ABSTRACT
The Islamic world faced a major challenge during the nineteenth century. Expanding Western European states and economies played an increasing role in determining events, both on a global scale and within Islamic societies. In the diversity of the Islamic experiences during the nineteenth century, some general trends can be discerned. Effective, organized opposition to reform, in Islamic terms, was largely the product of a fundamentalist style of activity. The role of Islam in the Ottoman state was changing, and, with that change, the ulama increasingly lost effective influence. Islam's role in Abdulhamid's autocracy was to provide legitimacy. In Egypt itself, Islamic developments tended to avoid militant activism, and the great Muslim leaders of the nineteenth century. A more rigorously Islamic position also developed under the influence of the Pan-Islamic politics of Abdulhamid and the teachings of Muhammad Abduh. The Moroccan Salafiyyah provides a contrast to the more conservative style of the major Islamic institutions in that country.
