Entanglements in the colony: Jewish–Muslim connected histories in colonial India

Abstract

This article examines often ignored ‘minority entanglements’ forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

The university in modern South Asia: Historiographical framings between the local and the global

“…Pushing forward this line of inquiry, scholarship has also gone beyond Manjapra's narrow focus on Hindu Bengali bhadralok actors to consider the “minority positions” of Jewish and Muslim intellectuals. Recently, Razak Khan (2020a, 2022) and Heide Liebau (2019, 2020) have charted the transnational encounters of Muslim and German educationists as blueprints for “cosmopolitan minority visions'' that crossed national and colonial epistemes (Khan, 2020a, p. 295). Framed around individual life histories and itinerant academic trajectories, these case studies look beyond colonial and institutional archives to sources of personal remembrance such as letters, travelogues, memoirs, and photographs.…”

“…Importantly, these dialogues took place on both sides of the transcultural equation. As Khan put it: “Moving beyond the entanglements within the European metropolis, it is time to think about entanglements in the colony” (Khan, 2022, p. 3). The entanglements of minority intellectual figures shaped the culture and vision of Indian academic institutions, as in the introduction of reformist pedagogy at Jamia Millia (Khan, 2020a, p. 304) or the promotion of political agendas at Aligarh (Liebau, 2020, p. 315).…”