Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India by Megan Eaton Robb

Author:Megan Eaton Robb [Robb, Megan Eaton]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: history, Asia, India & South Asia, Religion, islam, General
ISBN: 9780190089375
Google: uNQBEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:31:12.349551+00:00

4

Viewing the Map of Europe through the Lens of Islam

Hīch āfat nah rasad gausha-yi tanhā’ī rā1

During World War I, Madīnah published elaborate maps of the field of war, delineating the lines of control in Urdu.2 With these intricate visuals, Madīnah instructed Muslims on their place in the world beyond the qasbah. Chapter 4 and chapter 5 delineate the interpretive lens Madīnah provided to its Muslim readers to demonstrate how the newspaper became a space of observation for the ashrāf of Turkey, Europe, and Britain. Rather than assuming a separation between spatial knowledge that is prior to and following experience, this chapter shows how spatial knowledge of Europe was influenced by the available methods for representing this spatial knowledge, by looking at Madīnah as one influential medium of spatial representation.3 In this chapter I focus on the 1910s, when Madīnah became one of many viewfinders used by Muslims to train their eyes on a world that included Turkey, the Balkans, the European powers, and England. The history of the qasbah and the ashrāf were relevant to the shape and size of that viewfinder.

In the early twentieth century, the ashrāf Muslims descended from those Mughal retainers who had been exiled from Delhi in 1857 confronted a number of regional and international developments that gave them cause for anxiety. Religious buildings and the press took on new significance as possessions of the Muslim qaum under threat. As elites became aware of the increasingly precarious balance of power in Europe, support for the Caliph gave further clarity to expression of these anxieties. Elites became aware of the increasingly precarious balance of power in Europe in the early twentieth century. In the pages of Madīnah Muslim writers used discussion of warfare in Europe to hash out the boundaries of an Urdu public with global proportions. Through its coverage of the European martial and political landscape Madīnah focused attention on Islam as it vigorously debated the line between religious and political. In the 1910s, despite the nominal division between secular political objectives and the supposedly apolitical aims of the Deobandi ‘ulamā, in Madīnah the voices of ‘ulamā appeared alongside explicitly political discussions, visualizations of Europe and Turkey, and guidance on how to see the word as global Muslims. Chapters 2 and 3 established how the paper targeted Muslims as Muslims; this chapter discusses how the paper saw its relationship to the global political context and how it counseled Muslims to understand and act in the world in the early twentieth century.

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