306 DESTINY DISRUPTED
It would be quite plausible to say that at this point, Islam as a world-
historical narrative came to an end. Wrong but plausible. The Western
cross-current had disrupted Muslim societies, creating the deepest angst
and the most agonizing doubts. The secular modernists proposed to settle
the spiritual turmoil by realigning their societies with the Western current.
Make no mistake, most of these leaders still thought of themselves as Mus-
lims; they just adopted a new idea of what "Muslim" meant. Most still
worked to break the grip of specific Western powers over their specific peo-
ple; they just did so as revolutionary anticolonialists rather than as zealous
Muslims committed to promoting Islam as one big community on a mis-
sion from God. These elites sought to make gains by holding the West to
its own standards and ideals and in doing this they implicitly validated the
Western framework of assumptions.
They were not without popular support. Throughout the Middle
World, traditional, religious Islam was quiescent now: beaten and sub-
dued. Educated people tended to see the old-fashioned scholars and clerics
as quaint. The ulama, the scriptural literalists, the miracle merchants, the
orthodox "believers"-all these had dominated Dar al-Islam for centuries,
and what had they created? Threadbare societies that couldn't build a car
or invent an airplane, much less stand up to Western might. Their failure
discredited their outlook, and a sizable public was ready to give someone
else a turn. The future belonged to the secular modernists.
Or so it seemed.
But secular modernism was not the only reformist current to come out
of the nineteenth-century Muslim world. What of the other currents?
What of the Wahhabis, for example? What of Sayyid Jamaluddin's disci-
ples? These movements should not be confused with orthodox Islam or
old-fashioned religious conservatism. They were just as new-fangled as sec-
ular modernism, just as intent on smashing the status quo.
Even the Wahhabis, by their very appeal to a mythic moment in the
distant past, were rejecting the petrified present (and the twelve centuries
that led up to it). And they still breathed in the Arabian Peninsula. In fact,
they seized state power there, with the founding of Saudi Arabia, about
which more later. Outside Arabia, the Wahhabis could not gain much pur-
chase among the educated elite or the new middle classes but they
preached away in rural mosques to ill-educated and impoverished villagers.