European colonialism and the beginning of Western domination in the Muslim world: a silent war of conquest

There is a chapter in history where, not with the blood of the sword, but under the guise of agreements, trade, education and culture, a terrible war of conquest is going on. The name of this war is colonialism. And the most silent victim of this war was the Muslim world. When Europe began to dominate the economy, technology and trade through the Industrial Revolution, the Muslim world gradually lost its political unity, weakened its military power, and most terribly, began to be defeated psychologically. This discussion is a picture of that long, suffocating history.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, European countries—especially Britain, France, and later Italy, Spain and the Netherlands—started conquering the world ‘in the name of trade’, but it quickly became a naked reality of dispossession, plunder and cultural appropriation. They entered in the name of sugar, coffee, cotton and silk; but came out by strangling freedom, destroying culture and tearing apart the identity of Muslims.

When the British came to power after 800 years of Muslim rule in the Indian subcontinent, they not only brought about an administrative change, but also carried out an unprecedented cultural and educational aggression against Muslims. Their aim was to isolate Muslims from history and instill a sense of guilt in them. They strategically identified Muslims as ‘enemies’ and created conflict by giving administrative privileges in favour of Hindus. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 was a response to this imperialist conspiracy, where Muslims and Hindus came together, but the results were terrible for Muslims. The British retaliated by reducing the number of Muslim students in honours courses, confiscating waqf properties, and executing ulema.

The Ottoman Empire—the last great caliphate in the Islamic world—also fell victim to these colonialists. The weak administration of the Ottoman Caliphate, the nationalist ideology that misled the Arabs, and the trap of European agreements led them to lose territory one by one—Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq. Characters like Lawrence of Arabia incited the Arabs against the Caliphate, and later shattered their dreams of independence through the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

France destroyed Islamic education and culture in North Africa and imposed modern slavery on the cradle of European civilization. Millions of people were martyred in Algeria while fighting against the French, but the Western media almost erased that history. It became difficult to maintain Islamic identity when Arabic was banned in schools, when scholars were labeled “extremists.”

The real weapon of this colonial power was “psychological warfare.” They wanted to convince Muslims—your history is a failure, your rule is undemocratic, your religion is not worthy of leading life. They shaped the education system in such a way that Western history became the only criterion of civilization. As a result, a Muslim child learns to read Shakespeare, but does not know Imam Ghazali; knows Newton's mathematics, but remains unknown to Al-Khwarizmi.

Western domination was not only external, but it penetrated deep into the psyche of Muslims. Muslims once became skeptical about their own culture, beliefs and traditions. They began to consider the laws of Islam as old, obsolete and 'backdated'. Yet this Islamic civilization had once brought the entire world to unique heights in medicine, astronomy, philosophy, architecture and law.

Today's Muslim world is the successor to that colonial trend. States that are built on Western standards, whose constitutions barely mention Islam, whose education systems are modeled after European models, and whose economies are tied to the vortex of interest and corporateism—all are the transformed forms of that colonization. Only the armies are gone, but the structures they created remain. This is the best strategy of Western domination—they don’t want to be in your country, they want you to think like them.

So European colonialism is not just a political phenomenon; rather, it is a long-term, multi-layered war waged against the identity of the Muslim nation. And there can be only one answer to this—self-awareness, historical knowledge, and a firm determination to return to Islamic ideals.