In the second and third quarters of the twentieth century the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa began the process of breaking up an economic and social pattern that had been established, in most of them, a century earlier by a combination of European influences and native responses. The continuous display of European power from the end of the eighteenth century aroused the Muslim world to an appreciation of modern science, technology, and social and political organization. It aroused it also to self-defence through emulation of European society in order to acquire the means to overcome foreign control, or through regeneration of the traditional system of life and thought in order to withstand the intrusions. In the course of these varied responses, sometimes alternating and sometimes simultaneous, new leaders of Muslim peoples have sprung up since the early nineteenth century, changing the basis of political power and introducing reforms in the conduct of government and then in economic and social affairs. Further unplanned changes have taken place in consequence of these imposed ones.

During the nineteenth century, Europe penetrated the Muslim countries in several ways. A combination of military and political power led to varying degrees of European influence in North Africa, Egypt and the eastern portion of the Ottoman empire, ranging from outright occupation to certain preferential arrangements. Indigenous political leaders, however, still retained some power both to resist militarily and to introduce social, economic and political measures to reform their domains.

For the occidental reader there are grave difficulties in attaining a balanced understanding of the historical role of Muhammad. The most serious of these is that the dominant conception of religion as a private and individual matter leads men to expect that a religious leader will be a certain kind of man; and it is disconcerting to find that Muhammad does not conform to this expectation. He was undoubtedly a religious leader; but for him religion was the total response of his personality to the total situation in which he found himself. He was responding not merely to what the occidental would call the religious and intellectual aspects of the situation, but also to the economic, social and political pressures to which contemporary Mecca was subject. Because he was great as a leader his influence was important in all these spheres, and it is impossible for any occidental to distinguish within his achievement between what is religious and what is non-religious or secular.

Another difficulty is that some occidental readers are still not completely free from the prejudices inherited from their medieval ancestors. In the bitterness of the Crusades and other wars against the Saracens, they came to regard the Muslims, and in particular Muhammad, as the incarnation of all that was evil, and the continuing effect of the propaganda of that period has not yet been completely removed from occidental thinking about Islam. It is still much commoner to find good spoken about Buddhism than about Islam.

Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror

Imperial expansion

Two independent sources report that Mehmed II made the following points at the meeting which decided to proceed with the conquest of Constantinople: ‘The ghazā is our basic duty, as it was in the case of our fathers. Constantinople, situated as it is in the middle of our dominions, protects the enemies of our state and incites them against us. The conquest of this city is, therefore, essential to the future and the safety of the Ottoman state’. These words reaffirmed the policy of conquest pursued by Bāyezīd. They drew attention to cases when the Byzantine empire had given refuge to claimants to the Ottoman throne, thus causing frequent civil wars. They also showed that it was the Byzantine empire which had been the main instigator of crusades. It was also within the bounds of possibility that Constantinople could be surrendered to Western Catholics, as Salonica had been. This would have meant that the Ottoman empire would never be fully integrated. In brief, the conquest of Constantinople was a matter of vital concern to the Ottomans.

The siege of Constantinople lasted for fifty-four days (25 Rabī‘ I-20 Jumādā I 857/6 April-29 May 1453). In the Turkish camp Chandarli continued to draw attention to the great danger of provoking the Western Christian world, and to advocate a compromise. Zaganuz Pasha argued against this that the Ottomans' adversaries could never unite, and that even if an army were sent from the West, Ottoman forces would prove superior, but that, more probably, the city could be captured before the arrival of assistance from Italy.

In the last years of the eleventh/seventeenth and the first years of the twelfth/eighteenth century, the three countries of the Maghrib began almost simultaneously a new phase in their history. In 1076/1666, in Morocco, the ‘Alawī dynasty established itself on the ruins of the Sa'did state; in 1082/1671, in Algeria, the authority of the deys replaced that of the pashas; and in 1117/1705, in Tunisia, the Husaynid dynasty was born in the midst of the unrest provoked by the defeat and capture of the Bey Ibrāhīm al-Sharīf by the Algerians.

The three states, whose modern history was really beginning at this time, had to face the same problems until the middle of the nineteenth century, when they were confronted with the impact of European expansion: the problems of their development as coherent national entities, of the building up of efficient institutions, and of economic and social progress. These problems were only imperfectly solved. Morocco, comparatively protected by its geographical isolation, developed slowly, leaving open the Berber question and the question of the modernization of the Makhzan. In the meantime, each of the two neighbouring states, starting with the same status as Ottoman provinces, developed in a different way: whereas in Tunisia, for reasons both of geography and of early and recent history, there arose a national monarchy within clearly denned territorial frontiers, Algeria remained, both as a nation and in its institutions, immature.

To the end of the Fatimid caliphate

For more than two centuries after the Arab conquest, Egypt was a province of the Islamic empire. Her capital was Fustāt, a garrison centre established by the conquerors; her rulers were a line of Arab governors, sent by the caliphs in the East. Though the main centres of the empire lay in Asia, the province of Egypt was not unimportant. Her rich corn harvest helped to supply the needs of hungry Arabia; her revenues enriched the imperial exchequer; her ports, her camps, her marts and her schools were the bases from which the fleets and armies, the merchants and missionaries of Islam drove westward and southward, by the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and far into Africa. Though divided into administrative and fiscal sub-districts, Egypt was highly centralized. The unified valley of a great river, she was easily controlled, and kept firmly under the authority of the central, imperial power.

The Syrian lands, stretching from Sinai to the foothills of Taurus, present a different picture. At first, like Egypt, a conquered province of the Medina caliphate, Syria herself became the seat of empire under the Umayyads—only to revert to provincial status after their fall, and the transfer of the imperial capital to ‘Irāq. But here there was no centralized unity like that of Egypt. In the Syrian lands, a broken landscape of mountains, valleys, rivers, plains and deserts, with ancient and distinctive cities, held a population of great diversity, and imposed a fragmentation of government—a division into widely separated districts and regions, ruled by different authorities and often by different means.

The Tsarist Russian Empire had the third largest Muslim population in the world, being surpassed only by the British empire, especially India, and the Ottoman empire. After the Orthodox Church, the Muslims were the largest religious group in Russia, with a population of between 15 and 18 millions. This Muslim population was found in all parts of Russia: the Volga-Ural region, Siberia, Central Asia (Turkistān), the Crimea, and the Caucasus. In the main cities of European Russia there had always been large groups of Muslims, especially Kazan Tatars, who, like the people of Āzarbāyjān were advanced materially and culturally, and were to some extent westernized. The Religious Council of the Muslims of Russia in Ufa had been established in 1788 by an edict of Catherine II. The head of this organization, which was attached to the Ministry of the Interior, was a muftī appointed by the Russian government. There also was a board of qādīs. The Kazakh Turks eventually passed under the control of the Religious Council in Ufa in religious and cultural matters. After the Russian occupation and annexation of Turkistān (1865-84), the muftī of Ufa wanted to subject the Muslims in Central Asia to his administration, but the Russian government did not approve of this, and no central religious organization was founded following the annexation of the Crimea, Āzarbāyjān and the northern Caucasus. So, by the time of the Revolution in 1917 the only organization of the Muslims, which was officially recognized and had its expenses paid by the government, was the Religious Council in Ufa.

The Russian advance into the Kazakh steppes

The Kazakhs originated as tribal groups which broke away from the hegemony of the Shaybanid, Abu'l-Khayr Khān, in about 870/1465-6, and fled to the Chu river in the Semirech'ye region, where they were protected by the khan of Mughulistān, Esen Bogha. After the death of Abu'l-Khayr in 873/1468, their nomadic area spread westwards, and they were joined by other Turkish groups. They wandered along the Chu and Talas rivers during the conquests of Muhammad Shaybānī Khān (d. 916/1510), and gained control of the region between the Issiq Köl and the Ural river. This vast area was divided into three parts, to provide suitable grounds for three nomadic groups. The nomads of the Yedi-Su (Semirech'ye) region were called the Greater Horde, those between the Irtysh and the Jaxartes the Middle Horde, those further west the Lesser Horde. The Kipchak, Naiman and Kungrat tribes, which subsequently played an important part in the history of Khīva, Bukhārā and Khokand, were all members of the Middle Horde. The Kazakh tribes, who were somewhat superficially islamized, sometimes united under a strong khan, but separated again after his death.

Relations between the Kazakh khans and chiefs and the Russians start soon after Ivan the Terrible occupied Kazan khanate (959/1552) and the banks of the Volga. The cities of Tümen, Tobol'sk, Tara and Tomsk, which the Russians founded after they occupied western Siberia, were places on the route of trade with the Kazakhs. The city of Tobol'sk had a special importance in this respect.

The world, the West, and Islam

The impact of the West on the rest of the world has been the most striking feature of human history in the last five hundred years. It acquired its dynamic force, ultimately, from a new attitude of mind—an avid dedication to the exploration of the unknown, an appreciation of continuity in change and of unity in variety, and a restless ambition to convert knowledge into power. This new mental outlook resulted in the progressive control of man's natural environment by means of an ever vaster and tighter division of human labour. The Western impact has been an impact of modern science, of modern technology, and of modern forms of social organization; its channels of transmission have been improved means of transport, more powerful weapons, and the desire of non-Western peoples to emulate the patterns of civilization whose effectiveness had thus been demonstrated.

This world-wide Western impact took three principal forms: overseas settlement, colonial rule and what has been called defensive modernization. The Americas were the first continent to succumb to colonial conquest; much of the indigenous population was replaced by European immigrants, whose descendants took the lead in establishing the first post-colonial states. Australia and New Zealand followed a similar course, although for them, as for Canada, independence came as the result of more gradual evolution. Today, the countries of North and South America may be considered cultural offshoots of the West, with a strong admixture of indigenous elements mainly in the Andean region from Mexico to Bolivia.

The ‘Abbasid dynasty, known to its supporters as the ‘blessed dynasty’, which imposed its authority on the Islamic empire in 132/750, claimed to inaugurate a new era of justice, piety and happiness. Its sovereigns, all members of Muhammad's family, proclaimed that they alone had been designated to lead the community; all of them endeavoured to show, by means of the throne-names which they adopted, that they had the blessing of divine support. This second dynasty of Islam was thus characterized by a new moral trend, though in fact it pursued a policy which differed little from that of its predecessors. Indeed, throughout its period of domination, it suffered the consequences of the circumstances which had raised it to power; it was obliged to face the social disturbances, both economic and religious in origin, which the Umayyad caliphs had exhausted themselves in trying to suppress with their Syrian forces and it was confronted by the same difficulties as the last representatives of the fallen dynasty without having acquired any really new means of resolving them. The prestige of the new rulers was, however, to be buttressed by two tendencies, in some ways contradictory, which continued to become more pronounced over the years: on the one hand by the development of religious feeling, and on the other by the ever-increasing pomp and luxury of the caliphate.

Although linked with their predecessors by the very nature of the loosely constructed imperial state of which they had become the masters, the ‘Abbasids had formerly, during that period of more or less violent disturbances which is usually referred to as the ‘Abbasid revolution, been radically opposed to the Umayyads, whom they regarded as impious usurpers.

A reader taking up a work entitled The Cambridge history of Islam may reasonably ask, ‘What is Islam? In what sense is Islam an appropriate field for historical enquiry?’ Primarily, of course, Islam is, like Christianity, a religion, the antecedents, origin and development of which may, without prejudice to its transcendental aspects, be a legitimate concern of historians. Religious history in the narrow sense is not, however, the only, or even the main, concern of the contributors to these volumes. For the faith of Islam has, again like Christianity, been a great synthesizing agent. From its earliest days it displayed features of kinship with the earlier monotheisms of Judaism and Christianity. Implanted in the former provinces of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, it was compelled to maintain and define its autonomy against older and more developed faiths. Like Judaism and Christianity before it, it met the challenge of Greek philosophy, and adopted the conceptual and logical tools of this opponent to expand, to deepen, and to render articulate its self-consciousness. In this connexion, the first three centuries of Islam, like the first three centuries of Christianity, were critical for establishing the norms of belief and practice, and for embodying them in a tradition which was, or which purported to be, historical.

The Islamic synthesis did not stop at this stage. The external frontier of Islam has continued to move until our own day. For the most part, this movement has been one of expansion—into Central Asia, into the Indian sub-continent and south-east Asia, and into trans-Saharan Africa—but there have also been phases of retreat and withdrawal, notably in Spain, and in central and south-eastern Europe.

The foundation of the Great Seljuk empire and the domination of the Islamic world by the Turks is a turning point in the history of Islamic civilization and the Muslim peoples. At a time when the Muslim world was suffering from both external and internal crisis, the Seljuks with their fresh power, restored its political unity; with the new elements and institutions which they brought, they endowed Islamic civilization with a new vitality, and started it on a new phase. One of the basic changes brought about by the foundation of the Great Seljuk empire was, without doubt, the conquest and turkification of the Near East, and especially of Anatolia. Anatolia had been the homeland of many peoples, the scene of many civilizations, and had served them as a bridge between three continents; now for the first time in its history, in spite of the continuing local influences, Anatolia underwent a radical transformation from the ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, and artistic points of view. If the foundation of the Great Seljuk empire presents an important phase of Islamic civilization and Turkish history, the turkification of Anatolia is of equal importance, in the period after the fall of this empire and its successors, both in preserving Islamic civilization and the Muslim peoples, and in determining the future of certain Muslim and Christian nations. The origins and the historical role of the Ottoman empire prove this point. In spite of its importance, however, the history of the Seljuks has remained obscure, and it is only in our time that its historical significance has begun to be understood.