British (and its heir, the American) empire legacy in the Muslim world

In its unrelenting pursuit of supremacy, what the British Empire did (like most other colonial powers) was effectively decapitate the progressive and educated elites through poisonings, car accidents, mysterious murders, accusations of mental illness, exile, appointing spies as rulers' advisors, and outright invasions. It replaced them, where it could, with pliant rulers and trained their police to protect them against their people.

Britain executed its schemes directly or through proxies. It financed the military, reactionary tribal leaders, extremist Imams, or Mullahs. It used these diehards as countervailing forces should the leaders they appointed deviate from their assigned roles. British intelligence services cynically selected religious texts and used them out of context to incite, among poor and uneducated Muslims, takfir and kafir thoughts (accusing another Muslim of being an apostate, or infidel), as well as other debasing ideas about the role of women, and stoked these Islamist sentiments at every possible opportunity. Britain declared that the caliphate is "a necessity in Islam."

It knew that once fundamentalism ruled, the first loser was the woman, followed by her children who would become weak men and, inevitably, the country. The other losers are those of different religions and ethnicities, living alongside Muslim communities. And as it is said, it keeps Arabs and Muslims in a medieval cultural prison. Michel Chossudovsky of GlobalResearch says that the number of CIA-sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000 in 2023 in Afghanistan. USAID generously financed the process of religious indoctrination, largely to secure the demise of secular institutions and the collapse of civil society.