Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, Faisal Devji, Yale University Press, £25.

In the 50th chapter of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon observed that Muhammad had preached faith in the oneness of God ‘under the name of Islam’. In referring to ‘Islam’, as opposed to the then more common ‘Mohammedanism’, Gibbon was echoing George Sale, an impoverished English solicitor who, in the ‘preliminary discourse’ to his pioneering English translation of the Qur’an (1734), had explained that ‘the name of Islam, which word signifies resignation, or submission to the service and commands of God… is used as the proper name of the Mohammedan religion’.

This language is drawn from the Qur’an itself. ‘The true religion with God is Islam,’ reads verse 3:17 (in A.J. Arberry’s translation). In verse 5:3, which in traditional Islamic exegesis is said to have been revealed in the final year of Muhammad’s life, the Qur’anic God declares: ‘Today I have perfected your religion for you, and I have completed My blessing upon you, and I have approved Islam for your religion.’ As the Canadian scholar of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith remarked: ‘of all the world’s religious traditions, the Islamic would seem to be the one with a built-in name’.

Yet Smith, whose 1962 classic The Meaning and End of Religion made the case that the term ‘religion’ had only come to refer to an institution or abstract system in the modern period, went on to argue that ‘Islam’ is used in the Qur’an and medieval Islamic literature not so much as a name for a religious system but ‘as the designation of a decisive personal act’. As the Anglican priest and scholar of Islam Kenneth Cragg points out, the ambiguity is not helped by the fact that Arabic lacks capital letters. It was only in the later 19th century that ‘Islam’ came widely to be used by Muslims as a proper name for a religion that was comparable (and in their eyes superior) to other religions.

The emergence of ‘Islam’ as the central concept of modern Muslim thinking provides the starting point for this stimulating new book by Faisal Devji, the Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford. Devji’s earlier work has established him as one of the most original interpreters of modern South Asian Islam since Smith himself. His previous book, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013), argued that Muslim nationalism in India constituted both the precedent for the Zionist project and ‘perhaps its closest political relation’. Waning Crescent is full of similarly paradoxical arguments and provocative insights.

Devji’s concern is with the meaning, causes, implications, and contradictions of what he calls the ‘personification’ of Islam in modern times. ‘It is only from the nineteenth century,’ he notes, ‘that statements like “Islam wants, says, or does such-and-such” have become conceivable and indeed commonplace.’ This is a straightforward but important point, for it highlights that ‘Islam’ does not itself say anything about things like politics, gender, science, or jihad; rather, it is Muslims who have developed ideas about these topics through hermeneutical engagement with Islamic revelation.

More fundamentally, the personification of Islam involves its ‘expansion into an agent of history’. In influential works such as The Spirit of Islam (1890) by the Indian jurist Syed Ameer Ali, Islam is presented as a sort of ‘machine’ that works to bring universal human values to humanity. The implications of this transformation are, as Devji sees it, far-reaching. The elevation of Islam into a historical actor signals the diminution of Muslims’ own agency amid their loss of traditional forms of religious and political authority. It also removes God from the historical process. One of Devji’s key arguments concerns the absence of theology in modern Islamic thought. Here he draws again on W.C. Smith, who observed that, whereas the word Allah appears almost 2,000 times as often as ‘Islam’ in the Qur’an, ‘in a good deal of modern Muslim writing this ratio is perhaps, roughly, reversed’. Significant in this regard is Syed Ameer Ali’s assertion in The Spirit of Islam that the word Islam ‘does not imply, as is commonly supposed, absolute submission to God’s will, but means, on the contrary, striving after righteousness’ – a definition, Devji notes, in which God is notable by His absence.

Connoisseurs of Devjian paradox will be pleased to discover that the consequences of the de-theologisation of modern Islam are suitably counterintuitive. As God became concealed in modern Islamic discourse, so too was His Prophet, who, in late-medieval Islamic piety, had been elevated into a superhuman mediator with God and the cosmic light of creation, brought down to earth. Yet the humanisation of Muhammad did not mean that his status was diminished. On the contrary, the 19th century saw a vast outpouring of works on the life of the Prophet. It also witnessed the emergence of a seemingly new kind of popular protest – riots sparked by alleged insults made against Muhammad – such as those which took place in Bombay in 1851 and 1874, which set the pattern for later incidents like the Rushdie affair and the Danish cartoon controversy. In Devji’s reading, these protests are not really about ‘blasphemy’, for theology is basically absent from them. Instead, what is at stake is Muslims’ ‘hurt feelings or wounded sentiments’, since the Prophet, having been stripped of his metaphysical status, has instead become the ‘property’ of Muslims.

Just as the Prophet has become more vulnerable to insult with the demise of God, so, too, has idolatry reappeared as a perceived threat. This is Devji’s original explanation for the rise, in the 20th century, of Islamism, the movement to turn Islam into a political ideology. At the centre of Islamist thought is the concept of God’s hakimiyyah or sovereignty. For Islamist thinkers such as Abu l-A‘la Mawdudi, the sovereignty which the Qur’an ascribes to God ought to be understood in political terms, and acknowledging it means implementing God’s law – the Shari’a – as statutory law. According to this way of thinking, any political system or ideology that ascribes sovereignty to other than God – for instance, to a nation or parliament – or which recognises the rule of some humans over others is a kind of polytheism or idolatry. For Devji, it is because God has been subordinated to Islam that His opposite – the idol – has been allowed to return, albeit in the guise of communism, capitalism, or liberalism rather than al-Lat, al-‘Uzza, and Manat.

While the Islamists have sought to reassert Islam’s authority over the political sphere, they and others have also turned to the domestic sphere as a way of compensating for the diminished role of Islamic institutions in public life. Mawdudi, for instance, describes the family as ‘the workshop or factory (karkhana) of civilisation and so [of] Islam itself’. In this way, these thinkers have turned Muslim women, the traditional custodians of the domestic sphere, into the ideal or ‘generic’ Muslim – ‘a sort of guardian of tradition whose task was to save men from the wickedness of public life’. This turn to the domestic explains the almost obsessive focus on women’s dress in much modern Islamic thinking. Exemplary in this regard are the books of Maryam Jameelah, a Jewish convert to Islam and disciple of Mawdudi, each of which features a picture of the author fully veiled. This, Devji observes, is ‘a piece of irony’ that ‘proclaims that the Muslim woman must be seen not to be seen’. In making Jameelah visible yet invisible, the pictures present her – and the ideal Muslim woman whom she represents – as a ‘manifestation of the private or domestic sphere’ in public life.

Theology, once again, is rarely to be found here; Mawdudi’s arguments for gender complementarity in his 1939 book Veiling are biological rather than theological. The same goes for Salafi-jihadist militancy. Devji shows how Al-Qaeda justify their revolutionary violence not so much through theology as by ‘mirroring’ the humanitarian rhetoric of the modern West. Among the charges that Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri levelled against the western ‘far enemy’ were such things as invading others’ countries, double standards, and the destruction of the environment. Though ISIS tended to avoid ‘mirroring’ western humanitarianism, its militant Islamism was similarly lacking in theology. While it resurrected the caliphate and spoke the language of apocalypticism, its caliph ‘was not endowed with any special power or charisma, and its millenarianism was more performative than theological’.

Devji’s interpretations of these features of modern Islam are attractive and often convincing. Yet some doubts and questions remain. What appears to be new in modern Islam frequently turns out, on closer inspection, to have roots in the premodern tradition. That is sometimes the case here. For instance, Devji notes that the Qur’anic description of Muhammad as rahmatan li-l-‘alamin underwent a ‘routine redefinition’, whereby its ‘literal’ meaning of ‘a mercy to the worlds’ was replaced with ‘a mercy to all mankind’. This redefinition, he claims, ‘illustrates how older cosmologies that contain a plurality of worlds… have been replaced by a singular vision of the globe in which humanity… plays its solitary role as the only true subject and object of history’. In fact, academic scholars of the Qur’an argue that the term ‘alamin’ originally meant ‘world inhabitants’, not ‘worlds’, and premodern Muslim commentators typically take it to refer specifically to mankind. Likewise, the connection of insults to the Prophet to ‘hurt feelings’ is also rooted in the Qur’an and the premodern tradition. The Qur’an declares that God has cursed in this world and the next ‘those who hurt God and His Messenger’ (33:57). The 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyya – the author of one of the most influential premodern treatises on blasphemy – explains that ‘hurt’ in this context denotes a ‘light evil’, to be distinguished from ‘harm’, and that it is a testament to the rank of the Prophet that a little evil directed against him qualifies as unbelief. Devji also makes the insightful observation that Ayatollah Khomeini’s judgment against Salman Rushdie names Islam, before Muhammad and the Qur’an, as the first target of The Satanic Verses. Yet while the ordering may be new, the obligations placed on non-Muslim subjects in premodern Islamic law still include commitments not to denigrate the Qur’an, disparage the Prophet, or slander ‘the religion of Islam’.

Another query concerns the book’s scope. Though the title mentions ‘global Islam’, most of the examples are taken from South Asia. While this is in many ways a welcome corrective to the ‘Arabistic bias’ that still defines much writing on Islam, it might have been worth considering how ‘Islam’ is conceptualised by Arab-Muslim thinkers such as the Egyptian modernist Muhammad ‘Abduh (author of Science and Civilization between Islam and Christianity) and his disciple ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (whose 1925 book Islam and the Foundations of Political Power was a seminal statement of Islamic secularism). Perhaps more significant is Devji’s decision to focus on the modernist, Islamist, and militant jihadi tendencies in modern Islam, all of which, in their own ways, advocate a rupture with the premodern traditions of Islamic law, theology, and mysticism. The neo-traditionalists, who promote continuity with those traditions, are largely overlooked. More attention to them might have complicated – or enriched – the thesis that theology and metaphysics are absent from modern Islam.

Nevertheless, anyone interested in the role of Islam in the modern world will find much that is fresh and worthy of serious reflection. Most importantly, the personification of Islam has trapped Muslims and non-Muslims alike into a rigid way of viewing the Islamic faith, which neglects its rich theological tradition for a picture of Islam as a ‘mirror’ of modern western ideologies and ideals – a ‘system’ that tells Muslims what to do and believe. More helpful, and historically accurate, is the picture painted by Wilfred Cantwell Smith: ‘“Islam”,’ he wrote, ‘is obedience or commitment, the willingness to take on oneself the responsibility of living henceforth according to God’s proclaimed purpose; and submission, the recognition not in theory but in overpowering act of one’s littleness and worthlessness before the awe and majesty of God. It is a verbal noun: the name of an action, not of an institution; of a personal decision, not a social system.’