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Later on, with the development of colonialism, we came to consider European culture as superior to all others and to look upon the cultures of colonized peoples as inferior. Since then, Europe is infused with a deep cultural ethnocentricism through which it looks upon other cultures in an essentialist manner (that is to say as if they were closed up, inmutable and monolithic, incapable of progress nor evolution, in a way that is determinant for their future). As a result we tend to consider that the notions of progress, dynamism and innovation belong to European civilization, that was then transformed in Western, and it should be universally imitated. At a later stage, when the anti-colonial movement developed in Europe, it will question the legimacy of the methods used (political domination and economic exploitation), but not the vocation of the West to serve as the cultural model that would enable the world to modernize. Progress and development could not be but the identical reproduction of what had happened in the West.
In the Arab and Muslim world, the colonial vision at work will look upon the native cultural heritage and trsnmit the idea that everything that came from from the Islamic heritage was backward and contrary to progress and modernity. From then on, the idea according to which Islam and modernity are mutually exclusive gained more and more strength, the only valued contribution will be the one coming from Arab and Muslim intellectuals who are close to European thinking, since this is yet an other way to stress their dependance vis Г vis Western supremacy.
The problem is that the belief in such a supremacy prevailed also among the nationalist elites that lead the way to independance and then constitued the governments of the newly born Nation - States, which were convinced that the ideal solution lied in the imitation of the West.
As a consequence, the post-colonial value system in the Muslim world turned its back on islamic legitimacy and culture as it launched its political and economic modernization process, and thus took over the symbolic anti-islamic vision of the Western model. Far from renovating or updating the pre-colonial legal, political and cultural framework, the principle of "islamic authenticity", that was obsessively repeated by the official propaganda, turned into the intouchable pilar of islamic heritage, and remained completely left out of the process of building a modern State.
As a consequence, the State will leave behind, and even suppress, just as the Europeans had done, thecmodernist trends within Muslim reformist movements. On the contrary, it supported the more traditional ulemas, and granted them official status through the "Councils of Ulemas" that were set up by governments, so that their fatwas could be used as devices to give islamic legitimacy to any position, opinion or decision taken by the regime. In turn, The governments rewarded these ultr...
