Islam • 149came subject to the new Soviet Union. Even after some of these
countries had been allowed to become independent, the West
often continued to control the economy, the oil or such re-
sources as the Suez Canal. European occupation often left a
legacy of bitter conflict. When the British withdrew from India
in 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned between
Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, which are to this day in a
state of deadly hostility, with nuclear weapons aimed at each
other's capitals. In 1948 the Arabs of Palestine lost their home-
land to the Zionists, who set up the Jewish secular state of Is-
rael there, with the support of the United Nations and the
international community. The loss of Palestine became a po-
tent symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the
hands of the Western powers, who seemed to feel no qualms
about the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians.
Nevertheless, in the very early days, some Muslims were
in love with the West. The Iranian intellectuals Mulkum
Khan (1833-1908) and Aqa Khan Kirmani (1853-96) urged
Iranians to acquire a Western education and replace the
Shariah with a modern secular legal code, seeing this as the
only route to progress. Secularists from these circles joined
the more liberal ulama in the Constitutional Revolution of
1906, and forced the Qajars to set up a modern constitution,
to limit the powers of the monarchy and give Iranians parlia-
mentary representation. Most of the leading mujtahids in
Najaf supported the constitution. Sheikh Muhammad Husain
Naini expressed their view most cogently in his Admonition to
the Nation (1909), which argued that limiting tyranny in this
way was clearly an act worthy of the Shiah, and that constitu-
tional government, Western-style, was the next best thing to
the return of the Hidden Imam. The Egyptian writer Rifah
al-Tahtawi (1801-73) was enthralled by the ideas of the Eu-
ropean Enlightenment, whose vision reminded him of Fal-