A presentation by Michael O'Sullivan
Thursday, November 19, 201511:00 AM - 1:00 PM
11372 Bunche Hall
This presentation speaks to debates on the character of pan-Islam in Ottoman and South Asian historiography. It consists of two parts. In the first half, Michael examines the creation of a series of Ottoman consulates in colonial India from 1849. He is concerned with how the colonial authorities viewed Ottoman participation in an otherwise 'liberal' religious economy and how the consulates worked as extraterritorial proxies for the Ottoman government. In the second section of the paper Michael analyzes how Indian books, scholars, and money altered the religious landscape of the late Ottoman Empire. As largely untapped Ottoman archival and Indian newspaper sources demonstrate, the Ottoman government received enormous remittances from Indian Muslim associations beginning in 1877. Here he follows the transfer of these remittances from cities in India to the branches of the Imperial Ottoman Bank in London, Paris, and Istanbul. By shoring up the Ottoman government's capital base at a moment of great financial weakness, Indian Muslims sought to preserve Muslim sacred space in the Balkans, furnish the Ottomans with a railway for the Hajj, and support the families of Ottoman soldiers martyred in Benghazi and Salonika. The Ottoman consulates did play a minor role in these fundraising efforts, but were eclipsed and even bypassed by Indian financial and religious networks. Therefore, Michael argues that the financial resources of the Muslim communities of British India - and less Ottoman activities and religious rhetoric - made late Ottoman pan-Islam a material possibility. This financial infrastructure underpinning Muslim associations from Rangoon and Vizianagaram to Deoband and Karachi was later central to the Khilafat movement.