The End of Islam

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. The first was as a victorious goal to be achieved on a global stage, and the second as an equally global defeat. Both these meanings make sense only when we understand Islam to be an actor in global history. And it is the making of Islam into such an agent that I explore in my book.

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 thought that my original title would expose me to attacks by irate Muslims. But I decided to heed them for another reason, because I thought my preferred title would inadvertently win me readers among anti-Islam activists rather than those interested in the role of ideas in history. I have ventured instead to use my first title for this essay.

CHANGING THE SUBJECT

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).

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. 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.

Mir does not recognise ‘Islam’ as the name of a religion (din) or school (mazhab) but defines it instead as a set of ritual practices comparable to marking one’s forehead and sitting in a temple. ‘Islam’ in his verse names the most specific forms of Muslim worship for which religion and school are the containers. 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.

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. 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: 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).

As in Mir’s couplet, here, too, Islam and religion were distinguished one from the other but with their roles reversed. Islam now represented a broader idea than religion, 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), religious (dindar), or faithful (mumin), that could identify the devout.

Whereas Mir’s abandonment of Islam 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. If it was Mir himself and not Islam who was the subject of his verse, 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.

Islam thus became a protagonist in history 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. And in the 20th century it came to be understood by Muslim liberals but also Islamists as an ideology on the pattern of communism. But this was simply a more systematic way of conceptualising abstract agency in history.

I describe how Islam came to be seen as a subject of this kind and lay out what its implications have been for Muslim life as well as global politics. 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. But each has a distinctive 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.

Having been born in history it could now be imagined dying in it as well. And the anxiety of such an ending marks its career from the 19th century. To be a Muslim was to live in the shadow of Islam as the true subject of history, while trying to prevent its de­mise in projects of reform and revival that put its agency in doubt.

Islam remains a paradoxical figure with which Muslims enjoy a contradictory relationship. For it emerged as an autono­mous subject 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, now had to compete with one another 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.

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. 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.

Rather than the increasing power of its adherents then, Islam’s globalisation represents their weakness. Its personification as much as expansion into an agent of history 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. The attempt to shape a singular Islam globally has only resulted in a thin and brittle Muslim subject divorced from its more complex past.

This is a predicament that faces all those who struggle with defining human action at the inhuman scale of the globe. But it is addressed by Muslims to put religion and politics into question along with any conventional relationship between them. For, as a protagonist in history Islam was deprived of its theological language despite the belief of its followers. And hav­ing abandoned its traditional authorities for a vision of global agency, Islam also lacks a political language and reality.

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. Like any historical subject, Islam is capable of being defeated, which is what makes its defence so crucial for modern Muslims. God requires no such defence. But what kind of relationship can Muslims have with an Islam indifferent to theology? I describe how Islam stands in for the absent political subjectivity of Muslims individually as well as collectively.

But if it has become a global actor in place of the Muslim community, how might Islam encompass the role of figures like Muhammad? 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. 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. The passions aroused among Muslims by insults to a prophet so much like themselves take the place of his vanishing religio-political role as it is subordi­nated to Islam.

By doubling and so displacing God’s theological agency with its historical one, Islam takes as its opponents equally redoubled forms of idolatry. 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. 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.

Condemning political and religious forms of authority as idolatrous, however, places believers in an unmediated relation­ship with God. And this results in the possibility that they may encroach upon His sovereignty by claiming independent agency for themselves. 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.

This contradictory project often ends by emptying out all agency from the virtuous Muslim individual who thus becomes a curiously opaque figure. 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.

The relationship between Islam and the West is one of anx­ious intimacy and identification rather than difference. This is because Islam as an ungrounded global subject cannot be owned but forever escapes the grasp of those who claim it. 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. Islam therefore needs to be recovered from the West as an alter-ego. The relationship between the two is understood as intensely familiar and even fraternal, which explains the intensity of the violence that occasion­ally mars it.

And finally, I focus on violence by attending to the consequences of imputing such a negative character to Muslim subjectivity. In it I track a shift from the posthu­mous subject of martyrdom 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. In both the ideal Muslim must vanish to be replaced by a digital doppelganger.

Apart from God in the theological imagination, any historical protagonist attributed with life must also meet with its death. The enlivening of Islam as a subject in history, therefore, was inevitably linked to fore­bodings about its ending. 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. 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.

None of the great Muslim mobilisations of recent years has invoked Islam as a subject or even cause. From the Arab uprisings of 2010 to the 2020 protests over citizenship laws in India, and from the Green Movement of 2009 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, including protests over the Gaza war which have been remarkably muted in the Muslim world. Their participants have neither championed religion nor for the most part repudiated it, while their politics remains experimental and unanchored in any received model.

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. 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. 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.

agent of historyAltaf Hussain HaliCairoEnd of IslamMir Taqi Mirreligion’s journeyTahrir Square