INDIAN OCEAN                     EMPIRE

Between the end of World War I and the Mecca World Muslim Congress of 1926, Soviet officials and Indian Muslim thinkers imagined the possibilities of a post-imperial world through the Hijaz. The All-India Khilafat Committee (AIKC), an organization of Indian Muslim intellectuals, and the Soviet Union defended competing projects to safeguard the Hijaz, home to some Islam’s holiest shrines, from European imperialism. Yet, far from limiting themselves to the question of who should rule Hijaz, the AIKC and the Soviet state engaged in broader debates about religious and social difference, sovereignty and minority rights. Whereas the AIKC imagined the Hijaz as an international Muslim republic and a place of refuge for Muslims worldwide, Soviet officials contended that the political future of Muslims should only be settled within the framework of ethno-territorial nation-states. Ironically, both the programs of the AIKC and the Soviet state denied the right of self-determination to Hijazis themselves, leaving the region’s inhabitants to choose between two forms of external oversight: a Soviet-supported Saudi ethno-territorialism or limited domestic autonomy under the management and inspection of an international Muslim Council. Past scholarship on the Hijaz has analyzed the region’s political fortunes through Saudi statecraft or European colonial influence. However, Soviet and Indian Muslim experimental engagement with the Hijaz ultimately proved just as crucial to the consolidation of Saudi governance over the region. The article achieves these novel insights by bringing together rare Soviet archival sources with the AIKC's Urdu records and coverage from the Saudi and Egyptian press.