A History of Islamic Societies

By the eighteenth century a global system of Islamic societies had come into being. In Part I of this book we have seen how Islam originated in Arabia in the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad. The Arab-Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries established Islam as the politically dominant culture of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Inner Asia. In the first three centuries of the Islamic era a new religion and a new civilization came into being. Islam as a religion was expressed in ritual, law, theology, and mysticism, and Islam as a civilization was proclaimed in art and architecture, literature, philosophy, and science. In Part II we studied how from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries Islam in the Middle East and North Africa was embedded in social-communal and political organizations. This was the era of nomadic and slave elite regimes, schools of law and theology, Sufi brotherhoods and Shiʿi communities. In Part III we learned how, in successive waves, Islam and Islamic cultures were carried by conquering nomads, traveling merchants and itinerant holy men to vast reaches of Eastern Europe, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. In each of these regions, the Islamic institutions originally defined in the Middle East interacted with local institutions and cultures to generate a variety of Islamic societies. Each was distinctive, but they resembled each other, and were linked by political, cultural, and religious ties. They constituted a world system of Islamic societies. At the conclusion of Part III we saw how European economic and political imperialism impacted Islamic societies and initiated a new phase in their historical development.

The impact of Europe was profound, but there was no single model of a modern European society, nor any single type of Islamic society. The modern era is marked by the emergence of a great variety of Islamic societies. In each Islamic society indigenous elites were crucial in determining the patterns of modern development. The impact of Europe on Islamic societies was mediated by the collaboration or resistance of their elites. The changes that took place in Islamic societies were forged in terms of the interests, perceptions, and responses of internal elites to the pressures and incentives generated by European power and by their desire to exploit European influences in the struggles for power within their own societies.