The Legacy of European Occupation

The European powers colonized one Islamic country after

another. France occupied Algeria in 1830, and Britain Aden

nine years later. Tunisia was occupied in 1881, Egypt in 1882,

the Sudan in 1889 and Libya and Morocco in 1912. In 1915 the

Sykes-Picot agreement divided the territories of the moribund

Ottoman Empire (which had sided with Germany during the

First World War) between Britain and France in anticipation of

victory. After the war, Britain and France duly set up protectorates

and mandates in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and

Transjordan. This was experienced as an outrage, since the

European powers had promised the Arab provinces of the

Ottoman Empire independence. In the Ottoman heartlands,

Mustafa Kemal, known as Atatürk (1881-1938), was able to

keep the Europeans at bay and set up the independent state of

Turkey. Muslims in the Balkans, Russia and Central Asia became

subject to the new Soviet Union. Even after some of these

countries had been allowed to become independent, the West

often continued to control the economy, the oil or such resources

as the Suez Canal. European occupation often left a

legacy of bitter conflict. When the British withdrew from India

in 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned between

Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, which are to this day in a

state of deadly hostility, with nuclear weapons aimed at each

other's capitals. In 1948 the Arabs of Palestine lost their homeland

to the Zionists, who set up the Jewish secular state of Israel

there, with the support of the United Nations and the

international community. The loss of Palestine became a potent

symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the

hands of the Western powers, who seemed to feel no qualms

about the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of

thousands of Palestinians.

Fundamentalism

The Western media often give the impression that the embattled

and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as

"fundamentalism" is a purely Islamic phenomenon. This is

not the case. Fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced

in every major faith in response to the problems of our

modernity. There is fundamentalist Judaism, fundamentalist

Christianity, fundamentalist Hinduism, fundamentalist Buddhism,

fundamentalist Sikhism and even fundamentalist

Confucianism. This type of faith surfaced first in the Christian

world in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth

century. This was not accidental. Fundamentalism is not

a monolithic movement; each form of fundamentalism, even

within the same tradition, develops independently and has its

own symbols and enthusiasms, but its different manifestations

all bear a family resemblance. It has been noted that a fundamentalist 

movement does not arise immediately, as a kneejerk

response to the advent of Western modernity, but only

takes shape when the modernization process is quite far advanced.

At first religious people try to reform their traditions

and effect a marriage between them and modern culture, as

we have seen the Muslim reformers do. But when these moderate

measures are found to be of no avail, some people resort

to more extreme methods, and a fundamentalist movement is

born. With hindsight, we can see that it was only to be expected

that fundamentalism should first make itself known in

the United States, the showcase of modernity, and only appear

in other parts of the world at a later date. Of the three

monotheistic religions, Islam was in fact the last to develop a

fundamentalist strain, when modern culture began to take

root in the Muslim world in the late 1960s and 1970s. By this

date, fundamentalism was quite well established among

Christians and Jews, who had had a longer exposure to the

modern experience.

Secular Ideologies and Results

The nation states of Europe embarked on an arms race

in 1870, which led ultimately to two world wars. Secular ideologies

proved to be just as murderous as the old religious bigotry,

as became clear in the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet

Gulag. The Enlightenment philosophes had believed that the

more educated people became, the more rational and tolerant

they would be. This hope proved to be as utopian as any of the

old messianic fantasies. Finally, modern society was committed

to democracy, and this had, in general, made life more just and

equitable for more people in Europe and America. But the

people of the West had had centuries to prepare for the democratic

experiment. It would be a very different matter when

modern parliamentary systems would be imposed upon societies

that were still predominantly agrarian or imperfectly

modernized, and where the vast majority of the population

found modern political discourse incomprehensible.

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But it is true that secularization has been very different in the Muslim

world. In the West, it has usually been experienced as

benign. In the early days, it was conceived by such philosophers

as John Locke (1632-1704) as a new and better way of

being religious, since it freed religion from coercive state

control and enabled it to be more true to its spiritual ideals.

But in the Muslim world, secularism has often consisted of a

brutal attack upon religion and the religious.

Atatiirk, for example, closed down all the madrasahs, suppressed

the Sufi orders and forced men and women to wear

modern Western dress. Such coercion is always counterproductive.

Islam in Turkey did not disappear, it simply went underground.

Ottomans' Struggle for Transformation

¨When the Ottomans had tried to reorganize their [16th century]army

along Western lines in the hope of containing the threat

from Europe, their efforts were doomed because they were

too superficial. To beat Europe at its own game, a conventional

agrarian society would have to transform itself from

top to bottom, and re-create its entire social, economic,

educational, religious, spiritual, political and intellectual

structures.And it would have to do this very quickly, an impossible

task, since it had taken the West almost three hundred

years to achieve this development.

The Religious Movement in Islam History

The civil wars raised many crucial questions. How could a society

that killed its devout leaders (imams) claim to be guided

by God? What kind of man should lead the ummah? Should

the caliph be the most pious Muslim (as the Kharajites believed),

a direct descendant of the Prophet (as the Shiis contended),

or should the faithful accept the Umayyads, with all

their failings, in the interests of peace and unity? Had Ali or

Muawiyyah been right during the first fitnah? And how Islamic

was the Umayyad state? Could rulers who lived in such

luxury and condoned the poverty of the vast majority of the

people be true Muslims? And what about the position of non-

Arab converts to Islam, who had to become "clients" (mawali)

of one of the Arab tribes? Did this not suggest a chauvinism

and inequity that was quite incompatible with the Quran?

It was from these political discussions that the religion and

piety of Islam, as we know it, began to emerge. Quran reciters

and other concerned people asked what it really meant to be a

Muslim. They wanted their society to be Islamic first and Arab

second. The Quran spoke of the unification (tawhid) of the

whole of human life, which meant that all the actions of the

individual and all the institutions of the state should express a

fundamental submission to God's will. At an equally formative

stage of their history, Christians had held frequently vituperative

discussions about the nature and person of Jesus, which

helped them to evolve their distinctive view of God, salvation

and the human condition. These intense Muslim debates

about the political leadership of the u m m a h after the civil wars

played a role in Islam that was similar to the great Christological

debates of the fourth and fifth centuries in Christianity.

The prototype and supreme exemplar of this new Muslim

piety was Hasan al-Basri (d. 728).