The overwhelming majority of the United Nations’ 193 member states were once colonies of Western empires. Most of these colonies gained independence during the era of decolonization that followed the Second World War. Despite their numbers and their nationalist struggles, these colonies-cum-countries have not attracted much attention in the standard works on nationalism. As the editors of this volume observe, those works are largely Eurocentric in their orientation. They generally portray the rise of nationalism in colonial dependencies as supplemental to, and largely derivative of, nationalism in the Western world.1 Even Benedict Anderson, a specialist on Southeast Asia who was deeply knowledgeable about nationalist movements in the colonial world, characterized these movements in his hugely influential Imagined Communities as conforming to a modular design that originated with American and European nationalism and nations.2

The role of religion in government and public policy constitutes a major challenge to governance in modern times. Religious parties tend to play the role of spoiler to democratization and democratic governance around the world. In Muslim-majority countries, this issue is compounded by the permissive religious institutional environment that religious parties operate within; Islamist parties capitalize on the absence of a centralized hierarchical religious authority and take on hybrid party-movement structures to claim to represent the faith. Governments, as a result, struggle to contain Islamist parties to the political sphere. Contemporary analyses of Islamist parties disproportionately focus on the factors behind their ideological change, social activism, and intraparty conflicts at the expense of their organizational structures, despite the latter’s great political and policy relevance. The Conclusion offers an overview of the debate surrounding Islamist organizational structures and offers multiple policy options for incentivizing organizational reform within Islamist parties, with the end goal of facilitating a process of ideological reform.

The politicization of religion and emergence of a religious political identity in the modern era is firmly anchored in the rise of mass religious movements – a hitherto unknown phenomenon. These movements became the main instruments for fulfilling the newly developed religious sociopolitical vision. Not only did they play a crucial role in raising a religious generation to confront social change and secularization, but they also aimed to confront deviant ideologies and remake the political system in line with their religious visions. In this distinctly political objective lie the seeds of religious political parties, which carry the missions of religious mass movements into the political arena. Religious movements embody the ideal organizational form of modern religiopolitical activism – they can lay out a vision for societal and political transformation, teach and preach this vision, and mobilize resources and communities to achieve it. These movements translated the bourgeoning religious responses to modernization and secularization into tangible social, religious, and political agendas. This chapter analyzes the emergence of mass religious movements in the Middle East and Western Europe.

British rule was increasingly challenged by religiously inspired resistance movements, and, from the early twentieth century, nationalist political parties. They attempted to split the province of Bengal in 1905 but had to undo this administrative measure soon after. Towards the end of their rule, they allowed elections at the provincial level, instituting communal politics.