The Forgotten Alliance Between the Ottomans and Hyderabad | Imran Mulla

It wasn't just Muslim politicians who were engaged in this sort of panislamic politics. It was also Hindu politicians including some who would later become uh Hindu nationalist because they like Gandhi uh believed that panislamic politics was a means of uh enhancing India's importance uh in the world. So how do you see that? What is Kilafat movement in terms of that to you? I mean who were the people involved and what was the reasoning? There were many uh key figures in the kilaf movement. Of course, Mahatma Gandhi was one of them, but you also had Molana Azad who is very well known in India. Uh and the Ali brothers who are very important to my book. What is happening right now uh as you argue in the book when it is coming to the late 19th century, early 19th century, early 20th century is then reconceiving, reconceptualization of the idea of kilafhat itself. And I uh I write about a debate that that Sabukaro had with Molana Shocket Ali. And the argument of the Ali brothers was different. It was that there's no contradiction between our uh support for the Ottomans and our identification with Muslims elsewhere in the world and our Indianness. And not just that, it is the intellectual history you know, Shahawala, people like you know the Mum, Jamant Islami, all of this is an intellectual production par excellence uh even from the context of general Islamic intellectual history. The fact that the Indian Muslims uh did not have uh the Mughal Empire anymore actually introduced a great deal of dynamism into Indian Muslim political thought. So you had lots of uh people coming up with new and often very interesting very unconventional ideas. So one of the things that you highlighted is that the legitimacy of the caliphate of the Ottomans comes from philosopher Sufis but also from the territoriality that all of these important locations and so Shutt Ali suggested to the MUI that let's set up a world Islamic congress in Jerusalem and um we'll invite Muslim leaders and notables from all over the world and at this congress Khalif Abdul Majjid will be there. >> How is Hyderabad during that [music] time? What kind of political uh conversations are happening? What kind of Hindu Muslim relationships are happening? Now what we do know is that Abdul Majjid himself uh saw the marriage in very political terms. So he made it a condition that the firstborn son of this marriage should be in line uh to rule Hyderabad. Now see independent think tank media platform minority or human rights issues research or evidence-based conversations amplify support I came across your book a couple of months ago and I was always thinking about how to reach out to you and do a part podcast on this you know very volatile and important issue especially in the context of uh minority life in uh nationality. it it just is conceived as something which is very abhorent to talk about because as you argued in the book that these are the ideas related to ISIS al-Qaeda which we will come back to. Uh but then that also uh you know pushes us away from reading history. It just imposes a length on you and you could you are not even allowed to do neutral understanding of history or you know your own memory of your uh history of your uh uh you know religious uh for example civilizational history. So all of that mattered a lot in the sense that especially uh in the past couple of years in the Indian context the hyper marginalization of Muslims in all the modes of life has led to an intrigue and interest in Muslims studying about their own history uh largely concentrated on South Asian history because this is where the last 10,000 years of Indian Muslims has happened in different empire contexts and different colonial contexts. and even the uh this movement to free the Indian colony from the British rule. And in all of that the way history has been given to you is either in a nationalist context which is been uh really of course it is not just the Indian case everywhere in the world there is a certain history that needs to be conceived and constructed for the legitimacy of a particular understanding of nationality as it stands today. So in all of that even a lot of civilizational historical memory loses and it appears as if that that is the only way the world could have been or the world was uh especially when I was reading your book and I of course when we read about history one thing that has always interested me is that the world was maybe much more global in the sense that people were moving around uh throughout the world even 500 years ago. It it feels as if globalization is a very recent phenomena. Of course in the sense of you taking a you know aeroplane to reach certain regions very quickly but people used to travel for months for education for movement and so as you uh you know just before the podcast started you highlight you are a third generation uh English Muslim living in UK and then your book book comes up with specifically you know uh highlighting ing the context of caliphate but also in Hyderabad Nisam worldview uh in embedded in the Indian Muslim uh participation in the freedom struggle as well as anti-colonial rule. So what interested you uh why did you choose to study this particular neglected part of history which for me frankly was uh surprising. So how did you come across it? Why did you choose it and what did you find? >> Well, I think it's a very compelling uh history because it's so cosmopolitan. Uh and it's a story that involves, you know, multiple continents uh the Indian subcontinent uh Turkey, Istanbul, uh Jerusalem, the French Riviera, uh and of course England. And uh that really interested me because when we look at history through uh a national lens as you've already indicated you tend to miss that that that there was movement across different places the movement of people but also the movement of ideas and it was the extraordinary cosmopolitanism of this history and what it revealed about uh global politics and in particular global Muslim politics that really interested it really interested me. I would say that my uh my way into the history however was different. It was through the figure of Abdul Majid, the last Ottoman Caulif. And I read about him in 2023 and saw some of his artwork and I was fascinated. Uh that here was a Califf who uh painted um some of his paintings were in a European orientalist style, but he also painted mosques. He painted Harums. Uh he he engaged in calligraphy. calligraphy. He was a poet. He was a musician. So this was really a complicated man. And he embodied it felt to me all the complexity and contradictions of the late Ottoman experience. He saw himself as an Ottoman European Muslim. And so he had quite a coherent identity uh despite the sometimes paradoxical nature of it on the face of it. So I I really dug into that. I was very compelled by Khalif Abdul Majid and then I was interested in what on earth happened to him after the caliphate was abolished in 1924. So he became the califf in 1922 after the Ottoman Empire had fallen. So he was the first califf to be elected into the position by the new grand national assembly of Turkey. And the caliphate didn't last very long because Mustapa Kamal Ataturk decided that having a calip in Istanbul was really disrupting his nation building, modernizing, westernizing ambitions. And so he expelled all of the Ottoman imperial family. On the 3rd of March 1924, Abdul Majid and his family ended up on the Orient Express. They were bundled onto the train uh and went to Switzerland and then faded into obscurity. And usually that's where historians leave it. They're not very interested in what happened next. Uh but I wanted to look at that and I began piecing together uh this incredible story of how Abdul Majid in exile mostly uh on the French Riviera. He had a villa in Nice uh launched a very ambitious scheme to resurrect the caliphate and it was a scheme that came to involve people from across the Muslim world uh and in particular India. So uh one of the interesting things about your book is where it starts. It it talks about this monument in India in Orurangabad which feels like a which is a Ottoman monument in a sense and one feels why would there be uh a monument like that there and because you talked about the Indian connection. So you came here what did you see and what did it add to your narrative of your understanding of things? So I I read documents about uh the last khalif's tomb and and I was aware that very few people in India had any idea that it existed. So I I went to Hulabad uh and went to basically track the tomb down. It's quite near the Ora caves. So in a very well-known area, but you have to go off the beaten track. Uh you can't get there in a car. Uh I my friend and I were were hiking for a while essentially um in in the 40 degrees Celsius heat to try and find uh this mole and it's an incredible structure uh which is quite battered, quite gray, quite tired um vandalized actually but still exudes this sort of Ottoman majesty and it's incredible because it's an Ottoman Turkish style tomb but in in the middle of western India. Uh and that stands as testament to just how important the Indian subcontinent was in the global Islamic world and to India's historic links uh with the Middle East. So Abdul Majid intended to be buried in India and the Nisam of Hyderabad had this tomb built for him but he was never buried there. He's actually in Medina in the Jenna Talbaki uh graveyard after having his body was sort of interred in Paris for for 10 years before before he was finally buried in Medina. And what had happened was uh this is a topic of my book is this grand alliance between the house of Osman in particular between the Khalif and the Nisam of Hyderabad and his Asab Jahi dynasty which was the wealthiest Muslim family in the world. Indeed, the Nisam was uh the richest man in the world at one point and Hyderrobad was a huge modernizing princely state about the size of Italy, very significant and it had lots of wealth and influence. It was very cosmopolitan place as well. uh so Hyderabbad's status as a sort of uh cultural hub for for Muslims which attracted uh Muslim intellectuals and and other sorts of people from around the Islamic world made it an obvious place that the last Ottoman califf would look to uh and the nisam supported the califf financially in his exile and then the califf's daughter Princess Durabar was married to the Nisam's eldest son, Prince Azamja. And so this is this alliance which means that uh princess durabar and azamja's son prince mccuram ja who was born in 1933 if hyderabbad had not been annexed in 1948 as we know it was and uh if it had been within an Indian federation as an autonomous princely state it's easy to imagine that it would still have uh retained its status in the Islamic world as a great sort of Muslim capital. And in that context, Prince Mukuram Ja as the Nisam would have all the wealth of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, its prestige, but also the uh religious legacy of the Ottoman dynasty. And so you can imagine how he might have claimed uh the the role of calhiff and could that would have depended on him gaining recognition from Muslims not just elsewhere in India uh but also uh from across the Islamic world and that might not have happened. We we actually have no idea. Uh but but that is the possibility which never came to pass which I explore in my book. But the counterfactual is not very important to it. What's in because we really don't know what would have happened. We'd be shooting arrows in the dark to guess. What's important is what this attempt to revive the caliphate after its fall in 1924 reveals about the global Islamic world in that period of the 20th century which we've completely forgotten. We no longer remember uh these alliances. We we don't remember generally that Hyderabbad was a great Muslim capital essentially. Uh we we have no conception in in the public imagination I think both in India and elsewhere in the world that actually the subcontinent was the epicenter of the Islamic world in quite a [clears throat] lot of ways and and especially because it had the world's largest Muslim population. even though it was a minority, it was still larger than actually all the Muslims in the Arab world combined. So that is really the significance that I was trying to draw out in in my book. I mean one of the uh interesting things uh is that as you rightly argued that uh India, Pakistan and Bangladesh combined has one of the largest populations of Muslims in the world and yet people don't really know that India is seen as this backward region and South Asia as a whole as if none of the Islamic history happened here and then we read about uh you know the Delhi Sultan and the Mughal Empire and the nams and the princely states and not just that it is the intellectual history you know I'm a sarhandi shahawula people like you know thean movement javant Islami all of this is an intellectual production par excellence uh even from the context of general Islamic intellectual history and general Islamic empire building. So one thing is clear that the world as you rightly argued uh was relatively different. It had a different structure in terms of specialtity and geography and interlinkages and it is within that context in uh you know in the colonial India and even before that we are locating this history and for that one thing really becomes important because it's the right-wing hindutwa that always claims that the kilafhat movement happened in India and you know Indian Muslims have had always been disloyal to the project of India becoming a state in itself. And one of the things that surprises when you read and when I read history that of course there were many many versions but to a large extent the kalafhat movement and the nationalist movement they had an interesting alliance and interesting ways and modalities of talking about these issues. An Indian Muslim is a complex or the Muslim in the south Asia was a complex entity. How do you see it? Why do you think the khalafhat movement happened in India in the way that it happened here and did not have the same level of breath and energy elsewhere in the world? >> Well, it was uh to put it simply, it was because the Indian Muslims weren't under Ottoman rule where whereas other parts of the uh Islamic world that were were were frankly less enthusiastic about the Ottomans. But the the Indian Muslims hadn't particularly cared about the Ottoman caliphate um when the Mughles were still around. So it was after the fall of the Mughles in the final uh symbolic collapse in 1857 that the Indian Muslims now under British rule had to deal with you know a very new reality of the loss of sovereignty and the loss of privilege. And in that context they looked to the Ottomans uh because they were the caliphate and also frankly because they were a very powerful uh Islamic empire. Now the Ottomans at the same time were promoting their status as as a caliphate much more than they had in the past uh in order to to deal with this new reality of of European colonial empires and um and to respond to the loss of many of their non-Muslim uh populations in wars. So it became more of a a Muslim empire demographically than it had been before. So this is why you had the rise of uh panislamic arguments coming from Istanbul. Now the fact that the Indian Muslims uh did not have uh the Mughal Empire anymore actually introduced a great deal of dynamism into Indian Muslim political thought. So you had lots of uh people coming up with new and often very interesting very unconventional ideas. And this meant that people in the Ottoman world were very interested in a lot of Indian Muslim thinkers. One of them was Sey Amir Ali uh the great modernist who was um uh who lived in London mostly. And Seed Amir Ali advised the young Turks in in um 1908. Uh he he later established connections with Khalif Abdul Majid. So we see that it was precisely the fact that the Indian Muslims were colonized which made them interested in panislamic politics. Now the khilafhat movement itself of course uh was not just a Muslim phenomenon. It was incredibly important uh in Indian politics because it was the first really Indiawide mass mobilization and as everyone knows in India it formed the basis of what would become the non-ooperation uh and then and the freedom movement and it's very significant I think that uh it wasn't just Muslim politicians who were engaged in this sort of panislamic politics it was also Hindu politicians including some who would later become uh Hindu nationalists because they like Gandhi uh believed that panislamic politics was a means of uh enhancing India's importance uh in the world and of showing uh antic-colonial establishing anti-colonial solidarity between different places. So panislamic politics took on the sort of role that uh internationalist ideas and and even communist ideas would later do for for other countries or socialism for example. So you had Hindus and Muslims involved in this. Now the kilaf movement uh failed. I mean >> before moving to the failure of the kilaf movement I uh you know because you one of the things that you said and it's very interesting and should be uh we should go in more depth on it is that the coloniality created a condition wherein the uh you know uniqueness or experimentation of different kinds of political theologies or different kinds of uh even for example of the minority uh Hindu Muslim relation how you preserve your rituals in a so in a in a context where your political sovereignty is compromised. So it is in that context that you locate that this fruitful thinking uh in various combinations is happening within South Asia. So in that context what is the kilafhat movement in terms of its you know structure in terms of its argument and in terms of this relationship between Hindus and Muslims how could this movement which is panislamic of course one of the ideas that you've already portrayed is geopolitical that these leaders and the anti-colonial that that these two elements that Indian Muslims living in India with a nationalist framework have a potential to have good alliance with the geopolitical reality which is massive in the world and postcolonial world. So how do you see that? What is kilafhat movement in terms of that to you and how was it conceived in the very beginning? Who were the people involved and what was the reasoning? >> There were many uh key figures in the kilafat movement of course Mahatma Gandhi was one of them but you also had um Molana Azad who is very well known in India and the Ali brothers who are very important to my book less wellknown. So, so they're still remembered as as heroes in in Pakistan. There's uh Muhammad Ali Road in in Bombay in India. Uh but really very little is known about their actual political thought and and they were the pioneers um of the Kilafat movement. You also had the involvement though of um Zedir Ali of Aakhan III. Now, it's often stereotyped this this movement as a as a very niche religious one which which was basically bizarrely focused on on a califf uh somewhere else in in in Istanbul. uh but actually it was antic-colonial in tenor because it was a protest against the occupation of Ottoman lands in particular Anatolia by European empires and so the aim was to lobby the British to preserve uh that sovereignty and uh essentially support the the position of of the caliphate. And so has actually traveled to London, met with the prime minister, they campaigned in London. But you also had these huge protests um in India. Now Gandhi's position was that your movement is just it's it's this is a a solid demand um and the British Empire is as much a Muslim empire as it is a Hindu or a Christian empire. Now that the labeling of the British Empire as a Muslim empire had initially been done by the British themselves and they had done it on the basis that their empire had more Muslims than any other empire in the world. But what's very interesting is that Indian thinkers including Indian Muslims appropriated that idea and used it to demand things from the British uh such as for example concessions on the issue of of the Ottomans and the caliphate. And there is um some evidence that uh actually before the kilafhat movement proper uh the Indian Muslim mobilization uh during World War I uh did restrain British policy uh to some extent. They could have done more in the Middle East and they actually did and you can see when you look at the writings of of British statesmen at the time and their correspondences they were actively concerned about about uh the Indian Muslims. So India sh >> in what sense? >> They didn't want to uh anger them and they didn't want to cause you know massive protest >> because of the mass mobilization that could happen in response and could destabilize this region which is a fruitful region for the British Empire. >> Exactly. And and this also explains why the British sort of avowedly said that they were completely neutral on the caliphate. they they might not otherwise have have done so, but they they were very they were genuinely concerned about the movement and there were correspondences between um uh Ottomans and in particular the the national movement led by Mustafa Kimal that was fighting for independence in Anatolia and the so they they were discussing uh with each other. Uh so it's not the case that this was just a sort of purely narrowly religious issue. It was actually highly political but it did create uh religious tensions as well. There was there there were a lot of religious passions that were unleashed by this movement precisely because it was focused on the idea of an intimate relationship between Hindus and Muslims that we're not going to be governed by these sort of strict lines as as different interests as the British want us to be and and we're all going to be friends. And so, uh, Molana Abdul Buri, for example, declared that we won't, uh, slaughter cows, um, because you're you're you're doing this for us and and and it was said that we're we're doing this completely freely. We're making this decision. Uh, but at the same time, you did sometimes have uh communal rioting because religious passions got out of hand. And then many of the early Hindu nationalists came to see the movement as very dangerous and it shaped their thinking. One of these was um who who we now think of as the founding father of Hindutva as we know it today, Sabakar, who actually said that well the kilaf movement shows that Muslims are apparently loyal to uh to Makkah and to Istanbul and not to India and and this is proof that they're not truly Indian. And that was a very powerful Hindu nationalist argument at the time. And I uh I write about a debate that that Sabuker had with Molana Shokut Ali, one of the leaders of the kilafhat movement. And the argument of the Ali brothers was different. It was that there's no contradiction between our uh support for the Ottomans and our identification with Muslims elsewhere in the world and our Indianness. So Molana Muhammad Ali uh famous speech in London at the round table conference in 1930 shortly before he died declared that we Indian Muslims are we we are part of two circles. One is India and the other is the Muslim world and we can leave neither. So this was a very capacious understanding of identity and I think those debates about about national identity and religious affiliation and solidarity across national and imperial borders continue to ring out um and and continue to have relevance uh not just in India but in other countries including Britain today. So uh uh you were talking about the failure of Kalafat movement. Some of it was riots or the Mapla or other things. But there was a very deep understanding between the leaders of the Alafhat movement and the leaders of Congress. A lot of them especially uh Ali brothers, Molana Hazad, Gandhi, Nehu, even a lot of Jamia sessions and Congress sessions used to happen uh in close proximity to each other. So what happened? How did this massive political movement which you as you argued also converted into non-ooperation movement then did not lead to consolidation of the Indian Muslim or the Muslims of this region and the Hindus of this region's identity to conceive a nation or a nation state that could stay together. Why did these uh you know problems elevate more and more as we moved towards the 1940s? >> Well, you you really had multiple things going on. So, one was uh there was an outbreak of violence against um British officers and Gandhi responded by uh calling a halt to the non-ooperation movement and after this it was very difficult for any mobilization to be started again. uh the other the obvious factor was what was happening in in Turkey itself. So uh the Ottoman Empire uh had fallen uh and this was the impetus for the movement. But then Mustapa Kamal and the national movement essentially succeeded. Um and so this took a lot of the wind out of the sales of the movement and they uh supported the new settlement which had Musfa Kamar and the Grand National Assembly in Anchora and Khalif Abdul Majid in Istanbul. However, they grew more concerned by rumors that Mustafa Kamar was going to marginalize a caliphate and could even get rid of it altogether. So they lobbyed um the Turkish government uh not to get rid of the caliphate and and the Turkish government of course didn't listen. However, it is uh I should say at this at this point um is it's quite an important thing that it was the kilaf movement which I believe really secured Abdul Majid's election as Khalif in the first place because when the Grand National Assembly took over they abolished the Ottoman Sultanate because the empire was gone. So there was no Ottoman Sultan anymore. But they didn't get rid of the caliphate and this was because they argued it's not our decision to take the whole of the Islamic world is interested in this. Now the part of the Islamic world that was actually extremely interested was uh India and and because of the kilafhat movement and and so Abdul Majid later argued uh in response to calls for the caliphat's abolition and after the abolition that no uh the basis of my legitimacy is the consent and the support and recognition of the world's Muslims and not the grand national assembly. So that was uh an important legacy of the kilafant movement there. uh but it it of course uh it failed to actually keep the caliphate around. So so after the caliphate was abolished some Indian Muslim leaders actually supported that decision and said you know this is fine you've got a grand national assembly now and that has the authority of the caliphate and you don't actually need a calip um who doesn't have temporal power. This was the argument of Monana Azad. others like the Ali brothers uh they were outraged and they wanted a revival of the caliphate. So you had a big scramble for the caliphate and that's obviously uh central to my book. So all these different things going on, what happened in Turkey, what h what was going on in India. Uh and then the breakdown of uh the alliance between the Congress and the Muslim League also was uh was one reason why the movement didn't lead to any legacy of Hindu Muslim unity. But that breakdown basically happened over constitutional uh political questions. It was because they disagreed on uh whether Muslims should have various um safeguards for example with regards to electorates. Uh and the Congress claimed that it represented all Indians no matter what religion or cast they were. And so you didn't need um other parties like the Muslim League because these would actually perpetuate religious differences. uh but all the while the Hindu Mahas Sabha which was the um which was a Hindu nationalist uh movement was becoming more important within the Congress and so this led to a big split for example between the Ali brothers and Gandhi who had been very close to each other and it led to a split between um uh the Congress and the Muslim League in general. Some Muslims of course like Molana Azad stayed with the Congress. So let's talk about the caliphate itself because a lot of our viewers are non-Muslims and uh they would not know the context of what is a caliphate, what was the Ottoman caliphate and why was it that there was a movement for its abolishment in terms from the Turkish population itself, Turkish resistance movements itself, Turkish revolutionary movements itself and what is the role of the British Empire and why Why were people concerned about you know the falling of the caliphate? So a little uh quick history about the caliphate and why it mattered. >> Well the caliphate of course is uh essentially represents uh succession to uh the prophet Muhammad. Uh and there have been rival caliphate at different times in history. There have been different forms of caliphate um including monarchy. uh the the the great split between Sunnis and Shia was over the question of succession. Uh so it's never been clean history. But when the Ottomans uh started their empire, they claimed the caliphate after they had seized uh the holy cities of Mecca Medina um Jerusalem and then crucially Baghdad which had been the previous capital of the Abbasid caliphate. So the Ottomans now claimed that that they were uh the successors and they developed a new uh a new way of looking at the caliphate and of interpreting it uh in in a more mystical light actually. So the sultan who was the califf was the shadow of of god on earth. It was uh mainly these uh Sufi philosophers in close to uh the court who would uh define the nature of the caliphate as being this sort of um quai mystical figure uh with special powers and the Ottoman caliphate was destined to uh govern um until until the end until the end of time really it would never end. So he had very mystical ideas and the caliphate was quite important to uh Ottoman uh visions of governance at that time. Now it was then redefined multiple times later on. So in the modern period, Sultan Abdul Hameed II >> even before that you uh can you uh put more light on the jurist credential logic of not identifying historically in very meaningful ways by Muslim jurists themselves that the legitimacy of the Ottoman caliphate is not uh of course you've highlighted the philosopher Sufi but who are they pitting against and what is the alternate argument that is uh you know medieval uh his historical argument then we can move on to what happened in the way the modern logic was constructed. Well, in the medieval period, um, so for example, especially under the Abbasids, the caliphate was formulated as an idea by jurists as being succession to the prophet. And it was believed that the the califf had to be from the Quresh, from from the prophet's tribe. And so the califf certainly had to be an Arab. And this would prove quite the problem for the Ottomans who are not Arab at all. And so they dealt with that issue uh by essentially superseding the authority of jurists on this matter. So it wasn't that it wasn't that the jurists uh became irrelevant to conceptions of of rulership. It was just that they didn't take center stage in in how the Ottomans thought about it. uh Ottoman princes were tutored by these um uh essentially Sufi philosophers who who who gave them these these mystical ideas of of rulership and political philosophy at this time uh was shared across the Persian world. So there were lots of commonalities with what was being taught to the mul princes as well. So, so the caliphate was now, you know, it didn't have to be Arab, was the shadow of God on earth, had sort of special uh attributes and was a much more was seen in a much more mystical light, frankly, than than it had been. >> It's like the Akbarian philosophy of Insan Carl with which is the Timur, the Safet, the general personate culture in which the theologial king, theologian king was conceived like a philosopher king in Platonic. Exactly. Yes. So one of the things that you highlighted is that the legitimacy of the caliphate of the Ottomans comes from philosophers, Sufis, but also from the territoriality that all of these important locations that are celebrated by Shia, Sunnis, all of them and being able to control that territory and then have this logic of caliphate and kalafat being endowed to you even though you're not a kuresh is already a uh sort of an ishiad in terms of how you conceive the project of talafat and [snorts] so what is happening right now uh as you argue in the book when it is coming to the late 19th century early 19th century early 20th century [snorts] is then reconceiving reconceptualization of the idea of kalafat itself so you write about the 1908 revolution And then you talk about 1922, then you talk about 1924. Take us through that journey that what is happening now in the Ottoman world, the global context and how is it that all of these internal movements of young Turks and global imaginations about power is leading to the change in ideas about caliphate itself. >> Yes. So I've already spoken about the fact that Sultan Abdullah Hammed um essentially uh stressed the panislamic nature of the caliphate outside of the Ottoman Empire. So he he argued uh as had never been done in this way before very seriously that he was a calif of all the world's Muslims including those within uh European empires crucially um and not just the califf of those within the Ottoman Empire. And it was very convenient for him to do this uh because firstly it was a way of projecting power. Uh it was a way of making uh his rivals uh his rival empires very anxious. Um and it was also a response to the fact that uh the empire had lost many of its non-Muslim populations uh in war and so it made sense to stress the Islamic nature of it a lot more. But Abdul Hammed was also an absolutist ruler. So, so he came to power and initially there was a parliament but then he became very paranoid and dissolved it and he also locked uh all his cousins up. All the princes were were basically kept in confinement and it was under his rule and particularly in the early 1900s that there were movements against this uh underground movements often quite elite um and uh constitutional. So in 1908 came the constitutional revolution and after this the caliphate was reframed and reconstituted. Uh there was a parliament there was a constitution and the califf would derive his authority uh and legitimacy from that which meant that he was accountable. So in this we can see the obvious influence of uh modern European constitutionist ideas. thinkers including the ulah who were involved in this revolution did also uh point to Islamic ideas of of justice and accountability as well. So it was an Islamic revolution in that sense but the young Turks who had spearheaded this uh turned increasingly authoritarian in response to movements against uh what what they had done and basically it became effectively a dictatorship. Now in 1922 this was the next big change because uh the sultanate was abolished and the empire fell. So the last caliphate which was a caliphate of Abdul Majjid uh was unprecedented because he didn't have temporal power and so essentially Mustafa Kamal Ataturk and the Grand National Assembly. They wanted Abdul Majid to uh sit in his palace uh in Istanbul and be quiet and not appear too much in public and let them get on with the job of politics. But Abdul Majid wasn't interested in that at all. He came out on grand processions uh to to the mosque every Friday. He he grew a beard uh firstly. He met with uh political leaders. He issued statements on great political events. So he he was intent on really asserting the prestige uh of the caliphate and he said that the basis of uh my legitimacy is the recognition of the world's Muslims. And so it was uh for this reason this challenge to uh effectively the sovereignty of the Grand National assembly primarily that uh encouraged Mustapa Kamal to decide uh okay we need to get rid of the caliphate entirely and that's what they did on the 3rd of March 1924 and Abdul Majid was sent into exile and here we get the scramble for the caliphate. So now lots of different rulers are thinking well could could we claim the caliphate? And in the end they don't because they they don't see how they could get legitimacy from across the Islamic world. But what Abdul Majid does is he issues a statement from his hotel in Switzerland after he's been exiled saying that the decision to abolish the caliphate was not legitimately taken. it is now for the Muslim world to decide uh with full authority and in complete liberty on this vital question. Now this was extraordinary because it was totally unprecedented and it was a vision of a modern um pseudo democratic uh caliphate uh an Ottoman caliphate essentially without an empire. uh and on this basis he established alliances with the former kilafetists like the Ali brothers like say Amir Ali who were also uh they were democrats so they were very interested in this idea of the democratic caliphate and their idea was you know we need to have uh calif Abdul Majid recognized as head of a revived caliphate uh by the world's uh Muslim rulers and and and notables So, so this is what my book is about essentially. It's it's this radical modern um experiment in Islamic political thought which has been almost entirely uh forgotten today. So one of the interesting things that you just said there is a transformation that is already happening within the way the Ottomans are looking and conceiving caliphate that in 1908 it has already become a parliamentarian constitutional monarchy/caliphate. So there are three kinds of political powers that are intertwined. Before that it was you know absolute monarchy and the caliphate wherein you are a spiritual leader and a political leader. So there is uh the parliament and then the monarchy and then the you know sultenate and then the kalafat and then uh you know in 1922 as you're arguing that uh even uh the sultanate is demolished that this leg this perpetual right to be recognized as a uh you know sultan from a certain family. So that there's parliament and then there's just kalafat which is the spiritual seed which I perceive that the the turks or the uh ataturk would have felt that it it will be good in terms of ge geopolitical power and spiritual power to have the caliphate and not have the sultanate which is like the dictatorship and so then you're arguing that the uh you know extravagant uh display of the spiritual power as seated in Abdul Maji uh that also triggered that even this caliphate as long as it stays in Turkey has the potential to gain back power. >> And then uh they are uh you know uh kicked out of the Turkey. And this is where your book makes an important argument that there is a new kind of uh you know from the from the time of the prophet where every power is embedded within the prophet the prophethood the imam the caliphate and ultimately the caliphate itself is just one area of consolidation of power that can have a different structure. So what is that structure that was proposed? So this this without a territory without a nationality without so what is the kind of ideological power which is consolidated in this seat and what is the instit institutionalization of this particular power that was conceived and proposed. >> Okay. So I'm going to talk about two interconnected uh projects which essentially uh form the the the crux of my book. Um now the central figures here were Monana Shokut Ali this former movement leader and Majuk Pikthor um a great British Muslim scholar who is best remembered today for having translated the Quran under the patronage of the Nisam of Hyderabad. Now the Nisam of Hyderabbad himself had considered claiming the title of califf. This wasn't unusual. uh every uh significant Muslim ruler at the time probably uh considered it at one point or the other but the British would never have tolerated this. So he he quickly abandoned the idea but uh Shocked Ali and Mama Pikto came [snorts] up with another plan. So the first part of this uh related to Jerusalem. So Shocked Ali uh knew and was in alliance with the MUI of Jerusalem at the time um Mui Husseini and this was at a moment uh during the British mandate. So that the British were in control of Palestine um and uh it was a very tense. >> Yeah, it was post Balfur. It was after the Balfur declaration. uh and it was essentially an extremely uh febrial moment. Uh but the Palestinian cause was not yet seen as a kind of global Muslim cause uh that it is today. And so Shakat Ali suggested to the MUI that let's set up a world Islamic congress in Jerusalem and um will invite Muslim leaders and notables from all over the world. And at this congress, Khalif Abdul Majid will be there and will uh muster support for the revived caliphate and and Husini uh agreed to this. And actually Molana Muhammad Ali Shakatali's brother um had had died in 1930 and his body was buried in uh Jerusalem in the the Alaka precinct and it was after his funeral that Shocked Ali made this suggestion. So this was the political scheme to revive the caliphate um as an institution essentially uh based purely on the recognition of the world's Muslims. But now you had to consider uh the need for money and for estate. So the second uh project was by Shocket Ali and Mama Pikthor and this related to the Ottoman Assaf Jahi Union. So uh they really masterminded this that there's going to be a marriage between the Kalist daughter Durush Shavar uh which happened in in 1931 to the Nisam's son and and thereafter uh the two dynasties will be interlin and so uh the caliphate will have a future in Hyderabbad. Now what we do know is that Abdul Majjid himself uh saw the marriage in very political terms. So he made it a condition of the negotiation uh that the marriage negotiations that the firstborn son of this marriage uh should be in line uh to rule Hyderrobad. So he saw that this was a way to secure the future of his lineage his grandson uh would be the nisam of Hyderrobad. So that was the logic there and after the wedding >> gaining back the territory and the title. >> Exactly. a after after the wedding a statement was issued uh that this cannot it cannot fail to have very happy repercussion for the Muslim world. So so the the whole union was framed and seen by people at the time as uh having global Islamic significance and this really worried the Turkish government. They figured out what was going on. uh they learned about the Congress and what the plan was and they lobbyed the British government to uh stop Abdul Majid from entering Jerusalem. So the British mandate uh of Palestine well first actually they wanted the whole Congress to be um banned but the British mandate said there'll be riots if we do that but what they did do is they banned Abdul Majid from turning up. So in that sense the Congress was a failure um because Abdul Majid wasn't even there. However, it did have an important um political impact which is it marked uh the moment that the Palestinian cause really became both a pan-Arab and a panislamic cause. So there there's a a fascinating photo of an early version of the Palestinian flag um being held up and it was presented as a gift uh to shock Ali. This this was a congress which saw um future leaders of of Muslim countries attending. Uh you you also had people like Sir Muhammadbar addressing the congress. So it was an important moment in the history of global uh of of panislamic politics. It was a sort of high point of that but it also marked the end of this kind of scramble to reestablish the caliphate which really uh you know peted out after that. It is during this part of the book that you uh when you're talking about Jerusalem and the Zionist movement that is brewing up and then taking up Palestinian lands and the declaration and everything that you're revising the way Al Husseini the MUI of Jerusalem is seen and it is also because after the Gaza genocide started it is during that time the Zionist machinery also talks about this issue that the MUI is involved with the politics of Hitler and in terms of also uh the Jews uh being ostracized or Jews facing that kind of calamity. So how do you see that figurehead in in the complexity of what is happening during that time? what is to be seen in light of the research that you did and you also compare him to subhashand go in some ways. So please expand on that. >> Well in effect there are different versions of of Mui Husseini. So Husseini at this point is a very pragmatic uh political figure as well as religious figure who works with the British mandate actually agrees to a parliament which would have sort of proportional representation for different communities including uh for the Jewish community that was rejected by um Zionist leaders at the time. Husseini would later become a much more radical figure after the Arab uprising the the Arab revolt of 36. he was exiled uh you know he he he had to flee Palestine and so he became a much more disillusioned radical antic-colonial figure in the end and it was in that context that in uh World War II he courted the the Axis powers so so the Nazis and the Italians uh and it wasn't uh because he so you you mentioned uh Subbas Chandra BS and it's very similar there were quite a few antic-colonial figures um in this period during World War II who very uncomfortably um as as we look back on it uh allied themselves with the Nazis basically on the logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And so because they were against the British um they they thought they would do well to uh ally with uh the Nazis who were of course committing horrific atrocities and and most of all the the Holocaust. Uh and so that leaves his legacy as very complicated. But it's not correct to say that he was a fanatical uh anti-semite uh and this is you know this underpinned his politics. No, you can see a clear trajectory. He he moved from being a pragmatic politician who worked with the British mandate to someone who would try and ally with the Nazis uh later on. >> Interestingly that is also something which is said about Sauarker. So he's somebody who's writing the book on the first uh war of independence of India 1857. He's a nationalist and then uh he's also you know talking about this interaction with the uh with the with the Nazi state and even the Hindu right leaders traveling to uh Italy meeting Mussolini visiting. So how do you see that in that sense? Well, as a historian, I'm not uh in the business of uh pronouncing mor moral judgment on on the figures that I write about. I'm I'm interested in trying to determine the truth and and analyzing their actions in their context because the past after all uh is is a foreign country. uh and so um you I think it's for others to try and determine the the uh morality of uh you know any any of these figures whether it's Husseini or Abdul Majid Shakatali or Musafak Kimal that's that would be that's beyond my purview of the historian uh and I don't do that in the book >> as we've as you've already argued and we've discussed you call the early 20th uh century Islamic world perhaps more connected than it had ever But this is a connection between the elites. Say for example, Elon Musk has a good relationship with Amani. They have a good relationship with an oligarch sitting in Russia. It doesn't say much about the overall nature of the geography, the geographical spread, the uh so-called pasmandanda Muslims, the uh Hindus that are deprived, they have a hyperlocal locality, hyperlocal experience. So how much is it that we can state that that's like a cosmopolitism in a sense that we portray it to be or is it selective network? I think yes and no uh to all of that essentially. Um it's it's always been the case throughout history that elites have tended to be um cosmopolitan because they have the power and the ability to be and people lower down simply don't. And this is one of the great uh sort of structural uh problems of um of the archive is that uh you have elite voices readily available usually and you don't have the voices of of most people who were illiterate and uh so it's much harder to to get their views. I think what what I would say is that the the kilaf movement was a mass mobilization. So that brought lots of you know even people who couldn't read or write lots of ordinary people um into politics firstly into Indian politics antic-colonial politics but also into engagement with global politics and the other thing here is that the 20th century uh I mean the world was much more interconnected than it had been before. Uh the idea that someone in in um Bombay or or Delhi, an ordinary person would be hearing the news from the Balkans and Anatolia would have been absolutely unthinkable two centuries or even a century before that. So this was a really a new world uh where it that's why I call it the high point of panislamic politics precisely uh because it was more interconnected than ever before and and this was also true of elites. I mean people like Molana Shokat Ali were highly cosmopolitan. They were essentially flying around London to Paris, the French Riviera, Jerusalem, Bombay, Hyderrobad. I mean that would not have been possible uh to do so so easily and in in a short space of time in the past. So we're talking about a very modern form of cosmopolitanism um that involved more people than it had ever done before. But yes, I I would say this story is uh mostly uh an elite story and that's that's normal if we if we look throughout history. >> Let me first ask you some of which you've already covered but let's take a deep dive on why Hyderabad in in in the context of this changing world order and the fall of the caliphate and the kalaf movement in India. What is it in totality that privileges Hyderabad as the space wherein this kind of thinking was elevated, perceived and even you know con conceived and acted upon. >> Well, it was very large the size of Italy. Um it spanned uh quite quite a big area of western and southern uh India. It had vast mineral wealth and um it it it was highly cosmopolitan from particularly from the late 19th century onwards. So this is also an answer to your previous question actually. Uh there were tens of thousands of Arabs um particularly from Yemen uh who were in Hyderabad state often uh working as a kind of soldier class um for the Nisam. there was a a dynasty in uh southern Yemen uh the Kayi Sultanate which was founded uh from funds from Hyderrobad and actually had a marital alliance with the Assaf Jahi dynasty. So there was actually a deep cosmopolitanism that went beyond um elite cosmopolitanism and of course the presence of so many Arabs in Hyderabbad did give it an importance outside of the Indian subcontinent as well. But the nisam, the seventh nam we're talking about, Mir Osman Ali Khan, he claimed himself to be the the heir of Mu culture. So so Hyderabbad was seen as the last great flowering of Indo-Islamic culture. You had lots of administrators from elsewhere in India, particularly Muslims who came to Hyderabbad to work. Lots of poets and musicians who had previously uh have sought patronage in Delhi at the court of the Mughal emperor now came uh to Hyderabad. So it became culturally very significant even though politically in terms of Indian Muslim politics it was not uh so important. It you know the Muslim League and the Congress were much much more important in that regard. But Hyderabbad came to have this great uh cultural status. It was also a place of refuge for dissident to an extent. So uh some of the Islamic modernists um came to Hyderabad in the late 19th century in the early 20th century. Uh you had the first university in India to teach in a vernacular language the Osmania University which taught in Uru that was in Hyderrobad. Intellectually and culturally it was a very vibrant significant place and that was why Marajuk Pikthor said that he wanted Hyderabbad to become a Muslim capital. Uh and and and so it seemed like also particularly because of its its great wealth. It would have seemed to many people uh to be an obvious uh you know next capital for for a caliphate. So it is in this context you know that you talked earlier uh Malana Shawat Ali is interacting with Abdul Majjid and it is in this context the marriage is being conceived but you also argued and you highlighted that the discussions are very political in nature and very transactional in nature. Could you highlight it more? >> Yes. So um the nisam so the British at this time they believed they came to believe that the nisam had actually been taken in by shockali and mamajuk pikthor and and these two had had concocted a plot for the revival of the caliphate and the nisam was was sort of tangled up in it. I don't find that convincing at all. Mama pictol actually worked for the nisam. The nisam knew him very well, understood him and the nisam was a very intelligent and shrewd ruler who would have understood exactly what shocki this former kilafetist uh wanted. Uh we also have to remember that the nisam had toyed with the idea of claiming the caliphate himself just a few years earlier. Um and so uh I I think the this suggests that the Nisam uh would have known uh that there was a califa angle to this marriage, but he would obviously have had uh a different intention to shock Ali who was um a politician um and who who uh was something of a populist in that sense. He was organizing mass political movements. The Nisam very much was not. He was a prince. He was a faithful ally of of the British. He didn't want any any of these protests and he was actually furious with Shocket Ali when newspapers in India uh briefed by uh by Shakad Ali um said that uh this this foreshadows the restoration of the caliphate and he accused Shakadali of indiscretion. So not of being inaccurate but but of uh indiscretion. Um meanwhile Abdul Majid we know that he wanted to revive the caliphate. um hence Jerusalem. Uh we also know uh that he uh saw this marriage as a way of securing a future for his own line uh through his his daughter. However, I think that um the the story really carries on again in the 1940s because as I've said, the caliphate scramble ends uh at the end of 1931 after the World Islamic Congress. But in 1944, Khalif Abdul Majid dies of a heart attack in Paris during during World War II. And uh it it's after that that you have discussion in Hyderrobad in the elite circles including in the palace between the nisam and and his ministers and and his son about the caliphate about the revival of the caliphate and and I found you British uh correspondences including a letter to the viceroy saying that they had discovered that Abdul Majid had nominated his grandson Mukaram Jar to be his successor in the caliphate. Now we don't know for sure what Abdul Majid actually wanted because we we don't you know this is always the case with history. It's always probability. Um even if you think about everyday life so much is said uh in private conversations and behind closed doors that's never written down and so historians shouldn't claim that they know you the exact truth. I mean I it's definitely not the case. So there is some ambiguity. Similarly with the Nisam there were people in um Hyderabbad at the time like uh Philip Mason who uh was the tutor of young prince Muramja and knew Princess Durish Shavar um his mother very well. He later wrote that the Nisam had aspired for the caliphate. There was another British writer Rosita Forbes. Um she was tooured around Hyderabad by the prime minister at that time Sir Akbar Hederi. She later wrote that yes they aim towards the caliphate. So it's very clearly evidence that this was being discussed in the elite circles. What exactly did the nisam want? Um we don't know. It's quite possible that we will never know. So now uh we have a postc colonial world order where India is divided and independent where you have consolidated princely states into the union wherein there is also Hyderabad which used to be the size of you said Italy. So what is happening now out of you know after 48 of the nisam of the overall uh you know the so small princely empire and about this project of the caiff and the nam being intertwined into one personality. Yeah, I I deal with this topic only very briefly in my book and that's deliberate because I'm not really focused on the dynastic story and uh I think that the the political story ends in 48. So any um uh possibility of um future nisam of Hyderabad claiming the mantle of of Khalif is gone after after 1948. And uh Prince Mccurja he's he's then educated in England um Harrow and then at Cambridge uh then he he comes back to India just a few years after he becomes the nisam in 1967. He doesn't have any state. They have a lot of wealth. They have palaces. They have land uh but they don't uh govern over anything. Uh Indra Gandhi really deals the final blow to the uh princely order. So she abolishes her privy purses. Um the titles are gone. So he's now no longer Prince Mccarima. He's just Mccaram Ja. and he he deals with all this and and dealing with the the chaos of of Hyderabbad by um going away and and he ends up in Australia um and likes driving a tractor around uh and he said that you know the first khalif of Islam Abu Bakr was a shepherd why shouldn't I be a shepherd um and uh mukarim ja so I interviewed someone from my book called Shahid Hussein Zuberi um he's a very good writer actually and he was uh He worked for McCarim Jar for many years and he uh essentially became his his confidant. So so he was close to him and he told me that he remembered mukarim ja told him that yes I was um uh nominated to be the next khalif by my grandfather. uh but it wasn't something that mukarim ja spoke about a lot and actually um Joanu had uh well he was still alive um he thought that murim ja could you know work for him and become a sort of figurehead of of Indian Muslims um but that mukarim ja had no interest in that uh and he eventually uh would uh live in Turkey in relative obscurity um and he died in Turkey in in 2023 in January with his neighbors essentially not knowing who he was and then he was uh brought over to Hyderabbad um to be buried. Uh but one final thing I'll say about this this post48 legacy in history is that India uh the republic of India tried multiple times to join the organization of Islamic cooperation which was uh still exists this international alliance of Muslim countries and it and it tried to join it on the basis that it had uh at that time a larger Muslim population than even Pakistan. So you using the same logic that the British Empire had used and it was blocked from joining because of Pakistan. But the reason I think this is very interesting is it it shows that the Indian government um wanted to use panislamic politics, a form of pan panislamic politics to enhance its status and its relationship with the Middle East in the same way that leaders of the kilafhat movement had seen panislamic politics you know many decades before. >> So it is interesting that you know nu in that context wanted mukaram ja to be this figurehead good. Yes, he was much more sympathetic to the princes, although he was very against the princely states. He always had been. Um he he was personally on on good terms with lots of the princes and uh and his daughter uh was very different. She really didn't like them. >> So let's talk a little about uh Princess Durar uh the daughter of the last kiff. What happened to her? What was her life? And also I think there were two marriages. There was not one. So >> yes. So um uh when she married uh Prince Azamja in um 1931, uh her cousin, Princess Nilofur, a junior Ottoman princess uh married the Nisam's youngest son, Prince Mozimja. So both of those two went over to India together. And actually on their ship from from France, uh was also Gandhi. And uh it appears that he met the two uh princesses. We have a letter where he asked to meet them. So he he probably did. Um Princess Dashar was one of the most extraordinary women of the 20th century really. She was uh highly educated, brought up in Istanbul. Um then in uh in France on the French Riviera, she was uh you know she she she would write poetry. uh she knew music uh she was interested in in painting. Very cultivated young woman when she went over to Hyderrobad and now suddenly she was thrust into the uh the world of the court with all its its strictctures. Uh but both her and Nilfur uh instituted a sort of social revolution in Hyderabad in terms of women's um place in the public sphere. So they didn't stay in in seclusion. They would appear in public and they were extremely active. They they were involved in philanthropy. Uh they established various institutions and uh also they were known as fashion icons as well and both of them took to uh wearing saris. So uh they are still remembered fondly in Hyderabad to this day. I mean the first thing you see uh in the airport in Hyderabad when you come out is cafe Nilufur uh named after the the the younger princess. Uh so Princess Dur Shavar after the fall of Hyderabbad um she uh lived in London and um that was because uh her children were being educated in in London. She she didn't want to stay in in Hyderabbad and she lived there uh for the rest of her life and she um uh she's buried uh in uh Rookwood Cemetery in London today. Princess Nilofur um is a bit different. She ended up in France. [snorts] So she separated from Prince Mosamja. They hadn't had a a happy marriage and then she uh remarried very happily and and lived a uh you know quite a happy life as far as we can tell um after that. >> So uh because you had to deal with a lot of archive and in your book you're honest about it that some of it is limiting some of some of it is you know seen in a in it seen in a much positive light. So tell us about the archive. what was available, what the deeds, the all of it. >> Well, uh much of the research was done uh very conveniently in the British library uh which has uh you know many papers from uh India because of the empire and so this isn't very good for Indian scholars who who want to study it there. They have to come to London. Uh but it was it was convenient for me. Um, and so I I made great use of of the archives also of um Ottoman sources. So obscure memoirs of of Ottoman royals um translated correspondences and between you know the califf and his secretary and and princess Durishavar. Um there are princess Durishavar had had written her her memoirs. Uh there was also you know obscure udu memoirs such as those of the Nab of Chhattari which which they you know they had been published um but not many people had read them and so I was reading through and absolutely stunned to see you know mentions of uh oh you we were discussing the caliphat and the nisam asked me what I thought and prince aim said that he should be the califf and and this was absolutely extraordinary. you just had a gold mine of information just sitting here that that people hadn't um discovered. And in the British Library were these uh private uh correspondences between British officials in which among other things they discussed the issue of the caliphate. I also write about in my book um a deed um which I uh I saw when I was in Hyderabbad um which which was shown to me which uh is purportedly signed by the last califf um shortly after the weddings in 1931 um essentially signing the caliphate over to the nisam. However, that's a very contested deed as I detail in the book and so it's it's certainly particularly because I'm not a manuscript expert and I think you'd have to carbon date it um it's not possible uh at least for me to proclaim it as authentic. So lots of frustrations when it comes to uh the archives and and and the research but also um it's it's uh it's good that uh so so for example um I interviewed a few people uh one of them I think I'll just mention one just for the sake of time was princess Kenny Murad who was an Ottoman princess who has had the most uh extraordinary uh story. Her mother, Princess Selma, was exiled from Istanbul in 1924 with the others. She then married another Indian prince, the Raja of Kotwara um a few years after the 1931 marriages and that marriage was broken by Monana Shokut Ali. Uh her mother, Princess Salma, then uh moved to uh Paris to to have the baby uh and and gave birth to her. And then World War II broke out. So she couldn't leave and money couldn't get in. So she she died um very poor uh leaving this this young baby who ended up uh in a nunnery uh uh raised by nuns and with very little idea about who she really was. And when the Raja of Gotwara who was uh associated with the Congress party after World War II, he sent um people over to France to try and find his young daughter and bring them back to him. And the nuns hid her. They sent her off to the countryside because they didn't want to hand over this nice little young girl to a Muslim prince. And so uh as she uh told me and which I write about in the book, she says, "My life was defined by uh prejudice from very early on." So she grew up uh as a young French woman and then age 20 she got in touch with she managed to get in touch with her father. Uh she discovered Islam. She went over to India and and finally met her father and on that same uh day also met the Indian prime minister. No >> very interesting story. Uh that's something I totally missed out. Thank you. So then what is the book about in totality? What is it that you as an author had a goal in mind? What is the legacy that this book leaves behind? >> Uh well I don't know if I would claim that it leaves a legacy behind. I would hope that it leaves a legacy behind but that that remains to be seen. Um I what I want to uh try and convey uh is this is a forgotten history essentially. So you know bits and pieces of it have been known and also written about and this builds on that. uh but this full story um from uh London to the French Riviera to Jerusalem, Bombay and Hyderabad hasn't uh hadn't really been pieced together. And so I wanted to put it all together because it's it's an extraordinary story even though it's about a scheme um ideas that ultimately failed because it reveals a great deal about uh the early 20th century and uh global politics and in particular Islamic politics in that period and it shows it really reminds us that uh the world was more interconnected uh in many ways than we often remember. It encourages us not to think in terms of national history. So we just think about it as Indian history or Pakistani history or Turkish history or British history. Actually it's it's all of these things. It's even French history. So uh and it's important to recognize that history um should not be seen through n any national prism. It's it belongs to uh the whole world and is it's all of our heritage and um it's important to remember it. Uh it it the book uh highlights India's uh forgotten uh importance in the Islamic world uh in that period its forgotten influence in the Middle East. And I think that tomb uh with which I start the book in in Maharashtra now lying uh empty and abandoned is uh a symbolic reminder um of this uh forgotten story that that led to an Ottoman Turkish style tomb being in the middle of India and most people around it don't know what it is. >> By the way, uh I never got to ask who made that tomb. Well, it was uh the the construction of it was uh ordered by the Nisam and overseen as well to some extent by uh Princess Dur Shabbar. Um construction uh so the tomb itself had been built by 1948 but they were going to construct a sort of complex around it. Um and then the fall of Hyderrobad happened and the door was was damaged during that process and after that it was abandoned. Now years later I I discovered this in in the memoirs of someone who had uh who was um a scholar of that region of Hulabad. He uh tooured Princess Durabar who came back to visit around and and they went to go and see the tube and he described how you know as she was looking at it and she noted that it was in the Ottoman style and she found it very she must have found it very moving. >> Interesting. Thank you uh Iran for writing this wonderful book and reminding us of the historical episodes where as you rightly argued lot has happened the memory uh which we do not know and we must know and I hope that you keep on writing these wonderful pieces of history and keep enlightening uh people like