![]() Cosmopolis Of A Shared WorldviewFrancis Robinson MUSLIM COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE By Seema Alavi Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2015, pp. 490, Rs. 1495.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 10 October 2015 A feature of scholarship on Muslims and Islam in South Asia
until recently was that it tended not to explore their connections
beyond the subcontinent. The British as historians,
though not as rulers, established this tendency. After Partition Indian
Muslims for very good political reasons chose not to draw attention
to their historical links with the wider Muslim world. Recently
this has all changed. Several books on the Mughals, in particular
Moin Azfar’s The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and
Sainthood in Islam(Columbia University Press, 2014) has demonstrated
that it is not possible to understand Mughal kingship without
becoming aware of its Timurid background. The same goes for
much else of the Mughal period from the role of women at court
through to Islamic scholarship. Nile Green has demonstrated in his
Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–
1915 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) that to understand Islam
as practised in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bombay it is not
nearly enough to take into account its hinterlands in northern India
and Hyderabad. One must also take into account the great networks
of trade, princely and Sufi connections linking the Indian Ocean
worlds of South and East Africa, the Hadhramaut and Iran to the
great seaport.
Seema Alavi is concerned to show how in the nineteenth century
networks of primarily Indian Muslims grew in the spaces which lay
between the British and Ottoman empires, and also to a lesser extent
the Russian empire. Important underpinnings of these networks
were the improved communications provided by the British Empire
but also largely similar positions on Islamic reform, that is being
against worship at saints’ shrines and for a personal engagement with
scripture. Sufi connections were also there, in particular those of the
reforming elements of the Naqshbandiyya, so too, frequently, were
those of trade. Particularly important in fashioning a world of connected
sensibility was print, only seriously adopted in the Ottoman
and Indian Muslim worlds in the early nineteenth century. Printed
books, and increasingly newspapers, helped to fashion a shared world
of ideas and feelings. Thus the Muslim world of India linked into
Mecca, Cairo, Istanbul and further afield. This world of personal
connections, and often a shared worldview, Alavi terms a Muslim
cosmopolis.
Alavi begins with an excellent chapter on the Muslim reformers
in the context of the transition to British rule. She argues that the
central processes of reform—the reduction of ... Table of Contents >> |