30 Ansari
Mushir Hussain Kidwai’s support for the Ottoman Empire differed from
Pickthall’s in that his was not concerned with safeguarding the British Empire
but instead was underpinned by the principle that the struggle for the freedom
of colonised Muslims required solidarity with the few remaining indepen-
dent Muslim powers. Among these, the most pre-eminent was the Ottoman
Empire. Hence, Kidwai was intensely exercised by Britain’s role in the erosion
of Ottoman sovereignty. In taking this stance, he was echoing the sentiments
of Pan-Islamists back in India such as Zafar Ali Khan (1873–1956), editor of the
Indian newspaper Zamindar; writing in the Islamic Review in February 1913,
he stressed the need for Britain’s “friendly relations with the surviving Muslim
states, which in his case – such is the constitution of the Muslim mind – supply
the void created by the absence of a free and unfettered Muslim sovereignty
in India”.23
While Pickthall conducted his campaigns through more mainstream chan-
nels, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din’s monthly journal, the Islamic Review, also warned
of the grave apprehension caused by “the variance between the proclama-
tion of the Government [which was broadly supportive of Ottoman territo-
rial integrity] and the tone of the organs of public opinion with regard to the
conflicts in the Balkans, which was proclaimed by the Bishop of Oxford ‘a Holy
War of Cross against Crescent’”.24 In the run up to the First World War, the
Islamic Review continued to make trenchant criticisms of British policy viz-
à-vis the Ottoman Empire. Kamal-ud-Din’s open letter to the Prime Minister,
published in several parts during 1913, fulminated against European (imperial)
greed, its boundless “usurping of other’s life and property” through imperial-
ist expansion, justified by the doctrine of the “survival of the fittest” and the
notions that the European “is the best of the human race and the coloured
races were created simply to bear the white burden”.25 In the process, Kamal-
ud-Din argued, Islam was being devastated and that the desire of Muslims was
that the British government should change its policy and use its good offices
against European imperial ambitions. But just before the outbreak of war,
though Pickthall’s argument in support of the Ottoman Empire clearly differed
from that being made at the same time by South Asian Muslims in London,
the Ottoman cause proved sufficient to unite them in their – unsuccessful –
attempts to persuade the British government to secure Ottoman neutrality in
the likely conflict ahead.
The entry of Turkey in the war on the side of Germany and its proclama-
tion of jihad in November 1914, calling on Muslims all over the world to rise
23 Islamic Review, February 1913, 28.
24 Ibid., 36.
25 Islamic Review, May 1913, 128.