Islamic political thought

L. CARL BROWN

Islamic political thought over the past two centuries might best be studied around the theme of a new era in which all parts of the Muslim world responded to alien intrusion. Western hegemony reached different parts of the Muslim world at different times and differed in its intensity, but it was well under way by 1800. In the process the various Muslim polities (whether empires or states or lesser units) all faced a new reality that led in most cases to outright Western colonial rule, a development that reached a peak in the peace settlement following the First World War. Only Afghanistan, parts of Arabia, Iran and the Anatolian core of the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) escaped colonial rule but they experienced their own forms of persistent Western pressure.

Thereafter came decolonisation, mainly achieved in the two decades fol lowing the Second World War. Even with formal independence, however, the perception, not lacking in some reality, of the Muslim political leadership and their populations has been that they are controlled by the alien other.

As the timing and pattern of the Western intrusions differ so also did the circumstances within the diverse Muslim world make for different responses. The Ottoman Empire in i800 had existed for roughly a half millennium, possessed a long established government staffed by Muslims who ruled over a multi ethnic and multi religious empire with, however, a considerable Muslim majority. While thenceforth vulnerable before a threa tening Europe, the Ottoman Empire, until its end after the First World War, remained a going concern, and the political thought generated there was within the context of an existing ifbeleaguered state. Neighbouring Iran, even more beleaguered and serving as the principal pawn in the 'great game’ played throughout the nineteenth century pitting the Russian behemoth against the British leviathan, also had centuries of continuity as a political entity. In both the Ottoman Empire and Iran the essential factor stimulating political thought was how to strengthen the existing state.

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Egypt and Tunisia offer a variant on that pattern. Geography and history had combined to create in both countries distinctive polities for centuries (Egypt for millennia). Both had been dejure provinces of the Ottoman Empire since the sixteenth century, but were virtually independent de facto. Political thought there at least until they fell to colonial rule in the i88os followed the Ottoman pattern of concern about shoring up the existing state. Morocco had also been for centuries politically organised along relatively fixed territorial boundaries.

By contrast, the Muslim government of the Mughals was a spent force by 1800, and the Muslim population over whom they had ruled represented only a small minority scattered throughout Hindu India. Muslims in India with no Mughal state that could be saved looked to different political options.

Other Muslim areas largely skipped the period of seeking to strengthen the existing state against the alien onslaught and instead found themselves being given new political shape under colonialism. This would apply to what are now Indonesia and Malaysia as well as the Muslim states of Central Asia.

Islamic West Africa was emerging from a dynamic religio political change of the sort that had characterised the Muslim world since time out of mind (brilliantly interpreted centuries earlier by Ibn Khaldtin (1332 1406). This was the jihad induced state building process led by 'Usman dan Fodio (1754 1817) that created the Sokoto caliphate. A similar pattern of religio political chal lenge from the periphery had marked Arabia (Wahhabiyya) and then, later in the nineteenth century, the messianic movement of the Sudanese Mahdiyya.