Explain the impact of Western colonialism and the subsequent rise of the post-colonial nation-state on the intellectual and social structures of Islam. Discuss with reference to how the colonial and post-colonial state reconfigured the place of Islamic institutions in national life. Discuss also with reference to the rise of new intellectual movements like Islamic Modernism and the emergence of new lay Muslim movements like Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

Islam, has not only been a faith but also a source of identity and an important factor in social

relations and politics. Islam has long been important to Muslim politics. It has played a role in

the struggles for liberation from colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia,

and the Middle East. In various stages of the colonial era, Islamic forces, thinkers, and political

leaders have played an important part in shaping Muslim politics.

Step-by-step explanation

Articulating anti-colonialism in the language of the jihad, relating struggles for liberation to

Islam, has been a powerful paradigm that continues today to be relevant to Muslim struggles

against imperialism, most lately in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and

Chechnya's war of liberation against Russia in 1996.

Transnationalism was also a distinctive feature of Muslim societies and Islam itself; over the

course of the nineteenth century, Islam became more and more transnationally organized.

Institutions in the heartlands of Islam, such as the mosque university of Al-Azhar in Egypt, grew

in importance. Due to the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca, travelling Islamic scholars and Sufi

orders, dissemination of reformist ideologies and Islam-inspired revolts against Western rule.

There was a growing influence of Pan-Islamism and a defending solidarity between all Muslims.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, nationalism became related in a complex way to

religious identity, Islam, modernity and resistance to colonial rule. Islamic Modernism emerged

in the middle of the 19th century in reaction to the rapid changes of the time, especially the

perceived onslaught of Western civilization and colonialism on the Muslim World. The

insistence was on religion, claiming that only when Islam is interpreted so as to be relevant in a

world which is different from what it was 1400 years ago, can Islam be regarded as a religion for

all ages. The early Modernists influenced Islamist movements like Salafism and the Muslim

Brotherhood.

Many of the states that emerged after the end of colonialism were non-democratic. These states

have also been susceptible to coups, which have occurred in the range of two dozen times in the

Middle East in the post-colonial period. The spread of Christianity was taken as secularism,

which cannot be imposed globally as a universal norm as it is seen as simply extending Western

power in the Middle East. A question that arose was, if one does not have a political identity that

is different than the ruling empire, why be independent? Identities manifested in the form of

Muslim Brotherhood, claiming to be an authentic, indigenous political identity, which in their

depiction of history, had been suppressed by the colonial power.

Often, the political identities that anti-imperial movements stressed were representative of the

lower or lower middle classes. Post-colonial rulers often had to contend with the problem of

what it meant to be independent and whether they need to rid themselves of the old colonial

order, including the people who represented it, and then replace it with a new system based on

their supposedly authentic political identity.