14
~Industry, Constitutions,
and Nationalism
1163-1336 AH
1750-1918 CEABDUL WAHHAB, Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan, and Sayyid Ahmed of
1".. Aligarh-each of these men typified a different idea of what went
wrong with the Islamic world and how to fix it. Throughout the nine-
teenth century, numerous permutations of these three currents evolved
and spread. Of them all, it was secular modernism, the direction champi-
oned by Sayyid Ahmad of Aligarh, that acquired political power most
overtly. This is not to say that Sayyid Ahmad fathered some mighty move-
ment himself. He was just one of many secular reformists across the Is-
lamic world who came up with roughly similar ideas. What made these
ideas so persuasive was a trio of phenomena spilling into the Islamic
heartland just then, from Europe: industrialization, constitutionalism,
and nationalism.
The most consequential of the three was probably industrialization, the
seductions of which affected every part of the world. In Europe, the In-
dustrial Revolution came out of a great flurry of inventions straddling the
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