With the defeat of any forms of resistance to the Western powers then, the Malay scholars realised the inferiority of their forces in contrast to the superior Western forces. This led to a realisation that the Muslims in general and the Malays in particular were very backward in physical and material development. They lacked knowledge of natural sciences and modern technology. In this regard, Munshi Abdullah could be considered the first in the Malay world to pen his awareness of this major difference between the Malays and the Englishmen. This could probably be due to the opportunity he had of interacting closely with the English missionaries and Sir Stamford Raffles and thereby to observe the way they work or conduct their affairs and most importantly, the way they see things and the way they think. It is through his lenses that one can see the eighteenth century lifestyle of the Malays. He called for the Malays to acquire knowledge through studying the Malay language and not just the ability to read the Qur'an in Arabic without understanding, to learn from the West even if it meant attending the English missionary schools and reading the Bible, to have a proper understanding of Islam and to change their negative habits and characters.
Similarly later, there were call by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in the Middle East, specifically in Egypt, for independence from Western powers through unity of Muslim nation states and the caliphate and also reforms of Islamic education. The two reformers especially Abduh, believed that Muslim education has to be modernised in order to be relevant. More importantly the two reformers called for the Muslims not to follow the ulama' blindly but to acquire knowledge and to apply their reason. They called for the opening of the door of ijtihad, practice which has been abandoned for a long time in the Muslim world where the common practice was to study by heart the classical works of past great scholars in the various traditional sciences such as"aqidah, fiqh, Hadith, tafsir, Shari'ah and sirah and their commentaries without adding anything relevant to solve the problems of their own age. Both Afghani and Abduh also criticised the ulama' who they blamed for this situation because of the way they taught which did not encourage the society