Keddie, Nikki. "The Revolt of Islam, 1700 to 1993: Comparative Considerations and Relations to Imperialism". Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.36, No.3 (1994): 463-487.

Keddie, Nikki. "The Revolt of Islam, 1700 to 1993: Comparative Considerations and Relations to Imperialism". Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.36, No.3 (1994): 463-487.

• The author claims that religious revolts in Islam have either been 'left' sectarian conflicts or 'orthodox' revivalists, and that these revivalist movement had a marked increased after 1700, partially in response to colonialism and its aftermath. Dr. Keddie posits that three distinct periods of revolt existed: pre-colonial, anti-colonial, and the Cold War revival (463).
• Common assumptions about the inseparability of Islam and politics are more pious myths than reality, and since the last of the four pious Caliphs, the Muslim world has been mainly ruled by political dynasties promulgating law separately from the religious scholarship of the ulama, which saw its power continuous decrease (463-464).
• Although many Muslims will claim that Islam compromises a total world view of religion and politics, this has only rarely been put into political practice. Those times when it is realized mainly focus on a return to Quranic law and the example of early Mohammedan society, situations which usually appear in revolutions and do not characterize the larger states of the Muslim world (465).
• Another common idea is Western scholarship is the Islam is so ideologically hostile to revolt that the only route for dissent becomes religious, causing radicalism. Although Muslim rulers are consistently against revolts, they are not more so than Christian rulers. The revolts of the 1700s onward, however, do have decidedly religious focuses and commonalities regarding a return to stricter social norms and Quranic laws that must be addressed (466).
• A number of common factors have been suggested to explain revivalist movements in Islam during this time. The influence of Arabian Wahhabism is often cited as an inspiration for revivalism elsewhere, but modern scholars think that its role has been overstated (468).
• Revivalist movements during this time may have been brought on by the commercial, economic, and social changes wrought by Western encroachment into the Islamic world and the new social issues this caused. In areas, like West Africa, Sumatra, or Najd, with weak states, a return to an idealized Quranic state could seem like a way to handle these new issues (468-469).
• The spread of neo-Sufism and Sufi orders during this time period is also significant, as many of the revisionist leaders were Sufis. Some neo-sufi ideas about shari'a serving to instruct the mass not given access to Sufi mystery certainly may have played into the puritanical nature of these movements (469).
• These revivalism movements like spread during the 18th Century because that is when many of the great Muslim empires: the Mughals, the Safavids, and the Ottomans; when into a decline. This opened up possibilities for new states to form, whereas previous movements would have been crushed (469-470).
• Nearly all of these movements had extremely charismatic religious leaders at their head (470).
• Early Wahhabism in Najd was developed in an environment of rapid population growth and increased conflict between nomadic and agricultural groups. Without a pre-existing state structure outside of traditional customary law, an increasing number of educated ulama began to exercise state power in settling disputes. The weakness of the Ottomans during this period allowed for the expansion of clerical authority and the construction of a Wahhabi state (471-472).
• The Islamic revival in the Minangkabau highlands of western Sumatra took place in a rice-paddy agriculturalist society where politics had been extremely decentralized to isolated villages and Islam focused on ritual rather than law. In the late 1700s, the depletion of gold reserve led to the fall of the monarchy and intercommunal violence. During the same period, trade with the West had increasingly demanded new export crops which required non-existing protections for long-distance trade. Without other functioning state bodies, Islamic law increasingly regulated trade and provided governance (473-474).
• In 1803, a number of Islamic judges, later called the Padris, from the area travelled to Mecca, where they learned Wahhabi teachings. Upon return they were determined to apply a uniform Islamic law to the Minangkabau highlands, establish a military force to protect trade, mandate beards and hijabs, and ban opium, gambling, and alcohol. They were eventually removed from power in the 1830s by the Netherlandish and local collaborators (474-475).
• The traditions of Islam in Sumatra, where Islamic scholars held essentially no political power and rulers did not focus on enforcing shari'a allowed newly radicalized scholars returning from Mecca to claim that the current leadership were impious and replace them with a 'true' Islam (475-476).
• The influence of trade with the West, particularly the slave trade, is suggested by the fact that the same areas where trade was heavily concentrated experienced jihadi movements in sequential order: first Senegambia, then ending with the late slave trade hubs of Nigeria and Mali (476).
• There is other circumstantial evidence to suggest that trading elites enriched by first the export of slaves and now the commodity trade based on slave plantations participated in jihadi movements, in part to protect and enforce trading networks via application of Islamic law. The jihads also provided opportunities for the acquisition of more heretical slaves for sale or use in plantation labour (477-478).
• Islamic revival also certainly could have come out of societies devastated by the slave trade, as the instability of those region would have encouraged charismatic and legalistic leadership. Furthermore, because many West African leaders mixed Islam with local practices, more puritanical Sufi leaders could claim moral authority over the current leaders and declare their wars and heavy taxes to be illegitimate, something they often did (479-480).
• "Sumatra and West Africa seem to show similar situations. In each, European and other trade had a disruptive impact; and a small but growing orthodox educated cadre rejected the rulers, people, and policies that they considered only nominally Islamic" (480).
• The Islamic revival movements during the 19th Century were more focused on anti-colonial struggles and formations of strong states than they were on Islamic orthodoxy. Like earlier movements, these revivalist movements were heavily influenced by either neo-Sufism or Wahhabism, and tended to originate in peripheral territories only weakly affected by state power. These movements, however, were explicitly caused by Western imperial conquest (481-482).
• Revolts during this period could either be Wahhabist, focusing on a puritanical and literary interpretation of the Quran that stresses complete orthodoxy, or Mahdist, concentrated on a messianic figure who is often puritanical, but extremely heterodoxy or heretical to other groups (483).
• From the late 1800s until the 1950s and 1960s, the primary trend in Islam had been reformism, a trend among primarily the urban middle-class, who argued that the Muslim world could only thrive through the incorporation of Western ideas. Its popularity originally arose out of the defeat of Muslim nations by the West, including the crushing of earlier revivalist movements. This reformist consensus really only began to fall apart as modernist, secular Muslims failed to deal with the issues created by Israel (484).
• The contemporary movement of Islamism, although defined by the revolutionary government of Iran, began with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Iraq, with similar movements in Pakistan and northern India. Islamism is most popular in traditionally secular nations, and largely grew as a response to the failures of those governments (485-486).
• Islamism is devoutly anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist, allowing the movement to piggyback on wider sentiments in the Middle East. This trait especially allowed the movement to gain power in country's experiencing colonial interference or feeling subject to foreign powers, like Shahist Iran (486).