In the latest episode of UNAPOLOGETIC we sat down with Faisal Devji in Oxford. Devji is a widely acclaimed scholar of both South Asian history and the history of intellectual thought. In his latest book, Devji presents a novel idea: that "Islam", as many of us commonly use the word today, meaning a single thing with a will and a direction of its own, rather than the faith Muslims practise, is barely 150 years old. Sometime in the mid nineteenth century, people increasingly started using the word Islam not to describe the faith that Muslims follow, but as the name of something that acts. Islam wants, Islam demands, Islam is in decline, Islam will rise. Devji's argument is that this shift happened not because Muslims became more or less devout, but because Muslim political power collapsed under European empire. Once "Islam", or more specifically Muslim political power, was no longer held by kings, caliphs or clerics, it became something anyone could speak for, and many people did. Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. His new book is Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam. We follow that story through the three movements it produced. The modernists, from Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Ameer Ali through Iqbal to Fazlur Rahman. The Islamists, from Maududi to Khomeini. And the militants of the 21st century. Along the way we get into why Maududi thought sovereignty itself was a form of tyranny, why Khomeini told his own president that the state could suspend prayer and fasting, why Iqbal was declared a heretic and then became the intellectual father of a country, why Hamas quoted him in its founding document, and what it means that you can stand at the heart of Islamic ritual in Mecca today and find skyscrapers and fast food. None of this is an argument that Muslim belief is fading. Devji is clear that the people in the movements he describes may be deeply religious, and that this is not a story about secular against religious. It is a story about a word, where it came from, what it made possible, and what a much older and richer tradition of Muslim thought was obscured by it. And when he is asked whether Muslims are in crisis, his answer points somewhere else entirely. UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.
