(Marc David Baer, London)
Mehdi Sajid, Utrecht:
Rethinking Islam Beyond the Nationalist Realm— Muslims in Inter-war Berlin and the Beginnings of Modern European Islam
Umar Ryad, Utrecht:
The Interaction Between the Ahmadiyya (India), Salafiyya and European Converts in the Interwar Period
Marc David Baer, London:
Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany: Hugo Marcus and »The Message of the Holy Prophet Muhammad to Europe«
David Motadel, Cambridge:
The Entangled Histories of Muslims, Jews and Jewish Converts to Islam in German-Occupied Paris
Marjan Wardaki, Los Angeles:
Political Activism and Transnational Ties in Weimar Germany: The First Afghan Community in Germany
Abstract:
The proposed panel responds directly to the call for papers relating to “Matters of Faith,” collaboration with India, and the recognition that historians have adopted a transnational methodology. The five papers of the proposed panel explore the first Muslim communities in post-World-War-I Europe, situating their history in the context of the history of Islam in Europe, conversion to Islam, the history of relations between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and the connected histories of South and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
The panel’s first paper, Dr. Mehdi Sajid, “Rethinking Islam Beyond the Nationalist Realm – Muslims in interwar Berlin and the beginnings of modern European Islam,” takes as its starting point the fact that in today’s Germany the public associates the beginnings of the Muslim presence in the country with the immigration of Turkish and North African guest workers after 1945. That Muslims had been living in Germany and participating in its socio-cultural and political life for more than half a century before the coming of the later migrants seems to be known to only to few experts and interested parties. But the historical reality was more complex and diverse. In his presentation Dr. Sajid will address a set of questions, in order to highlight the historical importance of Muslim life in Germany from 1919 to 1945: What did the Muslim presence in Germany after World War I look like? Which Muslim trends were represented and how did they interact with German society? What were the positions of the German authorities in the Weimar Republic and later in Nazi-Germany towards these Muslims? Finally, why should they be considered as the “real” pioneers of Islam in Germany? Studying and re-discovering this unique Muslim European episode can in many ways contribute to putting the ongoing debate about the place of Islam and Muslims in Germany into perspective.
The panel’s second paper will be given by Associate Professor Umar Ryad, and is entitled, “Mediators: European Converts and Muslim Sectarianism in Inter-war Europe.” Within the context of “spreading the message” in Europe, different sectarian disputes emerged among Muslims in their new European environments. Some Muslims, especially European converts, promoted a universal Muslim community over sectarian differences. European converts played a prominent transcultural role in the development of modern Islamic thought, bridging historically and geographically established divisions within the Muslim community, which they as newcomers did not inherit. Whereas many of them maintained connections with the British-India based Ahmadiyya missions in Europe, they were also present in the debates in Salafi reformist pan-Islamic circles in Egypt. By focusing on two Muslim Salafi magazines in Egypt—Al-Manar by Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935), and al-Fath by Rida’s contemporary, the Syrian writer and activist Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib (1886-1969), the paper emphasizes that although Salafi writers attacked Ahmadiyya doctrine, they praised their missionary work in Europe. The many disputes finally led to a deterioration in their relations by the mid-1930s. Many converts left the Ahmadiyya missions and established their own organizations and societies protesting the Ahmadiyya’s refusal to recant their beliefs. The paper shows that although the conflict between the Salafiyya and Ahmadiyya was uncompromising, European converts served as new engaging figures unconsciously creating a certain commonality and religious hybridity between these contending Muslim branches. In the end, they all had one goal in common, making Islam relevant in Europe.
The third paper, Professor Marc David Baer, “Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany: Hugo Marcus and ‘The Message of the Holy Prophet Muhammad to Europe’” explores the Islam envisioned in the extensive writings of one of the most prominent of German converts to the Ahmadiyya, the Jewish poet, philosopher, and political activist Hugo Marcus (1880-1966). Rather than an “Eastern” Islam, Marcus’s understanding of that religion is a surprisingly Eurocentric and even Germanic one. Islam is not only the religion of the German past, Marcus claims, but also, given its faith in the intellect and in progress, the religion of the future. Marcus’s ideas do not figure in the historiography of Weimar Germany. Primarily this is because while many of the new political notions of the future that Weimar writers contemplated have been explored, scholars have paid less attention to the spiritual and religious utopias envisioned in the 1920s. This paper engages with the question of German responses to the rupture of World War I and the realm of imagined political possibilities in Weimar Germany by focusing on one such utopia overlooked in historiography, the German-Islamic synthesis as advocated by Hugo Marcus.
The panel’s fourth paper is Dr. David Motadel, “The entangled histories of Muslims,
Jews and Jewish converts to Islam in occupied Paris.” When German troops marched into the French capital in 1940, they encountered a significant minority of Jews from Bukhara, Iran, and Afghanistan. These Jews lived in the same religiously mixed émigré milieu as Muslims from these countries. As the Germans began rounding up the Jews of Paris, members of these Jewish communities tried to portray themselves as a Muslim minority, which descended from Jews who had converted to Islam in the early nineteenth century. They received active help from a number of Muslims in Paris who testified that they were part of the Islamic community. The most important of these interventions was made by the Iranian consul. The case of these non-European Jewish groups led to a heated debate about their status in Berlin. In the end, the Jewish communities were classified as Muslim and survived the Holocaust. The paper interweaves the history of these communities with broader questions about religious minorities and the politics of religion under Nazi occupation. Drawing on previously unknown documents from German, Iranian, Israeli, French, and Swiss archives, the paper will make a contribution to the entangled history of Muslims and Jews in Europe’s “Age of Extremes.”
The panel’s fifth paper, Marjan Wardaki, “Political Activism and Transnational Ties in Weimar Germany: The First Afghan Community in Germany,” explores the transational links of Muslims in Germany and Central Asia. In 1933 the popular German newspaper, Berliner Tageblatt, reported the assassination of Sirdar Muhammed Azziz Khan, the Afghan envoy to Berlin, sent by his brother, the Afghan king, Mohammed Nadir Shah. According to Gestapo records, the assassin, a young German-educated Afghan, Syed Kemal, confessed to the murder and claimed Azziz Khan and his brother, the new King, had sold Afghanistan to the British. Roughly four months later, as King Nadir Shah was visiting the graduation ceremony at the German-founded Amani school in Kabul, one of the students, a supporter of the previous King, assassinated him. To understand the motives around these political activities, Ms. Wardaki’s paper traces wider social and political networks that informed the actions of these Muslim students during the period from 1920 to 1935, as well as to examine the everyday entanglements that resulted from closer diplomatic relations between Germany and Afghanistan. Taking advantage of the production of diasporic literature, the circulation of ideas and the movement of goods through trading families around both large commercial areas such as Bombay, Hamburg, and more smaller locales, this paper will highlight the ways in which the first Afghan community in Germany navigated legal and social restrictions, and made sense of its wider function within a changing global political context. The method employed in this paper utilizes global and microhistorical study. A microhistorical focus has the advantage of uncovering forms of mediated networks and relations within which Afghan actors functioned vis-à-vis their changing roles within the larger political and social context.
