Roaming Between East and West: In Search of Religious Ecstasy in the Interwar Period

Abstract

This chapter is about the lives of Germans seeking to escape the wrath of a society in revolt through the help of religious ecstasy in the aftermath of the First World War. The Lahore-Ahmadiyya Mosque in Berlin provided the venue in which these happenings occurred. The chapter starts with the thought that a religious experience needs to find expression in words, actions, and physical deeds before it can form part of a social reality. To grasp what the seekers did to achieve their goal, the experiences of one, Irma Safiya Gohl (1906–64), are described in detail and compared with the narratives of her peers. The focus then shifts to the Lahore missionaries who enabled these religious experiments and how they steered their way towards fulfilling their truly global aim of combining Western rationality with the ‘wisdom of the East’, a quest that led the Lahoris to introduce a reform of the Islamic tradition in India. The chapter ends with a comparison between the German and Indian perspectives.