The Changing Muslim World: Energy, Extraction, and the Racialization of Islam in Protestant Missions

Abstract

This essay examines the role of Anglo Protestant missions in the Persian Gulf in racializing “the Moslem world” for the emergent white world order at the beginning of the 20th century. More specifically, I consider the way Protestant missionaries extracted knowledge about Islam, racializing “the Moslem world” as a civilizational “unit” devoid of energetic life—and therefore incompatible with the modern world—even as they simultaneously mediated the rise of oil extraction along the Persian Gulf in that same period. Extraction was not only evident in the material relations of empire, but also in the way Protestant missionary discourse shaped “the Muslim world” into a racial unit in need of management and optimization. I consider two energetic grammars used by Protestant missionaries to signify the changes occurring in “the Moslem World”, namely, Samuel Zwemer’s use of “disintegration” and Basil Mathews use of “ferment”. I argue that it was in these material and discursive entanglements of oil extraction where knowledge about Islam became an important tool of European colonial governance, and where energetic grammars of religion became critical to the biopolitical production and management of racialized Muslim populations.

1. Introduction

The US-born John R. Mott, voice of early 20th century global Protestant missions, opens the forward to his 1925 edited volume The Moslem World of To-Day by commenting on the urgency of the present moment for the prospect of Christianizing the world of Islam.1

“The Moslem world of to-day is markedly different from that of yesterday. The social and religious system of Islam, for centuries the most rigid, exclusive, & resistant… has during the first quarter of the present century, and notably during the last decade, been undergoing stupendous and well-nigh unbelievable changes”.

(Mott 1925)

Indeed, that last decade to which Mott referred included the First World War and its ground-shattering aftermath: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the Turkish Caliphate in 1924, and the installation of the European Mandate System over the Ottoman’s former territories. It was a pinnacle moment amongst a longer century of changes missionaries seized upon as momentous for the prospect of Christian missions.

For decades, Protestant missionaries had complained of the “difficult realities of a new Ottoman frontier they had opened but could not dominate” (Makdisi 2009). By the late 19th century, Protestant missionaries had begun to explain their failures at evangelizing Muslims by casting Islam as a civilization stuck in the past, fossilized, and resistant to change. For example, in Henry Jessup’s 1879 publication, The Mohammedan Missionary Problem, Jessup attacked the “degradation” of Islamic social customs, blaming Muslims for resisting evangelical efforts, being stubborn in doctrinal debates, set in their ways, and refusing to allow missionaries into their lands. But while missionary efforts had failed in the past, the growing optimism in Mott’s edited volume was palpable. As Mott wrote, here was finally an opportunity to bring to bear the “transforming energies of vital Christianity” upon “Muslim lands” that had grown incapable of its own regeneration.

Regardless of Mott’s optimism of the “stupendous” changes wrought by the First World War, change in the so-called “Muslim world” had already been long underway. On the one hand, the Ottoman Empire, for example, had already been undergoing several noticeable reforms of their own for the better part of a century. In 1839, Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I ushered in a new era of imperial reorganization known as the Tanzimat (1839–1876), abolishing the millet system, and establishing a more centralized political arrangement for the empire.2 On the other hand, the second half of the 19th century saw several places heavily populated by Muslims come for the first time under the control of European empires. The major player in this regard was the British Empire. The Crown took major control of India by the middle of the 19th century, and by 1882, had seized Egypt in order to protect its growing financial interests and naval supremacy in the region.3 In fact, we might articulate these larger changes to which Mott referred as the result of what Lelah Khalili has described as the “intensification of empire” wrought with the building of the Suez Canal in 1869 (Khalili 2020; Center for Mark Twain Studies n.d.). By opening maritime transport to Africa and Asia, European powers began a host of colonial projects that included the rapid development of imperial economies of extraction. Alongside Protestant missionaries and colonial administrators were the architects of modern capitalism “scrambling” for Africa and Asia: railway conglomerates, the rotary printing press, electric grids and telegraph networks, mining corporations, and the extractive economies of metal, rubber, coal, and, eventually, oil.

The Persian Gulf became an especially critical shipping center for British imperial interests when, in 1908, the era’s largest oil deposits were discovered by British geologists in Mohammerah, Persia (Iran). Significantly, the discovery of Persian oil was aided by the soft diplomacy of US Protestant missionaries at the nearby Arabian Mission in Basrah (Iraq), where the mission’s co-founder Samuel Zwemer would become a leading expert on Islam for a voracious Anglophone public at the beginning of the 20th century. Much like John Mott, Zwemer was convinced that Europe’s civilizational clash with the region would finally spell Islam’s impending disintegration, presenting an opportune moment for Christianizing the region. And, as was common of many missionary treatises of the era, nothing was believed to be more effective in this regard than the disintegrating effects of Europe’s technological might.4 Upon the installation of a veritable oil infrastructure on the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, Winston Churchill switched the British naval operations from coal steam to fuel oil on the eve of the First World War. In the following decades, the oil industry grew from just over ten million tons in 1870 to over 100 million tons by the 1930s, installing a petro-powered global economy that would become, and still remains, dependent on fossil fuels (Daggett 2019).

This essay examines the role of Anglo Protestant missions—specifically the US-based Arabian Mission—in racializing “the Moslem world” for the emergent white world order at the beginning of the 20th century. More specifically, I consider the way Protestant missionaries extracted knowledge about Islam, racializing “the Moslem world” as a civilizational “unit” devoid of energetic life—and therefore incompatible with the coming of the world wrought by modern capitalism—even as they simultaneously mediated the rise of oil extraction along the Persian Gulf in that same era. In short, I consider how knowledge about religion and race is produced in extractive zones.5 Following the intellectual lineage of Charles H. Long, scholars have shown how knowledge about religious cultures is often mediated in zones of cultural contact and exchange, forming “hermeneutical situations” oriented by the inequal power relations of empire and capital (Long 1999; Chidester 2014; Noel 2009; Callahan 2009; Reid and Carrasco 2020). Many of these imperial relations, including the one I outline below, function both materially and epistemologically as sites of extraction wherein new flows of people, resources, and knowledge become transmogrified into the service of imperial designs. In this essay, this extractive mode of relationship6 is evident not only in geopolitical shifts of European empire and the emergence of oil extraction in the Persian Gulf, but also in the way the Protestant missionary discourse shaped “the Muslim world” into a racial unit in need of management and optimization.

Additionally, this essay follows the work of Cara Daggett, Dominic Boyer, and others who argue that in addition to conflating progress with biological ideas of evolution, Victorian era theories of change also relied upon the emergence of energy, a central metaphor for biopolitical governance (Boyer 2014; Daggett 2019). Specifically, I consider two energetic grammars used by Protestant missionaries to signify the changes occurring in the so-called “Moslem World”, namely, Samuel Zwemer’s use of “disintegration” and Basil Mathews use of “ferment”. For Zwemer, disintegration, a theory borrowed from emergent discoveries in nuclear physics, enabled missionaries to finally articulate a Muslim world that could take on altogether new forms despite a history of the region’s seeming intractability. The grammar of ferment, on the other hand, warned that not all energetic changes are healthy changes, and that ferment could also lead to foment if not guided by the more constructive “energies” of vital Christianity.

2. Mapping the Muslim World as a Racial Unit

The emergent global racial order dominated by Anglo-Saxonism and pan-European white supremacy had by the early 20th century gained a profound geographical and geological frame.7 As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in Darkwater in 1920, “Manifestly it is expansion overseas; it is colonial aggrandizement which explains, and alone adequately explains, the World War”.8 As already noted, the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War had been preceded by nearly a half century of imperial intensification through Europe’s “scramble” for Africa and Asia, as well as a profound spirit of aggrandizement that Du Bois would notoriously describe in the first quarter of the twentieth century as “the religion of whiteness”—or, “the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good”.9 Du Bois was well aware that the problem of the “color line” in the twentieth century had developed a profoundly global, and, indeed, intrinsically imperial frame (Burden-Stelly and Horne 2019).

By 1908, the US-founded Arabian Mission had already gained a steady presence along the Persian Gulf. It had been nearly twenty years since its co-founder Samuel Zwemer had identified the city of Basrah, with its ideal location along the Shatt-el-Arab, as the first outpost for the Arabian Mission. As Darren Dochuk has explained in his history Anointed with Oil, British oil prospector George Reynolds visited US missionary John Van Ess at his home in Basrah before striking black gold later that year on 26 May 1908 in a spot near Masjid-I-Sulaiman across the border in Persia. Thanks to the local connections, resources, and an “erudite study of Islam” provided by the Arabian Mission,10 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was officially formed in the succeeding years, securing a contract with the British government and, eventually, building a 300-mile oil pipeline from the oil wells near Masjid-I-Sulaiman to the city of Abadan, just south of Basrah at the tip of the Persian Gulf. At Abadan, APOC would build a veritable oil infrastructure, including a large refinery, a “coolie” labor camp with workers mainly from India, medical missions from the US site in Basrah, laboratories for geologists and chemists, and a major port that enabled the British Navy to refuel and ship out oil on behalf of its expanding maritime empire (Shafiee 2018; Dochuk 2019).

In these same years, Protestant missionaries joined Euro-American oil moguls in imagining the remaking of the planet under Christian designs. As oil was being discovered in Southwest Persia, Arabian Mission co-founder Samuel M. Zwemer (1867–1952) published his composite survey of Islam entitled The Muslim World (1908), serving as a “text-book” for missions study classes at Euro-American colleges, universities, and churches throughout the English-speaking world (Zwemer 1908). Zwemer had been one of three “pioneer” missionaries into East Arabia, co-founding the Arabian Mission in 1889 in the dormitory building of the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church in America at New Brunswick, New Jersey. Two years later, the first station of the Arabian Mission was opened in the city of Basrah. After spending the better part of the next two decades touring the coast of the Persian Gulf and venturing into the Arabian Peninsula (under the protection of the British), Zwemer organized the first ever global missionary conference in Cairo (also under British control) on behalf of Christianizing “the Mohammedan World”.11 In the aftermath of the 1906 conference, Zwemer was asked to write a comprehensive survey of Islam by John Mott in his executive role on the committee of the US-based Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. Mott, by that time, had become the leading name in global Protestant missions and Zwemer was eager make his contribution.

Christian missionaries have long been critical to the production of knowledge about Islam on behalf of a Euro-American readership, who, with the expansion of imperial and commercial interests in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands, became increasingly invested in understanding the “problem” of Islam as a problem of colonial governance.12 Samuel M. Zwemer (1867–1952), a child of Dutch settlers to the United States, joined the Student Volunteer Movement as a college student at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. After his seminary training at New Brunswick Seminary, Zwemer entered the mission field with his fellow seminarian James Cantine only to become one of the leading figures in worldwide Protestant missions. In fact, historian Thomas Kidd argued that Zwemer was “the most influential American Christian missionary to Muslims of his time, if not ever” and, perhaps more significantly, “the most prominent shaper of American Christians’ views of Islam” (Kidd 2009, p. 58).

Perhaps one of the most significant outcomes of Zwemer’s SVM-commissioned 1908 textbook The Muslim World was Zwemer’s inclusion of one of the very first maps of “the Muslim world” as a contiguous geographic unit from Southeast Asia to North Africa (see Figure 1). Zwemer’s map not only demonstrated the emergent sociological mode of Protestant missionary strategy, but in so doing also gave “the Muslim world” a cartographic coherence as a single “unit” and so-called “problem” for European colonial governance (Zurlo 2014). The colorfully-shaded regions of the globe are joined by demographic statistics communicated in two bar graphs and one pie chart. In one graphic, the British are shown to govern more Muslims than any other polity in the world. The “Asiatic” power of China is second, followed by the Netherlands, France, and Russia—each European power now ahead of the Ottomans (Turkey) and other Afro-Asiatic powers like Persia, Morocco, Afghanistan, and Arabia. The map also includes a purple “Malaysian” region where, by 1908, the United States had come under control of an estimated 300,000 Muslims in its occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish–American War of 1898 (and, notably, the entire American hemisphere is left off the map completely).13

In giving cartographic coherence to “the Moslem world”—which is to say, in detailing the geographic and numerical scope of Islam as a singular unit—Zwemer contributed to the emergent association of “the Muslim World” as a race. As Cemil Ayden has argued, the very idea of “the Muslim world” was invented as a racial category that European empires increasingly used in the complex colonial relations of the 19th century to distinguish Muslims for differential treatment (Aydin 2017). It is crucial to note, here, that the racialization of Islam contained a much deeper genealogy in the white Christian supremacy of medieval and early modern Europe.14 Nevertheless, the association of Islam as a singular “world”—which is to say, as a civilizational unit (more on this shortly)—became a product not merely of the shifting racial epistemologies of the era, but also the changing political and economic contexts of 19th century European imperialism. For Aydin, Europe’s modern iteration of race became regularly applied to the idea of “the Muslim world”, especially during British and French imperialism in Asia and Africa, and the changing status of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century.

It is notable, then, that in addition to his map and “erudite study”, Samuel Zwemer would also become the founder and editor of the periodical, The Muslim World, founded at Hartford Seminary in 1911 and still today a prominent journal in Islamic Studies. In fact, according to Aydin, “Between the 1880s and the 1930s, several journals with that title were published in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Malay” (Aydin 2017, p. 78). Joining this expansive multitude of literature eager to consume knowledge of the world of Islam, John Mott would recommend that Zwemer’s quarterly journal “be adopted as the common organ of missions to Moslems… [deserving] the support of all those interested in evangelizing the Near East” (Zwemer 1925). Knowledge production joined conversion as complementary tools of imperial rule.

Critical to the impetus behind the journal for Zwemer was that knowledge about “the Moslem World” would be useful for anyone encountering Muslims wherever they should encounter them. “Islam is a unit”, Zwemer wrote, “and the movements which occur in one part of the world have a reflex influence in every other Mohammedan land” (Zwemer 1925, p. 9). While Zwemer was uniquely attuned to specificity and variety among Muslims in his experience as a missionary in predominantly Muslim lands, he nevertheless insisted on treating Islam as a homogeneous populational unit. In his 1911 essay, “A General Survey of the Muslim World”, Zwemer was adamant that “the Muslim world [was] a literalism which sums up an actual situation”. It was “not merely a geographical expression for the vast areas covered by Moslem conquest or conversion”, but had much deeper significance:

“The word Islam itself, stands for a unity of religious conception, a unity of political theory and of ideals of civilisation as well as of religion, which together form the problem of Islam. Therefore, the essential and philosophical unity of the problem, in lands which constitute the Moslem world, has been recognised by all those who have made a study of the subject. It is possible, for this reason, to give a general survey of the Moslem world as a unit”.

(Zwemer 1911)

Zwemer’s amalgamation of “the Moslem world” into an “essential and philosophical unity”, which “form the problem of Islam”, recalls the insight of another famed sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois, who thought carefully about what it meant to be lumped into a racial category and labeled “a problem”. In the opening of his 1903 study of Black religion, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois would declare that “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”.15 Much like Zwemer’s study, although approached “in vague, uncertain outline”, Du Bois sought to sketch “the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand [Black] Americans live and strive” (Du Bois 2007). Reading through Du Bois, Zwemer’s racialization of Islam into a world unit—and a “problem”—speaks not only to the politics of knowledge through which he wrote his study, but links the ascription of “problem” populations to the register of racial governance. Finally, it gestures toward a common theme in the emergence of the human sciences in this era: to extract knowledge of populations in the service of their reformation—or, in this case, their conversion.16

3. The Disintegration of Islam

In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, Winston Churchill made a calculated decision. After assessing the lifespan of the British-controlled oilfields, and considering the labor unrest at local coal mines in England, Churchill decided to switch from coal to oil to fuel the British navy, relying completely on the Anglo-Persian oil reserves in southwest Iran (Shafiee 2018, p. 72). In doubling down on this commitment, the British moved to secure a majority share in the nascent Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1914. And then, later that same year at the commencement of the Great War, British military forces captured the city of Basrah, the home of the Arabian Mission and the largest oil shipping center in the Persian Gulf now fully ousted from Ottoman control. As the British began transforming Basrah into a major shipping port on behalf of its newly petro-powered maritime empire, Samuel Zwemer would publish perhaps the most influential work in his time, The Disintegration of Islam (1915) (Zwemer 1916).

Zwemer opens his 1915 publication with the language of death and decay: “Like all other non-Christian systems and philosophies Islam is a dying religion”, Zwemer wrote. “From the outset it had in it the germs of death—neither the character of the Koran nor of its Prophet have in them the promise or potency of life that will endure”.17 Notably, Zwemer uses the biological language of life and death to adjudicate the changing Muslim world. The “germ”, a term more common to the field of evolutionary biology, is the portion of an organism which renders it capable of life—that is, germination, reproduction, evolution.18 Accordingly, life required a potency—an energy—that would enable it to continue to reproduce and evolve.19 The germinating portion of Islam, however, was counterintuitively reproducing death. Zwemer continued, “At the present time there are in Islam many evidences of decay… fatalism, the opposition of science, the rejection of religious freedom, neglect of education… the ignorance of Moslem womanhood” (Zwemer 1916, p. 7). Zwemer’s list typifies the stereotypical accusations of secular Protestantism that distinguished between good religion—one’s in line with so-called “modern” values—and religion that was passing away in the coming of the modern world.20

Still again, Zwemer uses the metaphor of “dead weight” to describe the Islamic tradition: “the accumulation of many centuries… an intolerable burden” (Zwemer 1916, p. 8). Borrowing from the seafaring image, dead weights are those heavy loads on a ship that weigh it down, often needing to be cast overboard to avoid sinking into the depths of the ocean. For Zwemer, the Muslim tradition would need to be cast off if the region would be able to progress through the rising tides of capitalist modernity. But this was easier said than done. According to Zwemer, the Muslim tradition was seen to affect every aspect of Muslim life. To throw it off would be no small-scale change. It would require a more wholesale transformation.

For example, on the hadiths (the doings and sayings of the prophet Mohammed), Zwemer wrote, “this mass of so-called learning touches every article of the Moslem faith and practices, deals with every detail of home life, trade, politics, war, jurisprudence; that it is, in fact, an encyclopedia of correct conduct and right opinion on every possible subject” (Zwemer 1916, p. 31). In Zwemer’s articulation of hadith, Islam emerged as, once again, “a unity of political theory and of ideals of civilisation as well as of religion”, touching “every detail” of Muslim life from the religious to the secular. But it also spoke to a common association in the 19th century of “world religions” with the “civilizations” they helped produce and sustain. Rather than understand religion in a siloed manner as individual private belief (as is more common today (McCrary 2022)), religions were understood at the civilizational level, if not as synonymous outright, then certainly as one its most essential features.21 In Zwemer’s use, religion was a civilization’s germ, its energy—”its potency of life” that would allow that civilization “to endure”.22 As such, the Ottoman collapse and the encroachment of European empires during this time was crucial. As Zwemer wrote, “we must remember that ‘occupation’ really means inevitably the disintegration of many Moslem religious institutions and the uprooting of old ideals and standards” (Zwemer 1916, p. 120). In other words, because of Islam’s political—and civilizational—nature, in coming under the governance of a foreign state, Zwemer predicted that Islam would lose its structural integrity, its nuclear center.

Despite Zwemer’s characterization of Islam as a dying religion, and “a unit”, he was nevertheless a well-connected local authority on the many differences between Islamic reform movements of the era. But, rather than treating these differences as a normal part of the heterogeneous nature of any changing religious tradition, Zwemer extracted local data for his own ends, characterizing each reform movement as last-ditch “revolts” against “Islam in its hard traditional form”. For example, Zwemer separated each “revolt” into three different types:

“Attempt to spiritualize its doctrines (Sufism); attempts to rid it of excrescences, that is, to minimize the weight of tradition, as in the case of the Wahabis; and finally, especially in recent years, syncretism (new wine into old bottles) by the establishment of new sects, such as Babism, Bahaism, and the Ahmadiya movement. This might be called Moslem eclecticism”.

(Zwemer 1916, p. 64)

Zwemer spent much of his account of Muslim reform movements on the Wahabis, an “attempt at Arabian reformation… by a return to primitive Islam” (Zwemer 1916, p. 77), and the Ahmadiya movement, a new sect that served as the exemplar of “syncretism”, the explosive outcome that occurs whenever new wine is placed into old wineskins, or whenever “Islam is in touch with Christianity” (more on the wine metaphor shortly).23 Despite a fairly impressive knowledge of the particularities of Muslim reform movements, Zwemer concluded that all of these attempts would ultimately end in disappointment. Rather than containing any vital energy that could progress Islam forward, each case operated for Zwemer as evidence that the Muslim World was revolting against its “traditional form”, whose germs of death were ultimately leading toward its inevitable disintegration.

In Zwemer’s outsider status as expert on Islam for the West, he extracts local knowledge on Muslim reform movements and uses it for an Anglo Protestant vision of global Christianization. In so doing, Zwemer’s narrative of “revolt against traditional Islam” serves to normalize his understanding of true Islam (what he calls traditional Islam) as ancient and unchanging (incompatible with the modern world), while identifying any new reform movements that do not fit this version as constituting an unhealthy growth incoherent with traditional Islam.24 These modernist Islam movements, were, in other words, less natural adaptations with the times than a volatile result of the disintegrating effects of modernity on the Muslim world. In Zwemer’s hands, the story of a changing “Muslim world” was deployedfor his own ends. Those changes did not come from within Islam itself (Islam had no internal potency of life, after all), but as a destructive result from its clash with the West.

4. Radioactive Transformations

In utilizing the biological concept of the “germ” as a figuration of Islam’s incapacity with (modern) life, Zwemer joins a host of evolutionary metaphors popular to the governing logics of nineteenth century imperialism. As Cara Daggett details, alongside the conflation of evolution with the idea of “progress”, which dominated Victorian era theories of evolutionary change, the emergence of energy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries became a political rationality that justified extractivism and imperial capitalism. In Daggett’s words,

“Energy metaphors and discourses were deployed as part of the scientific spirit of new imperialism, a momentous acceleration of European empires that began in the 1870s, with the so-called scramble for Africa, and lasted until the disintegration of European empires at the end of the Second World War”.

(Daggett 2019, p. 8)

In her groundbreaking manuscript The Birth of Energy, Daggett examines the rise of thermodynamics as an imperial science that appeared “alongside and through evolution and ecology” as imperial models of governance. Thermodynamics followed the discovery of energy in the 1840s. “Energy was born in the plumes of coal smoke”, Daggett writes, “wafting from Glaswegian shipbuilding factories and the British steamships that corralled its Victorian empire” (Daggett 2019, pp. 15–24). Even while the steam ship was already well on its way to transforming European empires, the process by which burning coal produced motion remained shrouded in mystery (Daggett 2019, p. 4). Presbyterian Scottish scientists in Glasgow offered the theory of thermodynamics in an attempt to clarify the physics of the steam engine, namely, the conservation of energy (energy can neither be created or destroyed but only change form), and the idea of entropy (the unavailability of a system’s energy to be converted into mechanical work). As Daggett details, the science of energy was reconciled with Scottish Presbyterianism as a way of explaining change in a rapidly changing world. Under the law of thermodynamics, energy was either being converted into available fuel for a rapidly growing system, or, more tragically, it was being wasted, leading to death and decay.25

In addition to the science of thermodynamics emerging on the coattails of the coal mine and steam ship came the proliferation of oil in the 19th century and a host of new scientific discoveries that have addended our modern conception of energy (Rowe 2024). For example, in 1896, radioactivity was discovered. Unknown as to how or why such radioactivity took place, the discoveries of radium, uranium, and other radioactive elements led to the emergence of nuclear physics and the discovery of the elemental parts of an atom: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Leading the charge was Ernest Rutherford and his colleague Frederick Soddy, who showed in their experiments with radium that radioactive substances would release alpha particles and change their atomic structure, leading to the transformation of radium into helium (Rutherford and Soddy n.d.). This resulted in Rutherford’s 1902 conclusion (for which he would win a Nobel prize), known as disintegration theory: “that elements could disintegrate and be transformed into other elements” (The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1908). While the cause of the transformation was unknown to Rutherford in his initial experiments, an “explosive disturbance within the atom” would cause an emission of energy from the atom, resulting in what he described as its “emanation”, a residual substance distinct from radium. As Rutherford wrote, “The residue of an atom, in consequence of the loss of an (alpha) particle, is lighter than before, and becomes the atom of a new substance quite distinct in chemical and physical properties from its parent”.26 This rare substance ended up being the element helium, an emanation of several radioactive transformations that underwent disintegration, resulting in Rutherford’s rather conclusive theory of radioactive disintegration.

The theory of disintegration offered an alternative theory of change from the concept of “plasticity” also commonly used by Protestant missions (as I detail elsewhere).27 Rather than merely changing form through evolutionary processes like adaptation, under disintegration theory, the application of radioactive material could lead a substance to becoming a new substance altogether with completely different chemical and physical properties. Disintegration theory highlighted the fact that even matter’s basic building blocks in the atom could be further broken down. Through an “explosive disturbance”, radioactivity could cause an element to lose part of its nuclear structure and become an entirely different element, emanating additional energetic gases in its wake. In short, it was a change not merely in form, but in essence. By the mid-1920s, chemists had developed procedures for artificially disintegrating elements by bombarding them with high-speed (alpha) particles, originally through radioactive substances like radium, but a process now commonly accomplished through particle accelerators (Rutherford 1924). This, of course, in addition to offering us quite the vivid imagery for what 20th century political scientist Samuel Huntington (and John Mott and Basil Mathews long before him28), have called “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996), also led to the demand for uranium by the early to mid-20th century, when the Manhattan Project would build a bomb that would once again change how change is conceptualized in modern geopolitics (Voyles 2015; Hecht 2012).

5. Will Reformed Islam Be Islam Any Longer?

Having seen his mission site now occupied by an allied “Protestant Power” hungry for oil after its invasion of Basrah during the First World War, Zwemer’s foreboding prediction of Islam’s downfall in 1915 nevertheless had a longer foundation in the decades of European imperial advance. It seemed the formerly closed door of the “Muslim world” was finally opening as European powers marked Muslim lands for colonial governance, resource extraction, and global economic expansion:

“The Caliphate has been one of the foundations of the Moslem state from the days of Abu Bakr; it will perchance disappear in the suicide of Turkey. Persia has been “strangled” by Russia and England. Egypt has been made a protectorate; Tripoli seized by Italy as the last piece of goods on the bargain counter of Africa; Morocco already belongs to France; only Afghanistan and part of Arabia retain nominal independence and even these wild, lawless lands are already marked by Great Britain”.

(Zwemer 1916, p. 107)

The political nature of the Ottoman collapse and the additional pressure being placed on Persia and Arabia was, for Zwemer, especially significant in his adjudication of the so-called Muslim World. Because Islam was perceived to be a “unity of political theory and of ideals of civilisation as well as of religion”, the political collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate signaled, for Zwemer, its impending disintegration. With the political nucleus of Islam disintegrating, the Muslim world was being transformed into something new altogether. “When the attempt is made”, Zwemer wrote, “the question naturally arises whether these changes and reforms are possible without being anti-religious. Will reformed Islam, even along economic and ethical lines, be Islam any longer?” (Zwemer 1916, pp. 123–24).

To give additional clarity to his question, Zwemer highlighted a common issue that arose when European corporate ventures attempted to purchase concession rights to explore Muslim lands for oil. Zwemer commented on Muslim resistance to interest-bearing loans as well as a more general resistance to privatize and sell property that had been set aside for religious endowments (waqf). He questioned “Will doing so disinherit as well as disestablish the Moslem Church? …Yet this is the very question which is at the basis of real economic progress in many parts of the Muslim world” (Zwemer 1916, pp. 123–24). As Historian Katayoun Shafiee suggests in her infrastructural history of British Petroleum in Iran, Machineries of Oil, European and US powers relied heavily on land concessions to secure their control of the worldwide oil market. But, in doing so, these same arrangements served to break up the property arrangements of local communities, including religious land endowments. In the case of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, several property disputes complicated setting the terms of William D’Arcy’s original 1901 concession with the Iranian government. As Shafiee discusses, “there was ambiguity in the terms defining the kinds of property that persisted in English versus Persian terms”. While the concession discussed property as “cultivated” or “uncultivated”, “the rules of property in Iran at the time did not entail or imply the same concepts in English as in Persian” (Shafiee 2018, p. 34). Read through Zwemer, Muslim economic customs and epistemologies of land were considered incompatible with those extractive modes of relationship that were the backbone of the British capitalist economy. Zwemer suggests that if local Muslims in Persia (Iran) were to embrace these economic changes, it would not signal a modernized Islam, however, but the abandonment of “traditional Islam” altogether. “Will doing so disestablish the Moslem Church?”

Notably, Zwemer’s conclusion about Islam was not far off from another heavily read source on Islam by Western audiences at the turn of the century, the Earl of Cromer, Evelyn Baring, who served as the consul-general in Egypt during the British occupation from 1883 to 1907. In 1908, Lord Cromer published a massive two-volume manuscript Modern Egypt (the same year as Zwemer’s The Moslem World), emerging equally as critical as Zwemer of the reformability of Islam. “The truth is”, the Earl wrote, “that in passing through the European educational mill, the young Egyptian Moslem loses his Islamism, or, at all events, he loses the best part of it. He cuts himself adrift from the sheet-anchor of his creed… the Europeanized Egyptian is no true Moslem”. Like Zwemer, the Earl of Cromer was also making normative judgements about what constitutes true Islam, positioning its essential form in opposition to Europeanness. However, losing one’s true Muslimness for the Europeanized Egyptian was not necessarily a positive thing for the Earl, especially from his position as colonial administrator. For the Earl, religion was the backbone of any moral system, and an important ingredient in having moral subjects of a liberalized state. “European civilization destroyed one religion without substituting another in its place”. Perhaps seeking to provoke additional efforts on behalf of Christian missionaries, the Earl added, “It remains to be seen whether the code of Christian morality, on which European civilization is based can be dissociated from the teaching of Christian religion”.29

6. Basil Mathews on the Muslim “Ferment”

For Basil Mathews, the monumental change underway in the “Moslem World” was also a result of its sudden clash with the West. However, unlike Zwemer, Mathews would describe these changes through the biopolitical grammar of fermentation. The “ferment in the youth”, as Mathews began his essay in John Mott’s 1925 collected volume The Moslem World of To-day (1925), was a like a “torrent”, or a “sweeping tidal wave” whose “waves break upon youth born and bred within the most rigid, resistant, and self-complete of the world’s religious and social systems…” (Mott 1925). By 1925, the prolific English writer Basil Mathews (1879–1951) had served as the Literature Secretary for the World’s Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations and the Editorial Secretary for the London Missionary Society. At the end of the First World War and after the fall of the Turkish Caliphate in 1924, consensus on Islam’s impending downfall was growing throughout Protestant missionary networks, so Mott brought together some of the most knowledgeable Anglophone voices to provide their commentary on the present state of “the Moslem world” (Mott 1925).

The primarily reason given by Mathews to the “ferment” in the youth of Islam was the “vehement nationalism issuing in an uncompromising and unqualified clamour for self-determination”. Nationalism was as an “explosive” idea for Mathews, so impactful that the “Moslem mind” was “no longer closed against new ideas” (Mott 1925, p. 62). Mathews continued, “In the mind of Moslem youth the idea of the nation has irreparably torn into fragments the enormous, heavy tapestry of pan-Islamism. Nothing parallel to this has happened in the mind of any generation of youth since the Reformation shattered the unity of the Holy Roman Empire” (Mott 1925, p. 63). Notably, Mathews also relates the “idea of the nation” with a reference to an era of reform, a naturally occurring response to its contact with the more vital and energetic Christian West. Utilizing the historical myths of European Christendom, Mathews viewed reform not only through the lens of the 16th century Protestant Reformation and break-off from Roman Catholicism, but also through Christianity’s second-century break-off from Temple Judaism as illustrated by Jesus’ parable of the wineskins.

Here, we might consider the work of Kyla Wazana Tompkins, who shows how fermentation became essential to the material and historical projection of the 19th century reformist nation (Tompkins 2014). Tomkins shows in the US context how ferment—and yeast in particular—was critical to the reformist dietetics of Sylvester Graham, whose famous “Graham Bread” sought to rid human (biopolitical) consumption of spices, sugar, and alcohol. In his attempt to achieve a proper fermentation, Graham Bread would yield more stable and desirable effects on the human diet and, ultimately, on the health of the racial population. Following Tompkins’, we find that ferment offers two complimentary meanings. First, it refers to the metabolic sense of fermentation—as in, a lively, energetic transformation like when bread rises, or when grapes ferment into wine—a biochemical reaction whose science had been abuzz since the mid-19th century discoveries of Louis Pasteur (Latour 1988). Fermentation consists of a metabolic chemical reaction of yeast on glucose, producing both alcohol, on the one hand, and energetic gases (CO₂), on the other, that provide the leaven for bread and fizz for beer and wine. While both metabolic processes had been used for centuries, their science had long remained a relative mystery.

In Jesus’ parable of the wineskins (found in the each of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke), fermentation signified the emergence of the Jesus Way, a community perceived by Jesus’ onlookers as a derivative form of Rabbinic Judaism. When Jesus was asked why his disciples did not fast as the Pharisees did, Jesus replied that one does not “put new wine into old wineskins; else the skins burst”. Instead, one ought to “pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved”.30 For many interpreters of the parable, Jesus’ comments suggest a kind of break between the Jesus movement and tradition of temple Judaism that he inherited. As Jesus traveled through Palestine, healing the sick and disabled and gaining crowds of followers, the Jesus movement seemed to be something new altogether, not subject to the rigid interpretations of the Law of Moses.31 Here was not merely another Jewish reform movement—but the Messiah—who had come to give his followers “new life” at the decaying periphery of the Holy Roman Empire.

This metaphor of fermentation as a stand-in for new life—for energetic transformation—became a notable recurrence in Mott’s volume of writers eager to explain the promise of Christianity for the region. In Mathews’ use, however, it also illustrated the bursting effects of what occurs when the lively modern world encounters the old, rigid, system of Islam. In this sense, ferment was also used to refer to its corollary meaning, as in foment—to agitate, excite, or produce unrest—as in the release of carbon dioxide causing a previously still juice to bubble and to come to life. In this sense, as the Muslim world encounters the yeastier Christian West, the formerly motionless substance suddenly comes alive, bubbles with energy, and, in doing do, bursts the old wineskins of the Islamic tradition into a wave of fomenting political fanaticisms.

Mathews’ account of the “Ferment in the Youth of Islam” was from a firsthand observation of Egyptian youth at Al Azhar University in Cairo. Cairo was, according to Mathews, “the intellectual head of Islam and… the nerve-centre of forces playing between North Africa, Nearer Asia, and Europe, the place of greatest ferment”. Julius Richter, Professor of Missions at the University of Berlin, similarly explained the “curious homogeneity in…the world of Islam with Mecca as its heart, Cairo as its head, and Constantinople as its hands” (Mott 1925, p. 21). Mathews spoke of the impact of the Young Turks in the nationalist movement in Turkey and of the antagonisms between Arabs and Jews in Palestine in the aftermath of the Belfour Declaration. And, notably, his portrayal of Muslim ferment in Cairo had followed a heightened period of anticolonial nationalism in Egypt from 1919 to 1922 which had led to the British eventually recognizing the Kingdom of Egypt as a nominally independent state. In each case, while the British Empire had supposedly contributed to the modernizing of the region, each was also followed by waves of unrest and political agitation.

Mathews’ language of the rising tide—of waves and ferment—took on an air of inevitability as Mathews detailed the movement of British imperialism into Cairo. For Mathews, however, the rise of Egyptian nationalism was less a result of Muslim agency resisting British imperialism than Muslim youth “absorbing” Western ideas. In doing so, Mathews focused on the fact that nationalism was a youth movement; a youth of which were increasingly “imitating” Western technical, political, and economic science:

“I looked around the faces of the dozen younger men who had assembled from the village for the talk, it was clear that for them these were the supremely absorbing issues that were fermenting in their minds. Many of them were clearly unable to read; but they were discussing issues identical with those that reverberate in the cloisters of Al Azhar University”.

(Mott 1925, p. 65)

According to Mathews, the anticolonial nationalist discussion taking place on the streets of Cairo was in response to the “extension of white, and in a technical sense, Christian authority over Moslem peoples” (Mott 1925, p. 65). And for the mass of uneducated Egyptian youth, while a formal Western education was still the most desirable, Mathews nevertheless insisted on the clear benefits of white Christian rule that were already leaving an indelible mark. British rule brought a raised “standard of living… the sewing-machine and the telephone, the electric light and the automobile, the typewriter and the dictaphone, the rotary printing press, the street car, and the cinema”, all those forces of Western technical science that were pushing “in upon a life that has been practically static for centuries” (Mott 1925, p. 66). While Christianity had yet to take root in the Muslim world, Mathews nevertheless saw the effects of Western technology on Islam, a fermentation process that was beginning to see noticeable energetic effects, for good or ill.

Mathews’ use of the grammar of ferment, then, also served as a warning for Protestant missionaries and colonial administrators. While it provided Protestants with evidence that the region was finally capable of change, “imitating” and “absorbing” Western ideas, not all changes were necessarily seen as equally desirable. Mathews cautioned:

“to impregnate the mind of Moslem youth with secular Western ideas, to break down through Western commerce Moslem traditional habits of business, to replace peasant industries a highly organized factory system, is not to move an inch nearer to Christianity. When at dawn the factory siren calling youth to the factory has drowned the voice of the muezzin calling to prayer, and when the factory chimney has replaced the minaret, we have not moved toward the Kingdom of God”.

(Mott 1925, p. 69)

Mathews was cognizant of the “white man’s burden” that occurred when disintegrating a former social order, including its traditional habits, systems, and rituals. But it was not enough to replace the ritualized habit of public prayer with the occupational rituals of industrial capitalism absent its foundational moral center.

Mathews saw this as especially dangerous due to the rise of Bolshevism, where in certain parts of the world, the “relatively primitive Moslems swing towards the most extreme phrase of sovietization, that is, clan communism, [which] is natural [and] fits their tribal background far more easily than state communism” (Mott 1925, p. 72). A breakdown of traditional Muslim habits through fermentation, Mathews warns, opens a population up to unforeseen, possibly explosive energies. In this sense, Mathews was not far off from Harvard-trained US historian Lothrop Stoddard who critical of “Christian polemicists”, including “Samuel Zwemer, the well-known missionary to the Arabs” (Stoddard 1921, p. 27). As Stoddard detailed in his 1921 publication The New World of Islam, the “profound ferment” undertaking “the entire world of Islam”, was not evolutionary but revolutionary. “A healthy organism well attuned to its environment is always plastic”, Stoddard wrote. “It instinctively senses environmental changes and adapts itself so rapidly that it escapes the injurious consequences of disharmony”. For an organism of “ill-health”, however, any “sudden breaks with the past” leads to unrest, including the “possibility of one of those violent crises known as ‘revolutions.’” (Stoddard 2008, p. 273). Unlike Zwemer, or European administrators like Lord Cromer, Stoddard believed Islam was not only capable or reform, but that its active rise could spell the end of white world supremacy (Stoddard 1920). Read alongside Mathews, containing this explosive foment would be crucial to managing and optimizing changes in the Muslim world.

Finally, Mathews laid out his aspirations for the Moslem world if properly guided by Christian influences. He spoke most glowingly, for example, of the possibilities of Christian educational institutions like Robert College in Constantinople and the International College in Smyrna. It was in these institutions of Christian formation that a constructive force could benefit the future of the Muslim world, where the energies of change could be productively nurtured and guided. “It may well be that, at the end of the day”, Mathews wrote, “we shall discover that the men who have in their lives this less explosive ferment, this leaven of human strength of character, this blend of progress with permanence, are the real constructive forces of the new world in Moslem lands” (Mott 1925, p. 74). While Islam’s clash with the West was leading to a growing ferment in youth, it was as of yet an imitative and explosive energy, the ferment of a youth not yet capable of its own constructive potential. The language of ferment, for Mathews, highlighted the emergent vitality and life of a region formerly fossilized in the past. However, it also signified a kind of change that if not properly guided by Christianity—absent a new wineskin to control, guide, and nurture its new energies—could bring about political foment. Christianity was, in the mind of Mathews, the only substitute of the old wineskin of Islam. It was the only constructive force able to properly ferment youth in the region toward a modern future.

7. Conclusions

The late 19th and early 20th century saw not only the emergence of the idea of “the Muslim world” for European racial governance, but the utilization of a host of energetic grammars always already tied to the changing material conditions of empire and extraction. Samuel Zwemer helped produce the idea of “the Muslim World” as a racial “unit” while serving as a missionary in an Arabian Peninsula flanked by the Suez Canal with its implications for Mecca and Medina on one side, and the discovery and extraction of oil along the Persian Gulf on the other. And the growing optimism of Protestant missionaries only gained more steam with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of European imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It was in these material and discursive entanglements where extracting knowledge about Islam became important tools of European colonial governance, and where energetic grammars of religion became critical to the biopolitical production and management of racialized Muslim populations. The changes occurring, in this situation, were not simply semantic points of contention for states attempting to differentiate between those supposedly capable of change and those stuck in a rigid past. They were changes that were literally produced and seized upon through the extractive modes of relationship of European imperialism.