Fadl ibn lawAlawī ibn Sahl

Fadl ibn ʿAlawī ibn Sahl ( Arabic فضل بن علوي بن سهل, DMG Faḍl ibn ʿAlawī ibn Sahl born. 1824 in Mambaram, Kerala , died October 1900 in Istanbul ), also known as Saiyid Fadl Pascha ( Ottoman سيد فضل پاشا Saiyid Faḍl Paša , IA Seyyid Fazıl Pasha ) or Pookoya Tangal was an Arab Sufi - Sheikh of Ba'Alawiyya in Malabar (southwest India), who in the mid-19th century, a revolt of the Mappila against the British led. After the British had expelled him from India, he tried from Mecca from 1860 to persuade the Ottomans to annex Dhofar in southern Arabia and use him there as Wālī . In 1875 he gained control of Dhofar independently, but was expelled from there again in 1879. He spent the last years of his life at the court of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in Istanbul as an advisor on his pan-Islamic projects. During this time he made numerous attempts to regain control of Dhofar with Ottoman or British help.

Life

Lineage and early years

Fadl came from a scholarly family of the Arab Bā-ʿAlawī clan, whose center was the city of Tarīm in the Hadramaut. His father Saiyid ʿAlawī ibn Muhammad Ibn Sahl (1764–1844), who was born in Tarīm himself, emigrated to the Calicut region on the Malabar coast at the end of the 18th century and joined the Tarīqa ʿAlawīya there in the 18th century had been brought to Malabar by the two ʿAlawī sheikhs Muhammad Hāmid al-Jafrī and Hasan al-Jafrī. He married the daughter of Hasan al-Jafrī, settled in the village of Tirurangadi in the hinterland of the Malabar coast and later inherited his father-in-law as the leader of the Tarīqa ʿAlawīya in Malabar. Fadl was the son of ʿAlawī's third wife, Fātima of Qilandi.

Fadl stayed in Mecca between 1844 and 1849, probably to undergo religious training here. 1847-1848 he visited the Hadramaut .

Confrontation with the British in Malabar

After his return from Mecca, Fadl was regarded by the local population as the spiritual leader of the Tarīqa ʿAlawīya in the succession of his father. Fadl used his influence to weaken the position of the British, who had increasingly brought the Malabar Coast under their control since 1790. Like his father before, Fadl used the Tirurangadi Mosque for his political and military activities and his religious-sanctioned social protest.

After a series of uprisings, including assaults against Hindu landowners and suicide bombings against British troops, the British began to see Fadl's presence in Malabar as a threat. In 1852, District Magistrate H. V. Connolly issued a warrant for his arrest. However, Fadl was able to flee Malabar and reached Mecca in 1853.

Mecca: Contacts with the Sublime Porte and ambitions for power in southern Arabia

Fadl settled in Mecca in 1853 and visited Istanbul for the first time around the mid-1850s . British interest in Fadl reached a new high in 1858 when 22 Europeans and protégés of European powers were killed in violent unrest in Jeddah and he was held responsible for these events. After a petition to the sultan in 1859, asking for help for the impoverished Fadl, the Ottoman side awarded him a state pension with which he could entertain not only himself but also his entourage.

In 1860, Sayyid Fadl, now appearing with the paschal title, publicly complained that the Hadramitic Saiyids in southern Arabia were being mistreated by the local tribes, and said that he wanted to save them with the support of the Kathiris of Dhofar by bringing this virtually independent region under Ottoman rule Rule. The background was probably the displacement of the Kathiris at this time by the Quʿaitis in the Hadramaut. In order to solicit Ottoman support for this project, Fadl traveled to Istanbul in the early 1860s. Although he could not win the Ottoman government to support him militarily, he made the acquaintance of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Ali Pasha , who headed the reform council established by the Tanzimat .

According to British reports, Fadl sent his sons to al-Hudaida during the Ottoman expedition to Yemen from 1870–1871 to persuade Ahmed Muhtar Pasha , commander of the Seventh Army in Yemen, to conduct his military operations on the Yāfiʿ region in southern Yemen and set him up as ruler of Yāfid. When the Ottomans completed their conquest of Yemen in 1872 and advanced to Lahidsch , the rumor spread that Fadl, who was in Mecca at the time, had been appointed Ottoman governor of the Hadramitic coast as well as of Dhofar. Fadl, it was said, was soon to go there with a whole army. Through the Hajj pilgrims from Malabar, who flock to Mecca every year , Fadl maintained close contact with the Muslims in his homeland during this time.

As the emir of Dhofar

While the Ottomans actually rejected Fadl's Dhofar plan for fear of increasing tensions with the British, Fadl negotiated independently with emissaries from the tribes there. In 1875 a delegation of tribal elders from Dhofar visited him and asked him to come to the area himself and to mediate in the bloody feuds that had brought life to a standstill in this area. He then traveled to Dhofar with his family in August of the same year. After he arrived there, he wrote to Istanbul in November, pointing to the support of his rule by the ʿAlawī Saiyids and tribal chiefs and soliciting support for his plan to establish Ottoman supremacy over this "Annex of Hadramaut". In January 1876, he declared Dhofar Ottoman territory and announced that he would rule it on behalf of the Ottoman sultan.

The hoped-for Ottoman military aid did not materialize, but in 1877 and 1878 Fadl Pasha succeeded in building his own government in Dhofar. Even the political claims that the Bu-Saʿīdī ruler Turkī ibn Saʿīd of Muscat made to the area could not deter him, as the British resident in the Persian Gulf, Lieutenant General WF Prideaux, had political complications in a military crackdown on Fadl feared with the tribes of the Hadramaut, rejected these claims and ensured that Turkī exercised restraint. In January 1879, however, members of the Kathīrīs rebelled against Fadl. After three days of fighting, he admitted his weakness and asked for a guarantee of protection ( amān ) that enabled him to leave. Shortly afterwards he went to Jeddah , where he arrived in April 1879.

Istanbul: Efforts to Recover Dhofar

A few weeks later, Fadl Pasha traveled on to Istanbul. There he presented his plan to Sultan Abdülhamid II to integrate Dhofar into the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, Dhofar should be converted into a regular vilayet , with Fadl Pasha being hereditary governor. The entire income of the vilayet should go to the central government. Conversely, the central government was to provide him with half a battalion ( tabur ) soldiers and two cannons and also provide him with two secretaries, a mining engineer and a painter ( ressam ) as well as a warship that was to anchor off the coast of Dhofar. She should also provide him with sufficient gifts and medals for the local notables . In July 1879, Abdülhamid submitted this plan to his Council of Ministers. However, the latter rejected the plan in October of the same year, arguing that half a battalion was not enough to defend the area, but that there was no financial leeway to deploy the six to seven battalions required.

Since Fadl Pasha attributed the Ottoman government's rejection of his plan to the influence of the British, who did not want him to be Ottoman governor in southern Arabia, he made the first of several attempts in February 1880 to win British approval for his Dhofar plan. On February 6th, he sent his son Sahl to Austen Henry Layard , the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, to express his kind feelings towards England. Layard wrote to the Marquess of Salisbury in February about a meeting with Sayyid Fadl and noted the friendliness he showed towards the British.

In March Fadl Pasha again turned to the Sultan with his request. Despite the High Porte's rejection of his plan, he informed Layard in early April that he was about to return to Dhofar and that he would see him before he left. In May 1880, Fadl Pascha had the hope of being able to take possession of Dhofar again. On May 14, he wrote to Turkī ibn Saʿīd, the Emir of Muscat, criticizing him for taking possession of Dhofar and referring to an alleged Ferman of the Sublime Porte, who granted him the right to to rule the area on behalf of the Ottoman Caliphate . At the beginning of June he asked the Sultan for permission to return to Dhofar in order to personally take care of his property there.

As advisor to Abdülhamids II.

From 1880 until his death, Fadl Pasha was effectively under house arrest in Istanbul. Abdülhamid II took care of his material needs and granted him the rank of vizier in August 1880, but did not allow him to return to Dhofar or Mecca.

However, rumors that Fadl enjoyed Ottoman support in his political plans to regain Dhofar persisted. At the beginning of September 1880, Suleyman Efendi, the sheikh of the Uzbek Tekke in Istanbul, informed Goshen , the new British ambassador in Istanbul that Fadl would soon be appointed governor ( hakim ) of Dhofar and that he would take possession of the area immediately. When tribal uprisings against the Omani rulers broke out in Dhofar at the end of 1880, the British in Istanbul tried to find out the timetable for Fadl's mission. On November 13, 1881, Fadl's son Muhammad informed the British ambassador in Istanbul that the Sultan intended to send his father on an inspection tour to Mecca and Yemen. When there was another uprising against Muscat in the spring of 1883 in Dhofar, Fadl reaffirmed his claim to rule over the area in a letter to Turkī ibn Saʿīd.

The French journalist Gabriel Charmes, who wrote his book “L'Avenir de la Turquie. Le Panislamisme ”, declares that Abdülhamid II uses Sheikh Fadl“ like a weapon of war ”for political-religious propaganda in the British possessions. After the murder of the Sherif Husain (r. 1877-1880), he had thought of placing Sheikh Fadl as coadjutor at the side of the new Sherif ʿAbd al-Muttalib ibn Ghālib, who was already very old, so that he could help with the British projects counteract and later succeed the Sherif in office. In 1884 Fadl made one last attempt to enforce his claim to rule: he sent his son Muhammad to Mecca, who was to make his way from there to Dhofar. Since Muhammad was detained by Osman Pascha, the Ottoman governor in the Hejaz , he was only able to leave Jeddah for Dhofar in January 1886.

At the same time, Fadl Pasha apparently found a greater hearing with the Sultan again. In 1886 he was able to arrange an audience with the Sultan for the well-known East African scholar Ahmad ibn Sumait , who visited him. In a document from the French embassy from 1888, Saiyid Fadl is named as one of four men whom the Sultan had assigned to carry out pan-Islamic propaganda in certain Arab areas. The other three men were Muhammad Zāfir ibn Muhammad at-Tarābulsī (1829–1903), a man from Tripolitania who was in charge of pan-Islamic activities in Egypt and North Africa, Ahmad Asʿad and the influential Syrian Rifai -Sheikh Abū l-Hudā as- Saiyādī (d. 1909), who was responsible for the Arab core areas. Saiyid Fadl was responsible for the coasts of Arabia and the Red Sea as well as for trade relations with British India. In fact, in the same year, through Fadl's mediation, a Muslim trader from India came to the sultan, who made a proposal to reorganize the pilgrimage of the Indian Muslims: Instead of British steamers, they should use Ottoman steamers to get to Arabia in the future in this way escaped British sovereignty.

In the French document from 1888 it is noted that Fadl's influence at court was rather weak and that he lived in a konak in the Taksim district. In fact, by the early 1890s, Fadl was so marginalized that the British had to do some research in Istanbul to find out if he was still alive. Even during this time, Fadl Pascha does not seem to have buried his hope of regaining power in Dhofar. Between 1894 and 1896 he turned to the British Embassy several times with the request to help him regain control of Dhofar. After these efforts were unsuccessful, he agitated again against the British. In 1897 he suggested that Afghan and Indian scholars from Mecca or Medina should be selected and specially trained to denounce the aggressive policy of England against the Ottoman Empire in their countries of origin. The aim should be to spark rebellions in these countries, which would then ultimately force the British to come to terms with the Ottomans.

Works

Fadl ibn ʿAlawī has written a total of 19 works in Arabic, of which the following three have so far received the most attention:

• Tanbīh al-ʿuqalāʾ li-sulūk as-suʿadāʾ (Istanbul 1881), edifying treatise in which Fadl describes Sultan Abdülhamid as the caliph and extols his rule.
• Nubḏa muḥtawīya ʿalā baʿḍ manāqib al-Ġauṯ ʿAlawī ibn Muḥammad ibn Sahl (Beirut 1889), hagiographic work about his father, which at the end lists the miracles supposedly performed by this.
• Īḍāḥ al-asrār al-ulwīya wa-minhāǧ al-Sāda al-ʿAlawīya ("Presentation of the sublime secrets and the method of the ʿAlawī Saiyids"; Cairo 1898/99), Sufi work, which on the one hand was aimed at proving that which Silsila of Tarīqa ʿAlawīya can trace back to the Prophet Mohammed, but on the other hand should also introduce young ʿAlawīs who lived in the diaspora to the tradition of their forefathers. The content of the work was evaluated by Wilson Chacko Jacob.

literature

• Seema Alavi: Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2015, pp. 93-168.
• Anne K. Bang: Sufis and scholars of the sea. Family networks in East Africa, 1860-1925 . Routledge Shorton, London and New York 2003, pp. 78-89.
• Ş. Tufan Buzpınar: Abdülhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha of Hadramawt. In: The Journal of Ottoman Studies 13 (1993), pp. 227-239. PDF
• Stephen Frederic Dale: Islamic society on the South Asian frontier: the Māppilas of Malabar, 1498-1922 . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1980, pp. 113-152.
• Stephen F. Dale: The Hadhrami Diaspora in South-Western India: The Role of the Sayyids of the Malabar Coast . In: Ulrike Freitag and William G. Clarence-Smith: Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s to 1960s . Brill, Leiden 1997, pp. 175-184.
• Thomas Eich: Abū l-Hudā aṣ-Ṣayyādī: a study on the instrumentalization of Sufi networks and genealogical controversies in the late Ottoman Empire . Schwarz, Berlin 2003, pp. 53-68. Digitized
• Ulrike Freitag: Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut: Reforming the Homeland . Brill, Leiden 2003, pp. 79-81, 192-194.
• Wilson Chacko Jacob: Of Angels and Men: Sayyid Fadl b. Alawi and Two Moments of Sovereignty. In: Arab Studies Journal 20 (2012), pp. 40–73.
• Jacob M. Landau: The Politics of Pan-Islam. Ideology and Organization . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1990, pp. 322 f.
• KK Muhammed Abdul Sathar: Mappila leader in exile: a political biography of Syed Fazl Pookoya. Other Books, Calicut, 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 227 f.
2. ↑ Dale: The Hadhrami Diaspora in South-Western India. 1997, p. 177.
3. ^ Jacob: Of Angels and Men. 2012, p. 43.
4. ^ Bang: Sufis and scholars of the sea . 2003, pp. 82, 87.
5. ^ Bang: Sufis and scholars of the sea . 2003, p. 81.
6. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha. 1993, p. 228.
7. ↑ Dale: The Hadhrami Diaspora in South-Western India. 1997, p. 178.
8. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 228.
9. ^ Bang: Sufis and scholars of the sea . 2003, p. 82.
10. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 228.
11. ^ Bang: Sufis and scholars of the sea . 2003, p. 83.
12. ^ Jacob: Of Angels and Men. 2012, pp. 46, 67.
13. ^ Bang: Sufis and scholars of the sea . 2003, p. 83.
14. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 228.
15. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, pp. 228f.
16. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 229.
17. ↑ Friday: Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut . 2003, p. 79.
18. ^ Dale: Islamic society on the South Asian frontier . 1980, pp. 165-167.
19. ^ Jacob: Of Angels and Men. 2012, p. 47.
20. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha. 1993, p. 229.
21. ↑ Alavi: Muslim Cosmopolitanism . 2015, p. 127.
22. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 231.
23. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 231 f.
24. ↑ Alavi: Muslim Cosmopolitanism . 2015, p. 130.
25. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 233.
26. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 234 f.
27. ^ Bang: Sufis and scholars of the sea . 2003, p. 85.
28. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, pp. 227, 238.
29. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 235.
30. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 236 f.
31. ↑ Gabriel Charmes: L'Avenir de la Turquie. Le Panislamisme . Calmann Lévy, Paris 1883. pp. 191 f.
32. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 236 f.
33. ↑ Friday: Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut . 2003, p. 211 f.
34. ↑ Landau: The Politics of Pan-Islam. 1990, p. 322.
35. ↑ Eich: Abū l-Hudā aṣ-Ṣayyādī . 2003, p. 62.
36. ↑ Landau: The Politics of Pan-Islam. 1990. p. 323.
37. ↑ Eich: Abū l-Hudā aṣ-Ṣayyādī . 2003, p. 56.
38. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 237.
39. ↑ Eich: Abū l-Hudā aṣ-Ṣayyādī . 2003, p. 63.
40. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 239.
41. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 239.
42. ↑ Buzpınar: Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha . 1993, p. 228.
43. ^ Bang: Sufis and scholars of the sea. 2003, pp. 18, 87.