Iranian soldiers visit Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb outside Tehran during a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of Khomeini’s return from exile. Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
The history of modern Islam has often been explained in terms of the impact of “the West.” From this perspective, the 18th century was a period of degeneration and a prelude to European domination, symbolized by Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. Yet it is also possible to argue that the period of Western domination was merely an interlude in the ongoing development of indigenous styles of modernization. In order to resolve this question, it is necessary to begin the “modern” period with the 18th century, when activism and revival were present throughout Islamdom. The three major Muslim empires did experience a decline during the 18th century, as compared with their own earlier power and with the rising powers in Europe, but most Muslims were not yet aware that Europe was partly to blame. Similar decline had occurred many times before, a product of the inevitable weaknesses of the military conquest state turned into centralized absolutism, overdependence on continuous expansion, weakening of training for rule, the difficulty of maintaining efficiency and loyalty in a large and complex royal household and army, and the difficulty of maintaining sufficient revenues for an increasingly lavish court life. Furthermore, population increased, as it did almost everywhere in the 18th-century world, just as inflation and expensive reform reduced income to central governments. Given the insights of Ibn Khaldun, however, one might have expected a new group with a fresh sense of cohesiveness to restore political strength.
Had Muslims remained on a par with all other societies, they might have revived. But by the 18th century one particular set of societies in western Europe had developed an economic and social system capable of transcending the 5,000-year-old limitations of the agrarian-based settled world as defined by the Greeks (who called it Oikoumene). Unlike most of the lands of Islamdom, those societies were rich in natural resources (especially the fossil fuels that could supplement human and animal power) and poor in space for expansion. Cut off by Muslims from controlling land routes from the East, European explorers had built on and surpassed Muslim seafaring technology to compete in the southern seas and discover new sea routes—and, accidentally, a new source of wealth in the Americas. In Europe, centralized absolutism, though an ideal, had not been the success it was in Islamdom. Emerging from the landed classes rather than from the cities, it had benefited from and been constrained by independent urban commercial classes. In Islamdom, the power of merchants had been inhibited by imperial over-taxation of local private enterprise, appropriation of the benefits of trade, and the privileging of foreign traders through agreements known as the Capitulations.
In Europe independent financial and social resources promoted an unusual freedom for technological experimentation and, consequently, the technicalization of other areas of society as well. Unlike previous innovations in the Oikoumene, Europe’s technology could not easily be diffused to societies that had not undergone the prerequisite fundamental social and economic changes. Outside Europe, gradual assimilation of the “new,” which had characterized change and cultural diffusion for 5,000 years, had to be replaced by hurried imitation, which proved enormously disorienting. This combination of innovation and imitation produced an unprecedented and persisting imbalance among various parts of the Oikoumene. Muslims’ responses paralleled those of other “non-Western” peoples but were often filtered through and expressed in peculiarly Islamic or Islamicate symbols and motifs. The power of Islam as a source of public values had already waxed and waned many times; it intensified in the 18th and 19th centuries, receded in the early 20th century, and surged again after the mid-20th century. Thus European colonizers appeared in the midst of an ongoing process that they greatly affected but did not completely transform.
From the mid-17th century through the 18th and early 19th centuries certain Muslims expressed an awareness of internal weakness in their societies. In some areas, Muslims were largely unaware of the rise of Europe; in others, such as India, Sumatra, and Java, the 18th century actually brought European control. Responses to decline, sometimes official and sometimes unofficial, sometimes Islamizing and sometimes Europeanizing, fell into two categories, as the following examples demonstrate.
In some areas leaders attempted to revive existing political systems. In Iran, for example, attempts at restoration combined military and religious reform. About 1730 a Turk from Khorasan named Nadr Qoli Beg reorganized the Safavid army in the name of the Safavid shah, whom he replaced with himself in 1736. Taking the title Nadir Shah, he extended the borders of the Safavid state farther than ever; he even defeated the Ottomans and may have aspired to be the leader of all Muslims. To this end he made overtures to neighbouring rulers, seeking their recognition by trying to represent Iranian Shi‘ism as a madhhab (school of Islamic law) alongside the Sunni madhhabs. After he was killed in 1747, however, his reforms did not survive and his house disintegrated. Karim Khan Zand, a general from Shiraz, ruled in the name of the Safavids but did not restore real power to the shah. By the time the Qajars (1779–1925) managed to resecure Iran’s borders, reviving Safavid legitimacy was impossible.
In the Ottoman Empire restoration involved selective imitation of things European. Its first phase, from 1718 to 1730, is known as the Tulip Period because of the cultivation by the wealthy of a Perso-Turkish flower then popular in Europe. Experimentation with European manners and tastes was matched by experimentation with European military technology. Restoration depended on reinvigorating the military, the key to earlier Ottoman success, and Christian Europeans were hired for the task. After Nadir Shah’s defeat of the Ottoman army, this first phase of absolutist restoration ended, but the pursuit of European fashion had become a permanent element in Ottoman life. Meanwhile, central power continued to weaken, especially in the area of international commerce. The certificates of protection that had accompanied the Capitulations arrangements for foreign nationals were extended to non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, who gradually oriented themselves toward their foreign associates. The Ottoman state was further weakened by the recognition, in the disastrous Treaty of Kücük Kaynarca (1774), of the Russian tsar as protector of the Ottoman’s Greek Orthodox millet. A second stage of absolutist restoration occurred under Selim III, who became sultan in the first year of the French Revolution and ruled until 1807. His military and political reforms, referred to as the new order (nizam-ı cedid), went beyond the Tulip Period in making use of things European; for example, the enlightened monarch, as exemplified by Napoleon himself, became an Ottoman ideal. There, as in Egypt under Muhammad ‘Ali (reigned 1805–48), the famed corps of Janissaries, the elite troops that had been a source of Ottoman strength was destroyed and replaced with European-trained troops.
In other areas, leaders envisioned or created new social orders that were self-consciously Islamic. The growing popularity of Westernization and a decreasing reliance on Islam as a source of public values was counterbalanced in many parts of Islamdom by all sorts of Islamic activism, ranging from educational reform to jihad. “Islamic” politics were often marked by an oppositional quality that drew on long-standing traditions of skepticism about government. Sufism could play very different roles. In the form of renovated tariqahs, communities of followers gathered around sheikhs (or pirs, “teachers”), it could support reform and stimulate a consciousness marked by Pan-Islamism (the idea that Islam can be the basis of a unified political and cultural order). Sufis often encouraged the study of Hadith, which they used to establish a model for spiritual and moral reconstruction and to invalidate many unacceptable traditional or customary Islamic practices. Sufi tariqahs provided interregional communication and contact and an indigenous form of social organization that in some cases led to the founding of a dynasty, as with the Libyan monarchy.
Sufism could also be condemned as a source of degeneracy. The most famous and influential militant anti-Sufi movement arose in the Arabian Peninsula and called itself al-Muwahhidun (“the Unitarians”), although it came to be known as Wahhabism, after its founder, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92). Inspired by Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Wahhab argued that the Qur’an and Sunnah could provide the basis for a reconstruction of Islamic society out of the degenerate form in which it had come to be practiced. Islam itself was not an inhibiting force; “traditional” Islam was. Far from advocating the traditional, the Wahhabis argued that what had become traditional had strayed very far from the fundamental, which can always be found in the Qur’an and Sunnah. The traditional they associated with blind imitation (taqlid); reform, with making the pious personal effort (ijtihad) necessary to understand the fundamentals. Within an Islamic context this type of movement was not conservative because it sought not to conserve what had been passed down but to renew what had been abandoned. The Wahhabi movement attracted the support of a tribe in the Najd led by Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud. Although the first state produced by this alliance did not last, it laid the foundations for the existing Saudi state in Arabia and inspired similar activism elsewhere down to the present day.
In West Africa a series of activist movements appeared from the 18th century into the 19th. There as in Arabia, Islamic activism was directed less at non-Muslims than at Muslims who had gone astray. As in many of Islamdom’s outlying areas, emergent groups of indigenous educated, observant Muslims, such as the Tukulor, were finding the casual, syncretistic, opportunistic nature of official Islam to be increasingly intolerable. Such Muslims were inspired by reformist scholars from numerous times and places (including al-Ghazali, al-Suyuti, and al-Maghili), by a theory of jihad comparable to that of the Wahhabis, and by expectations of a mujaddid at the turn of the Islamic century in AH 1200 (1785 CE). In what is now northern Nigeria, the discontent of the 1780s and 1790s erupted in 1804, when the Fulani mystic, philosopher, and revolutionary reformer Usman dan Fodio (1754–1817) declared a jihad against the Hausa rulers. Others followed, among them Muhammad al-Jaylani in Aïr, Shehuh Ahmadu Lobbo in Macina, al-Hajj ‘Umar Tal (a member of the reformist Tijani tariqah) in Fouta Djallon, and Samory in the Malinke (Mandingo) states. Jihad activity continued for a century; it again became millennial near the turn of the next Muslim century in AH 1300 (1882 CE), as the need to resist European occupation became more urgent. For example, Muhammad Ahmad declared himself to be the mahdi in the Sudan in 1881.
In the Indian Ocean area, Islamic activism was more often intellectual and educational. Its best exemplar was Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (1702/3–62), the spiritual ancestor of many later Indian Muslim reform movements. During his lifetime the collapse of Muslim political power was painfully evident. He tried to unite the Muslims of India, not around Sufism as Akbar had tried to do, but around the Shari‘ah. Like Ibn Taymiyyah, he understood the Shari‘ah to be based on firm sources—the Qur’an and Sunnah—that could with pious effort be applied to present circumstances. Once again the study of Hadith provided a rich array of precedents and inspired a positive spirit of social reconstruction akin to that of the Prophet Muhammad.
The many efforts to revive and resist were largely unsuccessful. By 1818 British hegemony over India was complete, and many other colonies and mandates followed between then and the aftermath of World War I. Not all Muslim territories were colonized, but nearly all experienced some kind of dependency, be it psychological, political, technological, cultural, or economic. Perhaps only the Saudi regime in the central parts of the Arabian Peninsula could be said to have escaped any kind of dependency; but even there oil exploration, begun in the 1930s, brought European interference. In the 19th century Westernization and Islamic activism coexisted and competed. By the turn of the 20th century secular ethnic nationalism had become the most common mode of protest in Islamdom, but the spirit of Islamic reconstruction was also kept alive, either in conjunction with secular nationalism or in opposition to it.
In the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, selective Westernization coexisted with a reconsideration of Islam. The program of reform known as the Tanzimat, which was in effect from 1839 to 1876, aimed to emulate European law and administration by giving all Ottoman subjects, regardless of religious confession, equal legal standing and by limiting the powers of the monarch. In the 1860s a group known as the Young Ottomans tried to identify the basic principles of European liberalism—and even love of nation—with Islam itself. In Iran the Qajar shahs brought in a special “Cossack Brigade,” trained and led by Russians, while at the same time the Shi‘ite mujtahids viewed the decisions of their spiritual leader as binding on all Iranian Shi‘ites and declared themselves to be independent of the shah. (One Shi‘ite revolt, that of the Bab [died 1850], led to a whole new religion, the Baha’i faith.) Like the Young Ottomans, Shi‘ite religious leaders came to identify with constitutionalism in opposition to the ruler.
Islamic protest often took the form of jihad against Europeans: by Southeast Asians against the Dutch; by the Sanusi tariqah over Italian control in Libya; by the Mahdist movement in the Sudan; or by the Salihi tariqah in Somalia, led by Sayyid Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah Hasan, who was nicknamed the Mad Mullah by Europeans. Sometimes religious leaders, such as those of the Shi‘ites in Iran (1905–11), took part in constitutional revolutions. Underlying much of this activity was a Pan-Islamic sentiment that drew on very old conceptions of the ummah as the ultimate solidarity group for Muslims. Three of the most prominent Islamic reconstructionists were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, his Egyptian disciple Muhammad ‘Abduh, and the Indian poet Sir Muhammad Iqbal. All warned against the blind pursuit of Westernization, arguing that blame for the weaknesses of Muslims lay not with Islam but rather with Muslims themselves, because they had lost touch with the progressive spirit of social, moral, and intellectual reconstruction that had made early Islamicate civilization one of the greatest in human history. Although al-Afghani, who taught and preached in many parts of Islamdom, acknowledged that organization by nationality might be necessary, he viewed it as inferior to Muslim identity. He further argued that Western technology could advance Muslims only if they retained and cultivated their own spiritual and cultural heritage. He pointed out that at one time Muslims had been intellectual and scientific leaders in the world, identifying a golden age under the ‘Abbasid caliphate and pointing to the many contributions Muslims had made to the West. Like al-Afghani, Iqbal assumed that without Islam Muslims could never regain the strength they had possessed when they were a vital force in the world, united in a single international community and unaffected by differences of language or ethnos. This aggressive recovery of the past became a permanent theme of Islamic reconstruction. In many regions of Islamdom the movement known as Salafiyyah also identified with an ideal time in history, that of the “pious ancestors” (salaf) in the early Muslim state of Muhammad and his companions, and advocated past-oriented change to bring present-day Muslims up to the progressive standards of an earlier ideal. In addition to clearly Islamic thinkers, there were others, such as the Egyptian Mustafa Kamil, whose nationalism was not simply secular. Kamil saw Egypt as simultaneously European, Ottoman, and Muslim. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 was followed by a period in which similarly complex views of national identity were discussed in the Ottoman Empire.
The tension between Islamic and national identification remained crucial for Muslims at the start of the 20th century. In countries under Western colonial rule, the struggle for national independence often went hand in hand with an effort by reformist intellectuals to recover the authentic message of the original Muslim community. Between the two World Wars, two distinct interpretations of Islam emerged from the Salafiyyah movement.
One interpretation, drawing upon Pan-Islamism, politicized Islam by taking its scriptures to be the proper foundation of the social and political order. The writings of the Syrian Egyptian scholar Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935) provided a basis for such an interpretation. Like earlier reformers, Rashid Rida viewed the cult of saints (the veneration of holy figures) as a corruption of Islam, and he sought a renovated religion that would be grounded in and faithful to the religion’s early scriptures. He insisted, however, that such a renovation entailed the implementation of Islamic precepts in social and political life. Rashid Rida considered the 1924 dissolution of the Ottoman caliphate to be a traumatic event because it marked the end (in his eyes) of a religious and political entity that had existed since the death of the Prophet. Yet he hailed the seizure of Mecca by the Arabian tribal leader ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Sa‘ud that same year. This led to the founding in 1932 of the modern state of Saudi Arabia, which Rashid Rida considered a model Islamic state.
Rashid Rida was widely influential among Muslims who were hoping for a wholly Islamic society. For example, his thought inspired Hasan al-Banna’ (1906–49), who founded the militant organization the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood later influenced other militant Islamic groups.
In contrast to these thinkers, the Egyptian reformer ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (1888–1966) claimed that Islam could not be the basis of a society’s political system because Muhammad was the last of the prophets. After direct revelation from God ended with Muhammad, al-Raziq maintained, Islam could have only a spiritual function; the use of religion for political aims could not be legitimate. The caliphate was merely a political construction and not an essential aspect of Islam. Its disappearance with the end of the Ottoman Empire, therefore, was not a matter of concern. Henceforward, each predominantly Muslim country would be free to determine its own political system. Although the great majority of the ulama rejected ‘Abd al-Raziq’s view, secular elites blended it with a liberal conception of society that regarded religion as only one of several cultural elements rather than as a comprehensive code of life. In the countries of the Maghrib (the North African Mediterranean), this understanding of Islam inspired visions of uniting the religion with Amazigh, Arab, and Mediterranean cultures to create a single cultural identity. Similarly, in Egypt liberal intellectuals such as Taha Husayn (1889–1973) viewed their national culture as incorporating Islamic, Arabic, ancient Egyptian, and European elements.
The question of whether Islam should be the foundation of a national culture and politics dominated political discourse in Islamic countries throughout the 20th century and beyond. In particular, the political interpretation of Islam inspired resistance to Western acculturation. Religious scholars and intellectuals such as ‘Abd al-Hamid ben Badis (1899–1940), founder in 1931 of the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, and Muhammad ‘Allal al-Fasi (1910–74) in Morocco reconceived the identity of their countries in Islamic terms and played significant roles in nationalist movements until independence was achieved. Between the two World Wars, these scholars established several Islamic private schools offering Arabic-language instruction for boys and girls. Islamic intellectuals and movements often put their educational endeavours at the centre of their projects to bring Islam into agreement with their times. Thus, the question of the transmission of Islamic knowledge versus secular and Westernized education became crucial. Yet not all Islamic thinkers viewed the two systems of education as incompatible. Some argued that they should be integrated and could complement each other. The Indonesian Nahdatul Ulama, for instance, favoured a system of Islamic schooling along modernized lines that would integrate religious and secular knowledge.
Later in the 20th century, colonized Muslim societies (except Palestine) gradually achieved political independence and built new states. Many of these states adopted a “Muslim” identity that they interpreted in various ways and implemented within such domains as law, education, and moral conduct. Two states, though established in societies that had not been colonized, exemplified contrasting paradigms. In 1924 the Turkish military officer Mustafa Kemal, taking the name Atatürk (“Father of the Turks”), brought a formal end to the Ottoman caliphate. Maintaining that Islam had contributed to the backwardness of Turkish society and that a modern country must be founded upon science and reason rather than religion, Atatürk claimed to relegate Islam to the private sphere. This brand of secularist government also controlled the public expression of Islam and did not separate state and religion. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, the state regulated public life according to Islamic norms, using a rigorous interpretation of Shari‘ah.
In Egypt, which became a constitutional monarchy after 1922 (though it was under colonial control until 1952), the question of the relation between state and Islam generated fierce political controversies between secularists and those who interpreted Islam as a system of government. Among the latter, the Muslim Brotherhood grew from a grassroots organization into a mass movement that provided key popular support for the 1952 Revolution of the Free Officers, a military coup led by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser that ousted the monarchy. Similar movements in Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and North Africa, the politicized heirs of earlier reformist intellectual trends, later emerged as significant actors in their respective political scenes. It was not until the end of the 1960s, however, that they became strong enough to pose a serious political challenge to their countries’ authoritarian regimes.
With the defeat in June 1967 of the Arab states by Israel in the Six-Day (June) War, socialist and Pan-Arab ideologies declined in the Islamic world while political Islam emerged as a public force. Egypt, which had been under the influence of the Soviet Union since the mid-1950s, withdrew from military and other treaties with the Soviets in the 1970s under Pres. Anwar el-Sadat. A new alliance between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, fostered by economic assistance to Egypt from Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Persian Gulf states, altered the geopolitical map of Islam and led to new religious dynamics. In 1962 the Saudi regime established the Muslim World League in Mecca with the participation of Muslim scholars and intellectuals from all over the world. The league, whose mission was to unify Muslims and promote the spread of Islam, opened offices in the Islamic world in the 1960s and in the West in subsequent decades. With financial assistance as well as religious guidance from the league, new Islamic organizations were created by revivalist movements in the Islamic world and by immigrant Muslim communities in Europe and America.
During this period Islamist movements, which insisted that society and government should conform to Islamic values, began to openly criticize state control of Islam in their countries and condemned their governments’ minimalist interpretations of Islamic norms. These movements were diverse from the start and did not reach public prominence until 1979, when an Islamic state was founded in Iran through revolution. The Iranian Revolution was influenced by Third Worldism (a political ideology emphasizing the economic gap between developed Western states and countries in other parts of the world) and by Marxism. Particularly important were the vehement critique of Western influence developed by Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–69) and the Marxist-oriented Islamic reformism promoted by ‘Ali Shari‘ati (1933–77). The revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900–89), emphasized the themes of defending the disinherited (referred to by the Qur’anic word mustadh‘afin) and resisting “Westoxification” (Farsi: gharbzadegi), a concept he borrowed from Al-e Ahmad and Shari‘ati. He also coined and implemented in the new Islamic republic the concept of velayat-e faqih, or government by the Muslim jurist. The Iranian Revolution gave hope to many Islamist movements with similar programs by demonstrating the potential of Islam as a foundation for political mobilization and resistance. It further provided them with a blueprint for political action against governments that they believed had betrayed authentic Islam and grown corrupt and authoritarian. The Islamic republic of Iran also competed with Saudi Arabia at the international level for influence in the Middle East.
Iranian soldiers visit Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb outside Tehran during a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of Khomeini’s return from exile. Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Even before the Iranian Revolution, however, offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood were radicalizing political Islam in other parts of the Islamic world. The most influential figure in this trend was the Egyptian author and Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was a prolific writer while in prison and became an influential voice among Islamists until his execution by the regime of Nasser, then premier, in 1966. In his writings Qutb declared that the influence of Western-inspired secularism had caused his society to become un-Islamic and that a new vanguard of Muslims must bring it back to Islam. He saw this as the “solution” to the two failed secular ideologies, capitalism and communism, that had relegated religion to the periphery of government throughout the Islamic world. Thus, a new ummah under the sole sovereignty of Allah and his revealed word needed to be constituted, because secular nation-states—exemplified by Nasserist Egypt—had led only to barbarity. Qutb’s ideology was also influenced by Abu al-A‘la al-Mawdudi (1903–79), founder of the Islamic Assembly in British India in 1941, the first Islamic political party. The Islamic Assembly was reconfigured after the partition of Pakistan and India in 1947 in order to support the establishment of an Islamic state in Pakistan.
Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of political activists who used violence and had no thorough Islamic education declared that their national leaders were “apostates” who had to be eliminated by force. In 1981 the radical group Egyptian Islamic Jihad assassinated el-Sadat for the 1979 peace treaty he had made with Israel, among other things. This trend was also present in North Africa and South Asia. In many cases these activists were violently repressed. In some instances conflicts with government authorities led to bloody civil wars, as in Algeria between 1992 and 2002, or to protracted armed struggles between military forces and Islamist groups, as in Egypt from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. This repression resulted in the exile of many Islamist activists to Europe and the Americas and led many others to join such military fronts as the Afghan Jihad.
From the late 1970s, Islamist groups were the object of sustained worldwide media attention. Yet nonviolent groups received significantly less attention than the few groups that advocated the use of violence. Nonviolent Islamists often expressed their will to participate in legal electoral politics. This became possible in the 1990s, when authoritarian regimes—faced with serious socioeconomic crises and seeking to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public—implemented policies of limited political liberalization, which in turn led to the participation of some Islamist movements in electoral politics and even to the co-optation of Islamist ideas by some governments.
The Muslim Brotherhood first engaged in electoral politics in Egypt in the 1980s and in Jordan as early as 1989. In Morocco the Party of Justice and Development elected its first parliamentary representatives in 1997. In Indonesia the Prosperous Justice Party took part in legislative elections in 2004. Turkey allowed Islamists not only to participate in elections but also to govern at the national level. In 2002, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, chairman of the Justice and Development Party, which won a majority of seats in that year’s general elections, formed a pragmatic Islamist government that cultivated diplomatic relations with Western powers.
In all these cases, mainstream opposition Islamist movements demonstrated their power to mobilize voters, a consequence of their social and charitable activism and their programs of good governance, especially their fight against government corruption. In contrast, such secular regimes as Fatah in the Palestinian territories and the government of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt were criticized by some segments of the citizenry as corrupt and repressive. In spite of their tendencies to speak about the universality of the Muslim community, Islamists remained nationalistic. Holding a conservative view of politics, they abandoned the revolutionary and utopian aspects of radical activism and instead struggled to moralize public and political life—e.g., by protesting “indecent” forms of entertainment and public behaviour and by insisting on accountability for political authorities. When they were allowed to govern, they rarely imposed Shari‘ah-based legislation. Laws inspired by the Islamic legal tradition were implemented, however, in various forms in Iran after the 1979 revolution and in northern Sudan after 1983.
In countries that did not practice electoral politics, movements of opposition devised other means of protest and participation. In Saudi Arabia in 1993, a “Memorandum of Advice” was signed by more than 100 ulama and Islamists and was sent to Sheikh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Baz, the head of the Board of Senior Ulama and grand mufti of the state, to be passed on to the king. They requested an even greater role for the ulama, a comprehensive implementation of Shari‘ah in Saudi society, social-welfare programs, respect for human rights, and a reorientation of Saudi foreign policy along “Islamic” lines.
Contemporary Islamist movements are polarized between two main trends. On the one hand, most movements are mainstream and pragmatic, seeking eventually to govern through participation in the political system and public debate. On the other hand, more-radical opposition groups reject electoral politics and seek revolutionary change, sometimes violently. Some groups alternate between these poles, choosing electoral participation or violence depending upon political circumstances, as in the case of Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In the first decade of the 21st century, some groups disconnected themselves from national politics in order to join transnational movements.
Various scholars have argued that Islamist movements emerged in reaction to the failure of state-led modernization projects and to general socioeconomic problems such as youth unemployment and poverty. Yet Islamist movements are not limited to poor countries or to disadvantaged, marginalized groups. In fact, members of these movements are generally highly educated, predominantly in secular fields, as a result of state-led modernization projects. In particular, mainstream Islamist parties are typically led by young men and women who are successful professionals with college or university degrees.
Scholars have also attempted to explain Islamism’s rise as the direct result of the failure of Pan-Arabism in the Arab Middle East and of secular nationalism in the Islamic world. As their Arab or national self-identifications break down, according to this view, people living in those countries turn to Islamism as a replacement. This is a misconception for two reasons. First, earlier forms of nationalism in Islamic countries were not devoid of religious ideas. Second, state institutions in those countries regulated the legal and public manifestations of Islam, in particular through their systems of public education.
In addition to becoming politicized in the hands of opposition movements and governments in the second half of the 20th century, Islam also followed a dynamic of revival that was deeply linked to sweeping educational, demographic, and social transformations. A young generation came of age in the 1960s, a time of rural exodus and urbanization, without having experienced colonial times. General access to education and the availability of printed Islamic literature also gave these young people an opportunity to build their own interpretations of Islam. Muslims could now study the Qur’an and the Sunnah without the mediation of the ulama, who represented a more institutionalized interpretation of Islam.
Technological innovations allowed some Islamic preachers to be heard or read, and even to develop followings, across the world. In the 1970s both the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Egyptian preacher Sheikh Kishk disseminated their speeches and sermons on audiocassettes. In the 1990s such new media as satellite television and the Internet began to offer faster means of access to ideas about Islam. In the late 1990s the Egyptian ‘Amr Khalid became one of many popular preachers who reached a global audience. Through his Web site he disseminated advice on understanding and living Islam as a general ethics and on specific disciplines for achieving success and happiness in this world and in the afterlife.
Modernization in the Islamic world also encouraged Muslims to reevaluate gender relations. As Muslim women gained significant access to higher education and the job market, they became integral to public life in Muslim countries. In many instances, they sought to express their piety in the public sphere by drawing from and adapting Islamic tradition. One of the most widespread and (since the late 20th century) controversial expressions of piety among Muslim women was hijab, or the wearing of the veil. Veiling was never a uniform practice: elite women of earlier generations had unveiled, and the veils themselves ranged from a simple scarf to a full-body covering, depending upon country, culture, and economic class. In some Muslim countries—notably Iran and Saudi Arabia—veiling was required by law. Yet in many other countries and in the Muslim minority communities of Europe, Australia, and the United States, veiling was a massive voluntary phenomenon beginning in the 1970s. The veil remains a subject of political controversy in Western countries with large Muslim minorities, and throughout the Islamic world there is continuing debate about whether women should be veiled in public.
Emigration of Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia accelerated after World War II and eventually produced large Muslim communities in the United States, Canada, and the countries of western Europe. While Islam was becoming politicized in the Islamic world, Western Muslims pondered how they could live and practice their religion in a non-Muslim context and whether full participation in Western culture and political life was possible, let alone desirable. These issues prompted the formation of numerous Muslim religious and cultural organizations in the West in the 1980s and ’90s, including the Islamic Society of North America, the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, and the European Council for Fatwa and Research. These groups attempted to provide guidance to Muslims who wished to preserve their Islamic identity while contributing to the political and social life of their adoptive countries.
In the first decade of the 21st century, Western Muslims were still not fully integrated into their societies, and many suffered various forms of discrimination. Many also retained important links with their countries of origin through frequent travel and modern means of communication (e.g., the Internet). Second- and third-generation immigrants often had the opportunity to redefine Islamic practices and beliefs in opposition to their parents and grandparents, whose interpretations they considered too parochial, too strongly influenced by the culture of origin, or not close enough to a more abstract and universal type of Islam. While thus articulating a more personal religious identity, young Western Muslims (like young Muslims in other parts of the world) came to rely on religious authorities who were not associated with traditional Islamic institutions of learning. For this young generation, the fatwas (formal opinions on questions of Islamic doctrine) issued by such authorities became a crucially important source of answers to political and ethical questions. These fatwas, moreover, tended to represent Islam as a moral rather than a political community.
It was in this context of the Western institutionalization of Islam, and more generally of the transformation of Islam from a blueprint for a political and legal system into an ethics of conduct, that the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States occurred. The attacks were staged by al-Qaeda, a radical Islamist organization founded in the late 1980s by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national. Bin Laden viewed the world as divided in a war between Muslims and “Crusaders and Zionists.” Although the so-called “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West was largely fictional, the term itself (coined in 1991 by the historian Bernard Lewis and popularized from 1993 by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington) had a tremendously real power to mobilize public perceptions. The notion was reinforced both in the West and in the Islamic world by the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Iraq War in 2003, and the protracted inability of the international community to solve the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel.
The Islamic Center of America mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, is seen here at sunset on ‘Id al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of Ramadan. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
Amid the ubiquitous language of global religious warfare, there were internal debates among Muslims about how the religious tradition should be interpreted, particularly as it concerned the use of violence, women’s rights, and interfaith relations. Intellectuals such as Nurcholis Majid in Indonesia and Amina Wadud in the United States attempted to reclaim Islamic traditions by showing how Islam could accommodate liberal-democratic societies and ideas. Their visions of Islam also recognized full gender equality and individual freedom of expression. Meanwhile, such controversies as the banning of the veil in public schools in France and the publication in Denmark of cartoons caricaturing the Islamic faith (and particularly the Prophet Muhammad) became instantly global, transforming intellectual and political debates between Islam and other faiths and within Islam itself, challenging the modes of regulation of Islam in Muslim and non-Muslim countries alike.
Today, one-third of the world’s Muslims live within minority communities. The rapid movement of Muslim immigrants to non-Muslim countries in modern times has meant a blurring of the distinction between Islam and the West. And although Islam has met with globalization before through migration, conquest, pilgrimage, and the use of Arabic language among far-flung learned classes, modern globalized Islam is altogether unique. It is a mass movement, not an elite one, and as emigration continues, the homeland left behind is not static but is itself greatly changed. The ummah, the community of believers, must be considered in abstract terms.
As Islam is deterritorialized—increasingly belonging not to a particular geographic place, culture, or society—the faith must now be redefined outside the context of a particular culture, and identities must be recast. Thus, the relationship between believers and their religion, and between Islam and society, continues to evolve. And as Muslims continue to face questions such as integration, exclusion, religious expression, and the relationship between religion and politics, such issues become ever increasingly global—and yet at the same time, local—in scope.