Just 'a Strange Polish Muslim'?

Abstract

By concentrating on the case study of Seyfeddin Thadée Gasztowtt (1881–1936)—a peripatetic activist, journalist and convert to Islam of Polish origin, who tied the issue of Poland’s independence to the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim world in the wake of the 1905 Japanese victory over Russia, this paper discusses opportunities of biography for global intellectual history. Focus on mobile individuals who operated in transcultural settings can help us to understand how major turning points in international history become global moments as these moments gain global significance only by virtue of activists seizing them and employing them in the service of their respective causes. A biographical approach gains us insights into how individuals were shaped by these watershed moments and at the same time were productive in them. A microscale analysis offered by biography can elucidate the processes of cross-cultural intellectual transfer and transregional entanglement in all their complexity.