Introduction
In 1911, a South Asian journal published a short article entitled ‘Islam in Japan’, discussing the attempts by Muhammad Barkatullah—an Indian pan-Islamist and anticolonial activist—to ‘propagate’ Islam in Asia's rising superpower.Footnote 1 The topic of the article may seem peculiar at first. Yet, after the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, Tokyo had become a hub for students, intellectuals, anticolonial activists, revolutionaries, and religious reformers from around Asia. This included Indian Muslims like Barkatullah who, in 1909, had joined the Tokyo Imperial University as a professor of Hindustani languages.Footnote 2
Outside of his teaching, Barkatullah was active in political and intellectual circles in the capital. He not only met with Japanese pan-Asianist allies to discuss and criticize British actions in Asia and the ‘Muslim World’, he also inspired one of the earliest conversions of a Japanese citizen to Islam, namely his pan-Asianist colleague in Japan, Hasan Hatano Uho. During his five years in Japan, he began publishing a journal called Islamic Fraternity. In Barkatullah's own words, the express purpose of this was to: ‘enlighten [the] non-Muslim public on the true principles of Islam and bring to the Muslim view some of the beauties of other religions, with a view to advance the cause of human fellowship’.Footnote 3 Barkatullah's activities in Tokyo were being discussed in various Indian journals, by both journals based in India and those established by émigré Indians, by Islamic journals and those published by non-Muslims.Footnote 4 Both British and Japanese authorities, meanwhile, kept a close eye on Barkatullah throughout his time in Tokyo.
What is interesting about the 1911 article is not the fact that Barkatullah's activities were being discussed, but where they were published: in the Maha Bodhi and the United Buddhist World. The Maha Bodhi journal was published in British Ceylon under the leadership of the influential Sinhalese Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala. ‘Islam in Japan’ was Dharmapala's response to being sent a copy of Barkatullah's Islamic Fraternity and he was categorical in asserting that Islam was ‘unsuited to civilized peoples’ like the Japanese.Footnote 5 Repeating European Orientalist tropes of Islam, while simultaneously asserting its similarity with Christianity, Dharmapala wrote:
Christianity and Islam are two sister religions with a Semitic basis. Both are crude, unscientific, blood thirsty, iconoclastic, intolerant, [and] dogmatic. Both propagated teachings of their respective founders by persecution, bloodshed, and vandalism. Wherever the propagandists went they destroyed older civilizations, massacred the professors of other religions, burnt libraries, and left no vestige of ancient monuments.Footnote 6
I should make clear at this point that, although I will briefly examine Dharmapala's views on Islam at the end of the article, I am not primarily interested in his bigotries. Rather, what is significant about this article is that it hints at the interconnected nature of Dharmapala and Barkatullah's lives and projects. While these two figures have usually been studied separately, this article asks the question: what does studying Dharmapala and Barkatullah together tell us about the entangled histories and potential incommensurabilities of pan-Islamism, pan-Asian Buddhism, and anticolonialism in South Asia from the late nineteenth century until 1914? After all, not only did Dharmapala write about Barkatullah's activities in Japan, they also moved in similar social circles.Footnote 7 For instance, on Dharmapala's fourth visit to Tokyo in 1913, he met Barkatullah several times, including at a gathering organized by his pan-Islamist contemporaries.Footnote 8 Moreover, both Dharmapala and Barkatullah had articles published in a journal edited by the influential Japanese pan-Asianist ideologue Ōkawa Shūmei.Footnote 9
Barkatullah, Dharmapala, and their Japanese interlocutors were involved in discussions about world religions at a moment when the European category of ‘religion’ itself was being globalized and taking shape on a global stage.Footnote 10 The globalization of these concepts and identities occurred in the context of European imperialism through Orientalist literature, diplomatic treaty negotiations, colonial administrative instruments, and the interconnectivity that resulted from technological improvements to the printing press, steamship travel, and the telegraph. Although religion was a European category and conception that had spread to the rest of the world by the turn of the nineteenth century, the process was uneven.Footnote 11 For instance, religion was both institutionalized and internalized in South Asia through instruments of colonial administration like censuses and the introduction of legal codes.Footnote 12 However, since Japan was a sovereign ‘Asian’ state, it was introduced as a diplomatic category through its encounter with Euro-American imperial powers.Footnote 13 Despite its European origins, though, the process by which religion was universalized took place in the context of the colonial (or, in Japan's case, imperial) encounter and, therefore, involved both local and non-European actors.Footnote 14
I argue that not only were non-European figures like Barkatullah, Dharmapala, and their Japanese counterparts participants in the global conversation about religion, Japan should be viewed as an important site that hosted and fostered these discussions. Through exploring these inter-Asian exchanges we can see more clearly that Europe did not have a monopoly on convening these conversations, even if European ideas and concepts were ever-present.Footnote 15 Moreover, although recent literature on pan-Islamism and transnational Buddhism has demonstrated the significant influence of transnational conversations to the emergence of modern Buddhism and modern Islam, the intersections of Barkatullah and Dharmapala's lives and projects show that these were intertwined movements that should be read together.Footnote 16
I borrow the term ‘world-religioning’ from Steven Kemper and adapt it to refer to four facets of Dharmapala and Barkatullah's projects: first, Dharmapala and Barkatullah intervening in Euro-American discourses about religions globally.Footnote 17 To be more specific, they both consistently challenged criticisms levelled against their respective religious traditions in Euro-American public discourse and scholarship. This does not mean that they had uniformly negative views of all Western scholarship, however. Dharmapala, for instance, held the work of Max Muller and Thomas Rhys Davids in high esteem. Second, a conscious articulation of one's own religious tradition as a universal ‘world religion’ within what Masuzawa describes as the emerging world religions 'paradigm'.Footnote 18 It is important to note here that they were always placing their religious traditions in comparison with other ‘world’ and ‘national’ religions. In short, Dharmapala and Barkatullah were invested in utilizing the comparative religions heuristic. While Christianity was ever-present in their world religioning discourse, in the inter-Asian context of Japan, Shintō and Confucianism were common reference points.
Third, both Dharmapala and Barkatullah were involved in projects that they thought could help unite the global communities of Buddhists and Muslims, respectively. Dharmapala's obsession was to re-establish Buddhist control over Bodh Gaya in order for it to serve as the centre for the global Buddhist community, much like Mecca functioned for the global Muslim ummah. The most enduring aspect of Barkatullah's career, meanwhile, was his pan-Islamic activism in which the institution of the caliphate was central. For Barkatullah, the caliphate was not just important symbolically due to its history that dated back to death of the Prophet Muhammad, it was indispensable for the possibility of Muslim political unity in the face of European imperialism. Fourth, Dharmapala and Barkatullah were both interested in spreading Buddhism and Islam, respectively, to the rest of the world. Although the geographical spread of a religion crossing racial and ethnic lines did not automatically translate as ‘universal’, it was a crucial ingredient in making the case in the world religions circuit and, more broadly, public conversations.
I will begin by giving brief biographical sketches of Barkatullah and Dharmapala before exploring the three main points of intersection between these two men: ‘world religioning’ in Japan, the British empire, and Theosophy.
Muhammad Barkatullah (1864–1927)
Barkatullah began his career as a religious scholar and intellectual, born and educated in the princely state of Bhopal in British India.Footnote 19 He spent the early part of his career abroad working in Britain (1880s–1903). Not long after arriving in the colonial metropole, Barkatullah quickly began to establish connections with local pan-Islamist networks centred around London and Liverpool, London-based Indian nationalists, as well as white-British allies in socialist and liberal circles. During his time in Britain, he was active in critiquing both the racism and bigotry faced by the burgeoning Muslim community there, as well as the negative stereotypes about the Ottoman empire and Islam as a religion more generally. However, during his time in Britain, Barkatullah seemed committed to imperial reform.Footnote 20
In 1903, Barkatullah was on the move again, this time across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. Barkatullah came into his own as a public intellectual during his time in the United States, addressing important foreign policy issues of the day in journals and speeches. He also became far more critical towards British actions around the world than he had been in Britain. He not only addressed British actions in the Middle East and South Asia, he also discussed the British invasion of Tibet as well as the rise of Japan as a global power. Moreover, Barkatullah was at the heart of the growing Indian nationalist network abroad and developed close ties with Irish-American Fenians like John Devoy and George Freeman of the Clan na Gael.Footnote 21
Although Barkatullah was known to British authorities during his time in Britain and New York, he only seriously began to alarm British authorities after he moved to Tokyo in 1909 and began publishing ‘seditious’ anti-British materials. It was in Tokyo, where he stayed until 1914, that Barkatullah became an important connection between a network of radical Indian nationalists abroad and a host of nationalist and internationalist networks around the world.Footnote 22 These networks included Chinese republicans, Egyptian nationalists, Irish-American Fenians, Theosophists, Japanese pan-Asianists, and pan-Islamists. In 1913, the network of Indian revolutionaries abroad would go on to establish Ghadar, a revolutionary anti-British organization and movement based in California, along with a global network of radical Indian nationalists.Footnote 23 In the end, it was not until the impending outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that Barkatullah became a significant part of Ghadar and was involved in the overthrow of British rule. He aligned himself with the Germans and Ottomans during the war, and then the Bolsheviks after the war ended. Barkatullah—based in Switzerland in his final years—died on a trip to the United States committed to two causes: ending British rule in India as well as re-establishing a reformulated, decentred, and democratized caliphate after the Ottoman caliphate was abolished by the new Turkish Republic in 1924.
Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1934)
Although Barkatullah has remained peripheral to the story of Indian nationalism and independence, his interlocutor Anagarika Dharmapala has been constructed as the originary figure of Sinhalese nationalism in post-independence Sri Lanka. Dharmapala was born into an elite Sinhala family with the name Don David Hewavitarne. His father Don Carolis was a Colombo-based businessman who sent his son to various Christian missionary schools. However, he also encouraged him to follow the path of the Buddha and become a brahmacharya. Despite enjoying the elite life of a son of an upper-caste Sinhalese businessman and working for his father's business enterprises, Dharmapala considered himself to be a serious Buddhist trying to follow the Buddha's path. In his revisionist biography of Dharmapala, Kemper argues that, far from being a ‘Protestant Buddhist’ as Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere famously put forward, Dharmapala was a committed Buddhist ascetic who renounced sex, marriage, and drinking alcohol, wore ochre robes, and tried giving up eating meat and fish.Footnote 24 Significantly, he had no interest in the laicization of Lankan Buddhism, which is a central feature of the Protestant Buddhism formulation.Footnote 25 Rather, Kemper argues that Dharmapala was a social reformer who ‘thought he was entitled to lead the Buddhist affairs not because he was a pious layman but because he was a world renouncer and considerably more ascetic than the monks he knew’.Footnote 26
While much of the literature has focused on Dharmapala connecting Sinhalese identity to Buddhism and being an ethnic chauvinist, the likes of Steven Kemper, Maria Moritz, Harshana Rambukwella, Michael Roberts, and Anne Blackburn have highlighted the internationalist dimensions of Dharmapala's career.Footnote 27 First, they clearly illustrate how his life and career were intimately tied with the Theosophical Society (TS) that established itself in British Ceylon in 1880. Not only was Dharmapala inspired to become a leader in the Lankan ‘Buddhist revival’ by the lectures and publications of the TS, he also became a protégé of its chief organizer, Henry Olcott, from a young age. While Dharmapala broke with the TS later in his life over differences over its direction, he never stopped having regard for the Theosophical teachings of Madame Blavatksy and the supposed mahatmas, like Koot Hoomi, who lived in the Himalayas. Moreover, Dharmapala spent most of his adult life outside of Ceylon in a variety of locations like Britain, India, and Japan. Significantly, he wanted to gain ownership of the land which housed the Maha Bodhi temple, located in Bodh Gaya in British India, and establish it as the centre of the ‘Buddhist World’. The Maha Bodhi temple became his main obsession.
Dharmapala's Bodh Gaya objective serves as the departure point for a discussion of his intersections with Barkatullah. After all, not only was Bodh Gaya based in India, this project also played an important part in bringing him to Japan where he would meet Barkatullah.
World religioning in Japan, the British empire, and theosophy
In many ways it is unsurprising that Barkatullah and Dharmapala met one another in Japan after the ‘1905 moment’.Footnote 28 For various reformers, anticolonial activists, and intellectuals across Asia and Africa, the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war represented a symbolic rebuttal to white supremacy.Footnote 29 The military victory ‘energized and strengthened’ anticolonial nationalists and provided an alternative model for modernity, one that was interpreted by intellectuals and activists from Asia and Africa to mean that non-Western religions, languages, and cultures were not obstacles for progress.Footnote 30 It was in this post-1905 context that Dharmapala and Barkatullah encountered one another.
They were connected to one another through mutual, pan-Asian Buddhist colleagues in Tokyo like Shaku Sōen and Tachibana Shundō, who spent a considerable amount of time in South Asia, as well as pan-Asianist ideologues like Ōkawa Shūmei.Footnote 31 Although the historiography of Japanese pan-Asianism has largely centred on geopolitical considerations and questions surrounding the movement's connections with the Japanese empire, more recent scholarship has begun to identify the significance of religious identity, ideas, and networks for various pan-Asianist figures.Footnote 32 Moreover, work by Selcuk Esenbel and Cemil Aydin, in particular, has demonstrated pan-Asianism's entanglements with parallel transnational movements like pan-Islamism and pan-Africanism, all of which emerged around the same period in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 33
While there is a significant body of literature on Dharmapala's career, including his time in Japan, Barkatullah's work on Japan has usually been characterized by his anti-British writings which were deemed ‘seditious’ by British authorities. This focus in the historiography is understandable as British pressure on the Japanese government meant that Barkatullah had to leave his post in Japan and move to the United States on the eve of the First World War, during which time he aligned with the Germans and the Ottomans in order to rid India of British rule.
However, Barkatullah was not just an anticolonial activist turned revolutionary, he was also a committed pan-Islamist who believed in the spiritual and geopolitical importance of the institution of the caliphate. As I have argued elsewhere, Barkatullah's pan-Islamism and imperial reformist activism became coupled projects during his time in Britain, both of which turned anti-British prior to the First World War.Footnote 34 These projects were ‘coupled’ in my view because they both had the same central target—the British empire. It not only ruled over Barkatullah's native India, it was also thought of as the ‘greatest Mohammedan’ empire in the world.Footnote 35 Moreover, although British India was not a Muslim-majority polity, it was a significant part of what many, including Barkatullah and the British authorities, considered to be the ‘Muslim World’. Barkatullah and other pan-Islamists demanded respect and favourable treatment of their ‘spiritual sovereign’, the Ottoman sultan and caliph.
For Barkatullah, British actions in India and the non-Indian territories of the ‘Muslim World’ were inextricably linked. A focus on either his religious activism or his anticolonialism misses out on recognizing that Barkatullah was experimenting with a number of parallel, complementary strategies that involved a constellation of, often overlapping, networks simultaneously.Footnote 36 This point is illustrated most clearly in Barkatullah's connections and activities during his time in New York where he not only had weekly meetings with Irish-American Fenians, he was also educating American Theosophists about Islam's liberal and ‘esoteric nature’, as well as connecting with an upper-class interracial, socialist group known as the Cosmopolitan Society of New York.Footnote 37
Dharmapala's meetings with Barkatullah and other Indian revolutionaries in Tokyo was part of the reason that ‘made Dharmapala look more revolutionary than he was’ to British authorities which were keeping tabs on them both.Footnote 38 Unlike Barkatullah, however, Dharmapala seems to have remained committed to imperial reform within the British empire. Although at times he was a harsh critic of British rule in Ceylon, unlike Barkatullah, there does not seem to be any evidence to suggest that he ever worked towards ending British rule in Ceylon.Footnote 39 Nor is there any real indication that Barkatullah and Dharmapala met in Tokyo in order to conspire against the British. Their interaction can be understood more accurately if we move away from a rigid anticolonial nationalist lens.
What is certain is that both Dharmapala and Barkatullah were involved in ‘world religioning’ projects during their time in Japan and that is what brought them into each other's spheres.Footnote 40 These were the coordinates of their intersection. While Barkatullah wanted dignity and respect for both colonized Muslims and the sovereign Muslim-ruled states like the Ottoman empire, Qajar Iran, and Afghanistan, Dharmapala wanted to reinvigorate Buddhism in Ceylon and India, and to establish a centre for Buddhists around the world. In other words, Barkatullah was trying to improve the position of the global Muslim community in the Eurocentric international order, while Dharmapala wanted to develop the symbols and consciousness of a global Buddhist community. Crucially, both spoke quite consciously of Islam and Buddhism, respectively, as ‘world religions’ and took part in world interfaith conferences that brought together experts and religious leaders from a variety of religious traditions.Footnote 41 During these discussions, Barkatullah and Dharmapala not only wanted to demonstrate the ‘world religion’ status of their respective religions to European scholars, they also wanted to convince them that Islam and Buddhism, respectively, could offer ‘materialist’ and ‘Christian’ Europe something that was missing: ‘Eastern spirituality’.
In her work, the Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa demonstrates how the world religions paradigm was a European discursive formation that emerged in the nineteenth century and constructed various religions as a set of discrete, essentialized, and commensurate systems.Footnote 42 While seemingly an ecumenical approach, Masuzawa argues that for European scholars of religion, Protestant Christianity was generally considered the default religion through which other religious traditions were compared and contrasted. Moreover, as Peter Gottschalk rightly points out, despite the seemingly ‘scientific’ nature of the exercise, ‘these new classifications and the understanding of religion as a system of belief and practice not only developed in no small part in response to the exigencies of empire, but they also significantly reshaped non-Western views in the context of Western political and cultural hegemony’.Footnote 43
While Masuzawa's work focuses on the European discourses on religions worldwide in the context of European global hegemony, I build on her insight that the concept of religion and the world religions paradigm could not have become globalized without the agency of the likes of Indian Hindus and Japanese Buddhists, for example.Footnote 44 Therefore, the emergence of modern Buddhism and reformulations within the Islamic tradition were ‘cocreations’ that emerged out of the colonial encounter but through the labour of colonized subjects.Footnote 45 Moreover, despite the significance of European colonial expansion and Orientalist discourses on the radical reformulations that took place in the religious landscape across Asia, it is important to note that Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Confucianists alike were also drawing on networks and epistemologies that preceded European colonial domination in the region.Footnote 46
In order for one's religion to be considered by European scholars as a part of the pantheon of world religions, it had to be seen to be universal, global, textual, monotheistic, and compatible with ‘modern science’ and ‘rationality’. Although Islam was considered by many to be a world religion, there always seemed to be an asterisk of sorts next to it. While one could argue that the Quran had a universal message and that Islam was both monotheistic and global, European intellectuals like Ernest Renan and W. W. Hunter considered Islam to be irrational, violent, and fanatical.Footnote 47 I should note that it is important for these ideas and categorizations to be understood in the context of European imperial concerns about geopolitics and managing imperial subjects as well as the circulation of ethno-linguistic theories that saw Islam as a Semitic religion/race (alongside Judaism, which was often thought of as a ‘national’ religion rather than a ‘global’ one). Conversely, Buddhism and Hinduism were considered to be Aryan religions.Footnote 48
Throughout his writings and lectures directed towards Euro-American audiences, Barkatullah was eager to demonstrate what he considered to be the liberal, peaceful, egalitarian, and scientific potential within the Quran, often through historical examples from the supposed Islamic ‘Golden Age’.Footnote 49 Dharmapala, meanwhile, argued against the idea that Buddhism was an atheistic philosophy or reformist tradition that was, at its core, nihilistic and pessimistic.
For Dharmapala, Japan's rise as a regional and global power represented an example of the vitality of Buddhism in the contemporary world and a clear illustration that Buddhism was compatible with science and rationality. Japan was an example of Asian modernity with a strong Buddhist core. There are echoes here with how Barkatullah and other pan-Islamists viewed the Ottoman empire, which helps to explain why so many Indian, Egyptian, and Indonesian pan-Islamists argued against European discourses that labelled the Ottomans as autocratic and backward. However, there was no Japanese equivalent to the Ottoman caliphate for Buddhists like Dharmapala. What he wanted from Japanese Buddhists was not for Japan to become the spiritual centre of the Buddhistic world; rather, he was seeking Japanese assistance in revitalizing Buddhism across Asia and, crucially, help in taking back control of the Maha Bodhi temple, which was under the control of Hindu Saivite renouncers. After all, Dharmapala ‘knew the Japanese had means to support the Bodh Gaya cause at a level impossible to imagine for Sinhalas, Thais, or Burmese, not to mention his supporters in India, England, and the United States, who were well off but few and far between’.Footnote 50 The Maha Bodhi temple was considered to be the site where the historical Buddha attained enlightenment, and Dharmapala wanted to make it a centre for Buddhists around the world, regardless of sectarian affiliation. Bodh Gaya was an important piece in Dharmapala's vision for establishing a universal Buddhism.
Although Dharmapala thought that Islam was not ‘civilized’ enough to be a good fit for Japan, he did think of Islam as a world religion, alongside Christianity. When Dharmapala argued for the necessity of having control over Bodh Gaya for the Buddhist world, he made explicit comparisons with Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. In a memoir Dharmapala wrote that:
Bodh Gaya is to the Buddhist what the Holy Sepulcher is to the Christians, Zion is to the Jews and Mecca is to the Mahommedans…For twenty-five centuries Buddhist pilgrims have come—from Ceylon, Burma and Siam, from China, Japan, and Korea, from Turkistan and Tibet, to see the holy tree and the place where, the Buddha sat.Footnote 51
However, Islam also served as a negative example when speaking to sympathetic Bengali Hindu elites in India and Britain. Dharmapala used the narrative of the violent, fanatical, iconoclastic, and intolerant Muslim invaders in Indian history to contrast it with what he saw as Buddhism's positive influence on Indian history and civilization.Footnote 52
Although Dharmapala's ‘world religioning’ did not include an institution equivalent to that of the Ottoman caliphate, it is interesting to note that his colleague, the influential Lankan monk Hikkaduwe Sumangala—who served as the president and adviser to Dharmapala at the Maha Bodhi Society established by Dharmapala in 1891—looked to the king of Siam to take on the mantle of ‘spiritual sovereign’ for Theravada Buddhists in Burma, Ceylon, and Thailand. As Anne Blackburn points out, Sumangala's vision ‘drew on memories of earlier, precolonial, Buddhist kingship, as well as new idioms of statecraft’.Footnote 53 Sumangala envisioned establishing an Ecclesiastical Council under the patronage and protection of King Chulalongkorn. He and others tried, unsuccessfully in the end, to convince the king that this role would not damage his relationship with the British. This proposed arrangement and the complications Sumangala and King Chulalongkorn had to work through has parallels with the idea of the Ottoman sultan being the ‘spiritual sovereign’ for Indian Muslims, as imagined by Barkatullah, while they were still subject to British rule in the political realm.Footnote 54
For Barkatullah, Japan was important for his intertwined projects of anticolonial and pan-Islamic activism. He was initially convinced by both Paris-based Indian anticolonial activists like Madame Cama and Irish-American Fenians like John Devoy to apply for the post at the Tokyo Imperial University.Footnote 55 However, as I have already mentioned, Barkatullah also established a journal to educate Japanese citizens about Islam and played a significant role in the conversions of a few Japanese citizens to Islam. Although these conversions made headlines, I argue that Barkatullah was not primarily interested in converting a large number of people in Japan to Islam, if for no other reason that it could be seen as a threat and an insult to his Japanese Buddhist colleagues—akin to how Christian missionaries were perceived across Asia. Rather, Barkatullah's presence in Tokyo, along with the existence of even a few elite Japanese converts, represented not only Islam's globality, but also an attempt to bring Japan into the ‘Muslim World’. In other words, it could help make Islam a part of Japanese society and, therefore, less foreign. I argue that this idea was informed by his experiences in Liverpool in the 1880s and 1890s when he worked at the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI) established by the Victorian gentleman and convert to Islam, Abdullah Quilliam.Footnote 56
During Barkatullah's brief tenure at the Institute, the LMI became an intellectual and diplomatic hub for Muslims visiting Britain. For instance, Quilliam had developed close relationships with powerful Muslim leaders like the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II and the amir of Afghanistan. Quilliam was particularly loyal to the Ottoman sultan and caliph, who was an important supporter of and donor for Quilliam's activism. Therefore, the LMI was not just important symbolically—established as it was by a white, Victorian gentlemen in Liverpool—it also became a diplomatic hub that connected influential Muslims spread across the world and advocated for Muslims globally.Footnote 57
Inspired by Quilliam's LMI, Barkatullah used his time in Tokyo to establish connections with a variety of religious, intellectual, and political figures.Footnote 58 Through his monthly publication Islamic Fraternity, meanwhile, Barkatullah tried not only to argue against Orientalist depictions of Islam and articulate Islam's globality, he also discussed how Indian Muslims and the ‘Muslim world’ more broadly could learn from Japan's rise as a modern industrial and military power.
Barkatullah also had a positive outlook towards the religious landscape in Japan. He argued that ‘Japanese latitudinarianism’ in the religious realm meant that Shintō, Confucianism, and Buddhism ‘all have equal hold on the sentiments of the people and enjoy equal respect’. Quoting an unnamed Japanese scholar, Barkatullah made the case that these different traditions weaved together seamlessly in Japanese society through an arrangement where ‘Shintoism furnishes the object, Confucianism offers the rules of life, while Buddhism supplies the way of salvation’.Footnote 59
It is understandable to analyse Barkatullah's glowing observations of religious tolerance and politics in Japan as purely strategic, and even obsequious, considering he was trying to ingratiate himself with his Japanese hosts.Footnote 60 However, these reflections were also indicative of Barkatullah's anxieties about events in his native British India where he could see early signs of religious tension in the political arena. For instance, in Islamic Fraternity, he criticized the nascent All-India Muslim League for ‘meddling’ with politics and advised the institution to ‘devote itself to the cause of national education’ for Indian Muslims. He also argued for sincere efforts to be made towards maintaining Hindu-Muslim unity and warned against his co-religionists castigating their Hindu brothers and sisters who ‘will be always in India with us’.Footnote 61 Unlike Dharmapala, therefore, who seemed to think of Indian civilization as an architectural structure resting on the twin pillars of Hinduism and Buddhism, I argue that Barkatullah understood it in oceanic terms, with various streams flowing in, including Islam.Footnote 62
Dharmapala on Islam and Muslims
Islam and Muslims were not a significant part of Dharmapala's writings as he was primarily interested in Buddhism in relationship to Christianity, Theosophy, and Hinduism. However, in putting his projects and ideas alongside Barkatullah's, it is important to examine his writings on Islam and Muslims more closely. While this section will focus on Dharmapala's views on Islam and Muslims, it is important to point out that Barkatullah also briefly mentioned Buddhism in his writings. For instance, Buddhism appears as a ‘world religion’ alongside Christianity and Islam in Barkatullah's speeches and articles. More substantially, he discussed the trauma of the British invasion of Lhasa in 1904 for Buddhists around the world. In an article entitled, ‘The British Invasion of Tibet. In Defence of the Dalai Lama’, Barkatullah wrote:
The invasion of Tibet by the British army, the violation of the sanctity of isolation of the Buddhistic capital, and laying bare the secrets of the holy of holies of the Grand Cathedral (jo-kang) to the vulgar gaze are events not only significant from a political point of view, but also fraught with an element of danger from the religious standpoint. For Lhassa is to China, Japan, and [K]orea what Mecca is to Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan. The desecration of the Holy Land of northern Buddhism has spread consternation among millions of people in Asia and created a commotion in the Far East.Footnote 63
Although the article was primarily a critique of British actions against fellow ‘Eastern’ Asian peoples, Barkatullah showed sympathy with the ‘Buddhistic World’ and the Dalai Lama. This article is also indicative of Barkatullah's interests in pan-Asianist politics several years prior to his arrival into Tokyo in 1909.Footnote 64
Dharmapala, meanwhile, published more regularly through his diaries and the journal Maha Bodhi and the United Buddhist World and had much more to say about Islam.Footnote 65 Dharmapala wrote about Islam's doctrine and civilizational history, reflected on his meetings with Barkatullah, and talked about the various Muslim communities in his native Ceylon. Therefore, Dharmapala's concerns related to Islam and Muslims in abstract, personal, global, and local terms and contexts. In the following paragraphs, I briefly examine Dharmapala's attitude towards Islam and Muslims in three ways: Dharmapala's writings on Islamic history, his comments regarding Barkatullah, and his understanding of the place of Muslim communities in his native Ceylon.
Broadly speaking, it is clear that Dharmapala held negative views of Islam as a ‘civilization’. This was in large part because he shared the popularly held notion that Islam was responsible for the demise of Buddhism in India.Footnote 66 However, even when Islam is mentioned, Dharmapala's interest was almost never Islam itself. By this I mean that when Dharmapala discussed Islamic history, it was usually for the purpose of explaining a historical phenomenon or using Islam as an example in his comparative religioning. For instance, a common way in which Islam entered the scene in Dharmapala's writing was him placing Buddhist texts, founding figure, and religious sites alongside those of other ‘world religions’ like Islam and Christianity. In this way, Muhammad and Mecca were comparable to the historical Buddha and Bodh Gaya.
Dharmapala often blamed Islam for the decline of Buddhism in India, in large part, to argue that Buddhism and Hinduism were compatible with one other before the ‘Muslim period’ in Indian history. In an article on ‘Who Destroyed Buddhism in India?’, he argued that Muslim fanaticism was experienced not just in medieval India:
Buddhism was not the only religion that suffered persecution at the hands of the Muhammedans. The whole of Zoroastrian literature was swept off and the whole religion effaced out of existence in Persia. The destruction of the magnificent collection of books in the Alexandrian Library; the extirpation of Christians in the Alexandria, Asia Minor and Turkey—all these fiendish acts were committed by the fanatics of Islam, who loved to dwell in darkness and ignorance.Footnote 67
Interestingly, in countering the idea that Christianity was central to European progress, Dharmapala argued that ‘all the arts and sciences such as medicine and alchemy were in the hands of the Mohamedans, to whom and not to Christianity is the real progress of Europe due’.Footnote 68 Even here, we can see that although Dharmapala credits Islam with European civilizational progress, the real target was countering self-congratulatory Christian narratives. A common strategy Dharmapala employed to counter Christian supremacy, however, was to highlight its similarity to Islam. Christianity and Islam were connected in that they were both Semitic and emerged from Arabia.Footnote 69 ‘Materialistic’ religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam grew out of the ‘barren soil’ of Arabia, whereas the ‘metaphysical’ religions of the Aryans were birthed in the fertile soil of the Ganges valley.Footnote 70 Here, again, the central target of critique is Christianity rather than Islam.
There does not seem to be much evidence of Dharmapala having any significant personal relationships with Muslims during his life. This is precisely one of the reasons that makes Barkatullah's appearance in Dharmapala's diaries so interesting. Reading his diary, it seems as if Dharmapala and Barkatullah were on cordial terms during his time in Japan. They had dinner several times and Barkatullah and his protégé Hassan Hatano even went to visit him to give their farewells on 12 August 1913.Footnote 71 However, even in these diary entries, it is clear that Dharmapala disapproves of Barkatullah preaching his ‘pagan’ religion in Japan. Aside from Barkatullah, there do not seem to be any personal interactions of note between Dharmapala and Muslims in either Calcutta or Colombo.Footnote 72
It is his attitudes and statements about Muslims in Ceylon that have received the most scholarly attention. Dharmapala was interned by British authorities following the 1915 anti-Muslim riots that lasted for nine days and resulted in deaths, sexual violence, and the destruction of property.Footnote 73 Dharmapala's name has become indelibly tied to the riots.Footnote 74 While the reasons for the riots have been a topic of debate in Sri Lankan historiography, Dharmapala has been seen by many scholars as a central figure in creating the anti-Muslim atmosphere in which the violence occurred.Footnote 75 In an oft-quoted letter to the secretary of state for colonies, Dharmapala deployed anti-Jewish tropes on Muslims when he wrote that they were ‘alien’ to the island and had become ‘prosperous like the Jews’ by employing ‘Shylockian methods’.Footnote 76
These statements are part of the reason why Dharmapala is considered to have played a significant role in creating an anti-Muslim environment through his economic, Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism. The ‘indigenous’ Sinhalese Buddhists, Dharmapala argued, had been betrayed by the British. It is important to recognize, however, that Dharmapala was not primarily a nationalist.Footnote 77 For instance, he was ‘never overtly politically active in Sri Lanka’ and ‘appears to have been largely marginalised by the local political elite’.Footnote 78 In thinking about Dharmapala's universalism, global activities, and nationalism, Rambukwella argues that ‘Dharmapala's universalism abroad and particularism at home undermine the authenticity attributed to him in later nationalist recuperations. Rather than a diehard nationalist, we may see a man who strategically shifts position to operate in a translocal world.’Footnote 79
In summary, while Dharmapala had negative views of Islamic history and of Islam as a religious tradition, it is important to recognize that Islam was largely in his peripheral vision. Usually when Dharmapala mentioned Islam in his writings, he was concerned with critiquing Christianity or discussing Buddhism's relationship to Hinduism. Although he interacted with Barkatullah on friendly terms, in his diaries and journal he clearly objected to Barkatullah preaching in Japan. Significantly, it was against Ceylonese Muslims, particularly the Coast Moors, that Dharmapala's language was most virulently anti-Muslim.Footnote 80 The contrast between Barkatullah and Dharmapala's views on their counterparts’ religious tradition might, in part, be understood through their positions in India and Ceylon, respectively. While Barkatullah came from a religious ‘minority’ in India that was being ‘Othered’ as foreign, Dharmapala came from the religious and ethnic majority in Ceylon.Footnote 81 However, although they are important, political and ethical commitments are not reducible to the political contexts of identities.
Conclusion
Barkatullah, Dharmapala, and the Japanese Buddhists they interacted with entered the conversation about religion with their European counterparts from a defensive position, arguing that their respective religious traditions were indeed compatible with modernity. However, they also put forward the idea that spirituality emanating from their respective ‘Eastern’ religions had the potential to heal the wounds of the world around them. The destruction caused by the Great War would have confirmed to them and their contemporaries around the world that the materialistic ‘Western civilization’ was barbaric and violent at its core.Footnote 82
Despite their differences about Islam as a religion and its role in Indian history, it is important to recognize the significant overlap in both their ideas and networks. For instance, what is perhaps hidden from view is the influence of Theosophical thinking for both Barkatullah and Dharmapala. Theosophy—a Western esoteric movement that, at least in theory, promised universal brotherhood and equality—proved to be appealing to them both. In crucial ways, their interactions with Theosophists and Theosophical materials, as well as access to the global Theosophical network, shaped the way they understood and articulated their own religious traditions.
While their personal interactions were few, studying these two figures together paints a more precise picture of the content, texture, and lived reality of religious internationalisms from the late nineteenth century until 1914. Importantly, it makes visible the fact that religion played a central role alongside nationalism, race, and empire in conversations about the possible futures of the international order.Footnote 83 Their relationship also raises the crucial question of whether these inter-Asian conversations about comparative religion ended up sharpening the boundaries between religious traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Shintō, and Christianity. In the case of Barkatullah and Dharmapala, while there were clear differences in the way their projects were articulated and in the goals they sought, their respective projects were entangled and had clear structural similarities. In comparing and contrasting the lives and works of Barkatullah and Dharmapala, we can see the interconnected histories in a new light, that is, as shared and, at times, contradictory visions for futures past.
Acknowledgements
This article comes out of a paper I gave at the Global Brexit and the Lost Futures of European Empires Conference held in April 2019 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I would like to thank Susan Pennybacker for encouraging me to give the paper. I would also like to thank Richard Jaffe, Steven Kemper, Anne Blackburn, David Gilmartin, Ulrich Brandenburg, and Sana Tannoury-Karam for providing helpful feedback on the draft of the conference paper. I also want to express my gratitude to my adviser Cemil Aydin, as well as Micah Hughes and Mark Reeves, for discussing this topic with me and giving detailed comments on multiple manuscript drafts. Finally, I wish to extend a special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of MAS for their detailed feedback and advice which helped me to clarify my arguments. In particular, I would like to thank them for encouraging me to expand on Dharmapala's views and writings on Islam.
Competing interests
None.
