The end ofthe First World War marks a new era in world history. During the following five decades, broad trends shaped the opportunities and limits of Muslim reformers. In political terms, although the modern nation state mode was emerging as dominant, a variety of political regimes still seemed possible in the 1920s. However, by the end of the 1960s, the modern style, territorial nation state was the conceptual framework for statehood in virtually all the world. Older transnational visions of pan Islamic political community or local principalities were replaced in practical terms by states attempting to operate in the nation state model. This transformation provides the political frame work for movements of Islamic reform.
A second major theme is the evolving definition of modernity. In the 1920s, the assumption that modernisation and Westernisation were the same domi nated the thinking of reformers throughout the world. However, by the late 1960s, modernisers in many societies worked to create distinctive versions of modernity, representing what S. N. Eisenstadt calls 'multiple modernities’.2
Initially among Muslim thinkers and activists, the challenge involved efforts to show the compatibility of Islam with modernity in its Western formats. However, in the inter war period, debates within the Muslim world about the relationships between Islam and modernity became debates about how to define an authentically Islamic modernity. By the 1960s, these debates involved defining the relationship between Islam and the emerging radical
2 S. N. Eisenstadt, 'The reconstruction of religious arenas in the framework of “multiple modernities”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29, 3 (2000), pp. 591 611.
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Nationalism, often seen at the time as a struggle between conservatives (and 'fundamentalists’) and new radical ideologies of nationalism.
These two broad trends, the transformation of political systems and the redefinition of the relationship between religion and modernity, shaped the history of Muslim movements of reform and modernism. In some move ments the visions tended to be state oriented. The alternatives concentrated on social transformation. While no movement was purely political or purely societal, the distinction between movements of 'statist Islam’ and 'civil Islam’3 is an important key to the broad spectrum of Islamic reformism.
World History
