Cover photo: The map shows the Muslim distribution in Islamic countries. Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC 20540-4650 USA, Central Intelligence Agency.

In the late 1970s, a global Islamic revival emerged as a means for Muslims to assert their identity, meaning, legitimacy, development, strength, and hope. This Islamic Revival represented an effort to find solutions within Islam rather than in Western ideologies.

The broad spiritual, cultural, social, and political movement embraced modernization without Westernization, reaffirming Islam as a guide for life in the modern world. Religiously, the revival was driven by the desire to “restore Islam to prominence in a world that had strayed from God.” This Revival was accompanied by the rise of various reformist-political movements inspired by Islam, with manifestations ranging from Sharia-based legal reforms to increased piety and the growing adoption of Islamic culture.

A particularly noticeable sign of the re-Islamization of many Muslims was the resurgence of the hijab in public spaces, which had been largely abandoned in some Middle Eastern countries in previous decades, as well as the adoption of the previously unknown niqab by women outside the Gulf countries. Among immigrants in non-Muslim countries, this included a sense of “an increasing universal Islamic identity” or transnational Islam. The revival was also marked by the growing influence of fundamentalist preachers and terrorist attacks by some radical Islamist groups on a global scale.

A prominent Saudi official explained in 1994: “… Foreign imports are good as fancy or high-tech objects. But social and political institutions imported from elsewhere can be fatal—ask the Shah of Iran (…). For us, Islam is not just a religion, but a way of life. We Saudis want to modernize but not necessarily Westernize.” The return to the values of the indigenous culture would be what kept Islam alive, not the imitation of the West, whose values led to alienation and identity crises. The signs of success were visible everywhere: increased attention to observing religious duties (mosque attendance, prayer, and fasting) and Islamic behavioral rules, a proliferation of religious programs, emphasis on Islamic dress and values, and a revival of Sufism (mysticism-Neo-Sufism). A central component was the development of Islamic social organizations, Islamic schools, and welfare systems that filled the gaps left by governments.

The rise of the Revival was largely due to the failure of the secular Arab nationalist movement in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and popular disappointment with the secular nation-states in the Middle East and the Westernized ruling elites that had dominated the Muslim world in previous decades, increasingly seen as authoritarian, ineffective, and lacking cultural authenticity. It was also a reaction against Western influences, such as individualism, consumerism, the commodification of women, and sexual freedom, which were perceived as undermining Islamic values and identities. Among the political factors was the ideological vacuum that emerged after the decline of the socialist system and the relative weakening of liberal (Western) ideology.

Economic and demographic factors, such as delayed economic development, rising income inequality, decreased social mobility, and the emergence of an educated youth with expectations of higher upward mobility (the universities of Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries saw impressive development in the 1970s. Eighty percent of the youth in militant organizations in Egypt were students or graduates from top universities, often in demanding fields like medicine and engineering), and urbanization in the Muslim world also played significant roles. Gulf oil money was a huge factor as well, in a phenomenon known as Petro-Islam, as it increased wealth and reversed the dominance-submission relationships with the West after many decades. “The humiliating sanctions imposed by the Saudis on the Westerners were not only an expression of power but also demonstrated their contempt for Christianity and the supremacy of Islam,” noted American John Kelly.

Another factor for the Revival was the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975 and led to a level of sectarianism between Muslims and Christians, and the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca in 1979. From the mid to late 1970s, in an effort by the Saudi monarchy to counterbalance the establishment of the Iranian Revolution, neo-Wahhabi ideologies were exported to many mosques worldwide.

The resurgence, which erupted in the late 1970s and continued through the 1980s, gradually subsided in many countries, including Saudi Arabia and Sudan, in more Islamist societies such as Iran, Tunisia, and Turkey. However, the Revival remained quite strong in several other countries and experienced a new wave of resurgence, especially in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sahel, as a result of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. The modern Islamic Revival includes a sense of “an increasing universal Islamic identity,” often shared by Muslim immigrants and their children living in non-Muslim countries.

According to Ira Lapidus, a Jewish professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at the University of California, Berkeley, “The increased integration of global societies as a result of enhanced communications, media, travel, and migration makes the concept of a unified Islam practiced everywhere in similar ways and an Islam that transcends national and ethnic customs essential.”