The All-India Khilafat Committee in the Age of Minority Rights: An Alternative History, 1917-1932

The All-India Khilafat Committee (AIKC; est. 1919) was an Indian Muslim organization that aimed to prevent the disintegration of the Ottoman Caliphate (abolished in 1924) and impede formal and informal European colonial control over former Ottoman territories. Simultaneously, the AIKC activists, “the Khilafists,” tied their mass campaigns to anti-colonial and trans-religious activism, most notably the Gandhi-led Noncooperation Movement (1919–1922) and its struggle for Indian “Home Rule.” With very few exceptions, most studies on the AIKC have placed it within the realms of “composite Indian nationalism” or “pan-Islamism.” This presentation, however, offers an alternative framework to understand its history. Tying the prehistory, emergence, and activities of the AIKC to changing norms and visions of religious and social difference, this presentation argues that AIKC’s activists offered various creative “solutions” to growing regional and international debates about the place of minorities in emerging ethnonational polities. Focusing on the period spanning from the loss of Ottoman rule over Mecca in 1916 to the General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem in 1931, we will examine the writings of several prominent AIKC thinkers who offered profound, albeit sometimes conflicting, critiques of various key models for managing difference, most notably the League of Nations and its Soviet alternative. In so doing, this presentation shows how the AIKC and its history constitute a microcosm for exploring alternative genealogies of “minority rights,” in particular during the moment of transition from empire to nation state.