published_or_final_version / Political Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis (M.S. in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy)--Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2008. / Title from PDF title page; viewed on Oct. 17, 2008. "12 August 2008." Electronic version of original print document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-85).

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-76). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1977. / Mimeographed. Also availalbe in microfilm.

This thesis examines Islamic reform as an intellectual-political movement that began in the first quarter of the 19th century and lasted until the first quarter of the 20th century. It was a philosophy founded by a group of Muslim-reformists as a result of their perception that degradation of Islamic civilisation and deterioration of the Islamic world had followed the so-called 'shock of modernity'. The investigation is based on the study of selected exponents of the Islamic reform movement. It examines the notions of political discourse of the Muslim-reformists, with particular reference to the problem that was central for Islamic reform: 'How did the political discourse of Islamic reform respond to the challenges of modernity at this early historic moment of opening up a communication with European modernity?' This discourse is examined through the texts that were produced by the Muslim-reformists following contact with European modernity and their realisation of the difference between the development of Europe and the retrogression of the Islamic world. The thesis sheds light on their attempts to find the causes of this retrogression and the ways to overcome it, examining their calls for a return to the Islamic ideals which are represented by the Qur'an and the Sunna and their interest in European modernity. This thesis also sets the Muslim-reformists' positions against the historical, political, and theological background that influenced their response: the French Revolution and Enlightenment philosophy on the one hand, and the theological tradition of Islam on the other hand. Emphasis is given to the ways in which they used both these traditions to offer original answers to the problems of the Islamic world. It is this common ground which, it is suggested, makes their political discourse intelligible and perhaps even essential, and gives a special interest to their interpretation.

Drawing on Ottoman and British archival sources as well as published materials in Arabic and modern Turkish, this dissertation analyzes how the Hijaz and the hajj to Mecca simultaneously became objects of Ottoman modernization, global public health, international law, and inter-imperial competition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that from the early 1880s onward, Ottoman administrators embarked on an ambitious redefinition of the empire’s Arab tribal frontiers. Through modern engineering, technology, medicine, and ethnography, they set out to manage human life and the resources needed to sustain it, transform Bedouins into proper subjects, and gradually replace autonomous political life with more rigorous forms of territorial power. At the same time, with the advent of the steamship colonial regimes identified Mecca as the source of a “twin infection” of sanitary and security threats. Repeated outbreaks of cholera marked steamship-going pilgrimage traffic as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from diasporic networks of anti-colonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. In contrast to scholarship framing biopolitical surveillance over the hajj as a colonial project, I emphasize the interplay between European and Ottoman visions of quarantines, medical inspections, steamship regulations, passports, and border controls. As with other more overtly strategic projects, such as rail and telegraph lines, I argue that the Ottoman state sought to harness the increasing medicalization of the hajj, Hijazi society, and the Arabian environment as part of a broader assemblage of efforts to consolidate its autonomous southern frontiers. Although historians have frequently held up the Hijaz and the pilgrimage to Mecca as natural assets for the invention of Hamidian tradition and legitimacy, they have often failed to recognize or clearly articulate how the very globalizing technologies of steam, print, and telegraphy, which made the dissemination and management of the Sultan-Caliph’s carefully curated image possible, were only just beginning to make the erection of more meaningful structures of Ottoman governmentality, biopolitical security, and territorial sovereignty in the Hijaz possible. And while modern technologies clearly lay at the very heart of the Hamidian impulse to reform, develop, and modernize the empire, concomitantly these very same technologies were also extending British India’s extraterritorial reach into the Hijaz. Thus, as an alternative to the traditional “Pan-Islamic” framing of the late Ottoman Hijaz, this study seeks to identify the assemblages of legal, documentary, technological, scientific, and environmental questions, the “everyday details” and quotidian “mechanics,” which were actually escalating and intensifying Anglo-Ottoman and wider international clashes over the status of the Hijaz and the administration of the hajj. In a sense, this dissertation is also a history of negation, absence, and contradiction. In order to better understand the possibilities and the limits of late Ottoman rule in the Hijaz, I spend much of this study detailing the enormous obstacles to territorial sovereignty and modern governmentality through an investigation of their Janus-faced inversions, autonomy and extraterritoriality. I argue that the autonomous legal status, exceptions, and special privileges enjoyed by both the Sharifate of Mecca and the Hijazi population (Bedouin and urban) laid bare the compromised nature and limits of Ottoman sovereignty and provided both the gateway and the rationale for the extension of the Capitulations and European extraterritorial protection into corners of the Ottoman world and Muslim spiritual affairs, which prior to the late-nineteenth century had been inconceivable.

At the beginning of the 20th century, in the midst of fears of anti-colonial Muslim uprisings fomented by the Ottoman Sultan, a network of French colonialists, diplomats, and scholars argued that France should colonize North Africa through Islam and not against it. They contended that, since expanding its dominion over large populations of Muslims, France had become “a Muslim Empire” and should govern as such. This dissertation studies what it meant for France to attempt to rule as a Muslim power through colonial expansions and crises from the 1900s to the 1920s. It reads this colonial rhetoric and practice against the grain of a wide array of North Africans’ writings, ranging from Islamic jurisprudence manuscripts, newspapers, memoirs, and private letters that reflected the multiple dimensions of anti-colonial struggles: from dreams to re-unify North Africa under the Ottoman Empire to trans-colonial Muslim solidarities from Morocco to India. By so doing, it attempts to place marginalized North African voices at the center of discourses on colonial subjecthood, race, and Islamic belonging.

Univ., Habil.-Schr. 2005 u.d.T.: Wrogemann, Henning: Daʻwa islāmīya - Der Ruf zum Islam--Heidelberg, 2005, eine Studie zu Begründung und Praxis des Aufrufes zum Islam im internationalen sunnitischen Diskurs.

Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri State University, 2008. / "December 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-101). Also available online.

Thesis (M.A.)--Baylor University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-108).