"'Radical Muslims': Anticolonial Solidarities Across Muslim Eurasia, 1914-1925"

Introduction by Francine Hirsch, Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History at UW-Madison.

About the lecture: The denouement of the Great War produced an arc of overlapping crises that stretched from Anatolia to India, which energized a number of anti-imperialist and anticolonial movements in the region. The Russian Revolution, itself a product of the war, offered a radical hope of remaking the world order on completely new lines. The collapse of both the Russian and the Ottoman empires had thrown open imperial borders and made mobility across them possible as never before. In this situation, Tashkent became a crossroads of (often self-proclaimed) revolutionaries from the former Ottoman Empire, Iran, and India. They were overwhelmingly Muslim but engaged in radical politics in which Islam played only a marginal role. The new Soviet regime espoused anticolonial rhetoric from the very outset and sought to harness anticolonial sentiment. In this short-lived conjuncture, Muslim activists encountered each other and the world’s first socialist regime. This talk will provide an account of this episode and explore the many ways in which new solidarities were born but also in which different groups often spoke past each other.

About the speaker: Adeeb Khalid is Jane & Raphael Bernstein Professor of History and Asian Studies at Carleton College. His work focuses on modern Central Asia, broadly defined, and which he situates in wide geographical and conceptual frames. His last book was Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a book that explores transregional connections made in Tashkent during the era of the Russian Revolution.