��228 No god but God
ciation), countered the Aligarth platform by arguing that, far from
separating the religious and civil, Islam requires that “the law of God
should become the law by which people lead their lives.”
Ironically, though Mawdudi was himself a fervent antinationalist,
his ideas were instrumental in providing the ideological foundation for
the creation of the world’s first Islamic state, Pakistan. Yet to under-
stand how India’s Muslim community progressed from the disastrous
aftermath of the Indian Revolt to the triumphant creation of their own
separate homeland in less than a hundred years requires a brief detour
through Egypt, where another group of Muslim reformists living
under colonial rule were on the verge of launching an awakening in the
East that would ripple through the whole of the Muslim world.
E GYPT AT THE turn of the nineteenth century had become, in the
words of William Welch, “an essential spoke in the imperial wheel” of
the British Empire. Unlike India, where the British held uncontested
and unconcealed control over every level of civic administration,
Egypt was allowed to maintain a façade of independence through the
hereditary reign of its utterly impotent viceroys, or khedives. Though
their fealty remained, in principle, to the Ottoman Empire, by the
nineteenth century the khedives were little more than subjects of the
British Empire. They were powerless to make any political or eco-
nomic decisions in Egypt without the consent of their colonial mas-
ters. In exchange for a seemingly inexhaustible line of credit, which
they could never hope to repay, a succession of viceroys had gradually
settled into apathetic reigns characterized by unrestrained excess and
political indifference.
Meanwhile, Egypt was inundated with foreign workers, wealthy
investors, and middle-class Englishmen eager to stake their claims on
a country with few bureaucratic obstacles and unlimited opportunities
for advancement. To accommodate the rapid influx of Europeans,
entire cities were built on the outskirts of Cairo, far away from the
indigenous population. The foreigners quickly took charge of Egypt’s
principal export of cotton. They built ports, railroads, and dams, all to
implement colonial control over the country’s economy. With the