From Afghan Pan-Islamism to Turkish Feminism: Examining Transnational Solidarities in the Early Twentieth Century

The above excerpt is from a 1917 intelligence report commissioned by the British Colonial Government’s Department of Information. The report explores pan-Turanianism, a political movement to bring the world’s Turkic and Turkish-speaking peoples into unity, as it related to pan-Islamism, a parallel political movement to unite Muslims of the world. The text discusses these two supranational ideologies as a source of tremendous anxiety for the British colonial apparatus precisely for their ability to transcend national borders and create lines of political mobilization that extended beyond the nation-state. The report went on to state that, in the regions of West and Central Asia, rather than being ideologically incompatible, “Pan-Turanianism and Pan-Islamism do not conflict with each other.”² The fear of “a Turkish-Islamic State in Central Asia” uniting with Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, the report noted, “would threaten India in the gravest way.” The text demonstrates how these lines of solidarity...