History of Islam

Beginnings

"Islam" is an Arabic word that means "acceptance,"
"surrender," "submission," or "commitment," and is closely
related to the Arabic word for peace (salaam; in
Hebrew, shalom). Adherents of Islam are called
Muslims, literally, those who make peace. Muslims are those who
surrender to the will of God (Allah, in Arabic) in every aspect
of their lives and enjoy the resulting peace with God and each
other. The prophet Muhammad gave the name Islam to the religious
movement he founded.

There are several events that could be considered the
beginning of Islam, including the life ofMuhammad, or theHijra.
If we seek the beginning of Islam in a sacred event, then perhaps
it lies in the Night of Power (laylat al-qadar), when
Muhammad received the call to be God's messenger. This article
briefly sets the context for this decisive event, and notes its
essential meaning in Islam.

In the Islamic worldview, the origins of the faith lie
in God's initial creation of the universe and everything in it,
including the First Parents, Adam and his wife. For a time, all
creatures lived in perfect peace, but then the First Parents were
tempted by Iblis and disobeyed God's rules. As a
result, Adam and his wife were banished from Paradise, though God
reassured Adam that the banishment was temporary. God promised to
send messengers to Adam and his progeny, and these messengers
would bring God's guidance. Adam was reassured that those who
follow God's guidance will have no reason to feel fear or grief
(surah 2:31-38).

One of God's most important messengers was Abraham
(Arabic, Ibrahim), who was called by God to leave his home in Ur
(in present-day Iraq). Abraham (whose name means "Father of Many
Nations") is revered in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam as the ideal model of pure faith in the one true God.
Abraham's islam was exemplary. He followed God's instructions in
everything, and was even willing to sacrifice his own son because
God had commanded it. The sacred story of Islam tells of how
Abraham and his son Ishmael (Arabic, Ismail) built
the Kaaba (literally "House of God") in Mecca, the
center of Muslim worship.

Muhammad, the final messenger sent by God, belonged to
the Quraysh, the tribe that controlled the sacred sites of Mecca,
including the Kaaba. At the time of Muhammad's birth, ca. 570
C.E., the culture of the Arabian peninsula was generally
animistic and polytheistic. Shrines with idols proliferated,
especially in Mecca. The Kaaba was filled with idols that had
been placed there by the different tribes and clans of Arabia.
Allah, which means quite simply "the God," was the highest god,
but only one among many.

Still, monotheism was not unknown, as there were
Christian and Jewish tribes in Arabia. They too had received
guidance from God's messengers, recorded in sacred writings such
as the Torah (Moses), the Psalms (David), or the Gospel (Jesus).
They were "People of the Book," or people who possessed sacred
scripture. But from the perspective of Muhammad and his
followers, God's message in these scriptures had become
corrupted, whether by time or self-interest. A fresh revelation
was needed, one that was incorruptible, and Muhammad was called
to deliver it. Although Muhammad was a prophet to the Arabs of
the 7th century, the message was timeless and intended for all
humankind. It was God's final revelation, and thus Muhammad is
called the last prophet, or Seal of the Prophets.

This revelation, which was to become the foundation of
Islam, had its beginning in the Night of Power, which many
traditional accounts date to the night between the 26th and 27th
of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar. Muhammad
often went to the caves of Mt. Hira near Mecca for solitary
meditations and vigils, and on this night, he experienced a
profound and disturbing vision. There are several versions of the
story. They differ in the details, but the meaning is the same.
An angelic being, later identified by Muhammad as Archangel
Gabriel, appeared to him and commanded him to "recite" in the
name of God. Muhammad did not respond immediately, and the angel
took him by the throat and shook him as he repeated his command
to "recite." Again Muhammad did not react, so the angel choked
him until Muhammad agreed to do as he was told. So began
Muhammad's years as a prophet, first to the Meccans and
ultimately to all of Arabia.

This decisive event took place when Muhammad was forty
years old, ca. 610, and the revelations continued until his death
in 632. TheQuran is the record of the messages Muhammad
recited in the name of God. It forms the basis of the religion of
Islam, which by the time of Muhammad's death had united nearly
all the people of the Arabian peninsula into a single polity with
common beliefs and purpose. And it is the inaugural event for the
establishment and spread of a religion that is now the
second-largest religion in the world, with over one billion
followers. Muslims live in almost every country in the world, and
are the majority in forty-eight countries stretching from north
Africa to southeast Asia, with the greatest populations
concentrated in south Asia and Indonesia. Despite the great
diversity in languages, customs, lifestyles, and beliefs, Muslims
share their love for the messenger and dedication to the
message.

Influences

Islam emerged in the 7th century C.E. in the city of
Mecca, a flourishing and cosmopolitan commercial center on the
coastal plane of Arabia. Muhammad did not claim to have invented
a new religion, but to have brought a new revelation that
returned the people of the peninsula to the one true God, known
to the Arabs as Allah, the God of Abraham, Ishmael, Noah, Moses,
and Jesus.

The Arabian peninsula is an arid region of deserts,
steppes, and mountains. Nomadic herders were best equipped to
survive the dry conditions, spending most of the year in the high
central plateau cultivating flocks of sheep and goats, and
relying on camels for food, transport, and clothing. In the
spring, they would herd their flocks into the desert, where
plants briefly bloomed in the spring rains. Water was only
sufficient to support settlements and agriculture in a few oases
and coastal areas. These geographic conditions were an impediment
to would-be military conquerors and tended to isolate the people
within. Not one of the great conquerors of antiquity was able to
conquer Arabia, and the Arabs themselves did not unite to create
a conquering state of their own. Resources were scarce, and
tribal life was competitive.

The culture of Muhammad's time included belief in a
number of spirits and powers, in particular those associated with
rocks, springs, and trees. Deities were associated with various
stars and planets, and the most important of these were
goddesses. A superior deity was known as Allah, or "the God," but
this god was somewhat vaguely defined and did not figure strongly
into the religious practices of the time.

One of the main religious practices was the pilgrimage.
There were shrines to various deities in different parts of the
peninsula, but the most important center of pilgrimage was Mecca,
where the rectangular stone building known as
theKaaba stood. The Kaaba was filled with images of deities,
including the gods of the different clans. During an annual
season of pilgrimage, all fighting was prohibited. People came to
Mecca from all over to perform the rites of pilgrimage, many
of which survive to the present day. They also engaged in
diplomacy, poetry competitions, and trade.

Muhammad was a member of a tribe called the Quraysh, one
of the most powerful groups in Arabia. The Quraysh had control of
Mecca, which in addition to being the center for polytheism
became the most important stop along what soon became the primary
trade route in the Arabian Peninsula. The Quraysh thrived on
Mecca's expanding commercial economy. Hostilities between the
Persian and Byzantine Roman Empires had ruined trade along the
traditional overland route from the Mediterranean to the Persian
Gulf. A new route was needed, and the coastal plain of Arabia
conveniently lay overland from the ports of Yemen. Mecca had the
advantage of sitting at an intersection, where the north-south
route for the transfer of goods from the east crossed another
major route that led east into the Iraqi markets. The Quraysh
gained a great deal of wealth and prestige from this particular
set of circumstances, and it was initially to the Quraysh and the
Meccans that Muhammad brought the message of Islam. The message
required social and economic changes that the Quraysh at first
resisted, leading to years of hostility and persecution. Yet it
was Muhammad who ultimately united the Arabs of the peninsula
into a single nation.

Trade with the regions to the north brought the Arabs
into contact with Judaism and Christianity. Moreover, there were
settled communities of Christians and Jews in the peninsula, and
Arabic-speaking Jewish tribes. As a result, the Arabs were
familiar with these two religions, and Muhammad's closely-related
teachings. Teaching that Islam is the climax of monotheistic
faith, Muhammad reached out to both Jews and Christians, seeking
alliances and hoping to win converts to his message of social and
religious reform.

Muslims and Christians enjoyed debate and dialogue,
particularly over theological issues, and Muhammad invited
Christians to pray in his mosque. Initially Muhammad and his
followers followed the Jewish Arabs by facing Jerusalem for
prayer, but shortly after arriving in Medina, Muhammad received a
revelation instructing the Muslims to face Mecca when praying.
This simple change served to distinguish Islam from Judaism,
despite the strong affinities between the two.

Founders

Muhammad is known as rasul
Allah, or God's Messenger to the Arabs, and to all of
humanity. He was born in Mecca ca. 570 C.E., and died in Medina
in 632. Most of what we know about Muhammad comes from theQuran,
but we also have biographies written in the century after his
death (called the sirah) and the hadith. Some general
histories contemporary with the sirah are also useful sources of
information about Muhammad's life.

Muhammad's father died before he was born, and his
mother died when he was six years old, leaving him an orphan. He
went to live with his paternal grandfather, who sent him to live
with a nomadic tribe. This was customary at the time for boys
born in the towns of the Arabian peninsula. Later, Muhammad began
accompanying his uncle, Abu Talib, on trading expeditions to
Syria. On one of these trips, Muhammad met a wealthy widow named
Khadija. Khadija was impressed by his honesty, and hired him to
manage her caravan business. Eventually she proposed marriage.
The couple was married for twenty-four years and had at least
seven children together, four daughters who survived to
adulthood, and at least three sons who died in infancy. The
marriage was monogamous, and by all accounts was very
happy.

The night Muhammad was called to become a prophet of
Allah, known as the Night of Power, took place when Muhammad was
around forty years old. The strange and terrifying vision shook
Muhammad deeply, but Khadija advised him to be steady and trust
the vision. Muhammad began preaching to the people of Mecca in
613. His earliest messages focused on the oneness
(tawhid) of Allah, the punishments that await the
greedy and the proud on Judgment Day, and on exhorting people to
show goodwill toward one another. He put special emphasis on the
care of the poor, especially orphans and widows.

Muhammad gathered followers from a variety of segments
of Meccan society, from both poor and weak clans, and wealthy
ones. All seemed to be seeking something more fulfilling than the
materialism offered by Meccan society. Muhammad and his followers
critiqued the culture of competition and the high value placed on
money and material goods, calling for submission to the will of
the one true God. Mecca, however, was a center for trade and the
most important destination in the peninsula for the annual
pilgrimage that celebrated the pantheon of gods, a festival that
netted for the Meccans their annual gross income. Therefore
logically the merchant society of Mecca was not particularly
receptive to Muhammad's critique of materialism and his calls for
social reform and monotheism. The Meccans wanted Muhammad to stop
preaching about monotheism and social justice. The most powerful
tribal leaders in Mecca attempted to bribe him into silence by
offering to share the wealth of the annual pilgrimage with him
and even allowed for the God that Muhammad believed in to be
deemed the most powerful of all the gods in Mecca. Muhammad did
not cooperate with the Meccans' attempts at negotiations, and the
Meccans began persecuting him and his followers.

In a town called Yathrib, north of Mecca, a civil war
was tearing the town apart. Muhammad had established a reputation
as both a charismatic holy man and a fair arbiter. So in 621 the
city leaders sent a delegation to Muhammad to invite him to move
to Yathrib. In 622, Muhammad and his followers left Mecca for
Yathrib, an event remembered as the Hijra, or emigration. This
event became year one of the Islamic calendar. Muhammad built the
first mosque in his new home, and Yathrib became known as the
city of the prophet, madinat al-nabi, or simply,
Medina, one of Islam's three holiest cities (Mecca and Jerusalem
being the other two).

Once in Medina, Muhammad drafted an agreement on behalf
of the feuding clans that guaranteed mutual respect and religious
freedom, and required common defense of the city. Muhammad and
his followers flourished, and added many more followers to their
ranks. He was deeply disappointed, however, when leaders of the
Jewish tribes of the city, close allies of Muhammad's enemies in
Mecca, did not accept his claims to be a prophet, although they
too signed the treaty to live together in mutual respect. Until
this time, Muhammad had taught that God's revelation to the Arabs
was in a common stream with Jewish and Christian revelations, not
a separate religion but the culmination of them. Upon this
rejection from the powerful Jewish tribal leaders of Medina,
Muhammad received revelation from God to break away and found
Islam as a separate religion.

The Meccans continued to harass Muslims, confiscating
and selling their property. They responded by defending
themselves and their property. In 624, the Meccans and Muslims
fought a major battle, with the Muslims defeating a Meccan force
three times its size. Many saw this as a sign of God's
protection, and converted to Islam. The following year, Muhammad
and his troops suffered heavy losses in a second battle with the
Meccans. Ultimately, however, Muhammad and the Muslims prevailed,
and in 630, Muhammad and the Muslims took control of Mecca.
Muhammad destroyed the idols in the Kaaba and the other
shrines in the city, and performed the rites
of pilgrimage.

Muhammad had married several women after Khadija's
death, and he and his wives and children settled in Medina. The
following year, many of the tribes of the peninsula pledged
loyalty to Muhammad and Meccans converted to Islam. Muhammad had
gained control of Arabia. After a pilgrimage to Mecca in 632,
Muhammad fell ill and died in the home of his youngest and
favorite wife, Aisha.

Sacred Texts

The word "Quran" means "recitation," because the Quran
was first heard in sermons and public readings. Muslims believe
it is still best communicated by being recited. The Quran has
been translated into many languages, but only the Arabic version
is considered authoritative. The sounds of the Quran recited
aloud in Arabic are considered part of its nature, inseparable
from its meaning. It is also believed to be divine, the eternal
and literal word of God. It is filled with God's direct speech,
revealed through the use of the first person plural ("we"). The
original, divine version of the earthly book is considered
coeternal with God, either in heaven or in the mind of God.
Translations into other languages, removed from sacred Arabic
words and sounds, are not the literal word of God, and are
classified as interpretations.

The Quran is available in translation in every language
of the world; non-Arabic-speaking Muslims read translations of
the Quran as a form of extra devotion and look to the Quran as a
source of divine guidance. All Muslims memorize verses from the
Arabic Quran because verses from the Quran are required to be
recited in the daily ritual prayer that all Muslims perform. The
ritual prayer has remained in Arabic despite the fact that most
Muslims in the world live outside of the Middle East. This
provides Muslims a tremendous sense of unity and shared
brotherhood and sisterhood throughout the world because the
liturgy of worship has never changed. The most devout male and
female Muslims—even those who are not religious authorities
on Islam—will memorize the entire Quran in Arabic; those
that do so are referred to
as hafiz or hafiza.

The Quran contains a record of the revelations recited
by the prophet Muhammad over a period of approximately twenty-two
years in piecemeal, from 610 to 632. Muhammad commissioned
scribes to record the revelations in writing, and at the time of
his death, a number of his followers had memorized the entire
text. As Muhammad's followers began to die, the community became
concerned that variations on the revelations would proliferate,
and the original, authentic revelation would become obscured.
Work began on producing an authoritative version, starting with
the time-consuming task of gathering all the revelations from
both written and oral sources. Muhammad's wives, companions, and
scribes all owned partial versions. The challenge was to
correlate all the partial versions, decide between variations,
and produce an authoritative version. Under Uthman, the
third caliph, a team of scholars led by one of Muhammad's
companions completed the task by around 650.

The Quran is approximately the same length as the
Christian New Testament. It has 114 chapters,
called surahs, which range in length from 3 to 286
verses. Each surah is named after an image or topic mentioned in
it, and many of the names are memorable and appealing, such as
"The Elephant," "Light," "Dawn," "Thunder," "The Cave," "The
Moon," or "Smoke." The surahs are ordered from longest to
shortest, except for the first one, which contains a brief
invocation and is the shortest of all. The first
surah, al-Fatiha, is the most recited chapter of
the Quran as it is said multiple times in every ritual prayer. In
contemporary printed Qurans, along with each chapter name, the
heading of the surah also indicates whether it was revealed
before or after the Hijra, as well as the number of verses
it contains. The surahs vary in style and content, and the longer
ones cover a variety of topics. Many Muslims and non-Muslims
consider the Quran to be a masterwork, a work of incredibly
beautiful and eloquent poetry and wisdom. Much of the beauty is
lost in the Quran's translation to English, so this point may be
hard to understand for those who do not understand
Arabic.

As the literal word of God, the Quran is regarded as
sacred and infallible. In the Quran, God's message is pure and
uncorrupted. It is the primary source of belief and practice for
Muslims, and is the source for understanding God's will for
humans. It contains solutions to disagreements and practical
challenges. As the territory under the Muslims expanded, and as
time passed, the original context of the Quran changed. It became
more urgent to understand the Quran's meaning in changed
circumstances. The pursuit of historically textualized
explanation and interpretation of the Quran became known
as tafsir, or exegesis.

The second most important source of guidance for Muslims
is the Sunna, the custom of the Prophet, which is recorded in
the hadith. The hadith do not have the status of
scripture, but they are deemed as canonical and are an important
source for culture and guidance. Along with the Quran, they are
the basis for shariah (political and religious
law). In contrast to the Quran, which is the record of God's
speech to Muhammad, the hadith contain sacred history, reports of
the words and deeds of Muhammad and other early Muslims. After
Muhammad's death, his companions compiled a record of all his
teachings and actions. They passed these on so that the study of
the Prophet's life and work would influence the community.
Muhammad is the model Muslim, and the hadith are studied for
their insight into understanding ideal Muslim
behavior.

Historical
Perspectives

Muslims live in nearly every country on earth, in places
as diverse as Paris, Los Angeles, Bali, and Kandahar. They are
old and young, male and female, urban and rural, rich and poor,
university professors and kindergarten students, parents,
farmers, shop owners, and CEOs. Yet dispassionate, even-handed,
and data-driven studies of the lives of Muslims and Muslim
communities have unfortunately been in the minority of the vast
published output concerning Islam in the past thirty years.
Concepts such as "Islamic terrorism" and "Islamic fundamentalism"
summarily dismiss Muslims as dangerously anti-western. These
hasty generalizations saturate the western media, despite the
many criticisms of such obvious stereotyping. One of the most
disputed theories has been Samuel Huntington's thesis of the
post-Cold War "clash of civilizations." Despite its vague and
untenable concept of "civilization identity," Huntington's
perspective has recently enjoyed both political and popular
influence.

Clichéd views of Islam and the "Islamic threat"
proliferate in serious journalism and popular entertainment,
despite patient and determined scholarly efforts to dispel them.
In The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?(3rd ed.
1999), John Esposito documented, in expert and accessible terms,
the vast diversity in politics, cultural expressions, traditions,
and historical realities of the world's Muslims. In The
Failure of Political Islam (1994), Olivier Roy
described the failure of political Islam to win over the great
majority of Muslims. In Covering Islam: How the Media
and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the
World (Vintage ed. 1997), Edward Said discussed the
ways in which some of the more crass stereotypes of Muslims have
come to dominate American media coverage of the Middle East and
the Arabs. In the first section of the book, "Islam as News,"
Said considers how Americans rely on the news media for their
knowledge of Islam and Muslims. In consequence, information is
limited to subjects deemed newsworthy, such as oil crises and
terrorist attacks. Further, the limited information Americans get
from the news media is filtered through American government and
industry experts whose overriding concern is to determine who is
friendly to U.S. interests and who is not. The result is a
distorted view of Islam in which questions of local concerns and
experiences are simply not asked.

Meanwhile, scholarship on Islam has changed considerably
in the last thirty years. In the 18th and 19th centuries,
European scholars specializing in the languages and literatures
of the "orient" (Turkey and the Arab world, and later India,
China, and Japan) were called "orientalists." The wars of the
first half of the 20th century put an end to the old empires of
the Ottomans, Russians, Germans, and Austrians, and then launched
the period of decolonization that followed the Second World War.
This led to the emergence of orientalist scholars from the very
countries formerly governed by European powers and studied by
European scholars.

These new orientalists challenged traditional
orientalist assumptions, such as the belief that an "oriental
essence" could be found within the cultures of Asia. In his
seminal 1963 essay "Orientalism in Crisis," Egyptian sociologist
Anouar Abdel-Malek argued that the national liberation movements
of Asia, Africa, and Latin America demanded a new approach to
understanding the problems of the orient. No longer would the
peoples of the orient be merely the objects of the scholars'
studies; they were the scholars themselves, with their own voices
and their own deep interest in the problems of their nations and
cultures. Abdel-Malek's essay was quickly followed by a critique
of orientalism from the Palestinian Muslim historian A.L. Tibawi.
In his 1964 essay "English-Speaking Orientalists," Tibawi
discussed European Christian hostility toward Islam, seen most
clearly in alliances between 19th-century Christian missionaries
and orientalist scholars. These alliances, Tibawi argued, cast
suspicion on the objectivity, or so-called "scientific
detachment," of orientalist scholarship.

Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalismlaunched what
was by far the most resonant and effective critique of
orientalism. Said, a Palestinian Christian professor of English
and Comparative Literature, analyzed orientalist scholarship and
argued that it serves as a body of hegemonic discourse. Echoing
Tibawi, Said discussed in great detail the failure of orientalist
scholarship to adhere to such core intellectual virtues as
rationality and objectivity. What orientalist scholarship does is
create stereotypes through which power over Muslims peoples is
asserted and justified. Instead of approaching the study of Islam
or Muslims in terms of specific questions about local
circumstances and historical influences, orientalism carelessly
portrays all Muslims in an undifferentiated mass, describing them
as irrational, backward, despotic, inferior, and so forth. The
West is then by extension stereotyped as rational, progressive,
humane, superior, and so forth. Other orientalist stereotypes
include such untenable concepts as the so-called "Arab mind" and
"Islamic society." Echoing Abdel-Malek, Said argued that whether
consciously or not, the orientalists had created a discourse that
serves to justify European, and subsequently American,
imperialism.

Said's critique of the power exercised by scholarly
discourse about "the Other" (those who are not us) sent
shockwaves through academia, permanently altering the dynamics of
such established disciplines as anthropology, history, sociology,
and comparative religions. Many now seek to study Islam and
Muslims with careful sensitivity to their own inherited
assumptions. While Said has been rightly criticized from a number
of positions, the majority of his critics accept his conclusions
in principle.

Others, less interested in entering the debate over the
validity of Said's claims, have taken his argument into the field
to conduct fresh analyses of Islamic cultures and histories, and
of the colonial empires that sought to subjugate the Muslims.
Through this fresh and original scholarship, the richness and
density of our shared knowledge on Islam and Muslims is
increasing. For excellent examples of studies of the diversity
and complexity to be found within specific localities and
historical moments, see Yann Richard's Shi'ite Islam:
Polity, Ideology, and Creed(Blackwell 1995), Peter Lamborn
Wilson's Scandal: Essays in Islamic
Heresy (Autonomedia 1988), or Lisa
Lowe's Critical Terrains: French and British
Orientalisms (Cornell 1991).

Modern
Age

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, European nations
were engaged in an aggressive and competitive campaign to secure
new territories and new markets. In this age of European
imperialism, certain key areas of the Muslim world attracted
increased European attention. The European nations expanded their
influence and established colonies in the Middle East, Africa,
and India. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in defeat in 1918 at
the end of World War I, France and Great Britain assumed control
of the Ottoman Empire's Middle East and north African
territories.

In the 19th century, in response to the political and
economic challenges of European imperialism, a number of schools
of Islamic thought emerged that included important political and
social components. Called Islamic revivalist movements, these
schools, such as the Wahhabi movement in Arabia and the Mahdi
movement in Sudan, were concerned that Islamic society appeared
to be in decline. While not necessarily agreeing in the details,
they shared a conviction that returning to careful adherence to
the Quran and the sunnahwould restore independence and
influence to Islamic societies.

In the 20thcentury, Muslims struggled with the political
and economic challenges presented by European colonialism and
imperialism, and with the intellectual and moral challenges
presented by a rapidly-changing world of nationalism, secularism,
anti-colonial struggles, and the Cold War. Two very different
hypotheses found wide appeal among Muslims. Some, such as the
Muslim Brotherhood, built on the revivalist teachings of the 19th
century and argued for a return to Islamic traditions. Finding
wide support among the working and impoverished classes of
Muslims, they taught that Islam is a positive alternative to the
modern world, which had left so many behind.  They led
reformist movements that advocated for an Islamic system of
government. Many of them spent time in prison for their political
leadership and publications, particularly in Egypt and
Syria.

Others advocated a search for a positive synthesis with
the modern world, arguing that Islam can and should be
reinterpreted in light of modern issues and concerns. In their
writing, they built bridges between the traditional teachings of
Islam and the modern challenges of secularism, nationalism,
multiculturalism, and democracy. These modernists—such as
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Qasim Amin,  Sayyid
Ahmad Khan, and Muhammad Iqbal—were popular with the
educated classes of the Middle East and south Asia.

In the 1950s and 1960s, most of the Muslim world won
independence from the European colonial powers.  Many of the
newly-independent states had not existed in their present forms
prior to European intervention, including Lebanon, Syria, Sudan,
Jordan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Pursuing their own interests, the
European powers had created these states by drawing artificial
borders on maps and appointing European allies as
rulers. 

As a result, the anti-colonial struggle was replaced by
another prolonged struggle, this time over national identity and
political legitimacy. Who is Lebanese, and who is Syrian? Who is
Pakistani, and who is Indian? Should the Arabs all be unified
into one state? Why should former colonies continue within
national borders imposed from London or Paris? Who is responsible
for the Palestinians? Who has the right to lead the countries,
and how should the leader be chosen? Struggles to find consensus
on the answers to these intractable questions were conducted in
the context of the Cold War and the American and Soviet
tendencies to conduct that war by proxy, in a strategy the United
States called "low-intensity warfare." As a result, political
conflict was frequently conducted through wars instead of public
debate, with a bewildering number of local and foreign interests
influencing critical national events.

In this context, Islamic revivalists and Islamic liberal
modernists competed with communist and other secular nationalist
movements. Many Muslims who participated in and defended Islamic
culture and practices nonetheless argued on behalf of the modern
thesis of separation of religious and state functions, and for
democracy founded in universal suffrage. They too joined
political parties and social movements and campaigned for
secular, national democracies. Secular governments neglected the
role of Islam in the public life of Muslim societies and jailed
Islamic revivalists and secular nationalists alike, because of
the different challenges they presented to these governments.
Many Muslim countries became one-party states or military
regimes, or a combination of both. Political repression and
uneven economic development contributed to growing popular
unrest.

The combination of foreign interference, grinding
poverty, political repression, and violence has led many Muslims
to turn to Islam as their best hope for liberation, peace,
security, health, and prosperity. The devastating effects on
families of ongoing violence have caused particularly powerful
grievances. Corrupt regimes, failed states, and the
marginalization of Muslim immigrant populations in Europe have
recently led some to seek more radical solutions to ongoing
despair and repression through a more globalized Muslim community
that transcends the boundaries of nation-states (e.g.,
al-Qaeda).

Islamic revivalism has become a powerful force in Muslim
politics, present in nearly every Muslim country. At its heart is
a belief that the politics of the 20th century have failed
Muslims, and that a full return of Islam to the center of
personal and public life will restore Muslim power and influence,
and bring health and welfare to Muslim societies. To this end,
Islamic organizations are active in social services, education,
publishing and broadcasting, and economics. Meanwhile, secular
Muslims work just as hard to achieve the same goals for their
families and fellow Muslims. It remains to be seen how peace will
be achieved.