250 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Even if Muslim and Christian scholars had found some forum in
which to exchange views, it would have been irrelevant to the conundrum
facing Muslims because by the nineteenth century, the challenge to Islam
came not so much from Christianity as from a secular, humanistic world-
view that evolved out of the Reformation, the melange now often called
"modernity."
The source of Muslim weakness and European strength was not obvi-
ous. It wasn't strictly a question of military advantage. For the most part,
the foreigners weren't torturing and killing. For the most part, the new
overlords didn't even set themselves up as rulers, quite. Officially, most
Muslims still had their own native monarchs, still had their own govern-
ment buildings where Muslim officials still stamped documents, and
somewhere in every Muslim state was still a capital dating back to ancient
days of bygone splendor, and in that capital was a palace and in that palace
a throne and on that throne usually a shah, sultan, nawab, khan, khedive,
or what you will, some native ruler whose wealth and pomp made him all
but indistinguishable from the potentates of old.
In Iran, the foreigners roamed the corridors of power merely as advi-
sers. In Turkey, there they were, collecting salaries as consultants. In Egypt
and the Levant, they stood by as "protectors." Even in India, which had a
governor-general appointed by the British parliament, the military and po-
lice forces that "kept order" consisted mostly of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs,
Parsees, and other locals. How could Muslims claim that they were not still
ruling themselves?
And yet by the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims looked around
and saw with dawning horror that they had been conquered: from Bengal
to Istanbul, they were subservient to foreigners in every aspect of their
lives, in their own cities and towns and neighborhoods and in their very
homes. And not just foreigners like the ones next door, but people who
spoke a whole different set of languages, practiced different religious ritu-
als, wore different kinds of clothes and different kinds of headgear {or,
shockingly, none at all!), built different kinds of houses, formed different
kinds of groupings. These foreigners ate pork, they drank liquor, their
women moved about in public with their faces showing, they laughed at
jokes that weren't funny and failed to see the humor in things that were hi-
larious, ate weird-tasting food, listened to music that sounded more like