Islam since its dawn has a long history of conflicts and mutual accommodations with the Christian West. At the outset it expanded westward at the expense of Christendom and for almost 700 years being the master of its own destiny through Spain and Sicily enlightened Europe with its modern scientific outlook on life. However, in 15th century European renaissance, The Movement of Enlightenment transpired into scientific revolution and industrial revolution swung the tide in favor of Christian Europe that matured the colonization of Muslim Asia and Africa during 18th, 19th and first quarter of 20th centuries. It secured not only military but cultural and civilizational defeat of Islam. Since the dawn of the impingement of Western modernity on Islam, the Muslim world has evoked different responses to the epistemological and military hegemony of the West. This paper intends to delineate the history of Islamic response to Western imperialism. This is a qualitative research, to know from the lens of history what went wrong with Islam, what is needed to redeem and reset the balance with imperial West. Have Muslims become irredeemable prisoners of their own historic creations or sooner or later the situation is bound to be reversed in the light of pure Islam of Quran and Prophetic model? This paper is intended to trace the dynamics of seesaw struggle between Islam and Western modernity.
Key words: Islam, modernity, imperialism, Western modernism, White man’s burden, Manifest destiny, Epistemological hegemony, Secularism, Nationalism, Islamic modernism, revivalism, conservatism, fundamentalism, Quran, Islamic intellectualism.
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