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Between Spirituality and Resistance: The Sufi Pilgrimage Town of Ajmer under British Rule

In March 1920, a three-day conference was convened at the dargah (shrine complex) for the Sufi saint Muinuddin Chishti (d. c.1230) in Ajmer in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. More than 10,000 people attended, and various political speakers discussed the question of whether to support the Khilafat movement, which existed between 1919 and 1923 and opposed the removal of the Ottoman sultan. The British administration of Ajmer recorded such politically motivated activities in detail and, in light of the conference, deemed the shrine a ‘peculiarly fertile centre for political and religious propaganda’.1 These politically ambitious gatherings were observed and classified, and the details passed on to the India Office. A Sufi shrine as a centre of propaganda? How could this have happened?

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  1. Continuation of Home Department telegram of 2 Feb. 1920, Political and Secret Department Records, IOR/L/PS/10/798, British Library. []

Ruins and Visions of Empire: Famagusta and the Quest for Revival in the Late Nineteenth Century

‘Ruin’ was the primary term used by countless visitors to describe the Cypriot port town of Famagusta during the period of Ottoman rule (1571–1878), to the extent that the two terms became almost synonymous. A notable example is Namık Kemal (1840–88), the foremost Ottoman thinker and a critic of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), who left a lasting mark on modern Turkish political thought and literature by reworking the concepts of vatan (fatherland) and hürriyet (liberty). Stripped of his freedom and imprisoned in Famagusta  between 1873 and 1876, he evoked the city’s uncanny atmosphere, a deserted urban landscape marked by ruins that signalled both a prosperous past and a post-apocalyptic present: ‘As I gazed out the window and saw plains full of ruins and piles of stones as if the mountains had been shattered, I felt as if Raphael’s trumpet had been blown—but I hadn’t heard it.’1 Despite the intensity and desolation of the cityscape, he soon drafted a memorandum at the behest of the island’s governor. This proposal outlined a port renovation project intended to revive Famagusta as a major commercial harbour in the Eastern Mediterranean and as a base for military operations—capable of projecting power into the empire’s Arabian provinces and beyond, especially in the aftermath of the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869.2

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  1. Namık Kemal, Rüya ve Mağusa Mektubu (Kahire, 1908), 59–60. []
  2. Mithat Cemal Kuntay, Namık Kemal: Devrinin İnsanları ve Olayları Arasında (Istanbul, 2010), vol. ii, pt. 1, 374–80. []