ABSTRACT
Few terms are more closely associated with the late Ottoman Empire than ‘pan-Islamism’. The term was coined in Europe in the 1870s and conventionally carried negative connotations of regressive anti-modernism rooted in the fanaticism of Islam and its followers. The term came into widespread use in the press and among colonial administrators in the British, French and Russian empires and it continues to be used quite indiscriminately in both popular and academic discourse to imply a phenomenon imbued with danger and fanaticism. In an era when religious radicalism is potent in many Muslim countries, the link of pan-Islamism to religion is easily assumed. The most recent academic treatment of the subject, by Jacob Landau, takes for granted that all the basic premises of pan-Islam were
based, first and foremost, on the commonality of religious sentiment which one can take for granted while devoting the attention in this study to politics and economics as perceived and employed by Pan-Islam. After all, for Muslims Islam has been and remains for most, the main social and cultural fact of life. However, Islam defines their politics as well, for Islam is also a means to articulate political and economic attitudes too. 1
