Circulation of Ideas and Capital: The Arabic Islamic Modernist Periodical al-Manar (1898–1935) and the Bombay Mercantile Communities

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Abstract

As various studies have demonstrated, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ British ‘imperial cosmopolitanism’ had contradictory effects. While the British Empire’s political and technological connectivity brought together geographically distanced communities, such ‘cosmopolitanism’ also produced new segregated politics that stressed ethnic and linguistic differences between members of different religious communities. By focusing on the interactions between the South Asia-based milieu of the Islamic modernist journal al-Manar (‘the Light-house’) (1898–1935) and Bombay’s Arab mercantile communities (mostly from the Arabian Peninsula) from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, this chapter examines how these connections triggered various visions of Arab-Muslim identity that sought to reshape the pedagogical position of Arabic as a transregional Muslim language. Founded in Cairo by the Syrian-born Muhammad Rashid Rida (1898–1935), al-Manar was one of the most important outlets of Islamic modernism, reaching various Muslim communities around the world. The diversity of topics covered by al-Manar notwithstanding its call for Islamic unity overshadowed all others. Within this unifying call, however, the role of the Arabs in the history of Islam was elevated above that of other ethnicities, conditioning Islamic unity on the utilization of the Arabic language, in addition to internalization of the journal’s Islamic modernist discourse. Al-Manar’s milieu sought to make British India, the home to the world’s largest number of Muslims until its 1947 partition, into one of the journal’s major target audiences. As this chapter shows, due to the period’s emergence of national imaginations in South Asia, especially Urdu’s primacy as an Indian Muslim lingua franca and its preference over Arabic, al-Manar’s message was espoused mainly by Bombay’s Arab mercantile families who searched, amidst their transregional commercial endeavors, for a sense of belonging in the crystalized environment produced by British colonialism. Overlooked by scholars of South Asia and the Middle East, the encounter between al-Manar’s milieu and Bombay’s Arab mercantile families tells an untold story of the formation of Arab scholarly networks across both these regions.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Routledge Handbook of Global Islam and Consumer Culture
EditorsBirgit Krawietz, François Gauthier
Place of PublicationAbingdon
PublisherRoutledge
Chapter8
Pages123-137
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781003152712
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Sept 2024

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