The prospects for Islam’s accommodation with the liberal-democratic societies of Europe and North America is one of the most urgent questions of our times. Why, ask western commentators, does Islam appear to have a problem with democracy and liberalism? Why did Islamic societies not experience modernity in the same way as the west? Is there anything about Islam itself-as religion or culture-that precludes development along such lines?
From Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, the Islamic world’s encounter with modernity shook it with such force that it was never to be the same again. All Muslims, from peasants to pashas, would in the course of the next 200 years feel the aftershocks as the economic, political, social and cultural horizons to which they had become accustomed were changed by the new global reality of European dominance. Accompanying this was a growing sense of decline, as Muslims measured their own societies against those of the west and found them wanting.
The gloom also gave way to efforts at renewal, resulting in the greatest flurry of intellectual activity within the Islamic world since the early centuries of Islam. Thinkers such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, Muhammad Abduh and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid from Egypt, Rashid Rida from Syria, Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Iqbal in India, and the Persian Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, grappled with the new questions. They formed a transnational class of intellectuals, administrators and reformers that emerged in the early 19th century, reaching its apogee in the 1920s. They had their disagreements but collectively their efforts represent the best attempt to reconcile Islam with the principles of secular-liberal modernity.
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