Pan-Islamic bonds and interest: Ottoman bonds,Red Crescent remittances and the limits of Indian Muslim capital,1877–1924

Introduction

A conspicuous feature of Ottoman-centered pan-Islam was the participation of hundreds of Indian Muslim organisations in the remittance of charitable donations to the Ottoman government and Red Crescent from the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877 to the demise of the Khilafat movement in 1924. ¹ At their peak during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, these campaigns witnessed the mobilisation of Muslim associations throughout the subcontinent, from Dhubri in Assam to Vizianagaram in Madras Presidency. While war raged in Ottoman Tripolitania and the Balkans from 1911, Indian Muslim newspaper editors solicited funds for Ottoman refugees and organised Red Crescent committees, joining newspapers from Cairo’s Al-Muʾayyad to Singapore’s Neracha in the creation of Muslim philanthropic publics. ² A range of Ottoman, Indian and British sources demonstrate that the financial portfolios of individuals with affiliations to myriad Indian Muslim associations—from Aligarh Old Boys to Deobandīs to Nadwīs and Dāwūdi Bohra Shiʿis—provided them with the capacity to eclipse contributions made by not only Ottoman citizens but also the combined allotments of all other global Muslims. ³ Between 1912 and 1914 alone, the Ottoman Red Crescent raised some Ottoman Lira (OL) 439,000, of which OL 185,000 came from Indian Muslims. ⁴ The contemporary rupee equivalent was around ₹2.5 million, or approximately £168,000–some £17,790,000 today. This was in no sense a colossal figure, but it is indicative of the broader financial infrastructure underlying pan-Islamic connections from the late nineteenth century. ⁵ With their immense geographic range, these financial transactions provide the opportunity to chart Indian Muslim financial histories both in the familiar contexts of Bombay, Hyderabad and Bhopal and—more compelling and moving still—in Dera Ismail Khan, Jalandhar and Sylhet. While commentators today are fixated with the transformative potential of Gulf remittances on the character of South Asian Islam, this is an older history of Indian Muslim remittances with ambitions of sustaining Islamic patrimony from Ottoman Adana to Jeddah. ⁶

Much of the humanitarian and fundraising work during the Balkan Wars was overseen by a core group of Indian Muslim activists, including Dr. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, a prominent figure in pan-Islamic politics and a correspondent for Muhammad Ali Jauhar’s The Comrade. As is well known, Ansari headed a Red Crescent medical mission that set up field hospitals in the Balkans. ⁷ With Zafar Ali Khan, proprietor of Lahore’s Zamīndār, Ansari and his associates also established refugee villages in Anatolia, material expressions on Ottoman soil of Indian Muslim largesse. ⁸ Largely unstudied, however, was the attempt by Ansari, Jauhar and their collaborators to assist the Ottoman Ministry of Finance in the flotation of £5 million worth of Ottoman treasury bonds in India. The Ottoman imperial decree issued in May 1913 had asserted that an Indian buyer had the option of obtaining either an interest-bearing or an interest-free bond. ⁹ Each bond carried five annual slips divided into two rows—one denoting the principal and other denoting the interest—that would be presented by Indian buyers to local exchange banks. The Ottoman Ministry of Finance would then pay the principal (with an annual interest rate of 5 per cent, if so demanded by the buyer) over a period of 5 years. By purchasing a bond, Indian Muslims would, so the planners envisioned, bankroll numerous philanthropic and developmental projects within the Ottoman domains, including the resettlement of Balkan Muslim refugees and the provision of monetary relief to the families of Ottoman soldiers.

In a litmus test of its financial sovereignty, these treasury bonds were to be nominally issued by the Ottoman Ministry of Finance rather than the Imperial Ottoman Bank, a British and French-owned consortium that functioned as the empire’s official state and commercial bank from 1863 and, with the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA, established in 1881), functioned as the semi-colonial stewards of Ottoman state finance. ¹⁰ Even so, European financial competition in the Ottoman Empire and the bevy of European exchange banks in India ensured that numerous other institutions joined in the undertaking as it clumsily unfolded, making unique demands on both the Ottoman government and Indian buyers. ¹¹ When the bonds, totalling a paltry £80,000, were finally transferred from the Ottoman Ministry of Finance to the Bombay branch of Comptoir National d’Escompte at the end of 1913, the drive had lost its momentum, sputtering along until the outbreak of the First World War. ¹²

This article examines the logistics of the bond campaign in 1912–13 and suggests that the fiscal discrepancies dividing the Ottoman bond drive from the Red Crescent charitable campaign highlight salient features of both Indian Muslim and late Ottoman financial history. Three questions are of concern: how did an assortment of Indian Muslim associations use local and international financial and print networks to participate in pan-Islamic projects in the Ottoman Empire from 1877 to 1923? How did International Financial Control (IFC) and financial decentralisation in the Ottoman Empire on the one hand, and the largely unbanked status of Indian Muslims and the discordant opinions of Indian ʿulamāʾ on the subject of Ottoman aid on the other hand, circumscribe the scale of both remittances and the bond drive? Finally, what bearing did the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of new religious economies in the post-war Middle East have on outlets of Indian Muslim capital? The article begins with a survey of the material infrastructure of pan-Islamic financial and religious exchange, followed by an examination of Indian Muslim monetary donations to the Ottoman government between 1877 and 1912. The two subsequent sections analyse the Ottoman effort to float treasury bonds in India, with the first portion taking up the supply side issues, and the second the difficulties on the demand end.

The relative failure of the Ottoman bond drive in India during 1912–13 owed in principal measure to the Ottoman government’s inefficiencies in supplying not merely the bonds themselves but also accurate financial information to its consuls in India, to Indian negotiators, and to participating European banks. Overlapping and contradictory agreements were initiated simultaneously from London to Lahore, resulting in scores of crossed-wires over which Ottoman and European institutions were responsible for issuing and selling the bonds. If Ottoman factors lacked the infrastructural capacities to implement a 5-year, extraterritorial bond commitment in India, several obstacles emerged on the demand end. Indian Muslims from diverse orientations struggled to secure support for the endeavour among their constituencies, displaying at times a deficient grasp of the fiscal complexities involved and a wanting literacy in financial economics. This confusion was compounded by the swirl of English, French, Persian and Ottoman correspondence that mediated these negotiations. Translational ambiguities were increased by the inconsistent monetary denomination of planned bond issues—varying between Ottoman piasters/lira and British pounds—in the Indian press. The tortuous mechanics of buying bonds complicated matters further, for while Red Crescent charitable remittances were made by villagers and schoolchildren at banks or post offices, purchasing Ottoman bonds required not simply a bank account but regular correspondence with banking staff and a multi-year pledge. Although Indian princes such as the Nizam of Hyderabad gave generously to the charitable campaign, they did not join leading Muslim merchants in buying bonds, scared off by the advice of the Viceroy of India.

Beyond these material hurdles, Indian Muslim investors harboured a multitude of religious and economic concerns towards bonds. In addition to the anxiety expressed by a minority of voices that buying bonds was tantamount to ‘eating interest’, and thus a violation of religious dictum (a subject that garnered fierce controversy among Indian Muslims independent of the bond drive), there remained a persistent disquiet that Ottoman financial insolvency posed a real risk to any eventual repayment to bondholders. Sayyid Hasan Bilgrami, former secretary of the All-India Muslim League, spoke for many when he thanked Jauhar for assigning his ‘mite’ to the Turkish Relief Fund rather than investing it in Ottoman bonds. ¹³ For Bilgrami and many others, making a multi-year commitment to the Ottoman securities market was simply too risky for the Indian Muslim investor.

Controversial too was whether Indian Muslim domestic needs must take priority over an Ottoman loan, a polemical scrum that encompassed the contemporary campaign to transform Aligarh Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College into a fully-fledged Muslim university, a tall order considering the university’s financial difficulties from Sir Sayyid’s death in 1898. ¹⁴ Organised as a series of local funds with a central secretariat, that initiative boasted sums up to ₹55 million, which were deposited at the Bank of Bengal and invested in Indian government securities at 3.5 per cent interest. When appeals were made in the Indian press to forward these funds to the Ottoman government, the university’s planners maintained that the domestic needs of Indian Muslims must take priority. The Aga Khan III initially rejected the proposal for disbursement, as did the All-India Muslim League, and a brief tussle ensued in the press. With Jauhar at the helm, the proponents of the Ottoman scheme eventually carried the day. At a meeting of the Anjuman-i Islām in Bombay in February 1913, the Aga Khan himself put forward a motion, seconded by the Raja of Mahmudabad, to raise a loan for the Ottoman government by way of purchasing bonds. ¹⁵

That the imam of the Niẓari Ismā’īlīs and a leading Shi‘i landlord became two key supporters of a financial campaign for the defence of a nominally ‘Sunni’ empire is an illustration of the need to reassess some of the accepted historiographical wisdom regarding late Ottoman pan-Islam. These studies tend to privilege Indian Muslim pronouncements of religious fealty to the Ottoman caliph-sultan, ¹⁶ the Ottoman instrumentalisation of pan-Islam as a check on European imperialism (or a mere bargaining chip with the Great Powers) ¹⁷ and the circulation of anti-colonial scholars between the Ottoman Hijaz and the broader Indian Ocean. ¹⁸ Still other commentators have rejected the category entirely as a product of colonial paranoia or ‘an interpretive concept developed by Western observers’. ¹⁹ At once a supplement and corrective to this historiography, this study shows that the Ottoman Empire had long been a forum of pan-Islamic investment, pilgrimage and study for a multitude of Indian Muslims, an arena for the projection of their own aspirations and anxieties. ²⁰

By expanding the remit of pan-Islam to include more actors, institutions and localities, these transactions also attend to the very real material constraints that facilitated and mitigated pan-Islamic connections. The conclusion considers how the comparatively decentralised nature of the Ottoman financial system and religious economy created a less-regulated environment for the circulation of Indian Muslim capital than in Ottoman successor states. With the collapse of the Ottomans, new political and religious entrepreneurs in the region—the Saudis, the Kemalists, the Palestinians and the Mandatory Powers—attempted to alternatively attract, curtail and repulse Indian Muslim capital in their efforts re-make the religious landscape of the post-Ottoman Middle East. No longer would Indian Muslims be able to use their capital with such ease to embed ‘Allahabads’ in the very heart of Ottoman Medina and ‘Hindias’ in Ottoman Anatolia. ²¹

The Religious and Political Economies of Indian Muslim Capital and Pan-Islamic Exchange

The diverse Indian Muslim associations involved in these financial-cum-humanitarian campaigns must be understood, to borrow from the language of religious economy, as ‘firms’ that in the aggregate constituted what was deemed ‘Muslim capital’ in the correspondence of the contemporary Indian newspaper entrepreneur, Muhammad Inshaullah. ²² As Nile Green and an increasing number of other historians of Islam have shown, a religious economy approach—in its conceptualisation of religious exchange through the economistic vocabulary of consumers, producers, markets, goods and services—is best attuned to the complex welter of parvenu Muslim religious ‘brands’ that emerged in the nineteenth-century subcontinent and beyond. ²³ A firm, as used in this article, comprises entities as varied as Muslim reformist associations, university student bodies, madrasa staff and arms suppliers. Indian Muslim capital serves here as an analytical device to further appreciate how individuals associated with these Indian Muslim ‘firms’, many with incompatible economic and religious aims, sought to provision the Ottoman government with monetary aid in various developmental and humanitarian causes. Contrary to the rhetoric that accompanied such acts, Muslim capital was neither sovereign nor unfettered but remained heavily subordinated to the structures of colonial and global finance, and dependent upon support from non-Muslim bankers, both European and Indian. However, the category of Indian Muslim capital sheds light on multiple histories of Muslim global capitalism, philanthropy, humanitarianism and reformism.

Even if the emphasis on firms underscores how parties from sundry Muslim religious orientations subsidised these causes and wrestled with their religious overtones in unique ways, the ‘skewness’ that Peter Brown has memorably called ‘an iron law in religious giving’ was persistent in all the campaigns studied here. ²⁴ Skewness took many forms—geographic, sectarian and individual. For while schoolchildren in Etawah and bibis in Lahore donated ‘their fives and tens’, leading Indian Muslim educationalists, merchants and princes dominated the organisation and dispensation of aid to the Ottoman government. When these individuals pooled their resources to create ‘suprafirm’ institutions, like Red Crescent committees or anjumans that availed themselves of a critical mass of participants, pecuniary assistance was of a greater order of magnitude than in those instances such as the Hijaz Railway when lone Urdu newspaper editors or traveling Muslim bureaucrats attempted to organise independent funds. In these latter instances the same economies of scale were never attained as they were in 1877–78 and 1912–13 when mercantile and political notables threw their weight behind fundraising efforts.

The successful mobilisation of charitable capital by prominent Indian Muslims depended on individual entrepreneurs’ affiliations with the institutions and norms of international finance. In part, these connections compensated for the largely unbanked status of many Indian Muslim donors in the Red Crescent campaigns, who sometimes relied on the managerial hierarchies of associations to remit money in their name. But more than this, a certain intimacy with global finance was a must for the simple reason that all trans-imperial pan-Islamic charitable donations and bond purchases were forced to operate within the strictures of pre-existing global remittance chains and necessitated connections with European banking houses that were established in India and the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century. For Indian Muslims in particular, the fact that European exchange banks financed the lion’s share of foreign trade and external exchange meant that pan-Islamic financial exchange was ineluctably mediated through such corporations as the Imperial Ottoman Bank, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Wiener Bank Verein and the National Bank of India, Ltd. ²⁵

The financial woes of the Ottoman government reinforced this reliance. As Ali Çoşkun Tunҫer has argued, IFC in the Ottoman context, while encouraging cooperation with foreign creditors and access to cheap foreign capital, came at the price of wholesale fiscal reform of existing Ottoman financial and political institutions. ²⁶ Indeed, the same structural weaknesses that hampered Ottoman extraterritorial fundraising in India in 1877 materialised once again in 1912–13, curbing the full weight of potential Indian contributions. As demonstrated below, European financial institutions were often unequal to the task of mobilizing Indian capital on behalf of Ottoman authorities. This history thus questions the tendency to view IFC in the Ottoman context as a mostly benevolent, almost altruistic, vehicle for ‘peripheralisation’. ²⁷ Although the supposed benefits of IFC are questioned, one must remember that without these institutions the transfer of both remittances and bonds between the subcontinent and Istanbul would have been prohibitive. ²⁸

Contrary to many studies on the origins of pan-Islam, these institutions confirm that the beginning of a pan-Islamic moment in the 1870s had origins beyond an instrumentalist, anti-imperialist ‘turn’ adopted by the Hamidian regime or the Islamophobia of European colonial officials. ²⁹ As one commentator in The Nineteenth Century succinctly put it, the growing appreciation among Indian Muslims for the Ottoman sultan in the 1870s was not due to ‘any direct propagandism’ but stemmed from the increased circulation of foreign and domestic newspapers between both regions. ³⁰ This focus on the material aspects of pan-Islam, as emphasised first by Takashi Oishi nearly 20 years ago, underscores that it was not simply Ottoman rhetorical or ideological claims, nor even the anti-colonial ambitions of Indian Muslims, that drove the consolidation of these links. ³¹ To be sure, a series of regular, if low-intensity, ties had connected Indian Muslims to Ottoman authorities from the sixteenth century. But substantial material links were forged only from the mid-nineteenth century with the expansion of British imperium into the perimeters of the Ottoman domains, which reinforced an intensified regime of circulation that accompanied East India Company supremacy in the western Indian Ocean. ³²

One key outcome over time was the growth of Indian banking firms in the Ottoman Gulf, Hijaz and Iraq. As Juan Cole, Meir Litvak and Julia Stephens have shown, ‘Indian money’ was crucial to the cultivation and preservation of Shi‘i sacred space in the shrines cities of Iraq. Michael Christopher Low in an excellent article has pointed to the nexus between British commercial expansion and Indian Muslim financial activity in the late nineteenth-century Hijaz. ³³ These links extended to other parts of the Ottoman domains—Ottoman Baghdad was so deeply integrated into the wider Indian Ocean that its monetary system was the Indian rupee. ³⁴ From the aptly-named ‘Jabal Hindi’ in Mecca to the shrines of Karbala, Indian Muslim munificence permeated the late Ottoman religious landscape, a fact that sometimes led Ottoman officials, such as the governor Osman Nuri Pasha, to lament the inordinate economic influence of Indian merchants in the Haramayn. ³⁵

Anxious to monitor activities within its own religious economy, the Ottoman government did its best to surveil this traffic. The Ottoman archives are dotted with directives sent to the Postal and Telegraph Ministry in Istanbul to seize and inspect objectionable ‘Hindi’ (i.e., Indian) papers that had filtered into the empire. ³⁶ (Readers of these very same papers subsequently raised immense amounts of money for the Ottoman government.) The spectre of pan-Islam was a persistent source of unease for British authorities, but Ottoman authorities also subjected Indian Muslim pilgrims and scholars to intense scrutiny. ³⁷ As the archival record clearly bears witness, Ottoman authorities were patently apprehensive of unregulated pan-Islamic contacts, confiscating and pulping many texts of Indian ʿulamāʾ on the pretext that such ‘Wahhabist’ works propagated heresy. ³⁸ But the expansion of Indian printing networks throughout the Indian Ocean made this an arduous commerce to police. On occasion though, Ottoman authorities were content to use the works of Indian ʿulamāʾ, such as Rahmatullah Kairanwi’s İẓhār al-Ḥaqq, to counter Shi‘i missionary activities among local tribesmen of theʿAtabāt, much of which was funded from Iran and India. ³⁹ Several works by Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan, a stalwart of Sunni reformism in the princely state of Bhopal, and a key fundraiser in 1877–78, were published in Istanbul in the 1880s. ⁴⁰ The Ottoman government also granted salaries to select Indian scholars, not least Sayyid Fazal Thangal. ⁴¹ Indian Muslims only benefited from the largesse of the Ottoman religious economy after a vetting process. No visceral pan-Islamic, anti-colonial agenda dictated Ottoman relationships with non-Ottoman Muslims.

The infrastructure of Ottoman interactions with Indian Muslims expanded with the foundation of an Ottoman consulate in Bombay in 1849, followed over the next 50 years by offices in Madras, Karachi, Rangoon, Colombo and other cities. Except in Bombay and Karachi, consular heads were not Ottoman bureaucrats but hailed from prominent local Muslim families. For example, the Badshah family, which held the post in Madras, were members of the board of directors for the Buckingham and the Carnatic Mills. ⁴² The consulates also helped coordinate the Hajj traffic departing from India and the implementation of quarantine measures. ⁴³ In this capacity, they corresponded regularly with colonial authorities and the consuls were even integrated into the panoply of the Raj durbar, as confirmed by the Bombay consul-general’s attendance at the imperial coronation in 1877. ⁴⁴ Yet, if the experiences of the Ottoman novelist and short-lived Bombay consul-general, Abdülhak Hamid, are any indication, despite the consulate’s prime location in Breach Candy, consular officials were largely house rich and cash poor. ⁴⁵ Over time they functioned as the ineffectual stage-managers for the Hamidian regime’s fumbling attempts to adorn itself as the champion of pan-Islam, whether in the form of orchestrating receptions for the ill-fated frigate Ertuğrul, on its way to Japan, ⁴⁶ or lodging a complaint against Bombay’s Police Commissioner for presiding over a meeting at the Anjuman-i Islām to protest Ottoman visa fees levied on Hajj pilgrims. ⁴⁷ With that said, as discussed below, the Bombay consul-general functioned as a central financial intermediary among the Ottoman government, European banks and Indian Muslim negotiators, particularly during the bond campaign of 1912–13. ⁴⁸

This section has shown that by 1870s the thick mesh of reformist associations, reading publics, consulates and banks strewn between the Ottoman lands and colonial South Asia prepared the ground for the first manifestation of pan-Islamic financial humanitarianism in 1877–78. Indian Muslim donors had to traverse a quagmire of Ottoman and British sovereignty disputes and regimes of economic and religious coercion in the process. Although the colonial metropole remained a fulcrum in these campaigns, Indian Muslim capital was also mediated through non-colonial agencies as well, not least Ottoman extraterritorial institutions and non-British European banks. The meaning of it all was deliberated over in the heavily saturated realm of vernacular print that linked the Ottoman domains with colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean. The next section considers how Indian Muslim firms throughout the subcontinent utilised these mechanisms before the 1912–13 bond drive.

Relief, or Lakhs Thereof: Indian Muslim Remittances to the Ottoman Government, 1877–1912

Having surveyed the institutions and technologies underwriting Indian Muslim financial humanitarianism, this section analyses the profile of Indian Muslim firms and individuals who participated in three Ottoman-centred remittance campaigns from 1877 to the beginning of the Balkan Wars. The principal aim here is not only to appreciate the magnitude of Indian Muslim firms engaged in these undertakings (and to deduce larger patterns on the character of Indian Muslim capital from this data),but also to emphasise some of the obstacles—religious, economic and logistical —faced by contributors. What is more, Indian Muslim fundraisers maintained variant attitudes towards the religious and political viability of the Ottoman Empire, which inflected the very act of giving itself. Monetary assistance to the Ottoman government thus became yet another polemical set-piece within contemporary debates among Indian Muslims over acceptable Muslim practice.

The inaugural 1877 remittance drive was motivated by two concerns: to help the Ottoman government pay the crippling war indemnity imposed by the Russians and to bring succor to the Ottoman wounded. ⁴⁹ To achieve this, Indian Muslims utilised British aid societies, notably ‘The Turkish Compassionate Fund’, which by 1882 received £9,000 from India and other colonial settings. ⁵⁰ With the help of British consular authorities in Istanbul, Indian Muslims also sent aid to ‘The National Ottoman Society for the Relief of Sick and Wounded’. ⁵¹ More important still was the ‘Stafford House Committee for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Turkish Soldiers’, founded by the Duke of Sutherland, which served as a key intermediary between Salar Jung, the Nizam of Hyderabad’s prime minister, and the Ottoman Foreign Ministry. ⁵² The Stafford House Committee even printed advertisements in India for its own fund. ⁵³ Nevertheless, as an Ottoman observer noted in a communique, the majority of funds from Indian Muslims were sent directly to Istanbul from India rather than through London. ⁵⁴

Here the European exchange banks came into play, in their role as proxies for the Imperial Ottoman Bank. After Muslim merchants in Bombay began dispatching a series of contributions to the Imperial Ottoman Bank in London from August 1877, ⁵⁵ the Imperial Ottoman Bank did explore the idea of coordinating a large-scale bond drive in India but lacked branches in India. The bank’s minutes reveal its unsuccessful negotiations with the Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, ‘begging’ it for assistance in obtaining subscriptions in India for the Ottoman Defence Loan, which was widely publicised in the European press in previous months. Sensing the desperation of the appeal, Prescott Winter, the solicitor of the Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, dismissed the notion of selling bonds in India as a hopeless endeavour. Winter’s misgivings were confirmed by subsequent telegrams from Bombay revealing that the Ottoman Defence Loan garnered little interest among local merchants. ⁵⁶ Moreover, although European banks were willing to wire remittances to the Imperial Ottoman Bank, none showed any inclination to carry out the bond drive on the bank’s behalf. While £5 million in subscriptions were eventually issued in London and Paris, in a foreshadowing of later efforts, only £5,000 worth of bonds were sold, mostly in India. ⁵⁷

Regardless of the fate of the bond drive, charitable remittances continued to filter into Ottoman coffers. For example, in November 1877, the Ottoman ambassador in London informed the head of the Ottoman Foreign Ministry that the Bombay branch of Comptoir d’Escompte had dispatched £18,400 telegram to the Imperial Ottoman Bank in London. ⁵⁸ Like their Muslim counterparts in places like Sarajevo, Indian Muslims had formed fundraising ‘suprafirm’ institutions of their own, such as the Indian War Fund Commission (ʿiāne-i harbiyye komisyon) that remitted £4,500 to the London branch of the Imperial Ottoman Bank. In turn, the consul-general in Bombay was ordered to express the Ottoman government’s gratitude to the commission for a gesture ‘resulting in the protection of Islamic unity’. ⁵⁹ However, the language of unity only obscures the range of Indian Muslim firms involved, for more than 150 Muslim associations sent aid to the Ottoman government, raising some OL 124,843, an equivalent to some £113,000 or ₹1 million.

Their contributions are collated in ‘The Inventory of Indian Contributions’ (Defter-iʿIāne-i Hindiyye), a 115-page work compiled for Abdülhamid II (see Figure 1). ⁶⁰ Based upon an extensive, if not entirely exhaustive, survey of Indian donations compiled by Ottoman bureaucrats, with the aid of the Ottoman Parliament and Refugee Association, the inventory was divided into 14 separate instalments, listing the names of donors by locality. ⁶¹ It was commissioned by the Ottoman government because many Indian donors demanded confirmation that their donations had successfully arrived in Istanbul. The geographic breadth is tremendous, ranging from Himalayan hill stations to mohalla quarters in Bombay and small principalities in Punjab. ⁶² Mercantile groups, such as Memons, Bohras and Nakhodas, stand out, as do the heads of leading princely states like Bhopal and Hyderabad. Bhopal’s contributions, which in one instalment exceeded ₹205,000, were overseen by Siddiq Hasan Khan, who was honoured by the Ottoman government for his actions. ⁶³ Such munificence is suggestive of the broader fiscal resources underwriting Khan’s reformist and educational efforts that extended via print from Bhopal to Istanbul.

The range of post-1857 reformist associations also feature prominently in the inventory. The denizens of Aligarh donated by means of a committee and subscriptions raised by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who went to great pains in the Aligarh Gazette to reassure the Indian Government that these activities did not contravene Indian Muslim loyalties. ⁶⁴ Displaying the precocious enthusiasm of later drives, the rectors of dar al-‘ulum Deoband penned a letter to the Ottoman grand vizier thanking him for confirming the receipt of the money. ⁶⁵ Only the Ottoman translation of the letter survives, but the directors were gracious for the ‘acceptance of the insignificant amount that we had the audacity to present without reservation to the struggle for the defence of Islam’. ⁶⁶ In the inventory itself, one of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi’s contributions earned its own bracket. ⁶⁷ Thus, Deoband’s ‘global turn’, in the guise of wire transfers to Ottoman authorities in Bombay, London and Istanbul, dates to its first decade, a reflection of the unique financial model adopted by the organisation from its inception. ⁶⁸

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Figure 1.

Source: Defter-I ʿ I ̄ane-i Hindiyye (I˙stanbul: Matbaa-i Âmire: 1296/1879).

Yet more remarkable than the funds sent by reformist titans are the diverse array of remittances from associations in the Carnatic, Hyderabad, Malabar and Burma. Unfortunately, the inventory reveals nothing of how the funds were raised locally, but one can assert confidently that even Muhammad Dargahi Qazi and Munshi Ghulam Ahmad of little Pimpalgoan Raja, who together contributed a modest ₹215, were sufficiency imbricated in wider material networks stretching, however torturously, to Istanbul. ⁶⁹ The same can be said of ‘Azimabad (Patna), where a sizable number of local Muslim worthies formed the ‘Turkish Aid Committee’, which printed a 14-page booklet in Urdu listing its members. ⁷⁰ A motley assemblage of bigwigs organised in a single firm, they were representative of the hundreds of Indian Muslims who participated in the religious and financial economy of pan-Islam from the Ottoman Balkans to Arabia. The experiences of Patna’s Turkish Aid Committee reflect the critical mass in donations that even contributors in smaller urban centres could achieve by pooling their resources into a single firm.

Despite the scale, some members of the Indian Muslim press expressed their disappointment in the low volume of aid, blaming poor organisation and official restrictions. ⁷¹ Remittances quickly slowed to a trickle, perhaps largely because of the labyrinthine infrastructure involved. Sometime later authorities in Istanbul called for the preparation of a new regulation (nizāmnāme) calling on Indian Muslims to make additional donations. ⁷² But the fitful Ottoman gesture towards pan-Islamic solidarity did nothing to solve the insurmountable logistical problems faced by the Ottoman government and the Imperial Ottoman Bank. In the end, these factors acted as a curb on the scale of Indian Muslim capital fundraising, which fell almost entirely on the shoulders of Indian Muslims.

For the next 20 years, Indian Muslim financial activities from Ottoman Iraq to the Hijaz permeate the Ottoman archival record, but not until the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897 was there a charitable campaign comparable to 1877. This conflict witnessed the printing of epic-length Urdu accounts of Ottoman military campaigns in Rawalpindi, Lahore and other cities. ⁷³ Money in turn was raised for the Muslim refugees of Crete under the supervision of Muhammad Inshaullah, the editor of Amritsar’s Vakīl. ⁷⁴ Unhappily, as Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had reputedly prophesied, ⁷⁵ the Ottoman consul in Karachi, Kamil Bey, and his associate in Kandahar embezzled the funds and were never punished, to Inshaullah’s chagrin. ⁷⁶ However, a table of donors in a March 1898 issue of Vakīl shows that the number of donors was rather meek. ⁷⁷ Involuntary contributions were also extorted by Ottoman authorities in the Hijaz from Indian pilgrims to fill the caissons of the Ottoman war fund. ⁷⁸

If such incidents had the character of a shakedown, within 3 years the Hijaz became the recipient of Muslim philanthropy from all over the globe. Unlike other Ottoman railway projects, the Hijaz Railway was to be funded entirely by donations rather than European financial consortiums, a demonstration of Ottoman financial independence and religious leadership. ⁷⁹ A full range of Ottoman financial institutions and consulates were mustered for the task. ⁸⁰ The Hijaz Railway campaign underlines best how Indian Muslim firms negotiated the difficult question of aiding the Ottoman government. Historians of the Hijaz railway have noted these donations but have not consulted the wider range of relevant Ottoman and Indian documentation. ⁸¹ Once again Urdu newspapers were key fundraisers and platforms for debate. In numerous issues, Bombay’s Pānch Bahādur listed contributors from Bhagalpur to Bijnor under the headline, ‘The Generosity of Indian Muslims’ and printed unequivocal articles such as ‘What is the Hijaz railway?’ ⁸² One piece boasted that the contributions showed the strength of the Indian rupee on international markets, ⁸³ and elsewhere Indian Muslim capital was held up as a catalyst for Ottoman progress. ⁸⁴ In this view, Ottoman Muslims were the poor relations of their Indian ‘co-religionists’. ⁸⁵ Not all agreed with such gestures, especially a writer from Lucknow’s Oudh Akhbar who complained ‘we ourselves are starving, why should we help?’ ⁸⁶

Sharply opposing this position were two of the leading Indian fundraisers: the aforementioned Muhammad Inshaullah and Hyderabad’s Mullah ʿAbd al-Qayyum. Before the advent of the project, Inshaullah calculated that via subscriptions Indian Muslims could collect a staggering £300 million for a railway line from Basra to Aleppo and thence to Syria, the Hijaz and Yemen. ⁸⁷ Some of this unrestrained ambition can only be understood in the context of Inshaullah’s opposition to swadeshi in the belief that it would undermine the material progress British rule bestowed upon Indian Muslims. ⁸⁸ Inshaullah had also toiled as a translator of Ottoman histories, receiving praise from no less a luminary than A. Vambery, the prolific Hungarian Orientalist. ⁸⁹ But Inshaullah’s most impressive intellectual labour was an extensive comparative work on the contemporary condition of the Ottoman Empire. ⁹⁰ In time, he opened a charity office in Lahore, where he began printing another paper, Waṭan, that sent funds in over 35 instalments. ⁹¹ Whatever his pro-Ottoman sympathies, he did not hide his contempt for certain Ottoman bureaucrats involved in the scheme, voicing sentiments not out of step with contemporary European tropes of Ottoman corruption.

The leader of Hyderabad’s campaign was Mullah ʿAbd al-Qayyum, an erstwhile education minister who became honorary secretary of a Central Committee of the ‘Hijaz Railway Fund’. Judging from contemporary British reports, Qayyum had fallen from the Nizam’s graces for obstructing plague measures and writing ‘exceedingly offensive letters’ to British officials. ⁹² Qayyum first travelled throughout Hyderabad collecting signatures to present to the Nizam ⁹³ but was unsuccessful in his attempt to secure the Viceroy as patron of the fund. ⁹⁴ Undeterred, he established several aid committees in Behar, Calcutta and Saharanpur and eventually moved onto Mysore, Madras and Malabar, corresponding along the way with the Ottoman consulate in Bombay. ⁹⁵ In a broader missive on Indian contributions from Lahore to Madras, Ottoman authorities singled out Qayyum. ⁹⁶ In one instance Qayyum requested permission from Ottoman authorities to send funds raised in Hyderabad for the renovation of a resting area in Mina, another reminder of Indian Muslim capital’s potential to transform the sacred space of the Ottoman Hijaz itself. ⁹⁷

Meanwhile, the Ottoman consulate in Madras, founded in 1890 and administered by the industrial tycoon Badshah Khan, vindicated its foundation by accumulating and transferring money to the Ottoman government. ⁹⁸ But two of the city’s most prominent newspapers, Shams al-Akhbar and Muḥammadan, functioned as the most vigorous mouthpieces for the cause. ⁹⁹ In an article in the latter—reprinted in Cairo’s Al-Liwāʾ—readers were reprimanded for their meagre contributions to the railway fund and compared unfavourably to European Jews who raised millions for Alfred Dreyfus. ‘We cannot imagine a greater shame’, the writer exclaimed, ‘than seeing the Jews spending millions of pounds for the sake of an individual while Muhammadans are unable to finish a line sacred and concerning the interest of millions’. ¹⁰⁰ Some of the restraint may have stemmed from the ambiguous status of these donations as forms of almsgiving. In an istiftāʾ (request for legal clarification) sent to Deoband’s Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, a petitioner, who had noticed Hijaz Railway contributions in the newspapers, asked whether ‘zakāt is permissible in this or not; whether this is a requirement for a particular person or not; and whether this subscription constituted transfer of ownership (tamlīk) or not?’ Gangohi replied that ‘any ṣadaqa for the Hijaz Railway subscription cannot be compulsory. Zakāt [and] ṣadaqa al-fi̤tr, etc., indeed ought to be given voluntarily’. ¹⁰¹ (In 1912–13, Gangohi’s successors among the Deobandi ʿulamāʾ asserted that it was mandatory for zakāt and ṣadaqa to be given to the Ottomans, even if Ottoman bonds were simultaneously deemed ḥarām).

Historians claim that throughout the construction of the Hijaz Railway somewhere between OL 15,000 and OL 100,000 were contributed by Indian Muslims. ¹⁰² The first figure is suspiciously low and based not on a systematic study of Ottoman sources, but rather on British reports and Ottoman Arabic newspapers. Unfortunately, comparable to the 1877 inventory exists for the Hijaz Railway. Because of the disparate nature of the evidence, and the lack of central coordination on the Ottoman end, exact estimates are impossible to make, but it is not likely that Indian contributions were below OL 60,000. If the 1877 campaign had demonstrated the failings of IFC institutions in mobilising pan-Islamic funds, the Hijaz Railway campaign reflected the ineffectual extraterritorial reach of intermediary Ottoman institutions, the Hamidian regimes’ impotency in attracting pan-Islamic support, and the misgivings of many Indian Muslims towards the Ottoman cause. The Hijaz Railway campaign was also marred by an inability to attract the upper crust of Indian Muslim investors, who might have supplied the badly needed infusion of capital that Inshaullah thought Indian Muslims capable of giving. In the end, the financial resources of those individuals who did participate were too diffuse and atomistic to even equal the 1877–78 amounts.

This portion of the article has appraised the sweep of Indian Muslim actors who had a hand in Ottoman remittance campaigns and has shown that furnishing aid was subject to considerable calculation that varied from firm to firm and individual to individual. After an initial moment of enthusiastic charity in 1877–78, Indian Muslim communities were divided starkly over their perceived financial obligations to the Ottoman government. Fundraising in the years after the Russo-Ottoman War was mainly the preserve of select entrepreneurs, typically with links to political patronage, networks of print and liquid capital. Each worked more or less without sustained Ottoman patronage, and few could lay claim to the merchant and princely capital on offer in 1877–78. If 1877–78 saw the mobilisation of firms and associations throughout north, central and southern India, subsequent drives seem to have been confined to specific urban clusters—such as Amritsar, Hyderabad and Lucknow—and never attained the same geographical breadth. This stemmed from changing attitudes towards Ottoman governance, sharpened by the difficulties of Indian pilgrims in the Hijaz and simmering criticism of Hamidian despotism. With these factors in mind, it is therefore unexpected that the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 elicited such an immense outpouring of monetary aid in the form of charitable remittances from hundreds of locations, drawing in groups that had hitherto never contributed to Ottoman humanitarian causes.

The Supply Side: Bond Drive Negotiations, 1912–13

The next two sections contrast the liberality shown by Indian Muslims in the Red Crescent campaign in 1912–13 with the lackluster execution of the bond drive. An initial answer is found in the woeful orchestration of bond negotiations on the supply end, owing in part to European financial rivalry and Ottoman fiscal decrepitude, and torturous negotiations involving a plurality of parties. On the demand side, Indian Muslim firms reacted with alarm to this improvidence, but as they began to submit the bond drive to intense scrutiny, many continued to contribute the parallel Red Crescent charitable campaign. While they chronicled lists of participants in the Red Crescent drive in issue after issue, those Indian Muslim print entrepreneurs in favour of the bond drive were hard-pressed to convince Muslim constituencies that such an endeavour was the best use of Indian Muslim capital. They also struggled to educate their readership in the proper means for purchasing bonds. As a result of their inadequate financial proficiency, many found the financial technicalities too arduous to convey, relying instead on the interventions of European financiers and leading Muslim capitalists like the Aga Khan III. Eventually, critical reactions in the Indian and European press, as well as the negative legal opinions of various Indian ʿulamāʾ, intensified these demand side objections. Growing malaise surrounding the bond drive, coupled with emerging political controversies in the subcontinent, led to a flight of Indian Muslim capital away from Ottoman-centred humanitarianism and towards causes closer to home, such as the fund for the restoration of the Kanpur mosque.

In 1912, a confederation of Balkan states declared war on the Ottoman Empire and within weeks had nearly pushed the Ottomans entirely out of southeastern Europe. Both the Ottoman Prime Minister’s Archive and the Turkish Red Crescent contain thousands of documents detailing the immense outpouring of Indian Muslim charity stirred up by these events (see Figure 3). ¹⁰³ For example, Seth Haji Abdullah Harun, a Memon businessman known as the ‘Sugar King’—a title he earned for being the largest importer of Java sugar ¹⁰⁴ —featured prominently in the pages of the press in his capacity as Karachi’s Red Crescent committee chair. ¹⁰⁵ Meanwhile, the rectors of Deoband corresponded with leading members of the Committee of Union and Progress, including Dr Bahaeddin Şakir and Rifat Bey, and remitted funds via the National Bank of India, Ltd. ¹⁰⁶ In Lahore, Muhammad Inshaullah was a leading donor, while the readers of the city’s women’s paper, Tahzīb al-Niswān, gave vigorously, as did uncounted contributors stretching from Quetta to Singapore. ¹⁰⁷

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Figure 2.

Source: ₹Anjuman-i h. ilāl-i ah. mer-i kost.ant.aniyya kī resīd', Al-Hilāl, 19 March 1913, p. 180.

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Figure 3.

Source: Donanma Mecmuası, no. 38, April 1913, p. 633.

In light of these figures, how did the Ottoman bond drive turn out so dismal? ¹⁰⁸ From the moment Ottoman relief funds were established, the Ottoman government and Muhammad Ali Jauhar corresponded via telegraph. In fact, it was Jauhar’s responsibility to gain the Viceroy’s consent for the ‘Muslim loan to Turkey’. ¹⁰⁹ As early as January 1912, Jauhar’s paper, The Comrade, had sought the assistance of the Bank of Bengal in Calcutta, Deutsche Bank in Istanbul and the Imperial Ottoman Bank to remit funds to the Grand Vizier. ¹¹⁰ That month the Ottoman government also approached Jauhar to open talks with the Alliance Bank of Simla, the Bank of Bengal and Comptoir National d’Escompte, but by March, Jauhar was impatiently imploring the Ottoman government ‘[for] Allah’s sake assure Indian Mussulmans trying secure loan for Turkey’. ¹¹¹ These frustrations were shared by Ansari, who handled negotiations in Istanbul proper with the help of Zafar Ali Khan. During his first meeting with the Ottoman Minister of Finance, Ansari was informed that the bonds would not be available for several months and therefore was encouraged to contact banks in India and to inquire ‘if it was possible to receive money from the people for these Treasury Bonds and give them receipts for their money to be changed for these bonds when they were ready’. Further foot-dragging on the part of Ottoman ministers followed this directive, leading Ansari to write to Jauhar: ‘the Turks have got absolutely no business capacity, and in arranging the issue of Bonds on such favourable terms they are not as prompt as they might be’. ¹¹² By April, Ansari learned the bonds would not be ready for another 2 months, while the Ottoman consul-general in Bombay communicated to Jauhar that an Ottoman functionary had to be sent to Leipzig to obtain the necessary stereotype plates. ¹¹³

This was a crucial reminder of how IFC shaped the entire enterprise. Indeed, in the existing records, there appears to be a fair amount of ambiguity over what institution would be responsible for issuing the bonds, which were deemed ‘National Defence Treasury Bonds’. Whatever its position as the official state bank of the empire, and a key recipient of Red Crescent remittances, the Imperial Ottoman Bank was surely not at the helm. Rather the Ottoman Ministry of Finance saw the bond scheme as its own prerogative. Yet, like the Imperial Ottoman Bank, that ministry hardly had the extraterritorial means to execute such a campaign. For that reason, the Ottoman Minister of Finance turned to two European exchange banks— Alliance Bank, Delhi and the Bank of Bengal—to issue the first provisional receipts of bonds (not the bonds themselves) in February 1913, leading Jauhar and a group from Delhi’s Jama Masjid to buy 150 bonds totalling £75. ¹¹⁴ At the bidding of Indian negotiators, a string of other European exchange banks in India agreed to receive deposits in turn. ¹¹⁵

Far from a transaction involving two or three parties, Ottoman correspondence reveals that other negotiations between Ottoman officials and other Indian Muslim entrepreneurs were occurring simultaneously. For one, the consul-general in Bombay produced a report on a meeting convened by the Anjuman-i Ṣana‘i al-Islām for the formation of a committee to facilitate the redemption of treasury bonds and the transmission of loans to the Ottoman government. ¹¹⁶ The Ottoman elder statesman, Ferid Pasha, prepared a memo for the Ottoman Ministry of Finance after some Indian Muslims asked to be exempt from the OL 500,000 of interest accruing on the OL 2 million worth of treasury bonds designated for sale. ¹¹⁷ At the same time, the Grand Vizier, Said Halim Pasha, initiated talks with the Ahmad Hassan, head of Lahore’s Muslim Orient Bank. In exchange for Ottoman permission to open branches of his bank in the Hejaz, Hassan offered to sell Ottoman securities in India without interest at the rate of OL 5, 10, 50 and 100. Said Halim thereafter promised Hassan that the Ottoman government would send him treasury bonds in the amount of OL 5 million without interest and redeemable in 5 years. ¹¹⁸

In one of many disconcerting turns, an article in The Comrade stated that the agreement between the Muslim Orient Bank and the Ottoman government had nothing whatsoever to do with the parallel campaign to disseminate Ottoman treasury bonds in India. While an Ottoman land tax would act as a security for the National Defence Treasury Bonds, in Hassan’s scheme his own bank’s credit fulfilled this role. No interest would be charged on the bonds. ¹¹⁹ The article vehemently criticised the financial viability of Hassan’s plan, condemning it as a distraction from the leading act and encouraging Indian Muslims to put their trust in Ottoman treasury bonds rather than the credit of the Muslim Orient Bank. ¹²⁰ While European banks would charge commission from Indian bond purchasers in the National Defence Treasury Bond undertaking, Hassan was subjected to criticism for his decision to extract a commission from the Ottoman government instead.

Hassan earned the further ire of the Aga Khan III in a piece written in February 1913, where the latter stressed the religious obligation of all Muslims to send charitable remittances to the Ottoman government, but rejected the proprietor of the Muslim Orient Bank’s suggestion to advance an interest-free loan to the Ottoman government, saying that ‘Loans without interest are out of the question’. In its place, the Aga Khan III advocated that banks, including the Muslim Orient Bank, sell as brokers for the bond campaign with the Ottoman government acting as their guarantor. He further acknowledged that if religious sentiments were offended by interest-bearing bonds ‘there should be a condition by which a loan of 100 would be issued at 75 and repaid at par after five years’. ¹²¹ In the end, Hassan’s elaborate plans came to nought, and by September 1914, the Muslim Orient Bank, one of the few banking institutions in India owned by Muslims, collapsed along with a torrent of other native banks. ¹²²

Ottoman officials continued to seek support through diverse channels. After learning that committees had been established in India to mediate bond purchases, the Ottoman Minister of Finance noted that all efforts had to be made to validate the zeal of Indian and Egyptian Muslims. ¹²³ Mahmud Şevket Pasha, the Grand Vizier who obtained celebrity status in the Indian Muslim press, personally thanked Jauhar and the readers of Hamdard for sending £3,000. ¹²⁴ Other overtures were made to Indian Muslims, such as that of an Ottoman parliamentarian from Basra, Abdul Wahab ibn Qurtas, who wrote an extended letter to Zafar Ali Khan, editor of Lahore’s Zamīndār, where he suggested, among other points, the abolition of the duty placed upon Indian pilgrims and the appointment at Jeddah and Mecca of an Urdu-speaking official. ¹²⁵ Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha, the head of the Ottoman Red Crescent, asked Zafar Ali to publish an aid appeal in his newspaper. ¹²⁶ Meanwhile, the Ottoman Ministry of War used the pages Tanīn to thank Indian contributors like Calcutta’s Abdul Latif for contributions. ¹²⁷ But collaboration masked deeper misgivings, as is clear in an article by S.M. Tevfik for the Ottoman newspaper, Sebil al-Reşad. The piece concerned the participation of Cafer Bey at an Indian Red Crescent meeting held in Bombay before Dr Ansari’s departure for Istanbul. ¹²⁸ Tevfik was impressed by the proceedings, but he ended his article on a curious note:

Indian Muslims are not democrats, they are all aristocrats. Therefore, unless they are satisfied by our activities, which do not conform to their tastes, we will not be able to utilize them. Several times I have written this. Unfortunately, I don’t see any hope of leverage. ¹²⁹

This sentiment points to the irreconcilable agendas pursued by Ottoman and Indian Muslim factors throughout these years, none of which expedited the implementation of the bond drive.

Ottoman dithering did delay the possible resolution of this mistrust, which was not aided by continued discrepancies in bond information and dizzying technicalities. Near the end of 1912, Bombay’s Ottoman consul-general, Cafer Bey, cabled Jauhar:

We shall pay through the agency of the Imperial Ottoman Bank and the Public Debt interest at the rate of 6 per cent, and we shall redeem the stock in three years at the rate of two instalments [sic] per year. We should like to know the quantity required in India. We shall send to the Banks mentioned by you as many Bonds as you require… ¹³⁰

After Jauhar and others protested the prohibitive value of bonds, the Ottoman government agreed that the lowest bond would be issued ‘for half a sovereign which is equal to Rs. 7–8–0 (7 rupees, 8 annas, 0 paise)’ for the sake of poor Muslims. ¹³¹ The effort to include unbanked Muslim bondholders led to considerable headaches for the planners. The Comrade reported with some consternation that many bond purchasers had deposited money at the British-owned Alliance Bank of Simla but neglected to give the bank the authority to remit the funds. ¹³²

For Jauhar, financial illiteracy was tantamount to assisting the enemy, and he rebuked his readers upon hearing reports that Comptoir National d’Escompte in Bombay and the Alliance Bank of Simla had been regularly visited by prospective bondholders ‘with five rupees and ten rupees and waste an hour or two each in asking silly questions, after which they stolidly return home—with their fives and tens’. ¹³³ Muhammad Fazl-i Matin, a session judge from Patiala, attributed these complications to the fact that many purchasers did not know English and were irregular in their communication with the banks. ¹³⁴ Furthermore, because of the Ottoman consulate-general’s unwillingness to pay for wire transfers to the Ottoman Ministry of Finance, a sizable portion of money languished in Indian banks. ¹³⁵

To surmount some of the unease brought on by these affairs, the Aga Khan III stepped into the foray with an article on the benefits of buying Ottoman bonds:

It may be asked whether the Mussalmans of India will find two or three millions. I think the Mussalmans all over the country have money in various banks and in various kinds of securities, and where will they find better investment than transferring their holdings to the 5 per cent. Turkish Bonds? Personally, I would not hesitate to get out of every investment that I possess and that does not bring me more than 5 per cent. and buy the 5 per cent. Turkish Bonds. ¹³⁶

He then asserted that if Indian Muslims contributed generously than the Ottoman government could rely on an additional £12 million per annum, an amount nearly equal to that which the Ottoman government drained every year from its ‘Asiatic’ provinces for the defence and maintenance of its European holdings. With that money, he continued, Indian Muslims could contribute to the rapid development of Mesopotamia, a region that would be ‘what the Argentines have been for Europe’ and whose commercial value was greater than ‘five East Africas’. ¹³⁷ As with the Hijaz railway then, Indian Muslim capital was to be a vehicle for Ottoman progress in its ‘backward’ regions, and by implication, a vehicle for Indian colonisation.

True to his word, the Aga Khan III eventually purchased some ₹ 90,000 (£6000) in Ottoman bonds. In that same issue, Jauhar commended the Aga Khan III’s intervention, noting that by his reckoning the status of Ottoman credit was better than Japan’s. Still, he did chide the Aga Khan III for his fixation with number crunching, assuring his readership that many Muslims held Indian government paper at a mere 3.5 per cent interest. They would be content, Jauhar added, to accept a lesser rate if the Ottoman government paid the principal on time. While in his 1918 India in Transition, the Aga Khan III looked forward to a time when the Indian empire extended ‘from Aden to Mesopotamia, from the two shores of the Gulf to India proper’, ¹³⁸ these 1913 remarks suggest that his ambitions to incorporate Ottoman Iraq into the ambit of Indian Muslim capital—or at the very least his own financial empire—preceded the war itself. This is an important reminder of the need to reckon with the competing motives of Indian Muslim firms in these pan-Islamic philanthropic movements.

Besides an acquaintance with global markets, the bond drive demanded an intimacy with international finance journalism. In one instance, Jauhar was forced, at the insistence of the Ottoman Minister of Finance, to quell rumours stoked by an anonymous article in Capital asserting that the Ottoman government was hopelessly bankrupt and that the holders of the supposedly £2 million of Ottoman bonds circulating in India (this figure was grossly exaggerated) could expect the same fate that befell holders of Ottoman bonds in 1868. ¹³⁹ Jauhar scrambled to enlist the help of Dalzell, the Delhi branch manager of Alliance Bank, to contradict these claims. ¹⁴⁰ Dalzell’s intervention forestalled the collapse of Jauhar’s elaborate blueprint, but this episode served as another reminder that Indian Muslim capital had many dissenting voices regarding Ottoman financial solvency. ¹⁴¹ Nonetheless, Jauhar remained committed to the bond drive as a preferred form of pan-Islamic activity than boycotting and protests against Balkan aggression. ¹⁴² Above all, he was convinced that the moment required a display of confidence in Ottoman credit by Bombay’s Muslim captains of industry, from whom he solicited ₹2.5 million, a sum partially dictated by ‘the fact that the money market is tight owing to large quantities of opium lying unsold in China’. ¹⁴³ Even so, as discussed below, neither Jauhar nor the Aga Khan was able to sway the Indian princes and the middle classes with such overtures.

To recapitulate the argument of this section, the execution of the bond drive on the supply end was hampered by Ottoman attempts to alternatively circumvent or rally the edifice of IFC, the rivalries of European institutions in the empire, the surfeit of pledges made to Indian Muslim financiers, and the conflicting agendas inherent to the ecumene of Indian Muslim capital. The following section turns to the demand side and considers how the merits of the bond drive were assessed by a spectrum of Indian Muslim scholars and politicians beyond the key negotiators. Compared to the supply side, unique problems reared their head that Ottoman planners never seem to have countenanced.

The Demand Side: Indian Muslim Debates over Ottoman Loans

The obstacles that emerged on the demand side of the bond campaign require special clarification, not least because the Balkan Wars stirred up such intense financial and emotional energy. Muhammad Iqbal first recited the following lines from his celebrated Jawāb-i Shikvah at a mus̱ẖāʿirah near Mochi Gate in Lahore in early 1913:

The tumult caused by the Bulgar onslaught and aggression

Is to rouse you out of complacency and gird your loins for action. ¹⁴⁴

The poem seems to have had the intended effect, for thousands of copies of Iqbal’s famous ‘Response to a Complaint’ were purchased that night, and the proceeds dispatched to the Ottoman government. ¹⁴⁵

But not even the forcefulness of Iqbal’s language could quite sway the serious material and religious obstacles the bonds presented to many Indian Muslim investors. Not only was the bond a potential bearer of usurious capital, it also was susceptible to forgery and default. The Red Crescent campaign was certainly not immune from these fears, with rumours afloat that hostile Ottoman Christians were in charge of the Ottoman Red Crescent. ¹⁴⁶ The circulation of shadowy political operatives did not help matters. In fact, British intelligence kept tabs on Ottoman officials sent to India to disseminate treasury bonds. A report produced at the time stated that ‘one is named Fazli and belongs to Salonica cripto (sic) Jewish sect; second wearing a green turban and Dervish dress is named Ali Khulki Effendi’. In the report, a second hand has crossed out ‘cripto’ and written ‘Coptic?’ ¹⁴⁷ Fazlı was likely a member of Salonika’s Dönme community, a reminder of the diverse Muslim constituencies that the bond drive mobilised.

The unease aroused in colonial circles by louche Ottoman political agents was matched by misgivings among Indian Muslims over the authenticity of Red Crescent remittance receipts. As noted in Abul Kalam Azad’s Al-Hilāl in March 1913, several readers had written letters to the editor to the effect of:

Having amassed rupees for the fund of the Red Crescent, we have left them in the trust of some gentlemen. They have stated that they will send them direct to Istanbul. Now they are showing a printed receipt and they say that this has come from the Society of the Red Crescent, Istanbul. Nevertheless, we remain uncertain. Something definitive ought to be said regarding with what means an original receipt can be recognized.

To alleviate the concerns of buyers, Al-Hilāl printed an example of a receipt and bid readers to inform the paper immediately of any discrepancies (see Figure 2). ¹⁴⁸ The fears surrounding paper instruments were made known to Ottoman officials. In one instance, the Ottoman consul-general in Bombay informed the Ottoman Ministry of Finance that ‘in spite of entering into negotiations with Alliance Bank and Eastern Bank, the people [Indian Muslims] prefer the originals of the treasury bonds’ and stressed the necessity of dispatching these. ¹⁴⁹ Not soon after, however, the Ottoman consul-general in Bombay was again writing to the Ottoman Ministry of Finance requesting a motion to reassure Indian Muslims—apprehensive about the delays in Leipzig—that the printing would be accelerated and that buyers would receive a good rate of return on their bonds. ¹⁵⁰

Among the hardest to convince were the Indian Muslim princes, with the Viceroy’s cool response to bond purchases having the predictable effect of driving away the capital the princes might have invested. As in earlier humanitarian movements, the support of the Viceroy was enlisted and Lady Hardinge herself organised a relief fund. ¹⁵¹ On the other hand, when it came to the bonds, the Viceroy himself was ‘doubtful whether there is adequate security for the repayment of monies so invested and considers that he is duty bound to make this view known to the political officers who may be consulted by chiefs who are approved in this matter.’ ¹⁵² While British officials did nothing to actively hamper the scheme (in many instances they were crucial intermediaries for the relief funds), the Nizam of Hyderabad was commended for declining Jauhar’s request for a loan to be raised for the Ottoman government. ¹⁵³ Without the support of the princes, the same numbers achieved in the charitable campaign were never obtained.

Besides speculative concerns and threats of embezzlement, Ottoman debt presented an awkward predicament for middle-class Muslims, as captured best by Nawab Viqar ul-Mulk Bahadur, general secretary of the All-India Muslim League, who lent his pen to the task of urging readers to invest in Ottoman government securities. ¹⁵⁴ Addressing the muṭawassat al-hāl (the middling classes), his ‘The Red Crescent Donations and Turkey’s debt: the means by which the rupee can be supplied’, noted how the poor had raised funds beyond their station, while middle-class donors had given little. Bahadur conceded that this stemmed from the low financial reserves of most middle-class Muslims. But with fundraisers expecting enormous donations, many from the middle class declined to take part rather than endure the indignities of contributing a quantity incommensurate with their social status. ¹⁵⁵ Fortunately, two methods of financial assistance were now available: the Red Crescent committees, whose organisational structure Bahadur praised, and treasury bonds. To Bahadur bonds were preferable as they permitted a middle-class Muslim to use a portion of his daily wage in separate instalments, thus sparing the shame of giving beneath one’s status. But was it morally permissible for such individuals to profit from Ottoman debt? Bahadur vacillated over this issue but concluded that no profit should be taken in light of the tribulations faced by the Ottomans.

Whatever Bahadur’s assertions, religious objections to the purchase of interest-bearing Ottoman treasury bonds were resolute. None matched Ahmad Riza Khan (head of Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jamāʿat, or Barelwi, by which their many detractors labelled them) in the sheer verve with which he tackled the subject of Ottoman aid. ¹⁵⁶ This is curious given his famous condemnation of the ecumenism of ‘Abdul Bari Farangi Mahalli’s Anjuman-i Khuddam-i Ka‘ba, an association that made Ottoman monetary relief one of its programmatic aims. ¹⁵⁷ To be sure, Khan’s rivals at Deoband were by no means silent on the matter. The head of Deoband’s fatwa department, ʻAziz al-Rahman ʻUsmani, was asked on several occasions whether Muslims were obliged to donate to the Ottoman Red Crescent. They were duty-bound to do so, ʻUsmani asserted, citing two hadith from Jāmi‘ al-Tirmidhī to bolster his answer. The first narrated by Khuraim bin Fatik was ‘Whoever spends a sum in the cause of God, it is recorded for him seven-hundred fold.’ ¹⁵⁸ The second, handed down by Abu Umamah, was ‘The best form of ṣadaqa is to furnish a tent in the way of God, to reward a servant in the way of God, and to furnish a camel in the way of God.’ From this, ʻUsmani concluded that zakāt, whether in the guise of prayer or material goods, should be allocated for Ottoman relief, even stating that the Red Crescent deserved precedence over the poor, the ʿulamāʾ, and madrasa students in the receipt of alms. There should be exceptions only in extreme cases, such as encountering a poor soul dying of hunger. ¹⁵⁹ It is therefore puzzling to learn that when asked whether buying Ottoman debentures was permissible for Muslims, ʻUsmani declared ‘this is not suitable according to the law for there is the “taint” (ishtibāh) of both “interest” (ribā) and “gambling” (qimār) in this. Thus, abstaining from buying the aforementioned bonds is incumbent upon Muslims.’ ¹⁶⁰

Ahmad Riza Khan was less circumspect—and more prolix. In a larger fatwā composed in reply to a question posed by Haji Munshi Lal Khan of Calcutta on the best means of assisting the Ottomans during the Balkan Wars, Riza Khan stressed that boycotts of European goods were not in the interest of Muslims. Instead he suggested that:

well-to-do Muslims of Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon, Madras, Hyderabad and other places should open banks for their disadvantaged brother Muslims. The law has decreed interest (sūd) totally ḥarām, however hundreds of methods for taking profit have been deemed lawful (ḥalāl), the account of which is laid out in detail in the great works of jurisprudence and one of which has already been printed in an extremely convenient fashion in Kafl al-faqīh al-fāhim fī aḥkām qirṭās al-darāhim. ¹⁶¹ They too could take profit upon those permissible paths which obtain profit for them and that also meet the needs of brother Muslims. ¹⁶²

If establishing ‘Islamic banks’ was one avenue to undercut the Hindu moneylender and, in his view, the still more rapacious Muslim usurers, ¹⁶³ Khan further encouraged every Muslim to donate a month’s salary to the Ottoman cause and, as ever, took the occasion to berate the worldliness of his fellow Muslims. ¹⁶⁴ He was in no doubt that the money raised for the Muslim university should be sent to the Ottoman government as an interest-free loan.

The quantitative effect of the opinions voiced by Indian Muslim scholars and politicians are impossible to state, but the polemical aspect of these debates shows how Indian Muslim firms and individual donors wrestled at length with the conundrums posed by Ottoman bonds. For while the desire to help Muslim refugees remained paramount and fuelled the vitality of the charitable remittance campaign, the spectre of ribā that bonds presented remained such a source of unease that the learned opinion of religious scholars was sought. These judicial opinions reinforce the imperative to incorporate sources such as fatāwā into histories of Indian Muslim financial life, not least for what they reveal of how interpretations of Islamic law were brought to bear on the instruments and institutions of global capitalism.

As the ʿulamāʾ tussled over the legality of bonds, only on 10 May 1913 was the Ottoman imperial irāde announcing the sale of bonds printed in The Comrade, followed by Hamdard three days later. ¹⁶⁵ The Ottoman government did eventually honour its commitment to its Indian bondholders in early 1914. On 5 March, the Comptoir National d’Escompte informed Jauhar that it had been authorised by the Ottoman government to pay the first instalment of the principal and the interest in relevant cases. ¹⁶⁶ But Jauhar’s private correspondence from this time reveals letters from bondholders, such as the Anjuman-i Hamaiyyat al-Islam in Bhairab, imploring him to send their long-awaited bonds. ¹⁶⁷ Bhairab’s anjuman seem to be one of the few who maintained an abiding investment in the Ottoman cause into mid-1914. Two years had passed since the Ottomans opened negotiations with Jauhar. As the ferment around the Kanpur Mosque incident gathered steam, donations appear to have been redirected to Muslim causes closer to home. ¹⁶⁸ The last donation worthy of the name was sent via a draft of the Comptoir National d’Escompte by Jauhar on 16 July 1914 for the Indo-Ottoman Colonization Society based in Erzine in the vilāyet of Adana. ¹⁶⁹ Soon thereafter London had begun to experience its own financial crises that the onset of the war in late summer exacerbated. ¹⁷⁰ Three decades of financial de-globalisation followed that reoriented the geographies of Indian Muslim capital, but not before an infrastructure of Muslim activism, sustained by uncounted firms with links to complex webs of print and fluid capital, had come into being.

Conclusion: The ‘De-globalisation’ of Indian Muslim Capital in the Interwar Period

When the Ottoman government rescinded its payments to its bondholders in the course of the First World War, it attempted as part of its own wartime strategy to turn ‘Indian Muslim capital’ into political capital. But Indian Muslims instead allocated funds to Britain’s war effort, not least the Raja of Mahmudabad and Aga Khan III, both of whom had advocated sending university funds to the Ottomans in 1913. ¹⁷¹ The Begum of Bhopal now contributed to the Belgian Relief Fund and sent donations to Indian troops at the front. ¹⁷² To be sure, at the war’s end, the Khilafat campaign saw the reinvigoration of some of the old financial connections with the Ottoman government. After all, a principal object of the Central Khilafat Committee was the remittance of money to the Ottoman government, with Abdul Kalam Azad and others attempting to raise some ₹5 million for the ‘Angora Fund’. ¹⁷³ In the end, some ₹3.4 million were raised, but the leading Bombay merchant, Mian Mohammad Haji Jan Mohammad Chotani, embezzled ₹1.6 million and invested the sum in his personal business concerns. ¹⁷⁴ When a fraction of the funds were recovered, the Central Khilafat Committee elected to not remit the funds. In the end, the so-called ‘Angora Fund’ remitted only OL 55,439, less than a fourth of the sum sent by Indian Muslims the Ottoman Red Crescent during the Balkan Wars. ¹⁷⁵ In 1922, the princely state of Bhopal’s durbar filed a claim against the Ottoman government for ₹22,000 in unpaid treasury bonds, seemingly one of the few bondholders still bothered by Ottoman debentures. ¹⁷⁶ Amidst these events, relations soured between the Khilafatists and the emergent Turkish nationalists, and in February 1924, a Turkish Red Crescent mission was reluctantly granted permission to journey to India to raise funds for post-Ottoman Muslim refugees flooding into Anatolia but had to return after arriving in Bombay following the abolition of the caliphate. ¹⁷⁷

The acquisition and incorporation of Britain’s new empire in the Middle East, and its support for nascent rulers in the region, prompted stricter regulation of Indian Muslim capital. But it also created opportunities for Britain’s Muslim clients to attract Indian Muslim capital. Over the next decade and a half, the Saudis and Palestinians sent emissaries to tap into Indian Muslim munificence, but they were largely rebuffed. ¹⁷⁸ It would be a gross overstatement to say that Indian Muslim capital ceased circulating in the post-Ottoman Middle East. The Saudis did solicit funds from the Nizam of Hyderabad for infrastructural improvements in the Hijaz in the 1930s, ¹⁷⁹ and other Indian princes sought amnesty from Saudi regulations passed in 1935 banning foreigners from owning property. ¹⁸⁰ Economic agreements between Britain and the Saudi state likely involved Muslim firms. But for all these—and whatever the sympathy for the Palestinian cause over the next 30 years exhibited by groups such as the All-India Muslim League ¹⁸¹ —contributions to post-Ottoman charity campaigns were more limited by comparison with the Ottoman campaigns. For example, in 1941, the Nawab of Bahawalpur sent only £100 to the shaykhs of the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem, most of whom received nothing. ¹⁸² At the same time, European banks, such as Barclay’s, gained an even greater supervisory role over Indian Muslim contributions to Palestinian causes. ¹⁸³ Even so, the de-globalisation of Indian Muslim capital had spurred the channelling of financial energies into Muslim causes in the subcontinent itself, and with it, produced more assertive demands for the creation of autonomous Muslim financial institutions that would better meet Muslim needs in a foreseeable postcolonial future. ¹⁸⁴

This article has examined, from the perspective of charitable remittances and bond drives, the complex engagement of a host of Indian Muslim religious and economic firms and individuals with the Ottoman government over a 50-year period. The motivations of these parties were not dictated by knee-jerk anti-colonial animus or necessarily pro-Ottoman sentiment, but by a tangled amalgam of financial ambition and religious duty, by considerations of thrift and profit, charity and sin. The enormous remittances sent in 1912–13 demonstrated how pan-Islamic humanitarianism was actualised through the structures of global finance. The lacklustre implementation of the parallel bond drive was as much a commentary on the limitations presented by the largely unbanked status of many Indian Muslims, as it was on the inordinate financial influence of a select Indian Muslim elite whose leadership was pivotal to the mobilisation of middling and poor constituencies. These same factors also marred the Ottoman Ministry of Finance’s attempts to function as a supplier. On both supply and demand sides, European financial control, for better or worse, shaped the contours of pan-Islamic exchange.