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Modern Muslim Communities

Colonial rupture, the twentieth century, and Muslim life today

The last two centuries reshaped the Muslim world: European colonialism, the fall of the Ottoman caliphate, waves of independence, mass migration and the rise of a global Muslim diaspora. Understanding this recent history is necessary for reading Muslim life today honestly.

Overview

What you will learn: the scale of European colonial rule over the Muslim world; the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 and why it still matters; the twentieth-century independence movements; the emergence of the global Muslim diaspora; and how to hold this recent history honestly — neither as constant victimhood nor as pretend triumph.

Context

By the early twentieth century, most of the Muslim world was under European colonial rule. The British ruled India (including today's Pakistan and Bangladesh), Egypt, Sudan, much of the Arabian coast, Malaya (Malaysia), and large parts of West and East Africa. The French ruled Algeria (from 1830), Tunisia, Morocco, most of West Africa and the Levant Mandates after the First World War. The Dutch ruled Indonesia. The Russians and later Soviets ruled Central Asia and much of the Caucasus. Italian, Spanish and other European powers held further Muslim-majority territories. This was not a peripheral episode; it was, for a period, the political condition of most of the ummah.

What this means

The Ottoman Empire — the last long-lasting Muslim political power to hold the title of caliphate — was dismantled after the First World War. Under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Republic of Turkey formally abolished the sultanate in 1922 and the caliphate itself on 3 March 1924. The abolition removed the last institution any part of the Muslim world had recognised, however loosely, as a symbolic centre. Modern Muslim political thought — from the reformists of the early twentieth century (Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida) through the Islamist and nationalist movements of the mid-twentieth century to contemporary debates — is not intelligible without reckoning with 1924.

What this means

The independence era ran roughly from the 1940s into the 1970s. Pakistan and India (1947), Indonesia (1945-1949), Egypt's full independence (1952 onward), Algeria (1962 after a long war), the Gulf states in the 1960s and 1970s, and Central Asian republics only in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The post-independence political record is mixed — with periods of authoritarian rule, war, and revolution across many Muslim-majority states — and this lesson does not attempt to summarise any specific country's politics. The point here is simply that most Muslim-majority states are, in political terms, quite young.

What this means

Alongside the political story, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries produced the largest Muslim diaspora in history. Substantial Muslim communities now live in Western Europe (approximately 26 million Muslims in the European Union as of the late 2010s per Pew estimates), the United States (see Lesson 15), Canada, Australia, Latin America and elsewhere — a mix of post-colonial migration (South Asians to the UK, North Africans to France, Turks to Germany, Indonesians to the Netherlands), refugee movements, and study and professional migration. Many of these communities are now in their third or fourth generation and are firmly part of their host societies while remaining Muslim.

Context

Global Muslim demography: Pew Research and other standard modern demographic studies estimate roughly 1.9-2.0 billion Muslims worldwide in the mid-2020s, projected to grow to about 2.8 billion by 2050 — around 30% of the world population — driven primarily by younger age structures in many Muslim-majority countries. Islam is projected to become, by mid-century, the world's largest religion by number of adherents. These are population statistics, not victory claims; they do describe the human scale of the community any Muslim today is part of.

Neither victimhood nor triumphalism

This history invites two errors. The first is a purely defeatist reading — that the last two centuries have been an unrelieved catastrophe and modern Muslims are essentially victims. The second is a purely triumphalist reading — that projected demographic growth or economic weight will restore something like a caliphate on its own. Neither is historically honest. Colonialism happened and its effects are real. The abolition of the caliphate happened and left a real gap. And, over the same period, the Muslim world produced serious scholars, mass institutions, independence movements, and a diaspora that is now built into most of the world's major cities. The honest response to this history is neither despair nor bravado but responsibility — for the ordinary work of scholarship, service and community that this whole collection has been about.

Application today

This is the last lesson in the collection. If any single practical takeaway follows from the seventeen lessons together, it is this: no one generation of Muslims — not the Companions, not the Abbasids, not al-Andalus, not the Mughals — inherited a completed tradition. Each generation received it, added to it, and handed it on. Whatever specific work of study, service or community-building sits in front of you this week is, in that exact sense, part of the same history.

Reflection

Every generation of Muslims received the tradition partway and handed it on. What specific piece of the tradition are you being asked, in your own life this year, to receive properly and pass on well?

Related lessons

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