In the last quarter of the 18th century, the gap widened between the technical skills of some western and northern European countries and those of the rest of the world.
[2] The rise of modern Europe coincided with what many scholars refer to as the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which by the 18th century was facing political, military, and economic breakdown.
Although the occupation was only three years, (followed by lingering hostility to the French) the experience ultimately exposed the Egyptian people to Enlightenment ideas and Europe's new technology.
This created conditions for the "gradual formation of a group of reformers with a certain knowledge of the modern world and a conviction that the empire must belong to it or perish".
[clarification needed] Known as the Tanzimat, many of these reforms involved adopting successful European practices that were considered antithetical to conservative Muslims such as confining sharia to family law.
[12] The Ottoman Empire was the first[citation needed] Muslim country where modernity surfaced, with major shifts in scientific and legal thought.
[10] In 1834, Ishak Efendi published Mecmua-i Ulum-i Riyaziye, a four volume text introducing many modern scientific concepts to the Muslim world.
[15] Much of this had to do with the intellectual appeal of social Darwinism, since it led to the conclusion that an old-fashioned Muslim society could not compete in the modern world.
[13] Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was politically active in the Islamic world and published the pamphlet "Al-'Urwa al-Wuthqà" during a brief spell in France, proclaiming that Europe had become successful due to its laws and its science.
[12] The reforms they proposed challenged the status quo maintained by the conservative Muslim scholars (ulama), who saw the established law as the ideal order that had to be followed and upheld the doctrine of taqlid (imitation / blind following).
Islamic modernists saw the resistance to change on the part of the conservative ulama as a major cause for the problems the Muslim community was facing as well as its inability to counter western hegemony.
He believed that Islam was compatible with science and reason and that in order to counter European power the Muslim world had to embrace progress.
[14] Muhammad Rashid Rida (1869–1935) also became active in the Egyptian modernization movement as Abduh's disciple, although he was born and educated in Syria.
[12] Other Modernists include Mahmud Tarzi of Afghanistan, Chiragh Ali of India, Ahmad Dahlan of Java, and Wang Jingzhai of China.
But in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood, the first Islamist organization, which had no interest in reinterpreting Islam to make it compatible with modernity.
The School of Theology at Ankara University undertook this forensic examination with the intent of removing centuries of often conservative cultural baggage and rediscovering the spirit of reason in the original message of Islam.
Fadi Hakura from London's Chatham House likens these revisions to the Reformation that took place in Protestant Christianity in the 16th Century.
[24] Turkey has also trained hundreds of women as theologians, and sent them senior imams known as vaizes all over the country, away from the relatively liberal capital and coastal cities, to explain these re-interpretations at town hall meetings.
[24] The aftermath of World War I resulted in the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the domination of the Middle East by European powers such as Britain and France.
The first created a flow of many billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia to fund Islamic books, scholarships, fellowships, and mosques around the world; the second undermined the assumption that Westernization strengthened Muslim countries and was the irreversible trend of the future.
It has been the reasoning for the Islamization of politics and protest, due to the large Muslim majority in the Middle East as well as the region's imperial past.
[33] According to polls taken in 2008 and 2010 by Pew and Gallop, pluralities of the population in Muslim-majority countries are undecided as to what extent religion (and certain interpretations of) should influence public life, politics, and the legal system.