Abstracts

Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University
Chughtai's Revival of Mughal Cosmopolitanism

The talk analyses the works and writings of the South Asian artist Abdurrahman Chughtai (1894-1975) in the context of Mughal, Persian, Central Asian and generally, "Oriental" nostalgia. Chughtai's paintings deploy, but also deviate from, the formal language of the Bengal School of Painting based in Calcutta and his assertions of difference between the Bengal School and what he characterises as the Lahore School are an imaginative effort to ground his work as an authentic modern take on Mughal painting. Chughtai articulated his views in a series of essays on aesthetics in Urdu, and his work was subject to extensive discussion by Urdu literary critics, these texts that have as yet never been critically examined at length. His work must also be situated in relation to his brother's Abdullah Chughtai's scholarly researches into Mughal and Persian painting, calligraphy, architecture, and ornament. I demonstrate how this nostalgia for the Persianate and the Mughal decentres identification with a specific national site, projecting it instead onto a Muslim cosmopolitanism during an era of national independence movements. The artist was innovative in seeking new audiences for his work at a time when exhibition venues were limited. Accordingly he is best known not by his individual paintings, but by the publication of illustrated works of the poetry of Ghalib (1928) and Iqbal (1968). Chughtai's contribution towards modernism includes his stress on artistic individualism, which enacts a transition towards modernism proper by the next generation of artists. Chughtai's reworking of miniature painting also forms an important precedent for the revival of contemporary miniature painting, which I examine in the paper’s conclusion. For more information please see the article Miniature Painting as Muslim Cosmopolitanism (ISIM Review 18, Autumn 2006).

Nile Green, UCLA
Cosmopolitan Pressures and Tumbling Tower Blocks: supernatural catastrophe in colonial Bombay

At 10:15 on the night of 31st May 1903, the D-block of the recently completed Sita Ram Building in Bombay “suddenly came down with a crash”. Most of the building was unoccupied, but on the ground floor was a saloon bar, which over the past months had done a brisk trade with British soldiers and sailors; it was the customers of this bar who comprised the dead and injured when the building collapsed. Since the bar stood across the road from the tomb of a Muslim saint, rumours spread that the disaster was the direct result of the insult to the holy man and implicitly of the transgression of Muslim space by the combined efforts of the Hindu bar-owner and his bibulous patrons. Through a comparison of its reportage in an English-language newspaper and an Urdu hagiography of the offended saint, this paper explores the cosmopolitan pressures that found dramatic expression with the collapse of Sita Ram Building. At the same time, it draws attention to the neglected importance of colonial Bombay as the prime location of the early Muslim experience of globalising modernity.

Kai Kresse, University of St. Andrews
How cosmopolitan is Mombasa: reflections and discussions  

Can we justifiably speak of cosmopolitanism in contemporary Mombasa, and if so, in what way? On the one hand, Mombasa and the Swahili coast have been part of Indian Ocean trade, kinship and religious networks for many centuries, and the social effects of intensive interaction with other port-towns and littoral societies of the Indian Ocean are clearly visible in everyday life, both in material culture and human interaction. On the other hand, many residents have next of kin who are residing in more prosperous countries around the world, whether in the Gulf states, North America or Europe. Thus it seems an argument for cosmopolitanism can easily be made, and it is very often made in the literature. This paper seeks to question and critically investigate this assumption, both from an Indian Ocean perspective (following on from Edward Simpson and my introduction to 'Stuggling with History', 2007) and from a conceptual perspective engaging with recent debates on ‘cosmopolitanism’. Ethnographically, Kresse uses primary research material on the internal debates and social dynamics of coastal Muslims in Kenya.

Muhammad Khalid Mas'ud, Council of Islamic Ideology, Pakistan
The Doctrine of tashabbuh bi’l kuffar (Imitating the infidel) Revisited: modern South Asian fatawa ‘cultural authenticity’

Roel Meijer (1999) problematizes cosmopolitanism in the Middle Eastern societies by referring to a somewhat negative role of religion in the debate about cultural authenticity in the postcolonial Muslim societies and concluding that ‘ Religions do not provide a positive environment for cosmopolitanism’ . Studies of cosmopolitanism in Muslim societies often find religion and culture indistinguishable. The paper explores this conclusion further with reference to debates about the cultural interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims in south Asian Muslim societies. Reviewing the fatawa literature during 19 th and 20 th centuries we find an ongoing debate about relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims reflecting the significance of this issue in the society. In the early 19 th century the fatawa deal with the questions about sharing food, employment, western dress, learning English language, and other questions mostly related with Christians and Europeans. In the 20th century the range of most of these questions is reduced and now focus is on interaction with Hindus. This shift in focus raises several questions about religion, culture, and national identity, and especially the above issue of cultural authenticity mentioned by Meijer. In order to explore how far religious issues inform these fatawa, this paper has chosen to focus on the core doctrine of cultural authenticity – the juristic theory of tashabbuhbi’lkuffar, imitating the infidel. In particular, a diverse array of fatawa of jurists from both cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan backgrounds will be analysed in order to trace variant approaches and contexts.

Ariel Salzman, Queen’s University
Cosmopolis, Islampolis: Ottoman urbanity between myth, memory, and post-modernity

On 23rd January 2007, some one hundred thousand people assembled in the center of Istanbul to accompany the hearse carrying the body of Hrank Dink, the slain Turkish-Armenian civil rights activist. This unprecedented response by Armenians, Kurds and Turks, Christians, Muslims and Jews, students, intellectuals, and labourers to racism and ethnic exclusion – the largest of its kind in a Middle Eastern, or for that matter, in a modern Euro-Mediterranean context--has produced an equally unprecedented outpouring of commentary and emotional expressions in the press, on official websites and on the blogsphere. As historians of the Ottoman past, we cannot summon such a dense documentary record to document its “cosmopolitan” character, that is, its long and varied history of inter-communal urbanity.  A partial record furnishes the raw material for myriad and often opposing positions, from the anti-Muslim positions expressed by the term “dhimmitude” to the rose-tinted quasi-utopian vision of theocratic apologists who justify political marginality. Indeed, we cannot avoid consideration of the impact of an “Ottomanist” memory on the projections of the post-modern world or post-national solidarities or avoid the ruptures and continuities of modernity which produced murderous persecutions and discriminatory policies at the end of the empire and during first half century of the Turkish Republic.  Beginning with the impositions of the present on the very terminology used to frame our inquiry, this presentation poses the epistemological and empirical questions that must inform historical methodologies which seek to reconstruct the intersecting, shared and divergent communal realities of Ottoman urbanity over time and in space.

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, University of Toronto
Persian Europology and Cosmopolitanism  

Modern Europe was a topic of intense interest to many eighteenth and nineteenth century Persian travellers. As keen observers of Europe, they were endowed with a critical cosmopolitan ‘double-consciousness.’ They critiqued European social settings with their own ethical standards and censured their own society from a European perspective. As anthropologists of modern Europe, they offered critical outsiders’ perspectives on the emerging modern social ethos. As critics of their own societies, travelers provided new perspectives on the dominant sociopolitical ethos. Fully aware of Europe as a significant new Other, travelers’ oral and written reports of self-experience served as cosmopolitan scenarios for the cultural reshaping of Persianate societies.