There had always been Muslim thinkers and parties opposed to the nationalist project. However, opposition to state promoted nationalism and secularisa tion acquired a new urgency and social force in the aftermath of the Islamic
51 Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: The roots of sectarianism (Cambridge, 2001), p. 137.
52 See Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial classroom: Islam, the state, and education in the late Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 2000), pp. 84 6; and Robert W. Hefner, 'The culture, politics, and future of Muslim education’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (eds.), Schooling Islam: The culture and politics of modern Muslim education (Princeton, 2007), pp. i 39.
53 John L. Esposito, 'Islam and secularism in the twenty first century’,inJohn L. Esposito and Azzam Tamimi (eds.), Islam and secularism in the Middle East (London, 2000, pp. i 28), p. 2.
Resurgence that swept the Muslim world in the 1970s and 1980s. Although varied in its political expressions, the resurgence challenged the nationalists’ hegemony, undercut state sponsored secularisation and re ignited the debate over the proper role of religion in public life.
The resurgence itself was the product of diverse influences, at once dem ographic, cultural and political. The background demographic reality was that from 1950 to 1990, the proportion of the population living in cities and towns in Muslim majority countries grew exponentially, as a result of rural to urban migration and (especially in Muslim Africa and the Middle East) exceptionally high fertility rates. The precise rate of growth varied, but most countries saw both their population and the proportion oftheir citizens living in towns grow by 200 300 per cent. Overwhelmingly rural in 1950, by 1990 most Muslim majority countries had 35 to 55 per cent of their people crowded into cities and towns, suffering the usual ill effects of pollution, crime and unemployment.54 Urbanisation and population growth converged with new media and conspic uous consumption to make the contradiction between the promised solidarity of nationalism and the reality of growing inequality all the more apparent.
As in earlier periods of urbanisation, economic development and nation making in Western Europe, the post colonial state in Muslim majority coun tries was not passive in the face ofthese changes. Like their counterparts in the modern West and East Asia,55 modern states in the Muslim majority countries were 'disciplinary’ in ambition, aiming to train growing numbers of citizens in the aptitudes and mores seen as necessary for modern progress and order. At the same time, the state set out to dismantle many of the social structures through which the urban poor and the rural population had long organised their lives. There was, however, one striking exception to the state’s cultural clear cutting: institutions of Muslim worship and learning. With rapid demo graphic growth and the squeezing of masses of people from different regions and ethnic backgrounds into congested urban settlements, mosques and madrasas sprang up across the new social landscape. Frustrated in their attempts to realise nationalist dreams ofequality and prosperity, some citizens turned to places of prayer and religious study for alternative answers to the question of how to be modern.
54 For an overview of demographic trends, see Brown, Religion and state, pp. 123 30; on their broader economic background, see Clement M. Henry and Robert Springborg, Globalization and the politics of development in the Middle East (Cambridge, 2001), pp. i 26.
55 See, for example, Byron K. Marshall, Learning to be modern: Japanese political discourse on education (Boulder, 1994); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The modernization of rural France, 1870 1914 (Stanford, 1976).
There was an important educational influence on the processes that took place in and around the fast proliferating network of mosques and religious schools. In the 1950s and early 1960s, nationalist governments had launched ambitious programmes of general education. Whatever their failings in eco nomic matters, the governments’ educational programmes succeeded in creating the first generation of Muslim youth with high rates of literacy and several years of schooling.56 Only poor countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan failed to get on board the schooling revolution.
Some among the newly educated applied their educational skills to economic and secular ends, but others threw themselves into religious study. Most, however, lacked the ability and opportunity to study scholarly commentaries on the Qur'an and Sunna. There were, however, other texts available for study. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the development of a booming market in inexpensive Islamic books and magazines. The publications provided a means for people who had received little if any formal religious education to familiarise themselves with the fundaments of their faith.57 The literature addressed sub jects remote from traditional scholarship, including Muslim views on courtship and marriage, how to get rich in business while being religious and the moral perils of Western entertainments. Alongside the new Islamic media there also emerged a new class of popular Muslim preachers, commentators and advice columnists, referred to rather loosely as the 'new Muslim intellectuals’. Most had little if any background in the traditional religious schooling. 'Freed from traditional processes of knowledge acquisition apprenticeship to a man of learning these new autodidact intellectuals stand outside of traditional author izing institutions, instead authorizing themselves in the process of knowledge production and dissemination.’58 In this way, the re pluralization of religious authority begun in the nineteenth century deepened under the influence of nation building, mass education and a restless religious resurgence.
56 See Dale F. Eickelman, 'Mass higher education and the religious imagination in con temporary Arab societies’, American Ethnologist, 19, 4 (1992), pp. 643 55; and Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to work: Education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt (Berkeley, 1998), esp. pp. 220 48.
57 Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, 'Print, Islam, and the prospects for civic pluralism: New religious writings and their audiences’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 8, i (1997), pp. 43 62; cf. Yves Gonzalez Quijano, Les gens du livre: Editions et champ intellectuel dans l’Egypte republicaine (Paris, 1998); and C. W. Watson, 'Islamic books and their publishers: Notes on the contemporary Indonesian scene’, Journal ofIslamic Studies, i6, 2
58 Starrett, Putting Islam to work, p. 232. See also, Michael E. Meeker, 'The new Muslim intellectuals in the Republic ofTurkey’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), Islam in modern Turkey: Religion, politics and literature in a secular state (London, 1991), pp. 189 219.
World History
