Dominated but never fully subordinated to foreign overlords, then, Muslim societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the rise of new religious movements promoting the reformation of personal piety and social mores. Most reformers echoed their eighteenth century predecessors in insisting that Muslims purge their traditions of all that was not directly sanctioned by the Qur'an and Sunna. As the Western advance intensified, reformers demanded not only greater individual adherence to the law, but a far reaching transformation of state and society.
There were two broad streams to this new reform current, one more establishment oriented and modernist, and the other more intellectually con servative and grounded in social classes as yet little afiected by new ways of learning and organising. Where, as in Egypt, Tunisia and the Ottoman Empire an indigenous establishment had survived the initial Western assault, political elites worked with a select group of religious scholars to forge a programme of reform imbued with the ideals of modernist progress. The key characteristics of this initiative were a commitment to the development of a centralised state; a modernised military; education on the European model and an Islamic activism de emphasising legal literalism in favour of a more rationalised and general religious ethic. The Young Ottomans of the i86os and 1870s were
34 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The ulama in contemporary Islam: Custodians of change (Princeton, 2002), p. 58. For an Egyptian example, see Malika Zeghal, Gardiens de I’Islam: Les oulemas d’AlAzhar dans I’Egypte contemporaine (Paris, 1996).
Among the first to formulate a version of this modernist programme, as part of a larger effort to shepherd the transformation of the Ottoman caliphate into a constitutional state.35 In India, where British rule had by mid century stripped Muslim rulers of their powers, Sayyid Alimad Khan (1817 98) espoused a similar programme of modernising reform, designed to provide Muslims with a moral compass even in the absence of a Muslim governed state.36 In British Malaya and western portions of the Dutch East Indies (especially Sumatra, which had close ties to the Malay population in British Malaya), the kaum muda or 'young group’ advocated an equally ambitious programme of Muslim ethics and social modernisation.37
Some among the modernist reformers, like Sayyid Jamal al Din al Afghani (1838 97), injected a political and internationalist theme into their message, one that reflected their own cosmopolitan journeys. Although his precise back ground is still a matter of dispute, al Afghani is thought to have been born an Iranian Shi '"i. However, so as to disseminate his message more widely, early on he took to identifying himself as an Afghan and Sunni.38 A resdess wanderer, al Afghani made the pilgrimage to Mecca at age twenty, setted in India in mid life (where he was harassed by British authorities for his anti colonial views), emigrated to Anatolia in 1870 and then settled in Cairo in the 1870s. In Egypt he met with and influenced Muhaammad 'Abduh (1849 1905), who, as rector of al Azhar University and grand mufti of Egypt, was to become the most renowned of al Afghlni’sstudents. ExpeUedfrom Egypt bythe Britishin i879,al Afghilnii spent the last eighteen years of his life trekking across India, England, France, Russia, Iran and the Ottoman Empire. Everywhere he travelled he promoted the twin causes of religious reform and the strengthening of the caliphate. Voicing what was to become a central theme in Islamic modernism, al Afghan! also called for Muslims to free themselves from the unquestioning obedience and 'imitation’ (taqlid) of religious tradition, and to recognise that Islam sanctioned the use of reason and science.
The modernist message received its warmest reception in the colonial world’s fast growing urban areas, especially among the recently disenfranchised political elite and the increasingly educated middle class. Often times, too, the
35 See Kemal H. Karpat, The politicization of Islam: Reconstructing identity, state, faith, and community in the late Ottoman state (Oxford, 2001).
36 On the circumstances in which this reform was initiated, see Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic revival in British India: Deoband, i860 1900 (Princeton, 1982).
37 William R. Roff, The origins of Malay nationalism, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1994), pp. 56 90.
38 Nikki R. Keddie, Sayyid Jamal al Din ‘al Afghani’: A political biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972).
World History
