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references to Islam in Chaucer's Tales', the Man of Law's fictional story of Custance offers an interfaith conflict whose bloodiness might almost rival the historical Alexandria debacle. Scholars that have examined Muslim-Christian contact?that is, religious or racial alterity?in the Canterbury Tales have naturally considered the
Nov 17, 2023 · Terms such as ‘Islamic history’, ‘Islamic civilisation’ and ‘Islamic world’—which figure prominently among the titles of these introductory works—feed this impression by creating the illusion of Muslim-only societies in which non-Muslims formed a separate, alien presence.
The combination of reason and observation in the acquisition of scientific knowledge, unlike the Hellenistic tradition of observation alone, advanced European scientific knowledge. The contribution of the Arab-Islamic world to the rise of the West also extends to material and institutional elements.
Canterbury Catherdral, one of the oldest and most historic Christian sturctues in England, mother church of the Anglican Communion, and seat of the archbishop of Canterbury, orginially established by St. Augustine of Canterbury, in Canterbury, Kent, England.
- Overview
- Islamic history from 1683 to the present: reform, dependency, and recovery
- Precolonial reform and experimentation from 1683 to 1818
The history of modern Islam has often been explained in terms of the impact of “the West.” From this perspective the 18th century was a period of degeneration and a prelude to European domination, symbolized by Napoleon I’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. Yet it is also possible to argue that the period of Western domination was merely an interlude in the ongoing development of indigenous styles of modernization. In order to resolve this question, it is necessary to begin the “modern” period with the 18th century, when activism and revival were present throughout Islamdom. The three major Muslim empires did experience a decline during the 18th century, as compared with their own earlier power and with the rising powers in Europe, but most Muslims were not yet aware that Europe was partly to blame. Similar decline had occurred many times before, a product of the inevitable weaknesses of the military-conquest state turned into centralized absolutism, overdependence on continuous expansion, weakening of training for rule, the difficulty of maintaining efficiency and loyalty in a large and complex royal household and army, and the difficulty of maintaining sufficient revenues for an increasingly lavish court life. Furthermore, population increased, as it did almost everywhere in the 18th-century world, just as inflation and expensive reform reduced income to central governments. Given the insights of Ibn Khaldūn, however, one might have expected a new group with a fresh sense of cohesiveness to restore political strength.
Had Muslims remained on a par with all other societies, they might have revived. But by the 18th century one particular set of societies in western Europe had developed an economic and social system capable of transcending the 5,000-year-old limitations of the agrarian-based settled world as defined by the Greeks—who called it Oikoumene. Unlike most of the lands of Islamdom, those societies were rich in natural resources (especially the fossil fuels that could supplement human and animal power) and poor in space for expansion. Cut off by Muslims from controlling land routes from the East, European explorers had built on and surpassed Muslim seafaring technology to compete in the southern seas and discover new sea routes—and, accidentally, a new source of wealth in the Americas. In Europe centralized absolutism, though an ideal, had not been the success it was in Islamdom. Emerging from the landed classes rather than from the cities, it had benefited from and been constrained by independent urban commercial classes. In Islamdom the power of merchants had been inhibited by imperial overtaxation of local private enterprise, appropriation of the benefits of trade, and the privileging of foreign traders through agreements known as the Capitulations.
The history of modern Islam has often been explained in terms of the impact of “the West.” From this perspective the 18th century was a period of degeneration and a prelude to European domination, symbolized by Napoleon I’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. Yet it is also possible to argue that the period of Western domination was merely an interlude in the ongoing development of indigenous styles of modernization. In order to resolve this question, it is necessary to begin the “modern” period with the 18th century, when activism and revival were present throughout Islamdom. The three major Muslim empires did experience a decline during the 18th century, as compared with their own earlier power and with the rising powers in Europe, but most Muslims were not yet aware that Europe was partly to blame. Similar decline had occurred many times before, a product of the inevitable weaknesses of the military-conquest state turned into centralized absolutism, overdependence on continuous expansion, weakening of training for rule, the difficulty of maintaining efficiency and loyalty in a large and complex royal household and army, and the difficulty of maintaining sufficient revenues for an increasingly lavish court life. Furthermore, population increased, as it did almost everywhere in the 18th-century world, just as inflation and expensive reform reduced income to central governments. Given the insights of Ibn Khaldūn, however, one might have expected a new group with a fresh sense of cohesiveness to restore political strength.
Had Muslims remained on a par with all other societies, they might have revived. But by the 18th century one particular set of societies in western Europe had developed an economic and social system capable of transcending the 5,000-year-old limitations of the agrarian-based settled world as defined by the Greeks—who called it Oikoumene. Unlike most of the lands of Islamdom, those societies were rich in natural resources (especially the fossil fuels that could supplement human and animal power) and poor in space for expansion. Cut off by Muslims from controlling land routes from the East, European explorers had built on and surpassed Muslim seafaring technology to compete in the southern seas and discover new sea routes—and, accidentally, a new source of wealth in the Americas. In Europe centralized absolutism, though an ideal, had not been the success it was in Islamdom. Emerging from the landed classes rather than from the cities, it had benefited from and been constrained by independent urban commercial classes. In Islamdom the power of merchants had been inhibited by imperial overtaxation of local private enterprise, appropriation of the benefits of trade, and the privileging of foreign traders through agreements known as the Capitulations.
From the mid-17th century through the 18th and early 19th centuries, certain Muslims expressed an awareness of internal weakness in their societies. In some areas, Muslims were largely unaware of the rise of Europe; in others, such as India, Sumatra, and Java, the 18th century actually brought European control. Responses to decline, sometimes official and sometimes unofficial, sometimes Islamizing and sometimes Europeanizing, fell into two categories, as the following examples demonstrate.
In some areas leaders attempted to revive existing political systems. In Iran, for example, attempts at restoration combined military and religious reform. About 1730 a Turk from Khorāsān named Nadr Qolī Beg reorganized the Ṣafavid army in the name of the Ṣafavid shah, whom he replaced with himself in 1736. Taking the title Nādir Shah, he extended the borders of the Ṣafavid state farther than ever; he even defeated the Ottomans and may have aspired to be the leader of all Muslims. To this end he made overtures to neighbouring rulers, seeking their recognition by trying to represent Iranian Shīʿism as a madhhab (school of Islamic law) alongside the Sunni madhhabs. After he was killed in 1747, however, his reforms did not survive and his house disintegrated. Karīm Khan Zand, a general from Shīrāz, ruled in the name of the Ṣafavids but did not restore real power to the shah. By the time the Qājārs (1779–1925) managed to resecure Iran’s borders, reviving Ṣafavid legitimacy was impossible.
In the Ottoman Empire restoration involved selective imitation of things European. Its first phase, from 1718 to 1730, is known as the Tulip Period because of the cultivation by the wealthy of a Perso-Turkish flower then popular in Europe. Experimentation with European manners and tastes was matched by experimentation with European military technology. Restoration depended on reinvigorating the military, the key to earlier Ottoman success, and Christian Europeans were hired for the task. After Nādir Shah’s defeat of the Ottoman army, this first phase of absolutist restoration ended, but the pursuit of European fashion had become a permanent element in Ottoman life. Meanwhile, central power continued to weaken, especially in the area of international commerce. The certificates of protection that had accompanied the Capitulations arrangements for foreign nationals were extended to non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, who gradually oriented themselves toward their foreign associates. The integration of such groups into the Ottoman state was further weakened by the recognition, in the disastrous Treaty of Küƈük Kaynarca (1774), of the Russian tsar as protector of the Ottoman’s Greek Orthodox millet.
A second stage of absolutist restoration occurred under Selim III, who became sultan in the first year of the French Revolution and ruled until 1807. His military and political reforms, referred to as the “new order” (nizam-ı cedid), went beyond the Tulip Period in making use of things European; for example, the enlightened monarch, as exemplified by Napoleon himself, became an Ottoman ideal. There, as in Egypt under Muḥammad ʿAlī (reigned 1805–48), the famed corps of Janissaries, the elite troops that had been a source of Ottoman strength, was destroyed and replaced with European-trained troops.
In other areas, leaders envisioned or created new social orders that were self-consciously Islamic. The growing popularity of Westernization and a decreasing reliance on Islam as a source of public values was counterbalanced in many parts of Islamdom by all sorts of Islamic activism, ranging from educational reform to jihad. Islamic politics often were marked by an oppositional quality that drew on long-standing traditions of skepticism about government. Sufism could play very different roles. In the form of renovated ṭarīqahs, fellowships around particular Islamic masters, it could support reform and stimulate a consciousness marked by Pan-Islamism (the idea that Islam can be the basis of a unified political and cultural order). Sufis often encouraged the study of tales about the Prophet Muhammad (Hadith), which they used to establish him as a model for spiritual and moral reconstruction and to invalidate many unacceptable traditional or customary Islamic practices. Sufi ṭarīqahs provided interregional communication and contact and an indigenous form of social organization that in some cases led to the founding of a dynasty, as with the Libyan monarchy.
Sufism could also be condemned as a source of degeneracy. The most famous and influential militant anti-Sufi movement arose in the Arabian Peninsula and called itself al-Muwaḥḥidūn (“the Monotheists”), but it came to be known as Wahhābiyyah, after its founder, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–92). Inspired by Ibn Taymiyyah (see above Migration and renewal [1041–1405]), Ibn al-Wahhāb argued that the Qurʾān and Sunnah could provide the basis for a reconstruction of Islamic society out of the degenerate form in which it had come to be practiced. Islam itself was not an inhibiting force; “traditional” Islam was. Far from advocating the traditional, the Wahhābīs argued that what had become traditional had strayed very far from the fundamental, which can always be found in the Qurʾān and Sunnah. The traditional they associated with blind imitation (taqlīd); reform, with making the pious personal effort (ijtihād) necessary to understand the fundamentals. Within an Islamic context this type of movement was not conservative, because it sought not to conserve what had been passed down but to renew what had been abandoned. The Wahhābī movement attracted the support of a tribe in the Najd led by Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd. Although the first state produced by this alliance did not last, it laid the foundations for the existing Saudi state in Arabia and inspired similar activism elsewhere down to the present day.
Aug 25, 2018 · In this chapter, the argument is made that Islam is a part of the European civilizational heritage and that as a result of migration in recent decades, a European Islam now exists and can be viewed as the latest expression of a long history of European-Islamic links.
Mar 30, 2021 · Canterbury Cathedral is one of England’s most famous cathedrals, both because of its prominent history dating back to the 6th century, and due to the famous murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket that took place there.
