ABSTRACT
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and a rising tide of anti-colonial sentiment throughout most Muslim-majority lands under European control (see Map 3.1), the stage was set for a debate between two (seemingly) distinct and incompatible approaches to Muslim political independence: a system of Islamic political universalism, represented by a renewed caliphate; or the nationalist option, which held language, territory, and shared history as the proper foundations of a political order. Various leading scholars and activists debated the merits of these two options, and some also proposed models that sought to combine elements of each. Read together, the ideas of these thinkers-figures such as Rashid Rida, Ali Abd al-Raziq, Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi, and Hassan al-Banna-provide us with a clear sense of how Islamic response to the Western liberal order evolved over the first half of the twentieth century. Understanding the complex interplay of Islam and secular nationalism in three core Muslim states, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan, also helps to set the stage for explaining later instances of Islamic revivalism. This is the period that saw the establishment of the prototypical modern Islamist movement in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Highly influential in terms of later developments, its formation, evolution, ideology, and political role are worth considering in some detail before sketching out the general course of Islamism over the remainder of the twentieth century.
