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

Abstract

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.