Sovereign Power and “Other Lives”

In 1954, a young Queen Elizabeth visited the Crown Colony of Aden on her way to India. Among the many ceremonies her visit demanded, she bestowed the title of Knight Commander of the British Empire on the advisor to the Kathiri Sultanate of Hadhramawt, a sayyid named Abu Bakr al-Kaf (d. 1965). The honour bestowed on Sayyid Abu Bakr resulted from his indispensable role in using his vast finances and influence, earned in his birthplace of Singapore, to build a series of roads through the Hadhramaut. The project helped unite two rival sultanates under British suzerainty and laid the groundwork for a series of treaties among the region’s warring tribes that would thereafter be named for the British colonial agent, Harold Ingrams, with whom Abu Bakr worked. For his service to the British Empire, he received the highest honour it could bestow on its native subjects. Even so, Sayyid Abu Bakr was allowed to kneel on a stool as he was knighted by the queen, for he refused to bow before any other than God. If only for a moment, it seems, he was able to resolve the seemingly contradictory relationship between the sovereign power of the divine and the demands of the modern state that Sayyid Fadl b. ‘Alawi (d. 1900) spent much of his life trying to balance. Wilson Chacko Jacob’s For God or Empire utilizes the story of Sayyid Fadl as a thought-provoking case study for an examination of the global emergence of the modern categories of sovereignty and life as foundational elements of our political present. What sets his account apart is that he does so with the historian’s careful attention to context, both spatial and temporal, that ultimately insists on recognizing the deeply contested process of this emergence and its imbrication in other modes of sovereignty and life, embodied in the exemplary trajectory of Sayyid Fadl. In a dazzling narrative that traverses empires (British, Ottoman, Omani), subcontinents (Arab and Indian), virtual spaces, and individual bodies, Jacob locates the potentialities of life at the interstices of divine and modern sovereignty across the Indian Ocean. As becomes clear in the book, the question of the unity of life, or form-of-life, a life irreducible to its barest biological form, is not only Sayyid Fadl’s struggle but also an ongoing struggle in our political present. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, since the 1990s, scholars have been drawn to the Hadhramaut region of Yemen as a paradigmatic example of an Indian Ocean society. Its history has been defined in part by the numbers of seafarers, soldiers, merchants, and scholars that have travelled from the Hadhrami interior, long known as a centre of Islamic learning, to destinations across the Indian Ocean littoral. The scholarship that emerged in the last couple of decades has generated many richly detailed accounts of scholarly networks, military entrepreneurs, and family firms that have challenged how scholars have viewed geography, community, and patterns of intellectual reform, often gesturing toward recuperative histories of pre-modern vernacular cosmopolitanisms. In this sense, much of this work has tended toward what Gaurav Desai has called the “production of history in a nostalgic mode.” Although early on he invokes “hospitality” as an “originary principle of the Indian Ocean world” (2), Jacob’s interest lies instead in the Indian Ocean as a domain in which European empire’s expanding sovereign order was forced to engage with older modes of sovereignty, temporal and divine, that circulated in this oceanic space. Methodologically, this kind of work requires a particular kind of textual strategy, one that resists the urge to reduce Sayyid Fadl’s writings, however …