Beyond the row over Erdogan’s honorary doctorate, a look at Jamia’s historic connection with Turkey

One of the central events in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s calendar during his two-day visit to India this week was a special convocation at Jamia Millia Islamia. During the convocation, Jamia conferred a Degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) on Erdogan for his contribution in strengthening international cooperation, peace and diplomacy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the university’s decision was met with some vocal opposition and more than a few raised eyebrows, given the deteriorating political situation in Turkey that Erdogan has presided over. Following a coup attempt last June, Erdogan has overseen a heavy crackdown on academic institutions, journalists and activities. This trend towards authoritarianism received a fillip last month when Erdogan’s party won a highly contentious referendum that will basically restructure Turkey’s parliamentary system to a presidential system with great powers concentrated in Erdogan’s hands.

A number of commentators have – legitimately – questioned whether Erdogan was worthy of the honour. Others (including on this forum), while noting that the decision to confer honorary doctorates is often made on behalf of the government, wondered whether Jamia was chosen “because an Islamist dictator can be honoured only by an Islamic institution”. Never mind the simplistic categorisation of Erdogan on religious lines, such a view also ignores the intellectual history of Muslim nationalism in India, its ties to Turkey, and Jamia’s central role in this history.

The Khilafat movement

During the First World War, the British declared war on the Ottoman Empire. This was a change in Britain’s traditional position of siding with the Ottomans against their Great Game rival, the Russians (such as in the Crimean War), and using Ottoman support to maintain the loyalty of the Empire’s Muslim subjects in India for whom the Ottoman sultan was also the religious caliph (khilafa). The Khilafat movement (1919-1924) gave formal shape to anti-British sentiments amongst Indian Muslims that had been increasing since the British declaration of war against the Ottomans. The movement aimed to pressure the British government to preserve the authority of the Ottoman sultan as the caliph of Islam and ensure that the 1914 boundaries of the Ottoman Empire remained intact. For the Khilafat leaders, the attacks upon the authority of the caliph was an attack upon Islam, and a threat to the religious freedoms of Muslims under British rule.

It might seem odd today that Indian Muslims seemed to care so much more about the fate of their Ottoman co-religionists, but the pan-Islamic sentiment was articulated by the nationalist Khilafat leader and one of the founders of Jamia, MA Ansari, as such:

It is difficult for anyone not an Indian Moslem to realise what Pan-islamism means to the Indian Moslem. Ever since the Moslems came into India more than seven hundred years ago, they have kept open house, in the widest political and social sense of the term. Arabs, Egyptians, Syrians Turks, even Tatar immigrants, have been given full opportunity to earn the just reward of talent and merit. But the Pan-islamism of the twentieth century is something far deeper than friendliness… It is not a sentiment inspired by interest, policy or worldly wisdom; it has no definite practical end in view. But strange to say, it is just for these reasons that the Pan-islamist sentiment has been one of the Indian Moslem’s most scared and exalted passions. It is because he is helpless, because all his co-religionists are equally helpless, because Western imperialism is aggressive and everywhere successful, that he has become a Pan-islamist. And because Turkey alone of all Moslem countries is free, because the Turks alone have power to defeat enemies not overwhelmingly strong and the manliness to prefer death to slavery, the imagination of the Indian Moslems… placed on their shoulders the burden not only of defending their hearth and home, but the honour of Islam and all Moslem peoples as well.

The Khilafat movement might have died a quiet death, especially given a new leader, Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk), was leading his troops against the Western occupation in Ottoman territories to forge a new country, which would become the modern, secular Republic of Turkey. Instead, the movement benefited from nationalist Hindu-Muslim cooperation in the aftermath of the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League (an agreement to collectively pressure the British government for greater autonomy and transfer of power to India).

Further, following the imposition by the government of the draconian Rowlatt Act in 1919 to purportedly curb sedition, Mahatma Gandhi began espousing the Khilafat cause to rally Muslim support for the Congress’ plan for non-cooperation. Jamia was a direct institutional outcome of this combined Khilafat-Non-cooperation movement: it was formed when a group of nationalist teachers and students responded to Gandhi’s call to boycott educational institutions supported and run by the colonial regime by quitting the Aligarh Muslim University. The movement came to an end first with the Chauri Chaura incident (when participants in the non-violent non-cooperation movement attacked and killed a group of policemen in the Uttar Pradesh town in 1922) and then Ataturk’s abolishment of the sultanate in 1922 and caliphate in 1924. (Interestingly, Ataturk cited Indian Khilafat sentiments as one reason to abolish the institution, arguing for the need to guard against any external interference in the new country’s political matters.)

Intellectual link

Jamia’s deep connection with Turkey does not end with the Khilafat movement. One interesting link was through one of early-Republican Turkey’s most famous intellectuals, the nationalist and feminist Halide Edip Adivar. Halide Edip became friends with MA Ansari when he was volunteering in Istanbul with the Ottoman Red Crescent Society during the First World War. On Ansari’s invitation, she visited India in 1935 to deliver a series of lectures at Jamia (including one chaired by Gandhi) entitled “Conflict of East and West in Turkey”. Halide Edip had been an active participant in the Ataturk-led resistance, but soon became disillusioned with and highly critical of Ataturk’s republican regime. Accused of treason in 1926, she escaped Turkey and remained in self-imposed exile till Ataturk’s death. Edip’s lectures at Jamia are widely considered some of her finest and were deeply contrarian at the time for criticising the Kemalist project’s blind imitation of the West, and rejecting the notion of Ataturk as Turkey’s saviour.

The history of Jamia’s engagement with Turkey detailed here is by no means meant to simplify its political engagement with the country or indicate that its politics were simply Islamist and anti-Kemalist. For example, while on the surface it would seem that Halide Edip’s rejection of Kemalism would tie in with the politics of President Erdogan, it is important to realise that Erdogan is less of an Islamist and more of an old-fashioned authoritarian in the mould of Ataturk, who has little patience for dissent and simply wants to shape the country in his image. In her Jamia lectures, Edip argued that a revolutionary leader is someone like Gandhi, rather than Ataturk, as he strives to establish consent across segments of society. This is sadly a trait missing in Turkey’s current leader and it is sobering that this advice propounded at Jamia by a Turkish intellectual in exile some eight decades ago is so pertinent even today. One can only hope that along with the honorary doctorate, Jamia also gifted Erdogan a copy of Halide Edip’s lectures.