Printing Islamic Modernism: Arabic Texts for Arab and South Asian Muslims in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the relationship between Islamic modernism and Arabic print between the Mashriq and Indian subcontinent in the early twentieth century. Seeking to understand how Islamic modernists modified their message as they targeted new audiences, even as they promoted a unilingual program, this article explores the two printed publications in Arabic that emerged from the 1912 journey of Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), the founder of the Cairo-based journal al-Manar (The Lighthouse, 1898–1935), to British India. The first publication is “ʿUjala min rihlat al-Hind” (A Brief Report from the Journey to India), which Rida serially published in Cairo in 1912. The second publication is the summary of Rida’s subcontinental travels by his Iraqi-born Urdu translator, Sayyid ʿAbd al-Haqq Haqqi al-Aʿzami al-Baghdadi al-Azhari (1873–1924), which he wrote in the United Provinces town of Aligarh during 1912. Examining these two texts together, this article argues that their publication reflected the two separate concerns of their authors. While Rida sought to convey to al-Manar’s readership his experiences in British India by depicting them as analogous to the realities of the Ottoman Arab provinces and Egypt, al-Azhari sought to integrate al-Manar’s Islamic modernist enterprise into North Indian spheres of Islamic thought, practice, and print aesthetics. In so doing, this article shows how different audiences and modes of circulation enabled Islamic modernist enterprises to operate on both regional and transregional scales, reflecting the malleability of, and interconnectedness between, the worlds of Arabic and Urdu print during the period in question.