The worlds that Islam made

Worlds of Islam: A Global History, James McDougall, Allen Lane, £40

The Renewal of Islam: Thinkers and Believers of the Modern Era, Fitzroy Morrissey, Bloomsbury, £25

We live in an era of self-appointed experts on Islam, its doctrine, history, and canons. Even a cursory glance at social media or the burgeoning podcast-sphere reveals a near endless series of discussions about Islam and Muslims, and their supposed incompatibility with the West. Opportunistic politicians have also seized upon the moment, hoping to boost their electoral prospects through raucous othering. For part of the commentariat, prestige and power amass around those spreading alarmist fears of a ‘takeover’ of western societies.

It is within such an environment that James McDougall’s new book, Worlds of Islam: A Global History, has emerged as a beautifully written and highly readable survey of Islam as a global force. What McDougall shows – in a tone the book describes as ‘humane’ – is that the secret of Islam’s global force has been less through the type of coercive power it is so often associated with in contemporary commentary, but, instead with its pragmatic adaptability. Islam’s expansion was rapid and, within two decades of the Prophet’s death, had reached as far as the gates of China’s Tang dynasty where it first settled in Guangzhou. Indeed, one of Islam’s oldest mosques (at least, according to Muslim folklore) was established there, the Huaisheng Mosque. Driven by trade, this wealthy port city in southern China was an obvious landing point for Muslim merchants who had taken to the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.

‘The world that Muslims had made was tied together by worldly interests and material goods, by merchants, money, and trade winds, at least as much as by religious teaching and spiritual values, itinerant scholars and wandering Sufis’, McDougall writes. About 600 years later, those very trading routes would also lead to the establishment and proselytisation of Islam in Indonesia, now the world’s most populous Muslim nation. McDougall observes:

Merchants were noted, too, for their displays of piety through charitable works and frequent pilgrimage (also, often, an opportunity for business). In keeping with both a concern for the ethical propriety of trade and the open, community-oriented nature of religious learning, many merchant families combined accumulating wealth with gaining distinction in hadith collection [narrated Prophetic tradition] and legal scholarship. In the absence of a separate clergy or professional priesthood, many legal scholars up to the eleventh century either came from merchant families, or engaged in trade themselves.

As these merchants settled in what might be called the peripheries of the Muslim world, intermarried, and integrated, McDougall shows how their Islam was deeply influenced by the prevailing environments in which it took root. Far from eroding those cultures, it adapted and eventually found its place. In many ways, this malleability has been crucial to Islam’s spread, allowing it to encompass traditions as diverse as the asceticism of north Africa’s whirling dervishes, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, the Sufi tariqas of South Asia, the scholarship of Ibn Khaldun, Rumi, and Iqbal, and, yes, even the nihilism of Osama bin Laden.

It was the actions of the latter in 2001 that first sparked a highly caricatured debate in the West about what Islam actually is. Put another way, Bin Laden prompted a discussion about whether there is a ‘true’, or ‘authentic’ Islam lying at the nexus of its various source bases consisting of the Quran, hadith, qiyas (deductive analogical reasoning), and ijma (consensus; usually that of the Prophet’s immediate companions). President George W. Bush waded into this discussion in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks arguing Bin Laden had presented a ‘distorted’ vision of Islam. ‘The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about’, he said. ‘Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.’ Although not as malignant, Bush’s characterisation of Islam is arguably every bit as mistaken as that of its harshest critics who argue the religion is inherently violent, regressive and incompatible with the modern world.

Scholarship like McDougall’s not only reveals how the lived experience of Islam is one of malleability and adaptation to the localities in which it became manifest; it also demonstrates that Islam is a faith which finds expression in the grey zone between scripture and interpretation. This view was once neatly captured by the most unlikely of sources, Omar Bakri Mohammed. A Syrian refugee who fled Saudi authorities in the late 1980s, he managed to settle in London and, from there, become one of the men most responsible for the spread of radical Islam across Europe. A number of his acolytes from across the European continent and the United Kingdom later died fighting for ISIS. His most famous student, Anjem Choudary, was effectively sentenced to life imprisonment in July 2024. Bakri was himself exiled from the UK in 2005, after the 7/7 bombings, and has been in Lebanon ever since. Speaking a few days after those attacks, he described Islam as ‘a message of peace for those who want to live with the Muslims in peace… but Islam is a message of war for those who declare war against Muslims’.

Like Bakri himself, the statement is clumsy and inelegant, obsessed with confrontation and laced with menace – but it is also instructive when considered in its broadest setting. Probably without realising it, Bakri illuminated the inherently constructivist nature of Islam, an iridescent and kaleidoscopic doctrine in which an expansive swathe of humanity is tasked with interpreting the divine: a burden of ‘one God, many peoples’, as McDougall puts it.

Muslims face two particularly unique challenges in this regard. The first is that Islam lacks a formal, centralised ordination process or clergy. While a self-styled rabbi or priest would be quickly exposed for their lack of credentials earned through a recognised process, anyone can call themselves an ‘imam’ or ‘sheikh’. Although both terms are used as markers for religious prominence, neither is inherently tied to Islamic practices. Linguistically speaking, both are used in the Arabic language as honorific markers. Thus, for years, Choudary marketed himself as ‘sheikh’ despite reading law at Southampton University and having never formally studied Islam in any recognised setting. Much more so than its Abrahamic counterparts, Islam is therefore built upon highly democratised foundations, a religion of contested praxis between those vying to both shape and steer its trajectory.

Those intent on charting a path of confrontation with modernity and, by extension, the West can find much grist to their mill from within Islamic sourcing. ‘The Quran recounts human history as a story of repeated warnings sent to the peoples of the earth’, McDougall writes. ‘As the Quranic stories went, such warnings, and the divinely inspired prophets who brought them, were all too often ignored, with calamitous results for humankind.’

This illuminates the second challenge Islam faces, stemming from the story it tells itself about its own existence – that it is humanity’s last chance at salvation. Regarding itself as a restorative correction to both Judaism and Christianity, Islam’s version of history is a teleological one. The story of its revelation is predicated on a belief that both of its predecessors were once the ‘true’ faith of God but that, over time, their messages became too diluted and distorted. They were therefore necessary but insufficient. Thus, when talking about the Jewish and Christian experience, for example, the Quran says, ‘they distorted the words of the Scripture and neglected a portion of what they had been commanded to uphold’. This explains the dogged, trenchant stubbornness of reactionaries and their rage against modernity, or the idea of religious compromise. Give an inch, and the entire faith risks condemning itself to the fate of its predecessors, which, in turn, negates the entire reason for Islam’s very existence. With the revelation of Islam, the Quran tells believers that God ‘completed my favour upon you’. This idea of Islam as the last testament and humanity’s final chance of salvation, therefore, underscores why some elements within it bristle so vehemently against anything other than literal absolutism.

While McDougall is concerned with Islam as a human experience, Morrissey looks at its scriptural exegesis in The Renewal of Islam: Thinkers and Believers of the Modern Era. An intellectual historian of the Islamic world, Morrissey unpicks the philosophical framework of Muslim scholars and thinkers grappling with modernity by considering the works of various mujaddid, or ‘renewers’. According to a Prophetic saying, every century will experience a mujaddid who comes to renew or revive the religion. This process of renewal is invested with profound significance because normative Islamic theory holds that a true mujaddid will be characterised by someone who guards authentic Islamic practice from heretical innovation. The unspoken corollary, of course, is that such figures protect it from backsliding into the same fate as that of its predecessors, although contestations rage over who truly deserves the title.

Until the ascension of Mohammed bin Salman to the de facto leadership of Saudi Arabia, much of the country’s official literature commonly referred to Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab – known as the father of ‘Wahhabi’ Islam – as a mujaddid. As a scholar concerned with maintaining the doctrinal purity of Islamic monotheism, he provided the kingdom’s ruling al-Saud family with the religious sanction they needed to establish the modern Saudi state. ‘In the view of the Wahhabis themselves, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was above all a mujaddid’, Morrissey writes. ‘Wahhabi chroniclers write of how God had “opened the breast” of the Najdi [central Arabian province from which he originated] renewer, an expression that is used about the Prophet in hadith corpus.’

As Mohammed bin Salman has sought to pivot Saudi Arabia onto a more modern footing in recent years, he has downplayed the centrality of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in national folklore. In the process, he has revealed just how subjective the appellation remains. Speaking to Abdullah al-Mudaifer, a prominent Saudi journalist, in 2021, about his vision for Saudi Arabia’s future, Bin Salman outlined a daring programme of legal reforms which challenged many of the kingdom’s more regressive laws. He explained:

If Sheikh Mohammed bin Abd al-Wahhab were with us today and he found us committed blindly to his texts and closing our minds to interpretation and jurisprudence while deifying and sanctifying him he would be the first to object to this. There are no fixed schools of thought and there is no infallible person. We should engage in continuous interpretation of Quranic texts and the same goes for the sunnah [tradition] of the Prophet, and all fatwas should be based on the time, place, and mindset in which they are issued.

In a way, Bin Salman was outlining his very own programme of renewal. This consisted of invoking the jurisprudential principle of al-maslaha al-mursalah, which means to act in the overall public good, or public interest. Within the context of Islamic law, this means doing so in a way that promotes the overall aims and objectives of the shariah, which are known as the maqasid al-shariah. In the process, he opens up much of Islamic law to subjective interpretation. In this respect, Saudi Arabia has been much slower than its Emirati neighbour to publicly engage with a programme of religious renewal that stresses toleration and moderation, while also placing Islam at peace with the modern world. Now it is racing ahead.

Morrissey helps us understand these trends by showing how this is far from a modern phenomenon. Drawing on the work of Ibn Arabi, a 12th-century Andalusian mystic who developed the concept of wahdat al-wujud (the unity of existence), he shows how Muslim thinkers cultivated ‘an open-minded view of religious diversity’. It is a concept as interesting as it is controversial among Islamic scholars. Wahdat al-wujud posits that God is the only reality and that all creation is merely a reflection of God and is dependent on the divine for its own actualisation. An easy way to think of this is to consider your image in a mirror. The image is not actually you, but is also you, while simultaneously being incapable of independent existence. When extended to religion, it elevates all religions to the same status by imbibing them with the purpose of the one, true creator.

Much like McDougall’s work, which showcases the importance of Islam’s experience at its periphery, Morrissey also explores experiences beyond the Arab world including in the Indian subcontinent. This is where the concept of wahdat al-wujud found its greatest expression in the 20th century in the work of Abul Kalam Azad, a scholar-turned-politician. He moved the idea beyond its esoteric framing in Sufi texts and adapted it for political purpose in the subcontinent, which he regarded as becoming dangerously fractured along confessional lines, making him a vocal and prominent opponent of partition. When momentum for the idea gathered steam, Azad pushed back with impassioned pleas for the maintenance of India’s unity. The very idea of dividing the subcontinent was an affront to God’s unitary design and divorced Muslims from their Hindu counterparts with whom they are divinely bound. ‘The unity of man is the primary aim of religion’, he lamented.

Neither McDougall nor Morrissey have written their books as explicit interventions to the current febrility that characterises so much of the public discourse about Islam’s place in the West, but their works are vital interventions, nonetheless. Their authoritative but unobtrusive expositions in a supposedly post-expert era move us beyond a hackneyed and essentialised depiction of a faith that is professed by around one quarter of humanity. Those promoting such a view, McDougall argues, are more often than not engaging in more ‘self-promoting paranoid fantasy than historically informed, judicious realism, but that has not prevented it from selling well’.