Islam in danger: reactions to Mughal decline and loss of power -- Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and the Ahmadiyya movement -- Ahmadiyya reactions to the British: taking Islam to the west -- Muslim mobilization in Britain -- Ahmadiyya relations with early converts to Islam -- Islamic mission to Britain: woking -- Islamic mission to Britain: London -- A mosque in London: transformations to the LMM -- Final reflections -- Interview between Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and Professor Wragge
Muslims in Interwar Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the history of Muslims in interwar Europe. Based on personal and official archives, memoirs, press writings and correspondences, the contributors analyse the multiple aspects of the global Muslim religious, political and intellectual affiliations in interwar Europe. They argue that Muslims in interwar Europe were neither simply visitors nor colonial victims, but that they constituted a group of engaged actors in the European and international space. Contributors are Ali Al Tuma, Egdūnas Račius, Gerdien Jonker, Klaas Stutje, Naomi Davidson, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, Umar Ryad, Zaur Gasimov and Wiebke Bachmann.
Abstract In this paper, I retrace the history of the Ahmadiyya mission in inter-war Europe as part of the globalisation narrative. Once they gained a footing, missionaries responded and adapted to local experiments with modernity as a means to simultaneously win over Europeans and to modernise Islam. The article first considers the mental map with which Ahmadiyya and other Muslim intellectuals approached Europe. It reconstructs the work of the mission organisation, and illustrates the communication difficulties between the Lahore centre and the mission post in Berlin. Making use of fresh sources, I then sketch out the political context in which the missionaries moved about, and trace their perceptions and adaptations of European ideas. In the larger picture of globalisation, the Berlin mission offers a telling example of local religious adaptation, emphasising the important rapport between the newcomers and the local factor.
