No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

In 1857, many Muslim and Hindu Indians revolted against the colonial rule of the British East India Company in protest both against economic subordination and the fear of being forced to convert to Christianity (a reasonable surmise in Aslan’s view). They lost, but the brute force the British used contrasted sharply with their claim to be benign agents of civilization. Some Indian Muslim “Modernists” like Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan remained loyal to Britain, finding fears of forced conversion unfounded, and believed the key to future prosperity lay in adapting Western ideas and technology to Muslim culture. Contemporary Islam, as he and others like him argued, need not be rigid and in fact the Ulama already had departed from the original roots of Muhammad’s pure preaching. These reformers wished to limit Shariah to purely religious matters.

Other reform movements popped up elsewhere in the colonial world, such as the Salafiyyah movement led by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in Egypt and the Young Ottomans in the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire. Unlike Ahmed Khan, al-Afghani committed himself to opposing European powers and believed that Islamic civilization was inherently superior to Western society and more socially just—provided the hidebound Ulama could be thwarted and the laws remade in the old tradition of independent