A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

PART THREE

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THE PLACE OF ISLAM
IN THE MODERN WORLD

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CHAPTER TWELVE
Colonialism, Nationalism, Islam, and the Independence Struggle
This is the brief sketch of a long and poignant trajectory for Muslims: Muslim
glory, gradual Muslim decline, the rise of the West, the takeover of the Muslim
world by Western imperial powers, the anticolonial struggle, and contemporary
resentments against Western neo-imperial policies of control and
interventionism. This story lies at the heart of the Muslim world’s confrontation
with the West and the United States today. An understanding of this trajectory is
essential to grasping the turmoil and anger that emerges from the Muslim world.
It is a history of dissatisfactions based on real, concrete, and negative series of
events in the Middle East and the Muslim world; the factor of Islam provides
focus, color, and vigor but is not especially central to its telling.
I say “Muslim world,” but in reality, the problems are not limited to a world
defined by Islam. These states are part of a broader swath of the developing
world with similar struggles and resentments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The problems stemming from colonialism and imperialism would exist in equal
measure without Islam. But the presence of a worldwide, self-conscious Muslim
culture undeniably helps focus Muslim grievances more intensely than anywhere
else. Furthermore, the psychology of resistance has eventually come to be
framed in a Muslim cultural and historical context. The Chinese, for example,
maintain equal sensitivities on issues of Western domination but frame it within
their own particular cultural narration and historical context.
MUSLIMS HAVE LONG BEEN CONFIDENT about their role in history—the
accomplishments of high Islamic civilization surely suggested that God was
smiling on the Islamic project. The explosive early success of the new religion
was astonishing; it spread across half of Asia and North Africa within a few
decades of the Prophet’s death, culminating in the establishment of brilliant,
durable cultures and empires. For many centuries, Muslims led most of the

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world in the arts, sciences, philosophy, military skills, and technology,
demonstrating to its followers that something was very right about this
flourishing civilization.
The one region of the then known world in which Islam had limited impact or
contact was Western Europe. It was only as Western Europe as a latecomer
began to hit its stride, with the rapid rise of nation-states after the Reformation
and the Age of Exploration, that the balance began to shift between Western and
Eastern civilizations. Muslim cultures and states had begun to lose their creative
élan and to move into decline.
Muslims still agonize over this vivid reversal of roles with Western Europe:
Why did it happen, what went wrong, and how can Muslims recover their place
in the sun? Was it because they lost their Islamic values? This was a period that
saw the rise of European power to challenge and then even take over the entire
Muslim world, ultimately sparking Muslim resistance against it. These
experiences form the foundation of Muslim anti-imperial psychology today.
The vigor of civilizations reveals well-known patterns of rise and fall, a
phenomenon that has affected Islamic civilization as well. Religious Muslims
tend to agonize over a possible loss of moral direction in the decline of their
civilization, but there are indeed other more objective reasons that must also be
cited in the relative decline of the East and the rise of the West. These factors
have little to do with Islam and a great deal to do with political and geopolitical
changes in the world, as well as other objective external factors. In short, if
Islam had not existed, it seems very likely the course of most of these events
would not have been significantly different. We witness, for example,
civilizational exhaustion in cases like China in the late nineteenth century as
well.

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