ROBERT W. HEFNER
On the eve of the modern era, Islam, not Christianity, was the most globalised of the world’s religions. Muslim majority societies stretched across a broad swath of Old World territory from West Africa and Morocco in the west to China and the Malay archipelago in the east. Several pieces were to be added to the map of the Muslim world after the eighteenth century, but otherwise most of what was to become the Muslim world’s modern expanse was in place. Meanwhile, however, another international order was emerging, one driven not by the hallowed imperatives of a world transforming religion but by the demands of industrial revolution and imperial expansion. The West’s great transformations were to unleash their own globalisations, ones that were to challenge Muslim culture and society to their core.
Earlier, in the late medieval period, the Muslim world had shared with China the distinction of being the greatest military and economic power on earth. Whereas Chinese emperors dominated only the far eastern face of the Eurasian land mass, however, Muslim rulers presided over its vast central and western domains. Muslim merchants also held monopoly shares in the mar itime trade that stretched from Indonesia’s spice islands through India and southern Arabia to the Mediterranean. Though jealously eying its riches, Western Europeans were but bit players in this vast mercantile ecumene. In matters of scholarship, too, medieval Muslims had inherited and expanded on the civilisational accomplishments of ancient Greece, Persia and India. Mathematics and science in the Muslim lands were the most advanced in the world.1 In the late Middle Ages Europeans had relied on Arabic translations to recover many lost classics of Greek philosophy and science. In all these
I See Toby Huff, The rise of early modern science: Islam, China, and the West, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2003); A. I. Sabra, 'The appropriation and subsequent naturalization of Greek science in medieval Islam’, History of Science, 25 (1987), pp. 223 43.
Regards, Muslim societies in the Middle Ages lay at the pinnacle of Old World civilisation.
As the modern world order began to take shape, however, the longstanding Muslim advantage over Christian Europe disappeared. Western Europe’s Renaissance, Reformation and early scientific revolutions passed largely unno ticed in Muslim lands. The revolution in industry and armaments that swept Western Europe after the eighteenth century, however, allowed no such indulgence. The West’s military and political ascendance hastened the decline of the three great Muslim empires of the early modern period, the Ottoman, the Persian and the Mughal. Western expansion also brought about the collapse or colonisation of a host of smaller Muslim states in Africa, the Middle East and Central, South and South East Asia. With these events, one thousand years of Muslim ascendancy came to a swift and traumatic end.
The Western impact was as much cultural and epistemological as it was political. For centuries Muslims had lived in societies governed by leaders identified as Muslim. With good reason, Muslims had grown accustomed to regarding their civilisation as foremost in trade, science and the arts. Suddenly and irrevocably, it seemed, the self regarding standards of Muslim civilisation were placed in doubt. The crisis of cultural confidence upset the delicate balance of power among the social authorities responsible for stewarding Muslim culture’s varied streams. The Western threat provoked loud cries for Muslim unity against the unbelievers. Although Muslim modernists quietly urged their fellows to learn from the West, conservative reformists countered that the cause of the Muslim decline was neglect of God’s law. The only way to reverse the slide, these reformists insisted, was to replace localised and accommodating variants of the faith with an uncompromising fidelity to scripture and traditions of the Prophet Muh. ammad.
Western hegemony eventually resulted in the introduction of new techni ques of education, administration and social disciplining into Muslim majority societies. The ascent of the West also introduced new models for private life and amusement. Although some Muslim leaders rejected these innovations, many did not. From the i8oos on, Muslim societies buzzed with debate over which elements in the Western cultural repertoire were to be welcomed and which forbidden.
The rise of the West, then, presented a deeply unsettling challenge to a civilisation and peoples long confident of their place in the world. Muslim debates over what was to be done in the face of the Western challenge eventually came to focus on the question of whether, in becoming modern, Muslims must adopt the habits and values of the West or whether Muslims
Have the means and duty to create a modernity of their own. Although the details have changed, this same question lies at the heart of arguments over religion, secularity and the modern in Muslim majority societies today.
World History
