Islamism has imitated, or colluded with, the state autocracies it claims to oppose. It has failed to suggest its own answers to economic problems, social justice, education or corruption.

Muslim Brothers, including Mohamed Morsi (right), inaugurate their Cairo headquarters on 21 May 2011 Patrick Chapuis · Gamma-Rapho · Getty

Muslims centred their identity upon the duality of religion and politics embodied in the umma, or community of believers, until the twilight of the last meaningful Islamic caliphate, the Ottoman empire (1290-1924). The umma encompassed the totality of Islam and its human achievements. It was timeless, representing Muslims’ past and future, and spatially unbounded, stretching across the known world. It was neither a government nor a theocracy, but a collectivity of faith.

This worldview changed dramatically with the fall of the Ottomans and rise of western hegemony. Through imperialism and war, western modes of thought penetrated Islamic lands, especially the Middle Eastern heartlands. The declining Ottoman empire had imported European military models, and colonised territories began to be incorporated into western economic production. Western legal traditions that emphasised rules and systemic constructs replaced the discourse of sharia (which had allowed a lot of room for adaptation) as the constitutional backbone of new nation states. In this new era, the religious and political fluidity around the umma gave way to codified institutions and territorial boundaries.

Reacting to this Islamic decline (inhitat) and to western pressures, Muslim thinkers reinterpreted their faith in the late 19th century to create new ideologies promising rejuvenation. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdouh led attempts to make Islam more legible by calling for the adaptation of Muslim life to the West’s views on economic and political modernity. They never called themselves Salafists (a term used and abused by western scholars); for them, it was about returning to the original sources to find compatibility with these new challenges.

In attempting to ‘rescue’ Islam, these Muslim thinkers, who supported the political, cultural and religious movement of the nahda (renaissance), unwittingly decentred it. The manifest truths of Islam, and the (...)