Crown colony until it became a possession of the
United States in 1898.
It is difficult to overestimate how deeply Euro-
pean colonialism changed life wherever it reached
in the world. Native and traditional forms of gov-
ernment, subsistence, commerce, and education
were replaced and transformed. Social institutions
and cultural practices were reshaped and often
redefined in new frameworks of thought and action
acquired from the West. Western powers such as
the French attempted to rule their colonies with
their own administrators, as the Spanish and British
had done in the New World. Greatly outnumbered
by the African and Asian populations, however,
Europeans realized that they would have to shift to
a policy of ruling in cooperation with native lead-
ers. This is the way the British governed India and
Egypt. Native elites served as bridgeheads for intro-
ducing Western reforms into their countries and
for transferring natural resources and wealth away
from them. They were educated in local schools
featuring new Western curricula, and they studied
abroad in European schools and academies. Such
changes caused deep cleavages in colonial societies,
which were once defined by close ties of language,
kinship, reciprocity, and patronage. Colonial cities
such as cairo, Fez, and New delhi reflected these
new divisions in their layouts. Traditional residen-
tial and commercial quarters were separated from
and surpassed by new urban districts with their
European-style buildings and broad boulevards.
Indigenous peoples nevertheless benefited from
colonization as health and housing conditions
improved, new employment opportunities arose,
and literacy spread from the select few to the
populace at large. Such developments helped pave
the way for participation of more people in public
life and self-governance.
Colonialism also had a marked impact on
Islam. Muslim religious leaders led anticolonial
resistance movements in French Algeria, the Rus-
sian Empire’s Caucasus region, Dutch Indonesia,
the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, British Somalia, and
Italian libya. These movements failed in the short
run, but they were incorporated into the histories
of the nation-states that emerged in the formerly
colonized territories during the 20th century.
Pan-Islamism, an attempt to reunite Muslims
under a revived Ottoman caliphate in the late
19th century, was another way in which Muslims
attempted to oppose colonial incursions into their
territories. This movement died when the caliph-
ate was officially abolished by the secular govern-
ment of the new Republic of Turkey in 1924. One
of the most famous modern Islamic movements
was the mUslim brotherhood of Egypt. It began
as a social and religious revitalization movement
in 1928, but it became a militant opponent of
the British and Zionist Jews who created Israel in- The brotherhood joined with secular Arab
nationalists to overthrow the British-backed mon-
archy in 1953, which resulted in the creation of
the Egyptian Republic.
The success of European colonization—
together with the decline of the Ottoman, Persian,
and Mughal Empires—created a sense of crisis in
Muslim societies. The age-old privileges of their
religious authorities, the Ulama, were undermined
by the creation of secular schools, the spread of
literacy and European languages, and the introduc-
tion of Western law codes bypassing the sharia. In
response, religious revival and reform movements,
supported and led by the ulama, swept through
much of the Muslim world. Revivalists sought to
uphold and defend essential Islamic teachings,
emphasizing literalistic interpretations of the Quran
and hadith, together with adherence to the Five
pillars, family law, and other prescribed religious
practices. Meanwhile, reform-minded modernists,
often with the approval of colonial authorities,
sought to demonstrate that Islam conformed to the
principles of Western reason and science. Revival-
ists and reformers alike declared war on religious
beliefs and practices they considered to be corrupt
innovations (bidaa) and superstitions. For many of
them, this meant turning against popular Sufism
and the worship of saints. It also meant questioning
the validity of traditional fiqh (jurisprudence), and
colonialism 157 J