A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Colonial Impact on Muslim Societies
Imperial rule quickly distorted the natural development of the Muslim world,
dismantling traditional structures of leadership and governance, destroying
traditional institutions, and upsetting cultural patterns, while failing to encourage
organic development of native alternatives. Imperialism represented the
wholesale export of foreign cultural instruments and structures to be imposed
upon the East. Such foreign bodies are not often successfully grafted onto the
earlier civilization. Muslim societies today are still haunted by the specter of
foreign domination, even if that domination no longer takes classic colonial
shape.
The European imperial governing structures were designed to represent first
and foremost the economic, political, and strategic interests of the metropole and
not the structural needs of broad national development of the colony. Appointed
native rulers had little independent authority and were in place to keep the lid on
and preserve the metropole’s interests.
Under colonial rule, the position of the ‘ulama was sharply downgraded.
Islamic institutions linked to governance, especially the legal system, were
weakened, limited, or abolished. ‘Ulama were generally relegated to relatively
minor aspects of governance, such as personal and family law. But the removal
of the ‘ulama from the governing and legal process dealt a severe blow to the
ability of Islamic institutions to evolve and modernize under contemporary
conditions. Local traditions of rule were unable to evolve organically, and
Islamic institutions, once removed from the processes of daily governance,
tended to wither and atrophy and could no longer keep pace with the demands of
developing societies. This left behind an entire class of traditional governance,
which would prove a source of resentment in the future as it struggled to find a
new power relationship within the country after independence.
The Algerian case was especially egregious in its cultural impact. Algeria
was formally annexed to France, and its choice lands settled by tens of thousands
of Europeans. A whole new francophone administrative and ruling elite of
Algerians emerged with intimate ties to the colonial authorities. Their own
worldview began to incorporate large elements of French culture, and they
gradually grew alienated from the Arab roots of the country. This elite ultimately
came to constitute a built-in social time bomb. In principle, such acculturation
into more technically and administratively advanced French society could have
benefited Algeria, but after a brutal eight-year armed struggle for independence,
the Frankified elite found itself in a highly ambivalent situation: were they more

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French, or Algerian? A broader question arises: is it a service to a society to
educate its elite in an entirely different language than the rest of the country’s
population? If a linguistic difference is perpetuated to create a permanent
cultural gap between the elite and the rest of the population, it will produce
serious political and social conflicts when new native elites arise who are
educated in their native Arabic and confront the old francophone elite in a power
struggle. Language, and even culture, then becomes a divisive rather than uniting
element. These issues have not yet been resolved in the agony of contemporary
Algerian politics.
It was primarily the Ottoman Empire that managed to preserve the core of its
sovereignty in the face of European encroachments during the nineteenth
century. Not surprisingly, this was also where the most searching debates about
the relationship of religion to the state took place—in a natural process of
evolution within the Turkish cultural tradition. This is why Turkish political
institutions today, despite a few stumbles, are vastly more stable, more
“organic,” than almost anywhere else in the Muslim world.
Elsewhere, however, European colonial rule essentially suspended Islamic
institutions from any possibility of organic evolution within developing
societies. This is one key explanation for the sclerotic and atrophied nature of
many Islamic institutions today, which end up playing an obstructive role in the
political evolution of the state, and creating socially emotional contradictions
between traditional and Western ways of conducting business. A strong
argument can be made that prevention of the “normal” evolution of Islam within
the state has created dangerous tensions across much of the Muslim world and
provided grist for increased radicalism among Islamist movements.
The same applies to colonial education policy: Islamic schooling was largely
sidelined, thereby eliminating normal organic societal pressures for evolutionary
change in the system to meet modern challenges. Significantly, in the Russian
Empire, the Western challenge to the Muslim populations of the Caucasus and
Central Asia did spark strong native efforts at education reform through the so-
called Jadidist, or renewal, movement. Schooling advanced within many
reformist segments of the Ottoman Empire as well.

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