The first split

But by early 1924 things took a different turn. In the midst of the Turkish Revolution, Mustafa Kemal, later Kemal Atatürk, abolished the caliphate and banished the last caliph from Istanbul. Until now, the very idea of the caliphate had served as a cornerstone for pan-Islamic politics, its sudden removal robbing Muslim liberation movements across the globe of their unifying principle. What was more, the influential Turkish Embassy in Berlin endorsed the banishment. The Kheiri brothers, who saw their vision threatened, organized protest meetings and wrote inflammatory speeches against the Kemalists and their Berlin proponents. April saw a manifesto published by a number of revolutionary organisations in Berlin, amongst them the IGB, the National-Radical Egyptians, the Egyptian Organisation of National Defence, the Arabic Union and the Sudanese Liberation Movement (Kheiri and Rifat 1924). It stated outright that the Turks did not have the right to abolish the caliphate, as this was not a national but a global institution. It also presented this statement as the opinion of the shūrā, the Body of Delegates of the IGB, and accused the Turkish Embassy of deceiving the “German public sphere with their talk of reform and their Europeanization of Turkey” (Kheiri and Rifat 1924, 2). After this was made public, the Turkish ambassador and his allies, the ambassadors of Persia, Afghanistan and Egypt, left the IGB and set up their own Islamic organisation, the Verein für Islamische Gottesverehrung or Mai’at Scha’a’iv Islamiya (GIG, 7). Alimcan Idris (1887-1957), another former member of the German war intelligence and imām of the Tatar community (Giljazov 1989), and Zeki Kiram (1886-1946), likewise member of the German war intelligence, wartime weapon dealer (Ryad 2011), peace-time director of the highly ideological Morgen- und Abendland Verlag (Orient and Occident Publishing House), accompanied them. For the IGB, this was a heavy loss. 127 In the following years, except when financially supporting the Ahmadiyya mosque in an aborted attempt to take over this institution, the GIG did not play any role in the competition for converts. A far-reaching result of their exit, however, was Jabbar Kheiri’s refusal to summon the IGB General Meeting again.

The second split

In the years following the split, another vicious struggle paralysed the community, in which Jabbar Kheiri was challenged by a growing section of the IGB, including his own brother. The IGB register file amply documents the struggle (IGB, 20-111). The student organisation Islamia, dissatisfied with Kheiri’s passivity, made an effort to revive the organisation. Letters were written to the Register Office demanding that this body force him into cooperation. A patisserie on the Kurfürstendamm witnessed an Extraordinary General Meeting with the aim of deposing Kheiri as Leader of the IGB. When he refused to acknowledge his opponents as IGB members, a law suit was prepared to prove the contrary. But all these actions were to no avail. The Register Office judged the students “non-authorized” (IGB, 30) and Kheiri managed to keep his position. When in December 1928 he finally resigned, Jabbar still possessed the power to establish his brother Sattar as “Interim Leader” in his stead (IGB, 111- 46).⁸

Students regrouped in the Islamia Student Organisation as early as 1924, remaining under the aegis of the IGB for some time. Once the controversy 128 with Kheiri reached an irrevocable stage, the Syrian student Nafi Tschelebi, supported by Georg Kampffmeyer, several university institutes and a range of German and Arab politicians, established Das Islam Institut (The Islam Institute, or DII).⁹ The Institute was accommodated in the Humboldt-Haus, a fin-de-siècle villa just off the Kurfürstendamm. The rooms were covered with colourful orientalist wall paintings and housed a library, an archive, editorial offices for several periodicals, a waqf for enabling the religious duties, and a restaurant (DIG 1927, 1).¹⁰ Its large range of academic, religious and educational assignments signalled that the Islam Institut had been designed as an alternative to the IGB. In the years to come, the two organisations would aggressively compete with one another.

Ahmadiyya Qādiyānī

Of the missionary Mubarak Ali neither his place and date of birth nor his whereabouts after he fled from Berlin are known. All we know is that in 1922 the Qādiyānī branch sent him there. There also exists a photograph of him, published in the centenary festival edition Ahmadiyya Mosques Around the World, showing a young man in his thirties with regular 131 features, beard and turban (Ahmadiyya Mosques 2008, 197). The caption reads: “Maulana Mubarak Ali, the first missionary sent to Germany (1922- 1924)”. Local sources help to elucidate his story further. They cover his activities between November 1922 and July 1924, during which he regularly appeared in the daily papers and attracted a hate campaign instigated by his fellow Muslims.

The first time we meet Mubarak Ali is in the IGB register file, where, on 4 November 1922, he appears as one of the signatories acknowledging the Managing Committee: “Mubarak Ali, Dahlmannstrasse 9” (IGB, 8). The find suggests that he looked for opportunities in the nascent Berlin community, even became a founding member, rallying support for his plan to erect the missing central mosque. In July 1923, we once again find his signature under the protocol of the only General Meeting Kheiri ever summoned, giving witness to continued communication (IGB, 16). By then he had already acquired “a piece of farmland” north-east of the Kurfürstendamm, where Berlin’s fashionable western suburb was still under construction, and asked planning permission for the erection of a large building, to be built by Berlin architect K.A. Hermann (AQ, 1-39). The architectural drawings, which accompany the construction plan, reveal a spectacular mosque with a large dome and four high minarets. Permission was granted on July 27 and ten days later, on August 6, the foundation stone was officially laid. Accounts of the building ceremony appeared in all the daily papers. Across the articles, Mubarak Ali is described as a millionaire, elegant, modest and sympathetic. Journalists marvel that “the exotic flair of Berlin is now in progress” (DAZ, Aug. 7, 1923). Expectations are indeed high. The papers announce leisure grounds, a hotel, clubrooms, a restaurant and a Turkish café, as well as a home for Persian, Indian and Ottoman students (alternatively: single student women) (BT, Aug. 7, 1923). 132

However, some days prior to the ceremony, the Foreign Office issued an internal circular warning the ministries not to accept Mubarak Ali’s invitation. “The Muslims of Berlin”, it states, “suspect him to act on behalf of the British Government”. Moreover, it had become known that “they will rally against the Ahmadiyya during the building ceremony” (“Eilt sehr!” in: AQ). In the summer of 1923, an Egyptian medical doctor, Mansur Rifat, leader of the National Radical Egyptians, composed a pamphlet against the Ahmadiyya (Rifat 1/1923). It featured an interview with Jabbar Kheiri, explaining to the general public why Ahmadis cannot be Muslims because they (1) refuse to pray behind a non-Ahmadi imām, (2) do not partake in non-Ahmadi funerals, and (3) do not marry non-Ahmadis. During the ceremony, this pamphlet was spread among the public and Rifat himself was reported to have yelled at the top of his voice: “It is all a lie! This is not a mosque, these are English barraques, erected with English money!” (DAZ, Aug. 7, 1923). Other papers report him as having screamed: “Spies! English Mercenaries! This mosque is the tomb of the Islamic movement!” (VZ, Aug. 7, 1923). Scuffles broke out until the police removed the rioters.

Both testimonies, the imām’s explanation and Rifat’s public rioting, disclose that from the perspective of Muslim nationalists and freedom fighters, Ahmadis kept themselves apart from mainstream Islam in ways that were not acceptable to pan-Islamists. Ahmadis were considered separatists and a threat to Muslim unity. Moreover, their acceptance of the British did not sit well with the revolutionary spirit of the day, which had adopted the British as its main enemy.

In the autumn of 1923 the campaign widened. Further pamphlets display a scathing tone towards everything Ahmadiyya, an entity endowed with ever more unacceptable features: Ahmadis helped the British to quell 133 the uprising of the Moplas¹¹; Ahmadis are against the caliphate; Ahmadis are hypocrites. In addition, letters were written to the local papers, the ministries and important Germans explaining again and again why the Ahmadiyya present the ‘wrong’ kind of Islam (reprinted in Rifat 2/1923 and 3/1924). Even the Imam of the Ottoman Embassy, Shukri Bey, a well-known and respected public figure, wrote an article entitled “Indian Missionaries in Europe. Their Anti-Islamic Activities”, which was published in London (Rifat 2/1923, 5; a copy of the article could not be traced).

This feverish activity betrays the nascent community’s need to enlist German support. This is 1923, a time in which Germany’s conversion is still thought imminent and considered an indispensable step towards the World-shūrā plan. However, with the arrival of the Ahmadiyya, the suspicion is kindled, not entirely unjustifiably, that Germans might choose the ‘wrong’ kind of Islam. Georg Kampffmeyer supported the campaign with a contribution of his own, warning against Ahmadis as agents of the British government (Rifat 3/1924, 4). For the rest, Berlin did not seem all that impressed. From the perspective of the average Berliner, exotic millionaires willing to erect oriental-looking buildings in their city were news, whereas political positions for or against the British, or, worse, obscure religious differences, were definitely not.

In December, the Qādiyānī missionary Ghulam Farid joined Mubarak Ali, who, until this moment, had resisted the tempest on his own. Together, they wrote a pamphlet in defence of the Ahmadiyya cause (Rifat 3/1924).¹² But their worries were soon drawn in an entirely different direction. 134 December brought the notorious German bank crash, followed by hyper-inflation. For Mubarak Ali, the event meant the loss of his entire capital. On the building site, where walls already had begun to appear, work stopped and the project was abandoned. Half a year later, a small entry in one of the papers makes mention of the fact that “the millionaire Mubarak Ali”, who had begun to build “a mosque in Indian-Muhammedan style”, lost his capital in the crash and meanwhile left town (VZ, June 3, 1924). In summer the plot was sold to a housing company. The last document in the file is a neighbour’s letter, complaining that the still remaining hoarding inhibits his business and his view (AQ, 39).

Mubarak Ali did not have much time to advocate his particular method of advance. In fact, the ceremony of August 6 seems to have been his only opportunity. Papers covering the riot also make mention of Ali’s speech in which he extemporized his reasons for erecting a mosque at all. Before the speech was interrupted, he seems to have said that the mosque was to offer a place of worship for Muslims of each and every persuasion, that it is intended to be a house of learning for adherents of all other religions, and that it aimed at becoming the centre for spreading the pure religion of Islam in Europe and the world. Germany as the centre of Protestantism, and Berlin as the heart of Germany and Europe, he is reported to have said, were worthy contexts for this peace message (DAZ/ BLA/ VZ, Aug. 7, 1923). Although the journalistic coverage varies, the ubiquity of terms like “centre”, “peace message”, “Europe”, “world”, “all Muslims” and “all religions” give testimony to the fact that Mubarak Ali, and through him Ahmadiyya Qādiyānī, were focusing on global change through the meeting of the world religions. 135

Ahmadiyya Lahore

About the time that Mubarak Ali’s star was sinking, journalists and political pamphleteers picked up the scent of yet another mission enterprise, that of Ahmadiyya Lahore. In early 1924, under the caption of “Sadrud- Din”, Rifat branded Sadr-ud-Din “a hypocrite” (Rifat 3/1924, 4). because he was rumoured to have supported anti-German politics in London. The author thought it “odd that this man, who repeatedly set himself against Muslim community feeling, now proposes the task of representing ‘Muslim man’ and creating an Islamic centre in Germany” (Rifat 3/1924, 4). It is no wonder, Rifat fumed, that “Ahmadis now cunningly and sneakingly shelter themselves (...) by appealing to Christians and Jews” (Rifat 3/1924, 5 and 8). The unpleasant phrasing betrays that Rifat could not bear the thought of sharing Berlin with somebody who, in his perception, ‘threatened’ Muslim unity. It also shows that the Lahore mission was already well under way.

In his obituary, Sadr-ud-Din is praised as a man with outstanding social skills: “He dressed well, talked well, was humorous, hospitable and endowed with manly beauty as well” (Khan 1981, 47). Originally a schoolmaster in Qādiyān, he followed the liberal faction to Lahore in 1913, received training as a missionary and was sent to London during the war. For the Ahmadiyya community in Lahore, his name is irrevocably connected with Berlin, where he set up a successful and widely visible mission post, erected a mosque that still stands today, and translated the Qurʾān into German.

After his arrival in June 1923, Sadr-ud-Din began his reports, describing to his Lahore readership the strength of the Berlin Muslim community (he counted as many as “15.000 Muslims”), that year’s celebration of the Islamic festival in the Wunsdorf mosque, the “bad corner” in which Germans had been “driven”, and the urgent need to present them with a 136 mosque (all quotes in The Light, Feb. 1923, 3).¹³ As these reports sought to collect money for the mosque’s erection, Sadr-ud-Din took great care to describe Germany’s desolate situation, analysing the mission’s chances as he went along:

Germany’s case is very pathetic. Its pangs are unbearable. But England and France are too callous to be moved. Christianity has proved an utter failure in the West. It has shown that it has no such thing as even a semblance of brotherhood. To these forlorn nations of the West the Muslim demonstration of the real, practical and universal brotherhood, is an object lesson. It is a wonder of wonders how Islam can weld together different nations and climes. (The Light, Oct. 1923, 61)

As they prepared for their task, the missionaries of Ahmadiyya Lahore moved stealthily. We do not meet their names in any of the signatory lists. When Mubarak Ali was targeted, they are barely mentioned. Only in spring 1924, when a building plot had already been found in Wilmersdorf and the first issue of Moslemische Revue (MR) was about to appear, do they surface in a public space. By all appearances, it seemed that the Lahore branch saw a propitious inauguration. The anti-Ahmadiyya hate campaign, followed by the dispute over the caliphate question, cost the IGB much of its public favour.

The best source for Sadr-ud-Din is his own quarterly. In the first two issues, published in 1924, we see him in several photographs, looking like the benign intellectual he is reported to have been, surrounded by “some German Muslim Gentlemen” as one of the captions reads, or linking arms 137 with well-known converts, a picture that is commented as “East and West United in Islam” (MR 1924, 1). Soon, he became a highly visible personality to whom many felt attracted.

Sadr-ud-Din’s mission advance was very straightforward. It included an open invitation, reprinted in every issue of the MR, explaining “How To Become A Muslim”:

To become a Muslim, a ceremony is not required. Islam is not only a rational, widely spread and practical religion, it is also in full harmony with the natural human disposition. Every child is born with it. This is why becoming a Muslim does not require a transformation. One can be a Muslim without telling anybody. To confess to Islam is only a matter of form for the organisation. The basic creed of Islamic belief runs: There is no God but God, Muhammad is His messenger (MR 1924, 151 et passim).

In his articles, Sadr-ud-Din adopted a fatherly, almost soothing tone: “Germany may have lost the war”, he told his readers, “but it won the hearts of the nations of the East” (MR 1924, 1). “The mosque is a vital sign of the friendship that has come into existence between the German people in their darkest moment and the Orient” (MR 1925, 1). This approach, in combination with the openness and intellectual atmosphere that surrounded the missionaries, appealed to Berliners. The Wilmersdorfer mosque attracted a good deal of converts, a very different crowd than those who went to Kheiri and the IGB.

The many single and group pictures published 1924 and 1927 are evidence that encouraging individual expression was part and parcel of the mission approach. The editors made ample use of the modern technique of photography, flanking this medium with short convert biographies. If people wanted to know what was going on in the mosque and who exactly 138 frequented it, they could simply leaf through some of the issues and study the faces.

From Rifat’s last pamphlet, written shortly before the authorities refused to renew his residence permit, we learn that the foundation stone ceremony for the Wilmersdorfer mosque, planned for October 1924, was violently disrupted, forcing a postponement of the construction work (Rifat 4/1924). After this incident, the Ahmadiyya missionaries went straight to the police, who proceeded to threaten Rifat and eventually to deport him (Höpp 1998).

In the following years, public opinion turned in favour of the Ahmadī missionaries from Lahore. Politicians, ambassadors and journalists gathered background information and discovered a philosophy of religious progress that was much to their liking. The Foreign Office, for example, inquiring at the German embassies in London and Calcutta, received letters and documents which put their minds at rest: “The sect has recently split into two sections, of which one considers the founder Aḥmad as their prophet and founder of a new religion, while the other accepts him as a reformer only. Both sections are nearer to Christianity, in so far as they preach universal love and abhor Islamic fanaticism. Like early Christianity, they avoid political dispute and declare themselves subject to the authorities.” (AA III.0.312; Freiherr von Rüdt on 31 January, 1925).

Sadr-ud-Din also managed to make friends among the Muslim émigrés. In the summer of 1927 the Muslim ambassadors, who three years earlier had fallen out with the IGB, wrote a letter to the Foreign Office asking this body to support financially the Wilmersdorfer mosque. Simultaneously, a “committee of Ambassadors of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and Egypt in Berlin” placed a series of advertisements calling for donations to erect the minarets, lay out the garden and build a fence (“1.500 Pound Sterling”, GIG, 1). That same year, the ambassadors also organized and paid for the 139 ʿīd al-fitr ceremony in the mosque (GIG, 1; cf. Jonker 2014a). Gradually, the Ahmadiyya mosque gained acceptance.

The interface

To sum up the situation once again: in the early 1920s, two very different Muslim missions advertised themselves in Berlin. The Kheiri brothers appealed to the revolutionary spirit of young Berlin intellectuals, inviting them to join the global struggle for the liberation of the Muslim peoples. Their basis of action was the IGB, in which they managed to gather a truly international community, captured in the formula “forty two nations”. In many ways, the Kheiri mission among the Germans seems to have continued their intelligence work for Germany during the war. With a difference: instead of intelligence officers, they now appealed to the German population for support. In contrast, Sadr-ud-Din believed in the meeting of minds to induce global change, and that winning Germany over for Islam could function as leverage towards that aim. Where Kheiri made use of the revolutionary spirit of the time, Sadr-ud-Din totally abstained from politics, creating a fluid atmosphere that encouraged religious border-crossing instead. Both mission approaches followed a politics of globalisation via adaptation, but, as will be shown in this section, it was Sadr-ud-Din’s advance that won the day because it answered to local needs of self-fulfilment, in full bloom after the catastrophic war and post-war experiences, to adopt non-European religions.

But what made that happen? Where did Indians and Germans come close enough to actually borrow from one other and to adapt these borrowings to their own needs? This third section is dedicated to their 140 interface, a region that appears to have included local topography, social class and a gusto for religious experiment.

The inter-war topography of Berlin serves as an entry to the interface between religious and intellectual dynamics. Revisiting the borough of Wilmersdorf, where Muslim émigrés and converts lived door to door, allows a reconstruction of the setting in which the cross-religious experiments were set into movement. The 1930 city map marks two spots on the outskirts of Wilmersdorf, where each Ahmadiyya mission society purchased a plot with the prospect to build a mosque within reach of the Muslim population. As we already saw, Sadr-ud-Din estimated their number to be 15.000. Wilmersdorf was their habitat and the streets around Kurfürstendamm surely harboured a dense web of Muslim organisations. Across the available literature, I counted 20 political, 9 religious and 5 student-oriented Muslim organisations (Giljazov 1989; Höpp 1988; Höpp 1990/1991; Höpp 1994; Höpp 1997; Böer et al. 2002). Next to pre-war initiatives such as The Turkish Club, the Turkish Colony and The Orient-Club, we find that a range of political exile organisations from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Kazan, Middle Asia (“Tatarstan”), and British-India set up shop here. Once the student flow was established, the Verein zur Unterstützung Russisch-Mohammedanischer Studenten (Association for the Support of Russian Muslim Students), the Studentenverein Islamia (Student Association Islamia) and the Vereinigung Arabischer Studierender El-Arabiya (The Society of Arabic Students El-Arabiya) became their neighbours.

Possibilities for meeting, or just spotting one another in the street, were numerous. Mubarak Ali and Sadr-ud-Din both lodged on the right side of the Kurfürstendamm, Sadr-ud-Din on Giesebrechtstrasse 5, Mubarak Ali on Dahlmannstrasse 9, a mere five minutes’ walk away. Like the Arab students who arrived between 1922 and 1923, they took up rooms near Kurfürstendamm. As the many advertisements in Die Islamische Gegenwart 141 show, Arab, Afghan and Persian entrepreneurs opened businesses like “Mossul-Mesopotamian Import-Export” or “Pension Tempo” on that street (for instance DIG, Dec. 1927, not numbered pages at the rear of the journal). We trace the Islam-Institut to Fasanenstrasse 23; the Hindustan-House to Uhlandstrasse 179; Café Orient to Grollmanstrasse and Restaurant Shark again to Uhlandstrasse. Left and right of the Kurfürstendamm, in the most fashionable part of town, a ‘Little Orient’ sprang into existence: bourgeois, moneyed, optimistic and very intellectually-minded.

Fashionable Berlin willingly received the Muslim newcomers as their neighbours. The two mosque builders were applauded, the papers marvelling that “the exotic flair of Berlin is now in progress” (BT 1923, 1). Door-to-door with the Muslim population lived the German writers, artists, journalists and theatre folk who made Weimar Berlin so famous. Mission strategies were tailored to these inhabitants, Jews and Christians, people equipped with many different cultural resources, intellectuals, artists, journalists, the well-to-do and widely travelled, orientalists and adventurers who could afford to live in the newly-built neighbourhood. These Berliners embraced the experiment of modernity, which had gripped Europe since the turn of the century. Originally a youth movement, Germans baptised it Lebensreform (Life Reform), a label under which it had become fashionable to experiment with the private and the personal, steadily moulding one’s life according to different principles (Buchholz et al. 2001). German Lebensreformer were seekers of well-being and Lebensreform served to shape their quest: love of nature, love of the body, Greek love, revolution, secularism, atheism, Eastern mysticism, infatuation with everything oriental, expressionism, Dadaism, African art. What they had in common was a yearning for redemption from the Wilhelmine German way of life dominated by military and professional drill. Lebensreformer simply felt exasperated with their parent generation (Radkau 2001). 142

But besides being close neighbours, Muslims and German Lebensreformer experienced a familiarity that David Motadel rightly recognized as bourgeois, drawing attention to the fact that the Muslim bourgeois attitude was not acquired in Berlin but imported from Muslim transformation societies, in which modernity and global urban culture were equally prevalent (Motadel 2009, 100-03). While vigorously promoting their mission, Muslim missionaries thus encountered a form of globalization that was neither religious nor political, but a feature of modern urban experience (Bayly 2004, 194f.). It presented a decisive factor for the creation of a hybrid middle ground without which the mission could not have advanced that easily.

Urbanity, social class, and modernity made up the framework in which Muslim reformers from British India established mission centres in Berlin, either to share a global political approach, or to challenge Western ideas of their religion that had been discredited by the accounts of Christian missionaries. But although on everybody’s lips, modernity eluded one single definition. Rather, it constituted the perfect field for visions and projections from all parts of the world. “An essential part of being modern”, as Christopher Bayly observes, “is thinking that you are modern” (Bayly 2004, 10). In this theatre of possibilities, the Kheiris could promote world revolution as the means to free the oppressed Muslim nations. The Ahmadiyya could present the Germans with a reformed version of Islam, and suggest to them that embracing this religion would help to overcome their guilt vis-á-vis a European civilization that had engendered utter destruction.

But although central on the Berlin stage, Indians were not the only Muslims to use the elusive modernity as a projection screen. In finishing, three short biographies may serve to illustrate the spectrum of ideas. 143

I. Hosseyn Kazemzadeh, who in later life called himself “Iranschär” (Land of Iran), offers the first example. Born to a noble Iranian family, Kazemzadeh started his first attempt at reforming Iranian society in 1901, when he set up a reform school in Tabriz. The school was closed down and Kazemzadeh immersed himself in extensive university studies, part of which he pursued in Leuven. When, in 1915, the German government invited him to Berlin he accepted the invitation, thus joining the growing army of Muslim revolutionaries from North Africa, the Middle East and British India in the service of the German war intelligence. But in 1918, when armistice was signed, he found himself among the exiles stranded in Berlin. Whatever government money had flowed during the war, it was stopped soon after, leaving him, like so many others, penniless. Like Zeki Kiram, he tried his hand at a publishing house, Iranschär GmbH, which soon served as a platform for his own books (Behnam 2006).

For some years, Kazemzadeh wrote for an educated Iranian readership about the possibilities and consequences of the modern age, collecting a wide range of European reform practices. His titles range from The Führer of the New Race (1925), and The New Road to Education (1926), to A New Road for a New Race (1926).¹⁴ They portray him as a secular thinker, very much concerned with modern leadership, modern education and the cultivation of a superior race (Behnam, 2006).

But when his publishing house was closed down for lack of funds, Kazemzadeh made a 180-degree turn. Joining both a theosophical lodge and the Sufi-Bewegung of Inayat Khan, he started to (re-)shape the future through the medium of religion. And remarkably, within a very short period of time Kazemzadeh became Berlin’s most popular speaker on mysticism, a patchwork of strands of Sufism, theosophy, Iranian lore (“Zarathustra”) and 144 Christian suffering. A stream of publications bearing titles like The Mystery of the Soul, The Sources of Suffering, The Healing Source of Silence, and How shall we meditate? accompanied his performance.¹⁵

Not before long, this brought him into contact with the Wilmersdorfer mosque, where he seems to have been much revered by the convert community. On personal invitation of imām S.M. Abdullah, who was always looking for novel religious thought (Jonker 2014b), he regularly spoke before a full house, and his lectures were published (MR 1933, 1935, 1936). Tapping into the complicated emotions that held Weimar Berlin in their grip, Kazemzadeh was a missionary whom the local situation engendered. He enabled his audience to bridge East and West on a personal level, borrowing from other cultures without ever so much as leaving their own. As a missionary, Kazemzadeh never spoke about politics. His road to success consisted of stitching together different religious languages. A faint echo of those heady days, some of his books, including Iranian and German publications, are still standing in the mosque library today.

II. The German-Jewish philosopher Hugo Marcus serves as a second example. A much-respected and very visible liberal publicist, Marcus converted to Islam in the Ahmadiyya mosque when he was fifty. Earlier assigned as its manager and editor of the MR, he also headed the Deutsch- Moslemische Gesellschaft, the famous convert circle of German artists and intellectuals who celebrated modernity through being Muslim, and organised regular lectures on religious reform and inter-religious exchange (Jonker 2014b). Taking place in the mosque, the lectures attracted a stream 145 of Berlin intellectuals and university professors. The names of famous Arabists, Iranists and Turcologists, but also the head of the Berlin Buddhist community, members of the Jewish Reform Community, or the Intendant of the Lutheran Church, regularly appear on the pages of the MR, either as lecturers or as participants in the yearly Islamic festivals. Some of them re-appear in the membership lists, giving witness to the fact that somewhere along the way these visitors crossed religious borders to join the Deutsch- Moslemische Gesellschaft.

With a view to this audience, and across numerous lectures and publications, Marcus developed his own vision of ‘future Man’, unfolding the argument that the truly modern man of the future could only result from a process in which the European civilization was grafted onto Islam. Taking Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche as the essence of European philosophy, he set out to weave a network between Jewish and Muslim thought on severe monotheism, Protestant and Muslim thought on the ethical imperative, and secular and Muslim thought on man as the centre of creation, capable of genius, able to grow beyond his station (examples: MR 1926, 79-88; 1929, 8-25). Although heavily borrowing from philosophy, it seems to have been Marcus’ view that the fusing of Eastern and Western thought could only take place within the religious domain, where it could move between languages, the language of intellectual tradition, of religious reform, of ritual and of symbolism. Its outcome he foresaw to be something wholly new: the yet unknown ‘future Man’.

In 1930, he published two lengthy articles on the topic of “Religion and Future Man” (MR 1930, 65-75; 94-98), in which he addressed the young Muslim reading public, challenging them to speak their mind about the future of Humankind. Many responded, but not only liberals answered the call. Being broadminded and open for suggestions from each and every political and religious direction, the editors of the Moslemische Revue also 146 thought to recognize “future man” in the writings of the popular author ‘Faruq H. Fischer’. He is our third example.

III. In the German library catalogues Faruq H. Fischer can easily be traced to Hans Fischer who, in 1932, was one of the up-and-coming young authors of popular Nazi literature. His many theatre plays, advertised with titles like Jung Deutschland voran (Young Germany to the fore), Deutschland’s Morgenroth entflammt! (Germany’s dawn ignites!), or Heb’ deine Flügel, deutscher Adler… (Raise your wings, German eagle…) are full of blood-and-earth symbols and ugly instances of anti-Semitism, which he employed for comic effect.¹⁶ When and why Fischer became a Muslim has not been discovered. But the editors made much of him, announcing this man as “the well-known author, one of the youngest Europeans who have gladly embraced Islam” (MR 1934, 62).

Fischer’s contribution to the MR is titled “Does Islam ‘lack modernity’? — A parallel between the old religion and Europe of the present” (MR 1934, 62–73). In his world ‘modern’ is everything that Nazi ideology stands for. Accordingly, he sets off to find striking — some would say over-simplified — parallels between Islam and modern European-ness. A few examples betray the general flavour: Islam forbids alcohol? No problem! “The Führer of the German people does not take one single drop!” (ibid., 67). Does Islam lack progress? Certainly not! “Europe adopts more and more Islamic thought” (ibid., 71). Instead of intellect and liberalism, Fischer writes, Nazism propagates hygiene, sports and attachment to the earth; instead of individualism, it cultivates group experience (ibid., 71). To Fischer, this is what Islam is all about: “Not modern? Never! Not civilized? Never! 147 Otherwise, our statesmen would not act in an Islamic way. Are you not modern? Am I perhaps not modern?” (ibid., 73)

Presenting the opposite voices, Marcus and Fischer mirror the scope of ideas among the German converts to Islam. They are rooted in the heated atmosphere of the early 1930s, just before and during the years when the Nazis came to power. Grafting European civilization onto Islam was Marcus’ alternative to the deadly Nazi ideology. Fischer turned this idea upside-down and saw the fusion between Islam and Western modernity realized in the Nazi regime. It shows the width of religious projections, which Indian missionaries set into movement only ten years before.