Interview by Masoud Golsorkhi
Portrait courtesy of Faisal Devji

MG What set you off on the journey with the book?

FD I’ve been interested for some time in the idea that all the most important Islamic movements of the 20th century – militancy, modernism or liberalism, and Islamism or fundamentalism – seem to have run their course. The 21st-century forms of militancy that characterised Al Qaeda and the Islamic State haven’t disappeared exactly, but they no longer produce new thinking, and their political and intellectual lives seem to have declined almost precipitously. I wanted to figure out what was going on. Of course, there are many other movements in the Muslim world, including those linked to older authorities such as the Ulama or clerics and Sufis; but modernism, Islamism and militancy have been by far the most important ones in the 20th and early 21st century.

MG Islamism, of course, had the support of a major partner, the US.

FD Yes. Interestingly enough, even though the Islamists are all very anti-communist, their model is taken from the Soviet Union and, to a lesser degree, from the fascist movements of the early 20th century, as much as the capitalist societies of the West. I should note, however, that they tend not to define themselves in ideological terms in any systematic way. Islamism is interesting because, on the one hand, it gravitates towards a capitalist understanding of society, however controlled, which makes it more familiar to Western liberal society. On the other hand, it takes its idea of a vanguard party that organises a revolutionary transformation from the Soviet Union. Whether Islamist movements sided with the West or the East during the Cold War, they remained a largely Cold War enterprise. With the end of the Cold War, you see Islamism fragmenting in many, if not most, parts of the world. In the early 21st century, with the end of political movements dedicated to revolutions and ideological states, there was the rise of Islamic forms of militancy, which were highly individualistic and belong to that neoliberal decade or two after the end of the Cold War. These are all movements that have been very powerful intellectually, and to some degree politically, but they seem to have run out of steam more recently. What I wanted to do in this book is to look at the way they arose and how they declined. Of course, these movements are very much set against each other, so the Islamic modernists or liberals are not necessarily fond of the Islamists and vice versa. Neither has any fondness for the militants who emerged at the very end of the 20th century and in the early 21st century. Nevertheless, you can take them together, because, as I argue, they all work with a concept of Islam founded by liberals towards the end of the 19th century. And that concept is of Islam as a subject, a protagonist in history, and as an agent of history. It acts, it wants you to do things, and it desires things – and it includes all Muslims and their beliefs and their practices. 

MG The movements you talk about may have run out of ideological runway, but there’s much evidence that they continue to be in the world in many forms. Is there something that transcends them – a flavour of an idea?

FD There are many continuities. When you look at the Arab Spring, the way in which its protests caught on from one Muslim country to another, across North Africa and the Middle East to the Persian Gulf, was extraordinary. None of them make use of the language of Islam, though many of the people involved are deeply observant Muslims, but then so are many of their enemies. They bring to mind protests over insults to the prophet that spread from one Muslim population to another, each one imitating the other initially through print and television and then social media. There is a modular form that these protests take. They combine Muslims in all kinds of ways, but they can no longer be defined purely in the terms of Islam, the way that protests over insulting the Prophet were. The Arab Spring protests had nothing to do with being religious or secular. Islam did not exist in those protests as a global subject, as an agent in its own right, but Muslims did, and that is what I find really interesting – that it’s now possible to think about and talk about Muslim sympathies without invoking Islam as defining them. With Gaza, you see the same thing. People are not sympathising with Hamas as an Islamist group, or making much in the way of Islamic claims about Palestinians. There is a form of identification and emulation that does bring Muslims together, but as individuals who might be part of an imagined community where Islam is no longer understood as an actor. I would like to distinguish between Islam as a subject and the Muslim community, let’s call it the Ummah, as a subject. 

MG A lot of liberals might read your book and go, “Yay, hurrah! Islamism is over, and liberalism has triumphed.” What is your response to this way of thinking?

FD Well, Islamic liberalism has collapsed along with Western liberalism. It’s not like something horrible has happened to Islam that hasn’t happened to non-Islam. What I’m trying to argue is that Islam is as much a part of world history as anything else – they are interconnected. There are different trajectories and forms of criticism and kinds of ideas that come up. But what I don’t want to do is suggest that Islam has its own inherent history that is separate from everyone else’s. That is certainly not the case. Islamic liberalism collapses as strains of liberalism break down in the West, alongside Cold War understandings of revolutionary and ideological states. No one really knows what comes next; all we can do is look at the auguries. I end my book with some interesting movements for which Islam is not the subject, but which are Muslim movements, and include deeply religious people. They don’t call themselves secular, so they can’t be judged according to that liberal axis of secular versus religious. Whether it’s the Arab Spring, or mobilisations in Iran of various kinds – from the Green movement to the Mahsa Amini protests – the mobilisation of Indian Muslims against repressive citizenship law in India, or the collapse of the Bangladeshi regime. We were always told that the opponents of the Bangladeshi regime were Islamists, and of course, there were Islamists among them, but that collapse did not invoke Islam at all. Just as you see the decline of older Islamic movements, you see the rise and the coming together of Muslim mobilisations around the world. They know each other – they copy each other, and learn from each other. So, there’s something happening. .