Pan-Islam

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PAN-ISLAM

Pan-Islam is the ideology that calls for the unity and cooperation of Muslims worldwide on the basis of their shared Islamic identity. Apart from this general description, the idea of pan-Islam has been formulated in myriad ways and used for various political ends during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The term "pan-Islam" is of nineteenth-century European origin and was used primarily to describe Ottoman attempts at promoting Muslim unity to counter European imperialism. Yet, the central premise of pan-Islam, that all Muslims form a single community of believers (umma) that ideally should be united politically as well as spiritually, may be traced to the very origins of Islam itself. Several Qur?anic verses refer to the Muslims as constituting a single community (e.g., 2:143, 3:110). Others warn against the dangers of fragmentation and internal strife (e.g., 3:103, 105). The prophet Muhammad clearly tried to forge a sense of Muslim communal solidarity that transcended the traditional tribal loyalties of the Arabs, as in the famous example of the "Constitution of Medina," in which the migrants from Mecca and the newly converted tribes of Medina are described as "a single umma apart from all other men." Although the political unity of the umma was shattered soon after the Prophet's death, the ideal continued to linger for several centuries afterwards, as best demonstrated in the reluctance of political theorists to accept the legitimacy of multiple, simultaneous caliphs.

Numerous attempts to unite Muslims through a revival of Islamic faith may be found in Islamic history. But given the far expanse of Islamic civilization, all of these were confined geographically. Many factors converged in the nineteenth century to allow a far more universal scope for attempts to unite Muslims: the steady loss of Ottoman territories in Europe, the advance of European colonialism into Muslim states in Africa and Asia, and the spread of mass communication media. Pan-Islam developed primarily as a defense mechanism to counter the military and political advance of European powers, primarily Britain, France, and Russia. The Ottoman Empire, the largest and most centrally located Sunni state, and the guardian of the holy sites of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, was best suited to exploit rising concerns with European imperialism and to initiate pan-Islamic responses.

Two men, more than any others, shaped the development of pan-Islam during the late nineteenth century: the Ottoman sultan ?Abd al-Hamid II (1842–1918) and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897). ?Abd al-Hamid cultivated the pan-Islamic sentiments that had emerged during the 1860s and 1870s under the impact of German and Italian unification during the reign of his predecessor, ?Abd al-?Aziz (1830–1876), and gave them the status of an official ideology. As it did for ?Abd al-?Aziz, pan-Islam provided ?Abd al-Hamid a rallying cry against both European powers and internal modernizers and critics of the sultanate.

Central to ?Abd al-Hamid's pan-Islam was the claim that the Ottoman sultan was the caliph of Islam, or at least of Sunni Islam. The Ottoman claim to the caliphate dated back centuries, but under ?Abd al-Hamid the title was asserted with far greater vigor than it had been before within the empire, and for the first time serious attempts were made to win the loyalty of Muslims beyond the Ottoman realm. Inside the empire, the sultan's pan-Islam meant the cultivation of Muslim interests over those of Christian and other non-Muslim minorities as well as increased state support for Islamic courts, schools, and religious orders. Outside the empire, a propaganda campaign was launched, using print media and emissaries or spies, to spread an image of the sultan as a pious Muslim ruler, the only one capable of effectively uniting Muslims against Christian colonizers.

?Abd al-Hamid's claims to the caliphate were challenged immediately, and the general failure of his pan-Islamic campaign partly contributed to his deposition following the Young Turk revolt of 1908. Still, the fruits of ?Abd al-Hamid's propaganda may be seen in the Indian Muslim agitation over the fate of the Ottoman caliphate following the First World War.

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani's early career emphasized the need for reform within particular Muslim countries, under the leadership of their own rulers. By the 1870s, Afghani's activism had assumed a decidedly pan-Islamic emphasis. He suggested that the only way to ameliorate the weakness of individual Muslim states was to form a bloc of semi-autonomous states, all recognizing the suzerainty of the Ottoman caliph. Afghani thus sought to combine nationalism and pan-Islam, apparently seeing no contradictions between the two.

Afghani proposed to ?Abd al-Hamid as early as the late 1870s that he be sent as an emissary to Afghanistan to rally support for the sultan's claims to the caliphate. The sultan, suspicious of Afghani's motivations, responded by encouraging him to continue his agitation from abroad but doing little to assist him. In 1892, ?Abd al-Hamid invited Afghani to settle in Istanbul. Afghani would die there four years later, disillusioned and complaining that he was a prisoner of the sultan.

Pan-Islamic appeals continued to be heard in the period before and immediately after the First World War, as in the Ottoman jihad proclamation of 1914, but increasingly they were made in the service of Turkish, Arab, or Indian Muslim nationalism. The issue that most stirred pan-Islamic loyalties was the fate of the Ottoman caliphate, particularly among the Muslims of British India. Ulema of the Deoband school led Indian Muslim opposition to the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, seeing in it a British ploy to seize control of the central Islamic lands. When Constantinople was occupied by the Allies at the end of the war, Indian nationalist leaders, chief among them the journalist Muhammad ?Ali, launched the Khilafat Movement to lobby the British government for the Ottoman caliph's retention of sovereignty over the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Iraq, and Anatolia, the "spiritual heartland" of Islam. Meanwhile, in 1919, groups of Indian ulema organized the hijra (migration) of Muslims from the subcontinent to Afghanistan, arguing that Muslims could no longer remain in a territory ruled by Great Britain while it was attempting to destroy the caliphate. Approximately 18,000, mostly poor, Muslims trekked to the Afghan border, only to be denied entry by the Afghan government. Thousands lost their lives to disease and hunger in the process. By the time the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, the Khilafat agitation had already diminished because of disillusionment and internal squabbles. Hopes that a reconstituted caliphate might reinvigorate pan-Islamic sentiments died when two conferences held in 1926, one in Cairo, the other in Mecca, ended in bitter disagreements over who should assume the title. A third conference held in 1931 in Jerusalem called only for solidarity and cooperation among Muslim peoples.

Muslim solidarity and international cooperation, rather than any supranational unity, is the way pan-Islam has generally been articulated in the years since the Second World War. Even those Muslim intellectuals who challenge the legitimacy of separate Muslim nation-states according to Islamic values do not propose any meaningful political union of Muslim states and in fact generally focus their activism on gaining control of a particular state.

The most prominent manifestation of pan-Islam today is in the host of transnational nongovernmental and intergovernmental Islamic organizations. During the 1950s, Pakistan initiated the creation of the Mu?tamar al-?Alam al-Islami, but disagreements with secular Arab governments over the organization's purpose led to its failure. During the 1960s, the campaign to create pan-Islamic organizations was revived by King Faysal of Saudi Arabia. With his backing, the Rabitat al-?Alam al-Islami was created in 1962 to provide a nongovernmental forum for the discussion and dissemination of Islamic viewpoints on issues facing Muslims around the world. In 1969, following Israel's capture of Jerusalem in the Six Day War, twenty-four Muslim states voted to form the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). In 2003 the OIC consisted of fifty-seven members, and though it is frequently criticized for its ineffectiveness, it remains the most important and universal expression of pan-Islamic political aspirations since the abolition of the caliphate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Khan, Saad S. Reasserting International Islam: A Focus on theOrganization of the Islamic Conference and other Islamic Institutions. Karachi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Kramer, Martin. Islam Assembled: The Advent of the MuslimCongresses. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Landau, Jacob. The Politics of Pan-Islam. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Sohail H. Hashmi

Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World