136. Karen Armstrongdinary people in their own dialect, and teaching them how to
perform such basic rituals as the salat prayer correctly. In his
view, the ulama had failed in their duty, had locked themselves
away in their madrasahs, interested only in the minutiae of fiqh,
and had left the people to their own devices. Other Neo-Sufis,
as these reformers are called, performed similar missions in Al-
geria and Medina. Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1832)
founded the Sanusiayyah movement, which is still the predom-
inant form of Islam in Libya. The Neo-Sufis had no interest in
and no knowledge of the new West, but they evolved ideas sim-
ilar to those espoused by the European Enlightenment by
means of their own mystical traditions. They insisted that the
people rely on their own insights, instead of relying on the
ulama. Ibn Idris went so far as to reject the authority of every
single Muslim thinker, except the Prophet. He thus encour-
aged Muslims to cast off habits of deference and to value what
was new, instead of clinging to past tradition. His mysticism
was based on the figure of the Prophet, and taught the people
to model themselves on an ideal human being rather than
yearn for a distant God, in a sort of devotional humanism.
There was, therefore, no intrinsic reason why Muslims
should reject the ethos of the new Europe. Over the centuries
they had cultivated virtues that would also be crucial to the
modern West: a passion for social justice, an egalitarian polity,
freedom of speech and, despite the ideal of tanshid, a de facto
or (in the case of Shiism) a principled separation of religion
and politics. But by the end of the eighteenth century the
most alert Muslims had been forced to recognize that Europe
had overtaken them. The Ottomans had inflicted stunning
defeats on the European powers in the early days, but by the
eighteenth century they could no longer hold their own
against them, nor deal with them as equals. In the sixteenth
century Suleiman had granted European traders diplomatic
immunity. The treaties known as the Capitulations (because