‘The Internationalism of Islam’: The British Perception of a Muslim Menace, 1840–1951
Abstract This article assesses British perceptions of a Muslim menace to imperial security between 1840–1951. These ideas had a long life. They rarely stood in the first rank of imperial concerns, but sometimes in the second. Over this period, British ideas of an Islamic menace focused first on the political self-consciousness of all Muslims than on subterranean bodies which tried to bind masses and elites for political ends, and moved to nationalist movements with a narrow popular base, and finally to those with a mass base. Between 1915 and 1924, fear of a pan-Islamic menace significantly affected British strategic and imperial policy. These ideas involved the interaction of observation, intelligence, perception, learning, fear, ignorance and uncertainty. Their study illuminates the evolution both of British intelligence and of its ideas about the political self-consciousness of its subjects, and the threat that posed to its rule, particularly about the nature and power of colonial nationalism.
Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c.1850–1950
Introduction: fragmenting sovereignty 1. Minor sovereignties: Hyderabad among states and empires 2. The legal framework of sovereignty Part I. Ideas: 3. A passage to another India: Hyderabad's discursive universe 4. Hyderabad and the world: bureaucrat-intellectuals and Muslim modernist internationalism Part II. Institutions: 5. Moglai temporality: institutions, imperialism and the making of the Hyderabad frontier 6. Frontier as resource: law, crime and sovereignty on the margins of empire Part III. Urban Space: 7. Remaking city, developing state: ethical patrimonialism, urbanism and economic planning 8. Improvising urbanism: sanitation and power in Hyderabad and Secunderabad Conclusion: fragmented sovereignty in a world of nation-states.
The Origins of the Foundation Stories Genre in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Eastern Mediterranean
This article examines two types of foundation narrative prevalent in the biblical literature in light of as-yet-undiscussed parallels from ancient Greek and Mediterranean texts. The first type, embodied in the Genesis narratives and Greek genealogical traditions, portrays the founders as leaving a distant land to settle peacefully in a new land. The second is exemplified by the central hexateuchal theme of the Israelites’ migration to Canaan by dispossessing the native population as well as the Dorian migration traditions. Several factors indicate that the foundation story genre also became central and foundational in other small kingdoms around the Mediterranean—as indicated, for example, by the Phoenician–Luwian inscriptions referring to bt Mpš/Mopsus and related classical sources. The popularity of the genre in the ancient Mediterranean is striking in light of the fact that, while experiencing tribal migrations and wanderings, the great Mesopotamian and Egyptian kingdoms never represented themselves as “immigrants.” It is suggested that this genre may have emerged with the rise of the new, small-scale kingdoms in the Mediterranean basin toward the end of the second millennium b.c.e. The Phoenician and Greek colonization enterprises of the first third of the first millennium b.c.e. in particular increased awareness of the newly emerging states and focused attention on ethnic identity.