ABSTRACT
The challenge to religious authority in Islam has grown out of its bruising
encounter with the West from the beginning of the nineteenth century and from the first stirrings of secularisation through military and educational
reform. Historians of modern Islam are familiar with this account of the
origins of reformist movements.1 In this chapter, I am primarily concerned
with a different order of change: the growth of a global Islamic diaspora,
the impact of educational reform on a new generation of Muslims growing
up in a Western consumer culture, the rapid advance of information tech-
nology and the emerging culture of individualism among Muslim youth.2
These macro-social changes necessarily represent a challenge to traditional forms of religious knowledge and constitute a crisis of authority. This reli-
gious crisis has a clear parallel with religious individualism, the rise of a
religious market place and new spirituality in Europe and the USA.3 There
are, nevertheless, significant differences in the contemporary transforma-
tions of Christianity and Islam that are, in part, a function of their different
organisational structures and doctrines of authority to which we need to
attend. However, it is the parallels rather than the cultural differences that
are striking, pointing as they do to common social processes. The cultural transformation of Islam in the modern period can be traced
historically to the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte’s expeditionary force at
Alexandria on 1 July 1798. Bonaparte’s brief encounter with Egypt
demonstrated the decisive superiority of European technology and social
organisation over the Ottoman Empire, and it was this military expedition
that launched the process of European colonialism in the Middle East,
which lasted until the Suez campaign of 1956. It also launched the spread
of modern ideologies – positivism, civil rights and secularism – that were aspects of the French Enlightenment. The disciples of Saint Simon did
more to change Egypt than the artillery of Bonaparte and Nelson.
Responses to this colonial intervention can be traced through subsequent
reformist activity among such Muslim intellectuals as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani
(1839-97), Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida (1865-1935).
These intellectuals sought to understand the decline of Muslim power, to
explain the causes of this decline and to offer a remedy. Influenced by
European social philosophy, especially by Ernest Renan and Herbert
Spencer, their diverse and heterogeneous writings had a common theme, namely that Islam had declined by departing from its pristine roots and
only a fundamental reform of Islam could offer an effective solution.
However, their version of Islam was radically innovative, and, despite its
apparent claims to restore the past, it was oriented towards the future. This
form of purified Islam was confrontational in its efforts to challenge the
religious establishment and to rid Islam of its traditional elements. Islam
was, they argued, a rational religion, and its rational components were
exclusively preserved in the Qur’an which could not be understood through the fog of medieval theological and legal disputations. The revival of Islam
required the liberation of independent reasoning (ijtihad). These currents of
reform were crystallised in the Egyptian context by Hasan al-Banna (1900-
49) who was the founder of contemporary Sunni activism and the Muslim
Brothers. Banna, who came from a small village and whose father was a
watchmaker, challenged the secularising elite of Cairo, the imperialists who
effectively ran Egyptian affairs and the puppet regime of King Farouk, and
called for the creation of an Islamic state.4
