The Encyclopedia of World Religions

Islam S 221

Many modernized Muslims did not find the fruits of such progress as gratifying as they had been promised, and instead they only felt spiri tually lost and alienated from their own culture. Some had studied in Western countries and came back feeling that the West was itself far from ideal. Indeed, much about it offended them. Their idea instead was to create a society that, in a way they contended Islam itself had not been for many cen turies, was thoroughly and consistently Islamic. It should follow the S HARIAH , or code of Islamic law; give Islamic teachers and scholars an impor tant role in government; distribute wealth fairly in accordance with Islamic ideals of justice and brotherhood; and resist all non-Muslim influence in such matters as dress, family life, education, and the role of women. This was the program of the revolution in Iran in 1979, which overthrew the monarchy of the pro-Western Shah to create such an Islamic state. Similar movements, though not as success ful politically except for a while in Afghanistan and Libya, have become important and influential elsewhere. Some have resorted to violence ( see AL -Q AEDA and H AMAS ). Others, in relatively stable nations such as Turkey, Malaysia, and Indonesia, have been content to function as normal political parties. In still other lands, such as Algeria, Egypt, and Iraq, the situation remained complex, volatile, and uncertain. Early in the 21st century, there were scattered signs of growing moderation on both sides, as “Islamic revolution” countries like Iran began to liberalize somewhat and secularists recognized the stature of Islam as a civilization. But the future shape and role of the Islamic one-fifth of the world remains open. A further important factor has been the large scale immigration of Muslims to other places, especially Europe, North America, and Australia. Despite some tensions in the host countries, these immigrants are discovering basic Islamic values in settings where they have to be clearly defined over against what is merely cultural, and in the process they are exploring new ways to be Muslim. Many others are also meeting Muslims as neighbors and

Moreover, seldom in the history of the reli gions of the world has the outer status of a reli gion changed as dramatically as has Islam since the beginning of the 20th century. In 1900, most Muslims lived under the humiliating colonial rule of professedly Christian overlords—British, French, Dutch, or Russian—or in weak and back ward Muslim empires, the Ottoman and Persian. Most of the Muslim world was sunk in poverty and underdeveloped. Many, among both Muslims and non-Muslims, had a sense that Islamic culture was stagnant, its day perhaps past. In 2000, the situation was radically different. Virtually all Muslim societies were independent nations by then, and some had become wealthy and technologically advanced, mostly from oil revenue. Vibrant new Islamic cultural and politi cal movements insisted that, far from dead, Islam was a contemporary way of life that had much to offer the world in the various moral and economic crises it now faced. But Islam’s new confidence and assertiveness sometimes led to harsh confron tations with the non-Muslim world around it. Many of these conflicts stemmed from Mus lim unease. Islamic economic and political gains were far from evenly distributed. Some nations, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, were rich, while oth ers, like Bangladesh and some of the Muslim Afri can states, remained among the poorest on earth. Some Muslim governments, while independent, were corrupt and undemocratic. Some Muslims felt that, despite independence, the West still exer cised far too much influence, both economic and cultural, in their societies. They saw Muslim offi cials as too easily swayed by Western alliances and money. Some devout Muslims believed that their young people were being seduced by false Western fashions, values, and loose sexual mores. Recent Islamic history has been largely shaped by the underlying problem of what an authentic Muslim society in the modern world would be like and how it could be actualized. The first responses tended to say that to be relevant, Islamic societies must modernize, westernize, and to a great extent secularize. By the 1970s, however, a powerful reac tion against such policies had set in.