How could the countries of the Muslim world have retained their independent status?

Answer 1

Answer 1

They succeeded to do so through the belief in the God holy book Qur'an that remained and will remain a single version without single word change opposite to other God holy books. Refer to questions below.

Answer 2

If this question is about how the Muslim World could have resisted colonization by Portugal and Spain as early as the 1500s and wholesale occupation in the 1800s and 1900s by the British and French, there is one major change that the Muslims could have made: rejecting Al-Ghazali and continuing their pursuit of scientific marvels and ingenuity.

Prior to 1100, Islamic Civilization was the most advanced civilization in the world other than perhaps China. Muslims were making pioneering discoveries in almost all of the sciences including chemistry, medicine, astronomy, mathematics (inventing algebra and repetitive functions), Biology, and basic physics. Their armies were expanding into new territories and bringing the light of these discoveries to the those who had previously lived in darkness.

Unfortunately, Philosophers like Al-Ghazali claimed that piety in Islam was accepting the Qur'an alone as the only source of knowledge and that the prospect of science was a demonic activity that led people inexorably to disbelief. His views crushed all opposition so that by the 1300s, with the exception of the Ottoman Empire, no Islamic country was progressing technologically. By the 1500s, the rate of technological growth in Europe began to grow, but the Islamic World did not compensate in aggregate. The Ottoman Sultans gathered knowledge and science close to them and did not share it with the people. When Europeans did colonize the Islamic World in the 1800s and 1900s, they found a society that had changed minimally in the last 500 years. Had the desire for science and wisdom continued after Al-Ghazali, the Islamic World may have avoided colonization all-together, just like Japan did.