The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

imperialism

Imperialism refers to the varied practices associated with constructing and maintaining an empire. Found throughout the globe and in every period, empires are large, complex political entities that project power over heterogeneous populations and territories and rule them in ways that preserve hierarchies and distinctions among the various units that make up a given polity. Muslim societies have produced diverse imperial states from West Africa to Southeast Asia. Beginning with the era of Mongol conquests in the 13th century, Muslims have also been the subjects of empires ruled by non-Muslims. With the rise of European empires in the 15th century, even Muslim societies that did not come under direct imperial control began to confront the challenge of European expansion.

For Muslim political thinkers, this type of political form has posed varied dilemmas and opportunities. Most closely resembling empires elsewhere, the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states were territorially sprawling, multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional polities whose management involved an eclectic range of political ideas. The Ottomans interpreted their armies’ capture of Constantinople in 1453 as confirmation that they had become the inheritors of an imperial tradition dating back to the Romans. Similarly, the Safavid dynasty would draw on pre-Islamic Iranian imperial institutions and ideas, while the Mughals would seek to enhance their legitimacy by highlighting their ties to Mongol imperial precedents. Each of these dynasties would act as patrons of an imperial aesthetic in architecture, painting, and poetry to dramatize the grandeur of their power and would devise various administrative and other mechanisms to incorporate a variety of constituencies. At the same time, imperial policies toward religious institutions as well as toward heterodox and non-Muslim groups frequently sparked controversies in learned circles about balancing pragmatic accommodation in the service of imperial stability with dynastic support for Islamic norms.

The problems of empire became far more pronounced for Muslim thinkers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when European armies began to gain the upper hand in confrontations with Muslim-led states, for example, in the Russian victory in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–74 and Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798. European pressure may have had no direct impact on many of the revivalist movements in West and North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and South Asia during this period, but from Egypt to the North Caucasus and Southeast Asia, disparate Muslim thinkers began to appropriate European technologies and agitate for religious change as well as social, administrative, and military reform. Despite these measures, the British, Russians, French, and Dutch all expanded their territories at the expense of Muslim rulers.

The imposition of European rule, in turn, provoked widely divergent responses. Muslim scholars’ debates centered on controversies surrounding the status of conquered lands. For a number of thinkers, conquest transformed the territory of Islam (dār al-islām) to one ruled by unbelievers (dār al-ḥarb), thereby obligating the faithful either to wage war (jihad) or, in the view of some, to migrate (hijra) in emulation of the Prophet Muhammad. Determining when a given territory became dār al-ḥarb proved contentious, however. Many jurists, especially Sunni Muslims who followed the Hanafi school of law, drew attention to various conditions, like possession of the means to migrate, that further qualified such judgments. Indeed, for the majority of Hanafis, including most of the vast Muslim populations of British India and the Russian Empire, such states merited the status of dār al-islām because Muslims were able to gather for Friday prayers and other rites and because many elements of Islamic law were integrated into their legal systems. Such an outlook often provided the basis for accommodation with imperial authorities and institutions, as in French West Africa, and imperial states tended to reciprocate by offering patronage to religious scholars and notables. These views were not unanimous, however, and in different political contexts, charismatic leaders rallied followers around calls for jihad against imperial authorities. In 1827, for instance, Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (1785–1831) launched a war among the Pathans on the North-West frontier of India to purify the faith and expel the British, and in the following decade, ‘Abd al-Qadir (1808–83) led a Sufi-based resistance movement in Algeria against the French. As in the 19th-century jihads among the mountain peoples of the North Caucasus, many of these campaigns simultaneously aimed at effecting religious change and building institutions rooted in Islamic law. In 1857, by contrast, many Muslims joined other subjects of the British in India in a massive revolt that articulated the most heterogeneous visions. The actors involved in these movements were frequently tied together through Sufi or scholarly networks, but local conditions tended to determine their varied trajectories.

In the late 19th century, a small group of activists critical of the state of Muslim societies and outraged, in particular, by the French seizure of Tunisia in 1881 and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, formed a transnational network committed to disseminating critiques of European imperialism and calling on Muslims to unite in liberating themselves from foreign rule. At the head of this movement, Afghani (1838–97), the itinerant thinker and agitator, called on Muslims to strengthen Islamic civilization against the European—especially British—threat by arriving at a proper understanding of the faith and by seeking unity. This vision inspired followers in Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere and briefly earned him the patronage of the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), who sought to bolster his own authority among Muslims in Ottoman lands as well as in rival European empires by adopting the title of caliph and acting as the defender of the faithful everywhere. In the first decades of the 20th century these Pan-Islamic ideas proved less attractive to critics of empire who increasingly elaborated visions of the future around the idea of the nation.

Yet just as empires have persisted despite waves of collapse during and after World War I and of decolonization following World War II, critiques of imperialism have endured, sustained in part by the anticolonial rhetoric of the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as by international organizations such as the United Nations. These criticisms have, in turn, influenced Islamist discourse. The restoration of sovereignty to the Muslim community was central to the program of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna (1906–49); while in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89) would repeatedly point to the dangers of American imperialism, mobilizing popular memory of 19th-century grievances as well as the U.S.-led coup of 1953. From the 1980s, wars in a number of theaters—Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Somalia—have focused Islamist thinkers on the problems of political sovereignty and military occupation. Although substantive ideological differences divide groups such as Hizbullah, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and others, the global reach of American power in the early 21st century looms as the central preoccupation of their political thought.