Yesterday marked the anniversary of the overthrowing of Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire by the Young Turks, a reformist group aimed to modernise the Ottoman Empire. They forced the sultan to reinstate the constitution in 1908 and deposed him in 1909. While their rule brought some reforms, it also led to rising nationalism, ethnic tensions, and ultimately contributed to the empire’s decline.
In addition, 29th April marks the anniversary of Ahmad Shah Bahadur’s reign as the 14th Mughal Sultan in India. It was during his rule the Mughal Empire began to decline. He was deposed by the Vizier Imad-ul-Mulk and later blinded along with his mother. He spent the remaining years of his life in prison and died in 1775.
European colonialism coincided with the decline of major Muslim empires—such as the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid empires—by exploiting internal weaknesses, advancing military and economic dominance, and imposing imperial control. As these empires struggled with political fragmentation, corruption, and outdated institutions, European powers expanded through trade, conquest, and colonisation, particularly in South Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The British dismantled the Mughal Empire, gradually taking over the Indian subcontinent, while the French and British seized territories in North Africa and the Middle East, weakening Ottoman authority.
After World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed entirely, leading to the partitioning of its lands under European mandates and the eventual creation of modern nation-states, often along artificial borders that reflected colonial interests more than local identities.
Scroll down for recommended books on Ottoman and Mughal history as well as Post-Colonialism.
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WATCH: Islamophobia Conference 2022
On 11th December 2022, IHRC held its annual Islamophobia Conference event. The conference explored: Is the Sun Setting on the Western Empire? Exploring Shifts in Global Power and Islamophobic Thinking. This panel was chaired by Dr Saeed Khan who is currently in the Department of History and Lecturer in the Department of Near East & Asian Studies at Wayne State University-Detroit, Michigan, where he teaches Islamic and Middle East History, Islamic Civilizations and History of Islamic Political Thought.
Guest speakers include: Cyrus McGoldrick, Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, Afroze Fatima Zaidi, Peter Oborne and Eman El-Bahnassawy. Click below to watch the recording of the event.
Cyrus McGoldrick is an American Muslim of Iranian and Irish descent who worked at several civil rights organisations that fight against discrimination.
Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria is an assistant professor at the University of Tehran, Faculty of Islamic Knowledge and Thought.
Afroze Fatima Zaidi is a writer, editor and journalist. She has a background in academia and writing for online platforms.
Peter Oborne is a British journalist and broadcaster. He is the former chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, from which he resigned in early 2015.
Eman El-Bahnassawy is a dentist by profession based in Edinburgh, Scotland as well as a Palestinian activist. Her parents were Palestinian refugees who left their homeland during the Nakba.
Below are books that are currently available at IHRC Bookstore:
Suleiman The Magnificent – Andre Clot
Suleiman the Magnificent, most glorious of the Ottoman sultans, kept Europe atremble for nearly half a century. In a few years he led his army as far as the gates of Vienna, made himself master of the Mediterranean and established his court in Baghdad. Faced with this redoubtable champion, who regarded it as his duty to extend the boundaries of Islam father and farther, the Christian world could not agree to unite against him. ‘The Shadow of God on Earth’, but also an expert politician and all-powerful despot, Suleiman ruled the state firmly with the help of his viziers.
His empire held dominion over three continents populated by more than thirty million inhabitants, prospering under a well-directed, authoritarian economy, Suleiman’s reign marked the apogee of Ottoman power. He extended the borders of the empire beyond what any of the Ottoman sultans had achieved, yet it primarily is as a lawgiver that he is remembered in Turkish. In this book, Andre Clot successfully produces both a life of the man and portrays a history of the Ottoman Empire at its peak.
History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey Vol 1 – Stanford J. Shaw
Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–1808 is the first book of the two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. It describes how the Ottoman Turks, a small band of nomadic soldiers, managed to expand their dominions from a small principality in northwestern Anatolia on the borders of the Byzantine Empire into one of the great empires of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe and Asia, extending from northern Hungary to southern Arabia and from the Crimea across North Africa almost to the Atlantic Ocean.
The volume sweeps away the accumulated prejudices of centuries and describes the empire of the sultans as a living, changing society, dominated by the small multinational Ottoman ruling class led by the sultan, but with a scope of government so narrow that the subjects, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, were left to carry on their own lives, religions, and traditions with little outside interference.
Also available at IHRC:
History of the Ottoman Empire And Modern Turkey Vol 2 – Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-1975 – Stanford J. Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw
Turkey: The Quest for Identity – Feroz Ahmad
Contemporary Turkey in Conflict: Ethnicity, Islam and Politics – Tahir Abbas
Islam, Politics and Pluralism: Turkey, Jordan, Tunisia and Algeria – Jennifer Noyon
Message for the Sick and Elderly – Bediuzzaman Said Nursi
Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King – Audrey Truschke
The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir is one of the most hated men in Indian history. Widely reviled as a religious fanatic who sought to violently oppress Hindus, he is even blamed by some for setting into motion conflicts that would result in the creation of a separate Muslim state in South Asia. In her lively overview of his life and influence, Audrey Truschke offers a clear-eyed perspective on the public debate over Aurangzeb and makes the case for why his often-maligned legacy deserves to be reassessed.
A Brief History of the Great Moghuls – Bamber Gascoigne
Bamber Gascoigne’s classic book tells of the most fascinating period of Indian history, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the country was ruled by the extraordinarily talented dynasty of emperors known to European travellers as ‘the Great Moghuls’, for their almost limitless power and incomparable wealth. Here is a unique picture of the way of life of India’s most flamboyant rulers – their sublime palaces, their passions, art, science and religion, and their sophisticated system of administration that stabilized the greater part of India and was later adopted by the British.
Acclaimed by travellers and scholars alike, and beautifully illustrated in colour, this is a book for anyone with an interest in India’s glorious past and achievements.
The Last Prince of Bengal: A Family’s Journey from an Indian Palace to the Australian Outback – Lyn InnesThe Nawab Nazim was born into one of India’s most powerful royal families. Three times the size of Great Britain, his kingdom ranged from the soaring Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. However, in 1880, he was forced to abdicate by the British authorities, who saw him as a threat and permanently abolished his titles. The Nawab’s change in fortune marked the end of an era in India and left his secret English family abandoned.
The Last Prince of Bengal tells the true story of the Nawab Nazim, his wife and their descendants, as they sought by turns to befriend, settle in and eventually escape Britain. From glamourous receptions with Queen Victoria to a scandalous Muslim marriage with an English chambermaid; from Bengal tiger hunts to sheep farming in the harsh Australian outback, Lyn Innes recounts her ancestors extraordinary journey from royalty to relative anonymity.
Exposing complex prejudices regarding race, class and gender, this riveting account visits the extremes of British rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also the intimate story of one family and their place in defining moments of recent Indian, British and Australian history.
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business.
William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
Also available:
The Last Mughal The Fall of Delhi, 1857 – William Dalrymple
Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom Paperback by Ramachandra Guha
The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India Hardcover By Supriya Gandhi
The Fathers and Sons of Deoband – Shaykh al-Hadith Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhalvi
In the aftermath of the Uprising of 1857, Deoband rose to prominence as a symbol of defiance to British colonialism. Espousing the tradition of the Waliullahi family, today, the prestigious Darul ‘Ulum Deoband seminary boasts thousands of branches within the Subcontinent and hundreds of affiliate institutions (madrasas) worldwide.
Many academic works have covered the political, ideological, and historical background of the movement but much remains to be written on the personal lives of the fathers who founded the movement and the sons who propagated its rich legacy for later generations. Among the sons of Deoband, Shaykh ul hadith Muhammad Zakariyya is the leading authority on the Elders of Deoband. In this private correspondence, he offers a closer look into the personal lives of the Elders and how they led their beautiful lives in light of the four pillars of Islam. He suggests that the triumphs of the Deoband thought owe to their piety, taqwa, and selflessness.
Also available:
Al-Fawz Al-Kabir Fi Usul Al-Tafsir – Shah Waliyullah
The Conclusive Argument From God: Hujjat Allah al-Baligha – Shah Wali Allah
Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 – Prasannan ParthasarathWhy Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not provides a striking new answer to the classic question of why Europe industrialised from the late eighteenth century and Asia did not. Drawing significantly from the case of India, Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than different, both characterized by sophisticated and growing economies.
Their subsequent divergence can be attributed to different competitive and ecological pressures that in turn produced varied state policies and economic outcomes. This account breaks with conventional views, which hold that divergence occurred because Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science or institutions. It offers instead a groundbreaking rereading of global economic development that ranges from India, Japan and China to Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire and from the textile and coal industries to the roles of science, technology and the state.
Female Islamic Education Movements – Masooda Bano
Since the 1970s, movements aimed at giving Muslim women access to the serious study of Islamic texts have emerged across the world. In this book, Masooda Bano argues that the creative spirit that marked the rise and consolidation of Islam, whereby Islam inspired serious intellectual engagement to create optimal societal institutions, can be found within these education movements.
Drawing on rich ethnographic material from Pakistan, northern Nigeria and Syria, Bano questions the restricted notion of agency associated with these movements, exploring the educational networks which have attracted educated, professional and culturally progressive Muslim women to textual study, thus helping to reverse the most damaging legacy of colonial rule in Muslim societies: the isolation of modern and Islamic knowledge. With its comparative approach, this will appeal to those studying and researching the role of women across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, as well as the wider Muslim world.
Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier – David B. Edwards
Much of the political turmoil that has occurred in Afghanistan since the Marxist revolution of 1978 has been attributed to the dispute between Soviet-aligned Marxists and the religious extremists inspired by Egyptian and Pakistani brands of “fundamentalist” Islam. In a significant departure from this view, David B. Edwards contends that—though Marxism and radical Islam have undoubtedly played a significant role in the conflict—Afghanistan’s troubles derive less from foreign forces and the ideological divisions between groups than they do from the moral incoherence of Afghanistan itself.
Seeking the historical and cultural roots of the conflict, Edwards examines the lives of three significant figures of the late nineteenth century—a tribal khan, a Muslim saint, and a prince who became king of the newly created state. He explores the ambiguities and contradictions of these lives and the stories that surround them, arguing that conflicting values within an artificially-created state are at the root of Afghanistan’s current instability.
Building on this foundation, Edwards examines conflicting narratives of a tribal uprising against the British Raj that broke out in the summer of 1897. Through an analysis of both colonial and native accounts, Edwards investigates the saint’s role in this conflict, his relationship to the Afghan state and the tribal groups that followed him, and the larger issue of how Islam traditionally functions as an encompassing framework of political association in frontier society.
