Religion and Secularism in Anti-Colonial Movements

Anti-colonial struggles are often remembered as straightforward fights for freedom. But underneath the shared goal of expelling foreign rulers lay a deeper question that divided activists everywhere: should the struggle be rooted in religious faith or in secular nationalism? This tension between the sacred and the secular shaped how movements mobilised people, what kind of states they imagined, and how their stories ended. From the deserts of Sudan to the frontier valleys of British India to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, leaders made very different choices about whether God or the nation should anchor their resistance. Understanding these choices helps explain why some movements united diverse populations while others fractured them.

Why the sacred and the secular collided
The Mahdist movement in Sudan: resistance as holy war
What religion achieved and where it fell short
Wahabi revivalism: purifying faith and resisting rule
From spiritual cleansing to political threat
The Young Turks: reviving the empire through secular nationalism
The promise and the problem of secular nationalism
Comparing the two approaches
Why the distinction is never absolute

Why the sacred and the secular collided

Colonialism did more than seize land and resources. It disrupted existing social orders, imposed alien legal systems, and often treated local religious traditions as obstacles to “progress.” This created two broad responses among the colonised. One path drew on religion as the primary source of identity and resistance. The other drew on secular ideas of nationhood, constitutionalism, and modernisation borrowed partly from the West itself.

Scholars have long noted that this divide was rarely clean. Academic research on India and Sudan argues that what we now call “secular” nationalism often grew out of earlier religious resistance to colonial rule rather than replacing it overnight. Religion supplied the first vocabulary of opposition because it was already deeply embedded in everyday life. Secular nationalism arrived later, usually led by educated elites who had studied Western political thought.

The result was a recurring contest. Should resistance speak the language of faith, which could unite ordinary believers quickly and powerfully? Or should it speak the language of citizenship and nation, which could potentially include people of different religions but might feel abstract to the masses? The movements below show how differently this question was answered.

The Mahdist movement in Sudan: resistance as holy war

The clearest example of religion driving an anti-colonial struggle is the Mahdist movement in Sudan. In 1881, a Sufi religious leader named Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi, a divinely guided redeemer figure in Islam, and called for jihad against Egyptian and British rule. What had begun as discontent over oppressive taxation and foreign domination was transformed into a fundamentally religious cause almost immediately.

The strategy worked. By framing the conflict as a sacred struggle to establish a true Islamic state, the Mahdi drew support from diverse ethnic and religious groups across Sudan who were suffering under heavy taxation, conscription, and economic exploitation. Faith became an instrument of liberation, giving fragmented communities a shared identity and a shared enemy.

What religion achieved and where it fell short

The Mahdist forces achieved remarkable military success against far better-equipped armies, using guerrilla tactics and the deep loyalty that religious conviction inspired. They captured Khartoum and established a Mahdist state that governed Sudan for over a decade. This proved that self-governance without colonial interference was possible, which was no small thing in an age of seemingly unstoppable European expansion.

But the movement also revealed the fragility of resistance built around a single charismatic figure. When the Mahdi died in 1885, the movement quickly fell into infighting among rival claimants to leadership. The British eventually returned, and in 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman, modern artillery destroyed the Mahdist army. The state collapsed the following year. Religious fervour could mobilise a population and challenge an empire, but it could not, on its own, build durable institutions that survived the loss of their founder.

Wahabi revivalism: purifying faith and resisting rule

In India, the Wahabi movement followed a similar logic of religious revival as resistance, though with its own distinct character. Inspired by the teachings of Shah Waliullah and led by Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi (1786-1831) of Rae Bareli, the movement aimed to purify Islam by returning to the Quran and Hadith and removing practices it considered un-Islamic innovations.

What makes the Wahabi movement important for understanding the sacred-versus-secular question is how religious reform shaded into political and military action. Shah Abdul Aziz, son of Shah Waliullah, declared British India a dar-ul-harb, or land of war, providing religious justification for armed struggle. Sayyid Ahmad built a base in the North-West Frontier and waged jihad, first against the Sikh kingdom and later, as the movement evolved, against the expanding British presence.

From spiritual cleansing to political threat

A common misconception is that the Wahabi movement remained purely concerned with internal spiritual matters. In reality it was highly political and anti-colonial. The British recognised this clearly. After the Revolt of 1857, colonial authorities viewed the Wahabis as a serious threat capable of inspiring widespread rebellion among Indian Muslims.

The colonial response was systematic. Between roughly 1863 and 1870, the British conducted a series of Wahabi Trials, arresting leaders, dismantling networks, and exiling many to the Andaman Islands. Yet the movement left a lasting legacy. It helped lay the groundwork for later Islamic reform movements and showed how religious revivalism could function as both moral reform and political resistance at the same time. Here too, the sacred provided the energy and the organising framework, with the explicitly secular nation barely featuring in the vocabulary of struggle.

The Young Turks: reviving the empire through secular nationalism

The Young Turks present the opposite model. This was a movement that deliberately chose the secular over the sacred. Emerging among Ottoman intellectuals and military officers in the late nineteenth century, the Young Turks were a coalition of reform groups opposed to the authoritarian rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Their goal was not to purify religion but to modernise and centralise a declining empire.

In 1908, they led a revolution that restored the suspended Ottoman constitution and ushered in a constitutional government. Many Young Turks had been trained in Western-style schools or had studied abroad, absorbing ideas of nationalism, liberalism, and secular governance. Where the Mahdist and Wahabi movements sought a return to religious foundations, the Young Turks looked toward parliamentary government, civil liberties, and administrative modernisation as the path to imperial revival.

The promise and the problem of secular nationalism

The Young Turks faced a defining challenge: what common identity could hold together an empire of Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, and Jews? Their answer increasingly became Turkish nationalism, promoted through the influential Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). This was a secular, ethnic conception of belonging rather than a religious one.

The strategy carried a serious cost. The initial promise of equality for all peoples gave way to a programme of Turkification that alienated the empire’s many ethnic minorities. The very nationalism meant to unify the empire instead kindled rival nationalisms among non-Turkish subjects. The secular path avoided some of the limitations of charismatic religious leadership, but it created its own form of exclusion. And notably, the Young Turks themselves faced a religious counter-revolution in 1909, when conservatives and mutinous soldiers demanded the restoration of Sharia law and the removal of the secular reformers, showing that the sacred-secular tension cut both ways.

Comparing the two approaches

Placing these movements side by side reveals a pattern. Religious movements like the Mahdist revolt and Wahabi revivalism were extraordinarily effective at rapid mass mobilisation. Faith offered an immediate, emotionally powerful identity that could unite diverse and fragmented populations against a foreign oppressor. Religion served as what historians call an idiom of anti-colonial resistance, a ready-made language of struggle in societies destabilised by colonial rule.

Secular movements like the Young Turks offered something different: a vision of modern institutions, constitutional governance, and a nation that could in principle include people of different faiths. This had appeal among educated elites and pointed toward the kind of state that would eventually dominate twentieth-century decolonisation. After the Second World War, secular nationalism became the dominant mode of decolonisation across India, Turkey, Egypt, and beyond.

Why the distinction is never absolute

It would be a mistake to treat the sacred and secular as completely separate boxes. The two constantly fed into each other. In the Indian context, anti-colonial nationalism drew deeply from religious sources even as it developed a pluralist, secular vision of the nation through the Congress party. Religious revival often came first and created the conditions in which secular nationalism could later grow. And secular elites, by privileging certain identities, sometimes ended up fostering the very religious or communal nationalism they hoped to transcend.

This interplay shaped the outcomes of struggles everywhere. A movement’s choice between sacred and secular foundations determined who it could mobilise, what kind of state it imagined, and whether it could hold together a diverse population. Neither approach was simply right or wrong. Each carried its own strengths and its own dangers, and the legacies of these choices continue to influence debates about identity, belonging, and the role of religion in public life today.

What do you think? Was religious mobilisation a strength or a weakness for anti-colonial movements in the long run, given how powerfully it united people but how vulnerable it left them to fragmentation? And can secular nationalism ever truly include everyone in a religiously diverse society, or does it inevitably privilege one identity over others?

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Table of Contents

Why the sacred and the secular collided 🔗

The Mahdist movement in Sudan: resistance as holy war 🔗

What religion achieved and where it fell short 🔗

Wahabi revivalism: purifying faith and resisting rule 🔗

From spiritual cleansing to political threat 🔗

The Young Turks: reviving the empire through secular nationalism 🔗

The promise and the problem of secular nationalism 🔗

Comparing the two approaches 🔗

Why the distinction is never absolute 🔗