Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Islam after Empire 4 7dents thought about the essentials of their faith, history, and the social world.As Benjamin Fortna phrases it, “Combining morals with chemistry and Frenchderives from a very different tradition from the one that linked grammar,logic, theology, and jurisprudence” (2000, 381). Thus, the intellectual mooringsof Islamic life were being transformed.Programs of Reform in the New Nation-StatesAlthough the Ottoman Empire was dismembered by the European powers afterthe end of World War I, its modernizing reform programs nevertheless hadlasting effects on the new nationalizing elites in its former territories. One ofthe most important of these legacies was the Ottomans’ mid-nineteenth-centu ry conviction that in order to compete politically, economically, and militarilyin the new world order and in order to free themselves of foreign domination,they would have to incorporate into their societies unfamiliar We s t e r nideas and institutions that could help their cultures flourish even as theychanged. According to this line of thought, Islam, as an important part ofthose cultures, would have to change as well.The paths of change taken by the central Ottoman lands in Asia Minor andby the Arabic-speaking lands to its south and east differed substantially. Thenew state of Turkey retained its independence following World War I underMustafa Kemal, a general who through a mixture of charisma and brute forcerevolutionized the way his country would construct its future, earning him thename Atatürk, “Father of the Turkish Nation.” However, at the same time, theformer Ottoman territories of North Africa, along with the Levant, parts ofArabia, and Mesopotamia, became or remained European dependencies untilthe latter half of the twentieth century.In these peripheral lands of the Ottoman Empire, substantially new ways ofthinking about Islam had begun to emerge during the latter half of the nineteenthcentury. These new ways of thinking responded to the growing imperialpower of the European nations by adopting Europe’s own political ideologiesand intellectual tools. These tools, the most important of which were theschool and the newspaper, led to the emergence of a new kind of spokespersonfor Islamic tradition in the region. French and Italian instructors who hadbeen brought to the Ottoman court in the late eighteenth century had by the1830s helped found a generation of intellectuals familiar with European languagesand ideas. Soon thereafter, Arabic- and Turkish-speaking student delegationsreturned from residence in Paris with new understandings of bothmodern military tactics and the political philosophies of Jean-JacquesRousseau and Montesquieu, who wrote about the unique souls of nations andthe necessity of popular participation in government. These returning stu-