170 • 11 WESTERNIZING REFORM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURYmay resort to violent revolution, but most successful reforms are achieved
through the ballot box, the legislature, or the forum of public opinion. They
may well reflect social and economic changes that have already occurred.
When we speak of the Reform Bills in English history, we mean the acts of
Parliament that extended voting rights to more people in the nineteenth cen¬
tury. A reform party in US politics usually is an out-group fighting against
corrupt or unjust practices within a city, state, or national government.
You might suppose that reformers come from below. In a few cases they
have, even in the Middle East. You learned earlier about the Kharijite and
Hashimite rebels under the Umayyad caliphate. In the seventeenth and eigh¬
teenth centuries farmers rebelled in Anatolia and the Balkans, but they
aimed at breaking away from, not reforming, the Ottoman government. A
better example would be the Wahhabis, a puritanical Muslim group, growing
out of the Hanbali rite of Sunni Islam, that seized power in central Arabia
during the eighteenth century. Led by a family named Sa'ud (hence the mod¬
ern state named Saudi Arabia), these Wahhabis wanted to conquer the Ara¬
bian Peninsula (if not more) and to purify Islam from practices they deemed
corrupt. They built up a fairly strong state in the late eighteenth century;
then they were checked by the Ottomans and Mehmet Ali in the nineteenth
but made a strong comeback early in the twentieth century (see Chapter 14).
Many of their ideas have won acceptance from Muslim thinkers outside
Saudi Arabia. Call them reformers if you wish. There have been many other
movements within Islam in the past two centuries that aimed to restore Is¬
lamic civilization's grandeur or to bring Muslim institutions into harmony
with modernity. They have come not from below but from the intellectual
elite. At times they have been started by the rulers themselves.
In Middle East history, significant and effective reforms usually come
from above. They have been instituted by the rulers, or by their viziers,
generals, or local governors. They have seldom been demanded by the
poor or done the lower class much good once put into effect. In particular,
we look at those governmentally imposed reforms that imitated the ways
of the West, often at the expense of Islam as the people understood it.
Westernization was—and still is—often confused with modernization.
This chapter focuses on westernizing reform in Egypt, the rest of the
Ottoman Empire, and Persia.
EGYPTIf Rip Van Winkle had nodded off in Cairo around 1795 and roused seventy-
five years later, he would have been amazed—if not bewildered—by the