ian im mi grati on see Charles-R obert Ager on, Les Algfriens musulmans et laFrance ( 1 8 7 1-1 9 1 9 ) ,2 :1 0 7 9- 9 2 ;s eea ls o

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