Islam and the West… for a better world @
bond among the dead, the living, and those yet to be born. In most of the Muslim world, the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the breaking of this bond. It is fashionable now for Muslim students of history and social sciences to speak of the early dawn of political representation and constitution in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt or Qajari Iran. The irony, of course, is that representation and the assertion of the state power went hand in hand. By undermining what Ira Lapidus called “the local autonomy” allowed in the traditional mode of social organisation, 24 by creating standardised legal and educational systems, by re-appropriating the power of legislation, the modern state reigned supreme. The rise of the centralized state thus marked the dawn of the modern in the Muslim world. The motivation behind the launching of modernization in the Muslim world was the deepening feeling of weakness among Muslims. As the Muslim states became unable to halt western encroachment in the Crimea, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and North Africa, Muslim statesmen believed that only by restructuring the state, military and society on the European modern model they would protect their land and people. In areas that had fallen under imperialist domination, the introduction of the modern was undertaken by the colonial administration. This does not mean that when independence was achieved the post-colonial Muslim state reversed the process. If anything, modernization in the post-colonial era was undoubtedly accelerated. 25 The reason is simple: Those who came to control the independent state emerged from among the modern intelligentsia, the modern army-officer corps, and the modern bureaucracy. Their vision of the world, their training, and their frame of reference were essentially modern 24 Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies , 599-600. 25 On the post-colonial modernization and its consequences, see Nazih N. Ayubi, Over- Stating the Arab State (London: Tauris, 1995); and the collection of articles, published in John I. Clarke and Howard Brown-Jones (eds.), Change and Development in the Middle East (London: Methuen, 1981); and the collection of articles in Giacomo Luciani (ed.), The Arab State (London: Routledge, 1990).
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