The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

colonialism

The expansion of Europe into the heartlands of the Muslim world in the 19th and early 20th centuries not only posed a sustained political and military threat to native populations but also prompted an internal debate over how best to renew Muslim societies that were apparently in decline. Under colonial rule, Islamic reformism and, increasingly, nationalism were the main vehicles for this debate, which continued over subsequent decades once it became evident that the end of European occupation did not necessarily lead to political independence. To figures as diverse as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Osama bin Laden, the insidious workings of neocolonialism still restrained the development of the Arab and Islamic worlds.

European colonialism typically encountered sporadic armed resistance as it spread across first North Africa and then the Near East. Anticolonial revolts often legitimized themselves by appealing to the concept of jihad, though in some cases the mythic paradigm of the Mahdi, or redeemer, was invoked to galvanize the local community’s millenarian zeal. Such resistance was largely rural, rooted in Sufi networks and united by the extraordinary charisma of one individual leader. Traditional urban elites, in contrast, were more accustomed to the need for political agility and typically acquiesced to the new European rule. The rebellion of ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri against the French in Algeria (1830–47) provides one of the earliest examples of this form of resistance. Taking advantage of the speed and mobility of his irregular troops, ‘Abd al-Qadir used guerrilla tactics to good effect against the slow, cumbersome, and heavily armored columns of France’s Armée d’Afrique. His revolt ended only when General Bugeaud made the transition to lighter columns and the collective punishment of Algerian villagers the keystone of his military strategy. Just as the Qadiri Sufi order played an important role in this revolt, so too did the Sanusi brotherhood seek to counter Italy’s invasion of Libya (1911) from their stronghold in Cyrenaica. The Sanusi also fought against the British in Egypt (1915) and the French in sub-Saharan Africa; their battle against the Italians in Libya did not end until 1931. In Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad (1844–85) was declared a Mahdi and led a revolt against Egyptian rule in 1881, resulting in the creation of an independent state until Britain’s Lord Kitchener reconquered the region in 1898.

While this early resistance largely drew on religious attachments and rural networks, after World War I, local populations increasingly turned to nationalism to provide their desire for independence with a coherent ideological framework. This development paralleled the construction of modern state forms in the Middle East (most evident in the mandated territories of Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon) and the reorientation of political life toward urban centers, which soon became the most important arena for politics. Rural revolts continued to erupt in reaction to the imposition of British and French rule, most notably in Iraq (1920) and Syria (1925–27), but in many countries, outright insurgencies were superseded by new forms of urban resistance, such as student demonstrations, strikes, and public protests. Elites who formerly had not been inclined to contest European rule while it supported their interests found their positions as compradors increasingly untenable. Admittedly, these elites were handed the reins of power by the colonial authorities upon their departure, but more often than not these “bourgeois nationalist” regimes were overthrown by a younger, more radical generation that sought to purge the traces of colonial complicity from their newly independent states.

The Muslim world’s inability to withstand European penetration preoccupied social and religious thinkers in the 19th century who asked, first, how Muslims could modernize their societies without mimicking the West and, second, how they could secure independence from Europe. The two questions were intimately related. Afghani (1838–97) thought that Islam’s essential vitality could be seen in the successful episodes of armed resistance against the Europeans; he advocated a deep sociocultural revival to wake the Muslim people from their slumber. This line of argument can be traced from Afghani to the writings of Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) and his followers, who were also proponents of Islamic reformism. But it also carried through to the postindependence period, when political ideologues couched their appeals to the dormant nationalism of their people in remarkably similar terms. Mystified by the failure of the Egyptian masses to come out in support of the Free Officers coup of 1952, Nasser concluded that his nation’s sleeping political will could be revived only through a profound social and political transformation. Bin Laden also expressed the belief that a moral awakening was the sole necessary condition for reasserting Muslim civilization against the West’s ongoing occupation of Islamic lands. This focus on Muslim moral regeneration as a tool to cast off colonial domination was prevalent in popular Arab political discourse, and structural questions regarding the global system (such as economic dependency) were featured mostly as second-order issues.

Suspicion of Western domination remained alive in many developing countries, and the mere existence of the State of Israel rendered such concerns especially acute in the Middle East. To nationalists and Islamists alike, Israel represented the enduring success of colonialism in the region. For many Arabs and Muslims, the 2003 occupation of Iraq confirmed that colonialism could not yet be consigned to the history books.