People’s Mission to the Ottoman Empire: M.A. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission, 1912-13

During the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, concerned Muslims around India mobilized to dispatch three medical teams to treat wounded Ottoman soldiers. Among them, the one organized by Mohammad Ali Jauhar and directed by Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari caught the limelight, thanks to the regular letters sent home by the director of the Mission and published in the weekly Comrade journal. In the body of scholarship on Ottoman pan-Islamism, as a manifestation of pan-Islamist political ideology and Muslim internationalist action and its influence on the 1919 Khilafat Movement in India, the 1912-13 Indian Medical Mission has not been analysed in detail.

This book studies the letters by the director of the Mission and the political and ideational context of the period to provide the first full narrative history of the Medical Mission, detailing its simultaneously humanitarian and political purposes and activities in Turkey. The Mission was as much a humanitarian initiative as it was an effort to heal the pride of the Muslim population in India.