Engaging Books Series: Stanford Press on Transregional Connections in the Middle East and Central Asia

Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from Stanford University Press on the theme of Transregional Connections in the Middle East and Central Asia. Other publishers’ books will follow on a monthly basis.

Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism

 

By Mana Kia
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews

 

For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World

By Wilson Chacko Jacob
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews

 

Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire

By Lâle Can
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews

 

The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity

By Darryl Li
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews

 

Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism

By Mana Kia

 

About the Book

For centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the land of Iran was Persian, and Persians lived in many other lands as well. Thus to be Persian was to be embedded in a set of connections with people we today consider members of different groups. Persianate selfhood encompassed a broader range of possibilities than contemporary nationalist claims to place and origin allow. We cannot grasp these older connections without historicizing our conceptions of difference and affiliation.

Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.

About the Author

Mana Kia is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.

Scholarly Praise for Persianate Selves

“Few questions are more vexed in the study of early modern Asia, with evidence more evanescent, than how people identified before nationalism. Persianate Selves is an invaluable vade mecum for navigating the transregional Persianate past.”

—Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles

“Persianate Selves disturbs our national imaginaries and challenges the way we write Persianate history. Whether one contests or agrees, we will all have to engage with the different terms of analysis Mana Kia offers in this pioneering work.”

—Kathryn Babayan, University of Michigan

“Persianate Selves traverses a now-vanished cosmopolitan world and suggests a fascinating new approach to conceptualizing a shared cultural space. This engaging book is sure to generate considerable discussion among scholars interested in the intellectual cultures of the world before the nationalist divide.”

—Muzaffar Alam, University of Chicago

Additional Information

May 2020

336 pages

From $30.00 (list price)

Cloth ISBN: 9781503610682

Paper ISBN: 9781503611955

Digital ISBN: 9781503611962

Where to Purchase

Stanford University Press: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29033

Excerpt

From Introduction: The Shadow of Nationalism

The Persianate

Let me put it another way. A commonsensical formulation asserts that Persian is the language of a place called Persia, which has existed since antiquity. This is the nationalist formulation of culture, based on an assumed confluence of territory, people, and language linked by modern notions of native-ness. The mirror image of this formulation holds sway in South Asia, where Persian was the language of Muslim conquerors and thus is inherently foreign. Both of these nationalist narratives rely on modern notions of what is native, what is foreign, and what “naturally” constitutes difference. The foreign-native binary coheres around an idea of home and origin that, in each case, appears empirical and thus objectively true, singular, and mutually exclusive.

Underlying this ostensible mutual exclusivity, however, is a history of commonality and intimacy. For centuries, Persians from Central, South, and West Asia read the same corpus of well-known ethical, literary, and commemorative texts.¹ These basic texts, some widely disseminated through oral recitation, gave rise to shared literary tropes, interpretive paradigms, and representational forms. These were also diversely inflected. Most educated Persians had other languages of learning, such as Arabic or Sanskrit, and other vernacular languages such as Chagatai or Braj.² Nevertheless, Szuppe has argued that “a clear perception of belonging to a single cultural space was maintained over this geographically vast area” (eastern Iran, or Khurasan, Central Asia, and northern India)

for centuries after the “Empire” of Timur’s descendants had disappeared in the years following 1506. This perception derives partly from the use in these regions of the Persian language as the dominant idiom of literary expression, as well as from a common adherence to the Perso-Islamicate cultural-social system of education, behavior, and good manners, or adab, which provided a common basis for the educational and cultural references shared in particular by the literate middle and upper classes of society.³

Through this basic education, a person imbibed proper forms of aesthetic style and ethical conduct (the two faces of adab) that made them Persian.⁴ These forms changed according to geographical and temporal contingencies, producing variations that lay alongside one another with uneven degrees of comfort.

Despite differing local contexts, these meanings were shared between the educated classes of former Safavid and Timurid domains. Certain local specificities became diffused across regions through sustained circulation of people, texts, and ideas.⁵ What was Persian thus remained living, breathing, and diverse, not only across religions or regions but also across types of people—courtiers, scholars, poets, merchants, mystics, military leaders, and many who combined these roles. Their perspectives and affiliations differed, even as they shared the means for expressing these differences. A shared basic education bestowed particular forms of place, origin, and proper conduct, creating modes of affiliation constituting selves and community. This commonality did not necessarily lead to agreement about the meanings of places or the relative values of particular origins. Rather, Persians shared a mutually intelligible vocabulary with which they expressed agreement or disagreement, drawn from their shared education. The sometimes conflicting views of Persians in Irani and Hindustani domains thus points to a range of possibilities for connection and affiliation, as well as distance and difference.

To understand common notions of place and origin, we must first embrace a form of meaning-making different from our own. For Persians, categorical differences did not need to be absolute or mutually exclusive. The sensibilities imparted by their basic education were governed by adab (proper form), whose aporetic character allowed for multiplicities of meaning and interpretation within its forms. Concepts were constituted relationally, so that the meanings of place and origin could be multiple and shifting. Elucidating these meanings reveals a different kind of Persianate self, with a range of possibilities. Before nationalism, Persianate selves could hail from many places, and their origins comprised a variety of lineages. The interrelations among these lineages render coherent their multiple modes of imagination, practice, and experience.

For the Islamic, this multiplicity has been called “coherent contradiction,” reconciled through hierarchies of meaning, interdependent and part of the same truth of the unity of God (tawhīd).⁶ The road to the more valued unseen (bātin) was through and connected to the manifest (zāhir), which was at once superficial and necessary.⁷ Multiplicities and their tensions were thus necessary, even if ideally transcendable (for some; others could only recognize or merely follow). As Hafiz’s verses in the epigraph show, the unseen and the manifest were part of one Splendor. This cosmology was simultaneously articulated in adab, the proper form of things, as the means and manifestation of the most harmonious, beautiful, and virtuous substance, most perfect and closest to the Truth. Historically, awareness of the multiplicity that hierarchies of meaning allowed produced an understanding of difference as overlapping gradients, rather than as mutual exclusivity. Certain categories of people, for instance, could be from Iran, even as they belonged to India.

Aporia is key here. Formulating categories with discrete borders—like the distinction between text and context or Iranian and Indian—is a way of knowing firmly rooted in modern epistemology. Another logic, however, governs our sources. Persian adab and its defining limits thus present to us moderns as a set of paradoxes. Instead of paradox, I use the term aporia to underline the way in which seeming contradictions appear so through the lens of our present. I borrow Jacques Derrida’s formulation of aporia as a distinction that has “no limit. There is not yet or there is no longer a border to cross, no opposition between two sides: the limit is too porous, permeable and indeterminate.”⁸ Two categories need not be oppositional; rather “they are articulated with each other; they supplement and engender each other.”⁹ Thus aporetically defined distinctions create the terms by which social affiliations, their forms, and the articulation of their hermeneutical contours imbued and linked language and practice, the imaginative and the experiential.

To make room for prenationalist Persian self-understandings and their possibilities for connection, I argue against the application of modern notions of ethnicity in historicizing origins of earlier periods. Disavowing Orientalism and its narratives of stagnation and decline require us to consider the immediate premodern past as more than a prelude to modernity.

Notes

1. This basic education is outlined in Alam, “Culture and Politics of Persian,” 163 and 166. This education included books widely read across the Persian world, such as Saʿdi’s Gulistan, the most read Persian book of this time (see Kia, “Adab as Literary Form.”)

2. The terms and degree of Sanskrit-Persian intellectual exchange have not received enough attention. Pollock cites social divisions between Brahmins who were Sanskrit scholars and those who learned Persian and entered Timurid service as indications that, apart from some narrow scientific forms of exchange, formal scholarly exchange was not widespread between languages. This assertion, however, does not address the informal reading habits of learned, multilingual individuals who may have been writing in only one language but who were nevertheless engaging in transcultural exchange (Pollock, “Languages of Science,” 35). More recently, Truschke gives an example of the exchange of knowledge through the oral medium of Hindi, which facilitated communication for the translation of Sanskrit literary texts into Persian at Akbar’s court (“Cosmopolitan Encounters”). Similarly, Allison Busch has shown the ways in which Persians’ cultivation of Braj literary and aesthetic culture, itself drawing on Sanskrit, actually blurs the distinction between cosmopolitan and vernacular poetic circulation (Poetry of Kings, 130–65).

3. Szuppe, “Glorious Past,” 41. Her repeated emphasis on a shared culture specifically limited to the eastern part of Iran is belied by at least one of her authors originating in Asadabad (near Hamdan in ʿIraq-i ʿajam) and others traveling to Shiraz and Isfahan for study.

4. Adab had specificities relational to context. For a discussion of the centrality of adab to Sufi orders, see Bashir, Sufi Bodies, 78-85.

5. This shared cultural framework seems to have been sustained by regular contacts among individuals, family groups, and social groups functioning within the political units of the post-Timurid space, who “traveled frequently between Central Asia, Iran and India, thus promoting cultural, literary, and spiritual exchanges through direct personal contacts, and generating an overall climate of profound interest in literary trends, accomplishments and production in all parts of the Persianate world” (Szuppe, “Glorious Past,” 41).

6. Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 109, 335–36, 368–77, 397–404. The harmony of unity in seeming contradiction or paradox is elaborated by Melvin-Koushki, “Imperial Talismanic Love.”

7. Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 377–82. He illustrates this concept of connectedness in his reading of the hierarchies of meaning in representations of wine drinking (417–24).

8. Derrida, Aporias, 20. Derrida presents three types of aporia, stating that “the partitioning among multiple figures of aporia does not oppose figures to each other, but instead installs the haunting of the ones in the other” (20). The classification of aporia proceeds according to the definition of the concept itself.

9. Derrida, Aporias, 64.

(c) by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. No reproduction or any other use is allowed without the publisher’s prior permission.

 

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Dates and Transliteration
• Dramatis Personae
• Map
• Introduction. The Shadow of Nationalism
• Part I – Place
  • Chapter 1: Landscapes
  • Chapter 2: Remembering, Lamenting
  • Chapter 3: Place-Making and Proximity
• Part II – Origin
  • Chapter 4: Lineages and Their Places
  • Chapter 5: Kinship Without Ethnicity
  • Chapter 6: Naming and Its Affiliations
  • Chapter 7: Commemorating Persianate Collectives, Selves
• Coda: Memories and Multiplicity (Lost and Lingering)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Call for Reviews

If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com.

 

For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World

By Wilson Chacko Jacob

About the Book

Sayyid Fadl, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, led a unique life—one that spanned much of the nineteenth century and connected India, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire. For God or Empire tells his story, part biography and part global history, as his life and legacy afford a singular view on historical shifts of power and sovereignty, religion and politics.

Wilson Chacko Jacob recasts the genealogy of modern sovereignty through the encounter between Islam and empire-states in the Indian Ocean world. Fadl’s travels in worlds seen and unseen made for a life that was both unsettled and unsettling. And through his life at least two forms of sovereignty—God and empire—become apparent in intersecting global contexts of religion and modern state formation. While these changes are typically explained in terms of secularization of the state and the birth of rational modern man, the life and afterlives of Sayyid Fadl—which take us from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean worlds to twenty-first century cyberspace—offer a more open-ended global history of sovereignty and a more capacious conception of life.

About the Author

Wilson Chacko Jacob is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. He is the author of Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 (2011).

Scholarly Praise for For God or Empire

“For God or Empire is a gripping global history of the Indian Ocean world, with striking theoretical implications. Wilson Chacko Jacob both recounts the story of modern state sovereignty and troubles it from the grounds of divine sovereignty that cannot be simply read as political theology. A brilliant critical historical inquiry into the present of state sovereignty, threaded with and opposed by life’s other trajectories.”

—Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley

“Wilson Chacko Jacob joins the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds within a hitherto hidden global history to explore the making and movement of ideas. A forceful intellectual intervention in the way we understand sovereignty.”

—Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

Additional Information

July 2019

304 pages

From $30.00 (list price)

Cloth ISBN: 9780804793186
Paper ISBN: 9781503609631
Digital ISBN: 9781503609648

Where to Purchase

Stanford University Press: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25017

Excerpt

From Chapter 1: Remaking the Indian Ocean World: Sufis, Sovereigns, and the Mappilas of Malabar

Your number 79 of 6th January. Sultan Muscat sent troops to Dhofar but failed in recovering forts. Emissaries of Moplah Outlaws [sic] said to be there with flags. Sultan asks us to check Outlaw’s designs. Political agent Muscat proceeding to Dhofar in Brisk to effect settlement. Please instruct Resident Aden to watch any movements by outlaws. Consul General Cairo and Consul Jedda informed through Secretary of State

These words were telegraphed on March 1, 1896 from the Calcutta Foreign Office the British Raj in India to its Bombay Political Office, which at the time was responsible for Near Eastern affairs. The “Outlaw” in question is Sayyid Fadl Ibn Alawi. The various signs and geographical markers strewn throughout this telegram evoke the breadth of the story we are embarking on. We will return to the deep context of this specific alert issued by Calcutta in later chapters.¹ For now it suffices to take in the vastness of the space in which the life history of a single nineteenth-century Muslim preacher unfolded. Take in the view quickly, though, because a good map of this life must plot a much larger, multidimensional space than the coordinates provided by the imperial information web.²

In terms of empire’s knowledge, the ports of Muscat, Dhofar, Shihr, Mukalla, Aden, Cairo, and Jedda became relevant to this specific story once the British exiled Fadl in 1852 from India. The designation “Moplah” (Mappila) evoked the ancient connection to Malabar even as colonial officials described his expulsion as returning him to his “home country” in Arabia. The Muslim communities threaded around the Indian Ocean through port cities and their hinterlands and linked in some way to the Hadhrami Alawi diaspora had maps both similar to and radically different from the imperial map projected in the telegraphic intelligence earlier. The sameness and difference of spatial imagination and organization is one of the themes that a history of Sayyid Fadl helps illuminate.³ In the process, a clearer picture appears of sovereignty’s reconfiguration and its implications for life, death, and more uniform—more global—conceptions of law, politics, and religion.

The life of Sayyid Fadl that I trace is not a standard biography. Rather, as Linda Colley does with the intrepid eighteenth-century world traveler Elizabeth Marsh, we may regard his life as a window onto globally significant historical changes affecting the nature of state, religion, and political subjectivity.⁴ This is not simply because the kinds of sources available make it impossible to provide a sustained account of the development of an internal self, but also because the life Fadl sought to live, however (un)successfully, conformed to rules, laws, and norms that defy the limits of biography.⁵ By the same token, and pace historical treatment of globe-trotting figures such as Marsh, an account of Fadl must also trace life’s genealogy through anthropology, theology, and philosophy. A proper history of Sayyid Fadl’s paradoxical life, as both his and not his, cannot be written if the discipline of history’s temporal terms and conditions are accepted tout court. For the unity of life we seek to glimpse along with Fadl was not fashioned by humans, encompassed life and nonlife, and transcended historical time, existing before and after us. Giving a full account of the historical subject thus requires an (im)possible cartography of life as the subject’s excess.

Returning to the Calcutta telegram—a technology developed during Fadl’s lifetime and intimately tied to far-flung imperial projects—we find juxtaposed to territorial markers signs of sovereignty as we understand it today: flags, troops, warships, sovereigns, residents, agents, and consuls.⁶ These signs recommend an examination of the state form, to which we will have recourse as we consider its expansion and transformation in the nineteenth century, though it is the looming presence of the “outlaw” that will be our primary focus. This label was applied to Fadl at a time when the terms of sovereignty around the Indian Ocean were moving out of a state of flux and settling into the governmentalized state. Probing the distance between the colonial label and the person, between the person and the state, reveals a remarkable picture of the nineteenth century and of our present, in which unresolved problems of sovereignty return as recurring nightmares for many and as an opening to life for some.

Notes

Epigraph from BL IOR/R/20/E/198, Item 1.

1. See also Freitag, Indian Ocean Migrants, 79-81.

2. On the development of a British imperial information order marked by a relationship between state intelligence and local networks of knowledge production and dissemination, see Bayly, Empire and Information. On the role of the culture broker or go-between in contexts around the globe, see Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009).

3. On similar historical formations through the lives and shrines of saints in the Deccan, see Nile Green, “Stories of Saints and Sultans: Re-Membering History at the Sufi Shrines of Aurangabad,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (May 2004): 419-46.  Green’s concluding line is relevant here, “Whatever the epistemic breaks experienced by other historical traditions, the continued topographic presence of the shrines of the Sufi saints and the saints’ continued miraculous intervention in the lives of their communities has in turn helped to ensure the continuity of history itself” (446).

4. Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon, 2007). There are many such works now, including an Oxford University Press series titled “The World in a Life”; see, e.g., Omar H. Ali, Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

5. I am aware of the modernist assumptions of this statement. By “biography,” I mean a genre of modern history writing that consciously departs from prior forms of life- or self-narratives. This departure can also be located in traditions of tarajim/tarikh in Arabic and charitram in Malayalam. See Dwight F. Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and V.N. Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). A work that has become controversial in part for its assertions of radical alterity over time and space but is nonetheless erudite and useful for thinking about multiple modes of writing life is Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); see also Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

6. Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

(c) by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. No reproduction or any other use is allowed without the publisher’s prior permission.

 

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: Life In-Between
• Chapter 1: Remaking the Indian Ocean World: Sufis, Sovereigns, and the Mappilas of Malabar
• Chapter 2: “Where the Sun Rises to Where the Sun Sets”: Origins, Life, and the Faces of Sovereignty
• Chapter 3: “The Tear Will Widen”: Reordering Government Madras to Istanbul
• Chapter 4: “Time Is the Only Veil”: Sufism and the Politics of Recognition
• Chapter 5: Uncertain Returns: Cyberspace, Genetics, and Genealogies
• Chapter 6: “This True and Merciful Way”: Sovereignty and Life’s End(s)
• Conclusion: Sovereignty and Life’s Mysterious Unity
• Notes
• Index

Call for Reviews

If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com.

 

Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire

By Lâle Can

About the Book

At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Central Asians made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Traveling long distances, many lived for extended periods in Ottoman cities dotting the routes. Though technically foreigners, these Muslim colonial subjects often blurred the lines between pilgrims and migrants. Not quite Ottoman and not quite foreign, Central Asians became the sultan’s spiritual subjects. Their status was continually negotiated by Ottoman statesmen as attempts to exclude foreign Muslim nationals from the body politic were compromised by a changing international legal order and the caliphate’s ecumenical claims.

Spiritual Subjects examines the paradoxes of nationality reform and pan-Islamic politics in late Ottoman history. Lâle Can unravels how imperial belonging was wrapped up in deeply symbolic instantiations of religion, as well as prosaic acts and experiences that paved the way to integration into Ottoman communities. A complex system of belonging emerged—one where it was possible for a Muslim to be both, by law, a foreigner and a subject of the Ottoman sultan-caliph. This panoramic story informs broader transregional and global developments, with important implications for how we make sense of subjecthood in the last Muslim empire and the legacy of religion in the Turkish Republic.

About the Author

Lâle Can is Assistant Professor of History at The City College of New York, CUNY.

Scholarly Praise for Spiritual Subjects

“Spiritual Subjects is a beautifully and imaginatively crafted history of the hajj. Lâle Can humanizes the Central Asian pilgrims, telling their stories with the same grace and veneration that they showed in the course of their spiritual journey.”

—Christine Philliou, University of California, Berkeley

“Lâle Can offers us a striking new vision of the late Ottoman Empire . Part study of Ottoman transformation, part social history of travel and the hajj, Spiritual Subjects will reshape our understanding of Islam in the late Ottoman order.”

—Adeeb Khalid, Carleton College

“Spiritual Subjects offers a powerful message, and narrates a tale that has previously been known only in partial relief. The story Lâle Can tells here deftly opens up a fascinating new world to readers.”

—Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University

Additional Information

March 2020

272 pages

From $25.00 (list price)

Cloth ISBN: 9781503610170
Paper ISBN: 9781503611160
Digital ISBN: 9781503611177

Where to Purchase

Stanford University Press: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26509

 

Excerpt

From Chapter 2: Sufi Lodges as Sites of Transimperial Connection

In the fall of 1905, an eight-year-old named Bekir arrived in Istanbul, about midway through a trip that would take him farther than most boys his age would travel in a lifetime. He and his father, a forty-eight-year-old hajji named Azım Han, had set out from Kashgar and crossed the dizzying mountain passes that separated his native city in East, or Chinese, Turkestan from Russian Turkestan, before reaching the terminus—or beginning, depending on how you looked at it—of the Trans-Caspian Railway. While Bekir may have been initially excited about the “fire ships” and “fire wagons” people talked about, he would never see much fire—only dark, ugly coal. As they traveled on these vessels, he would likely have experienced the seasickness and overcrowding that pilgrims frequently complained of and grown weary of being among so many people in such cramped quarters. The journey was no doubt doubly challenging for a young child, who would want to do all the things that eight-year-olds normally do and would have trouble interpreting things that make even less sense to children than they do adults. He might wonder, for example, why they had to repeatedly pay to have people stamp pieces of paper called passports. He would observe how colonial officials mistreated pilgrims and experience firsthand the strangeness of being disinfected at sanitation stations and of being placed in quarantine.¹ During the long trip, he was bound to have heard stories about people being cheated and robbed, and he would spend much time guarding his and his father’s bags and being told by his father to stay close by. He was probably relieved when they arrived in Istanbul and found lodging at the Sultantepe Özbekler Tekkesi, one of the Sufi lodges that served people from Central Asia. In yet another foreign city in a foreign country, it would be home for the next couple of weeks.

When they arrived in Üsküdar, it was early November and father and son joined recent arrivals who had been coming in small groups over the course of the past few weeks. Mehmed Salih Efendi, the postnişin (head of a religious order), entered their names into the register of guests and added them to a running list of people whose passage he was trying to secure on the imperial caravan ships leaving for Jeddah. After tucking away a copy in one of his registers, he had sent the petition to contacts in the government and turned to dealing with other pressing problems. As part of the lodge’s broader mission—later described by his brother Şeyh Edhem Efendi as “the provision of repose to dervishes and the poor” and “refuge and shelter to those among the poor people from Mavaraünnehir [Transoxiana]”—Mehmed Salih performed a number of duties that extended beyond what we might imagine as those of a Sufi shaykh. One of them was to arrange for ill pilgrims to receive medical treatment.² Among the recent arrivals, there was a sick teenager named Ahmet, whom he sent to a hospital for the Muslim poor called Gureba-yı Müslimin, where he would be treated for an undisclosed illness.³

Within days, news would arrive that the pilgrims’ travel documents (mürur tezkeresi) and tickets were being prepared and that they could soon depart.⁴ All of the men (and children) would make it in time for that year’s hajj—including Ahmed, who had been released from the hospital in time to join them. While he waited for their departure, Bekir would spend his days in and around the courtyard, looking for ways to pass the time. The tekke rooms were musty and dank, and there was nothing to do indoors. The boy may have tried to help the resident servant, Hacı Mehmed, with various tasks or sit in the shaykh’s receiving room and watch as he greeted guests and managed the ledgers. During the days, most of the men went out to look for work, to earn money for unexpected expenses they were quickly learning to anticipate. Some of them sold goods they had brought from home or worked odd jobs here and there as day laborers. Those who planned to stay in Istanbul longer sought employment in ateliers and workshops in Üsküdar and the old city, sometimes moving from Sultantepe to the Bukharan lodge in Sultanahmet to be closer to job prospects. When they returned in the evenings, the men gathered in the courtyard and shared stories about their days and discussed strategies for completing a successful hajj. In lilting Chaghatay they would greet each other with long lists of questions—a custom particular

to Central Asians and that likely threw off Ottoman Turks. “How are you? Are you well? How is your father, son, family? Is everything in order? How was work? Did you manage not to get too tired?” they would ask. Placing their hands over their hearts, their interlocutors would answer, “Good, good, thanks to God, everything is in order,” and then repeat the ritual.

On Thursdays, people gathered for the weekly remembrance of God (dhikr), and were often joined by others from the neighborhood and nearby tekkes. Sultantepe was a Naqshbandi brotherhood, but the dhikr incorporated rituals from other orders. Bekir would be too young to understand most of the ceremonies, which included the reading of poems by the twelfth-century mystic Ahmed Yesevi.⁵ But as a boy far from home, he likely looked forward to the big cauldrons of aş, the carrot and mutton rice dish prepared by the resident cook for communal gatherings and that reminded Bekir of Kashgar.

Bekir bin Azım had become a hajji when he was only eight years old (unless he turned nine before reaching Mecca), crossing lands ruled by four different empires—Qing China, Russian Central Asia, Ottoman Istanbul to the Hijaz, and British-occupied Egypt. If he returned to Kashgar and lived to reach the age his father was when they set out, he would no longer be able to travel the same roads to Arabia. As empires were replaced by nation-states, borders increasingly lost their porosity and the types of transregional travel that shaped his early life—and centuries of Central Asian history—began to draw to a close. His own children would likely only know places like Bukhara, Krasnovodosk, Odessa, Istanbul, Alexandria, Mecca, and Medina from their father’s stories or old texts. Undoubtedly, their father had many stories to tell. But as far as we know, he never recorded them. The only glimpses we have of his hajj are the days he spent in Istanbul in the autumn of 1905, when Mehmed Salih Efendi entered his name into a guest register he kept for the central government. We know from these sources how long Bekir was there, what kinds of people he interacted with, and how an Ottoman tekke catering to Central Asians gave him and his father shelter and helped them reach their destination.⁶

Notes

1. Various petitions from people originating from Chinese Turkestan describe the problems they experienced in Russia and ask for representatives or guides to be appointed on their behalf. See, e.g., a letter from Kashgaris dated 7 Ağustos 1322 in BOA, DH.MKT 1110/67, 11 B 1324 (31 August 1906).

2. Undated letter draft from Şeyh [İbrahim?] Edhem Efendi (1829–1904), which seems to be to the Ministry of Pious Endowments, since it mentions the paucity of the tekke’s existing endowed funds and the significant financial strains it faced.

3. Ahmed bin Tohta was a fifteen-year-old from Kashgar. SÖTA Register 1, entry no. 397. Gureba-yı Müslimin was an endowed hospital for the Muslim poor built by Bezmiâlem Valide Sultan, the mother of Sultan Abdülmecid. See Shefer, “Charity and Hospitality.”

4. This was a form of identity and travel document, similar to an internal passport. On its history, see Turna, 19. Yüzyıldan 20. Yüzyıla Osmanlı Topraklarında Seyahat, Göç ve Asayiş Belgeleri.

5. Dhikr (Ottoman, zikir), which literally means remembering or reminding, represents the ways of reminding oneself of God. In Sufi devotional practice, dhikr may be an act of individual devotion or a collective devotion with specific formulas and prayers defined by the tariqa (Sufi order or brotherhood).

6. This vignette is based on entries in SÖTA Register 1, in fall through winter 1905-6 (numbers 372 through 424); and a 5 Şaban 1323 (15 Oct. 1905) petition addressed to an unspecified shaykh. Entry 423 is for Hacı Azım, age 48, and Entry 424 is for his son, Bekir, age 8. Both are listed as from Kashgar, and headed to the Hijaz. The petition was on behalf of a group of men from Chinese Turkestan and was probably written by Mehmed Salih Efendi, who was the postnişin from 1904 until his death in 1915. He succeeded İbrahim Edhem Efendi, who presided over the lodge from c. 1855 to 1904. During part of this period, he shared the post with his brother, Mehmed Sadık (1846–1915). According to Münir Atalar, the imperial caravan steamship transported pilgrims and the annual gift, or “purse” (surre), to Mecca. It included payments to Bedouin tribes for safe conduct, payments to the sharif of Mecca, and monies for people who served in various Ottoman-funded religious institutions in Mecca and Medina. Until 1864, the surre traveled overland to Damascus. From 1864 to 1908 it departed Istanbul by sea, via steamship. After 1908, it traveled by rail. The practice of the imperial caravan ended with WWI and Ottoman loss of control over the Hijaz. See Atalar, Osmanlı Devletinde Surre-i Hümayûn.

(c) by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. No reproduction or any other use is allowed without the publisher’s prior permission.

 

Table of Contents

• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Preface: On Twists and Turns
• Introduction: The Terrain of Transimperial Pilgrimage
• Chapter 1: Rewriting the Road to Mecca
• Chapter 2: Sufi Lodges as Sites of Transimperial Connection
• Chapter 3: Extraterritoriality and the Question of Protection
• Chapter 4: Petitioning the Sultan
• Chapter 5: From Pilgrims to Migrants and De Facto Ottomans
• Conclusion: A Return to Sultantepe
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Call for Reviews

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The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity

By Darryl Li

About the Book

No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.

Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment.  Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both.

About the Author

Darryl Li is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago.

In the Media

“[This book] stingingly criticizes the field of ‘jihadism’ as an academic discipline connected to the national security state…. Li lets his subjects speak for themselves and casts few judgments. The picture that emerges is a morally complex one.”

—Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept

Scholarly Praise for The Universal Enemy

“Thought provoking and beautifully written, The Universal Enemy raises important questions about the legalities, conduct, and effects of global violence in all its forms.”

—Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University

“The Universal Enemy shows brilliantly that jihad is not a uniform terrorist movement but includes a wide variety of actors, motivations, and ideologies inspired by religion and the aspiration for universality, parallel to other ideologies such as human rights.”

—Sally Engle Merry, New York University

“The Universal Enemy is original, authoritative, and broad in significance. This remarkable achievement is anchored in Darryl Li’s unique combination of skills and sensibilities, which are at once ethnographic, lawyerly, and linguistic.”

—Brinkley Messick, Columbia University

Additional Information

December 2019

384 pages

From $30.00 (list price)

Cloth ISBN: 9780804792370
Paper ISBN: 9781503610873
Digital ISBN: 9781503610880

Where to Purchase

Stanford University Press: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24702

Excerpt

From Chapter 1, Migrations

After a decade of piecing together his story from newspaper clippings, excavated online postings, archival documents, and the narratives of others, I sat down with Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, then in his early seventies. We had a pleasant chat in a more or less public place in Jeddah in the winter of 2014 while I was on a brief visit to Saudi Arabia. We were joined by his brother Khalid, a prominent physician whom I had interviewed by Skype several years earlier while Abu Abd al-Aziz was still in prison. Abu Abd al-Aziz had spent the better part of the previous decade incarcerated, but the buoyant sense of humor evident from his 1990s interviews remained: “I like to be happy and to tell people that there is also fun in jihad.” Thanks to his being on US and UN terrorism lists, his bank accounts were frozen and he could not leave the country. Two decades had passed since the only photographs of him that I had seen were taken: now he wore spectacles and the almost pinkish dye in his hair was much more vivid than the orange henna of the early 1990s. Finding Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz was not particularly difficult, requiring little more than knowledge of Arabic, the ability to use an internet search engine, and some deductive reasoning. It was certainly more straightforward—and, for me, less ethnographically noteworthy—than untangling the footnotes and citations of the texts about him circulating through and around the US security state.

More than other fieldwork encounters—including those that took place in contexts of incarceration—this one was overdetermined by the law in one specific sense: through the foreclosure of the very possibility of reciprocity. This is because in 2010, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned an extraordinarily broad interpretation of the crime of material support for terrorism that would include even speech acts ordinarily protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution if undertaken “in coordination with… a foreign terrorist organization.”¹ In the context of my meeting with Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz this meant adopting a maximally cautious approach of avoiding any behavior that could be mischaracterized as “coordination,” even small gestures such as coffee-buying, driving, and draft-sharing that anthropologists use to convince themselves that they can mitigate the disturbingly one-sided power relationships that often structure the act of “fieldwork.” Under US law, the safest course of action was to conjure a relationship of pure parasitism: the collection of data in exchange for nothing.² Yet logics of exchange were not far from Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s mind: after I showed him the quick photograph of him I had snapped on my phone, he chuckled and remarked dryly, “You can sell it.”

Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s enforced immobility follows several generations of transregional migration around the Indian Ocean. In the pages that follow, I hope to give some sense of this movement—not only its geographical range, but also how it could be seen as not so extraordinary for such a person. Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s paternal grandfather, Ahmad Bahadhiq, left his home in the Wadi al-Aysar area of Hadramawt in the early twentieth century, crossed the Arabian Sea, and found his way to the city-state of Hyderabad in southern India.³ Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz and his brother did not know exactly why their grandfather left, but written histories allow some educated guesses. Wadi al-Aysar was conquered with great difficulty in 1898 by forces allied with the Quʿayti sultanate. The new rulers imposed heavy exactions on their vanquished foes, forcing many to sell their lands or go into exile.⁴ One may be tempted to think of Ahmad Bahadhiq’s move as one between nations—Yemen to India—or between regions—from the Middle East to South Asia. But it was also a journey through territory familiar to Hadramis, akin to “two rooms in the same house.”⁵ After all, Hyderabad had been a major destination for Hadramis since at least the late eighteenth century, where despite their limited numbers they became especially prominent in this large multi-ethnic city as soldiers, police officers, and private guards—a migrant military labor force that the British were anxious to surveil.⁶ Tens of thousands of Hadramis and their descendants made the city their home. This migration had significant political ramifications as well: the Quʿaytis who conquered the Bahadhiqs’ lands had themselves amassed their fortunes in Hyderabad. And like Hyderabad, the Quʿayti sultanate was a nominally independent kingdom under indirect British rule, albeit a much smaller one on the overseas fringe of the Indian empire.⁷ Many of the Quʿaytis were absentee aristocrats, more accustomed to living in Hyderabad than in their ancestral homeland.

Nearly a half-century after Ahmad Bahadhiq crossed the sea to Hyderabad, the family moved again. On his deathbed, he told his son Muhammad—Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s father—to go to the Hijaz, site of Islam’s two holiest cities and under the rule of the House of Saud. Muhammad had grown up in Hyderabad, graduated from a government high school, and found a job as a clerk in the government. He married another Hadrami from the Baghazal clan; the family was part of Hyderabad’s cosmopolitan Muslim middle class, and their children grew up speaking Arabic, Urdu, and English. Even decades later, Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s accent in English retained distinctively Urdu characteristics, such as the semivowel medial “v” in words like “government.”⁸ The family’s Indian Arab social world was violently rearranged with the end of British rule in South Asia: decolonization did not just birth the two newly independent states of India and Pakistan, it also led to the absorption of hundreds of princely states, of which Hyderabad was the largest. In September 1948, the Indian army marched into the city, suppressed several competing insurgencies, and accepted the surrender of its Hadrami-led army. The Hadramis’ place in the new order was unclear: some left for Pakistan, while early attempts by India to repatriate those born in Yemen also ran aground.⁹ Those who stayed became a marginalized community in the city, later associated with organized crime and professional sports, especially wrestling. With their status and prospects diminished, the Bahadhiqs came to see their future elsewhere. But instead of crossing the newly forged border between the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Muhammad took to the ocean, finding it to be a more suitably traversable threshold. He journeyed to the gulf coast of Saudi Arabia by ship and made his way by land to Jeddah, as thoroughly cosmopolitan a city as Hyderabad was. A few years later, he sent for his wife and for some of his children—the oldest son stayed behind in India with a prosperous maternal uncle to complete his studies.

Mahmud Bahadhiq, who would later be known to the world as Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, was around ten years old when he arrived in Jeddah. The family may not have felt especially out of place, as the cosmopolitan port city boasted large and long-standing Hadrami and Indian populations and trade ties with the subcontinent, including Hyderabad.¹⁰ Within a few years of settling in the Hijaz, the Bahadhiqs received Saudi citizenship, something that became far more difficult to obtain in subsequent decades. The early years weren’t easy; the boys worked as street vendors, hawking cigarettes, and watermelon seeds in coffee shops or at football matches. With his language skills and work experience, the father readily found work at the US Embassy, which around that time moved to a new compound on the northern outskirts of the city. He died of tuberculosis in 1962, and his widow continued to work from home, stuffing and addressing envelopes containing copies of the embassy’s Arabic newsletter. In the meantime, the boys managed to visit India a few times, except now they flew, arriving via Bombay in 1965 to see their uncle. For Mahmud, it was the start of decades of travel: after completing high school in Syria in 1967, he applied to be a pilot for Saudia Airlines, which was training its first generation of pilots to replace the Americans provided by the ARAMCO oil company. He remembered being impressed with the smart uniforms he saw on pilots in Syria, with their neckties and stripes. Colorblindness disqualified him from the job, but he was instead hired as a secretary and eventually worked his way up to middle management—a job that would take him all over the world. Several years later, Mahmud visited Egypt for the first time, and while calling on the family of a colleague in Mansura met the woman who would become his first wife, ʿAzza—“you can write it,” he pointed at my notebook as he mentioned her name. They wed in 1973.

For Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, the shift to jihad came with middle age. By the mid-1980s, Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz was nearing early retirement from Saudia Airlines, which gifted him with a Rado wristwatch that an envious fellow mujahid in Bosnia would “borrow” years later.¹¹ He and ʿAzza, already active in charitable causes, were at the time caught up in the general mood of solidarity with the Afghan jihad prevalent in Jeddah. Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz decided to check things out for himself: he traveled to Pakistan on holiday and spent a few weeks in a training camp financed by bin Laden. The decision to travel and fight may seem either pathological or heroic when left in the margins of grand geopolitical narratives of “global jihad.” Those accounts have focused on the billions of dollars spent by the United States and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s to drive the war in Afghanistan but have had much less to say about the parallel networks of activism built on a confluence of migratory ties shaped and driven by oil, capital, and piety across the Indian Ocean and the Arab world. The Hijaz region became an important site for these mobilizations through the multiple opportunities for networking afforded by the Hajj pilgrimage, Saudi-sponsored pan-Islamic organizations, and Jeddah’s cosmopolitan communities and its massive new airport, opened in 1981. When understood against this backdrop, Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz emerges clearly not simply as a Saudi national radicalized into joining other people’s wars, but as a third-generation migrant with a genealogy extending from Hadramawt to Hyderabad to the Hijaz, command of multiple languages, and a career in civil aviation that allowed him to travel widely.

Notes

1. Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 561 U.S. 1, 24 (2010). In that case, an American NGO found itself exposed to potential criminal liability merely for offering designated terrorist groups training in international humanitarian law. If one subscribes to the notion that the definition of terrorism is nonstate violence against civilians, then it would seem that helping terrorists give up terrorism can itself be a form of supporting terrorism.

2. To be precise: the statute in question, 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, concerns the several dozen “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) declared as such by the State Department, a different category from the Treasury’s list of thousands of “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” (SDGTs) that includes individuals like Abu ʿAbd al-ʿAziz. In the context of material support prosecutions, there is no clear standard for determining whether any individual (SDGT or otherwise) is part of an FTO—but in any event, I had no interest in offering myself up as a test case for this question.

3. The Bahadhiq brothers I interviewed had different recollections about their grandfather Ahmad’s work in Hyderabad: Khalid believed he joined the military, while Mahmud said he worked as a clerk. One of Ahmad’s brothers migrated even further east to the Indonesian island of Java and was buried there.

4. See Boxberger, 190–91.

5. Nita Verma Prasad, “Indian or Arabian?” 200.

6. Muslims were about 10 percent of Hyderabad’s population throughout the first half of the twentieth century, of whom Hadramis were a small fraction. The Hyderabad branch of the Hadrami diaspora in Hyderabad has received less thorough treatment than its counterparts in island southeast Asia, but some of the relevant work includes Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire, 93–108; Prasad; Leif Man­ger, “Hadramis in Hyderabad,” 410–15; Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-Qādir Bakrī , Tārīkh Ḥaḍramawt al-siyāsī, Vol. 2, 239–40; Khālid Bāwazīr, Mawānī ʾ sāḥil Ḥaḍramawt, 73–110; and Omar Khalidi, “The Arabs of Hadramawt, South Yemen in Hyderabad.”

7. Having established themselves in 1858, the Quʿaytis were later effectively deputized by the British to create a buffer zone around Aden. For more on the Quʿayti-British relationship, see Boxberger, 183–240; Ho, Graves of Tarim, 257–58. The Quʿayti sultanate was abolished by the 1967 advent of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.

8. See Delić Exhibit 51 for audio of the August 1992 interview with Abu ʿAbd al- ʿAziz conducted by the journalist Andrew Hogg.

9. On India’s attempts to expel Arabs from Hyderabad, see Taylor Sherman, “Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956.” On the Arabs’ claims to British diplomatic protection either as British protected persons or Commonwealth citizens, see Petition of Arab Representatives to Military Governor Maj. Gen. J. N. Chaudhuri, November 7, 1948, UKNA DO/142/441.

10. Wahīb Aḥmad Kābilī, al-Ḥirafiyyūn fī madīnat Jidda, 33–51; ʿAbd al-Quddūs Anṣārī, Tārīkh madīnat Jidda, 205. Hyderabad’s government and ruling monarchs owned numerous properties in the Hijaz in the mid-nineteenth century and helped to finance the construction of the Hijaz railway later on. See Alavi, 192–93, 224; William Ochsenwald, “The Financing of the Hijaz Railroad,” 142.

11. See “Muqābala maʿa al-mujāhid al-shaykh Abū ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (al-juzʾal-thānī lā yafūtuk),” June 2, 2002, http://www.montada.com/showthread.php?p=899505[site now password-protected]

(c) by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. No reproduction or any other use is allowed without the publisher’s prior permission.

 

Table of Contents

• Terms of Engagement
• Dramatis Personae
• Introduction
• Part I – Jihad
  • Chapter 1: Migrations
  • Chapter 2: Locations
  • Chapter 3: Authorities
  • Chapter 4: Groundings
• Interlude: Exchanging Arabs
• Part II – Other Universalisms
  • Chapter 5: Non-Alignment
  • Chapter 6: Peacekeeping
  • Chapter 7: The Global War on Terror
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Call for Reviews

If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com.