From Regional Islamic Reform to Global Anti-colonialism? Jamaladdin al-Afghani and Russia’s Muslims

In Russia’s revolutionary year of 1917, the Muslim journalist and educator Rida’addin b. Fakhraddin (1858–1936) published a biography of Jamaladdin al-Afghani (d. 1897), a person famous for his Pan-Islamic political agitation in many countries of the Middle East and beyond. Fakhraddin’s Tatar-language biography is the central source for studying Afghani’s reception among Russia’s Muslims. I argue that Fakhraddin constructed a sanitized image of Afghani that emphasized the latter’s compatibility with the homegrown movement of Islamic reform (islah) that Fakhraddin himself stood for, and which was shaped by the Kazan theologian Shihabaddin al-Marjani (d. 1889). The article analyzes the transnational links that Fakhraddin established, concluding that Fakhraddin depicted himself as Afghani’s foremost disciple in Russia, in competition with others, and independent of Afghani’s most famous disciple, Muhammad ʿAbduh. At the center of Fakhraddin’s account are his own memories of a meeting he had with Afghani in St. Petersburg in 1888.