Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization

with Esmat Elhalaby

hosted by Susanna Ferguson

| How did Palestine become central to anti-imperial movements and thought in the global south? In this episode, Esmat Elhalaby asks how Arabs and South Asians contended with the “parting gifts of empire” in the long twentieth century, often by turning to Palestine. He talks about how Arab writers in conversation with India reinvented Orientalism as a critique of empire and reinterpreted the political possibilities and limitations of Islam as a political force. We close with a discussion of Esmat’s new work on the intellectual history of Gaza, the importance of talking about “bad Palestinians,” and what it means to write history at a time of genocide.   

Click for RSS Feed

How did Palestine become central to anti-imperial movements and thought in the global south? In this episode, Esmat Elhalaby asks how Arabs and South Asians contended with the “parting gifts of empire” in the long twentieth century, often by turning to Palestine. He talks about how Arab writers in conversation with India reinvented Orientalism as a critique of empire and reinterpreted the political possibilities and limitations of Islam as a political force. We close with a discussion of Esmat’s new work on the intellectual history of Gaza, the importance of talking about “bad Palestinians,” and what it means to write history at a time of genocide.   

Contributor Bios

	Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto. His first book, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization was published by the University of California Press in 2025.
	Susanna Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Smith College. She writes and teaches on the history of gender, sexuality, and political thought in the modern Arab world.

Credits

Episode No. 580

Release Date: 11 February 2026

Sound production by Susanna Ferguson and Chris Gratien

Special thanks to Nada Moumtaz

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

Bibliography courtesy of Esmat Elhalaby

Further Listening

	Greg Thomas	366 7/11/18	George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine
	Rashid Khalidi	553 11/19/23	The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
	Suja Sawafta	414 6/14/19	The Environmental Politics of Abdul Rahman Munif
	Salim Tamari	367 7/17/18	The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine
	Faiz Ahmed	443 1/4/20	Afghanistan's Constitution and the Ottoman Empire

Select Bibliography

Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. “The Pitfalls of Palestiniology.” Arab Studies Quarterly 3 no.4 (1981).

ʿAlam, Suhayb, ed. al-Hind fi al-shiʿr al-ʿArabi. Rampur: Raza Rampur Library, 2010. 

Berman, Edward H. The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.

Chandra, Satish. "A Note On the Decentring of History and Apprehension By All People of Their History," Diogenes 20 no. 77 (1972). 

Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996

Datla, Kavita. The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial Hyderabad. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013

Elhalaby, Esmat. Arab Archives and Asian Histories. World Humanities Report, CHCI, 2023.

Elhalaby, Esmat. “Genocide and the Limits of History in Gaza,” Journal of Palestine Studies 54:3 (2025). 

Hammad, Hanan. “From Orientalism to Khomeinism: A century of Persian studies in Egypt.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 35 (May 2015).

Jansen, G.H. Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. 

Jansen, G.H. Zionism, Israel and Asian Nationalism. Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1971. 

Khan, Noor-Aiman. Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 

Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 

Said, Edward. “The Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism.” Gazelle Review  2 (1977):  47-52.

Thomson, Sorcha and Pelle Valentin Olsen, Palestine in the World International Solidarity with the Palestinian Liberation Movement. London: I.B. Tauris, 2023. 

Willis, John M. “Making Yemen Indian: Rewriting the Boundaries of Imperial Arabia,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 no. 1 (2009).