THE REFORM MOVEMENTS 251noise, and spent their leisure time in puzzling and pointless activities such
as cricket and quadrilles.
So the question arose now, as it had in the wake of the Mongol holo-
caust: if the triumphant expansion of the Muslim project proved the truth
of the revelation, what did the impotence of Muslims in the face of these
new foreigners signify about the faith?
With this question looming over the Muslim world, movements to re-
vive Islam could not be extricated from the need to resurrect Muslim
power. Reformers could not merely offer proposals for achieving more au-
thentic religious experiences. They had to expound how the authenticity
they proposed would get history back on course, how their proposals
would restore the dignity and splendor of the Umma, how they would get
Muslims moving again toward the proper endpoint of history: perfecting
the community of justice and compassion that flourished in Medina in the
original golden moment and enlarging it until it included all the world.
Many reformers emerged and many movements bubbled up, but all of
them can be sorted into three general sorts of responses to the troubling
question.
One response was to say that what needed changing was not Islam but
Muslims. Innovations, alterations, and accretions had corrupted the faith,
so that no one was practicing true Islam anymore. What Muslims needed
to do was to shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine,
original form.
Another response was to say that the West was right. Muslims had got-
ten mired in obsolete religious ideas; they had ceded control oflslam to ig-
norant clerics who were out of touch with changing times; they needed to
modernize their faith along Western lines by clearing out superstition, re-
nouncing magical thinking, and rethinking Islam as an ethical system com-
patible with science and secular activities.
A third response was to declare Islam the true religion but concede that
Muslims had certain things to learn from the West. In this view, Muslims
needed to rediscover and strengthen the essence of their own faith, history,
and traditions, but absorb Western learning in the fields of science and tech-
nology. According to this river of reform, Muslims needed to modernize but
could do so in a distinctively Muslim way: science was compatible with the
Muslim faith and modernization did not have to mean Westernization.