‘Waning Crescent’ by Faisal Devji review

What does adding the term ‘global’ demand of a historian when writing about Islam? Does it require a survey of versions of Islam from different world regions, or the extraction of a distinct Islam forged by globalisation? Does it involve dealing with the historical experiences of actual Muslims, or can the historian instead examine Islam in the abstract?

Faisal Devji takes the last approach, focusing on what he sees as a global transformation in the way the term Islam was used in the colonial and postcolonial eras. More specifically, he focuses on what he sees as a semantic, philosophical, and ultimately political shift whereby the abstract noun Islam became ‘the proper name of an actor in its own right’. Devji clarifies that he does not mean that Islam came to be understood ‘as a person in some metaphorical sense, but rather as a structure or system that acts on the world in the way that civilizations in the 19th century and ideologies in the 20th were imagined to act’. In other words, Islam ‘came to be imagined as an actor on the world’s stage’. Here, as throughout the book, the key term is ‘imagined’, since Devji’s thesis revolves around what he claims was a new way in which modern Muslim and non-Muslim writers began to conceive the working of history by replacing human and divine forces with the imagined ‘agency’ of Islam as a historical actor. Pursuing this argument, he proposes that this new way of understanding history led even Muslim thinkers to displace God with ‘Islam’ as the grand force that shaped the destinies of individuals and empires alike.

Devji identifies the driving force behind this shift in historical thinking as the ‘crisis of Muslim sovereignty’ that followed European imperial expansion. This broad colonial context allows him to discuss European and American thinkers as often as – and sometimes more often than – Muslim thinkers on the grounds that they shared the same global imaginary. Unlike the acolytes of Edward Said, Devji doesn’t explicitly claim that this imaginary (a term he prefers to Said’s ‘discourse’) was created by European Orientalists because ‘this new conception of Islam could not be owned by any one group or authority’. Still, the traumas of colonisation remain centre stage, as from the 1880s to the 2020s Devji describes the competing attempts of Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals and activists to control the abstract global actor they imagined Islam to be. These attempts were inevitably futile, he argues, because they were impossible, being predicated on an imagined Islam that for all practical purposes was everywhere yet nowhere.

Waning Crescent traces three stages of Islam’s modern career as an imagined ‘global actor’, focusing on episodes that chart the ‘rise and fall’ arc of the book’s subtitle. After locating the emergence of this new conception in the writings of British Arabist Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) and Indian lawyer Ameer Ali (1849-1928), subsequent chapters turn to the philosophical and political consequences of this paradigm shift. Many of these consequences were unintended, not least the cycle of insults since the 19th century aimed at the Prophet Muhammad and protests in response: this cycle resulted from the Prophet’s historicisation because by being ‘humanised’ he was ‘disarmed’. God suffered even greater indignities through his ‘theological disappearance as a transcendent being’, leading Allah to be displaced by Islam as the prime mover of global affairs. Elsewhere Devji deals with the Muslim woman, whose ‘emergence as a subject’, we are told, ‘is paradoxically premised on her disappearance as an agent, which is why it is she rather than a man who can best represent Islam’. From Muslim women, Devji turns to proponents of Islamic statehood, particularly the Indo-Pakistani theorist Abul Ala Maududi (1903-79), making a case that they too relied on this modern conception of Islam. The inevitable failure of their various projects, Devji concludes, shows the impossibility of ‘a global politics’, whether Muslim or not. Because for Muslims – even Islamists – imagining Islam ‘as a historical actor robbed the Muslim community and its authorities of their political agency’. He closes by suggesting that, with the defeat of al-Qaeda and ISIS, this conception of Islam has reached its nadir, so that we can now see ‘Islam’s own disappearance as an agent of history’.

Devji’s approach echoes the reification debate that rocked university religious studies departments in the 1990s, when Victorian Orientalists were said to have misconstrued abstract concepts such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism as concrete entities with historical agency. (Reification – a term that originates in Marxist theory – means to treat an abstract concept as though it were a living entity with the capacity of acting on the world.) By ignoring this scholarship Devji misses the opportunity to show where his approach makes original departures from that older debate.

While the focus on a grammatical-cum-ontological shift in the meaning of the term Islam suggests Waning Crescent be considered a work of ‘concept history’ (or Begriffsgeschichte, as its original German proponents called it), it isn’t quite convincing in these terms. Its main evidence is drawn from a small number of Indian and British thinkers, bolstered by the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Barack Obama. Southeast Asia and Africa receive scarcely a mention despite their colonial pasts and huge Muslim populations; even the Middle East receives patchy coverage. This leaves lingering uncertainty about what exactly is ‘global’ about all this. Is this an account of how a handful of prominent intellectuals began to think about Islam in global terms? Or does Devji want readers to believe their reimagining of Islam had worldwide reach and impact? More a meta-commentary on history than a sustained analysis of events, ideas, and the people and circumstances that drove them, readers will need to be familiar already with the incidents and ideologies the book discusses. Still, the overall premise is an intriguing one.

• Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam
  Faisal Devji
  Yale University Press, 270pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Nile Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles.