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The Turkish Empires

The Turks are originally from Central Asia, and over centuries they gradually moved out of their homeland of sometimes arid prairies into richer lands in the Middle East. Some Turks came with the Mongol expansion of the mid-1200’s, and they eventually consolidated their control over much of the Middle East, Iran, and India. They created three empires which dominated much of the world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Ottoman Empire (1453-1918):

The Turks in the Middle East and Europe

The Ottoman Turks built the most important Muslim empire of the last 500 years. Their empire included present day Turkey, as well as North Africa, Egypt, part of Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and much of Eastern Europe. The Byzantine Empire had controlled Eastern Europe and most of Asia Minor after the disintegration of the Roman Empire, but over the centuries the Muslims had gradually chipped away its holdings on the east. During the Fourth Crusade, the Christians sacked Constantinople which weakened the Byzantine Empire, and it was further weakened in 1345 when the Ottomans defeated the Byzantine army, reducing the emperor to a vassal. In the meantime, the Turks conquered the Balkans, and finally, in the siege of 1453 they took Constantinople, renaming it Istanbul and making it the Ottoman capital. This marked the beginning of the Ottoman Empire.
By the mid-1400's, it looked like Europe was caught in a pincer movement with Muslims on the West in Spain and in the East in Constantinople and the Balkans. After the Muslim Turks defeated the Byzantines, the eastern Christian stronghold, pressure grew on the Spanish kings to defeat the weakened Muslim kingdom there. Responding to that pressure, the combined armies of Castile and Aragon forced out the last Muslim ruler from Spain in 1492. After that, contact with Islam declined in Western Europe although contact was never broken in Eastern Europe. Albania, Bosnia, and Kosovo continue to be predominantly Muslim today.
The Story of the Ottoman Empire. Suleyman I, also known as the Magnificent, is considered by many as the most important of the Ottoman sultans, ruling from 1520 to 1566. He led the Turkish expansion into Europe taking the Balkans, Hungary, and most of Austria. His forces struck fear into the hearts of the Europeans whose allied forces finally defeated him in Vienna. Under Suleyman and his successors, the Ottomans occupied much of Eastern Europe laying siege to Vienna on two different occasions. The Ottomans controlled much of Eastern Europe, specifically Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, and they were an important presence in the formation of modern Europe. By also controlling the Middle East and North Africa, the Ottomans essentially turned the eastern Mediterranean into their own private lake.
As the Greeks built their empire on that of the Persians, and the Romans built theirs on that of the Greeks, so the Ottomans built their empire on that of the Byzantine world. The Turks were nomadic horsemen who did not have an urban civilized lifestyle, but they quickly adopted civilization to organize the empire they conquered. They left existing government procedures and bureaucracies in place. Court ritual in the new empire was borrowed from the Byzantine court, and centralized rule was concentrated in the hands of the sultan in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. One of the keys to a rapid and successful transition following a conquest is to leave the existing culture and traditions in place. In contrast to the Turks, the Mongols destroyed existing governmental and economic structures, and they were unable to rebuild them, never establishing a civilization of their own.
The Ottomans were characterized by their general openness about gender issues and ethnic pluralism. The Turkish tribal traditions were basically egalitarian in gender roles, and in the Empire women were free to own and inherit property, and they owned their own dowries. Women made their own choices about marriage, and they could ask for divorce if the husband were not acceptable to them. Women also served as government officials, and some women reached relatively high positions, even provincial governors.
Since the Empire covered diverse regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, it was a culturally pluralistic society. Into this mix came many of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492. As the Jews left Spain, most went first to the immediately neighboring countries of Portugal, France, Italy, and Morocco, but many eventually migrated on to the territories of the Ottoman Empire. They were a people who had lived between the Christian and Muslim worlds for centuries, and they knew how to negotiate between them culturally and economically. The Sephardic Jews were well known for their knowledge of medicine, literacy and scholarship, and international trade and finance. Many settled in the Balkans (Sarajevo) and Greece (Salonika) where they could use their knowledge of international trade developed in Spain. Others settled in the Turkish mainland where they thrived for the next four hundred years until the creation of the state of Israel where most migrated in the last decades of the twentieth century.
During the late Ottoman period most of the Latin American colonies became independent from Spain, and many Middle Easterners, (Christians, Jews, and Muslims), migrated to these new countries as merchants and skilled craftspeople. They were commonly called “Turks” because of their origin from the Empire although they may have been Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians, or Palestinians. Many of the descendants of these migrants went on to become wealthy and powerful members of their new countries, and some even became presidents, such as Carlos Menem of Argentina and Julio Caesar Turbay of Colombia.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the influence of Islam in world politics waned as the Ottoman Empire shrank and bits and pieces of its territory were chipped away. By the late 1800's the Ottomans were clearly weakened, and the European powers were beginning to move against them. They lost most of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania in 1878. The French took Algeria and Tunisia in the 1880's, and simultaneously the British took Egypt. In 1912 the Italians took Libya, and the Albanians broke away from the Ottomans. The Ottomans allied with the Germans in World War I hoping to be able to drive the British from Egypt, but in contrast the British took Palestine (1917) and encouraged the Saudi tribes to declare independence. Syria and Lebanon also gained their independence in 1920, and the British added Jordan (1918) and Iraq (1920) to their territory, reducing Turkey to its present dimensions.
As the Ottoman Empire weakened, the Armenians and Kurds tried to win their own independence, and their demands were crushed by the Turks. It resulted in the Armenian genocide, as the Turks suppressed the Armenian cause. This was the first state sponsored genocidal campaign of the twentieth century, a forewarning of what would come later with the Nazis, Serbians, Hutus, and others. Following a policy of deportation and systematic killing, 1 to 1.5 million Armenians were killed out of the population of three million. Although these genocidal attacks were made by a Muslim nation on its Christian subjects, Europe turned away and virtually ignored that they occurred.
Mosque Architecture and the Ottomans. The cultural contributions of the Ottomans are notable in architecture and the arts. The arts flourished under imperial patronage, and frequently their purpose was to celebrate imperial achievements and power. Religious expression was also important in art and architecture. The sultans employed workshops of artists and artisans in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul as well as in other cities throughout the empire.
Ottoman architecture is the most widely known contribution to world art, especially mosque architecture. Until the late 1500's mosques throughout the Muslim world were built with pillars supporting a series of individual archways or domes, creating a forest of pillars that broke up the line of sight. Worshipers were scattered among the columns. The Ottomans began building their mosques on a more open floor plan permitted by creating one large central dome modeled on the plan of the Byzantine church, Santa Sophia which had been converted into a mosque. The Romans had initially experimented with domes to create large open spaces in buildings, but the Byzantine and Ottoman architects mastered and expanded their use.
The most famous of the Ottoman architects was Sinan who build eighty-one mosques throughout the empire, including the world famous Blue Mosque of Istanbul. He influenced mosque architecture throughout the Muslim world. His mosques were known for their domes and elegantly slender minarets which marked the four corners of the buildings. The style he created in the mid-1500's was to be copied by the Mughals in India with the Taj Mahal being the most famous example. Although mosques were traditionally designed with minarets to be used for the call to prayer five times a day, the Sinan style narrow minarets eventually evolved into non-functional towers that had more of an esthetic use than a religious one. The visual lightness of these thin minarets with the curves of the dome served to cancel out the blockish heaviness of building itself. These visually appealing lines were frequently complemented by elaborate surface designs on the walls, sometimes in the famous blue tiles of the Middle East.
The interiors of Sinan’s mosques were characterized by elaborately carved plaster work on the upper parts of the walls and multi-colored tiles decorated in complex geometric designs in the lower part. By using the soaring openness of the dome and frequent windows he created prayer halls that inspired the faithful as did the gothic cathedrals of Europe. As was common in the Muslim world, Sinan’s mosques were a part of a complex of religious buildings that included a school, library, hospital, and even a mausoleum. Since the mosque was an important urban gathering place with so many activities going on within it, bazaars frequently grew up next to them, furthering emphasizing its importance as a focal point of social activity in the city.
In addition to architecture the most important media for the arts were ceramics, calligraphy, rugs, jewelry, silk weaving, and weapons. Ceramics and rugs were important for display in the houses of the ruling elite, and each was created with exquisite designs and techniques. Rug weaving was a village industry, and the weavers of each village used particular colors and designs that identified their work. One design element common to Turkish rugs was the “Gordian knot” which is a maze-like knot-like design from the Gordes region. Calligraphy was commonly used to write out verses of the Koran in beautiful lines with both the art and the verse showing the devotion of the owner. Silks and jewelry were usually for personal adornment, but silks were also woven for wall hangings and covers of various types. Silk weaving was under the direct patronage of the sultan, and he had control over its distribution which was largely for court use. Much of Islamic art was expressed in the design of functional objects, such as metal bowls with embossed designs and glazed ceramics either painted with calligraphy or floral designs. Persian and Turkish ceramics were important, and they interchanged influences with Chinese potters. Blue on white patterns were popular, and the Muslims developed a special process called lusterware which had metallic glazes that reflected light like polished gold, silver, or copper. Muslim ceramics were especially sophisticated in the use of glazed tiles made in complex geometric patterns on houses, palaces, and mosques. These manifestations of classic Muslim culture and religion have created a legacy of fine arts and architecture that can be appreciated today from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to the Taj Mahal in India.

The Safavid Empire (1501-1723)

After the fall of the short-lived empire that Tamerlane had built in Samarkand and south central Asia in the 1300's, a Turkish speaking group from near the Caspian Sea emerged to dominate the area from the south Caucasus through Persia into Uzbekistan and even parts of the Arabian Peninsula. It occupied the territory between the Ottoman Empire on the west and the Mughal Empire on the east, but it was the weakest of these three Muslim empires. The leaders of this empire were called “Shah” in contrast to “Sultan” in the Ottoman Empire. The founder of the Safavid Empire was Shah Ismail who conquered much of Iran and Iraq in 1501 and assumed the title of Shah of Persia.
Shah Ismail was from a region where Sufi religious mysticism was important, and religion was to play an important role in the making and unmaking of this empire. The Sufis emphasized the emotional experience of religion, rather than the more studied, scholarly approach of established Islam. Rather than reading and contemplating the Quran, Sufis would dance themselves into an ecstatic state to experience the greatness of God. Sufism became common among the nomadic tribal groups in this region, and eventually these Sufis converted to the more fundamentalist Shi’ite tradition. Shah Ismail sent Shi’ite preachers as missionaries to the Turkic tribal people in the Ottoman Empire, provoking the ire of the Sultan. This led to a series of confrontations between the two empires over the next century with the Safavids gradually losing ground to their more powerful neighbor, the Ottomans.
During the seventeenth century, militant Shi’ites increasingly gained power and influence within Safavid society. They imposed a strict religious orthodoxy on the people, limiting the intellectual and religious freedoms. In the relative freedom of the early empire, women had freedom of movement like in the Ottoman world, but under the Shi’ites, women were required to wear the veil and retire to the seclusion of the home. Restrictions on the religious practices of non-Muslims, including Christians, Jews, and Mandeans created unrest among these groups. Eventually, the Safavid Empire succumbed to its internal conflicts and stronger forces from the outside. The Shi’ites have continued to be important in Persia/Iran up to the present day, and Iran is the only nation in the Muslim world that is predominantly Shi’ite. The Safavid Empire fragmented and collapsed in the early 1700's even before its stronger neighbors, the Ottomans and the Mughals. Later, in the 1700 and 1800's, British colonialism encroached on the latter two empires, and they also fell.

The Mughal Empire (1526 to 1858)

The Muslim occupation of Indian territory (713 to 1483) occurred in three long stages over eight centuries. The first (713 to 1206) consisted of repeated invasions out of Persia. They took the Sind region of the lower Indus Valley, but they stopped there while they were consolidating their rapidly acquired territories in the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. They did continue evangelizing in the region, and they gained many converts among the Turkish speaking central Asia peoples. It was these central Asian peoples who were to eventually make the Muslim conquest of India.
In 986 Turkish Muslims were on the march out of Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass into the Punjab region of northwest India. They conquered the entire Indus River Valley from north to south, including the long established Arab kingdom in the south. They had turned toward the rich Ganges Plain before the death of their leader brought their advance to a halt. The non-iconic Muslims considered the elaborate art of Hinduism and Buddhism as idolatry and systematically destroyed it along with looting palaces and temples. From that time to the present the Indus Valley (now Pakistan) has been under Muslim control.
The second stage of the Muslim conquest of India is called the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). In 1192 another Turkish Muslim group successfully invaded through the northwest corner of India next to present day Pakistan and took all of the Ganges River Plain as far as the Bay of Bengal in the east, bringing most of northern India under their control. They struck against Hindu and Buddhist places of worship and learning, including shrines and monasteries, and many Buddhists fled into Tibet and other countries to escape this military and religious attack. The Hindus and Jains, who emphasized non-violence, absorbed the Muslim attacks and carried on with their lives. Some Indians in the Ganges heartland converted to Islam, but most remained Hindu. The Mongol threat occupied the attention of the Muslim rulers for the next century as Mongol armies took Iran and invaded the heartland of the Middle East sacking Baghdad in 1258. Eventually, Tamerlane, one of the Mongol khans (or leaders), did invade India in 1398 leaving a toll of 100,000 or more dead.
In the fifteenth century yet another group of Muslim Turks out of the Asian steppes, the Mughals, invaded India, and they established a stable Muslim dynasty which was to last for three centuries. The Mughals were from the upland valleys in the area of where present day countries of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan come together. In the early fifteenth century the empire of Tamerlane with its capital in Samarkand collapsed, and central Asia was thrown into turmoil. Babur, who was the leader of the Mughals, was descended from Tamerlane and inherited part of his empire. Benefiting from the use of firearms and artillery, the Mughals conquered Afghanistan and present day Pakistan. In 1526 they captured Delhi, establishing their control over the rich Ganges plain and the heartland of India. The first decades of the Mughal presence in India were a time of struggle and war between them and the local kingdoms. Eventually under Akbar, who ruled in the late 1500's, the Mughals completed the conquest of the northern half of India. The reigns of Akbar, his son, and grandson were some of the most culturally sophisticated periods in Indian history. With his conquests Akbar created the largest kingdom in India since the Mauryan Empire almost 2000 years earlier.
The Europeans arrived almost simultaneously with the Mughal conquest. Vasco de Gama, the Portuguese explorer, had arrived to the port of Calicut on the southwest coast in 1498, the first European to have sailed to India. The Portuguese came for the rich spice trade with India which up to this time was controlled by Middle Eastern kingdoms. They were determined to take control of the lucrative spice trade, and simultaneously bring Christianity to the Indians. With that in mind, the Portuguese attacked the island of Goa in 1510 using their cannon to destroy the defenders. Shortly afterwards they took the port cities of Calicut, Ormuz, and Malacca, forcing Indians to become Christians. Then, they began the attack on Muslim shipping in the Indian Ocean, boarding and looting ships in a combination of piracy and terrorism. Once they gained control of the seas, they were able to monopolize the spice trade for the next century.
 Europeans and Christianity had arrived to the south just as the Mughal Muslims were launching their own invasion from the north. India was being invaded simultaneously by two different religious and cultural systems, and that struggle within India has continued to the present day with varying fortunes. It was in this environment that the Mughals established their empire. Typical of other fragmented kingdoms in Indian history the Mughal Empire was less cohesive than it might seem from the word empire. Although there was a centralized government and the imperial court, local kingdoms continued to exercise considerable autonomy under their own elites. Although the Mughal leaders had the use of cannon and gunpowder and could overpower weak neighboring kingdoms, their conquests seem to have relied largely on traditional siege techniques and negotiation.
Akbar (ruled 1556 to 1605). Akbar is considered by many as one of the two greatest leaders of pre-Independence India along with Ashoka. He organized the empire into provinces which were administered through a strong bureaucracy and tax collection system. One of Akbar’s wives was Hindu, and he did more to integrate Muslims and Hindus than did any of the other Mughal rulers, and he included more Hindus in the imperial bureaucracy than did his successors. His Hindu wife was the mother to the son, Jahangir, who succeeded him on the throne. Akbar also invited European Christians into the court, and named a Spanish Jesuit to tutor one of his sons.
In keeping with his general attitude of co-existence Akbar was known for religious tolerance, and he made repeated efforts to bridge the differences between Muslims and Hindus. He ended a tax on Hindu pilgrims visiting sacred sites which earned him the appreciation of Hindus. Akbar invited Jains, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Christians to join Muslims in finding a common belief in God and establishing a doctrine of right conduct, the dharma which had been a preoccupation of Indians for thousands of years. He even proposed a new spiritual path, called Din-i-Ilahi (belief in God or divine faith) which combined elements from several religions. A central tenet of Akbar’s new spiritual path was the belief in the infallibility of the emperor based on God’s guidance. It was an autocratic appeal to people to accept his decisions without discussion, and it disappeared quickly after his death. Ultimately Muslims and Hindus stayed loyal to their traditional beliefs.
The Mughal Dynasty was a golden age for art and architecture, much of it borrowed from Persia. Akbar was born in Persia, and he made Persian the court language. He built a new imperial city, and the red sandstone buildings of that city have the delicate decorative details of Persian design adapted to Indian architecture. Although he was illiterate, Akbar prized books, and had people read to him daily. Akbar had a large personal collection of books. Although Akbar's son, Jahangir, was even more known for his patronage of the arts as a part of court life, it was under his grandson, Shah Jahan, that the arts reached their most beautiful expression.
Shah Jahan (ruled 1628 to 1657). Shah Jahan expanded the empire into the south of India and into present day Uzbekistan. However, finances were strained from the military ventures and extensive building projects. Although the vast majority of Indians were peasant farmers living with virtually no money, he raised taxes to support his campaigns and building projects which severely strained the economic resources of the people. Little was done to improve agricultural production during this period or the infrastructure of roads and public works.
Shah Jahan left a legacy of brilliance in the arts and architecture. He built a new capital in Delhi which became one of the most important cities in the world. It was characterized by beautiful boulevards, and it had one of the best mosques of all of Islam, the Juma Masjid. Like his grandfather and father, Shah Jahan had a corps of court painters who recorded important events of his reign, painting in the style of Persian miniatures. These small (4 by 6 inches) paintings were put into books which literally became art books about courtly events. Such books were prized gifts from the king. Shah Jahan also commissioned the making of the fabled Peacock Throne for himself. This luxurious example of courtly wealth had legs of gold, and it was encrusted with emeralds, rubies, pearls, and diamonds.
But, Shah Jahan's most famous monument is the Taj Mahal, which he had built for his favorite wife when she died at the age of thirty-nine shortly after giving birth to their fourteenth child. The Taj Mahal is widely considered the most beautiful tomb in the world and maybe the most beautiful building. It is built in a garden surrounded by a wall, an example of the Mughal garden tomb tradition. The intention was to create a paradise on earth for the deceased one. The Persian word for walled garden, pairidaeza, is the origin of the English word paradise. The Taj Mahal was done at extraordinary cost. For almost twenty years, twenty thousand artisans and workers were employed to build and decorate it. Its white marble is carved in hundreds of intricate patterns, and delicate inlays of precious stones were made in the shape of beautiful plants and flowers. The enormous sums that he spend on luxurious building programs such as this, rather than on economic infrastructure, eventually weakened the empire.
Aurangzeb (ruled 1658 to 1707). In the 1650's, Shah Jahan fell ill, and a power struggle resulted between his sons for the throne. In a bold step one of them, Aurangzeb, took the throne and put his father under house arrest. Aurangzeb was a devout Muslim and imposed a partisan Islamic rule that tended to separate Hindus from Muslims once again. He re-activated the Muslim non-believers tax on Hindus and prohibited the building of their temples. On the other hand, he made a number of beneficial reforms, such as prohibiting sati (widows being cremated with their dead husbands), as well as drinking, gambling, and prostitution. He was a successful general and extended the territory of the empire to its greatest limits. However, after his death local revolts throughout the next century led to a shrinking of Mughal power, and regional kingdoms around India re-asserted their autonomy.
Society and Culture. The role of women in India improved during the Mughal reign. Traditionally women had played an active role in Mughal tribal society, and women had even fought alongside men in battle. During the empire period women gave political advice, owned land, and engaged in business. Elite women could be educated, and Akbar established a school for girls. Women of all classes knew how to spin thread, and non-elite women spent much of their lives spinning. Even with the relative freedom of women in Mughal society, most Hindu women continued to be rigidly controlled. The Hindus even borrowed the idea of female seclusion inside the home, purdah, from the Muslims. Child marriage continued for women, and even the burning of widows on the funeral pyre of the husband although it was prohibited.
The arts improved greatly in India under the Mughals. Traditionally painting had been done on palm leaves, but the Mughals introduced paper for painting which was superior. The Mughals initially brought Persian painters who had a rich tradition of miniature paintings made with microscopic detail. Later, Akbar created a painting workshop and recruited two hundred local artists to work under the direction of Persian master painters. These Indian painters adopted new elements not previously used in Persian painting, such as gradations and shades of coloring, paintings of people in action, and more realistic portraits. These were innovations that were introduced in the Ottoman Empire through its contacts with European painting at the time, and they were gradually borrowed by Persian and Mughal painters. Mughal art was primarily about court life and the people who were enjoying it.
Literature continued to be an elite activity, mostly religious or about court life, because printing had not yet been introduced to make it available to the general public. One of the few libraries in India was located in Agra, and it had a collection of hand written books estimated to be 24,000 volumes. Poetry and religious literature were the most important literary forms. The Mughals named poet laureates for the court society who wrote in Persian. This poetry tended to be mannered and formal because it reflected the artificiality of court customs rather than the vitality of the broader society. In contrast, the creative religious literature at this time was Hindu, and it consolidated some of the traditional elements of Hinduism into their modern forms. Although the followers of the Vishnu and Shiva cults have competed with each other historically, during this period writers emphasized that Vishnu and Shiva were just two routes to godliness, which may have been an influence from the monotheism of Islam. There was also a resurgence of interest in the Ramayana at this time, and a classic treatment of it was written by the Hindi poet Tulsidas, entitled Ramcaritmanas. Tulsidas’ version was a religious story about Rama and Sita, and it has become so popular that it has virtually replaced the original story from 2000 years ago.
During the Mughal Empire, India was one of the most important manufacturing and exporting countries in the world. Felipe Fernández-Armesto says that,

...eighteenth-century India was an enormous exporter of manufactures the Mughal Empre was almost certainly the world’s most productive state in terms of manufactures for export despite the modest technical equipment with which her industries were generally supplied. Indian workers cut screws without a lathe and made muslin without a spinning wheel...

India’s highly developed artisan-based manufacturing system eventually collapsed, and it was largely replaced by machine manufactured goods from England during the British colonial period. India today still has a significant artisan class that continues to produce goods with hand technologies.
The Slow Decline of the Empire. In 1739 the Persians sacked the Mughal capital in Delhi and even took the famous Peacock Throne as war booty. In a slow process the Mughal heirs lost land to the Maratha's Confederation of Hindu kingdoms in the central and western part of the country and to the British along the east coast and in the Ganges Valley. By 1805 the Mughal heirs were largely reduced to the Indus River Valley, present day Pakistan, and Britain had become the stronger power in India. In 1858 the last Mughal emperor was dethroned, and the empire ceased to exist.

Conclusions

      From 1500 to the early 1900’s Turkish Muslims were a major power in the world, and today they are still important players on the world stage. The Turkish Empire morphed into the modern Republic of Turkey after losing its non-Turkish territories. The Turks of the Safavid world exist in Iran, as a minority group today, and in recent decades they have emerged as a new nation-state, Turkmenistan. In India, the Turks are simply known as the Muslims with their religious identity dominating the ethnic one. The Turkish Empires left permanent influences on the cultures of the lands they ruled, from India, where they left a rich heritage in architecture and the arts, to Europe where they left a legacy in language, engineering, science, and the arts and crafts.
Today, the international political system is organized into nation-states, and the economic system is dominated by transnational corporations. In this global political and economic system, only large nation-states or clusters of nation-states have power and influence. The Muslim world is now divided into forty-eight small nation-states, and no one of these states has the power, wealth, or resources to establish a dominant position for Islam. The critical role of the Middle East in the oil supply for the world gives it certain power, but the oil industry is controlled by established elites. In recent decades, non-establishment militants frequently have turned to armed violence as a way to exercise power. The Ottoman Empire was the face of Islam to the world until the beginning of the twentieth century. When it disintegrated, much of the Muslim world was colonized by the European powers. By the mid-twentieth century, religious and ethnic groups within Islam began to voice their demands after centuries of imperial and colonial subservience. There has been a cacophony of voices defining what the new Islam should be. Nasser defined it as pan-Arab nationalism, warlords in Afghanistan see it as local power, the royal families of various countries see the future as monarchical, Islamists see it as Muslim, and Turks see it as a democratic republic. What will Islam of the twenty-first century be?