KARACHI: Historian Ayesha Jalal’s lectures are worth attending. They yank you from the high pedestal you so comfortably sit on, roughen you up a bit and send you sprawling down to your knees. Her latest talk, held at the Aga Khan University on Friday as part of their Special Lecture Series, achieved something similar. The ambiguously vast topic, ‘Islam is the Ocean: Muslims and Globalisation in the Age of Empire’ weaved together snippets from history and historical figures that cross-channelled the oceans to forge colonial ties with like-minded brethren. This in turn influenced the trajectory of Islam to what it is today.

The two lands that Ms Jalal scrutinised were South Asia, referred to as Hindustan throughout the lecture, and West Asia, popularly known as the Middle East. “Exploring the contours of Oceanic Islam in the modern world, especially after the 1850s,” Ms Jalal documented how Islam should not be likened to the desert, but more to the ocean as it not just traversed deserts in caravans, but more dominantly through the oceans, and down river streams. This analogy set the stage for the revelation that followed: Islam and its various patrons in Hindustan undertook several journeys on the high seas to propagate, promulgate and protect the sovereignty of Islam, whether it needed these efforts or not. This was primarily in retaliation to the “relentless onslaught of European thought and its technological determinism practised against the Islamic world.”

These were “intellectual journeys in search of other Muslim lands and to identify Islamic universalism,” and were followed by various sources of oral, textual and visual interpretations of a much more diverse form of Islam than previously imagined. What aided historians like Ms Jalal to examine this alternative narrative was the extensive documentation of these journeys, in the form of travelogues, printed in periodicals. According to her, “the question that needed to be addressed was whether the Muslim ummah really existed, or was it just a figment of the imagination among Indian Muslims.” And so men like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Shibli Naumani, Munshi Mahboob Alam and Mohammad Ali Jauhar boarded ships to distant ‘Muslim’ lands in search of answers.

Their travelogues, printed in the late 19th- and early 20th-century were reformist, politically-inclined and enlightening. Revealing the dynamics of social fabrics from Egypt to the more prominent areas of the Ottoman Empire, the lesson these scholars learnt, and shared, was that Islam was no longer dwelling in isolation, but had adopted a more cosmopolitan outlook.

A prominent publisher and journalist based in Lahore, Munshi Alam, owned the newspaper Paisa Akhbar in which his travels to Europe, and the likes, were recorded. Ms Jalal shared details about his journey to Egypt, specifically his interactions with students at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Fascinated by the diversity at the university, and the ease with which students disregarded the basic tenants of Islam in the face of acquiring knowledge, he realised, according to Ms Jalal, that “Islamic history is more nostalgic rather than analytic.”

Ms Jalal’s premise encompasses the belief that colonial networks by scholars and reformers within Hindustan were rampantly utilised to allow intimate navigation into distant lands that was not possible earlier. This argument was furthered by giving examples of how, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Indian Muslims became more involved in the affairs of the land, and thus journeys to Istanbul increased. They empathised with the Turks as they formed connections between the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and their own predicament of living in a land which they had once ruled and now were subjugated in. However, she emphasised that “the emotive bonds of Muslim universalism did not translate into political bonds”.

Allama Iqbal was also a feature at the lecture and credited for his disdain against “territorial nationalism” which he considered a source of most conflicts. He did espouse the importance of Muslim unity that, according to him, should not be confused with pan-Islamism.

A detached academic study of the schisms and chasms in Islamic history, emphasised by Ms Jalal on many occasions, was essential for a more nuanced understanding of how Islam developed and influenced societies, as well as how it itself transformed. She allowed a glimpse into how a view of the Muslim world, among Muslims, was in sharp contrast to the practical reality. This was true in the 19th century, as is in the 21st.

Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2015

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