146. Karen Armstrongare not likely to emerge from the process in the way that they
did in the West.
The Islamic world has been convulsed by the moderniza-
tion process. Instead of being one of the leaders of world
civilization, Islamdom was quickly and permanently re-
duced to a dependent bloc by the European powers. Mus-
lims were exposed to the contempt of the colonialists, who
were so thoroughly imbued with the modern ethos that they
were often appalled by what they could only see as the back-
wardness, inefficiency, fatalism and corruption of Muslim
society. They assumed that European culture had always
been progressive, and lacked the historical perspective to see
that they were simply seeing a pre-modern agrarian society,
and that a few centuries earlier Europe had been just as
"backward." They often took it for granted that Westerners
were inherently and racially superior to "orientals" and ex-
pressed their contempt in myriad ways. All this not unnatu-
rally had a corrosive effect. Western people are often
bewildered by the hostility and rage that Muslims often feel
for their culture, which, because of their very different ex-
perience, they have found to be liberating and empowering.
But the Muslim response is not bizarre and eccentric; be-
cause the Islamic world was so widespread and strategically
placed, it was the first to be subjected in a concerted, sys-
tematic manner to the colonization process in the Middle
East, India, Arabia, Malaya and a significant part of Africa.
Muslims in all these places very early felt the brunt of this
modernizing assault. Their response has not been simply a
reaction to the new West, but the paradigmatic reaction.
They would not be able to come to modernity as success-
fully or as smoothly as, for example, Japan, which had never
been colonized, whose economy and institutions had re-
mained intact and which had not been forced into a debili-
tating dependency on the West.