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Introduction
From the beginning of the Islamic era, Muslim societies have experienced periods of renewal (tajdid). Since the eighteenth century, Muslim societies across the world have been subject to a prolonged and increasingly deeply felt process of renewal. This has been expressed in different ways in different contexts. Amongst political elites with immediate concerns to answer the challenges of the West, it has meant attempts to reshape Islamic knowledge and institutions in the light of Western models, a process described as Islamic modernism. Amongst 'ulama and sufis, whose social base might lie in urban, commercial or tribal communities, it has meant 'the reorganisation of communities . . . [or] the reform of individual behavior in terms of fundamental religious principles', a development known as reformism.2 These processes have been expressed in movements as different as the Iranian constitutional revolution, the jihads of West Africa, and the great drives to spread reformed Islamic knowledge in India and Indonesia. In the second half of the twentieth century, the process of renewal mutated to develop a new strand, which claimed that revelation had the right to control all human experiences and that state power must be sought to achieve this end. This is known to many as Islamic fundamentalism, but is usually better understood as Islamism. For the majority of Muslims today, Islamic renewal in some shape or other has helped to mould the inner and outer realities of their lives.
This great movement of religious change in the Muslim world coincided with a Western engagement with that world of growing intensity. It should be clear, of course, that the movement of reform precedes the Western presence, its roots lying deep in the Islamic past, and being represented classically in the eighteenth century by the teaching of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab in Arabia and Shah Wali Allah in India. Nevertheless, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Western imperial powers surged across the Muslim world so that by 1920 only Central Arabia, the Yemen, Anatolia, Afghanistan and Iran were free from formal Western control. The process of decolonisation that spanned the period from the mid-twentieth century to the 1990s made little difference. The end of formal political control, more...