Take a tour of some of the world’s hottest issues! For more than a decade, Truman State University’s Global Issues Colloquium has been helping the Truman community understand many of the most challenging questions, conflicted responses and hopeful developments facing various governments and societies.
Thursday, January 16, 2025, 7pm, BH 102, https://zoom.us/my/global.issues
Matt Sharp, Research and Instruction Librarian, Truman State University
“Diplomacy and Faith: The Entanglements of the Late Ottoman State and Muslim Intellectuals with Western Converts to Islam”
William Henry Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) and Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb (1846-1916) were notable British and American converts to Islam in the late 19th century. Quilliam led the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI) from 1887 to 1908, and Webb founded the American Islamic Propaganda (AIP) from 1892 to 1896. Both promoted Islam through institutions, publications, and outreach in their respective countries. This talk delves into their connections with the Ottoman state and Middle Eastern Muslim intellectuals using the Ottoman archives and Arabic and Ottoman Turkish printed materials. I will discuss how Sultan Abdülhamid II, Ottoman diplomats, and Muslim intellectuals actively fostered relationships and spread news about these converts for diplomatic, geopolitical, and religious purposes. The talk explains the late Ottoman state’s entanglements with these converts as part of their image management efforts. It also considers how Muslim intellectuals framed Western converts as evidence of Islam’s universal appeal and relevance during an era of Western imperialism. The narratives of these convert communities shed light on Ottoman diplomacy, pan-Islamism, the concept of the Muslim world, and transnational Muslim thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a Middle East and Ottoman perspective.
In addition to serving as one of the Research and Instruction Librarians at Truman, Dr. Matt Sharp is an independent scholar of the Middle East whose work explores the exchanges and relationships between British and American converts to Islam and Ottoman state officials and Arab and Turkish Muslim intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He holds a PhD in Middle East Languages and Cultures from the University of Pennsylvania. For a decade, he lived in the Middle East (Amman, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon) where he also obtained an MA in Middle Eastern History from the American University of Beirut.
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