Robinson, Francis (2001) The British Empire and the Muslim world In: The Oxford History of the British Empire. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Full text access: Open
By the 1920s the British Empire embraced substantially more than half the Muslim peoples of the world. For much of the twentieth century Britain was the greatest influence over their development. Imperial security in large part dictated which territories of former Muslim empires or petty Muslim states the British came to rule. Imperial interests in combination with those of rival empires and local forces dictated precisely, and sometimes not so precisely, where the boundaries of new states were to fall. By the same token they dictated which peoples would have to learn to live together, or not as the case may be, in the increasingly demanding environments of the modern economy and modern state. Imperial techniques of government shaped the developing politics of these dependencies, often leaving major legacies to the years when the British had gone. The British Empire was the context in which many Muslims experienced the transition to modernity.
This is a Published version This version's date is: 09/2001 This item is peer reviewed
https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/af8d750b-01b1-b826-aada-267fe68b63bc/1/
Deposited by () on 23-Dec-2009 in Royal Holloway Research Online.Last modified on 23-Dec-2009
1 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: the British empire and the World 1780-1930 (London, 1989). 2. This was one of two infamous hoaxes involving the impersonation of oriental potentates perpetrated by Horace de Vere Cole, Adrian Stephen, the brother of Virginia Woolf, and others. Adrian Stephen, The `Dreadnoughtâ Hoax (London, 1983), pp, 24-29. 3. For European and British attitudes to Islam and the Muslim world see, Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge, 1991), Maxime Rodinson, trans. R. Veinus, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (Seattle, 1987), Kathryn Tidrick, Heart Beguiling Araby (Cambridge, 1981), Norman Daniel, Islam, Europe and Empire (Edinburgh, 1966), and Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provincesâ Muslims 1860-1923 (Cambridge, 1974). 4. Daniel, Islam, p. 465. 5. Sharif al Mujahid, Muslim League Documents 1900-1947, I, (Karachi, 1990), p. 102. 6. Article 2 of the mandatory instrument for Palestine, 1922, in C.H. Dodd and M.E. Sales, Israel and the Arab World (New York, 1970) p. 68. 7. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, 1985). 8. Avril A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London 1993), pp. 226-98. 9. Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious thought and its Medieval Background (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 1-46. 10. Ralph Russell & Khurshidul Islam, `The Satirical Verse of Akbar Ilahabadi (1846-1921)', Modern Asian Studies, 8, 1, January 1974, p. 18. 11. Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1995), p. 210. 12. Part of Muhammad `Abd Allahâs savage poem `the Death of Richard Corfieldâ in B.W. Andrzejewski and I.M. Lewis, Somali Poetry: An Introduction (Oxford, 1964), p. 72. 13. Russell & Islam, `Akbar Ilahabadi', p. 9. 14. Saidul Haq Imadi, Nawab Imad-ul-Mulk (Hyderabad, 1975), p. 130. 15. C.C. Stewart, `Islam' in J.D. Fage and others eds., The Cambridge History of Africa, 8 vols, (Cambridge 1986, VII, esp., pp. 192-202, and Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, (New York, 1982). 16. Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900, (Princeton, New Jersey, 1982). 17. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 (Oxford, 1962), pp. 103-244. 18. William R. Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism, (New Haven, 1967), esp., pp. 56-90. 19. David Lelyveld, Aligarhâs First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, New Jersey, 1978). 20. Christian W. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of 21. Hafeez Malik ed., Iqbal: Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan (New York, 1971). 22. Richard Mitchell, The Society of Muslim Brothers, (New York, 1969) and Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, the Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: the Jam`at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley, 1994). 23. Quoted from Iqbalâs `Rumuz-i-Bekhudiâ `The Mysteries of Selflessness', 1918, in Wm. Theodore De Bary and others eds. Sources of Indian Tradition (New York, 1958), p. 756. 24. Afzal Iqbal ed., My Life, A Gragment: an Autobiographical Sketch of Maulana Mohamed Ali, (Lahore, 1942), pp. 35-6. 25. Mushirul Hasan, Mohamed Ali: Ideology and Politics, (New Delhi, 1981). 26. Martin Kramer, Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim Congresses, (New York, 1986), and for the charter and activities of the Islamic Conference see Haider Mehdi, Organization of the Islamic Conference: OIC: A Review of its Political and Educational Policies (Lahore, 1988).