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 .