book reviews Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 241-244 241

David Motadel (ed.)

Islam and the European Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 (The Past &
Present Book Series). xiv and 312 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-966831-1.

A substantial amount of Muslim writings (as well as Western postcolonial and

third-world literature) on the modern history of the so-called Islamic world
make a living emphasizing the supposedly crusader-like nature of European
colonial rule between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. While it is
certainly true that colonialists were primarily motivated by strategic interests
and economic exploitation rather than by altruism and charity, their behav-
iour in their colonies was anything but inevitably hostile. Pragmatism and ac-
commodation reigned in many places, more often than not combined with
condescension and paternalism, which did not, however, preclude periods of
suppression and warfare. Islam and the European Empires, edited by David
Motadel, Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, is a highly welcome contribution to putting
things into perspective and gaining a more nuanced and differentiated view of
West-Eastern history. The fourteen authors whom he has assembled are emi-
nent specialists; many of them have previously published monographs on
their respective subject.
The book is divided into three parts: Islam and imperial rule, Islam and an-
ticolonial resistance, and Islam and colonial knowledge, making it clear that
the volume’s focus is on Islam’s role as a religion in the relations between the
rulers and the ruled, between colonialism and the colonized, both with regard
to the colonialists’ demeanour and to the reactions of the Muslim populations
and their intellectual and political leaders. David Motadel’s claim, in his emi-
nently readable and comprehensive introduction, that “the very structure of
the book provides a comparative analytical framework” (p. 4), however, stands
up to scrutiny only to a limited degree. Only Great Britain and France are dealt
with in all three sections, which makes a systematic comparison of the various
aspects possible. Furthermore, not all European empires are taken into ac-
count, at least not equally: Italy figures only in passing in the context of reli-
gious revolts in colonial North Africa (esp. pp. 179-81); the Austro-Hungarian
Habsburg empire, which ruled over a substantial number of Muslims in the
Balkans, is completely left out (save for Motadel’s short remarks, pp. 11-12).
­Finally, no conceptional distinction is made (again, save for Motadel’s brief
observation, ibid.) between the British, French, Dutch, and Germans, on the
one hand – whose colonies were overseas and far away from the mother
­country – and, on the other hand, Russia’s continental empire – whose Muslim
subjects could (and did) become fully fledged citizens, even aristocrats and
ISSN 0043-2539 (print version) ISSN 1570-0607 (online version) WDI 2

Die
© Welt des brill
koninklijke Islams
nv,57leiden,
(2017) 2017 | doi
241-244 10.1163/15700607-00572p09

International Journal for the Study of Modern Islam

242 book reviews

members of parliament. The volume should therefore be read not as an ex-

haustive handbook (which would be impossible to achieve, in any case, in
three hundred pages) but, for the most part, as a collection of case studies of
particularly illuminating events or developments that allow cautiously gener-
alizing conclusions about the respective colonial power.
It would be going too far to give a detailed summary of all fourteen articles;
for this, I would refer the reader to the volume’s introduction, which places the
contributions in a wider context. For a quick orientation, the table of contents
can be consulted here: <http://swbplus.bsz-bw.de/bsz403727359inh.htm>. In
what follows, some general observations and conclusions will be given about
the individual articles. Part 1 (“Islam and Imperial Rule”, pp. 35-128) focuses on
the various ways the European powers tried to cope with the Muslim majority
populations in their colonial domains. In a good number of cases, their policy
was characterized by a tendency to accommodation, sometimes for pragmatic
reasons, frequently combined with the ulterior motive of surveillance. Russia,
for instance, established four regional Islamic hierarchies between 1788 and
1872, which could be considered both as an acknowledgment of Muslim au-
tonomy and as an effort at clericalization for the sake of control. Muslim coop-
eration and anticolonial resistance in religious garb, and, on the part of the
colonial powers, the willingness to co-opt Muslims and the readiness to crush
this religiously motivated resistance often existed side by side. Not even within
an empire, policy took by necessity a uniform shape: the French procedure in
Algeria, whose coastal regions were départements and thus under the com-
mand of the French Ministry of the Interior, differed markedly from the situa-
tion in Tunisia and Morocco, which were given protectorate status and placed
in the responsibility of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A main point of concern
for all European powers was the organization of the annual Mecca pilgrimage,
for a number of obvious reasons. First, there was the medical aspect: in 1865, a
cholera epidemic killed fifteen thousand out of the ninety thousand pilgrims
before spreading to Europe, which made health facilities, quarantine stations,
inoculations, and so forth a sheer condition for survival. Then there was the
problem of the so-called ‘pauper pilgrims’, who could not afford the return
travel on their own means; while the Dutch made the evidence of a return
ticket the condition for going on the ḥajj, the British were forced to pay for the
transport of stranded Indians back to India. And finally, there were political
considerations: British policy in the Hijaz, particularly with regard to the Hash-
emites and the Wahhabis, was always bound to deliberations about imperial
security and about Britain’s prestige in the Muslim world, the more so as Brit-
ain’s self-view was that of “the greatest of Moslem states”, as Lord Kitchener put
it in 1915 (p. 62).

Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 241-244

book reviews 243

But not all Muslim subjects were sufficiently pleased with the degree of ac-
commodation on the part of the colonial rulers; resistance was therefore high
on the agenda in many parts of the colonies, and for a prolonged period. While
accommodation, however, is largely a matter of structures and institutions, re-
sistance usually needs individuals, leaders endowed with charisma and au-
thority. This is the reason why the articles of part 2 (“Islam and Anti-Colonial
Resistance”, pp. 131-227) are mainly written from a biographical angle. Apart
from the Trinity of Islamic reform – al-Afghānī, ʿAbduh, and Riḍā, who preached
revolution from above, reform from below, or cultivated a nostalgia for the ca-
liphate (pp. 132, 138, 142) – all other protagonists of resistance presented here
took up arms. And in all cases, they spoke in the idiom of jihād, demanded to
rid the dār al-islām of foreign (in other words, non-Muslim) rule, and some-
times availed themselves of millenarist ideas. Defying the external enemy
­often went hand in hand with purging their own societies, and in regions
where they temporarily managed to gain the upper hand – such as in Sudan
(Muḥammad Aḥmad ‘the Mahdi’, pp. 162-66) or in the North Caucasus (Ghazi
Muḥammad and Imam Shāmil, pp. 196-210) – they usually fought local cus-
toms and imposed bans on alcohol, tobacco, the mixing of the sexes, music,
and dancing. The connecting lines that may be drawn from the anticolonial
fighters of the nineteenth century to today’s salafist deportment are disturb-
ingly straight.
Part 3 (“Islam and Colonial Knowledge”, pp. 231-302) is, in a way, the least
gratifying. With the exception of Cemil Aydin’s article on the development of
Japanese oriental studies as a by-product of colonial competition with Europe,
the authors have missed the opportunity to inquire into the production of co-
lonial knowledge from a broader institutional perspective. Instead, they con-
centrate on individual missionaries, orientalists, colonial administrators,
writers, and so forth, and their respective studies on colonial subjects. To be
sure, it is useful to single out individual scholars such as Carl Heinrich Becker
and Martin Hartmann, the more so as a towering figure like Christiaan Snouck
Hurgronje (who is by all means underrepresented in the book) would certainly
have deserved a chapter of its own. But one wonders how one could pos-
sibly talk about Becker in a colonial context without even mentioning the
­Hamburgisches Kolonialinstitut where he taught from 1908 to 1913, or about
Hartmann without referring to the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Islamkunde,
whose chairman he was.1 Hartmann’s deputy, Georg Kampffmeyer, was the
founding editor of this journal, Die Welt des Islams, from 1913 onward, and both

1 Cf. Peter Heine, “Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Islamkunde”, in Islamstudien ohne Ende.
Festschrift für Werner Ende zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Rainer Brunner, Monika Gronke, Jens Peter
Laut and Ulrich Rebstock (Würzburg: Ergon, 2002), 175-81.

Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 241-244

244 book reviews

Hartmann and Kampffmeyer taught at the Berlin-based Seminar für Orien-

talische Sprachen (SOS), which was also in the service of the colonial adminis-
tration. These and other structural contexts would probably have been a little
more instructive than the hackneyed reference to the novels of the popular
writer Karl May. In the articles on France and Britain, there are regrettable la-
cunae of this kind as well. To give but a few examples: in the case of France,
neither the Mission scientifique du Maroc and its journal, Revue du monde mu-
sulman (1907-26), nor the École des langues orientales (founded in 1795), nor in
fact any French academic society on colonial soil (e.g., the École des lettres
d’Alger) are mentioned. As for Britain, the Asiatic Society and its various over-
seas branches go unnoted, as does the School of Oriental and African Studies
(founded in 1917).2 As already observed, Dutch and Russian scholarship are
completely absent.
All in all, however, Islam and the European Empires is an impressive achieve-
ment due to its wide geographic range and the depth of research in the major-
ity of its articles. One may regret the absence of maps and of a comprehensive
bibliography (which sentences the reader to carefully sifting the numerous
footnotes). But the fact that all articles are diligently copy-edited and most of
them well written and devoid of jargon makes up for it. The number of factual
errors or misprints I came across is minimal (some random findings: p. 154: for
“jihad-i ashgar” read “jihad-i asghar”, p. 168: for “did not leave a paper trial” read
“did not leave a paper trail”, pp. 241 and 243: for “Die Welt des Islam” read “Die
Welt des Islams”, p. 249: for “Michael Hartmann” read “Martin Hartmann”,
p. 250: for “Christian Snouck Hurgronje” read “Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje”,
pp. 259 and 304: for “Wilfred Scawen Blunt” read “Wilfrid Scawen Blunt”).
While the print edition is warmly recommended to everyone interested in
modern Islamic and European colonial history, the prospective reader should,
however, be dissuaded from the electronic version <http://www.oxfordschol
arship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668311.001.0001/acprof-978
0199668311>. For there, the fertile pastures of richly documented footnotes
have degenerated into barren deserts of completely impractical and detached
endnotes. Sometimes it still pays off to read books on paper.

Rainer Brunner
CNRS, PSL Research University Paris, LEM (UMR 8584)
brunner@vjf.cnrs.fr

2 On SOAS see now Ian Brown, The School of Oriental and African Studies. Imperial Training and
the Expansion of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); on France, see now
Alain Messaoudi, Les arabisants et la France coloniale. Savants, conseillers, médiateurs (1780-
1930) (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2015).

Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 241-244