The history of Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resembles that of Turkey. Egypt also developed from an Ottoman and Islamic to a national and secular form of society. Its evolution also began with a period of state-managed reform, but its development was diverted by British occupation from 1882 to 1952. British rule cut off the consolidation of an Egyptian military and administrative elite, making a secondary elite of landowners, officials, merchants, and intelligentsia the spokespeople for national independence. These elites, still hampered by British occupation, came to power in 1922 and ruled until 1952. Unable to surmount the dilemmas of governing under foreign rule, divided by nationalist and Islamist political orientations, the liberal elites were removed from power and replaced in 1952 by Arab nationalist military officers who instituted the regime that governed Egypt until the popular revolution in the Spring of 2011.

The nineteenth-century reforming state

Though part of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt retained a separate political and cultural identity. Under Ottoman suzerainty, Egypt was ruled by local Mamluk military factions. Like the rest of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt had a strong religious scholarly (ʿulamaʾ) establishment and Sufi brotherhoods. In the course of the eighteenth century, as Ottoman control weakened, fighting among the Mamluk factions led to the decline of irrigation, excessive taxation, and increasing tribal autonomy and pastoralism. Ottoman weakness exposed Egypt to invasion by Napoleon in 1798, to British counter-intervention, and finally to the appointment of Muhammad ʿAli as governor (1805–48).

The East African states are here grouped together for geographical convenience, but the experience of each country was in fact very different. The history of the Sudan resembles that of North Africa and the Middle Eastern Arab countries. For a century and a half, the Sudan has been consolidating a modern state. The northern part of the country has an Arabic-speaking population, a Muslim identity, and strong Islamic movements, but the southern part encompasses a non-Muslim African population that resists assimilation on Arab, Muslim, and central-state terms. In 2011, the south became an independent state. Somalia resembles Mauritania in that tribal, Muslim, and Arab identity have become part of Somali national identity. Ethiopia also has a long history of state consolidation, but this has taken place under Christian rather than Muslim auspices. In Ethiopia, the Muslims have resisted incorporation into a non-Muslim state, but until recently their resistance was expressed in secular rather than religious terms. The histories of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and other East African countries, by contrast, follow a West African pattern in which the dominant consideration in the twentieth century has been the formation of colonial regimes and their replacement by secular national states. In these countries, Islam is the basis of local communal and social organization but not of state power or national identity.

Sudan

By the nineteenth century, many parts of the modern state of Sudan already had a long history of Muslim sultanates, substantial Muslim populations, and developed Muslim religious institutions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the process of territorial unification and consolidation of state power proceeded relentlessly. It began with the Egyptian conquest of the Sudan by Muhammad ʿAli, nominally the Ottoman governor of Egypt, but already an independent ruler, who conquered the Funj sultanate in 1820, and founded Khartoum as a new capital in 1830. Later Egyptian rulers expanded their territory to include the Upper Nile and equatorial provinces in 1871, Bahr al-Ghazal in 1873, and Darfur in 1874.

The history of Islamic societies will be presented in two dimensions: one historical, an effort to account for the formation of Islamic societies and their change over time; the other analytic and comparative, which attempts to understand the variations among them. Three methodological and historical assumptions underlie these approaches. The first is that the history of whole societies may be presented in terms of their institutional systems. An institution, whether an empire, a mode of economic exchange, a family, or a religious practice, is an activity carried out in a patterned relationship with other persons as defined and legitimized in the mental world of the participants. An institution encompasses at once an activity, a pattern of social relations, and a set of mental constructs.

The second assumption is that the history of Islamic societies may be told in terms of four basic types of institutions: familial, including tribal, ethnic, and other small-scale community groups; economic, the organization of production and distribution of material goods; cultural or religious, the concepts of ultimate values and human goals and the collectivities built on such commitments; and political, the organization of conflict resolution, defense, and domination.

Despite conservative intentions, the conquests, the settlement of large Arab-Muslim populations in numerous garrisons, and the consolidation of a new imperial regime set in motion vast changes in the patterns of international trade, local commerce, and agriculture. The unification of former Sasanian and Byzantine territories removed political and strategic barriers to trade and laid the foundations for a major economic revival. The Euphrates frontier between the Persian and the Roman worlds disappeared, and Transoxania, for the first time in history, was incorporated into a Middle Eastern empire. Commercial considerations inspired Arab-Muslim expansion in Inner Asia and India. Cities prospered in Iraq, Iran, and Transoxania. Basra and later Baghdad became two of the leading trading cities in the world. Samarqand, Bukhara, and Nishapur prospered. However, a new frontier was drawn between Syria and Anatolia, which had formerly been part of a single Byzantine state, and trade between these regions declined.

Each region of the new empire fared differently under Arab-Muslim rule. Some prospered, some declined. Agricultural production shifted from one area to another. Arab-Muslim landowners often replaced the previous elites. Soldiers settled on the land, and non-Arabs moved to Arab settlements. These changes created a high degree of mobility and interaction between different peoples and set the basis for the ultimate integration of populations into a shared culture.

Alongside peaceful Muslim colonization there was a parallel tradition of military campaigns to establish Muslim states and convert pagan populations to Islam. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, with the Almoravid movement as a shadowy precedent, jihads burst out from Mauritania to Chad. The jihads were led by Muslim scholars and teachers, the religious leaders of trading and agricultural communities, itinerant preachers, and their student followers. They were supported by the Fulbe, the Hausa, the Mande, the Wolof, and the Tuareg peoples: nomadic pastoralists, ʿulamaʾ, Sufi disciples, and slaves. As Muslim teachers articulated the hardships of ordinary people, they both radicalized Islamic teaching and mobilized popular support.

The jihads took their immediate inspiration from the militant reformers of the fifteenth century such as al-Maghili (d. c. 1503–06). In the fifteenth century, al-Maghili had denounced the corrupt and un-Islamic practices of West African Muslim states. He condemned illegal taxation and the seizure of private property and denounced pagan ceremonial practices and “venal” mallams (religious scholars) who served rulers without adequate knowledge of Arabic or Islam. Al-Maghili called for the implementation of Muslim law by a strong and committed Muslim ruler and introduced into West Africa the concept of the mujaddid, the renewer of Islam. The pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina also brought West African scholars into contact with reformist Sufi circles, and perhaps with the radical views of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia.

On the eve of the Islamic era, Arabia stood on the periphery of the Middle Eastern imperial societies. (See Map 1.) In Arabia, the primary communities remained especially powerful, and urban, religious, and royal institutions were less developed. Whereas the imperial world was predominantly agricultural, Arabia was primarily pastoral. Whereas the imperial world was citied, Arabia was the home of camps and oases. Whereas the imperial peoples were committed to the monotheistic religions, Arabia was largely pagan. The imperial world was politically organized; Arabia was politically fragmented.

At the same time, pre-Islamic Arabia was in many ways an integral part, a provincial variant, of the larger Middle Eastern civilization. There were no physical or political boundaries between Arabia and the larger region; no great walls, nor rigid ethnic or demographic frontiers. Migrating Arabian peoples made up much of the population of the desert margins of Syria and Iraq. Arabs in the Fertile Crescent region shared political forms, religious beliefs, economic connections, and physical space with the societies around them.

Just as Islam spread from the Middle East to Inner Asia and from Afghanistan to India, in the late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries it spread from various parts of India and Arabia to the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago. Whereas the history of Islamic societies in other parts of Asia can be told in terms of empires and contiguous geographical areas, maritime Southeast Asia is a region of scattered peninsulas and islands. The sea was the connection among them. The region held a central position on the trade routes that connected China to the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. The population of the region included not only local peoples but Chinese, Indians from Gujarat, and Arabs from Hadramawt. Hadramawtis were especially active as teachers, traders, judges, and officials and married and sired children with local women.

Whereas in other regions Islam was established by Arab or Turkish conquests, it was introduced into Southeast Asia by traveling merchants and Sufis, often coming from Arabia and western India. Whereas in the Middle East and India, Muslim regimes were founded by new political elites, in Southeast Asia existing regimes were consolidated by conversion to Islam. The continuity of elites gave strong expression to the pre-Islamic components of Southeast Asian–Islamic civilization. The royal culture of Java seems more local and less Muslim than the corresponding royal culture of the Mughal Empire was Indian. At the same time there were Muslim merchant communities typical of international Islam and also syncretisms of Islam and village cultures. Whereas Muslims remained a minority in India, in Indonesia and Malaya they became the overwhelming majority.

Islam is the religion of peoples who inhabit the “middle” regions of the planet from the Atlantic shores of Africa to the South Pacific and from the steppes of Siberia to the remote islands of South Asia: Berbers, West Africans, Sudanese, Swahili-speaking East Africans, Middle Eastern Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Turkish and Persian peoples of Central Asia, Afghans, Pakistanis, many millions of Indians and Chinese, most of the peoples of Malaysia and Indonesia, and minorities in the Philippines – some 1.5 billion people adhere to Islam. In ethnic background, language, customs, social and political organization, and forms of culture and technology, they represent innumerable variations of human experience. Yet Islam unites them. Although Islam is not often the totality of their lives, it permeates their self-conception, regulates their daily existence, provides the bonds of society, and fulfills the yearning for salvation. For all its diversity, Islam forges one of the great spiritual families of mankind.

This book is the history of how these multitudes have become Muslims and what Islam means to them. In this book we ask the following questions: What is Islam? What are its values? How did so many peoples, so different and dispersed, become Muslims? What does Islam contribute to their character, to their way of living, to the ordering of their communities, and to their aspirations and identity? What are the historical conditions that have given rise to Islamic religious and cultural values? What are the manifold ways in which it is understood and practiced? To answer these questions, we shall see how religious concepts about the nature of reality and the meaning of human experience, embedded at once in holy scripture and works of commentary and as thoughts and feelings in the minds and hearts of Muslim believers, have given shape to the lifestyles and institutions of Muslim peoples, and how reciprocally the political and social experiences of Muslim peoples have been given expression in the values and symbols of Islam. Our history of Islam is the history of a dialogue between religious symbols and everyday reality.

In this period we have more abundant source materials on the community life not only of Baghdad but of many Middle Eastern cities. In this era, the town populations included four main strata: the military elites and their administrative adjuncts, as well as the notability defined by religious learning connected through family ties to the landowning, bureaucratic, and merchant elites; the common people – tradesmen, peddlers, craftsmen in both luxury and ordinary trades; and the lumpen proletariat, an underworld of illicit entertainers such as prostitutes, dancers, wine sellers, and cock fighters; and finally menial workers (especially in despised trades such as tanning, scavenging, and waste removal) and beggars, vagabonds, drifters, migrants, and refugees. These, however, were not amorphous masses. They were organized into a variety of communities, including families, quarters, markets, and religious associations.

Women and family: ideology versus reality (co-author, Lena Salaymeh)

In the early Islamic era (roughly from the seventh to the tenth centuries), our sources for women in society are meager. Chronicles and poetry primarily depict women in the caliphal court, but not in everyday life; legal sources communicate the expectations of jurists, rather than daily behavior. In the “medieval” era (roughly from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries), although our sources are still limited, we can broadly reconstruct the lives of women as they function in the politics, economics, and social life of their communities. However, most of our sources come from Egypt and Syria and therefore do not represent the full geographic scope of medieval Islamic societies.

The Muslim populations of Europe and America are extremely diverse, and it is mainly for geographical convenience that we consider them in one chapter. They are diverse in origins, in living conditions, in customs, and in their concepts of their political and social identities. Indeed, most people of Muslim family or cultural background are likely to consider their ethnicity or nationality, place of origin, or even class to be more important than their religion. In considering them primarily as Muslims we take the perspective of this book, but not necessarily their own point of view.

There are two principal sources for the Muslim population of the United States: African-American converts to Islam; and immigrants from all over the world. A small number of Muslims emigrated to the United States around the time of World War I, but the majority of the Muslim populations of the United States and Canada arrived in recent decades.

From the origins of the Islamic era to the nineteenth century, the history of North African society turned on two essential motifs: state formation and Islamization. Historically the basic units of society – families, hamlets, or groups of hamlets – were embedded in factional and tribal groups. The economy was based on small-scale grain, fruit, and olive production; stock raising by pastoral peoples; and limited urban-based textile and other small-scale manufacturing. Although trade was important, the merchant middle class was not highly developed. Unlike the Middle East, North Africa did not have a long experience of imperial organization, monotheistic religious communities, sedentarized agriculture, and urban commerce. It had a veneer of imperial and urban Christian civilization set down by the Phoenicians and Romans, and confined to relatively limited coastal territories.

Islamic civilization was brought to North Africa and Spain by the Arab conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries. The Arab conquests led to the formation of not one but several political centers, and an ever-changing political geography. North African forces conquered Spain in the eighth century. From the seventh to the eleventh centuries, North Africa and Spain were divided among governments formed by the Arab conquerors, by Berber tribes, or by Arab-Berber coalitions. The smaller Berber kingdoms defined themselves in varying forms of Khariji Islam, while the Umayyad dynasty in Spain and the Fatimids in North Africa claimed to be the caliphs of the whole Islamic world.

Muslim Spain from the Arab conquest to the liquidation of the last Muslim possessions in Granada in 1492 represents yet another expression of the caliphal type of early Islamic civilization. This civilization assimilated the Spanish, Jewish, and Berber populations to Arab-Islamic culture, fostering extraordinary economic prosperity. Muslim Spain bears an aura of glory. The great Mosque of Cordoba; the gardens, fountains, and courtyards of the Alhambra; the muwashshah and zajal poetry, with their Arabic verses and Romance language refrains; the irrigated gardens of Seville and Valencia; the wisdom of philosophy and science – these are the monuments of Spanish Islam. Spain was the focal point for the transmission of Greek philosophy from the Arab world to Europe. No less important was the drama of the defeat of this brilliant Muslim civilization by its European enemies, the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims, and the reabsorption of Spain into Christian Europe.

For all its brilliance, Muslim Spain was a province of the Arab caliphate. Already overrun by successive waves of Alaric and Vandal invasions from the north, Spain was conquered by Arab and Berber forces from North Africa led by Tariq, who defeated the Visigothic King Roderic at the River Barbate in 711. The Arab advance into France was checked by Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. Whereas in the East Arab conquerors were generally forced to settle in garrison towns and villages – leaving the land in the direct control of its preconquest landlord elite and a tax-collecting bureaucracy – in Spain large territories were parceled out among Arab and Berber clans. This was both the basis of the complex integration of ethnic groups, religions, and cultures and the tumultuous political competition that would characterize Hispano-Arabic civilization.

Women and family (co-author, Lena Salaymeh)

Of the topics that we have discussed thus far, the position of women in Muslim societies is the most controversial. It requires a digression to discuss the political, cultural, and methodological considerations that shape our views. Contemporary European and American public discourses are driven by religious rivalry, geopolitical issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and ongoing wars in the Middle East. This situation promotes an atmosphere of suspicion, prejudice, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims. These same considerations also motivate widespread Muslim hostility against the West.

A key theme in this atmosphere of conflict is the position of women in Muslim families, communities, and countries. Westerners often allege that in Muslim societies women are oppressed and subordinated to men, without opportunities for independence, education and careers, or the cultivation of their talents and full potentials. Islamic law is perceived as discriminating against women, and Islamist demands for a return to Shariʿa are understood as being a campaign against the emancipation of women. The wearing of the veil or the burqa is viewed as the foremost sign of this subordination.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Muslim peoples of Southeast Asia were not yet part of a unified culture or empire, but were divided into many ethnic and linguistic populations and numerous states. Holland and Britain were in the process of consolidating their empires. The consolidation of Dutch control over Java (see Chapter 38) opened the way for the expansion of Dutch rule to other parts of the East Indies. On Java, in the wake of the defeated rebellion of Dipanegara, the Dutch governor, Graaf van Den Bosch, centralized political and economic control. The Dutch government was based on the support of the indigenous elites, but they no longer had independent political power and turned more and more to culture and ritual to distinguish their class. A Dutch controller supervised the local princes, or regents, whose position was made hereditary but was reduced in actual effectiveness. In the course of the century, the regents were reduced from independent princes to salaried local officials. They were deprived of their share of tax revenues. In 1867, their lands were confiscated, and in 1882 they were denied the labor and personal services once owed them by the peasants.

Between 1824 and 1858, the Dutch acquired much of Sumatra. Dutch expansion was motivated by interest in coffee, sugar, tobacco, pepper, and spice production and, after 1870, in tin and rubber. Dutch conservatives opposed the costs of military actions, but officials, soldiers, and traders favored a larger empire. Commercial and military expansion brought the Dutch into direct conflict with Aceh for control of the pepper ports of northern and western Sumatra. After two campaigns in 1871 and 1874, the Dutch declared the annexation of Aceh and the abolition of the sultanate, and demanded the unconditional surrender of the local district lords, the uleebalangs. The ʿulamaʾ, however, continued guerrilla resistance. In the end, Dutch control of the trade of north Sumatra, aggressive military action, and a religious policy that called for the suppression of militant Muslim opposition but the acceptance of pacific Muslim religious interests enabled the Dutch to divide the uleebalangs from the ʿulamaʾ, suppress guerrilla resistance, and dominate Aceh by 1908.