Political Modernity 67read in European literature and political theory, who read natural law theory
into some construction of an original Islam of the fi rst generation, which they
claimed had brought liberty and law.^10 The gift of liberty, argued Namik
Kemal, is not some largesse bestowed by the Sultan upon his subjects, but it was
a gift from God to the Muslims. Those intellectuals, in their ideas and lifestyles,
were highly secular, and their appeal was to the new middle classes. One of
their demands was for a constitution and parliament in order to limit the power
of the Sultan. An associated statesman, Midhat Pasha, was the champion and
architect of a constitution and parliament, which came into effect in 1876, only
to be suspended a year later by the Sultan Abdulhamid II. This latter presided
over a much-reduced empire, which had lost most of its European territories
and Christian populations and become almost entirely Muslim, with Turks,
Arabs and Kurds. He made an ideological virtue of that by the ideologisation of
Islam against Europe and at the same time by cultivating conservative Muslim
sentiment against the forces calling for democracy and constitutionalism.^11 He
nurtured the image of the traditional Muslim absolute ruler enforcing the com-
mands of God and the correct path. At the same time he continued with the
processes of centralisation and bureaucratisation that etatised previously reli-
gious functions, and constituted a form of secularisation. In this, Abdulhamid set
the pattern, which was to prevail through the twentieth century, of authoritarian
rulers resisting opposition or limitations on their power by invoking religion and
casting their opponents as infi dels.
Islam then was ideologised and politicised into forms that recur in modern
politics: the conservatives, resorting to populism as well as the support of author-
itarian rulers; modern reformists reading liberalism into Islam; and, to emerge
later, in the early decades of the twentieth century, radical populists, such as
the Muslim Brothers. At the same time, so much of cultural, intellectual and
political life was secularised, favouring the emergence and dominance of secular
ideologies and political movements.
These processes of modernity proceeded in the general context of increasing
European penetration, in some cases, as in Egypt, of direct military and politi-
cal control. This shaped the structure of modern politics, predominantly urban,
in forms of anti-colonial struggle. The models of liberation and of independent
government were derived from European ideas and ideologies, fi rst liberal and
nationalist, and later fascist and socialist. National liberation and nationalism
remained a central component of all these ideologies and political movements.
Islamist ideology also developed in this context.
On the social level the processes of economic development and political
centralisation contributed to the breakdown of primary social unities and soli-
darities of tribe, village and urban quarter, although this proceeded unevenly in
different places. Egyptian guilds were weakened as they lost their monopoly over
labour in their particular crafts and became redundant by the 1920s (Baer 1968: