John M. Willis

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1:  Jerusalem 1931

Chapter2:  Pakistan’s Dragoman

Chapter 3:  The Qalandar-Diplomat

Chapter 4:  The Revolutionary in Exile 

Chapter 5:  The Blind Shaykh and the Star of the Orient

Chapter 6:  A Traveler in the East

Conclusion

The Indian Muslim poet Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) is considered the originator of the Pakistan idea and the poet-philosopher of the Islamic state.  Outside of Pakistan his Persian and Urdu verse was enthusiastically adopted as an authentically Muslim call for anti-colonial resistance in a world on the verge of decolonization.  Thinkers as diverse as Roeslan Abdulgani, one of the principal architects of the Afro-Asian Conference, and Ali Shariati, an early theorist of the Islamic state in Iran, considered Iqbal to be at the forefront of a modern postcolonial Asian literature.   His poetic exhortation that “the true League of Nations is the unity of humanity” (jamiat-i aqwam ke jamiat-i Adam) informed a generation of Muslim anti-colonial activists, searching for a form of transnational political association beyond European empire.  Yet, Iqbal’s place in the Arabic-speaking world has largely been forgotten, despite a brief and frenetic engagement with his poetry in the immediate post-war period. 

Cosmopolitanism in Translation tells the story of the Arab World’s encounter with Muhammad Iqbal in the mid-twentieth century by following the lives and itineraries of his Arab translators.  Brought together by employment or political circumstances in the first decade of Pakistan’s independence, a small network of Arab diplomats, poets, activists, and refugees gathered in the cosmopolitan port of Karachi, often under the auspices of the revived World Islamic Conference, and read, discussed, and translated the verse of Iqbal.  At this nexus of transnationalism and translation, Iqbal’s vision of Islamic unity became synonymous with the political project of Pakistan and thus, in its Arabic translation, bore witness to the possibilities of a postcolonial order whose horizons were not determined by secular (Arab) nationalism but by the bonds of faith. 

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter One:  City of Caliphs

Chapter Two:  City of Refuge

Chapter Three:  City of the Living Dead

Chapter Four:  City of Brotherhood

Chapter Five:  City of Traces

Conclusion

In a 2019 interview with the program 60 Minutes, Muhammad b. Salman or “MbS”, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, stated that Saudi Arabia had been on a developmental course like any other Gulf country “until 1979.” The argument, repeated by the likes of Thomas Friedman, is that the 1979 siege of Mecca, perpetrated by Islamist critics of the Saudi state, had pushed the government to enforce an austere scriptualist interpretation of Islam that ended 40 years of a pluralist, moderate, and modernizing Saudi society. Appealing as this narrative of a cosmopolitan historical trajectory arrested by the forces of conservative Islam is, it is itself built upon its own kind of willed forgetting, an intentional lapse in historical memory that obscures the role of the Saudi State in forestalling the kinds of cosmopolitan possibilities that MbS argues ended in 1979.

Meccan Variations returns to the city of Mecca in the years between the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and the founding of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and charts the emergence of the holy city as the site of multiple liberatory political projects in the interwar period. Using the language of the musical variation on a theme, in this case Mecca’s paradigmatic status as an “other space” (Foucault’s heterotopia) distinct from the mundane world around it, the book recounts the city’s possible futures in projects to restore the caliphate, redefine the meaning of political life, and to establish a Meccan republic that would act as the ethical and political center of a new global ethical order. That the major actors in these movements were activists and intellectuals from South Asia indicates the extent to which Mecca’s other futures were bound up with the trans-regional politics of anti-colonialism and Islamic reform. In short, Meccan Variations suggests a history, or histories, of political possibility that were not enabled by the emergence of the Saudi kingdom, but forestalled by its very foundation.

From the Publisher

Unmaking North and South revisits the Yemeni past by situating the historical construction of Yemen’s north and south as bounded political, social, and moral spaces in the broader context of imperial rule, state formation, and religious reform in the Indian Ocean arena. The study is centered on the formation of the British Aden Protectorate and the Zaydi-Shiite Imamate of the Hamid al-Din family in the period between 1857 and 1934. Focusing on the British creation of a series of ‘native states’ on the model of princely India in the Yemeni south and Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din’s formation of a hybrid state based on Ottoman state forms and Sunni reformist ideology in the north, the book demonstrates the extent to which Yemen’s modern history was rooted both in the structures of the British Raj and the intellectual debates of the greater Sunni Muslim world. The book uses a variety of case studies dealing with imperial state ritual, arms smuggling, cartography and colonial ethnography, debates over the nature of the Islamic polity, and an undeclared war between the British and the Yemeni Imamate in order to re-center the history of Yemen in a trans-regional context. Moving deftly between narratives of the colonial, local, modern, and Islamic, Willis questions the historical inevitability of the post-colonial Yemeni nation and suggests other modes of narrating Yemen’s contested past.