I

Historical writing about imperialism has long been influenced by the notion of an antagonism between the Christian European empires and Islam. European colonialism has been described as part of a long history of conflict between Christendom and Islam that began with the expansion of Islam and continued with the Battle of Tours, the Crusades, and the Siege of Vienna. The reality was of course more complex. Muslims formed an integral part of the European empires, just as Muslim powers like Persia or the Ottoman empire accommodated Christians and Jews as dhimmis for centuries.Footnote ⁶ From the beginning of the European expansion into Muslim lands, imperial authorities not only made significant efforts to integrate Islam in the colonial state, but often actively sought Islamic legitimacy for their rule.

Studies have addressed various aspects of the imperial politics of religion in the colonized Muslim world. They have explored the employment of religious dignitaries and leaders by the imperial authorities to reinforce control and order. They have also examined the integration of Islamic institutions like mosques, law courts, and madrassas in the colonial state and enquired into the control and regulation of religious rituals like the pilgrimage to Mecca. Most of these works show that to administer Islamic affairs, European authorities institutionalized Islam and introduced ecclesiastical hierarchies and religious bureaucracies, which had been hitherto widely unknown in the Muslim world.

Imperial policies towards Islam were first studied by historians of Napoleonic Egypt. As early as 1914, Christian Cherfils published a pioneering book about French attempts to exploit Islam in Egypt politically.Footnote ⁷ Shortly after the invasion of 1798, French colonial authorities decided to administer Egypt using the Islamic judicial system and employing religious leaders. The Koran was repeatedly interpreted in favour of the Grande Armée, and proclamations were translated into Koranic Arabic to give religious legitimacy to the occupying regime. Napoleon himself attended a public celebration of the Prophet's birthday (Mawlid) in Cairo. Also in other parts of the empire, the French soon made efforts to employ Islam for their rule. In Algeria, as Allan Christelow has shown in his study on Muslim law courts and the French colonial state in Algeria, French authorities used local sharia courts and the Islamic judiciary to maintain order.Footnote ⁸ Gradually, formal rules and modern bureaucratic structures were introduced into the traditional Islamic judicial system. Qadis, now paid by the state, were placed under strict surveillance. Merging French legal principles and sharia, a hybrid Islamic-French law, the droit musulman algérien, was created. As orthodox interpretations of Islam seemed easier to control, the sharia was strengthened at the expense of customary law. Although it thereby lost much of its flexibility and autonomy, in the end the Islamic judicial system survived. A similar integration of religious structures in the colonial state has also been observed, though studied less, in the French protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco.Footnote ⁹

Eventually, the policies in the Maghreb served as a model for French officials in colonial West Africa, as has been shown by Christopher Harrison. In his authoritative book France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960, Harrison has explored how Islamic institutions were integrated into the French colonial state.Footnote ¹⁰ Although cautiously monitored by the colonial administration, Muslims were granted full religious autonomy and could run their own law courts and schools. The co-operation between Islamic dignitaries and the French in West Africa has been examined in great detail in David Robinson's Paths of accommodation.Footnote ¹¹ In their search for local allies, the French soon became convinced that it was more useful to co-operate with the sheikhs of the Sufi brotherhoods than with the less influential traditional chiefs. Robinson looks at the relations between the colonial administration and four Sufi leaders: Saad Buh and Sidiyya Baba (both Qadiriyya order) in Mauritania, and Malik Sy (Tijaniyya order) and Amadu Bamba (Muridiyya order) in the Peanut Basin in Senegal. The sheikhs and their brotherhoods were granted full autonomy, and, in return, endorsed the colonial regime. Some of the sheikhs even legitimized French rule in religious terms, claiming that it was ‘good for our religion’, as Malik Sy put it in a missive of 1912, and helped to promote the secular Third Republic as a ‘Muslim power’, a puissance musulmane. In turn, the co-operation with the colonial regime helped the Sufi sheikhs to consolidate their position in French West Africa. Under foreign rule, their Islamic institutions grew.Footnote ¹² The French even sponsored the hajj of loyal religious leaders and expanded this policy soon to wider parts of the population. Gregory Mann and Baz Lecocq have shown that, by the mid-twentieth century, French authorities supported the hajj of hundreds of ordinary West African Muslims.Footnote ¹³

The studies on the accommodation of Islam under French rule have to some extent relativized the widely held view that French colonialism undermined and destroyed Islamic structures in West Africa. In particular, works on the era of conquest and early colonial period in French Senegal like the studies of Martin Klein, who has examined the erosion of Islamic institutions under French rule, and, more recently, of Cheikh Anta Babou, who has emphasized the frictions between colonial authorities and Muslim leaders, have shown the less accommodating side of French policies towards Islam.Footnote ¹⁴ Scholars of imperialism in West Africa have often characterized French policies as interventionist and unaccommodating, contrasting them with British policies of non-interference and accommodation. Studies like Michael Crowder's classic West Africa under colonial rule and William Miles's more recent Hausaland divided have described the French destruction of, interference in and surveillance of Islamic institutions in comparison with British rule in Northern Nigeria, where Muslim political and religious institutions remained intact.Footnote ¹⁵

Indeed, the classic example of the accommodation of Islam in the British empire is West Africa. In the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, established at the turn of the twentieth century in the territories of the former Sokoto Caliphate, Islamic leaders and institutions enjoyed remarkable autonomy. The system of colonial government established by Frederick Lugard, high commissioner of the Protectorate from 1899 to 1906, has often been described as the major example not only of indirect rule, but also of the accommodation of Islam in the colonial state.Footnote ¹⁶ Under the control of only a few British officials, Muslim authorities of the Caliphate, most notably local judges and the emirs, were employed to govern on a local level. Their autonomy was, of course, not unlimited. Scholars have in fact pointed to the limits of British indirect rule of Muslims in West Africa (just as historians have alluded to the attempts made by French authorities to accommodate Islam in colonial West Africa). In Islam and colonialism, Muhammad Sani Umar has argued that religious leaders and the ulema of the Hausa-Fulani Muslims in Northern Nigeria were far less loyal to the British than usually assumed.Footnote ¹⁷ And even though the British accepted Islamic law within their jurisdiction, their rule affected various Islamic legal practices, and many of their edicts and rulings even destroyed Islamic institutions.

The largest Muslim population of the British empire lived on the Indian subcontinent. The historiography of Muslims in British India has long focused on Muslim political representation and activism in the colonial state. Influenced by the events of 1947, scholars have explored the history of Muslim separatism and British efforts to support Muslim political representation.Footnote ¹⁸ The influential studies of Peter Hardy and Francis Robinson showed how from the middle of the nineteenth century the British increasingly treated the Muslim population of India as a distinct group, thereby contributing to the rise of Muslim community consciousness. British endorsement of the foundation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906, and the introduction of separate electorates in 1909, provided, albeit unintentionally, an environment in which Muslim separatism could develop. Colonial officials made significant efforts to co-operate with loyal Muslim leaders like Sayyid Ahmad Khan and were at pains to accommodate Muslims in the colonial state. Yet, studies on Muslim political representation and activism have been concerned with social and political aspects rather than with religion as such. Only recently have scholars begun to enquire more deeply into British policies towards the religion of their Muslim subjects in India, addressing themes such as the role of the Islamic judiciary system and the creation of the colonial ‘Anglo-Mohammedan law’Footnote ¹⁹, and British policies towards specific religious rituals like the hajj Footnote ²⁰. A fascinating example of this kind of research is Nile Green's Islam and the army in British India.Footnote ²¹

In their armies, the European colonial powers had direct influence over the religious practices of their subjects. Although the British Indian army enlisted Indians of different ethnic and religious groups, the number of Muslims was disproportionally high. Exploring the spiritual life of Muslim sepoys of the Hyderabad contingent between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1930s, Green shows how British officers widely tolerated the religious practices of their soldiers. Freedom of religion was to strengthen military resolve and guarantee loyalty to the crown. In the units, religious life flourished. At the same time, however, Islamic conventions, norms, and customs were influenced by the colonial context. The institutional framework of the army strengthened certain forms of religiosity, while others were restrained, creating a distinct form of Islam, which Green calls ‘barracks Islam’. He reconstructs the religious life of the Muslim soldiers on the basis of the biographies of a number of Sufi faqirs, who played an important role in the religious communities of the units. Naked and under the influence of drugs, the faqirs stood out in the units. For their followers, their peculiar appearance was a sign of their sacrality. In the eyes of the sepoys, faqirs had supernatural powers. Only after the turn of the century did increasingly modern, self-reflective, and often more orthodox forms of religiosity emerge in the units. Green shows how the autonomy of the faqirs was curbed more and more, as the British became increasingly suspicious and intolerant in their attitudes towards Islam. In the early twentieth century, as fears of pan-Islamic fanaticism grew, colonial authorities came to believe that Islam posed a political threat to the empire. Representing an Islam that the British could neither understand nor control, the faqirs of Hyderabad were increasingly seen as subversive. Moreover, changing norms of morality and rationality in Britain proved incompatible with the faqirs’ lifestyle. Their erratic movements, their nudity, their drug consumption and, not least, their dirty appearance were seen as repulsive. In the eyes of the rulers and the new Indian elites, the faqirs’ behaviour was not a sign of their special religious status, but an expression of laziness and moral disorder. Perceived as a threat to military discipline and the colonial order in general, the British made increasing efforts to control the faqirs. Their conduct was now even taken as a sign of insanity and mental deficiency, and the colonial administration confined many ‘mad faqirs’ in psychiatric asylums. Green connects this development with both the increasing significance of psychiatry in Victorian Britain, and contemporary discourses on madness, criminality, and emotional normality. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the mounting intolerance towards the faqirs and the religiosity of the sepoys was the result of the growing influence of evangelical British officers, who could find nothing religious in the Sufi cults and at times even pursued missionary aims, which could lead to violent confrontation. In the end, the question remains open as to whether there was a linear increase of intolerance in the units, or rather a constant tension between toleration and restriction. After all, the army consistently pursued, at least formally, a policy of religious neutrality. Connecting military, political, and religious history, Green's study is a role model for future research on the history of Islam in European colonial armies.

The accommodation of Islam in the colonial state has also been addressed by historians of the Dutch empire. Although in Dutch colonialism and Indonesian Islam, still the standard work on Islam in the Dutch East Indies, Karel Steenbrink emphasizes confrontations between Christian conquerors and Muslim subjects, he points out that once Dutch rule had been established, Islamic institutions continued to develop within the imperial framework.Footnote ²² Dutch colonial authorities maintained Islamic schools and courts and tried to administer Islam in a modern bureaucracy. The colonial Office for Native Affairs, responsible for Islamic matters, was in fact the predecessor of the post-colonial Indonesian ministry of religious affairs.

It was not only the overseas empires, but also some of the European continental empires that expanded into Muslim lands. Habsburg policies towards Islam in the Balkans have been researched in depth by scholars such as Robert Donia and Ferdinand Hauptmann.Footnote ²³ An even greater interest in the position of Islam in the imperial state has been shown by historians of the tsarist empire. The most comprehensive study in the field is Robert Crews's book For Prophet and tsar, which examines the relationship between state and mosque in tsarist Central Asia.Footnote ²⁴ Exploring Russia's imperial policies towards Islam from the reign of Catherine the Great in the 1780s to the fall of Nicholas II in 1917, Crews argues that the Russian administration of Muslims was far more tolerant and successful than has often been assumed. After a period of suppression of Islam under Peter the Great, marked by the destruction of mosques and forced conversions, in the late eighteenth century Catherine II introduced a policy of religious tolerance. Although Russian rulers saw themselves as the leaders of Orthodox Christendom, they also promoted themselves as the patrons of Islam. In fact, tsarist rule was heavily based on confessional foundations, and Islam was an important pillar of the imperial order. Tsarist authorities employed reliable Muslim dignitaries and members of the ulema, who were to exert power in their local communities. Paid by St Petersburg, they became government officials and a part of the imperial state. Tsarist Russia is a perfect example of the bureaucratization of Islam. In 1788, Catherine II created the Orenburg Muslim assembly in Ufa. Headed by a mufti who was on St Petersburg's payroll, the body was to administrate and control Muslims across the empire. The assembly had authority over the local ulema, but was subordinated to the tsarist ministry of internal affairs. In the following decades, similar bodies were founded in different regions of the empire – in 1831 in the Crimea, and in 1872 in the Caucasus, where assemblies for the Sunni community and for the Shiites were established. The institutionalization of Islam in hierarchical and ecclesiastical structures had a considerable impact on the religious practice of Muslims under Russian rule. Through the system, the imperial state tried to control almost every part of Muslim life, including marriage and funerary rights, the number of mosques and imams, and the hajj. Yet, Muslim leaders, too, employed the new bureaucracy to their own advantage. It gave them the opportunity directly to petition the state and to employ tsarist authorities to settle disputes, enforce the sharia and exert authority in their communities. In some parts of the empire, however, the picture seems to have been more complicated. The Caucasus, a region which Crews's study only covers marginally, became a hotbed of Muslim discontent and rebellion. A good complementary study, which sheds light on tsarist religious policies in the Caucasus, is Firouzeh Mostashari's On the religious frontier.Footnote ²⁵ Focusing on Azerbaijan from 1800 to 1917, Mostashari argues that religion proved to be the most resistant element to Russian rule. Although in Azerbaijan the imperial state also employed Muslim dignitaries, Russian support for members of the ulema could easily discredit the Islamic establishment in the eyes of the local population, who then turned from state-paid religious leaders to anti-tsarist Sufi orders. In a more recent book, Alexander Morrison has argued that conflicts with Muslims in the Caucasus and elsewhere even contributed to a growing distrust of Russian officials across the empire, and that tsarist policies towards Muslims were becoming increasingly confrontational as the nineteenth century progressed.Footnote ²⁶ Drawing on a wide range of sources, he compares this to the British engagement with Muslims in India, contending that British colonial authorities remained less anxious about Islam. Morrison's fascinating study shows the great potential of a comparison of different colonial policies towards Islam. There is certainly a pressing need for more comparative studies of this nature. Overall, the literature on the accommodation of Islam in the European imperial order has added a crucial dimension to research on Islam and empire, which has predominantly focused on anti-colonial conflict and armed revolt.

II

An important part of the historiography on European colonialism in the Muslim world addresses Islamic anti-colonial resistance. Throughout the imperial age, European authorities were confronted with religious insurgency and Islamic anti-colonialism. Across Africa and Asia, religious leaders called for holy war against non-Muslim rule over the dar al-Islam. At times, this call was combined with the appeal for emigration from the colonized territories, drawing on the concept of hijra. Though we must be cautious not to adopt an essentialist view of these resistance movements, there seem to be some striking similarities.Footnote ²⁷ They were led by religious authorities. Rhetoric and slogans were religiously charged. Religious forms of organization and Islamic polities were promoted as viable alternatives to non-Muslim rule. The movements were usually rooted in the pre-colonial era and regularly went along with internal struggles and attempts to transform local communities and to establish theocratic states. The emphasis put here on religion should by no means imply that socio-economic forces and material conditions were unimportant.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless, the role of religion needs to be taken seriously in order to understand these movements. Islam played a crucial part in shaping the social and political life in Muslim communities and proved to be a highly effective legitimizing, organizing, and mobilizing force in a considerable number of popular anti-colonial movements. Historians have studied different types of Islamic resistance movements: Sufi brotherhoods and networks, Mahdist movements, and revivalist and reformist groups. To be sure, there were many varieties and streams within each of these movements, and the lines that can be drawn between them are not clear-cut.Footnote ²⁹

Messianic movements arguably posed the most potent threat to imperial rule.Footnote ³⁰ Centred on a charismatic leader and driven by millennial expectations, entire peoples could rise in revolt. The most prominent example is the late nineteenth-century Sudanese Mahdi uprising when Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi, waged holy war against Ottoman-Egyptian rule in Sudan and its British protectors, conquered Khartoum, and established a theocratic state. In 1896, London sent an army under the ruthless Herbert Kitchener against the Islamic state, now led by Ahmad's successor, Abdallahi al-Taashi. The campaign took more than three years and ended with the total defeat of al-Taashi. A topic of continued fascination, the revolt has been the subject of numerous popular books.Footnote ³¹ Over the last decades, historians have consistently shown interest in the subject, examining the role of reformist puritanical ideas in Sudanese Mahdism and British official assessments of millennial Islam.Footnote ³² In Gordon and the Sudan, Alice Moore-Harell has examined the pre-conditions for the movement.Footnote ³³ The most authoritative study on the structure of the theocratic regime itself remains Peter Holt's classic Mahdist state in the Sudan.Footnote ³⁴ Holt has provided unique insights into the organization of the state, its eschatological propaganda, and its ambivalent relationship with the local Sufi brotherhoods. An excellent recent complement to Holt's book is Kim Searcy's study The formation of the Sudanese Mahdist state, which looks into the ceremonies and rituals of power employed by the Mahdi and Abdallahi to articulate religious legitimacy and authority.Footnote ³⁵ The Sudanese Mahdiyya remains at the centre of research on the intersection of Islamic millenarianism and anti-colonialism. Yet, scholars have also shown longstanding interest in anti-British Mahdism in Northern Nigeria, specifically the uprisings in Burmi (1903), Satiru (1906), and Dumbulwa (1923).Footnote ³⁶ Thea Büttner has, moreover, provided an analysis of the German colonial war against the Mahdist uprisings in Northern Cameroon in 1907, connecting these with other messianic revolts in Central and West Africa.Footnote ³⁷ Finally, the studies of Peter Carey and others have shown that during the Dipanegara revolt of the 1820s, Javanese rebels likewise drew not only on mystical Islam but also on various messianic ideas to wage holy war against the Dutch.Footnote ³⁸

The most prevalent forces of armed anti-colonial struggle in the Islamic world were Sufi orders.Footnote ³⁹ Among the best known of these movements is Abd al-Qadir and the Qadiriyya brotherhood which waged war against French colonial troops in Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s and has been studied, among others, in Raphael Danziger's classic Abd al-Qadir and the Algerians.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet al-Qadir and his followers were not the only anti-colonial force in Algeria.Footnote ⁴¹ The role of the Rahmaniyya brotherhood in the resistance to French rule in Algeria has been examined in exceptional depth in Julia Clancy-Smith's Rebel and saint.Footnote ⁴² Many members of the order supported both the revolt of the Mahdi Bu Ziyan in 1849 and the uprising of Muhammad ibn Abdallah, the Mahdi of Warqala, in 1851–5. Even though neither of the self-proclaimed Mahdis was a Rahmani sheikh, Clancy-Smith points out that only the Rahmaniyya involvement gave the uprising some structure. After the failure of both revolts, the Rahmanis increasingly sought accommodation under colonial rule. Clancy-Smith also discusses mechanisms of Muslim resistance within the framework of the colonial state. When Shaykh Muhammed Ibn Abi al-Qasim of the Rahmaniyya order died in 1897 and left no male heir, his unmarried daughter, Lalla Zaynab, claimed succession. She faced fierce opposition from French officials, who called for a male successor and tried to install al-Qasim's nephew. In the end, Zaynab employed French lawyers and successfully used the French judicial system to confront the colonial authorities. One of the most studied Sufi resistance movements in North Africa remains the Sanusiyya. After the turn of the twentieth century, the warriors of Ahmed Sharif as-Senussi and his brotherhood waged jihad against French troops in the Sahara, as has been masterfully chronicled by Jean-Louis Triaud.Footnote ⁴³ The Sanusiyya would later also challenge the French during the 1916–17 Kaocen Revolt in Northern Niger and the Southern Maghreb and, finally, oppose the Italian occupation of Cyrenaica. Examining the intellectual formation of the brotherhood, Knut Vikør has shown that the order was rooted in a long scholarly tradition that went back to the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁴

The intersection of Sufi brotherhoods and anti-imperialism has also been studied by historians of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. David Robinson's The holy war of Umar Tal presents a multifaceted picture of the legendary Al Hajj Umar Tal and the Tijaniyya, which in the mid-nineteenth century confronted the French expansion into the West African savannah.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Fighting the Greater Jihad, Cheikh Anta Babou examines the role of Amadu Bamba and his Muridiyya in anti-colonial resistance in French Senegal.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, conflicts between the Muridiyya and French authorities even led to the arrest, deportation, and seven-year exile of Bamba in 1895. Only after the turn of the century did the French change their policies and began to engage in a gradual, if unplanned, rapprochement with the Sufi order. Scholars have also explored militant Sufi resistance to European rule in East Africa. Most important in this field is Abdi Sheik-Abdi's study of the ‘Dervish movement’ of Salihiyya sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, the ‘mad mullah’ as the British called him, who, after the turn of the twentieth century, confronted Italian, British, and Ethiopian troops in Somaliland.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hassan's Salihiyya also stood in conflict with the rival Qadiriyya brotherhood, which itself, as we know from the works of Bradford Martin and Michael Pesek, opposed German colonial rule in East Africa.Footnote ⁴⁸ Martin and Pesek have shown that the mere spread of Islamic anti-colonial propaganda, the so-called ‘Mecca Letters’, caused distress among German colonial officials.

Sufi resistance has also attracted the attention of scholars of the tsarist empire. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the three legendary imams Ghazi Muhammad, Hamza Bek, and Shamil called for holy war, or ghazawat, against Russian troops in the Northern Caucasus. Imam Shamil, a brutal military genius immortalized in Tolstoy's Hadji Murad, fought the tsarist army for almost thirty years. Enforcing sharia legislation, the imams merged the local communities of the Northern Caucasus into an imamate. The Russians confronted the rebels with excessive brutality, as has been described in detail in Moshe Gammer's authoritative Muslim resistance to the tsar.Footnote ⁴⁹ Gammer and other historians have emphasized the role of the Naqshbandiyya brotherhood in organizing the anti-tsarist struggle and unifying Muslims in the imamate. The importance of Sufi networks in anti-Russian resistance in the Caucasus has most recently been underlined in Anna Zelkina's In quest of God and freedom.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet, shortly after the publication of Zelkina's book, scholars began questioning the importance of the Sufi brotherhood in the anti-Russian resistance. In a ground-breaking article, Alexander Knysh pointed out that there is no clear evidence of Sufi influence on Muslim resistance in the Caucasus, even though outside observers had believed in the Sufi threat since the colonial period.Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly, in his excellent study on anti-tsarist resistance in the Caucasus, Michael Kemper has argued that the Naqshbandiyya had no crucial influence on the jihad movement and, indeed, on the organization of the imamate.Footnote ⁵² Although supporting the imams’ war and polity, the sheikhs of the brotherhood did not get particularly involved in military and administrative work. More important were old notable families and local warlords of the village communities who had, at best, only superficial connections to the Naqshbandiyya. Also, Sufi ideas, Kemper argued, played only a minor role. The three imams mainly promoted the enforcement of the sharia, the abolishment of the adat, and the foundation of an Islamic polity, and thus acted in the tradition of the reformist ‘sharia movement’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Confronting the North Caucasian Islamic resistance, the Russian imperial state consciously tried to strengthen the adat law.Footnote ⁵³ More recently, another major study on the ghazawat in the Caucasus, written by Clemens Sidorko, has supported Kemper's theses.Footnote ⁵⁴

The question of the importance of Sufi influences in anti-colonial revolts has also been discussed more generally. Both Alexander Knysh and Michael Kemper have suggested rethinking the role of Sufism in anti-colonial resistance altogether.Footnote ⁵⁵ Referring to the historiography on the tsarist Caucasus as well as on French Algeria, they argue that the influence of Sufi brotherhoods in religious resistance movements has been overestimated. Indeed, Raphael Danziger's book on Abd al-Qadir has relativized the importance of Sufism in al-Qadir's rule.Footnote ⁵⁶ Abdi Sheik-Abdi's study on Mohammed Abdullah Hassan's movement in Somaliland has emphasized Wahhabi influences.Footnote ⁵⁷ Similarly, scholars have shown that the Tiganiyya leader Umar Tal was most concerned with the enforcement of the sharia and reform.Footnote ⁵⁸ Undeniably, Islamic reformism was influential in various anti-colonial struggles.

Many of the Islamic reformist movements emerged in the eighteenth century, most famously perhaps Wahhabism on the Arab peninsula, and became powerful forces against European colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Muslim reformers preached a renewal and purification of Islam, putting new emphasis on the Koran, the sunnah, and the hadith. Only the return to an ‘authentic’ and ‘uncorrupted’ Islam would prevent the perceived global decline of their faith. To be sure, the ideas of Islamic reformers implied a significant degree of secular reflection about faith and a conceptionalization of religion in abstract terms. In fact, this formalization of religion could be observed globally, and has been described as part of the ‘birth of the modern world’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Of course, Islamic reform movements were not necessarily connected to anti-colonial militancy. The major movements of religious purification and renewal in British India, for instance, the reformist Deoband School (founded in 1866) and the Aligarh School (founded in 1875), were firmly accommodated within the colonial state.Footnote ⁶⁰ In her seminal study on the Deoband School, Barbara Metcalf has shown that British rule indeed shaped the formulation of reformist ideas.Footnote ⁶¹ Metcalf explored the systematization of teaching and the introduction of bureaucratic structures like an examination system, the establishment of institutions like a central library and the employment of modern technologies like the printing press, the telegraph and the postal system, which revolutionized the spread of religious knowledge.Footnote ⁶² Similarly, as Adeeb Khalid has shown, Jadidism, a reform movement of Muslim intellectuals and scholars in late nineteenth-century Central Asia, never sought violent confrontation with Russian imperialism – even though tsarist officials remained suspicious.Footnote ⁶³ Colonial authorities were aware that reformist ideas could fuel anti-imperial revolt.

Revivalist Islam was a particularly strong force in anti-colonial resistance movements in British North India.Footnote ⁶⁴ Among the first was the reformist Tariqa-i Muhammadi, led by Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi and his successors, which waged war against Sikhs, and, later, the British in northern India. Throughout the nineteenth century, a main concern of colonial officers in British India was revolt on the notorious Northwest Frontier, waged by (presumably) Wahhabi inspired insurgents, the ‘Hindustani fanatics’ or ‘Hindostan Wahabees’ as the British called them. The frontier region remained a hotbed of rebels like the legendary mullahs Sadullah, Najmuddin, and Sayyid Akbar, the Syrian imam Shami Pir, and Mirza Ali Khan, known as the ‘Faqir of Ipi’, until the end of British colonial rule.

In the Dutch East Indies, too, Islamic revivalism played a significant role in anti-colonial mobilization. Fighting colonial troops, Muslim guerrilla groups in the Padri War (after the Dutch intervention of 1821–37), the Banten Uprising (1888), and the Aceh War (1873–1913) called for jihad and used Islamic revivalist rhetoric as a unifying motive against both internal rivals and colonial domination. In his study Islamic nationhood and colonial Indonesia, Michael Francis Laffan stresses the importance of international religious networks that connected Indonesian Muslims with Islamic movements and centres of learning in the Middle East.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ideas about reform and anti-colonialism, which would also shape early Indonesian nationalism, were brought home by Mecca pilgrims and by students and religious dignitaries who had studied in Egypt, Syria, or the Hejaz. The Dutch authorities saw the Islamic anti-colonial agitation of reformist activists as a profound threat and introduced various instruments of surveillance and regulation. As Mecca was perceived to be a market for Islamic revolutionary ideas, Dutch authorities were particularly concerned about the hajj and established an entire bureaucracy and regulatory system to control the mobility of pilgrims. Also, students from the East Indies, who studied at Al-Azhar and other centres of Islamic learning, were monitored.

Islamic renewal movements were widely perceived by the colonial officials as a global threat. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, government offices in St Petersburg, Paris, and London were haunted by the spectre of pan-Islamism.Footnote ⁶⁶ Across the world, pan-Islamist agitators spread their ideas of religious solidarity and a united Islamic front against European domination. Although pan-Islamism was mainly an urban intellectual project, it could inspire violent revolt. In Egypt, the Urabi rebels used pan-Islamist rhetoric to mobilize the faithful against British involvement in 1882. In the following years, Lord Cromer fought vigorously against pan-Islamist propaganda, banning, for instance, the popular Paris-published pan-Islamic journal Al-Urwa Al-Wuthqa (‘The Firmest Bond’). After the First World War, the British struggled with the pan-Islamic Caliphate movement in India. Pan-Islamist activists and thinkers, most importantly the triumvirate of Jamal-al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, continue to capture the attention of scholars.Footnote ⁶⁷ One of the most remarkable recent studies on the subject is Umar Ryad's Islamic reformism and Christianity, which explores the perception of Christianity and Christian missionary movement in pan-Islamic thought.Footnote ⁶⁸ Examining the writings of Rashid Rida, most importantly articles of his paper Al-Manar (‘The Lighthouse’) and his fatwas about Christianity, issued when he was mufti of Egypt, Ryad shows that Rida spent much time challenging the anti-Islamic polemics of Christian missionaries and Arabic Christian intellectuals. Rida never rejected Christianity as such but tried to reinterpret its messages and doctrine according to the Koran. He would even praise the religious zeal of missionaries as an example for every Muslim. There are a number of fascinating trends in the more general research of pan-Islamic ideology and activism. Recently, the movement has been situated in the wider context of anti-colonial rhetoric and propaganda in the non-European world. In his brilliant comparative study of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought, Cemil Aydin has shown how non-European intellectuals rejected the Western world order and developed ideas of Islamic and Asian revival, once they realized in the middle of the nineteenth century that European ideas of world order proved anything but universal in practice.Footnote ⁶⁹ Aydin has also pointed to the role of the Ottoman state in the promotion of pan-Islamism. Since the reign of Abdülhamid II, pan-Islamic rhetoric was famously employed by the Ottoman Porte as both a domestic and a geopolitical strategy, and was eventually used to incite Muslim revolt in the enemies’ empires during the First World War.

In recent years, scholarship has drawn more attention to the efforts of European empires to employ religious propaganda to stir up the Muslim subjects of rival colonial powers. Islam, it seemed, provided a powerful mobilizing force that could be exploited to provoke Islamic revolt for political and military aims. Already Napoleon had hoped for a united Islamic front against Orthodox Russia.Footnote ⁷⁰ Historians have also hinted at British, French, and Ottoman attempts to incite the Muslims on the Crimean peninsula and in the Caucasian mountains during the Crimean War.Footnote ⁷¹ Well researched are the efforts of the Central Powers to revolutionize pious Muslims in the First World War.Footnote ⁷² In November 1914, the German and Ottoman governments published a fatwa by the Sheikh al-Islam, the highest religious authority of the Caliphate in Constantinople, calling for holy war against the Entente. The text was translated into numerous languages and distributed across the world. In a massive propaganda campaign, Islamic rhetoric and imperatives were employed to give religious legitimacy to the involvement of Muslims on the side of the Central Powers. The British, French and Russians responded with their own religious propaganda campaigns, which, however, remain less studied. More recently, scholarship has enquired into similar attempts by the Axis to mobilize Muslims during the Second World War.Footnote ⁷³

There are various issues worth being addressed by future research on Islam and anti-colonialism. It seems promising to extend the timeframe of research on Islam and empire to the period of decolonization. Also, a shift of scholarly focus from the elites to ordinary Muslims and their discourses – as reflected in songs, prayers, stories, and other forms of folklore – could be fruitful. Studies might moreover examine in more depth the relationship between sacred and profane reasons for Islamic resistance and revolts. Most fascinating remain questions about the role of global Islamic movements and networks in anti-imperial struggles across the colonized Muslim world. Although usually studied in a regional context, many conflicts had a global dimension and were perceived as such by colonial authorities. There is also a need for comparative studies of anti-colonial jihad movements.Footnote ⁷⁴

III

Colonial officials produced an extensive body of texts about Islam. These writings give insight into the wide range and evolution of ideas about Islam that informed European colonial officials, military officers, and politicians.Footnote ⁷⁵ Islam was usually understood as an organized religion that could be studied and understood. Muslim communities seemed to be governed by a coherent system of values, norms, and conventions, and characterized by a specific mentality and set of manners. Above all, Islamic imperatives appeared to provide an ideal framework to legitimize claims to power and authority that could be employed by both Islamic rebels and European rulers.

Over the last decades, questions about the relationship between empire, power, and knowledge have attracted much interest among scholars.Footnote ⁷⁶ Seminal works by Bernard Cohn, Christopher Bayly, and Saul Dubow have examined information gathering, and the production, ordering, and distillation of colonial knowledge, the language and terminology used to convey this information, and ultimately the relations between this knowledge, political decisions, and the exertion of colonial control. Historians have enquired into cartographic, linguistic, ethnographic, and ecological knowledge. Among the most important categories used by colonial authorities to map and understand local populations, though, was religion.Footnote ⁷⁷ Religion became a central analytic and bureaucratic category applied to colonial subjects, no matter how pious they were or how different their notion of religion. While European authorities had a clear idea of what religion was, and were quick to separate sacred and profane spheres of their subjects’ lives, many of the colonized would not make such a distinction.

Much, though not all, historical scholarship on the connections between knowledge and colonial power has been influenced by Foucauldian and Saidian ideas. In one of the most intriguing parts of Orientalism, Said discussed the employment of Islam by French authorities during the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt, stressing the crucial role played by Oriental scholars, most notably the students of Silvestre de Sacy.Footnote ⁷⁸ The studies of Islam and French colonialism reviewed above, most importantly those of Christelow, Harrison and Robinson have examined in greater detail French knowledge and ideas of Islam and the ways in which they shaped political practice.Footnote ⁷⁹ They, too, have emphasized the importance of French scholars like Alfred Le Chatelier, Robert Arnaud, Xavier Coppolani, and Paul Marty, who not only studied the Muslim societies under French rule but also took part in drafting colonial policies towards them. The French considered Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa as quite distinct from those in North Africa and the Arab world. Although perceived as superior to African animist beliefs, Islam in sub-Saharan Africa was deemed to be different from the ‘original’ and ‘pure’ Arab Islam. Merging notions of race and religion, scholars, most importantly Paul Marty, invented the notion of ‘black Islam’, or Islam noir. Islam noir was imagined as a mixture of ‘pure’ Arab Islam and pre-Islamic African beliefs and customs, which were increasingly studied by French anthropologists like Émile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. On the other side, the concepts of ‘white Islam’, Islam bidan, and ‘Moorish Islam’, Islam maure, was created to categorize Muslims of Mauritania, the Maghreb, and the Arab world. While ‘white Islam’ was considered to be more ‘fanatical’ and dangerous, French scholars and colonial officials believed that ‘black Islam’ was easier to govern. Still, in sub-Saharan Africa, too, fears of Islam, le péril de l'Islam, never really vanished from the colonial records.

In An empire of facts, George Trumbull examines French perceptions of Islam in colonial Algeria between 1870 and the beginning of the First World War.Footnote ⁸⁰ Trumbull discusses the works of a wide range of authors, among them travellers, colonial officials, and scholars, arguing that the imperial context not only shaped the texts, but that the texts in turn informed the thinking of colonial officials and determined French policies in Algeria. A prominent example is the work of Louis Rinn, a colonial bureaucrat responsible for the Muslim population in Algeria, who in 1884 published his monumental study of Sufi orders, Marabouts et Khouan. The book was intended to prepare colonial officers for their service in Algeria. French authorities showed a great deal of interest in the brotherhoods as they seemed to be the most important organizing form of religious life in nineteenth-century Algeria. Although often described as weak and backward, the orders were also seen as a potential political threat. Generally, Trumbull observes a growing French suspicion of Islam, which he traces back to a number of causes. First, fuelled by anti-colonial Islamic uprisings like the 1870 revolt of the Rahmaniyya in Kabylia, fears of religious rebellion spread among French writers. Second, French attitudes towards Islam were tainted by anti-religious republicanism. Just as the left saw Catholicism as a danger to French republicanism, and the anti-Semitic right tried to portray Judaism as a political threat, many colonialists in Algeria saw Islamic religiosity as a risk to the colonial state. Finally, the aspirations of the mission civilisatrice and the idea of an evolutionary progress of civilization influenced French texts on Algerian Islam. Gender relations among the Muslim population in particular were seen as a moral and civilizational problem. Religious rituals were also described by some writers as proof of backwardness, thereby legitimizing French interference. In the most captivating parts of An empire of facts, Trumbull questions the dichotomy between colonial ruler and subject. How fluid this division was is shown in the passages about local Muslim intermediaries like the Sufi sheikh Ahmad al-Tijani, an important informer of Louis Rinn, or Tayyib bin al-Hajj Bashir, a former colonial soldier and Sufi leader who promoted Sufi orders as a pillar of, not as a threat to, the colonial state.

Imperial historians have also shown interest in the wide range of British colonial conceptions of Islam in Africa.Footnote ⁸¹ Furthermore, scholars of British colonialism in India have long debated the role of British conceptions of religious differences in fostering religious communalism on the subcontinent. While some historians have argued that the British understood Indian society in terms of religious divisions and therefore pursued a policy that created religious communalism, others have stressed the fact that religious categories like ‘Sikh’, ‘Hindu’, and ‘Muslim’ already had a political meaning in pre-colonial India, and that religious communalism was not an invention of the British colonial mind.Footnote ⁸² Islam, in any case, played a significant role in British perceptions of colonial India. In Representations of Indian Muslims in British colonial discourse, Alex Padamsee has recently examined the nature of British colonial conceptions of Islam in India more generally.Footnote ⁸³ Although the author insists that British ideas about Islam were highly complex, the book focuses mainly on British hostility towards Islam. The turning point, Padamsee contends, was the revolt of 1857. In its aftermath, a growing number of writings associated Islam with conspiracy, militancy, and fanaticism. Among the texts discussed are the writings of the colonial officer Alfred Lyall, Mark Thornhill's famous memoir of the ‘Mutiny’, and the sensationalist polemics of William Wilson Hunter, who, in The Indian Musalmans: are they bound in conscience to rebel against the Queen? (1871) spread fears of a Wahhabi conspiracy – indeed, the British tended to call all Muslim resistance groups in India ‘Wahabees’. The most interesting part of the book deals with Muslim criticism of these publications. Overall, Padamsee tends to overemphasize British hostility towards Islam. Publications which discuss Britain as the ‘protector’ of Islam like Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's The future of Islam (1882) or as a ‘Moslem power’ like R. G. Corbet's Mohammedanism and the British empire (1902) are not considered. In fact, other scholarship has suggested that British political attitudes towards Islam in India became increasingly sympathetic since the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁴ It also remains unclear how influential the texts discussed by Padamsee were in shaping official British attitudes in the colony. The book can be seen as part of a growing body of literature on Victorian images of Islam, which are based on published works and focus on misconceptions of Islam in the metropolis, including Philip Almond's Heretic and hero, Clinton Bennett's Victorian images of Islam and Shahin Kuli Khan Khattak's Islam and the Victorians.Footnote ⁸⁵

The historiography of the Dutch empire in the East Indies has long emphasized the role of Islam experts, most notably Karel Frederik Holle, L. W. C. van der Berg and Snouck Hurgronje, in shaping colonial policies. Hurgronje, the most prominent of these figures, has been studied in depth by Harry Benda, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, Ulrike Freitag, Eric Tagliacozzo and, most recently, Michael Laffan.Footnote ⁸⁶ An eminent scholar, Hurgronje was posted to Mecca and Jidda, where he monitored the hajj and anti-colonial and pan-Islamic activism, and was later transferred to the Dutch East Indies. Hurgronje used an extensive network of Muslim informants to write his reports about Islam, which has proven a fascinating subject of study in itself. Also German colonial authorities drew on the expertise of German scholars of Islam. In his article German images of Islam in West Africa, Holger Weiss has shown that German official conceptions of Islam and colonial policies were notably shaped by experts like Carl Heinrich Becker, Martin Hartmann, and Diedrich Westermann.Footnote ⁸⁷

Most studies of Islam and colonial knowledge tend to underestimate the diversity of images of Islam. More significant, however, is a methodical problem. Many works on colonial representations of Islam do not define their source basis clearly, but look at a wide spectrum of writings, mixing government documents, literature, journalistic articles, travel writing, and memoirs. Scholars thereby tend to ignore the fact that authors often had very different motives and audiences. Academic texts, reports of colonial officials, and the writings of travellers addressed quite different groups of readers and varied significantly in their political influence. The actual impact of these texts on political practice often remains unclear. There is a need for further systematic exploration of official government documents – political directives, administrative reports, military manuals, and orders – which concern Islam. Future research needs to focus more on the ‘official mind’, as Robinson and Gallagher famously put it, in order to explore the ideas of Islam that shaped policy-making processes in the colonies and in the centres of power like London, Paris, and St Petersburg.Footnote ⁸⁸

All of the books and articles surveyed in the three parts of this essay have contributed considerably to our understanding of the engagement of the European empires with Islam. Yet most of these studies have been written primarily as contributions to the historiography of a specific empire or a distinct geographic region and rarely refer to research on other empires, even though the questions and themes raised in all these imperial contexts are remarkably similar. This article has sought to bring together these studies and to show some of the common questions and lines of research. It is an effort to establish the history of Islam and empire as a research subject in its own right.