Introduction

Lord Cromer was a typical colonialist. In his view, the Egyptians were an inherently backward people and needed to be colonized for their own good.
Like Renan, when he compared the Muslim countries to his own more developed nation, he assumed that Europe had always been in the vanguard of progress. He did not realize that European countries such as Britain and France had once been as “backward” as the Middle East, and that he was simply looking at an imperfectly modernized country. He saw “Orientals” themselves as inherently, genetically flawed. Cromer’s achievements in Egypt were considerable. He stabilized the economy, improved irrigation in the country, and increased the market production of cotton. He abolished the corvee, the old system of forced labor, and established a competent judicial system. But this progress came at a price. Although the khedive was nominally in charge of his government, each ministry had an English “adviser” whose views invariably carried the day. Cromer believed this to be necessary. He assumed that Europeans had always been rational, efficient, and modern, while the Orientals were naturally illogical, unreliable, and corrupt.
Similarly, Islam “as a social system was a complete failure,” and incapable of reform or development. It was not possible to resuscitate “a body which is not, indeed, dead, and which may yet linger on for centuries, but which is nevertheless politically and socially moribund, and whose gradual decay cannot be arrested by any modern palliatives.
He made it clear that this chronically retarded country would need direct British supervision for some time.
The British occupation created new rifts within Egyptian society. The ulema were displaced as the educators and chief guardians of knowledge by those who had received a Western education. The Shariah courts were replaced by the European civil courts established by Lord Cromer.
Artisans and small merchants were also adversely affected. A new class of Westernized civil servants and intellectuals formed a new elite, estranged from the vast majority of the people. But most damaging of all, perhaps, was the tendency of Egyptians themselves to internalize the colonialists’ negative views of the Egyptian people. Thus, Muhammad Abdu (1849--1905), a disciple of Afghani, was devastated by the British occupation. He described the modern period as a “torrent of science” drowning the traditional men of religion: It is an age which has formed a bond between ourselves and the civilized nations, making us aware of their excellent conditions . and our mediocre situation: thus revealing their wealth and our poverty, their pride and our degradation, their strength and our weakness, their triumphs and our defects.
This corrosive sense of inferiority crept into the religious life of the colonized people, compelling a reformer such as Abdu to answer the charges of the colonialists and to prove that Islam could be just as rational and modern as any Western system. For the first time, Muslims were forced to allow their conquerors to set their intellectual agenda.
Abdu had been involved in the Urubi revolt and was exiled after the British victory. He joined Afghani in Paris. The two men had much in common.
Abdu had been initially drawn into Afghani’s circle by his love of mystical religion (irfan), which, he used to say, was “the key to his happiness. But Afghani had also introduced Abdu to the Western sciences and, later, Abdu read Guizot, Tolstoy, Renan, Strauss, and Herbert Spencer. Abdu felt quite at home in Europe and enjoyed the company of Europeans. Like Afghani, he was convinced that Islam was compatible with modernity and argued that it was an eminently rational faith, and that the habit of taqlidwas corrupting and inauthentic. But, also like Afghani, Abdu was committed to rational thinking from within a mystical perspective. It was not as yet emancipated from the spirituality of the old world. Eventually, Abdu quarreled with Afghani about politics. He believed that Egypt needed reform more than revolution. He was a deeper thinker than his master, and could see that there could be no shortcut to modernization and independence.
Instead of joining Afghani in his dangerous, pointless schemes, he wanted to rectify some of Egypt’s immense problems by means of education, and in 1888 he was allowed to return. He became one of the most beloved men in the country, remained on good terms with both Egyptians and British, and became a personal friend of both Lord Cromer and the khedive.
By this time there was considerable frustration in the country. At first, many educated Egyptians had been forced to admit that, unwelcome as the British occupation undoubtedly was, Lord Cromer ruled the country far more efficiently than Khedive Is mail had done. But by the 18908, relations with the British had deteriorated. The British officials were often of lower caliber than before and made less effort to cement relations with the Egyptians.
They created their own privileged colonial enclave in the Gezira district.
Egyptian civil servants found that their promotions were blocked by young Britons, and there was resentment of the privileges accorded the British and other foreigners by the Capitulations, which exempted them from the law of the land. More and more people listened to the fiery rhetoric of the nationalist Mustafa Kamil (1874-1908), who called for the immediate evacuation of the British. Abdu regarded Kamil as an empty demagogue. He could see that before Egyptians were able to run a modern independent state, they would have to deal with some serious social problems, which had been exacerbated by the occupation.
In Abdu’s view, secularist ideas and institutions were being introduced far too rapidly into a deeply religious country. The people were not being given time to adapt. Abdu greatly respected the political institutions of Europe, but did not think they could be transplanted wholesale into Egypt. The vast mass of the people simply could not understand the new legal system; its spirit and scope were quite alien to them. As a result, Egypt was effectively becoming a country without law. He therefore planned a major revision of Islamic law to meet modern conditions; this program was finally implemented in the 1920s after his death, and it is the system still in use in Egypt today. Abdu could see that Egyptian society was fragmenting; it was, therefore, essential to link modern legal and constitutional developments to traditional Islamic norms. Otherwise, the vast majority of Egyptians, who had not been much exposed to Western ideas, would make no sense of the new institutions. The Islamic principle of shurah (“consultation”), for example, could clearly be seen as compatible with democracy; and ijmah (the “consensus” of the community, which in Islamic law gave validity to a Muslim doctrine or practice) could now help the people to understand constitutional rule, whereby public opinion limited the power of the ruler.
There was urgent need for educational reform. At present, Abdu noted, there were three entirely separate educational systems in place, which pursued wholly different objectives; this was creating impassable divisions in society. In the religious schools and madrasahs, which were still ruled by the conservative ethos, students were discouraged from thinking independently;
in the Christian missionary schools, which supported the colonialist venture, young Muslims were alienated from their country and their religion.
The state schools had the worst of all worlds: they were inadequate copies of European schools, and taught no religion at all. Those who had been educated by the ulema resisted all change, while Western-educated youth accepted any change at all, but were only superficially conversant with European culture and estranged from their own.
In 1899, Abdu became the mufti of Egypt, the country’s chief consultant in Islamic law, and was determined to reform traditional religious education.
He was convinced that madras ah students should study science in order to take a full part in modern society. At the time, the Azhar was, in Abdu’s view, an example of everything that was currently wrong with Islam: it had turned its back on the modern world and become a defensive anachronism.
But the ulema resisted the reforms Abdu tried to implement. Since the time of Muhammad All, they had experienced modernization as a destructive assault, which had reduced God’s influence in politics, law, education, and the economy. They would continue to resist any attempt to force them into the modern world and, unlike the Iranian ulema, fell seriously out of touch with the world outside the madras ah Abdu had little success with them. He managed to modernize the administration of the Azhar and to improve the salaries and working conditions of the teachers. But ulema and students alike were fiercely opposed to any attempt to introduce modern secular subjects into the curriculum.76 Faced with such opposition, Abdu became dispirited.
In 1905, he resigned as Mufti, and died shortly afterward.
The struggles of both Abdu and Afghani show how difficult it was to adapt a faith that had come to fruition in the conservative period to the entirely different ethos of the modern world. They were both aware--and rightly so--of the dangers of too rapid secularization.
Islam could provide much-needed continuity at a time of dislocating transformation. Egyptians were becoming strangers to one another, and those who had been Westernized were often alienated from their own culture. They were truly at home in neither the East nor the West, and, without the mythical and cultic practices which had once given life meaning, they were beginning to descend into the void that lay at the heart of the modern experience. The old institutions were being destroyed, but the new ones were strange and imperfectly understood.
Abdu and Afghani were still nourished personally by the old spirituality.
When they insisted that religion must be rational, they were closer to Mulla Sadra than to European rationalists and scientists, who discounted all religiously acquired truth. When they insisted that reason was the sole arbiter of truth and that all doctrines must be capable of rational proof, they spoke as practicing mystics. Shaped by conservative norms, they saw reason and intuition as complementary. But later generations, who had imbibed more of the spirit of Western rationalism, would find that reason alone could not yield a sense of the sacred. This loss of transcendent meaning would not be counter-balanced, as in the West, by the benefits of liberation and independence, because, increasingly, it was the West that set the agenda--even in religious matters.
A telling example of how confusing and damaging this could be occurred in 1899, when Qassim Amin (1865--1908) published Tahrir al-Mara (“The Liberation of Women”), which argued that the degraded position of women--in particular, the practice of veiling--was responsible for Egypt’s backwardness. The veil was “a huge barrier between woman and her elevation, and consequently a barrier between the nation and its advance.” The book caused an uproar, not because it was saying anything new, but because an Egyptian writer had internalized and adopted a colonial prejudice. For years, men and women in Egypt had been agitating for fundamental changes in the position of women. Abdu himself had argued that the Koran presents men and women as equal before God, and that traditional rulings concerning divorce or polygamy were not essential to Islam: they could and should be changed. The lot of women had improved. Muhammad All had established a school that trained women in elementary medical procedures; by 1875 about three thousand Egyptian girls attended the mission schools, and in 1873 the government established the first state primary school for girls, and a secondary school the following year. Visitors noted that women were seen more frequently in public; some were discarding the veil, and by the end of the century, women were publishing articles in journals, and becoming doctors and teachers. Change was already under way when the British arrived, and, though there was still a long way to go, a start had been made.

The veiling of women is neither an original nor a fundamental practice in Islam. The Koran does not command all women to cover their heads, and the habit of veiling women and secluding them in harems did not become common in the Islamic world until some three generations after the Prophet’s death, when Muslims began to copy the Christians of Byzantium and Zoroastrians of Persia, who had long treated their women in this way. But the veil was not worn by all women; it was a mark of status and worn by women of the upper classes, not by peasants. Qassim Amin’s book, however, brought the peripheral practice of veiling right into the heart of the debate about modernization. He insisted that unless the veil were abolished, the Muslim world would remain in a degraded state. Partly as a result of the furor arising from Tahrir al-Mara, the veil became for many Muslims a symbol of Islamic authenticity, whereas for many Westerners, the veil was and is “proof” of an ineradicable misogyny in Islam.

Amin was not the first to see the veil as a symbol of everything that was wrong with Islam. When the British arrived, they were appalled by the practice, even though most Western men at this date derided feminism, wanted their own wives securely at home, and opposed the education and enfranchisement of women. Lord Cromer was typical in this respect: he was one of the founders in London of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, yet in his monumental book on Egypt, he expressed great concern about the status of Muslim women. Their degraded state was a canker that began its destructive work early in childhood, as infants perceived the oppression of their mothers, and had eaten into the whole system of Islam.
The practice of veiling was the “fatal obstacle” that prevented Egyptians from attaining that “elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization.”
Missionaries also lamented the catastrophic influence of the veil, which, they believed, buried a woman alive and reduced her to the status of a prisoner or a slave. It showed how greatly the people of Egypt needed the benevolent supervision of the Western colonialists.
Amin had accepted this somewhat cynical European assessment of veiling at face value. There is nothing feminist about Tahrir al-Mara. Amin presented Egyptian women as dirty and ignorant; with such mothers, how could Egypt be anything other than a backward, lazy nation? Did Egyptians imagine that the men of Europe, who have attained such completeness of intellect and feeling that they were able to discover the force of steam and electricity, ... those souls who daily risk their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and honor above the pleasures of life, ... these intellects and these souls that we so admire, ..
would have abandoned veiling after it had been in use among them if they had seen any good in it?
Not surprisingly, this sickly sycophancy inspired a backlash. Arab writers refused to accept this estimate of their society, and in the course of this heated debate the veil turned into a symbol of resistance to colonialism. And so it has remained. Many Muslims now consider the veil de rigueur for all women, and a sign of true Islam.
By using feminist arguments, for which most had little or no sympathy, as part of their propaganda, the colonialists tainted the cause of feminism in the Muslim world, and helped to distort the faith by introducing an imbalance that had not existed before.
The modern ethos was changing religion. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were Jews, Christians, and Muslims who believed that their faith was in danger of being obliterated. To save it from this fate they had resorted to a number of stratagems. Some had retreated from modern society altogether and had built their own militant institutions as a sacred bastion and refuge; some were planning a counteroffensive, others were beginning to create a counterculture and a discourse of their own to challenge the secularist bias of modernity.
There was a growing conviction that religion had to become as rational as modern science. In the early years of the twentieth century, a new defensiveness would lead to the first clear manifestation of the embattled religiosity that we now call fundamentalism. 6. fundamentals (1900-1925) The great war, which broke out in Europe in 1914 and reduced the landscape of France to a nightmarish inferno, showed the lethal and selfdestructive tendency of the modern spirit. By decimating a generation of young men, the war damaged Europe at its core, so that it would, perhaps, never quite recover. After the war, no thinking person could be serenely optimistic about the progress of civilization. The most cultivated and advanced nations in Europe had crippled each other with the new military technology, and the war itself seemed a hideous parody of the mechanization that had brought such wealth and power. Once the intricate apparatus of conscription, transportation of troops, and manufacture of armaments had been set up and switched on, it acquired its own momentum and became difficult to stop. The pointlessness and futility of trench warfare defied the logic and rationalism of the age, and had nothing whatever to do with human need. The people of the West looked straight into the void that some had sensed for decades. The economy of the West had also begun to falter, and in 1910 had begun the decline that would lead to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The world seemed to be hurtling toward some unimaginable catastrophe.
The Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) saw the “Second Coming” not as a triumph of righteousness and peace, but as the birth of a savage, pitiless era:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. But these were also years of unparalleled creativity and astonishing achievements in the arts and sciences, revealing the full flowering of the modern spirit. In all fields, the most creative thinkers seemed possessed by the desire to create the world anew, throw away the forms of the past, and break free. Modern people had evolved an entirely different mentality and could no longer look at the world in the same way. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century novel had developed narratives that expressed an ordered progress of cause and effect;
modern narratives splintered, leaving the reader uncertain about what had happened or what to think. Painters such as Pablo Picasso (1881--1973) dismembered their subjects or viewed them from two different perspectives at the same time; they seemed deliberately to flout the expectation of the viewer, and announced that a new vision was necessary. In both the arts and the sciences, there was a desire to go back to first principles, to irreducible fundamentals, and from this zero base to start again. Scientists now searched for the atom or the particle; sociologists and anthropologists reverted to primeval societies or primitive artifacts.
This was not like the conservative return ad fontes because the aim was not to re-create the past but to break it asunder, to split the atom, and bring forth something entirely new.
Some of these endeavors were an attempt to create a spirituality, without God or the supernatural. The painting, sculpture, poetry, and drama of the early twentieth century were all quests for meaning in a disordered, changing world; they were trying to create novel modes of perception and modern myths. The psychoanalytical science of Sigmund Freud, which strove to uncover the most fundamental layers of the unconscious, was also a search for new insight and an attempt to access a hidden source of spiritual strength. Freud had no time for conventional religion, which he regarded as the most serious enemy of the logos of science. But he tried to revive a modern sense of the old myths of the Greeks and even made up mythical fictions of his own. The horror and fear of much of the modern experience lent new urgency to the search for some intangible significance which could save human beings from despair, but which could not be attained by the normal processes of logical, discursive thought. Freud, indeed, for all his devotion to scientific rationalism, showed that reason represented only the outermost rind of the mind, overlaying a seething cauldron of unconscious, irrational, and primitive impulses that profoundly affect our behavior but over which we have little control.
Religious people too were making similar attempts to build a new vision on fundamentals. The most prescient realized that it was impossible for fully modernized people to be religious in the old way. The conservative spirituality, which had helped people to adjust to essential limitations and to accept things as they were, would not help people in this iconoclastic, future oriented climate. The whole tenor of their thought and perception had changed. Many in the West, whose education had been entirely rational, were not equipped for the mythical, mystical, and cultic rituals that had evoked a sense of transcendent value in the past. There was no going back.
If they wanted to be religious, they would have to develop rites, beliefs, and practices that spoke to them in their radically altered circumstances. In the early twentieth century, people were trying to find new ways to be religious.
Just as people in the first Axial Age (c. 700--200 bee) had found that the old paganism no longer worked in the new conditions of their period and had evolved the great confessional faiths, so too, in this second Axial Age, there was a similar challenge. Like any truly creative enterprise, the search for modern (and, later, for postmodern) faith was supremely difficult. The quest continues; as yet, no definitive or even very satisfactory solution has emerged. The religiosity that we call “fundamentalism” is just one of these attempts.
The Protestants of the United States had been aware for some time of the need for something new. By the end of the nineteenth century, the denominations were polarized, but the crisis of the i89os, which had seen heresy trials and expulsions, seemed to have passed. Liberals and conservatives in the early years of the century were both involved in the social programs of this so-called Progressive Age (1900--20), which attempted to deal with the problems arising from the rapid and unregulated development of industry and city life. Despite their doctrinal quarrels, Protestants in all the denominations were committed to the progressive ideal, and cooperated together in foreign missions and campaigns for Prohibition or improved education.3 Despite the immense difficulties they faced, most felt confident. America had been “Christianized,” wrote the liberal theologian Walter Rauschenbusch in 1912; it only remained now for business and industry to be transformed by “the thought and spirit of Christ.”
Protestants developed what they called the “Social Gospel” to sacralize the Godless cities and factories. It was an attempt to return to what they saw as the basic teachings of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ himself, who had taught his followers to visit prisoners, clothe the naked, and feed the hungry. Social Gospelers set up what they called “institutional churches” to provide services and recreational facilities for the poor and for new immigrants.
Liberal Protestants, such as Charles Stelzle, who founded the New York Labor Temple in 1911 in one of the most crowded and desperate neighborhoods in the city, tried to baptize socialism: Christians should study urban and labor problems rather than the minutiae of Bible history, and fight such abuses as child labor. In the early years of the century, conservative Christians were just as involved in social programs as the liberal Protestants;