Umar Ryad, Abdalrahman Aboelmajd and the history of Muslims in interwar Europe

 We have a fresh opportunity to reflect on the history of Muslims in interwar Europe .

Leading a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC website: https://erc.europa.eu/neither-visitors-nor-colonial-victims-muslims-interwar-europe-and-european-trans-cultural-history ) Dr.Umar Ryad and his team try to prove that Muslims in interwar Europe cannot be reduced to passive strangers to the internal European local politics and public debates .

Umar Ryad

Associate Professor

Research Institute for Philosophy and Religious Studies (OFR) - Religious Studies

Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies - Religious Studies - Islam and Arabic

Ryad's current research focuses on the modern Islamic intellectual and religious history, dynamics of the networks of Islamic reformist and pan-Islamist movements, Muslim polemics on Christianity, the history of Christian missions in the modern Muslim World, and transnational Islam in interwar Europe .

Q: First of all, I know you are a specialist in Islamic studies.I wonder  what made you focus on studying the history of Muslims in interwar Europe . 

AR: The idea of the project is dated to 2005 during my research on the personal
papers and family archive of the well-known Muslim reformist Muhammad Rashid Rida in Cairo at the University of Leiden.In Rida’s archive I came across thirteen letters sent to him from Berlin dated back to 1920s and 1930s.At this stage no information was available to me about the sender of these letters, except his name Dr.Zeki Hishmat Bey Kiram and address at Karlstrasse no.10 in Berlin.Although existing secondary sources do not say much about him, the letters reveal to us somebody of a noteworthy role in the West-East relations who was almost buried in history.Back in Leiden, and since his name is not that common in Arabic, I have started to check the telephone directory (Dastelefonbuch) of Germany in the case that anybody of his family would be still living there.To my big surprise, I have found two persons who are still carrying this family name in the whole country.After having made a phone call with one of them, Dr.Harun al-Rashid Kiram (d.2015) in Kornwestheim (a village close to Stuttgart), he happened to be his son who was born in 1923 at the same address which was mentioned in Kiram’s letter to Rashid Rida.Kiram’s son in Germany was still keeping the personal papers of his father containing thousands of diaries, letters and photos.Studying the papers exposes that Kiram was a Syrian Ottoman commander during the First World War who was injured during the war and was transferred to Germany in 1917 for medical treatment.In Berlin he joined a huge Muslim network of activists living in interwar Europe who kept the East-West connections intact.Kiram was in contact with Prince Shakib Arslan, Imam Yahya of Yemen, Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia (later King) and many other Arab luminaries of his time .

Sheikh Rashid Rida

Zeki Kiram in his military uniform

Q: We know you are the Principal Investigator leading a team consisting of Mehdi Sajid (post-doc researcher), Sophie Spaan (PhD candidate), Andrei Tirtan (PhD candidate), and Soumia Hida-Middelburg (research assistant); duration: 2014 – 2019, could you elaborate on the project, please ?  

AR: The project focuses on the Muslim presence in Europe during the interwar period and World War II, which has been mostly dealt with as part of Middle-Eastern and Asian history, colonial studies or briefly as related to European migration history.Previous research focused either on the accounts of Arab/Muslim travellers and residents in Europe in the nineteenth century or on the later Muslim labour migration after World War II.Such approaches doubtlessly have their justification.Yet they tend to overlook the impact of Muslim nationalist and intellectual émigrés as a histoire croisée (entangled history) with the socio-political and trans-cultural context of Europe itself. Historians, in general, have been reluctant to critically look at the primary sources to actually understand and evaluate the meaning of the presence of such Muslim actors to our knowledge of the historical status of Islam in Europe.The primary sources and the research I have conducted so far reveal an alternative narrative.The time span 1919-1945 has been carefully chosen.World War I is chosen as a point of departure, as it was the catalyst in encouraging the migration of Muslims to Europe because of the demands of the war.These Muslim networks and activities ceased by the end of World War II, and re-emerged with the arrival of guest workers in early 1960s.

In studying Muslim networks in interwar Europe we should highlight the multiple layers of political identification and action which often combined religious orientation, political ambitions, social status and habits.This comprehensive inquiry into the unknown particulars of a generation of Muslims exposes the dynamism of those who spoke for Islam in Europe, and their place in world history .

 Q : No doubt you examine the history of Muslims in interwar Europe, how can we look for such history ?

AR: The interwar period also represents the high age of imperialism.Additionally, it was the very era in which the destinies of the contemporary European and Muslim-majority societies were shaped.In that period, Europe became an attractive destination for Arab and Muslim students, revolutionaries, nationalist activists, political exiles, and intellectuals.Europe is used here not only as a geographical entity, but as a homogenous intellectual space for Muslim actors .

In order to reconstruct this history of Muslims in interwar Europe, the following main questions will be addressed :

• How did Muslims in interwar Europe act and interact among each other and with Western politicians, diplomats, Orientalists, publishers, and the media ?

 •To what degree did they succeed in creating a distinct identity as a “European Islam,” combining their fascination for Western civilization with the preservation of a Muslim religious and political entity  ?

• How did Muslims in interwar Europe influence ideas of the West in the Muslim world ?

• How far did their writings and activities really exercise or receive any influence in the European context ?

Muslim networks in interwar Europe could be divided into social and political networks on the one hand, and religious ones on the other.This divide does not mean that the two areas of networking activism were completely separated.On the contrary, they were overlapping and in many cases intertwined.Due to the impact of the increasing circulation of information, many various political and religious ideas were spread among Muslim activists between the colonies and European states.Notably enough, such networks connected Muslims loyal to the European colonial Empire to other pan-Islamist militants who fought against colonial subordination.

In general, the idea of international conventions was the single most striking phenomenon that connected pan-Islamists in the interwar era.The congresses of Mecca (1924) and (1926), Cairo (1926), and Jerusalem (1931) had their affiliates in Europe.Likewise, the creation of religious and political associations, travel and correspondences and above all diffusion of newspapers were the main tools to build up these networks.  Examples of these associations were: ‘Society for the Progress of Islam’, ‘Alliance Musulmane Internationale’, ‘Islamische Zentralinstitut’, ‘Islamische Gemeinde,’ and ‘Verein für islamische Gottesverehrung’ (Berlin); ‘La Fraternité Musulmane’, ‘Association des oulémas musulmans en Algérie’ (Paris); ‘Orientbund’ and ‘Islamische Kulturbund’ (Vienna); and the European Muslim Congress (held by Shakib Arslan, Geneva).The most important figure in interwar Europe was the Lebanese Prince Shakib Arslan who had direct contact with European political leaders, orientalists and policy-makers.

Prince Shakib Arslan

Q: What about methodological challenges that face you and your team ?

AR: The main encompassing working hypothesis of the project is that the research team will comparably deal with Muslims in interwar Europe that they were neither simply visitors nor colonial victims, but that they constituted a group of engaged actors in the European and international space.Since such Muslim actors were active in Europe, having intensive contacts with peers across colonial lines, the focus on their activities and networks challenges the long-standing historiographical assumptions that ignored their significance for the history of Europe.

If this premise is proved correct, Muslims in interwar Europe cannot be reduced to passive strangers to the internal European local politics and public debates.The concept will gain a dynamic complexity that expresses the political, religious and intellectual interests of Muslims outside their original borders.The study of Muslim actors in interwar Europe will be therefore a new “promising line of inquiry for the writing of a history of Europe .”

Q: Your team spent almost two years; have you discovered any interesting research outputs ?

AR: Please check our website to see the discoveries

http://www.muslims-in-interwar-europe.com /

http://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/URyad/0

Q: Do you think Muslims are seen as cultural threats in Europe and why ?

AR: I think that this is a rhetorical question and our project tries to argue the opposite.We set up a historical tool in understanding the roots of the present modern Islamic trends within the fields of European history, Islam in Europe, and Middle Eastern Studies.Pushing the research further will generate “frontier knowledge” in the historical study of Muslim pre-migration and pre-integration experience in Europe.It could further our understanding the current trends in European and international Islam.By studying the socio-cultural developments of Muslim activities in Europe in that formative era, the study looks afresh at current debates about Europe and the world of Islam and the contemporary scene without resorting to a neatly tailored or exaggerated hypothesis; by getting to know the first Islamic activists, who lay the foundation for the ongoing Muslim activity in Europe in the post-1945 era.

In the early twentieth century, Muslim transnational networks, where Rashid Rida and his associates assumed a central position, were on the fault line of later developments in contemporary Islamic thought.Rida is described as the exemplary intermediate figure between classic and vernacular discourse and between secular rulers and masses, whose intellectual and journalistic pattern is being followed with the advent of digital technologies today.After World War II the heirs of the religious intellectual heritage and activism of this network have developed into two extremes of Islam – one, reformist and open to influence, and another; radical, rigid and closed.Both streams continue to polarize the Muslim communities in the West .

Abdalrahman Aboelmajd: Thank you very much for sharing with us your research on Muslims in interwar Europe; and that they cannot be reduced to passive strangers, Dr.Umar.