Editor’s Note (2026): This is a historical essay written in 1963. Its population figures, references to newly independent Muslim states, Cold War alignments, and descriptions of industrial society reflect the context of that period and should not be read as current data.
According to an estimate available at the time of writing, the Muslim population of the world had exceeded 500 million. This represented about one-seventh of the world’s population and made Muslims the second-largest religious community, after Christians and before Buddhists. Muslims were widely dispersed across the globe, and there was hardly any country in which they could not be found.
A glance at human geography reveals that the Muslim population formed a fairly continuous band from Morocco to Indonesia, extending to the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, northward into Siberia, and southward to Zanzibar, with communities in other parts of the five continents. Broadly speaking, an overwhelming majority of Muslims lived in Asia, Africa, and Southern Europe and, at the time, the Muslim population was reported to have one of the world’s highest birth rates. Nevertheless, it was their concentration along the strategic trade routes of Asia and Africa—from Morocco and Turkey to Indonesia, and from the Atlantic and Black Sea to the Pacific—that made them politically important and inevitably involved in world politics. Muslim control of these trade routes during the medieval period helped raise Muslim powers to global prominence; their gradual decline during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries broadly corresponded with their weakening command of these routes.
This geographical picture leads us to consider the historical significance of nearly fourteen centuries of Islam’s worldly experience: the vitality of the Islamic faith; the success of the humanitarian principles embodied in the Islamic ummah, or social order; the victories achieved by Muslims during the first thousand years of their history; the development of their societies; and their significant contributions to human culture and civilization. It also invites reflection on the degree to which Muslims succeeded—or fell short—in realizing Islam’s enduring values in earthly life, and on their failure during the preceding three centuries to sustain the intellectual and imaginative dynamism that had once characterized their civilization, a decline that contributed to their subjugation by Western powers. At length, however, after centuries of social, economic, and political stagnation, the Muslim world had again entered a period of ferment. The speed with which Muslim countries were casting off colonial rule and emerging as independent nations was remarkable. This was a major achievement for which Muslims in different countries had worked tirelessly for about a century.
Yet political freedom brought not only rewards but also serious challenges. First, Muslim independence movements achieved success largely under the aegis of modernism, whereas earlier movements—including puritan Islamic revivalism, sometimes inaccurately grouped under the label ‘Wahhabi Movement,’ and the universalist Pan-Islamic or Khilafat Movement—had failed to achieve their respective political objectives. Muslim modernism, in turn, was accompanied by local patriotism, regional identity, and territorial nationalism. These tendencies revived the memory of the glorious pre-Islamic past of a particular people or region and often inclined toward secularism on the Western model. Consequently, national sentiment could cut across the religious affiliation and international character of the Ummah, which Islam recognizes as a firm bond of brotherhood and cooperation. Nationalism and Islam could therefore polarize public opinion, producing conflict, frustration, and political instability. Finding a principled reconciliation between Islam and nationalism thus emerged as a major challenge.
Second, social progress and economic development were major problems confronting the newly emerging Muslim states. They could no longer be regarded as luxuries or benevolent services; they had become vital necessities for survival in the modern world. The two were closely interrelated and urgently needed to meet both the rising aspirations of the masses and the challenge of rapid modernization. In other words, the transformation of economically and institutionally underdeveloped Muslim societies into modern societies was imperative: it promised less hardship, better opportunities, and the ability to keep pace with a fast-changing world. Consequently, a vast industrial and social transformation was underway in countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Malaya, and Indonesia. The shortage of capital and technical expertise created serious obstacles that Muslim statesmen had to address effectively—not only to retain public confidence, but also to safeguard the future of their nations.
Third, prolonged contact with Western or Communist powers that dominated world politics, together with financial interests and ideological preferences, led some Muslim states to align with the West and others with the East. They adopted capitalist or socialist models to pursue socio-economic transformation, and these choices sometimes set one Muslim nation against another. Thus, at the time of writing, different Muslim countries were experimenting with various forms of democracy and socialism, modifying them as necessary to suit their national needs and cultural and ideological values.
Finally, Muslim states that had embarked upon industrialization were beginning to face a range of social, moral, and spiritual crises. These crises were associated with self-centred individualism, sexual permissiveness, and the neglect or rejection of religious and cultural values—conditions believed to be encouraged by the concentration of low-paid industrial workers in small urban areas and which had long troubled the industrial societies of the West. The author warned that such developments could destabilize the entire structure of Islamic society.
The task of restating Islamic values and reconstructing Muslim social institutions in a way that could ensure sufficient speed and stability in this vast socio-economic transformation posed another urgent challenge.An objective study of these problems, together with their offshoots and wider implications, may therefore be regarded as a prerequisite for understanding the prospects, difficulties, and current affairs of the Muslim states of that period.}}Khan, Muin-ud-Din Ahmad. “Basic Problems of Muslim States” Originally published in The Voice of Islam 12, no. 1 (1963): 30–33. Edited by Mufti Shah Rafi Uddin Hamdani (2026). Islamic Thoughts Academic Forum, online publication date: 21.08.2026.
https://islamicthoughts.com/article/en/basic-problems-of-muslim-states