Radical Muslims: Anticolonial solidarities across Muslim Eurasia, 1914-1925 - Astor Lectureship 2025

The denouement of the Great War produced an arc of overlapping crises that stretched from Anatolia to India that provided a fillip to a number of political struggles that shared an anti-imperialist and anticolonial sentiment. The Russian revolution, itself a product of the war, offered a radical hope of remaking the world order on completely new lines. The collapse of both the Russian and the Ottoman empires had thrown open imperial borders and made mobility across them possible as never before. In this situation, Tashkent became a crossroads of (often self-proclaimed) revolutionaries from the former Ottoman Empire, Iran, and India. They were overwhelmingly Muslim but engaged in radical politics in which Islam played only a marginal role. The new Soviet regime espoused anticolonial rhetoric from the very outset and sought to harness anticolonial sentiment. In this short-lived conjuncture, Muslim activists encountered each other and the world’s first socialist regime. This talk will provide an account of this episode and explore the many ways in which new solidarities were born but also in which different groups over spoke past each other.

Adeeb Khalid is Jane & Raphael Bernstein Professor of History and Asian Studies at Carleton College. He is the author of The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (University of California Press, 1998); Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (University of California Press, 2007 – winner of the 2008 Vucinich Prize); Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Revolution, and Empire in the Early USSR (Cornell University Press, 2015); and Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021).