Imam/Merchant/King: Floating Sovereignty and the Indian Ocean World

This lecture explores the question of de-territorialized sovereignty through the history of one of the Indian Ocean world’s itinerant Muslim merchant communities: the Khojas. The Khojas were one of a handful of groups from Gujarat who came to dominate oceanic trade during the colonial period. The lecture considers the relationship of the Khojas to their imam, the Aga Khan, and argues that his person came to function as a unique figuration of their otherwise “invisible” or detached sovereignty, one that was linked to neither state nor territory. From the nineteenth century onwards, the first Aga Khan and his heirs gradually mapped their authority out of, rather than onto, dynamic Khoja concepts. By the moment of decolonisation and the materialisation of nation-states around the Indian Ocean, “the imam” emerged for the Khojas by collapsing three previously discreet forms of authority into a single frame: the king (shah), the saint (pir), and the merchant-lord (sheth). Drawing on a range of accounts from Bombay, Dar es Salaam, Gwadar, and Zanzibar, the lecture demonstrates how the Khojas combined concepts of messianism and sainthood with Indian traditions of kingship and gendered notions of seva (service). These concepts and symbols were then grafted onto the circulation of merchant capital in order to produce the figure of the imam anew. This figure was abstracted from territory and functioned as a king without a geographical kingdom; not unlike modern currency, the circulating and globally dispersed Khojas were effectively ‘pinned’ to their floating imam.

Taushif Kara is an historian of Muslim political thought at King’s College London, where he is currently a Lecturer in Modern Islamic History in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies. He has taught at SOAS and at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, and has held research fellowships at the University of Chicago, the Alwaleed bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, and Jesus College, Cambridge, from where he obtained his PhD. His first book project, Invisible Sovereignty: Islam and political thought in the Indian Ocean world is based on his thesis.