Prof named National Humanities Center fellow

Historian to study Mecca in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate

By Clay Evans

John M. Willis, assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been named a fellow of the National Humanities Center.

One of 30 fellows named for the 2014-15 academic year, he will be in residence at the center in North Carolina from September through May, and plans to spend time working on “After the Caliphate: Mecca and the Geography of Crisis and Hope,” an examination of Mecca as the site of various anticipatory political projects in the period after the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate.



“I’ll be in residence with around 40 other scholars of different ranks. I’ll be given an office and I’m more or less there to work on the project and interact with my colleagues there,” Willis says. “During the year I’ll be presenting my research, and I’ll have library support from Duke University and (the University of North Carolina at) Chapel Hill.”

“These leading scholars will come to the center from 16 states, Canada, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and the United Kingdom,” says Don Solomon, a spokesman for the center. “Chosen from 362 applicants, they represent humanistic scholarship in anthropology, art history, classics and archaeology, communications studies, history, law, literature, political science, philosophy and religion.”

Willis is the fourth CU-Boulder faculty member to be chosen as a fellow at the center, including Professor of History Fred Anderson, who was selected for 2012-13.

“Fred Anderson is part of the reason I applied in the first place. I’m very excited. It will be a wonderful place to work on new material,” Willis says.

The caliphate project examines the two decades of history between World War I and World War II in the Islamic world. The first war brought about the collapse of the Ottomans and “the last great Islamic empire,” Willis says. There was a simultaneous effect in Europe, with the collapse of empire.

“This was a sign of a new period of political order but the parameters were unclear. You had things like Bolshevism, pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism, all distinct from the European international system,” he says.

Within that context, the holy city of Mecca came to embody a vision of hope for the future for Muslims from across the Middle East and into India.

“This brings Muslims together for the Haj” — the pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of Islam — “no matter their nationality. But how can this provide a model for a future community after the caliphate? Putting it into practice proved difficult,” Willis says.

The idea of a caliphate is a potent symbol of the universality of the Islamic message, but there is little agreement about what it would even look like in the modern era, Willis says.

“What should it be? A symbol or informal system in which people enact ethical directives, or should it actually be a state?” he says.

Despite that lack of unanimity in the Islamic world, ideas like the caliphate and sharia (Islamic) law generate anxiety for many Westerners, who imagine they represent a system antithetical to their values and way of life, but often don’t go beyond that. Willis, who has lived in Egypt, Yemen and India, finds most such fears uninformed and exaggerated.

“Often, the thing people are afraid of is more an idea than the real thing. When people think of the Caliphate, they just imagine a system antithetical to the one in which they live,” he says. “But there is a great diversity of Islamic thought, and there are various communities of interpretation. Islam is not institutionalized. There is no hierarchy, no compulsion to follow any one school of thought.”

Clay Evans is director of public relations for CU Presents.

June 25, 2014