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In What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis charted the decline of Islam in the modern era and the resulting theological crisis for the Muslim world.
Now Islam is going through a second crisis, caused by the repeated failures of revivalist responses to the first crisis. This second crisis, combined with the cumulative effect of the first crisis, which remains unresolved, will lead to a long drawn-out period of political and social instability for Muslim societies.
The first millennium of Islam was a period of expansion through conquest. However for five centuries from around 1500, Western powers were pushing back Islamic rule. There were numerous landmarks of the ascendancy of the West (which includes Russia), such as:
the conquest of Goa in India by the Portuguese in 1510;
the liberation of Christian Ethiopia in 1543 with the aid of the Portuguese soldiers;
the defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683 and
the ensuing liberation of Hungary and Transylvania;
Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798;
the USA-Barbary State Wars of 1801-1815, which put an end to tribute payments by the US to the north African states to prevent piracy and the enslavement of US citizens;
a long series of defeats for the Ottomans in Russo-Turkish wars stretching across four centuries and culminating in the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war,
which led to the independence of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria;
the overthrow of Muslim principalities in Southeast Asia by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English;
the final destruction of Mughal rule in India at the hands by the British in 1857;
the defeat and dismantling of the Ottoman Empire as a result of WWI;
and finally, the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, in territory formerly ruled by Islam, which was considered by many Muslims to be the crowning humiliation in this long line of defeats.
We are not just talking about Western colonialism. Some of the victories over Muslim principalities involved the occupation or colonisation of primarily Muslim lands, but many involved the liberation of non-Muslim peoples from the yoke of Muslim rule, such as in Ethiopia, Hungary and India, and some were defensive responses to Islamic aggression, such as the defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna.
While the external borders of Islam kept shrinking, its position of dominance within its own borders was also being challenged. During this same period there were in many places improvements in the conditions experienced by non-Muslims under Islamic rule – a weakening of the dhimmi system – which communicated to Muslims an impression of their own faith’s loss of dominance and its loss of ‘success’. A landmark in this long process was the Paris Peace Treaty of 1856, which settled the Crimean War. As part of this settlement the Ottomans were compelled to grant equal rights to Christians throughout their empire.
The gradual process of improvement of conditions for Christians and Jews under Islam was regretted by Muslim scholars, who saw it as evidence of Islam’s decline. For example a request for a fatwa from a Egyptian Muslim judge in 1772 lamented the ‘deplorable innovations’ of Christians and Jews, who were daring to make themselves equal to Muslims by their manner of dress and behavior, all in violation of Islamic law.
In a similar vein, the Baghdad Quranic commentator Al-Alusi complained that non-Muslims in Syria during the first half of the 19th century were being permitted to make annual tribute payments by means of an agent, thus escaping the personal ritual degradations prescribed by Islamic law. He concluded: “All this is caused by the weakness of Islam.”
Why would Islam’s lack of dominance be evidence of weakness?
Islamic doctrine promises falah ‘success’ to the religion’s followers, symbolized by the daily call to prayer which rings out from minarets: ‘come to success, come to success’. The success promised by Islam has always been understood to be both spiritual and material: conquest and rule this life, and paradise in the next. The Qur’an states that Allah has sent Muhammad “with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may cause it to triumph over all (other) religions” (Sura 48:28).
Islam’s theology of success meant that the global failure of Islamic armies and states at the hands of ‘Christian’ states constituted a profound spiritual challenge to Islam’s core claims. Just as Muslim scholars had always pointed to the military victories of Islam as proof of its divine authority, this litany of defeats testified to the failure of its failure as the religion of the successful ones.
The urgency of the question ‘What went wrong?’ drove the Islamic revival, an interconnected network of renewal movements which have as their central tenet that Muslims will once again be ‘successful’ – achieving political and military domination over non-Muslims – if they are truly devoted to Allah and implement Islamic laws faithfully. These are reformation movements in the original (medieval) sense of the Latin word reformatio, for they seek to restore Islam to its former glory by returning to first principles.
Some of the main formative strands of Islamic revivalism have been:
the Wahhabi movement which originated in the 18th century;
the Deobandi movement in India and Pakistan which dates from 1866;
Jamaat e-Islami, which was founded 1941 in India;
the Muslim Brotherhood, founded 1928;
and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Out of these have come a myriad of offshoots and branches such as the Taliban (from the Deobandi movement); Al Qaida (a product of the ideology of Muslim Brotherhood theologian Said Qutb); the missionary movement Tablighi Jamaat; and Hizb Ut-Tahrir.
Even the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the ‘United Nations’ of the Muslim world, is a revivalist organization: this is reflected in its Charter which states that it exists “to work for revitalizing Islam’s pioneering role in the world”, a euphemism for reestablishing Islam’s dominant place in world affairs.
