The Closing of the Muslim Mind
How three events in the 20th century destroyed the Muslim capacity to produce new ideas.
In the first half of the 20th century, Islamic civilisation was obliterated. The obliteration was not the standard process of entropy that afflicts all human endeavours, but rather, the result of several violent decades that dismembered the entire infrastructure of Islamic civilisation between 1918 and 1947.
Today, when you walk through any Muslim country’s capital, be it Istanbul, Riyadh, or Kuala Lumpur, you will find universities, publishing houses, research centres, and religious institutions; the outward forms of intellectual life. Yet something is not quite right. The form exists as an outward manifestation of the desire to produce knowledge, but its substance is wanting at best, as evidenced by low rates of production in terms of published scientific papers, very few rewards (if any) for innovation (such as Nobel Prizes), and a lack of serious urban agglomerations for knowledge, science, and industry.
The capacity to generate new ideas, to process complexity, to build institutions that compound knowledge across generations has atrophied to the point of near extinction. Today, Muslims and their venerated institutions debate the same questions, in the same language, that our forefathers debated a century ago. The discourse has not evolved; if anything, it appears to have regressed, each generation receiving a progressively degraded copy of ideas first articulated in the ‘short 19th century’, a time of great potential amidst accelerating ruin – also forgotten in popular memory. Discourses on sharia, Islam, and the modern state, as well as secularism, European philosophy, and its relationship to Islamic philosophy, among other subjects, have largely been inherited from this period and have made few, if any, notable advances over the past century.
Stagnation and crisis are ill-fitting words to describe our current state of affairs. What we suffer from is amnesia masquerading as tradition – a collective forgetting so absolute that we no longer remember what we have lost, or even that we have lost it.
Standard explanations and narratives fail to account for the totality of this rupture. We speak of colonialism, of Western imperialism, of the corruption of leaders or the backwardness of the masses. All true enough, but insufficient and abstract.
Between 1918 and 1947, Islamic civilisation suffered three cataclysmic events that systematically destroyed the institutional, social, and intellectual infrastructure required for a complex civilisation to function: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after 1914; the rise of Communism after 1917 across the Muslim territories of the Russian Empire and its misbegotten progeny further afield in regions like the Balkans; and the Partition of India in 1947.
Each event severed networks that had taken centuries to cultivate. Each event displaced or destroyed entire classes, such as the Ottoman governing elite, the Tatar Muslim intelligentsia, and the Indo-Muslim aristocracy, all of whose patronage and participation were essential to the production and maintenance of knowledge and culture. In each event, refugee states were born in a state of existential crisis. Mere survival became the highest aspiration, and we became incapable of pursuing long-term thinking and development required to build institutions.
Finally, and perhaps the factor that is the least understood, is that each of these three events compounded the others, ensuring that no safe harbour remained where the work of industrialising and developing on our own terms, haltingly begun in the 19th century, could continue.
These three catastrophes were not only the destruction of individual cultures and countries, but together became the piecemeal dismemberment of Islamic civilisation. Understanding this destruction is the necessary first step toward any genuine renewal. For what could not survive the 20th century will not survive the 21st, and we can build nothing new without first reckoning with what was lost.
The Ottoman Dissolution
The Ottoman Empire’s final decades were a protracted agony. The 1838 Treaty of Balta Liman had already gutted the empire’s capacity for economic self-determination, imposing “free trade” that ensured Ottoman manufactures could not compete with British industrial output. However, it was the empire’s territorial disintegration, particularly in the Balkans, that proved most devastating, not necessarily because of lost land, but because of what happened to the people who lived there. Buildings can be rebuilt and farms resown, but once a people are dispersed, a culture is consigned to ruin forever.
The Balkan Wars and their aftermath saw one of modern history’s forgotten genocides. Between 1870 and 1923, Ottoman Muslims of various ethnicities across the Balkans, in Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, and beyond, were subjected to systematic ethno-religious cleansing. Millions fled or were killed. Those who survived became muhajir, with the refugees flooding into a shrinking Anatolian core. By 1923, one-third of the newly-founded Turkish Republic’s population consisted of displaced Muslims from the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Crimea. This catastrophe is often reduced to a mere statistic, but the muhajirs were scholars, artisans, merchants, and landowners; the very classes that sustained society and its cultural and intellectual production. Their displacement resulted in the destruction of businesses, the severing of patronage networks, the silencing of printing presses, and the abandonment of libraries. An entire world of knowing and being was eviscerated and subsequently banished from popular memory out of sheer trauma.
The Ottoman response to European pressure in the 19th century had been halting, but it gained momentum throughout the end of that century. Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals experimented with the Tanzimat reforms, the establishment of modern schools and universities, and the development of an Ottoman Turkish press. These efforts were a genuine attempt to negotiate the emergence of industrial civilisation on Islamic terms. Figures such as Said Halim Pasha and Mehmet Akif Ersoy, writing in journals like Sebilürreşad, articulated visions of Islamic philosophy, law, and governance that sought to indigenise modern developments in Europe. The Young Ottomans and later Young Turks, whatever their failures, represented a living debate about the future of Islamic civilisation.
The First World War annihilated these possibilities. The Arab provinces were carved up between British and French mandates. Anatolia itself nearly followed, saved only by the numerous heroes of Türkiye’s War of Independence. But the price of Turkish survival was the abandonment of its past. Kemal’s secular revolution deliberately severed the new Turkish Republic from its Ottoman past, abolishing the caliphate in 1924, replacing Arabic script with Latin in 1927, and systematically suppressing the religious and cultural institutions that had sustained Ottoman civilisation – all to ensure a clean break with the past.
The loss was not confined to Türkiye. With the Ottoman centre gone, Muslim elites across the former empire found themselves adrift. In the Arab world, the mandates imposed colonial structures that elevated compradors and marginalised traditional elites. In the Balkans, the remaining Muslim populations were reduced to minority status under hostile Christian nation-states. The transnational networks that had once connected statesmen, merchants, intellectuals, and scholars from Cairo to Damascus to Istanbul to Sarajevo were shattered beyond repair.
It was a cruel fate that the Ottoman collapse occurred just as Islamic civilisation’s cultural and intellectual production was gaining momentum. The short 19th century’s achievements – printing presses, journals, and transnational networks – were liquidated. No successor state inherited or could rebuild this infrastructure. The Nahda would continue in a diminished form in Cairo and Beirut, but without the institutional depth and patronage networks that the Ottoman system had provided.
The Rise of Communism
While the Ottoman Empire collapsed from external pressure and internal exhaustion, the Muslim communities of the Russian Empire faced a different horror: systematic ideological destruction. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 inaugurated seven decades of deliberate cultural annihilation that sought to erase Islam as a living civilisation across the vast expanse from Crimea to Central Asia.
Before 1917, Muslim Russia was undergoing its own intellectual awakening. The Jadid movement, born in Crimea and spreading across the Tatar-speaking world into Central Asia, represented a sophisticated effort to create a modern Muslim culture. Intellectuals like Ismail Gaspıralı advocated educational reform, the modernisation of Islamic schools, the adoption of scientific knowledge, and the development of a vernacular Muslim press. By the early 20th century, dozens of Jadid schools operated across the region, Tatar-language journals flourished, and a network of Muslim intellectuals connected Kazan, Bakhchisaray, Samarkand, and Bukhara, and extended their influence beyond into the Ottoman and Indo-Islamic worlds.
The Jadids were not secularists imitating the West. They were reform-minded Muslims attempting to reconcile Islamic learning with modern knowledge, creating institutions that could produce Muslims capable of functioning in an industrial age. Their project paralleled and often intersected with Ottoman and Egyptian reformism, forming part of a broader pan-Islamic intellectual moment.
The rise of the Bolsheviks utterly destroyed this. Initially, there was a brief window of hope. Some Jadids, like Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, believed socialism might accommodate Muslim aspirations for self-determination and modernisation. They were swiftly disabused of such notions. By the mid-1920s, Josef Stalin’s consolidation of power brought a campaign of terror against Muslim intellectuals and institutions. The Jadid schools were closed. Islamic endowments (waqf) were confiscated. The Arabic script was first replaced with Latin, then with Cyrillic, severing new generations from their literary heritage. Mosques were demolished or converted to warehouses. The ulema, who had resisted the Jadid movement’s call for reforms, were imprisoned or executed.
The destruction ran deeper than political and ideological repression. Communist ideology demanded the eradication of religion as a category of human experience. Where western colonial powers might allow Islam to persist as personal faith whilst neutering its political expression, Communism sought to extinguish even private belief. Children were raised in state institutions designed to produce atheist citizens. Islamic scholarship became impossible, not merely discouraged but expressly criminalised. The networks connecting Tatar Muslim intellectuals across Eurasia were severed. By the 1950s, entire generations had grown up knowing nothing of the Islamic intellectual tradition that had flourished just decades earlier.
The consequences extended beyond Soviet borders. Tatar Muslims had played a crucial role in connecting the Ottoman, Persian, and Indian intellectual worlds. Their journals circulated from Istanbul to Calcutta. Their scholars studied in Cairo and Bukhara, taught in Kazan and Kashgar. When Soviet repression closed this northern tier of Islamic civilisation, it isolated the Muslim heartlands from each other, interrupting exchanges that had sustained intellectual vitality for centuries.
Albania’s fate exemplified the totality of Communist destruction in Muslim Europe. Once the most influential corner of the Muslim Balkans, Albania underwent the most extreme anti-religious campaign in Communist history. By the 1960s, Enver Hoxha’s regime had declared Albania the world’s first atheist state. Every mosque and tekke was closed. The Muslim landowning class, which had sustained Sufi orders and Islamic learning, was liquidated. Within two generations, a civilisation that had produced Muslim scholars, poets, and statesmen for five centuries was reduced to fantastical memories whispered in the dark.
The Communist assault succeeded where colonialism had only partially damaged Islamic civilisation. Colonial powers, however exploitative, generally permitted the continued existence of Islamic institutions in some form. They might control them, tax them, or marginalise them, but they rarely attempted wholesale eradication. Communism offered no such reprieve. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, the Muslim communities it had ruled for seven decades emerged traumatised and hollow. Their institutions, intellectual traditions, and cultural continuity had all been deliberately erased. What remains today are fragments, and the work of reconstruction has barely begun.
The Indian Partition
If the Ottoman collapse destroyed Islamic civilisation’s western anchor and Communism severed its northern tier, the Partition of India in 1947 dealt the final, perhaps most consequential blow. India had been, for centuries, one of Islamic civilisation’s most productive centres. At its peak, the Mughal Empire surpassed the Ottomans in terms of wealth and sophistication. Its successor states and the Indo-Muslim elite who emerged under British rule sustained networks of learning, patronage, and cultural production that connected the subcontinent to the wider Islamic world.
The East India Company’s conquest of Bengal in the 18th century and the subsequent abolition of the Mughal sultanate in 1857 had already severely damaged this world. But Muslims in British India adapted. They established new institutions, such as the Aligarh Muslim University, to provide modern education while preserving Islamic learning and identity. They played a significant role in the emergence of an Urdu public sphere. They sent scholars to study in Cairo and Istanbul, and received students from across the Islamic world. The Indo-Muslim elite, though subordinate to British rule, retained sufficient autonomy and resources to continue participating in Islamic civilisation’s intellectual life. Such was India’s centrality that after the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, a conspiracy was hatched to transfer the seat of the Caliphate to Hyderabad, in the heart of India. As the last pseudo-sovereign Muslim ruler, the Nizam’s intermarriage with the Ottoman royal family was seen as a realistic endeavour.
In the end, it was not Britain’s direct rule, but the domestically driven partition of India, that destroyed this. The decision to divide India along religious lines created two nations and shattered a civilisation. Some 16 million people were displaced in the largest forced migration in human history. Communal violence is estimated to have killed between one and two million people. In the aftermath, Pakistan emerged as a refugee state for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Millions of muhajir from India flooded into a territory that lacked the institutional capacity to absorb them. The new state’s energies were consumed by survival: feeding refugees, establishing basic administration, and preparing for inevitable conflict with India. There was no bandwidth for the long-term institution-building required for intellectual and cultural flourishing. The Pakistani state, born in crisis, has struggled with legitimacy and coherence ever since, oscillating between secular nationalism and religious ideology without synthesising them into a workable model.
India retained the majority of the subcontinent’s infrastructure and institutions, but its Muslim population became traumatised and diminished. The Indo-Muslim elite, who had constituted a sophisticated governing and intellectual class, were decimated. Those who remained in India found themselves a vulnerable minority in a Hindu-majority state. Those who fled to Pakistan left behind homes, libraries, endowments, and institutional networks built over centuries. The transnational networks sustained by pilgrimage, scholarship, and trade, and connecting Indian Muslims to Cairo, Istanbul, and Mecca, were decimated.
The deeper loss in this case was civilisational memory. Indian Muslims had long regarded themselves as inheritors of a grand tradition that stretched back to the Delhi Sultanate and beyond. Partition forced a redefinition in which Pakistan was driven to adopt a national identity based on Islam without a deeper civilisational basis; instead, it became a shallow, ideological Islam divorced from the sophisticated legal and cultural traditions that had actually characterised Muslim India. In the Indian Republic itself, the need to prove loyalty to a Hindu-majority state encouraged many Muslims to minimise or privatise their Islamic identity. In both cases, the rich intellectual tradition of Indo-Islamic civilisation became attenuated, reduced to symbols and slogans rather than lived practice.
Partition also severed the Indian subcontinent from the broader Islamic world in ways that had not existed even under British colonialism. Pakistan’s chronic insecurity and conflicts have consumed resources and attention that might have been directed toward cultural and intellectual development. India’s Muslim minority status meant that Indian Muslims, once central to Islamic knowledge, culture, and intellectual networks, became peripheral. The golden age of Indo-Islamic learning, when students from Java to Morocco studied in Delhi and Lucknow, came to an end.
A Compounding Catastrophe
Each of these catastrophes might have been survivable on its own. Civilisations have recovered from territorial loss, foreign occupation, and demographic collapse. Islamic civilisation itself had survived the Mongol invasions, integrating the conquerors and eventually reaching new heights of sophistication under the auspices of the later gunpowder empires. Even in the 19th century, despite the encroaching colonialism and military defeats on all fronts, a genuine Islamic intellectual renaissance had emerged, a flowering of print culture and public debate that suggested the capacity for renewal remained intact.
But the three catastrophes did not occur in isolation. They compounded each other, each destroying a different pillar of Islamic civilisation’s infrastructure. The Ottoman collapse eliminated the central political authority and patronage network that had sustained intellectual life across the Arab and Turkish-speaking worlds. Communist repression severed the northern tier, isolating Central Asia and the Caucasus from the rest of the Islamic world and destroying the Jadid reform movement that might have offered a model for synthesis between Islam and modernity. Partition fractured the Indian subcontinent, creating two wounded states incapable of continuing the intellectual traditions that had made Muslim India a beacon of culture and learning.
These events not only destroyed institutions but also the social and political classes that played crucial roles in their sustenance. The Ottoman governing elite, the Tatar Muslim intelligentsia, and the Indo-Muslim aristocracy were patrons who commissioned books, endowed schools, and supported scholars, thereby participating in the networks that made Islamic civilisation more than a collection of atomised believers. Without them, knowledge production collapsed. Muslim societies retained mosques and basic religious education, but the complex ecosystem required for sustained intellectual innovation was gone.
The refugee dynamic accelerated the collapse. The Ottoman Empire became a refugee state in its final decades, and Anatolia was flooded with displaced Muslims from every direction. Pakistan was literally founded by and for refugees. These populations, traumatised and dispossessed, lacked the stability and resources for long-term cultural investment. States consumed by existential crises cannot build universities, fund research, or sustain the generational continuity required for intellectual traditions to flourish.
Crucially, the modernisation efforts begun in the 19th century were aborted before they could mature. The Ottoman Tanzimat, Jadid movement, and Aligarh represented genuine attempts to create indigenous Islamic modernity, to develop institutions and ideas that reconciled Islam with industrial civilisation without wholesale capitulation to Western models. In every case, their institutions were destroyed, intellectuals killed or silenced, and transnational networks severed. What survived were fragments, which have degenerated with each passing generation.
The result is the poverty of contemporary Islamic intellectual life. We rely on ideas formulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not because these ideas are adequate to our moment, but because we have lost the capacity to generate new ones. The institutions that might critique, refine, and build upon these earlier efforts do not exist, for the most part. Venerated institutions such as Al-Azhar are husks of their former selves. The class of people who might staff such institutions was destroyed. We are left with degraded copies, slogans repeated without understanding, and an amnesia so profound we do not even recognise what we have lost.
Reckoning with Defeat
Muslims have carefully constructed narratives around our defeat, usually centred around colonialism’s injustices and Western perfidy. Some go further in transforming our total defeat into a paradoxical victory: Islamic civilisation’s failure to survive the 20th century has become evidence of our moral superiority. We were too pure for this corrupted modernity, too devoted to principle to sully ourselves with the compromises required for power. The fact that we lost proves we were right.
This is delusion masquerading as piety. It is the closing of the Muslim mind made manifest through a retreat into nostalgic fantasies of the past. Unable to confront the scale of our loss, we have absolved ourselves of responsibility and rendered our defeat inexplicable except as a divine test or a Western conspiracy. In doing so, we have surrendered the one thing that might allow recovery: agency.
Contrary to prevailing attitudes, to own defeat is not capitulation. It is the recovery of agency through recognition of reality. When we accept that we were comprehensively beaten, that our military power was broken, our economic systems dismantled, our institutions destroyed, and our intellectual traditions severed, we unlock the only question that matters: how does this never happen again?
But if we refuse to own our defeat, if we insist it was really something else, whether test or blessing or vindication of our virtue, then we never ask that question and remain paralysed in time, condemned to taste defeat again and again while congratulating ourselves on our steadfastness. The artificial glass ceiling that constrains the Muslim mind must be shattered with a full recognition, acceptance, and internalisation of defeat. Only by sitting with this reality and feeling its full weight can we begin to understand how we arrived at this stage and what reconstruction demands of us.
However, dwelling on our sorrows is a popular pastime, and reckoning alone is insufficient. Understanding requires knowledge, and we lack the knowledge necessary to comprehend our own recent history. We must study the 19th and 20th centuries with the same rigour we apply to the halcyon days of the Umayyads, or Abbasids, or any other era of history that is distant enough for us to project our fantasies onto. We must understand the dynamics of history, not as a succession of discrete events, but as processes driven by material conditions, institutional arrangements, and the decisions of governing elites. We need an accurate theory of history that explains causation in human societies, the divergent fates of polities that seem similarly positioned, why certain ideas flourish in one context and wither in another, and the mechanisms by which entire classes and nations are elevated or destroyed.
Previous generations of Muslim intellectuals focused heavily on Western colonialism’s conquests, extraction, and cultural arrogance. This was necessary work, but it has led us to misdiagnose the timeline of our destruction. Colonialism weakened us, certainly, but we were not broken by the gradual processes of 19th-century imperial expansion. We were shattered by three concrete, cataclysmic events in the first half of the 20th century: the Ottoman dissolution, the rise of Communism across our northern territories, and the Indian Partition. These events, rather than the colonial pressures that mounted through the 18th and 19th centuries, were what eventually severed our civilisational continuity through the wholesale destruction of our social classes, political institutions, and the transnational networks that had sustained knowledge production for centuries. It is perhaps encouraging and exasperating that, even under the yoke of British or Russian imperialism, Aligarh and Jadid alike engaged in a creative process of reform and engagement. In contrast, we struggle to perform as vigorously today, despite the fact that colonialism is no longer a factor. This is a self-imposed condition.
By correcting our understanding of the timeline, we can finally ask the right questions. Perhaps most importantly, we can ground our efforts in concrete historical analysis rather than the abstract theorising that has dominated recent decades, by understanding precisely what was destroyed: which institutions were lost, which networks were severed, which systems of patronage supported cultural production, which social arrangements enabled intellectual life; then we can begin to imagine how to design new structures suited to our circumstances rather than attempting to resurrect dead forms.
The question now is whether we possess the courage to reckon with our history in an honest fashion and to abandon the comforting myths that excuse inaction. There are no shortcuts. There is no divine intervention that will restore what was lost. There is only the work, and it begins with seeing clearly.
Author: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine for the 21st century.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
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Further Reading
Ali A. Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees
Andrew Hammond, Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought