Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

H i s to r i cal Introduction and Overv i e w 2 7decentralization of political control and reconfigurations of their basic economicstructures. This economic disruption was to some degree the result ofEuropean influence on commerce in the Middle East and southern Asia,which had begun to make itself felt even before European imperialism andcolonial expansion in those regions were fully developed politically and milita r i l y. These changes tended to decrease the central power of the empires,which in turn fostered the growing autonomy of local and regional rulers.At the same time as the political and economic spheres were evolving, significantchanges were occurring in Muslim religious life. A number of Sufi ordersand other religious revivalist movements took on new doctrinal positions that favoredmodes of purification of Islamic doctrine over adaptation to local culturalpractices. As has been mentioned already in connection with the Wahhabi andneo-Sufi movements, much of the Islamic reformism during this period wasaimed at pursuing the social and moral reconstruction of Muslim societiesthrough a renewed emphasis on and stricter adherence to the teachings of Islamin the Qur’an and s u n n a . At times, these new visions of a reformist Islamic moralorder clashed with the policies of the major Muslim empires of the period,which revealed aspects of the historical split between Muslim officials in the serviceof various states, on the one hand, and the independent religious scholars,on the other. Challenges to the authority of the state increasingly met with newgovernment measures designed to extend bureaucratic control over the u l a m aand their associated institutions, a strategy that later European colonial regimesand the independent governments of the postcolonial period also followed.As the nineteenth century progressed, these developments constituted abroad trend across the Muslim world, a trend that found manifestations in awide range of cultural and political settings and included armed Muslim resistanceto the French in North Africa, the British in India, the Russians in Chechnya,and the Dutch in Indonesia. Over time, more and more Muslims began tofeel that their interests—political and economic as well as religious—were beingimperiled by the spread of European colonialism in their societies. The religiousimpetus for revival and reform that had earlier been directed toward internalcritiques of corruptions of Islam was redirected and reenergized in oppositionto the external threat of European imperialism. Moreover, during the nineteenthcentury, the improvements in transportation and communicationbrought to these regions by Western colonial powers contributed even further tothe spread of reformist Islam in modernizing Asian and African societies.Islamic ModernismOne of the first major figures in the development of Islamic modernism wasSayyid Jamal al-Din “al-Afghani” (d. 1897), whose career as a Muslim reformist