Humayun Ansari

Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali’s Transnationalism: Pan-Islamism, Colonialism, and Radical Politics

Muslim challenges to Western hegemony over the past two centuries have received much scholarly attention in recent years. This, in turn, has generated growing interest in their role as a marker of resistance to imperialism, stretching from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of decolonization following World War II. In many parts of the so-called Muslim world, this defiance assumed the guise of Pan-Islamism, which burst onto the political scene in the form of mass mobilizations such as that associated with the Khilafat Movement in India (1919–1924) during the early interwar period. Such developments raised the question of the significance of this Pan-Islamic movement. Not surprisingly, contrasting perspectives have emerged, some arguing that the movement posed a serious threat to the West, while others have judged this insistence by contemporary agents of political surveillance on its severity to be largely an attack of the nerves. Indeed, as far as this second response is concerned, it would seem that target populations often took the writings and programs of Pan-Islamic leaders with a proverbial “grain of salt” and were skeptical of their radicalism, while colonial authorities tended to overinflate their impact.

“Tasting the King’s Salt”: Muslims, Contested Loyalties and the First World War

Identities and loyalties have become increasingly salient in contemporary popular and official political discourse, particularly in relation to Muslims. By exploring how Muslims juggled divergent loyalties in the context of the First World War, this chapter addresses the ebbs and flows of what being “loyal” meant to them in practice. It is argued that Muslim loyalties, whether of combatants or civilians, were multiple and that these competed and intersected with each other. While Muslim attachments to their own specific realms were effectively harnessed by the British to serve their Empire, Muslim responses were largely instrumentalist in character; contextual and contractual, they were variously and continually generated and shaped by their own diverse values rather than primarily by an emotional patriotic devotion to Britain and its Empire.

The Multiculturalism Backlash and the Mainstreaming of Islamophobia Post-9/11

In response to the failure of the assimilationist agenda of the early 1960s, the idea of multiculturalism had by the end of the twentieth century broadly come to be accepted as an effective strategy for managing diversity in British society. Since 9/11, however, it has sustained heavy attacks from a variety of antagonists. Increasingly, the multiculturalism backlash has come to be linked with critiques of Islam and Muslims and, in turn, with Islamophobia. Given the small size of the Muslim communities in Northern Ireland (4000–5000), the praxis of multiculturalism remains relatively underdeveloped, but there has emerged considerable evidence of anti-Muslim bigotry that runs in parallel with Protestant-Catholic tensions.