In May 1912, under the combined influence of the reformist currents of Egypt and the Indian Ocean, the first school described as “modern” in the country, was created in Kuwait. At the same time, the tenth congress of the Association of Indian Ulemas was held in Lucknow, bringing together reformist intellectuals influenced by the legacy of the famous Sayyid Ahmad Khan who died in 1898. The presence of the Syrian thinker Rashid Rida at these two events is a little-known historical fact, despite its importance, right when the ideas of reformism were experiencing an unprecedented increase in circulation in the major port cities of the Persian Gulf. Rida's account of the trip shows how the theme of education was given an unprecedented political and internationalist meaning by the Muslim elites of the Indian Ocean ; a region strongly connected by its port synapses where both mercantile and intellectual networks wove and intertwined together.
The migration from the Indian state of Kerala to the Arabian Gulf is credited with giving rise to consumerist culture. The households of Gulf migrants in Kerala are found to have better access to technology and improved conditions of living. The cultural matrix in which these technologies and foreign goods made their meanings and mobilize affects is under-researched. Taking the case of a canned powdered milk, Nido, as a spectral presence of the Gulf in Kerala, this paper, veered towards a singular reading drawing on mainstream films, and a variety of Keralan Gulf migrant archives, examines the ways in which the canned milk powder entered existing cultural values and produced discourses around itself, while also being an excess to discourse. The paper illustrates the enmeshed nature of migration, in which materials cross borders and purposes, is imputed with essences, or pass on from the spectacular to the quotidian. The paper argues that the contradictions of the Gulf migration — the limits of migration induced mobility in Kerala on the one hand, and the denial of citizenship in the Gulf on the other — is resolved through spectrality that the Gulf migration is projected and experienced as.
This article explores how the reception of early Arabic radio broadcasts throughout the Arabian Peninsula was connected to global media markets and geopolitics leading up to the Second World War. Specifically, it uses British efforts to establish the BBC Arabic service to investigate the various radio stations and other technologies that defined the region’s global media landscape during the 1930s. It argues that, while the BBC broadcasts pushed colonial territories in Arabian Peninsula away from British India into the fold of Britain's Middle East administration, colonial officials had to acknowledge Arabia’s social, economic, and cultural ties to the Indian Ocean region in order to have the BBC successfully compete with German and Italian broadcasts among Arab and Muslim audiences worldwide. As such, the article also suggests that the Arabian Peninsula’s role in the history of early Arabic broadcasting is significantly more important than previously assumed in scholarship.
This article looks at the hitherto ignored project by the Indian Khilafat Movement to establish a republican government in the city of Mecca after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It argues that while activists of the Khilafat Movement were able to articulate an ethical vision of a transnational state rooted in the Islamic concept of fraternity (ikhvat), they were unable to effectively bring this vision to bear on the domain of the political, especially in the confrontation with the emerging power of the Saudi state and its intellectual allies.
