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Faisal Devji, "Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam" (Yale UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Ronak Bose
Hello everybody. Welcome back to New Books in Intellectual History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ronak Bose, your host of the channel. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Faisal Dev Ji, one of the most influential historians and theorists of modern Islam. Writing today, Dr. Dev Ji needs little introduction. He teaches at the University of Oxford, where he's a Beit professor of Global and imperial history at St. Anthony's College. His work moves across intellectual history, political thought, global Islam, and modern South Asian history, with a particular interest in how ideas travel across geographies and how abstractions such as the Muslim world, the Ummah, and even Islam itself acquire political and moral force. He's the author of several landmark books such as the Landscapes of Jihad, Muslim Zion, Pakistan as a Political Idea and the Impossible Indian Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, all of which have shaped scholarly debates on militancy, nationalism, violence and ethical life in the modern world. We're here to discuss his latest book, Waning Crescent, the Rise and Fall of Global Islam, published by Yale University Press, which offers Parash's most ambitious argument yet. Dr. Dev? Ji argues that Islam becomes a global historical subject only in the 19th century, an actor with a fate, a trajectory and a fragility tied to empire, sociological thought and the collapse of older Muslim authorities. He traces how this modern Islam, shorn of its theological and political foundations, came to stand in for Muslims themselves, and how its subjecthood may now be reaching its limits. The book is both a history of an idea and a meditation on the exhaustion of the political forms that once carried it. Dr. Devji, it's such a pleasure to have you with us at the New Books Network today.
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Dr. Faisal Devji
Thank you very much.
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Ronak Bose
To start off things off for our listeners, I want to ask you about the journey that led to this book. As a reader and admirer of your work, I can sense a method of intellectual subsequence from, let's say, Landscapes of Jihad that released almost 20 years ago now to the Muslim Zion, Islam After Liberalism, and now Waning Crescent. I can see a sustained interest in the abstractions that become agents the Muslim world, the Ummah, the Zionist subject, the figure of the martyr, and now Islam itself. For readers and listeners who are familiar with your earlier work and those who aren't, could you draw the intellectual trajectory here a bit and how it all culminates down to Waning Crescent or doesn't?
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Dr. Faisal Devji
Well, you know, that's an interesting question because, of course it's always a temptation to draw a straight line between one's early interests and work down to the present. And it is always possible to draw that line. But I'm not so sure in reality whether it exists in any significant way. Of course, there are continuities. I suppose I could say that one of the things I've been quite interested in is the counterfactual and the counterintuitive. What might things look like if you turn them on their head? Is that one of Marx's things where you turn Hegel on his head and you move from, if you will, idealistic forms of knowledge to materialistic ones? And so even as an intellectual experiment, I always try to think about what any historical phenomenon might look like if you reverse the standard narratives in which it has been conventionally embedded. And that, I think, often gives you a new way of thinking about these events, not necessarily the correct way of thinking about them, but it opens up questions, this kind of act of reversal, that are not visible within conventional narratives, which, even if they're contested by historians, end up being thought about in linear terms. That you move from one kind of narrative or set of arguments to another, either by a process of expansion and continuation or one of refuto. Whereas what I always like to do is to turn things around and see what new questions come to light in that experiment, which may not itself be, as it were, an accurate. May not represent an accurate historical understanding of any particular phenomenon. But having said this, you're right, I am interested in abstraction. Though in my book on Gandhi, of course, I was interested in the reverse, because Gandhi is a critic of abstraction. And Gandhi grounds everything, mediates everything, embodies everything. And so, you know, the book on Gandhi posed a different kind of question. How do you think of politics? And how do you construct political thought out of a deeply embedded subjectivity and set of practices? So he refuses to think about them in abstract terms. And so to reconstruct Gandhi as a political thinker is an interesting venture in its own right because of this. So with the work on Islam, I have be concerned more about its increasing abstraction. And this book, Waning Crescent, really is the culmination of that interest in abstraction. Muslim Zion was also about abstraction. It was about how the Pakistani national idea is ungrounded in either history or territoriality. And it has to be ungrounded if it is to differentiate itself from what I'm calling the romantic nationalism of India, which is grounded in history and land and soil and all of these kinds of things familiar from the histories of European romantic nationalism. The work on Islam reads this kind of process globally and not with regards to the making of a nationalist project or a nation state. So in that sense, it's directly connected to Muslim Sign, the book that immediately preceded it.
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Ronak Bose
Thank you so much for answering that. I recently read in an interview of yours that you changed the name of the book from the End of Islam to Waning Crescent. I'm just personally curious to know about that a little bit.
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Dr. Faisal Devji
Yeah, well, I had to use Islam in the title, but it's such an overexposed word that there's nothing you can pair it with that has any tinge of novelty to it. And we know why, because certainly since the war on terror, even before then, Islam has become a kind of overexposed category. But I couldn't do without it in a title, because the book indeed is about Islam and Then I thought to myself that in fact what I was interested in was this process starting in the middle of the 19th century, in some places, later in others, in which Muslim thinkers come to imagine Islam's ending in non metaphysical terms. So they imagine it both arising in history as opposed to arising as the act of God, and therefore declining in history, possibly or potentially, or indeed even in actuality. So this whole genre of writing in prose and in poetry, which laments the decline of Islam in historical terms. And I thought, well, this really is a way of thinking that foregrounds the end of Islam in a completely new way, non metaphysical God is not really part of the story and there is no apocalypse. And then I thought to myself, well, Islam has clearly become in this way of thinking, a historical actor, a protagonist of history in its own right. And therefore it has ends in both senses of that term. An end in the sense of a finishing or completion, but an end also in the sense of a goal that it sets itself. So I naively thought to myself that the ambiguity of the word end would serve me well in a title. I still think it's a, you know, it's a great title, but the press didn't think so, and perhaps they thought it might mean the end of me, which I don't think there is any risk of. Nevertheless, I had to accede to them because they own the project in certain ways. And so I had to content myself with waning crescent. And that's all there is to say to it. Sadly, waning Crescent does signify some of my argument, but it seems to have a more organic character. The moon waxes and wanes, and the crescent of course has a symbol of Islam. But the end of Islam speaks more directly to my own argument that I suppose the press was concerned that it might give people the wrong impression and indeed that it might attract, if you will, anti Muslim readers. And I thought to myself, yes, I suppose that's true, but you know, why not actually have them read something they don't like for once? So that is the story of the title, which I nevertheless continue to use when I speak about the book, even though I couldn't use it for the book itself.
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Ronak Bose
Right? And in the opening as well, you show that Islam only becomes a subject, a figure capable of action, quite late, essentially in the 19th century. You do contrast me Ta K Meer's use of Islam as a narrow set of ritual practices with Hali's mother Mado Jazer e Islam, where Islam becomes a protagonist with a history and a faith. Can you Explain what happened in the 19th century that allowed Islam to be imagined in this way as an actor. How does this shift from ritual detail to civilizational subject set the stage for the book's central argument?
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Dr. Faisal Devji
Yeah, so, you know, first of all, of course, I need to say that there is no singular meaning to the term Islam, though grammatically it's a verbal noun, so it refers to a set of actions rather than constituting a proper name. Its use or deployment as a proper name is not entirely unprecedented, but it's not necessarily common until the middle to late 19th century. And what interested me about this shift is that it occurs at a time when European empires are spreading. And you have, partly as a result of this, the diminution of older forms of Muslim authority, both profane and sacred. And it is this that actually ends up turning Islam into a global subject in their place, which may contain these older actors, but can no longer be led by them. And what's fascinating about this process is that it's quite conventional to think about globalization in terms of an expansiveness of power, Goods, people, ideas are moving and expanding constantly in space. And therefore, globalization is often linked to empire or to superpower rivalry or something of this kind. Whereas here, what I think you see is the possibility of thinking of globalization as a product or consequence of weakness, of diminution that allows Islam to be separated out from kings and clerics. And for other kinds of Muslim actors, like new middle classes, military men, et cetera, lay people, not clerics, not mystics, not traditional political leaders, to make claims in its name. And yet Islam can never be claimed by anyone, in part because it really is an abstraction. It's not grounded institutionally by any of these people. So unlike a vision of Christianity, which may be mediated in or grounded in a church or a business enterprise grounded in a corporate structure or a political community grounded in a state, Islam, always in the imagination of these figures, transcends these institutional boundaries. And so it was initially understood as a civilization which could act in its own name, as we imagine civilizations doing, and which had a spirit or had ideals and things like that. And then eventually, in the early 20th century, especially after the Bolshevik Revolution, it came to be imagined, particularly by Islamists, but not only them as an ideology. Nazariya, or, you know, nazariati, often in Urdu, you would say something. Islam is nazariati. It's ideological. Even in the civilizational understanding of Islam, it's often described as a system. Nizam is the most common word used. And that word, nizam, is used much More so when Islam is understood ideologically. So if you will, Islam becomes an abstract agent without institutional grounding or mediation. That is initially understood by the so called Muslim liberals or modernists as a civilizational entity and then later on, especially by Islamists, but not only them as an ideology. And what this means is, is that Islam's rivals or competitors are also abstractions of this kind. So often these abstractions include nationalism or monarchy or even democracy or this sort of capitalism or communism. And so you have a debate between what is Islam and what its rivals or enemies are that really has moved beyond older considerations of religious warfare or contestation. So for instance, nationalism or communism or capitalism is often understood by Islamists as a form of idolatry. So the idol now is no longer an actual figure, is no longer, if you will, even a religious figure. In fact, idolatry comes to refer primarily to modern ideologies. And it is true for Maudhudi and it is true of Iqbal, it's true for many people. And so even when older terms are used like idolatry, they refer to quite different entities than they had in the past because these are now Islam's equivalents or rivals or competitors. So the process of abstraction is what defines Islam, but at the same time defines its partners or rivals as well.
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Ronak Bose
That brings me to the question that I had about idolatry. Your analysis of idolatry shows how Muslim thinkers, Madhudi Qutub, others, cast nationalism, monarchy and communism, as you said, as rivals to Islam. And these idols are abstract systems similar to Islam itself. Can you talk a bit more about why modern Islam produces so many new idols? And what does this reveal about the search of agency on a global scale? If you could?
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Dr. Faisal Devji
Yeah, no, I think, you know what's happened is that once Islam gets to be a subject in its own right, an agent, it automatically undoes the role of traditional theological agency. So, for instance, the Prophet or indeed God, no longer play the same kind of role once Islam comes to be an agent in its own right. In a way they are subordinated to Islam, which itself is not a theological category or entity because it arises in history and it can decline in history. It's a historical subject. And turning to your question in particular about idolatry, it's only with the setting aside, if not expulsion of God from this set of debates that the idol comes to take his place or threatens to take his place. So you have a profusion of idols suddenly from the mid to late 19th century and into the 20th, idols defined in all kinds of ways, right? And that is possible because God is absent in some sense. And indeed, you see, you know, I have a chapter focusing mostly on Islamism, the third chapter of the book, where I write about the Islamist debate on sovereignty. And as you may know, the classic Islamist argument made by someone like Abu Ala Modu, the Indian thinker who then moves to Pakistan after partition, is that sovereignty belongs to God alone. And the argument he makes is a fascinating one because it's congruent in many ways with the argument of Carl Schmitt, the German jurist who was his contemporary, though not someone whose work Maududi, I think mutual. Schmidt makes the argument that sovereignty is a theological category that has been secularized. Moduti makes the argument that sovereignty is a theological category. He too says that. But he says that precisely because it is a theological category, it cannot be secularized. It cannot be translated into human life and society. And so to say that sovereignty belongs to God is to literally expel sovereignty into the keeping of God along with God himself. So Modudi is in large part responsible for the framing of the Pakistani constitution in such a way as to deny sovereignty to the people or the state or its president. Sovereignty in the Pakistani Constitution belongs to God. It's the first and, as far as I know, only constitution which repudiates rather than claims sovereignty for this postcolonial nation state and what Modudi wanted to do. Now, you might argue that Modudi's effort to have sovereignty disposed of from the Pakistani Constitution was a dead letter, because, after all, how can a country do without sovereignty? But I would respond by saying that it is precisely the absence of sovereignty vested in any institution in the Pakistani states that allows it to return as a ghost in its purest form, as the military coup, where it emerges from outside the system in a way and is retrospectively justified. So, if you will, Modudi's conception of sovereignty and his desire to expel it results in the reverse of what he wanted. It results in the return of sovereignty in its more Schmittian form as an exception. But this is not the only way in which the sovereignty of God is conceived of by Islamists, because in neighboring Iran you have a similar idea that sovereignty belongs to God, but that sovereignty is fully claimed by the state. And this has to do with the difference of Islamism in Iran and Pakistan, the Shiite version of Islam practiced in Iran and the clerical class that shepherds it, unlike Maududi, who was a journalist and not a cleric. Right. And in that case, you have this very interesting situation in which someone like Khomeini will argue that Islam is like a machine, like a system, and the role of people like the prophet within it have been reduced to functions that anyone can perform. A traditional, if you will, Neoplatonic form of connection with the divine is possible in mysticism, but it's kept apart from the state and its policies. But even with Khomeini, what's interesting is that you end up expelling God. Modudi expels him by saying sovereignty belongs to him alone and we cannot exercise it. We can only work with God's detritus, as it were, with the law right, which is meant to be guarded by clerics or experts outside the state itself. So he's deeply distrustful of the modern state, like Gandhi was, in his own way. Both of them are anarchistic thinkers in some fashion. With Khomeini you have this thought taken in a different direction. So for Khomeini, sovereignty is Schmitian, it is about the exception. But unlike Schmidt where the sovereign exception is meant to set aside the welfarest provisions of normative law in the context of an emergency, for Khomeini, sovereignty is meant to suspend precisely Sharia, precisely Islamic law and make possible a welfarist provision of law in non Islamic terms. So in both cases Moduli and Khomeini, you have, if you will, the deployment of sovereignty to set God aside, and in the case of Iran, to suspend Islamic law itself. And this becomes possible, I want to repeat, precisely because it is Islam that is the true subject of history, not God.
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Ronak Bose
That was fabulously put. There are way too many things to think about this now, and I want to sort of put a pin on this for the moment and get back to the first couple of chapters. The co production of Islam with Europe. You spent a striking amount of time on figures such as Wilfrid's Cabin, Blunt, Napoleon and other Europeans who in different ways participated in imagining Islam as a global agent. So how were European thinkers so central in imagining Islam's global future? And what does that collaboration, if we can call it that, tell us about the intellectual origins of modern Islam?
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Dr. Faisal Devji
Yeah, you know, so, you know, Blunt is an interesting figure because, you know, he's at one, at the same time a member of the British establishment who advises prime ministers and a critic of the British Empire, if you will, a partisan of Muslim causes around the world. And, you know, he writes a book in the early 1880s out of a couple of articles called the Future of Islam. And it's a very interesting book because it really does treat Islam as a subject. You know, that's why Islam can have a future. If it was simply a set of doctrinal rules, you know, you wouldn't use that title. It's too bad I couldn't use that title because he took it. But so what Blunt does is trying to think of Islam as a global subject, but a subject in waiting, that it might once have been a historical subject in its own right, but it no longer is and it is threatened by European imperialism. And what he would like to have happen is the partnership of the British Empire with the world of Islam, which will eventually allow Islam to resume or recover its subjectivity through the empire itself. And he makes these interesting comparisons that the British Empire, Islam is, if you will, a hemispheric Entity. Christianity is its only peer in terms of its dispersal across the globe. And its geographical dispersal is comparable only to. To that of. He doesn't say Christianity, interestingly, but that of the British and the Dutch empires, which are equally dispersed across the globe. Not only that. So not only does the world of Islam share something with these empires, these Christian empires, but in the case of the British, and to some degree the Dutch empires as well, the sheer number of Muslims within those dispensations means that they're effectively in part, Muslim empires. So Anglo Muslim or Dutch Muslim empires. And so he argues that the British Empire in particular, whether it likes it or not, has a responsibility to its Muslim subjects because it has to keep them on side. And so he envisions in his earlier in his career this kind of benign partnership. Eventually, he's disappointed in this. But Muslim thinkers pick up on Blunt's vision, which is also, as I point out in the book, a sociological vision, not a theological one. Right. So the world of Islam, Islam itself is a sociological category. His book begins with a kind of census of pilgrims in Mecca. Like, where do they come from, all these people? And he sees that, in fact, most of them are from India, from British India and from Southeast Asia. And that's where the future of Islam lies, he thinks. It's not in the Middle east, which he thinks is destined to be conquered by European imperialism. Of course, India and Indonesia already are in some respects, but they have another kind of future before them because they can participate in this empire as equal partners eventually. So Muslim thinkers not only pick up on blunt, but independently come to these kinds of conclusions in the earlier civilizational period of Islam's emergence as a global subject. And what interests me about this vision of partnership, which eventually becomes competitive and even rivalrous, is. Is that neither the idea of the west nor that of Islam can do without the other. That you cannot think any longer British or European imperial expansiveness without, in this case, Islam. Right. And Muslims also can't think of their expansion without Europe. In some senses, you know, Islam is important for European empires because by moving beyond Europe itself, they have outgrown European terms and categories. They might try to impose them elsewhere, but in fact, they have to deal with others. And Islam provides a very convenient mirror for them, a precedent, but also a warning. We might become like them, a defeated civilization. Right? But we could be like they once were. And similar are Muslim views of the West. So you end up with a quite intimate but problematic identification, which is in some ways not true to history. So the form of Christianity, for instance, that Muslim thinkers eventually end up with as an interlocutor is not the kind of Christianity that most Muslim societies have been exposed to until then. So they focus on Latin, Christendom and the Crusades and all of the rest. But when you look at the Muslim world, it's generally orthodox Christianity, right? Eastern forms of Christianity, not Latinate Christianity. Similarly, they focus on the Christian west, whereas historically, as we know and to this day, the immediate religious neighbors of Muslims all over the world have been Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists and Animists, not Christians at all. So the fact that this Christian Muslim died, is created, is actually a highly artificial thing. It isn't true to the history of Muslim societies, but this is how their imagination is globalized.
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Ronak Bose
I think at some point we can all see Islam's modern subjectivity as some sort of structural inevitability once globality becomes a scale of political imagining. That kind of also wants me to get back to what we were talking about just a while ago about Pakistan and Iran. In your chapter on prophetic insult, you argue that Muhammad becomes newly vulnerable because the older political and theological structures that once protected him and they no longer operate. So could you talk about how a little bit more about how these modern controversies from colonial India to the Rushdie affair, help us see the reorganization of authority inside Islam that the book describes?
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Dr. Faisal Devji
Yeah. So just as I was saying earlier about God, you know, where in a way he's been expelled along with divine sovereignty, and that's what allows for the return of idolatry. You see this happening in a different way with Muhammad, who has also been reduced. He's been humanized and he, you know, now requires protection. Now, of course, in the past too, you had instances of outrage over blasphemous descriptions or whatever of Muhammad. What's interesting about the modern period is that you can blaspheme Muhammad, but apparently not God. So God continues to be immune to outrage Muslims, in part because he has been expelled, I suggest. And there are other factors as well that explain God's immunity, because of course, God is not a figure who represents social order, but he represents the end of social order, the apocalypse. And so God has traditionally in Muslim poetry, for instance, been paired with women, infidels and ephebes. You know, these are kind of counter legalistic figures, antinomian figures. And God in that paradoxical way belongs outside the law. He is beyond it. Right, but you couldn't say anything of the same sort about the Prophet. And so what happens to Muhammad is he becomes like us in some ways, because after all, it is Islam that is the true subject, as I keep saying, of history. And so he requires protection. And this happens first in British India, in particular in 19th century, mid 19th century Bombay, where there are a couple of riots, you know, 1851 and 1874, which are labeled as Muslim Parsi riots, not Hindu Muslim riots. And they unlike sort of Hindu Muslim debates, which often in this period started out as theological debates and were not necessarily, if ever even violent ones, you know, where missionaries are debating each other or something of this sort. These Bombay riots have no religious backing to them or background to them. They are about stories published in Parsi owned newspapers in Gujarati, which are deemed to be insulting. But these newspapers are products of colonial capitalism. They are commodities in a marketplace meant to be read by an anonymous audience. They have no religious character to them. And they are simply the stories published in the newspapers are meant to instruct and inform or entertain people, right? So already you see that offense, the offense taken at these texts is an offense taken in a context of what I'm calling colonial capitalism. And it's offense that is defined by the anonymous circulation of newspapers, newsprint. And there is no theological debate attached to, to any of this stuff. And what Muslims are saying in these riots is that our feelings need to be protected like the feelings of all other religious groups. So they make their claim not just for themselves, but for others. It's a pluralistic claim and if you will, it is a secular one, because they are not making theological claims about blasphemy. Blasphemy, that term which we use so frequently is imported from Christian narratives. And it's often colonial officialdom that imputes blasphemy to this, to this set of debates and the riots that they name. And I say these debates name the riot because of course the riots are also about quite different matters. They're about class, they are about the relations between workers and owners of capital. They're about different ethnicities and caste groups, right? Not all Muslims participate in them, not all Parsis participate in them, et cetera. So what interests me is the language produced by these riots because it becomes universalized and can apply itself to different contexts with different kinds of, different kinds of contestations. So I'm not arguing that there's the same set of conflicts that repeats itself around the world. But the model or precedent that is set in colonial India is really a fascinating one because it really absorbs the profit into, if you will, a secular jurisprudence. By 1874, the language used by Muslim protesters is the language of the Indian Penal Code and which has been put in Place in 1860. This code is authored by Lord Macaulay, who doesn't have any blasphemy provision in it. It's in that sense a secular code and informed by Jeremy Bentham's principle of harms, he replaces blasphemy, which is still available in British law, by offenses against the sentiments of people, however true or false. So it's not about religious truth, it's about deeply held feelings and sentiments. And you know, this article is in the midst of a set of articles about libel, defamation and such things, right? So there's a fundamental transformation of any kind of history of disputation over Muhammad. Blasphemy is not really, you know, an available category, but rather defamation and libel and that sort of thing. And this way of manufacturing outrage, if you will, goes global with the Rushdie affair towards the end of the Cold War, and not accidentally, because with the end of the Cold War, you have the making of a global arena and you have the globalization of Islam through it in this new. In this new fashion. So Muhammad therefore becomes this mortal figure who you can identify with. So he's either a figure of identification. And often during the Rushdie affair, people would say, you know, he's like our uncle or our father or husband or something like this. Not a theological figure, a figure of civil life, right? Not a political figure even. And therefore we are offended because we would be offended if you insulted our relatives or he becomes understood as, if you will, a representation of Muslim property whose circulation must be curtailed. He should not be commodified in these ways. He should not be controlled by others. He should be removed from the marketplace of ideas, if you will, and protected. And so Muhammad, in these arguments, his role shifts constantly from being a figure of identification to a figure of property which needs to be removed from circulation. And it makes for a very interesting, in my view, set of debates and controversies. The big paradox, of course, there is that the Muslim complaints, as you will see, are banal because they are about libel and defamation. But sometimes their consequences are extraordinarily violent. And there seem to be a non fit between the banality of the complaints and the sometimes violent consequences of those complaints. And I suggest in that chapter, chapter two of the book, that in a way, the gap between these two narratives, well, the narrative of complaint on the one hand and the violent response on the other, result from the fact precisely of the non availability of the theological. We keep calling this stuff blasphemy. But in fact no one ever really uses theological terms for it. And the act of violence takes the place of the theological categories which have no longer, which no longer exist.
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Ronak Bose
Now that we have spoken a bit about the subjectivities of the Prophet and God, I would just like to sort of segue to gender as a side of Islam's objecthood. You argue that women, through dress, comportment and surface piety, become the emblematic subjects of Islam precisely because they embody an opaque, empty than anti political form of selfhood. Why do women become the privileged representatives of Islam in the 20th and 21st centuries? And what does this tell about Islam's attempt to regulate or displace agency in itself?
- [43:17]
Dr. Faisal Devji
Well, you know, just as I was saying about Islamist understandings of God's sovereignty, you know, for which sovereignty as a theological category, as something that pertains to God, cannot be exercised by men. You therefore needed to create a properly obedient Muslim subject because the true subject of Muslim history was Islam itself. So ordinary Muslim individuals should, by their behavior and acts and lives, represent Islam and contribute to Islam's agency, but shouldn't possess sovereignty in their own right. This idea plays itself out in conceptions of gender difference and similarity. So whereas in the past women really didn't even have, if you will, an identity of their own, they were often thought about in terms of as part of a group of people who were, let's say, legally disadvantaged. So women, children, slaves, servitors, people who are handicapped in various ways, are not full legal subjects. They are either wards of adult men or of the community itself. What happens from the middle of the 19th century is that, you know, women are separated out from these other categories of legal personhood and come to have an identity of their own in their own right and become the objects of male Muslim discourse and debate. And this is in part because European thinkers and colonial officials focus on the apparent mistreatment of women in most colonized societies and therefore make them figures of debate. But also because Muslim men in these societies have been removed from political and public roles and thrown back into the domestic realm inhabited by women and children. So that becomes the site of their, as it were, colonization. These spaces need to be Islamized. Children need to be removed from the influence of women, sent to boarding schools, kept more with men. Servants need to be removed so that they don't influence women. You know, women need to be literate and learn how to do arithmetic, at least so that they don't depend on servants. So a class division is manufactured or recognized. The Old world of the zenana or the harem, needs to be dismantled because it's the site of corruption and superstition. And all of this makes the woman into a specific kind of subject in her own right. And she becomes an ideal Muslim subject precisely because she doesn't have sovereignty. Unlike earlier images of the, as it were, pagan or highly sexualized woman who exercised a kind of extraordinary seduction upon men along with infidels and others. So there's a kind of taming of women, but they are tamed by being made more like men in other respects. And so in the way, the burden of my argument in that chapter is that, unlike in European thought of the same period, the distinction between genders is not, if you will, a sexual distinction. It's not a biologically defined difference. And one reason why this is the case is because Muslim thinkers have already consistently criticized biological forms of distinction in race. So they keep saying that Islam is really, truly representative of the human race because it doesn't distinguish between racial types. Everyone is equal. But colonial empires do distinguish their subjects racially. So having already dismissed biological distinctions for race, that could hardly bring them back for sex. Occasionally they do, but these things are quite minor and temporary. In fact, men and women are seen to be more alike than unlike. But what that means is it creates an entirely new anxiety, which is, how do you then distinguish between them? And it is by sartorial and behavioral practices that gender is to be distinguished. Therefore, the kind of anxious obsession, the dress codes and with spatial segregation and things like that, which would not be needed if you had a fully biologized understanding of sex. And the consequences are really extraordinary. For instance, in Islamist societies, Iran foremost, first and foremost, gender reassignment surgery is not a problem. Iran is one of the chief sites where gender reassignment surgery occurs in the world, after Thailand, I think. And what happened there is that the plastic surgeons, or plastic surgery that was developed to deal with wounded soldiers during the Iran Iraq war was repurposed for cosmetic surgery and for gender reassignment surgery. But Khomeini himself approved of it, and there has been no problem. On the contrary, the Iranian state, and there's been a book written about this by Afsan E. Najmabadi, that the Iranian state has a whole set of procedures available for people who want to transition. And that shows you that gender is not biologically resident, as it were. And I go on about how this relates to earlier discourses about hermaphroditism and all the rest, but I'll leave that aside. All of it to just show that Muslim women become ideal Muslim subjects in this period with surprising consequences.
- [49:47]
Ronak Bose
That's very interesting. I mean, I had no idea about the bit that you spoke about Iran. I think our listeners are going to have a field day with that and discussing more about that. So you point to the Arab uprisings, the Indian citizenship protest, Iran's women led mobilization, as well as Bangladesh's 2024 revolt, none of which place Islam at the center. Could you talk, albeit briefly, if you would, a bit more about how these movements help us see the decline of Islam as a global actor? What kind of political subjectivity emerge at the place? I'm also trying to think about the recent New York City mayoral campaign of Zoran Hamdani and what we can learn using the lens that you provide, not to center New York City or the west again in our discussion, but something that we can learn from the discourses around that campaign. From what you offer in this book.
- [50:38]
Dr. Faisal Devji
Yeah, I mean, I haven't thought about the campaign in terms of the book, but I'll come to it. I mean, I suppose the thing to say is, as you know, in my conclusion to this book I argue that we might have seen the end in one of its senses of Islam's career as a global subject, in part because it has been separated out from Muslim practices and religiosity. In a way, it's overweening agency that is so universalistic and abstract has left behind can no longer appropriate these everyday practices in the same fashion, but also because, of course, what I do in the book is look at three movements as representing Islam's globalization. Not all Muslims do it, not every movement or group does it. But the ones I look at are the aforementioned modernists or liberals of the 19th and early 20th century who really create and invent all of these terms. Then the Islamists who emerge in the 20th century and who have their moment in the sun mostly during the Cold War, in the period of ideological states where ideological Islam nicely belongs and fits, right? And with the end of the Cold War they are on the back foot. Iran is the last of the Cold War regimes in some ways, and it begins quite late 1979 and then in the early 21st century you have the sort of transnational in the period of globalization and neoliberalism you have the emergence of Al Qaeda and then isis, which really destroy the earlier two movements. But all three of them take Islam as the subject of history and try to plug in Muslim actions, behaviors and ideas into this form of agency with all the Contradictions, limitations, anxieties that entails. Now, I think you are in a situation where Islam is curiously absent from the movements that we see before us. But this doesn't mean that they have become secular or that irreligious or anything of that sort. You know, people might be many, might be deeply religious and observant, others may not be. It doesn't really matter. And you've named some of them. The Arab Spring protests come to mind. But even if you look at the war in Gaza, for instance, what's interesting about it is that the language of protest, really, apart from Iran and its allies, who are still using an old fashioned language, really doesn't invoke Islam very much. Even Hamas doesn't. If anything, they're invoking an equally dated language of human rights and crimes against humanity. Right. They've turned back to international institutions at the very moment where those institutions are falling apart. And similar things are true of, of many other movements. And this leads me to wonder whether we might be seeing, with the decline of Islam as a global subject, whether we might be seeing the reemergence of certain forms of spirituality, of a new attention to theological languages and categories. It's not clear to me. I don't know. But the Mamdani campaign is interesting because what it does is it shows you how someone like Zohran Mamdani can be very clear about who he is. But he's many things, right? So, you know, he could talk about his, the Hindu side of his family, the Muslim side of his family, the Indus side of his family owns on both sides. You know, he's quoted somewhere as saying that his paternal grandfather, who was Muslim, you know, was singing Gujarati bhajans, right? So that is also possible and indeed true. But these claims do not define his political Persona. They are simply who he is. Everyone is who they are, and often they are more than one thing. But these claims actually belie or belies the wrong word. They are not part of an identity politics. They just acknowledge the everyday reality of people which is messy and not linear. And they are not in contradiction to the political narrative that he propounds. So he, to my knowledge, is not making the case. You need to elect me because I will be the first Muslim mayor, or I will be the first South Asian mayor of New York, or I will be whatever it is, or this is a diversity initiative. The politics are not about that at all. And so there, in fact, you see how the recognition and acknowledgement of, in this case, a religious identity and more than one of them can go along with the displacement of Islam because he doesn't or didn't refer to Islam at all if at, you know, much if at all during his campaign. The Muslim has replaced Islam in that sense. And that is, you know, it's worth thinking about.
- [56:51]
Ronak Bose
Right, Right, absolutely. And I think you've, I mean, I. That's going to be a very generative conversation for another time about how we can look at this campaign or, you know, similar campaigns around the world based on what we learned from the book. But. Well, Dr. Devji, we have taken up a lot of your time today already. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you, given the argument that you've made, what kind of questions should historians and thinkers of Islam should be asking next? What is the field failing to look? Where is the field failing to look?
- [57:21]
Dr. Faisal Devji
Rather well, you know, I always thought, you know, my early work was on al Qaeda and, you know, militancy, Muslim militancy. And when I was doing that work, when I was reading the sources, I realized that scholars and journalists, because, you know, initially it was journalists who looked at this phenomenon were very selective in what they took from these materials. So they zeroed in on everything that appeared to look religious or theological, and that was, as it were, actionable material. But often the majority of what people like Osama bin Laden was saying had nothing to do with those kinds of things. Of course, they were quoting the Quran and they were doing all this and but is by no means unimportant. But for me, the question was how do you link all those kinds of statements with the other things equally, if not more plentiful that people like bin Laden were saying about climate change, about corporations, about, I don't know, Samuel Huntington's book, the Clash of Civilizations, about popular culture, American popular culture. They were talking about many things, and yet all those things were dismissed as being irrelevant or propagandistic. On what criterion? I don't know. There was a kind of deliberate exoticization of these figures. And what I tried to do is to bring those separated narratives together and see what they told us about our own time. Because Muslim or Islamic history does not exist on its own. It is part of global or world history, like everything, and you have to understand them together. And the militancy of that period was so fascinating to me because it drew upon the resources of our shared world, including an especially popular culture from the West. This is not a way of displacing responsibility or blame. On the contrary, it's about thinking the global as global. So I think that this remains a problem to be addressed on other matters as well, not just for militancy. We have for too long been fascinated by the exotic element or the archaic element in thinking about Islam. So for instance, there's a lot of attention on, on clerics. I am sure it's justified, but I can't help thinking that academics love looking at clerics because it's like looking in a mirror. They're exactly like us. They're scholars. They read and write, they write polemically against each other, and they write a lot. But like academics who write a lot, those words do not necessarily have larger importance. It's rare that they do. But because there is so much verbiage strewn about, we think that it must mean something. But it might not mean as much as we think it does. Academic work also doesn't mean as much as we would like it to mean. So it's important and it's interesting. But I think there is a completely over the top approbation of this kind of stuff. When you look at the role clerics have played in Muslim society, it too has been rather modern, which is to say, traditionally, these are figures who are in urban centers and who are deeply implicated with states and rulers. Sometimes they may go against them. It's only in colonial times and in the postcolonial state that clerical establishments have moved into the countryside due to technology and various things. So we know for Pakistan, for instance, there's been all these studies of madrasas of which there were very few at independence, but now there are many more in the countryside as well. So this is an entirely modern shift. We cannot really read back to medieval times, though of course, these ulema of medieval times, because they wrote so much, have a lot to tell us about the times in which they lived, but they didn't necessarily dominate those times. So this too is a way of trying to think about Islam in non standard ways, or in ways that shouldn't be non standard, I should say. So I think the patterns of scholarly inquiry, while being very productive and useful in many ways, have really shot out other aspects of, you know, Muslim history and the history of Islam. Despite the fact that Islam is arguably, as I suggest in my book itself in quotes, a secular category, it has no theological reality. It has become mortal, which is why it must be defended. So the irony of focusing on all this other religious stuff, given what kind of agent Islam has become, never ceases to amaze me.
- [62:40]
Ronak Bose
Dr. Dev Ji, just before I let you go, what's next for you intellectually?
- [62:44]
Dr. Faisal Devji
Now, from here Well, I meant to write a shorter book on Muhammad Iqbal, the philosopher and poet whom I also deal with extensively in this one that we are talking about. But the bigger project after that has nothing to do with it will include both South Asia and Islam in some fashion. But it's a project on the return of civil war to the political imagination from the post colonial period to the post Cold war period and today. So I'm looking at three moments and in a way it'll be a book about another kind of end, the end of history, another version of the end of history and how in the current global conjuncture, the kinds of historical narratives that we have been used to no longer seem to make sense. And they no longer seem to make sense because they're all without accepting European ones. And the world is no longer a European world. But there is no alternative to that history of Europe. You can see my gesture to Dipesh Chakraborty's work here proverientalizing Europe. So I'm looking forward to doing that. And some of my older areas of interest, like India or Islam will obviously play a role, but not a definitive one.
- [64:11]
Ronak Bose
That sounds truly exciting and thank you so much for talking to us today. I had a wonderful time chatting with you and thank you so much again and take care and hope we'll talk soon.
- [64:22]
Dr. Faisal Devji
Thank you very much. Ronak.
- [64:35]
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