Perhaps the most foolish article ever published by Open magazine claims that Global Islam is in decline. The opposite is the case.
The End of Islam
Faisal Devji
Is the religion’s journey as an agent of history over?
THE TITLE I INITIALLY gave my forthcoming book was 'The End of Islam'. I chose it not only to be provocative but because I was interested in how Muslims have in modern times envisioned the end of Islam in both of its senses.
Some thought all religions would disappear as humanity transitioned to 'scientific' socialism. But, by the beginning of the Eighties, it became obvious that Muhammad would prevail over Marx. The Crescent moon would defeat the Hammer & Sickle.
The first was as a victorious goal to be achieved on a global stage, and the second as an equally global defeat.
You can only defeat religion locally. Thankfully, local Muslims kick ass- as both the Soviets & the Americans discovered in Afghanistan.
Both these meanings make sense only when we understand Islam to be an actor in global history.
Just like Christianity. Islam was on the back foot because it was the Europeans who got to the New World first. They won the 'scramble for Africa'. Still, Muslims, acting locally, were able to spread their religion despite lacking economic or military might.
And it is the making of Islam into such an agent that I explore in my book.
It became such an agent very quickly.
I was persuaded by my friends and publisher to change the book's title to Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam.
They didn't want to get fatwa'd and beheaded.
They thought that my original title would expose me to attacks by irate Muslims.
Fuck Facile. Publishers are worried about their own skins.
But I decided to heed them for another reason, because I thought my preferred title would inadvertently win me readers among anti-Islam activists
No. They wouldn't be anti-Islam if they thought the thing had curled up and died.
rather than those interested in the role of ideas in history. I have ventured instead to use my first title for this essay.
In one of his most popular ghazals, the 18th-century poet Mir of Delhi writes:
Mir ke din-o mazhab ko ab puchhte kya ho unne to/ Qashqa khincha dayr men baytha kab ka tark Islam kiya (Why do you ask Mir about his religion and school?/ He's daubed saffron on his forehead and is sitting in a temple having long abandoned Islam).
This is standard 'malamati' Sufism. The meaning is that Mir has become so devout that he has passed beyond duality.
Although his words invoke Hindu imagery, there is nothing peculiarly Indian let alone syncretic about them. Similar verses using Zoroastrian or Christian images could have been written in the Safavid and Ottoman empires as much as the Mughal one in which Mir lived.
Because the thing was meaningless. Hindu monks would write erotic verses. Muslim clerics would write about the Tavern. It was merely a literary convention.
In all cases they would have been understood as forsaking the narrow dimensions of ritual worship for a philosophical universality which held such rites to be equally true or false.
It was a claim to have advanced far down the Sufi path.
Mir does not recognise 'Islam' as the name of a religion (din)
Sure he does. He is saying he has gone beyond duality. He has reached 'fana'.
or school (mazhab) but defines it instead as a set of ritual practices comparable to marking one's forehead and sitting in a temple.
No. He sees there is nothing but God. This is the truth (Haq). Duality is an illusion (majaz).
'Islam' in his verse names the most specific forms of Muslim worship for which religion and school are the containers.
It means the religion founded by Prophet Muhammad. But Mir was merely following a literary convention. He was a pious Muslim.
Only in colonial times would Islam abandon its grammatical role as a verbal noun describing a set of Muslim practices to become the proper name of a subject in its own right.
Nonsense! "Islam" was the word used by Muslims to describe themselves in the inscription on the Dome of the Rock, which was written in 691 AD. The word Muslim has the same etymology as the word Islam.
From being one of many different terms, such as religion and school, that might be used to define Muslim devotion, Islam in the 19th century became the name of a subject that not only contained them all but was capable of acting as an agent.
Rubbish! Islam's rapid territorial expansion was without parallel in world history. Moreover, the Caliphate burgeoned in intellectual, technical and commercial sophistication. Not till the Mongol invasion could Islam be said to have suffered a dark age. True, there were reverses in the Nineteenth Century but Islam made a terrific comeback.
We can see this transformation in the century's most popular poetic work by another writer living in Delhi. Hali's epic, the 'Ebb and Flow of Islam' (Madd-o Jazr-e Islam), charts the decline of Islam understood in a new way:
No. It echoes al-Rundi's lament for the loss of Andalusia written in 1267. But Indian Muslims had been mourning lost glories since the rise of the Marathas, Sikhs, etc.
Raha din baqi na Islam baqi/ Ik Islam ka rah gaya nam baqi (Neither religion nor Islam was left/Only the name of Islam was left).
i.e. 'Islam is in danger'. What truly mattered was the attitude of the Brits. They needed to see that it was the Hindus who were the real danger to their Raj.
None of the great Muslim mobilisations of recent years has invoked Islam as a subject or even cause.
Did you know that the Taliban didn't study Islam in seminaries? They did PhD in Queer Theory. Field Marshal Munir didn't study in madrasa. He was sent to Roedean and then a finish school in Switzerland. He looks very cute in bikini.
From the Arab uprisings of 2010
against 'Secular Socialist' Nasserite or 'Ba'athist military backed regimes.
to the 2020 protests over citizenship laws in India,
Indian Muslims don't want Non-Muslims to be given refuge in India. They should stay in Islamic hellholes and get raped to death.
and from the Green movement of 2009
in Iran
to the 2022 women's uprising in Iran, none opted for Muslim liberalism, Islamism or militancy. Islam is no longer a subject in these events
Because everybody was already Muslim. What is interesting is that it is Islamists who gain from such protests. Look at Bangladesh. The students who started the uprising are now quietly joining the Jamat.
As in Mir's couplet, here, too, Islam and religion were distinguished one from the other but with their roles reversed.
No. Mir was merely following a literary convention. Popular uprisings in Muslim countries may have economic causes.
Islam now represented a broader idea than religion,
No. It really is a religion. There may have been 'secularists' who said 'real meaning of Islam is 'insaniyat' (Humanity). But nobody gives a fart about them.
which it had come to include within itself. Islam's new dominance ensured that of the term Muslim as well, which in the past had been one of several, like unitarian (muwahhid),
this is desirable but not necessary. Some people are more spiritually inclined and like to gas on about 'tawhid'.
religious (dindar), or faithful (mumin), that could identify the devout.
You can be a Muslim without being very devout or a momin.
Whereas Mir's abandonment of Islam
He was a bit unorthodox but did compose verses praising the Prophet's family. Apparently, he wasn't actually a Sayyad, though, being a Shia with that nom de plume, people assumed this.
was personal and did not imply any threat to its independent existence, Hali was anguished by the possibility of Islam's decline and the threat this posed to the collective life of Muslims.
Actually, Delhi was beginning to revive under the Brits. The Mutiny was a terrible blow to the Muslims and it took some time for them to recover.
If it was Mir himself and not Islam who was the subject of his verse,
Mir did write a shehr-ashob lamenting Abdali's devastating attack on Delhi.
for Hali it was Islam that had become a subject and actor in its own name by containing and so concealing the agency of Muslims themselves.
No. The Indian Muslim could take comfort that, in theory, the Mughal Emperor remained sovereign. Perhaps, the Brits would have the sense to convert to Islam. Alternatively, some new Timur or Nadir might rise up and invade India ridding it of the Xtians. The question for Hali & Sir Syed Ahmed etc. was how Muslims could embrace the new Sciences and technologies without losing their ancestral faith. But even the Xtians were worried by the discoveries being made by Darwin & the Geologists.
Islam thus became a protagonist in history
in the Seventh Century.
which in the 19th century took the form of a civilisation, conceptualised in European thought as an abstract agent whose rise and fall played out on a global stage.
European thought was not utterly shit. It didn't believe 'abstract agents' could do anything. They knew that Islam had the power to revive. You can defeat the Ummayads and throw them out of Spain, but then the Turks rise up and suddenly they are knocking at the gates of Vienna. The decline of Ottoman Turkey was of great concern to Indian Muslims who, at a later point, started the Khilafat movement.
And in the 20th century it came to be understood by Muslim liberals but also Islamists as an ideology on the pattern of communism.
No. You could say that the Ikhwan chose a 'Leninist' style of organization or that there were some crappy journalists or nutters like Gaddafi who pretended their religion was actually some sort of crazy ideology.
But this was simply a more systematic way of conceptualising abstract agency in history.
There is no fucking abstract agency in history. Napoleon was a man, not an idea. The same was true of Lenin or Mao.
I describe how Islam came to be seen as a subject of this kind
it wasn't. Few people, back then, were as stupid as Facile.
and lay out what its implications have been for Muslim life as well as global politics.
The question was whether Islamic societies would follow a secular path- like that of Ataturk. When I was a kid, the leader of an Islamic country was likely to wear Army uniform and a military moustache. The turbaned & bearded were provincial and powerless.
Of course, what happened to Islam was not unique, with most if not all religious traditions being refashioned as civilisations or ideologies in modern times.
None have been refashioned in this way.
But each has a distinctive history.
There is no such history.
As a new kind of subject in the history of decline that Hali sketched, Islam for the first time faced the possibility of its own end.
It finally had to admit that it would not rule non-Muslim majority parts of India. Also, it needed to please the Brits otherwise the cunning Hindus would take over the administration.
Having been born in history it could now be imagined dying in it as well.
Islam affirms the end of days and bodily resurrection.
And the anxiety of such an ending marks its career from the 19th century.
Nonsense! Muslims simply weren't converting to Xtianity whereas plenty of Hindus, Confucians etc were. The problem was intellectual and state capacity decline relate to the Christian West.
To be a Muslim was to live in the shadow of Islam as the true subject of history,
No. It was to feel sure of going to the 'good place'. History doesn't matter. Eternity does.
while trying to prevent its demise in projects of reform and revival that put its agency in doubt.
People have agency. Religions don't. The question was whether a new Timur or Nadir would rise up. The alternative was to rise through commerce and industry and invest in STEM subject education to raise productivity. Some people thought you had to wear a hat and a tie to advance intellectually. They were wrong.
Islam remains a paradoxical figure with which Muslims enjoy a contradictory relationship.
No. It is a religion. Follow it faithfully and you will get to Heaven for all eternity. That's a very good deal indeed. True, the Xtians get the same deal while still being allowed to drink wine and eat pork. But they can only have one wife at a time. Pussy is better than pork.
For it emerged as an autonomous subject
It didn't. One could say the Papacy was autonomous. But Islam doesn't have a Pope.
due to the marginalisation of Muslim power, profane as much as sacred, in the face of Europe's imperial expansion. The princes, preachers, and other authorities who had once governed Muslim societies,
One way or another, they continued to do so in places where Muslims were the majority and there were no large population of White settlers.
now had to compete with one another
they always did. The advantage the West had was monogamy plus male primogeniture. Polygamy meant lots of claimants to the throne or ancestral property.
as well as with newer rivals to represent an Islam suddenly beyond their reach and newly conceptualised as an historical actor by believers and unbelievers alike.
I suppose this nutter means worthless books published by stupid journalists and crazy academics who teach worthless shite. Still, one can certainly speak of the Organization of Islamic States and a global Islamist movement which has been growing rapidly since the Seventies. But even by the end of the Nineteenth Century, Muslims could 'act globally' e.g. by getting UK & France to ban a play about the Prophet.
The new claimants in this competition numbered not only colonial states with the modern forms of knowledge they promoted, but also Western-educated Muslim elites and the masses they sought to lead. But the more open Islam became to such claims in the absence of Muslim political power, the less could it be possessed by any single group or polity.
This could be said about Hinduism or cricket. But what would be the point?
Freed from ownership within a capitalist marketplace of ideas, Islam not only became an agent in its own right but a global one taking the history of humanity as its field of action.
Islam is owned by Muslims. There is no 'capitalist market for ideas'. There is a market for books by shitty academics- but it is a small one.
Mir does not recognise 'Islam' as the name of a religion or school but defines it instead as a set of ritual practices.
No. He was writing in the 'malamati' vein such that the truth (haq) was the opposite of the apparent (majazi) meaning.
'Islam' in his verse names the most specific forms of Muslim worship for which religion and school are the containers.
No. Ayatollah Khomeini wrote similar mystical verses though, like the vast majority of such poets, he was highly observant of orthopraxy.
Only in colonial times would Islam abandon its grammatical role as a verbal noun describing a set of Muslim practices to become the proper name of a subject in its own right
No. Right from the start, people understood that a Muslim might be a wine bibber and too lazy to perform namaz etc. Ask God for forgiveness and try to straighten up and fly right.
Rather than the increasing power of its adherents then, Islam's globalisation represents their weakness.
America is very weak. That is why we are all drinking coca-cola and eating McDonalds.
Its personification as much as expansion into an agent of history
which happened in the Seventh Century
suggests both their marginalisation and inability to control this new idea and experience of Islam, one whose agency confiscated that of Muslims themselves to the extent of rendering it illegitimate.
Nonsense! Muslims do well when Islam is expanding. The first centuries of Islam were marked by extraordinary achievements. The West's secret weapon was monogamy which in turn militated for male primogeniture. In Europe, the King's strongest supporter was his own younger brother. In Islamic or Hindu polities, your brother would try to kill you unless you killed him first.
The attempt to shape a singular Islam globally has only resulted in a thin and brittle Muslim subject divorced from its more complex past.
No. Muslims are flourishing save where they have bad leadership. So long as they stick with STEM subjects- rather than study useless shite of Facile's sort- they will continue to thrive.
This is a predicament that faces all those who struggle with defining human action at the inhuman scale of the globe.
Fuck off! Environmentalists are thinking at the global level. Facile must have heard of 'Global Warming'.
But it is addressed by Muslims to put religion and politics into question along with any conventional relationship between them.
There are plenty of Islamic parties. I think they are gaining market share.
For, as a protagonist in history Islam was deprived of its theological language despite the belief of its followers.
Field Marshall Munir's 'theological language' is pretty good. The future leaders of Muslim countries are becoming Hafizs. They aren't studying the worthless shite Facile teaches.
And having abandoned its traditional authorities for a vision of global agency, Islam also lacks a political language and reality.
Even in England, it has both.
THE REVENGE OF HISTORY
Understood as an actor in human history, Islam repeats God's role while stripping it of theological meaning since it is not itself divine.
No. Islam says it is part of God's plan. Christianity makes the same claim.
Like any historical subject, Islam is capable of being defeated,
if God so wills- sure. That's what all religions teach. Anyway, what matters is eternity, not history.
which is what makes its defence so crucial for modern Muslims.
I suppose White British people are coming to a similar conclusion. People like me may be stripped of citizenship and deported.
God requires no such defence. But what kind of relationship can Muslims have with an Islam indifferent to theology?
A good one. Most people find theology confusing. God, they get. Theodicy- not so much.
I describe how Islam stands in for the absent political subjectivity of Muslims individually as well as collectively.
Where? Not in the UK. The Gaza conflict helped get many more Muslims- some as independents- elected.
But if it has become a global actor in place of the Muslim community,
it is like Sexiness becoming a global actor in the next Margot Robbie blockbuster.
how might Islam encompass the role of figures like Muhammad?
The way it has always done.
I look at controversies about insults to the Prophet, starting in India during the middle of the 19th century to become global at the end of the Cold War.
If you were White, you could say what you liked about darkies of all descriptions.
Such controversies emerge from the stripping away of Muhammad's religious as much as political character such that he becomes vulnerable to insult as an ordinary person.
They emerged because there's money to be made in publishing scurrilous books. Muslims were welcome to get their own back by pretending Christian Bishops spent all their time raping nuns. Sadly, it was choir boys they were interested in.
The passions aroused among Muslims by insults to a prophet so much like themselves
Muslims don't think the exalted Prophet was a weak and sinful creature like themselves. They may pray to become more like the Prophet. Nothing wrong with that at all.
take the place of his vanishing religio-political role as it is subordinated to Islam.
This simply isn't true. The spread of education and access to the internet means Muslims know much more about the Prophet. Ordinary people can read the hadith in their own mother tongue.
By doubling and so displacing God's theological agency with its historical one, Islam takes as its opponents equally redoubled forms of idolatry.
Not for Muslims. But even non-Muslims with no great love for that religion have to admit that Islam is a spiritual religion with an Occassionalist metaphysics- i.e. God is the only efficient cause. We don't know God's plan for this world but feel reassured that our Creator will grant the virtuous eternal life by His side.
God's absence from the arena of Islam's historical action, in other words, leads to the unprecedented proliferation of idols in Muslim political debate.
Iqbal said Nationalism was an idol of this sort. He also lurved Mussolini.
For Islamists idolatry no longer refers to objects of worship but political forms such as monarchy, nationalism, or communism, all abstract agents much like Islam and so its rivals. I examine the consequences of repudiating such idolatrous forms of political authority as so many Muslim thinkers have done.
There are no consequences. Saying something is idolatry is like saying it is totes gay or bougie or Nazi or whatever.
Condemning political and religious forms of authority as idolatrous, however, places believers in an unmediated relationship with God.
Everyone can have this in any religion.
And this results in the possibility that they may encroach upon His sovereignty by claiming independent agency for themselves.
Very true. If you have an unmediated relationship with a pussy cat, you may turn into a cat and start catching mice.
This is why one of the crucial themes of 20th-century Islamic thought has to do with the effort to displace and even expel sovereignty into the keeping of God and so effectively make Muslims into anti-political subjects in some sense.
Also it's a great way to write a lot without saying anything.
This contradictory project often ends by emptying out all agency from the virtuous Muslim individual who thus becomes a curiously opaque figure.
All individuals are opaque. That's why you can't see their hearts and livers.
I therefore deal with the gender of Islam's anti-political subject, making the case that women have replaced men as generic Muslims in allowing Islam to speak through them in a privileged way as the most common and visible symbols of individual piety.
Very true. Most Mullahs today are female. Taliban is composed entirely of bearded ladies.
The relationship between Islam and the West is one of
demographic replacement?
anxious intimacy
butt sex? What if the condom breaks? Could I get AIDS?
and identification rather than difference.
Very true. The Pope identifies as a Muslim lady. That is why he wears hijab.
This is because Islam as an ungrounded global subject cannot be owned but forever escapes the grasp of those who claim it.
You belong to a religion. You don't own it which is why you can't sell it on Ebay. Islam is the set of people who are Muslims. That's grounding right there.
The West enters into a relationship with Islam not through hostility so much as by its alleged theft of Muslim virtues to replace Muhammad's followers as God's favoured community.
No. The West was Christian before the Prophet's birth. Islam says it improves on Christianity just as Christianity is considered to have improved on Judaism. Why did the West rise relative to Islam? Monogamy and male primogeniture.
Islam therefore needs to be recovered from the West
Pope is hiding it under his bed. Naughty Pope!
as an alter-ego.
Fuck the West. It is the Chinese who are rising most rapidly.
The relationship between the two is understood as intensely familiar and even fraternal, which explains the intensity of the violence that occasionally mars it.
Like Shruti Kapila, this shithead thinks fraternity means fratricide. But if the dude you are killing aint your brother, then you are just a murderer.
And finally, I focus on violence by attending to the consequences of imputing such a negative character to Muslim subjectivity.
Facile imputes a negative character to Muslims though the vast majority of them would prefer to study STEM subjects rather than useless shit.
In it I track a shift from the posthumous subject of martyrdom
coz a martyr who is still alive aint a fucking martyr.
in the videotapes of Al Qaeda's suicide bombers to a virtual selfhood defined by pleasure in the brutal spectacles filmed by the Islamic State.
Some actual dudes liked watching those videos.
In both the ideal Muslim must vanish to be replaced by a digital doppelganger.
No. Real people watch stuff on Youtube. There may soon be digital doppelgangers which can answer the phone for us at work or undertake other routine activities on our behalf. But such dopplegangers won't be undertaking enjoyable leisure activities.
Apart from God in the theological imagination, any historical protagonist attributed with life must also meet with its death.
This cretin has never heard of Al-Khidr.
The enlivening of Islam as a subject in history, therefore, was inevitably linked to forebodings about its ending.
There was foreboding that the Mongols would exterminate Islam in West and Central Asia. Thankfully, they soon converted just as the Turks had done.
It was not simply the fact that Muslims in many parts of the world had fallen under colonial rule that gave rise to such fears, but the emergence of Islam itself as an agent.
Muslims don't need to get jobs. Islam will get a job as a travel-agent and earn plenty of money for them. Also, it will become a Secret Agent and defeat the machinations of SMERSH.
And so it may be that Islam's career as a subject has today reached its own end in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Islam got a job as a travel agent. Then it had a career as a subject. But that career has ended because of some stupid shite inside the head of an utter cretin.
None of the great Muslim mobilisations of recent years has invoked Islam as a subject or even cause.
They all have
From the Arab uprisings of 2010
in which Islamists played a role challenging 'secular' rulers.
to the 2020 protests over citizenship laws in India,
in which Islamists- especially the PFI- played a big part
and from the Green Movement of 2009 to the 2022 women's uprising in Iran, none opted for Muslim liberalism,
The Iranian middle class, what is left of it, would love a bit of liberalism
Islamism or militancy.
Taliban wasn't militant at all. It didn't come to power in Afghanistan.
Islam is no longer a subject in these events, including protests over the Gaza war which have been remarkably muted in the Muslim world.
Especially in Egypt. El Sisi is a tough guy.
Their participants have neither championed religion nor for the most part repudiated it, while their politics remains experimental and unanchored in any received model.
Unless they succeed- as the students did in Bangladesh. But it now looks as though it was the Jamat which was doing the heavy lifting.
Unprecedented as these events have been, their popularity matching that of the region's independence and revolutionary movements from the last century, none can be said to have succeeded.
Facile hasn't heard of a little place named Bangladesh.
And yet they represent the future not only for Muslim societies but insofar as such events tell us about other ways in which we all understand and inhabit the globe.
No. China represents the future. Kids there study STEM subjects not worthless bullshit.
The rise and fall of global Islam is not a story about joining religion to politics but demonstrates instead the inability of Muslims to do so.
Because Islam decided to become a Travel Agent or Secret Agent or take up some other such career. There are plenty of very able Muslims. Sadly, one or two end up teaching useless shite.
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