The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Pan-Islamism

Pan-Islamism (1876) or Pan-Islam (1882) was an interpretative concept developed by Western observers to denote claims by Muslim public intellectuals and politicians to represent what they imagined to be a unified Muslim community (umma). Though some Western writers denied that this concept referred to anything real, and in spite of the fact that its use was extremely diverse, it deeply influenced the public opinion on Islam and Muslims, especially from 1880 to 1920. In scholarship, Pan-Islam or Pan-Islamism has been studied from 1900 onward. It was mostly Indian Muslim writers who, from the late 19th century, used the concept in a positive sense. Already in the 1870s, the Ottoman term ittiḥād-i islām (Union of Islam) was conceptually contextualized on the pattern of Western pan-ideologies, in particular pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism. The term itself had come into public use in the middle of the 1860s and soon spread to India and Iran. Originally there was no clear Arabic expression that reflected the Ottoman usage. Only at a later stage in the 19th century did Egyptian reformers coin terms like waḥda islāmiyya (Islamic Unity) or jāmi‘a islāmiyya (Islamic Union). Nevertheless, already in the late 1870s Muslim reformers based in Egypt, notably Afghani (ca. 1838–97), identified Pan-Islamism as descriptive of a political and cultural agency whose claim was not to be restricted to specific national publics. Many Muslims and some Western writers were extremely critical of efforts to assemble the heterogeneity of Muslim public expressions under the single term Pan-Islam, as this only mirrored the Western construct of a “Muslim peril” (following clichés like the “yellow peril”). In fact, Pan-Islamism was often interpreted as an endeavor to unite Muslims under the despotic rule of the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II using Sufi orders and other religious groups or secret political associations, both creating a “widespread European anxiety about Muslim solidarity.” In this sense, Pan-Islamism had been frequently used as a framework to contextualize Islam in the then-current realm of political imagination.

Although no longer used as an analytical tool to study Islamic political thought, Pan-Islamism can be discussed as a historical label for different and partly contradictory intellectual and political trends from the 1870s to the 1930s. Both Western observers and Muslims refer mainly to one of the following trends: (1) the claim of the Ottoman Empire to act as a representative of the Muslim world in its struggle with colonial powers; (2) the claim of specific social groups and communities, such as certain Sufi orders, to represent a network of internal solidarity and loyalty that transcend the nation-state boundaries; (3) the claim of Muslim public intellectuals that they represent Islam as a transnational cultural and even political order that should be reunified against the particularism and despotism of nation-states as well as against the dominion of Western colonial powers and, not least, against Christian missionary activities; and (4) a general cultural call for the “awakening of an Islamic conscience” and a striving for “free and complete expression of progress in Moslem societies.”

All four trends have in common (1) a reference to the totality of the Muslim World and its “valorization” as a symbolic framework of political activity; (2) a definition of some sort of political, social, or cultural representation, either in the form of the Ottoman sultan or embodied by networks or institutions of Muslim intellectuals; and (3) a moral judgment on the Islamic past and on the contemporary state of Muslim societies. In fact, all three characteristics mirror the standards of secular ideological and religious cultural discourses that dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is why Western observers had no difficulty seeing these trends as equivalent to other pan-ideologies (e.g., pan-Slavism [1836], pan-Hellenism [1847], pan-Germanism [1850], pan-orthodoxy [Karl Marx; 1855], and pan-Europeanism [1856]).

Perceiving Islam as an immanent frame of political and cultural references was a common feature of public Islam and of Ottoman imperial ideology. Islamic currents subsumed under Pan-Islamism thus belonged to different social fields. As an imperial ideology, Pan-Islamism legitimated the power of the Ottoman sultan after the dramatic course of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), which resulted in the establishment of the Bulgarian state; the full independence of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro; the Russian annexation of the Kars district; and the formation of a British protectorate over Cyprus and of an Austrian-Hungarian protectorate over Bosnia and Herzegovina (established by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878). Its importance grew after the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881, the Greek annexation of Thessaly and South Epirus in 1881, and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. The Ottoman ruling elites tried to compensate for these territorial losses with an appeal to a transnational Islamic identity, which would create general support for the Ottoman Empire in the emerging public opinion in Muslim societies. As an imperial ideology, Pan-Islamism did not have distinct normative content or irridentist claims but was conceived as a network of solidarity founded on the activities of individual agents. In some cases, this network incorporated Sufi orders (Madani, Rifa‘i) whose elites were often called to Istanbul in order to directly work as an Ottoman agency.

The Ottoman propagation of Islamic unity did not, however, yield the response the empire might have expected. Ottoman Pan-Islamism faded out after 1910. In spite of massive propaganda, it had only limited success in mobilizing pro-Ottoman public opinion during the Italian-Turkish War (1911–12) and World War I. Consequently, Muslim public intellectuals came to stress the independence of Islam as an autonomous category of cultural and moral order based on ideas of Islamic unity. Apart from a few exceptions, such as the Khilafat movement in India (1919–24), the denationalized form of Pan-Islamism never served as an instrument for broader political mobilization but remained instead a framework for contextualizing particularistic political and cultural claims. In most cases, Islamic unity was construed as a symbolic field of solidarity that competed with other universalisms like Christianity, socialism, or, more generally, the West. Only rarely was this Islamic unity theoretically constructed, being taken instead as a self-evident form of religious solidarity and of a transnational Islamic public.