Arabic, Persian, and Turkic, as shared literary languages of the Muslim world, provided a means of communication and a basis for political coordination to the early generations of radical anticolonial writers and thinkers from Jakarta, Cairo, and Timbuktu; Bukhara, Lahore, and Tabriz; Istanbul, Kazan, and Kashgar. These revolutionaries read each other’s newspapers, spent years of exile in each other’s regions, and developed rich literary subcultures based on their shared cultural traditions. Ultimately, these activists’ shared projects of independence, vernacularization, and national modernization produced a far less continuous linguistic and cultural space, with new patterns of coordination and solidarity. Three new books explore this transnational world of literary and political revolution, providing different vantage points on the ways that world contributed to the making of the national literatures and world literature that we have inherited today.
