Islamic Imperialism In The Middle East

The Middle East was left in turmoil after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1 and its eventual dissolution in 1922, initiated by the Allies. The Ottoman Empire was a multinational, multilingual empire and the official state Dīn of the empire was Sunni Islam, although there was a hegemonic power of Muslim control over the non-Muslim population, non-Muslim communities in the Ottoman Empire had been granted state recognition and protection in the Islamic tradition. With the Empires defeat, its partitioning and the loss of its Middle Eastern territories to the French and British, created a void of Islamic representation in the geopolitics of the early 20th century. This void and lack of representation led to multiple Islamist and
Hassan’s belief was that Islam had lost its social dominance through the involvement of British imperial rule and corrupt Western influences in Egypt. Due to this belief he preached the implication of traditional Islamic Sharia law in every aspect of life, from day to day business to the organisation of the government. He also promoted a social regression based on Islamic altruism and civic duty, to oppose what he believed Western influences, such as capitalism, that had brought to Egypt. This altruism ethos can be seen in the early stages of the Brotherhood, were the organisation initially focused on charitable and educational work in communities, providing job-training programmes, schools, programs to support widows and orphans as well as operating 21 hospitals throughout Egypt. The brotherhood grew and quickly became a major political force, by representing the cause of the disenfranchised classes, promoting a conception of Islam that could restore broken links between tradition and modernity, and playing an important role in the Egyptian nationalist
These teachings influenced Hassan to found the brotherhood in wake of the Islamism Modernism movement, the brotherhood was then considered to be an intellectual descendant of Islamic Modernism. Proponents of Islamic Modernism strove to reconcile their Islamic faith with the Enlightenment, modernity and Western ideals such as democracy, nationalism, civil rights, equality, progress and rationality, as such the movement has been described as being “the first Muslim ideological response”. It is considered the first Islamic movement to have emerged from the middle of the 19th century, the ideology a retaliation to the rapid changes on the geopolitical stage as well as the perceived onslaught of Western civilisation and colonialization of the Muslim