THE ISLAMIC WORLD AND INDIA, 1600–1917 497

The Islamic religion is a religion of unity throughout. It is not a religion of

conflicting principles but is built squarely on reason, while Divine revelation is
its surest pillar. Shaykh Muhammad Abduh

The Islamic World and India, 1600–1917

The Decline of the Muslim Empires The Strengths and Weaknesses of Ottoman
Civilization The Decline of the Ottoman Empire Safavid and Mughal Decline

The Muslim Countries until World War I

Reforms of the Muslim Ruling Elites The Tanzimat Egypt and Sudan under
Muhammad Ali and Khedive Ismail Reforms under the Iranian Shahs

Social and Intellectual Responses Wahhabi Fundamentalism and Jihad The

Salafiyya Movement Arab Nationalism

1500s–1722 Safavid Empire in Persia

1526–1857 Mughal Empire in India

early 1600s Ottoman decline begins

c. 1700–1830 External attacks on Ottoman Empire

late 1700s Wahhabist movement begins

1880–1898 Mahdi rebellion in Sudan

1890s Beginnings of Salafiyya and Arab nationalist movements

494

37

ment that depended for the most part on the qualities and energy of one or two
individuals, the sultan and the grand vizier. It was no accident that the name of
the empire was that of its founding figure, Osman (in Turkish, it was called the
Osmanli Empire), and of its ruling dynasty. The sultans were not just the
principal administrators: the sultanate provided the institutional machinery and
energy that drove it. It was the central fact of the empire. Other weaknesses
included a theory of government that was essentially military in nature and
needed constant new conquests to justify and maintain itself; an almost complete
inability to convert the Qur’an-based Sharia code of law to changing necessities
in legal administration; a collective blind eye to the importance of secular
education and to all types of technology; and an excessive reverence for
tradition, which produced the kind of stagnation that follows from excessive
conservatism. From the middle of the 1700s on, the weaknesses of the Ottoman
state in Europe rendered it prey to an increasingly aggressive West. First the
Habsburg Dynasty in Vienna, then the Russian Romanovs went on the
counterattack against Turkey in Europe, driving back its frontiers step by step
(see Map 37.1). In the early 1800s, rising national consciousness among the
native peoples of the Balkans made them rebel against an Ottoman control that
had become increasingly intolerant and oppressive as it

The Decline of the Muslim Empires

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Ottoman Civilization

The strengths of the Ottomans were most evident during the earlier centuries of
their rule, as one would expect, and the weaknesses later. But some of each are
clear throughout the long reign of the Ottoman dynasty that lasted from about
1300 to 1922. Aside from their military merits, their strengths included
extraordinary artistic sensitivity in literature, architecture, and symbolic
imagery; a commitment to justice for all, no matter how weak; a tolerance for
nonbelievers that was unusual for its time; and a literary language (Turkish with
an Arabic-Persian overlay) that was truly an international bond as well as the
channel for a rich literature. In economic and administrative affairs, the
Ottomans had a far more efficient tax system and better control of their
provincial authorities than any European government of the fourteenth through
sixteenth centuries. Unfortunately, these institutions were to weaken later on.
Although the sultans were assisted by a vast bureaucracy, among the Ottomans’
weaknesses were a govern

THE ISLAMIC WORLD AND INDIA, 1600–1917 495

European imperialism and the rise of nationalist movements in the Balkans cost
the Ottomans considerable loss of territory throughout the nineteenth century.
MAP 37.1 European Gains in Islamic Lands

Rome

Tunis
Algiers

Naples

Athens

Ankara

Belgrade

Damascus

Jerusalem

Baghdad

Basra

Alexandria

Cairo

Constantinople

Vienna

Italy

Egypt

Sicily

Crete

Anatolia

Greece

Hungary

Moldavia

Bulgaria

Wallachia

Cyprus
Syria

Tripoli

Manzikert

Atlantic Ocean

Mediterranean Sea

Black Sea

C as pi a n S e a

Red Sea

Persian Gulf

Danube

R.

E u p h ra t e s R . T i g ri s R .

D n iep e r R .

Nile

R.

D o n R.

V o l ga R.

0 300 600 Miles 0 300 600 900 Kilometers

Ottoman Empire, 1900 Under European control, 1900

496 CHAPTER 37

declined. The European powers provided them with encouragement and

assistance until the Turks’ domain was reduced to Bulgaria, Albania, and
northern Greece. At that point, about 1830, the external attacks ceased when the
aggressors became wary of one another. The “sick man of Europe” was allowed
to linger on his deathbed until 1918 only because his heirs could not agree on
the division of the estate.
The Decline of the Ottoman Empire

Suleiman’s reign (1520–1566) was the high point of the sultan’s authority and
also of the efficiency and prestige of the central government. Beginning with
Suleiman’s son and successor Selim the Sot (!), many of the sultans became
captives of their own viziers and of the intrigues constantly spun within the
harem. After 1603, rather than exposing young princes to the rigors of military
service, as had been past practice, the sultans began to restrict their sons to being
reared entirely within the harem. There, as the sultanate began to decline, the
power of the harem and the court bureaucracy grew. More and more, young
princes were subject to manipulation by court eunuchs and the sultans’ many
wives and concubines, who vied for power or to see their sons succeed to the
throne. Whichever prince succeeded to the throne, this practice gravely
weakened his fitness to rule. Nevertheless, the empire did not run straight
downhill after 1600. Once every few decades, a dedicated grand vizier or a
strong-willed sultan attempted to reverse the decay. He would enforce reforms,
sweep out the corrupt or rebellious officials in one province or another, and
make sure the army was obedient, but then the rot would set in again. By the end
of the 1700s, effective reversal was becoming impossible. Besides the personal
qualities of the sultan, several other factors contributed to the long decline: 1.
Economic. Starting around 1550, the shift of European trade routes from the
Muslim-controlled Near and Middle East to the Atlantic Ocean (and later the
Pacific Ocean) dealt a heavy, long-term blow to Ottoman prosperity. 2. Military.
After the 1570s, the Janissaries and other elite units were allowed to marry and
settle down in a given garrison, which gradually eroded their loyalties to the
central government and allowed them to become local strongmen with local
sympathies, often allying with local craft guilds and in conflict with government
interests. Moreover, by the seventeenth century the Ottomans reached the limits
of expansion possible with the types of weapons and organization on which their
armies were based. Although the Ottoman armies had been the most innovative
in earlier centuries (for example, in the use of artillery and firearms), a
conservative

resistance to further change and nepotism set in, particularly among the
Janissary corps. The repeated failures of Ottoman armies to win decisively when
far from their winter quarters in Istanbul meant that the military initiative passed
to the Europeans by the late 1600s. 3. Technological. From the seventeenth
century on, the Ottomans failed to comprehend how Western technology and
science were changing. Increasingly, they found themselves unready when
confronted in tests of power. They almost always responded by attempting to
ignore the unpleasant realities. They failed to acknowledge or give up old ways
when the situation demanded change. This characteristic was spectacularly
apparent in military sciences, where the once-pioneering Turks fell far behind
the West in all spheres, including training, organization, weapons, and tactics.

Safavid and Mughal Decline

None of the Safavid rulers who followed Akbar the Great matched his
statesmanship. Consequently, by the 1700s, the Safavids had disappeared as a
dynasty. In contrast to the Ottomans and Mughals, they had been unable to
advance from an empire relying on its original tribal alliance to a centralized
bureaucratic empire. Though they had tried, with the help of Georgian Janissary-
type infantries, in the end they fell victim to invading Afghan tribesmen and a
renewal of tribal competition in Iran through most of the 1700s. At the end of
the century, a new dynasty, the Qajars, established themselves, and under them
Iran continued to remain under tribal rule. The Qajars, however, tried with
mixed results to bureaucratize Iran in the course of the nineteenth century. In
India, Aurangzeb (ruled 1656–1707), though a triumphant warrior, was
responsible for reversing the climate of toleration that Akbar had introduced and
that had been generally maintained for the ensuing half century. Aurangzeb was
a confirmed Muslim, and he reintroduced a distinctly Islamic character to public
life. This change heightened the latent frictions between the ruling class and
their Hindu, Zoroastrian, Jain, and (few) Christian subjects. Although his large,
efficient, and taxeating army was too big to challenge directly, Aurangzeb’s rule
set the stage for eventual rebellion by the Hindu majority, led by the Marathas,
against his weaker successors. The entire eighteenth century witnessed a slow
decline of the emperor’s powers and prestige and a gradual whittling off of the
territory he controlled. The latter condition was the result of both internal
(Maratha) and external (European) challengers. In the expanding empires of the
Safavids in Persia and the Mughals in India, the appearance of European
explorers and traders during the 1500s did not create much of a

One after another, the many subdivisions of the subcontinent were incorporated
into the British-ruled empire.

The Muslim Countries until World War I

The three Muslim empires of earlier times in Asia were either overthrown or
much weakened by the nineteenth century. The Mughals in India, the Safavid
Persians, and the Ottoman Turks had been overwhelmed by Western military
and financial powers where they came into conflict with them. By the mid-
1800s, the British had made most of India an outright colony, and Persia was
effectively divided into Russian and British spheres. The Ottomans had been
repeatedly defeated by Russia in Europe and had been forced to watch as even
the façade of their political overlordship in North Africa faded away and was
lost to invading French armies after 1830 (see Chapter 38). Napoleon invaded
Egypt in 1798, and while he and his army were expelled by an Anglo-Ottoman
alliance in 1804, for all practical purposes Egypt became independent under its
new military governor, Muhammad Ali Pasha. Finally, in 1882, Britain invaded
and occupied Egypt, adding that country to its worldwide empire. Only in the
Middle East did some substance of Turkish control remain. But these political
and military weaknesses were not the only indicators of decline. The Islamic
world would have to overcome a series of psychological and technical barriers if
it were to regain its equality with the West. The fundamental tradition of Islam,
wherever it attained power, was to understand itself as a community of righteous
believers who were actively spreading the sole authentic word of God and
establishing his rule on Earth. For a thousand years, since the time of the prophet
Muhammad, this viewpoint had been the driving force behind the expansion of
the religion around the globe. From about the mid-eighteenth century, however,
this view could no longer be sustained, as the unbelievers took over former
Muslim territories from the Balkans to the islands of Southeast Asia. The
learned and powerful men of Islam reacted in several ways. Some assumed that
these reverses were temporary and would soon be regained. Others looked—for
the first time—to the West for inspiration in technology and, above all, military
science, to help them to counter and overcome Western superiority.
Unfortunately for Muslim ambitions, the first trend prevailed over the second.
The ulama and the imams of the Ottoman domains could not accept the
secularism of post– French Revolution Europe, but a few grudgingly recognized
that Muslim practice would have to incorporate some Western elements if it was
not to be utterly overwhelmed.

stir. At that time, the European presence in India was limited to a relative
handful of traders in a few ports such as Goa and Calicut. The Portuguese were
the first Europeans to arrive in India, followed by the Dutch, English, and
French. By the end of the 1600s, the Portuguese “factories” except Goa had
been absorbed first by the Dutch, then by the English. After some tentative
skirmishing on the seas (demonstrating that no non-Western force could hold its
own against the European navies), the Mughals had settled into a mutually
comfortable relationship with the British centered on trade goods in both
directions, with luxury goods flowing to the West and firearms going in the
opposite direction. The privately owned British East India Company, founded in
1603, was given monopolistic concessions to trade Indian goods, notably tea and
cotton cloth, to the West and bring in a few European items in return. For a long
time, the arrangement worked out harmoniously. At times, the East India
Company made large profits, though as a whole profits rose and fell wildly,
while the members of the Mughal upper class were pleased with their access to
European firearms, metal, and fabrics. Within the company’s handful of port
enclaves, all power over both Englishmen and Indians was vested in the English
superintendent, who had strict reminders not to involve himself in local politics.
The arrival of the French in the 1670s put some strain on English–Mughal
relations, as Paris was already in competition with London for a colonial empire.
Under the brilliant administrator Joseph François Dupleix (GovernorGeneral of
French possessions in India, 1742–1754) the French made an effort to enlist the
Indians as allies, not just trading partners. The British then responded similarly.
By the 1740s, the frequent European wars between Britain and France involved
their Indian outposts as well. On the French side, Dupleix commanded tens of
thousands of Indian troops. On the British side, Robert Clive was just as active.
They fought one another even while the home countries were at peace. In India
as in North America, the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was the decisive round
in the contest. British control of the sea proved more important than French
victories on land. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, control of much of India fell
into British hands through the intermediation of the East India Company, but
Parliament was by now unwilling to trust such a costly asset entirely to private
hands, and a statute in 1773 divided political oversight between London and the
company. In the 1780s, Lord Cornwallis (lately, commander-in-chief of the
British forces in Virginia) was put in charge of the Indian possessions, and
others who followed him crushed the occasional Muslim or Hindu attempts to
defy British power. Increasingly, those rajahs who did not obey London’s
wishes were forcibly replaced by British civil governors.

Yet they still believed in the inherent superiority of the community of God (Dar
al-Islam) over the unbelievers (Dar al-Harb). As a result, they only sporadically
and inconsistently attempted to adopt some European science and technology
without changing the conservative cast of Islamic education and government,
which frowned on innovation. A vast body of traditions and prejudices opposed
those few who attempted to bring large-scale Western ideas into Islam. Even
some of the Ottoman sultans who recognized that resisting the West without the
assistance of Western science and education would be hopeless were unable to
carry through their plans of reform against the twin obstacles of tradition and
fatalistic apathy. By the midnineteenth century, Islam, as a religious community
and as a political association, was in a nearly moribund state. Unwilling to adapt
beyond a few superficial phenomena, the Muslim nations were seemingly
destined to a future in which they were the permanent pawns of the European
powers.

Reforms of the Muslim Ruling Elites

By the 1890s, this inability to resist external pressure had produced four
different responses in the Muslim world. The first of these was simply ignoring
or rejecting the changes that were occurring around them. This was the easiest
response, and many of the ulama and the general population continued to take
for granted the superiority of all things Islamic over other ways and ideas. The
second amounted to attempts at accommodation, which began when the ruling
elites in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Iran tried to impose limited, largely
military reforms. The third was the beginnings of what is now called Islamic
fundamentalism. The fourth was pan-Arabism or Arab nationalism, which are
related but not identical attempts to create a sense of unity among the Arab
peoples of the Middle East and North Africa.

The Tanzimat

The Ottoman Empire was the first Islamic state to try modernizing along
European lines, and in many respects it was the one that experimented the
longest and whose attempts ultimately went the deepest in changing Ottoman
society as a whole. Egypt and Iran also tried to implement similar reforms in the
1800s. However, in each of these cases the reforms were state-directed—that is,
they did not begin as a popular response to the Western challenge—and the
ruling elite intended to limit them only to the military sphere.

With the further defeats and losses of territory that came after the Treaty of
Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottoman sultans and grand viziers of the eighteenth
century finally realized that they had lost the military advantage to the
Europeans. To save the sultanate and what remained of the Empire, they had to
modernize the Ottoman military machinery. As early as 1719, the grand vizier
tried introducing reforms that were essentially conservative: the objective was
not a wholesale reform of Ottoman society or Islamic institutions, but rather was
limited to improving military instruction. Alas, in 1730, a popular uprising
against these “Frankish (European) manners” ended Damad’s experiment, and
the grand vizier paid for his perceived mistakes by being executed. Other
similarly brief and unsuccessful experiments were tried in the following
decades. Sultan Selim III was the first to initiate the far-reaching and successful
reforms, later called the Tanzimat (“New Order”) Reforms. Beginning in 1793,
he tightened government control over the crumbling and corrupt provinces, and
created new schools for the training of officers who were to become the
backbone of a new, European-style Ottoman army and navy. European
instructors were brought in, books were imported—many

498 CHAPTER 37

Ottoman Sultan Selim III. Selim was the first to institute the permanent and
thoroughgoing reforms of the Ottoman military and administration known as the
Tanzimat.

Michael Nicholson/Corbis

1861), Mejid reinforced the terms of the Rose Chamber Rescript by replacing
the moribund feudal estate system with individual land ownership and by
creating a new law code modeled on European paradigms and new courts to
administer it equally to all their subjects. Up to this point, the reforms remained
state-directed, but in 1861, the Tanzimat entered a new phase. A new sultan,
Abdul Aziz, proved to be a reactionary who was opposed to further
liberalizations of Islamic law and society. By then the direction and extent of
reform had begun to slip from state control. Decades of training Ottoman
subjects in European sciences and ideas (including those of Enlightenment
liberalism) had created a broader base and momentum for change. A group of
young intellectuals and journalists, called the Young Ottomans, had started to
exert pressure for the political liberalization of Ottoman society. Using
European nations as their model, they clamored to replace the sultanate with a
constitutional monarchy and parliamentary system. In 1876, when Abdul Aziz
died, they and other reformers within the government supported Abdul Hamid II
for the succession, on the promise that he would liberalize the government. The
reformers got their constitution, and an election was held for the first time in
Ottoman history for the creation of a parliament. Once in power, however,
Abdul Hamid proved to be just another autocrat: he ended the Tanzimat by
dismissing the parliament and suspending the constitution. Throughout his long
reign (1876–1909), he used a vast system of spies to put down all resistance and
impose strict control over all Ottoman subjects. He also gradually began to ally
the empire with Germany. A nationalist reform party of army officers deposed
him in 1909 and set up a military junta in place of the sultanate. Called the
Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), it continued to govern using the
policies and methods Abdul Hamid had established. More important, perhaps,
the CUP led the Ottoman Empire into World War I as an ally of Germany.

from France and reflecting the new thought of the European Enlightenment—
and a new library was made available to the students. Again, though, in 1807,
another uprising of the ulama and the Janissaries deposed Selim and temporarily
set back the reforms. The next sultan, Mahmud II, permanently reignited the
reorganization in 1826 when he ended the opposition of the Janissaries and the
ulama once and for all after luring them into an ambush. Immediately afterward,
he dismantled the Janissary corps, banned the religious (Sufi) brotherhoods, and
seized all sources of funding previously controlled by the ulama (waqfs, for
example). New reforms promptly followed, as the sultan and his viziers created
schools for training students in European languages and sciences, and set new
controls over education, administration, and communications. When Abdul
Mejid succeeded to the sultanate in 1839, he added even more far-reaching
reforms, called the Tanzimat. The Rose Chamber Rescript of 1839
revolutionized Islamic society by declaring the legal equality of all Ottoman
subjects, regardless of religion or ethnicity. In the succeeding decades (1839–

THE ISLAMIC WORLD AND INDIA, 1600–1917 499

A Janissary. This portrait shows one of the Sultan’s Janissary corps as they
appeared about the time of Sultan Selim III. At one time the elite of the Ottoman
army, the Janissaries had become largely reactionary by the eighteenth century.
It was a revolt of the Janissaries that ended Selim’s reforms in 1806–07.

Historical Picture Archive/Corbis

Egypt and Sudan under Muhammad Ali and Khedive Ismail

Appointed as the Ottoman viceroy to Egypt in 1805, Muhammad Ali Pasha

filled the political vacuum that had been left in Egypt after the forced
withdrawal of French forces in 1805. His reign in Egypt was highly unusual for
two reasons: (1) its longevity, lasting until 1848, and (2) his success in
modernizing the armed forces. He accomplished the first of these goals through
bribery and intimidation: regular gifts of large sums of cash were sent to the
sultan and influential members of the Ottoman Court to ensure that he would not
be removed from his position. By such methods, he succeeded not only in
ensuring that he would remain as Egypt’s governor, but also that the position
would remain in his family. (The last of his line, King Farouk, was deposed in
1952.) Far more important for Egypt, though, were Muhammad Ali’s reforms.
An Albanian by birth, he had served in the Ottoman forces against the French. In
those years, he had become utterly convinced of the military superiority

of European armies, so to strengthen his position he implemented a far-reaching

program of military reforms similar to what was occurring in Istanbul at that
time. Above all, he turned to the French for his models. Missions were
dispatched to France to pursue studies in military science, engineering, and
medicine. He brought scores of French technicians and officers to Egypt to
advise him. He forcefully conscripted thousands of Egyptian peasants, whom he
outfitted with the latest weapons, and placed them under the command of
Turkish and European officers. To help support these measures, he established
munitions industries and created a modern system of schools and public health.
He encouraged private landownership, and sugar and cotton were added as
important new cash crops. State monopolies of vital industries such as sugar
refining, plus textile, iron, and weapons manufacturing, were established.
Emboldened by his successes, the viceroy also expanded his holdings outside of
Egypt. Much like the ancient pharaohs, he sent his armies up the Nile to occupy
the Sudan. The Egyptians founded the city of Khartoum as their primary
command center. In 1838, he sent his son to invade Syria, challenging Ottoman
authority there. Unfortunately, this aggressiveness against the Ottoman sultanate
invited Anglo-French intervention, and the viceroy’s navy was destroyed in a
battle fought off the coast of Greece in 1839. This disappointment set back the
Egyptian reform movement for several decades. Under Muhammad Ali, foreign
investment played a key part in Egypt’s modernization. This continued under his
successors, particularly in the building of Egypt’s railroads and the construction
of the Suez Canal, which British and French investors largely capitalized. This
created a difficult problem for Egypt’s rulers, who were forced to wrestle with
the enormous debts they incurred to foreign banks and other investors. The third
of Muhammad Ali’s sons to rule, Ismail, greatly added to the problem because
he loved everything European. It was his fondest desire to make Egypt into a
European nation, and he hoped to be accepted by European leaders as one of
them. Therefore, when the Suez Canal was opened for the first time in 1869, he
spent lavishly on a huge fête, to which he invited all of the European heads of
state and royal families. To impress them, he commissioned the Italian
composer, Verdi, to compose an opera, Aida, and he rebuilt large parts of Cairo
and Alexandria to resemble Paris. Ultimately, he bankrupted his country and
was forced to sell Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal Company to Britain. Worse,
he was forced by the European powers to turn over the management of Egypt’s
treasury to a committee made up largely of his principal investors. An uprising
of army officers who opposed this European intervention finally forced Britain
to occupy Egypt in 1882 in order to protect its interests in the canal. Britain
installed Ismail’s son as the new khedive, and they remained as a colonial
occupier in Egypt until 1922.

500 CHAPTER 37

Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The last sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the last
Islamic caliph, Abdul Hamid ended the Tanzimat. Throughout his long reign
from 1876 to 1909, he suppressed liberal reforms and the growing Arab
nationalist movement.

Bettmann/Corbis

The Egyptian occupation of the Sudan led to some unexpected resistance, which
also entangled the British. Between 1881 and 1885, Muhammad Ahmad, called
the Mahdi (“the Expected One”), led a successful revolt against Egyptian (and
British) presence there. Khedive Ismail sent a British officer, General Charles
Gordon, as his governor of the Sudan, but Gordon was killed in an assault by the
Mahdi’s followers on Khartoum. The Mahdist rebellion combined elements of
national resistance to foreign rule and Islamic, fundamentalist reaction against
innovations. Following his victory, Muhammad Ahmad formed a government in
which he imposed traditional laws and established courts of Islamic judges to
enforce Islamic law. Believing he was sent as a savior of Islam, a Mahdi, he
believed he communicated directly with God, so he also modified Islam’s Five
Pillars to support the principle that loyalty to him was part of true belief.
Muhammad Ahmad died of typhus six months after the capture of Khartoum,
but the Mahdiyya lasted until British forces finally defeated the rebels in 1898
and set up a protectorate over the Sudan.
Reforms under the Iranian Shahs

Under the Safavid shahs and the Qajar Dynasty that replaced them in the
eighteenth century, Iran did not experience the full impact of growing European
cultural superiority and military might that the Ottoman Empire did in the
1700s. Consequently, it did not start down the

THE ISLAMIC WORLD AND INDIA, 1600–1917 501

Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt. Many consider Muhammad Ali to have been
the founder of modern Egypt. His reforms of the army reached into many other
aspects of Egyptian life, including its economy.

Bettmann/Corbis

The Harem of a Cairo Shaykh, ca. 1870. The harem actually was the private
quarters of a Muslim home, the place where women and children were protected
from strangers.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library

path of reform until well into the nineteenth century. Shah Nasir ad-Din was the
first Qajar ruler to introduce significant restructuring. Like Selim III and
Muhammad Ali Pasha, he tried to reform the shah’s army to counter steady
Russian encroachment in the Caspian Sea region and British expansion in India.
The result was an intensification of military and commercial ties with the West,
and gradually Iran was drawn into the world market. As Iranians developed a
taste for imports, more turned to growing cash crops such as tobacco, cotton,
and opium to pay for imports. Under pressure from Britain to lower tariffs, Iran
imported a flood of cheap European-manufactured goods, putting indigenous
producers out of business. Moreover, for help in building modern transport and
communications systems, Nasir ad-Din made overly generous concessions to
European firms. In 1890, the granting of a tobacco monopoly to a British firm
created a serious crisis when, led by a Muslim cleric by the name of Jamal
adDin al-Afghani, national resistance to foreign interference in Iran broke out.
Afghani, fearing Big Power political intervention in Muslim countries such as
Iran, convinced local merchants that the concessions would bring harm to local
people and compromise Iran’s religious and political autonomy. The shah
expelled Afghani from the country in 1891, but he was forced in the end to
withdraw the monopoly when another cleric declared a national prohibition on
the smoking of tobacco. However, the Western control over Iran’s mineral and
oil rights was established by another concession to the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company, and between 1908 and 1912, Iran began its first exports of oil to the
industrial West. Meanwhile, as happened in Turkey under Young Ottoman
leadership in the 1870s, demands for a constitutional and representative
government to broaden the government and make it more democratic began
circulating among Iran’s young, increasingly Western-educated intelligentsia.
The catalyst for this movement was Shah Muzaffar ad-Din’s attempts at
punishing Tehran’s merchants for price-fixing. The ulama and young
intellectuals united in defending the merchants and demanding reforms to curb
the shah’s actions. Popular support grew so fast that Shah Muzaffar was obliged
to capitulate to the protesters’ demands for a constitution and a Majlis (National
Assembly). In 1907, the Majlis convened for the first time, but the shah’s
willingness to use military force against the Majlis for many years effectively
weakened it. Although the movement for popular reform ended in a partial
failure, nationalist feelings had been born in Iran, and the constitution and the
popular movement that supported it remained vivid memories among Iranian
reformers that had their echoes in the 1950s and in 1979 (Chapter 54).

Social and Intellectual Responses

Wahhabi Fundamentalism and Jihad

Throughout its long history, Islam has witnessed periodic episodes of

revivalism. Sometimes, especially during times when Islam was in crisis, these
developments took a decidedly fundamentalist and violent form. At other times,
as was the case in the late 1800s, they assumed the character of movements of
reform and accommodation. A modern example of the former, violent reaction,
was Wahhabism, a militant reform begun in the late 1700s when a desert
shaykh, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), joined forces with a
tribal leader, Muhammad ibn Saud (from whom the Saudi royal family is
descended). Together, they fought a jihad to purge Islam of sufis, Shi’ites, and
all others whom they accused of introducing innovations, which they believed
were responsible for the decline of Islam. Largely inspired by the
ultraconservative writing of a late-thirteenth-century theologian, Ibn Taymiyya
(see Patterns of Belief), the Wahhabis believed that Islam would survive attacks
against it by its enemies only by returning to the fundamental sources of the
faith, namely the Qur’an and collections of oral traditions (called hadith)
concerning the prophet Muhammad. Only the example of the primitive Islamic
community as it was assumed to have existed at Medina in the time of
Muhammad served as an acceptable model to the Wahhabis for Muslim life.
Therefore, all Muslims had to be forced to follow that example. Ibn Abd al-
Wahhab labeled all who disagreed with this view as heretics deserving of death.
These zealots declared holy war on all neighboring tribes to force them to accept
their more purified version of Islam. “Enforcers of obedience” maintained moral
order, and they still do so in modern Saudi Arabia. “Objectionable innovations”
targeted for destruction even included mosque minarets and grave markers;
therefore, they even planned attacks on the tomb of the prophet Muhammad in
Medina. In 1802 they destroyed the tomb of the Shi’ite Imam Husayn at
Karbala, Iraq. In 1803 they succeeded in capturing Mecca, the holiest city of
Islam, and Medina, where they destroyed the markers of Muhammad’s grave.
The Ottoman sultan, Mahmud II, sent Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1811 to drive
them out. As the original fundamentalist sect of Islam, Wahhabism has inspired
many similar violent reactions to change, especially to any innovations
originating in the West. In the nineteenth century, to a varying extent, it helped
inspire resistance to European ideas and imperialism in Africa and the Middle
East.

502 CHAPTER 37

their varied tools and facilitators, such as secular schools, mixed-religion

marriages, and nonconfessional parliaments. In the rise of Wahhabism in Arabia
and the bitter resistance by Abd al-Qadir’s followers to the French in Algeria
(see Chapter 38), modern Islamic fundamentalism found its first heroes. Many
others would come forth in the twentieth century.

The Salafiyya Movement

Not all who advocated a return to the early community of Islam did so by
demanding the wholesale rejection of all things Western. As we saw previously,
Muslims who lived under autocratic regimes (such as the Ottomans and the

Today, Wahhabist-inspired fundamentalism is notorious for fueling Islamic

terrorism against America and other Western nations. Fundamentalism was and
is marked by a thoroughgoing rejection of Western influences and Western
ideas, including such notions as political democracy, religious toleration, the
equality of citizens, and various other offshoots of the Age of Enlightenment
and the American and French revolutions. To a fundamentalist (the word is a
recent appellation), the task of government is to bring about the reign of Allah
and his faithful on Earth— nothing less and nothing more. Any obstacles that
stand in the way of this process should be swept aside, by persuasion if possible,
but by force (jihad) if necessary. There can be no compromise with the enemies
of God or with

Many Muslims today consider Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) to have
been the leading intellectual of the ultraconservative Hanbali school of Islamic
thought in the Middle Ages. His writings inspired the eighteenth-century
Wahhabi movement, an Islamic fundamentalist movement founded by
Muhammad ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab, and also influenced the reform thought
(Salafiyya) of Shaykh Muhammad Abduh and others. The son of a Hanbali
scholar, Ibn Taymiyya received his education in Damascus, where afterward he
lived for about fifteen years as a schoolmaster. Living at a time when the
Muslim world was divided internally by sectarian differences and under
repeated assaults by Christian Crusaders and the Mongol armies (Chapter 17),
he sought to overcome the problems of Islam by reviving a strictly literal
interpretation of the Qur’an and Islamic law of the prophet Muhammad and by
opposing customs and innovations he considered to be illegal innovations, such
as sufism and the worshipping of saints. Because of the zeal with which he
expressed his opinions, he offended many secular and religious officials. He
spent much of his life in various prisons in Cairo, Alexandria, and Damascus,
and finally died in prison. Ibn Taymiyya was convinced of the utter perfection of
Islam. Furthermore, as did most ulama, he thought Muhammad had been both
the Messenger of God and the perfect Muslim. Reasoning thus, to him later
additions to Islam, such as theological speculation, sufism, and saint worship,
detracted from the perfection of Islam as it was in Muhammad’s days. To solve
current problems, he struggled to revive an understanding of Islam as
Muhammad and his close companions (Salaf, hence the adjective Salafiyya
sometimes is applied to his Revivalism) had originally defined the faith.
Although the ulama of all four schools of Islamic law (Sharia) accepted this

last point, where Ibn Taymiyya and most Hanbali scholars differed was in their
rejection of every other form of Islam, or sources of Islam other than the Qur’an
and the traditions of the prophet. He stated that the goal of a true Muslim was
not to think or speculate about God, nor to “know” Him, nor love Him, nor to
seek Him in any way. Rather, he thought the only legitimate goals for a Muslim
were to carry out God’s will through worshipping Him and obeying Him. Any
other form of religious belief and practice for Muslims was mere “innovation”
(bida), hence unbelief (kufr). Therefore, in his words, it was the duty of every
Muslim to wage jihad against anyone who failed to subscribe to these beliefs:

The command to participate in jihad and the mention of its merits occur
innumerable times in the Koran and the Sunna. Therefore it is the best voluntary
[religious] act that man can perform. . . . Jihad implies all kinds of worship, both
in its inner and outer forms. More than any other act it implies love and devotion
for God, Who is exalted, trust in Him, the surrender of one’s life and property to
Him, patience, asceticism, remembrance of God and all kinds of other acts [of
worship]. . . . Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that
the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according
to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.

Analyze and Interpret In your experience, how do the views of Ibn Taymiyya
compare to the views of religious fundamentalists or revivalists of other
religions, such as Christian, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalists?

Source: Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, NJ:
Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996), pp. 47–49.

patterns of belief

The Founding Figure of Islamic Fundamentalism and Reform

503

Qajars) agitated for Western-style liberal democracies and constitutional

governments to replace the systems they had lived under for centuries, but
others wanted even more, namely the reform of Islam to permit modern ideas
and ways of life to penetrate Islamic societies. Chafing under European
occupation of parts of Africa and the Middle East, some Muslim leaders in
Egypt and India in the 1890s were distressed that Islamic civilization had fallen
hopelessly behind the West, especially in technology and the sciences. One of
these concerned leaders was Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, who urged Muslims to
reform themselves in order to find the strength to meet the challenges of the
West. Afghani believed that the key to the future of Islam was to reject blind
obedience to religious tradition, and he called for Islam to modernize itself. It
was left to the Egyptian shaykh Muhammad Abduh to develop a program of
reform. Between 1889 and 1905, Abduh served as the grand mufti and as the
rector of Egypt’s most prestigious mosque university, the Azhar. In these
positions, he was able to influence many students and intellectuals to accept
limited modifications of Islamic law and thus admit the teaching of new
subjects, such as science and geography. Above all, he realized this change
required discarding adherence to tradition that had been the rule since the tenth
century. Calling for modernization based on Islamic principles, Abduh and his
followers began what came to be known as the Salafiyya movement. Rather than
simply accepting the ways of the past, even the ways of the early community, as
Ibn Taymiyya and the Wahhabists had advocated, Abduh called for returning to
the days of the “pious ancestors” (Salaf, from which Salafiyya comes) before the
tenth century, to the time when Islamic civilization led the world in intellectual
experimentation. Firmly adhering to the belief that God favored Muslims,
Abduh believed Allah could not desire to see Muslims in their present state of
inferiority and subjection to “Christian” Westerners. Rather, he reasoned, God
wished the Muslims to return to the days of free intellectual enquiry when they
studied all of the sciences. That focus, he believed, would enable them to catch
up with the West. Many of Abduh’s ideas spread rapidly in some intellectual
circles throughout the Islamic world. Seyyid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad
Iqbal advocated similar reforms for the modernization of India, as did Shaykh
al-Amin bin Ali Mazrui and Shaykh Abdallah Saleh Farsy in East Africa, for
example. Unfortunately, though, most ulama continued to ignore all innovations.

Arab Nationalism

Pan-Arabism is an outgrowth of Arab national consciousness that began to be

articulated in the late nineteenth century, especially among Lebanese and
Egyptian Christians. (Note that the word Arab or Arabic refers to an ethnic
group, not a religious one. There are many Arab Christians in Egypt, Lebanon,
and Syria, and they were among the leaders of Arab nationalism.) Ottoman
recognition of the equality of all Ottoman subjects in the nineteenth century,
regardless of religion, meant that they could no longer refuse admission to
missionaries to work among the Christian communities of the empire. The
establishment of mission schools in Lebanon and Egypt gradually introduced
Christian Arabs to the Enlightenment ideas of political liberalism and
nationalism for the first time. In Beirut, editors of a few small Christian
newspapers called for increased political self-identity among all Arabs,
regardless of religion. These ideas spread rapidly into Syria, Egypt, and Iraq,
where they appealed especially to anti-Turkish dissidents, who wished to see an
end to Ottoman rule. By the 1890s, various vocal Arabic societies had appeared,
which advocated political independence from the Ottoman Empire for the Arab
provinces. The reaction of the autocratic Sultan Abdul Hamid to these ideas was
predictable: he was able to use his secret police to suppress such talk and hound
the leaders of the Pan-Arab movement into hiding. Agents were sent disguised
as ulama to exacerbate tensions and traditional rivalries between tribes, clans,
and families, as well as between Christians and Muslims. These actions were
temporarily alleviated when the officers to the CUP deposed the Sultan in 1909,
but soon conservatives within the junta clamped down on Arab aspirations by
ordering that all ethnically based organizations be disbanded. None of this action
seriously discouraged the Arab nationalist movement, though. In 1905, many
were openly promoting the creation of an independent, Arabic-speaking nation,
stretching from Iraq to the Suez Canal. By 1913, as the Ottoman Empire was on
the brink of entering a world war as an ally of Germany, an Arab Congress met
in Paris to hammer out a consensus scheme for an autonomous Arab state.
Although the Congress failed to gain the support of the major Western powers
that they had hoped for, events during the war soon changed the whole history
of the Pan-Arab movement, as well as of the entire Middle East (see Chapter
54).

504 CHAPTER 37

2. The original objective of the British East India Company in India was to a.
study native customs. b.use India as a base for further Asian conquests c.
conquer and convert the Hindus to Christianity. d.colonize southern India for the
British Crown. e. control the tea and cotton trade with Europe.

1. A major source of internal trouble for the Ottoman rulers of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries was a. the spreading atheism of most of the Turkish
upper class. b.the professional military units called Janissaries. c. the
missionaries from Europe in the Ottoman cities. d.the attacks from the Mughal
Empire of India. e. their inability to control their police forces.

THE ISLAMIC WORLD AND INDIA, 1600–1917 505

Summary Their worldwide expansion in the Age of Discovery brought

Europeans into more frequent and, inevitably, more violent contact with other
world civilizations. For many centuries beforehand, Muslims and European
Christians had fought across religious frontiers in periodic “holy wars,” and in
these encounters, both intellectually and militarily, the Muslims generally had
enjoyed the upper hand. In the centuries following the Renaissance, the balance
of power between Europe and the lands of Islam began shifting slowly in favor
of the West, so bewildered Muslims responded in several ways that set the
pattern for interactions between Western nations and Muslim peoples that have
continued to this day. Although these responses differed considerably, they all
shared two features: (1) their continued religious base, and because they were
religious, (2) the continued assumption of the superiority of all things Islamic,
even to a Western civilization that clearly had become wealthier and more
powerful. Because of this assumption, for example, the first responses of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were

state-directed and limited to relatively insignificant borrowings from Western

technology, particularly military technology. Muslim leaders were willing to
learn from the West, provided that what they learned did not affect what they
believed were rules for living and truths that Allah had mandated. Inevitably,
though, such attempts at maintaining a barrier between science and religion had
to fail, especially because what the Muslims coveted, science— hence, the
scientific method—derived from a Western revolution in thought that was so
highly secular. In the modern era, Westerners learned not to discard their beliefs,
but to suspend them in trying to understand and master their world while leaving
what happened after death to their faiths. So, in the end, Muslim religious
extremists have found that their greatest “enemy” was not Western Christianity,
but Western secularism. Islamic civilization, like the medieval civilization that
modern Westerners finally discarded, has struggled to separate religion from
everyday life.

Identification Terms

Test your knowledge of this chapter’s key concepts by defining the following
terms. If you can’t recall the meaning of certain terms, refresh your memory by
looking up the boldfaced term in the chapter, turning to the Glossary

at the end of the book, or working with the flashcards that are available on the
World Civilizations Companion Website http://history.wadsworth.com/adler04.

Test Your Knowledge

The Mahdi Muhammad Ali Pasha

Rose Chamber Rescript of 1839

Salafiyya movement Tanzimat Reforms

Wahhabism Young Ottomans

Test your knowledge of this chapter by answering the following questions.
Complete answers appear at the end of the book. You may also take this quiz
interactively and find

even more quiz questions on the World Civilizations Companion Website:

http://history.wadsworth.com/adler04.

3. Which of these was not cited as a reason why the Ottoman Empire weakened
after the seventeenth century? a. The empire became militarily overextended.
b.New trade routes bypassed Ottoman territories, weakening the economy. c.
Later sultans were less well prepared to rule, passing much of their youth in the
harem. d.The sultans failed to perceive the growing threats posed by the Western
powers. e. Islamic attitudes and institutions helped to block needed changes. 4.
Which of the following is/are true about the Tanzimat Reforms? a. They were
initiated and directed by the sultans’ government. b.They were popularly
supported from their inception. c. They failed in their objectives. d.They were
forced on the Ottomans by the European powers. e. Both a and d are true. 5. The
Rose Chamber Rescript was significant because it a. ended the Ottoman
monarchy. b.advocated the creation of a new, modern army. c. established the
legal equality of all Ottoman subjects. d.banned Islamic law. e. ended the feudal
system of military estates. 6. An Islamic leader who influenced movements for
reform in both Iran and Egypt and who advocated Islamic modernization was a.
Nasir ad-Din. b.Muhammad Abduh.

c. Mahmud II. d.Abdul Hamid II. e. Al-Afghani. 7. In Iran, national resistance to

a reform-minded government finally gelled around the issue of a. government
attempts to stop merchants from fixing prices. b.efforts by the Shahs to
modernize their armies. c. attempts by the government to regulate education.
d.government concessions of monopolies to foreigners. e. Both a and b 8. Many
people today trace the roots of Islamic fundamentalist violence to a. the
Salafiyya movement. b.the Sudanese Mahdiyya. c. the writings of Ibn
Taymiyya. d.eighteenth-century Wahhabism. e. the establishment of the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 9. In many respects, the founder of modern Egypt was
a. Nasir ad-Din. b.Mahmud II. c. Selim III. d.Muhammad Ali. e. Khedive Ismail.
10. The Mahdist uprising in the Sudan was a result of a. efforts by the Egyptian
Khedive to modernize Sudanese society. b.the Egyptian occupation. c. the
British occupation. d.Sultan Abdul Hamid’s efforts to suppress Arab
nationalism. e. the expansion of the slave trade under Egyptian rule.
506 CHAPTER 37

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