The intellectual landscape of early twentieth-century Indian Muslim political thought was both expansive and capacious. The dual imperatives of navigating life under British colonial rule in an increasingly globalised age and being part of a Muslim world grappling with persistent crises in the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate gave rise to novel conceptions of the relationship between India’s Muslims and the broader world. Throughout much of the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Caliphate itself served as a central locus of intellectual and political engagement, catalysing experiments in pan-Islamic thought. These dynamics reached their zenith during the Indian Khilafat Movement (1919–1924), a period marked by the Caliphate’s symbolic and political prominence in India. While the Caliphate’s considerable role as a source of ideological and political vitality is widely acknowledged, the ramifications of its abolition in 1924 – and the responses of the Khilafat Movement’s leading protagonists to this event – have received less attention in existing scholarship. This paper examines the trajectories of Muslim political thought in India in the aftermath of the Ottoman collapse.

Faridah Zaman is Associate Professor of the History of Britain and the World, and Fellow and Tutor of Modern History at Somerville College. Professor Zaman has two main areas of research interest. The first concerns Muslim political activists, religious scholars, journalists and poets in early twentieth-century British India. This will be the topic of her first monograph, entitled The Young Muhammadans. The second concerns the relationship between the British left, imperialism and Islam in the twentieth century. Professor Zaman has published on these topics in journals such as Modern Intellectual History, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Twentieth Century British History.