of Egyptian society. Each town had between one and seven madrasahs (colleges for the study of Islamic law and theology), which provided the country with its teachers. Intellectual standards were not high. When Selim I conquered Egypt, he took many of the leading ulema back to Istanbul with him together with the most precious manuscripts. Egypt became a backward province of the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans did not patronize Arab scholars, Egyptians had no contact with the outside world, and Egyptian philosophy, astronomy, medicine, and science, which had flourished under the Mamluk empire, deteriorated.17
But because they were a major channel of communication between the rulers and the people, the ulema became extremely powerful. Many of them came from the peasant class of fellahin, so their influence was considerable in the rural areas. In the Koran schools and madrasahs, they controlled the whole educational system; because the Shariah courts were the chief dispensers of justice, the ulema also had a monopoly of the legal system. Moreover, they held important political office in the divan,18 and, as the guardians of the Shariah, could also lead a principled opposition to the government. The great madrasah of al-Azhar was next to the bazaar, and ulema often had family links with the merchant class. If they wished to protest against government policy, a drumroll from the minaret of the Azhar could close the bazaar and bring the crowds onto the street. In 1794, for example, Shaykh al-Sharqawi, the rector of the Azhar, marched at the head of a mob to protest against a new tax, which, he declared, was oppressive and un-Islamic. Three days later, the beys were forced to rescind the tax.19 But there was no real danger of the ulema leading an Islamic revolution to replace the government. The beys were usually able to keep them in check by confiscating their property, and mob violence could not offer a sustained challenge to the Mamluk army.20 Nevertheless, the prominence of the ulema gave Egyptian society a distinctly religious character. Islam gave the people of Egypt their only real security.21
Security was at a premium in the Middle East by the late eighteenth century. The Ottoman state was now in serious disarray. The superb efficiency of its government in the sixteenth century had given way to incompetence, especially on the peripheries of the empire. The West had begun its startling rise to power, and the Ottomans found that they could no longer fight as equals with the powers of Europe. It was difficult for them to respond to the Western challenge, not simply because it occurred at a time of political weakness, but because the new society that was being created in Europe was without precedent in world history.22 The sultans tried to adapt, but their efforts were superficial. Sultan Selim III (ruled 1789–1807), for example, saw the Western threat in purely military terms. There had been abortive attempts in the 1730s to reform the army along European lines, but when he ascended the throne in 1789 Selim opened a number of military schools with French instructors, where students became acquainted with European languages and Western books on mathematics, navigation, geography, and history.23 Learning a few military techniques and a smattering of modern sciences, however, would not prove sufficient to contain the Western threat, because Europeans had evolved an entirely new way of life and thought, so that they operated on entirely different norms. To meet them on their own ground, the Ottomans would need to develop a wholly rational culture, dismantle the Islamic structure of society, and be prepared to sever all sacred links with the past. A few members of the elite might be able to achieve this transition, which had taken Europeans almost three hundred years, but how would they persuade the masses, whose minds and hearts were imbued with the conservative ethos, to accept and understand the need for such radical change?
On the margins of the empire, where Ottoman decline was most acutely felt, people responded to the change and unrest as they had always done—in religious terms. In the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92) managed to break away from Istanbul and create a state of his own in central Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. Abd al-Wahhab was a typical Islamic reformer. He met the current crisis by returning to the Koran and the Sunnah, and by vehemently rejecting medieval jurisprudence, mysticism, and philosophy. Because they diverged from this pristine Islam, as he envisaged it, Abd al-Wahhab declared the Ottoman sultans to be apostates, unworthy of the obedience of the faithful and deserving of death. Their Shariah state was inauthentic. Instead, Abd al-Wahhab tried to create an enclave of pure faith, based on the practice of the first Muslim community in the seventh century. It was an aggressive movement, which imposed itself on the people by force. Some of these violent and rejectionist Wahhabi techniques would be used by some of the fundamentalist Islamist reformers during the twentieth century, a period of even greater change and unrest.24
The Moroccan Sufi reformer Ahmad ibn Idris (1780–1836) had quite a different approach, which also has its followers in our own day. His solution to the disintegration of life in the peripheral Ottoman provinces was to educate the people and make them better Muslims. He traveled extensively in North Africa and the Yemen, addressing the people in their own dialect, teaching them how to perform the ritual of communal prayer, and trying to shame them out of immoral practices. This was a grassroots movement. Ibn Idris had no time for Wahhabi methods. In his view, education, not force, was the key. Killing people in the name of religion was obviously wrong. Other reformers worked along similar lines. In Algeria, Ahmad al-Tigrani (d. 1815), in Medina, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim Sameem (d. 1775), and in Libya, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1832) all took the faith directly to the people, bypassing the ulema. This was a populist reform; they attacked the religious establishment, which they considered to be elitist and out of touch, and, unlike Abd al-Wahhab, were not interested in doctrinal purity. Taking the people back to the basic cult and rituals and persuading them to live morally would cure the ills of society more effectively than complicated fiqh.
For centuries, Sufis had taught their disciples to reproduce the Muhammadan paradigm in their own lives; they had also insisted that the way to God lay through the creative and mystical imagination: people had a duty to create their own theophanies with the aid of the contemplative disciplines of Sufism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these reformers, whom scholars call “Neo-Sufis,” went one step further. They taught the common people to rely entirely on their own insights; they should not have to depend upon the scholars and learned clerics. Ibn Idris went so far as to reject the authority of every single Muslim sage and saint, however exalted, except the Prophet. He was thus encouraging Muslims to value what was new and to cast off habits of deference. The goal of the mystical quest was not union with God, but a deep identification with the human figure of the Prophet, who had opened himself so perfectly to the divine. These were incipiently modern attitudes. Even though the Neo-Sufis were still harking back to the archetypal persona of the Prophet, they seem to have been evolving a humanly rather than a transcendently oriented faith and were encouraging their disciples to prize what was novel and innovative as much as the old. Ibn Idris had no contact with the West, never once mentions Europe in his writings, and shows no knowledge of or interest in Western ideas. But the mythical disciplines of Sunni Islam led him to embrace some of the principles of the European Enlightenment.25
This was also the case in Iran, whose history during this period is better documented than that of Egypt. When the Safavids conquered Iran in the early sixteenth century, they made Shiism the official religion of the state. Hitherto, the Shiah had been an intellectual and mystical esoteric movement, and Shiis had as a matter of principle refrained from participation in political life. There had always been a few important Shii centers in Iran, but most Shiis were Arabs, not Persians. The Safavid experiment in Iran was, therefore, a startling innovation. There was no doctrinal quarrel between Sunnis and Shiis; the difference was chiefly one of feeling. Sunnis were basically optimistic about Muslim history, whereas the Shii vision was more tragic: the fate of the descendants of the
