While I’m neither a Muslim nor a scholar, I think it’s important to draw a line between fundamentalist, Wahhabi interpretations of Islam like those the west has backed (the US and then the UK with the house of Saud) and the overwhelming majority of Islamic history as well as the breadth of its countless living, breathing cultures, traditions, and interpretations/schools of thought nowadays.

And of course, we also have to look at the cultural context of reactionary Islam (or “”“Islam”“” the way it has been twisted by Daesh/ISIS as an example of particularly wretched strain which to my understanding the Muslim community doesn’t want to be associated with- akin to how any halfways sensible Christians, and certainly all the early Christians would have looked on in absolute horror at the “prosperity gospel” and other wretched takes from the west) came to be, and why it came to be so prominent- as said, I’m not a scholar on any of this, but the religious (not necessarily reactionary- but identity-based defense) resistance to literal, violent, dehumanizing colonialism was something found across the entire world, from the Shawnee prophet Tecumseh’s rebellion and short-lived state against the US, to the Boxer Rebellion with its “bulletproof” superstitions (probably exaggerated nowadays, but still) and the Taiping revolution, to Irish resistance to prior and ongoing colonialism by the Brits, and- in Islam’s case- while I won’t claim to know the most on the subject as always- through their own anti-imperialist movements and teachers like al-Afghani and the Muslim Brotherhood, etc (in regards to religious responses- of course secular ones also existed).

Look at the history of the Islamic world, and time after time, a predictable pattern shows up ever since the Cold War started, arguably even earlier with the Brits backing Wahhabis over pan-Arab and secularists.