ABSTRACT
This chapter examines views of Islam outside the metropole where British writers who worked and lived in Oriental spaces, who might be expected to denigrate Islam and champion European superiority, did not fully subscribe to imperialism's claim of a divinely sanctioned right to subordinate, and govern others in ways that canceled their cultures and religions. Perhaps Europeans did not always know best. Even though these writers did not question that Britain's colonial enterprise fulfilled its national destiny they thought that respect for subject peoples’ religious and cultural traditions would strengthen rather than weaken the imperial project.
