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Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam
A compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor
Until the nineteenth century, Islam was understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam’s birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim sovereignty in the age of European empire, provided a way of thinking about agency in a global context, with an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics having the potential to represent the human race itself as a newly empirical reality.
Ordinary Muslims, now recognized as the privileged representatives of Islam, were freed from traditional forms of Islamic authority. However, their conception of Islam as an impersonal actor in history meant that it could not be defined in either religious or political terms, and that its existence as a civilizational and later ideological subject deprived figures like God or the Prophet of their theological subjectivities while robbing the Muslim community of its political agency. Devji illuminates this history and explores its ramifications for the modern Muslim world.
Until the nineteenth century, Islam was understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam’s birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim sovereignty in the age of European empire, provided a way of thinking about agency in a global context, with an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics having the potential to represent the human race itself as a newly empirical reality.
Ordinary Muslims, now recognized as the privileged representatives of Islam, were freed from traditional forms of Islamic authority. However, their conception of Islam as an impersonal actor in history meant that it could not be defined in either religious or political terms, and that its existence as a civilizational and later ideological subject deprived figures like God or the Prophet of their theological subjectivities while robbing the Muslim community of its political agency. Devji illuminates this history and explores its ramifications for the modern Muslim world.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published August 26, 2025
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August 3, 2025
Book Review: Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam by Faisal Devji
Rating: 4.8/5
A Paradigm-Shifting Study of Islam as a Global Historical Actor
Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent is a revelatory examination of how Islam transformed from a theological tradition into an impersonal historical force during the 19th and 20th centuries. By tracing this shift—sparked by the collapse of Muslim sovereignty under European empire—Devji argues that Islam’s reconceptualization as a civilizational subject liberated ordinary Muslims from clerical authority but also depoliticized their agency. His thesis, which bridges intellectual history and political theory, shifts the world on its axis by challenging Western-centric narratives of modernity.
Emotional Resonance and Personal Reflections
Reading Devji’s analysis of Islam’s waning as a sovereign entity evoked a profound sense of melancholy. His description of how God and the Prophet became theological abstractions in modern Muslim thought forced me to confront the costs of globalization on spiritual subjectivity. Yet, the book’s bold reframing of Islam as a universal empirical reality also stirred hope—particularly in passages exploring how decentralized Muslim communities reclaimed interpretive power.
Devji’s prose is both erudite and accessible, though his dense theoretical interludes (e.g., on secularism and gender) occasionally demand rereading. The chapter on postcolonial Muslim identity politics stands out for its flood of light on contemporary tensions between ideology and faith.
Constructive Criticism
-Chronological Gaps: The book focuses heavily on the 19th–20th centuries; a deeper dive into premodern Islamic conceptions of historicity would strengthen its comparative framework.
-Case Study Imbalance: While Devji’s South Asian expertise shines, the analysis of Arab and Southeast Asian contexts feels abbreviated.
-Future Trajectories: The titular fall of global Islam is provocatively framed but underexplored in the concluding chapters.
Summary Takeaways:
- The Silent Spring of Islamic studies—a book that rewrites modernity’s spiritual map.
- From caliphates to hashtags: Devji decodes Islam’s journey from faith to global actor.
- Essential reading post-9/11: proves Islam’s crisis isn’t extremism—it’s the paradox of universalism.
- Anne Norton meets Edward Said: a tour de force on sovereignty, secularism, and the Muslim imaginary.
- A flare in the darkness for scholars of religion, politics, and decolonial thought.
Gratitude
Thank you to Edelweiss and Yale University Press for the advance copy. Devji’s work is a normative resource for our fractured age.
Final Verdict: A stunning and disarming masterpiece, docked 0.2 for uneven geographic scope, but a must-read for its field.
Why Read It? To grapple with Devji’s central question: Can a faith survive its own emancipation from kings and clerics?
Rating: 4.8/5
A Paradigm-Shifting Study of Islam as a Global Historical Actor
Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent is a revelatory examination of how Islam transformed from a theological tradition into an impersonal historical force during the 19th and 20th centuries. By tracing this shift—sparked by the collapse of Muslim sovereignty under European empire—Devji argues that Islam’s reconceptualization as a civilizational subject liberated ordinary Muslims from clerical authority but also depoliticized their agency. His thesis, which bridges intellectual history and political theory, shifts the world on its axis by challenging Western-centric narratives of modernity.
Emotional Resonance and Personal Reflections
Reading Devji’s analysis of Islam’s waning as a sovereign entity evoked a profound sense of melancholy. His description of how God and the Prophet became theological abstractions in modern Muslim thought forced me to confront the costs of globalization on spiritual subjectivity. Yet, the book’s bold reframing of Islam as a universal empirical reality also stirred hope—particularly in passages exploring how decentralized Muslim communities reclaimed interpretive power.
Devji’s prose is both erudite and accessible, though his dense theoretical interludes (e.g., on secularism and gender) occasionally demand rereading. The chapter on postcolonial Muslim identity politics stands out for its flood of light on contemporary tensions between ideology and faith.
Constructive Criticism
-Chronological Gaps: The book focuses heavily on the 19th–20th centuries; a deeper dive into premodern Islamic conceptions of historicity would strengthen its comparative framework.
-Case Study Imbalance: While Devji’s South Asian expertise shines, the analysis of Arab and Southeast Asian contexts feels abbreviated.
-Future Trajectories: The titular fall of global Islam is provocatively framed but underexplored in the concluding chapters.
Summary Takeaways:
- The Silent Spring of Islamic studies—a book that rewrites modernity’s spiritual map.
- From caliphates to hashtags: Devji decodes Islam’s journey from faith to global actor.
- Essential reading post-9/11: proves Islam’s crisis isn’t extremism—it’s the paradox of universalism.
- Anne Norton meets Edward Said: a tour de force on sovereignty, secularism, and the Muslim imaginary.
- A flare in the darkness for scholars of religion, politics, and decolonial thought.
Gratitude
Thank you to Edelweiss and Yale University Press for the advance copy. Devji’s work is a normative resource for our fractured age.
Final Verdict: A stunning and disarming masterpiece, docked 0.2 for uneven geographic scope, but a must-read for its field.
Why Read It? To grapple with Devji’s central question: Can a faith survive its own emancipation from kings and clerics?
April 12, 2026
This book looks at how Islam became a factor in global politics, from the 19th century until today. This is an important topic, but I think the author fell into the trap that so many scholars of ideology do, which is to look at ideology without considering the practical factors that impact decisions on the ground.
The author focuses on South Asian Muslims living under the British Empire, who are definitely important in this story, but I thought the author should have considered other interactions between Muslims and the West. For example, there were many Muslims living as colonial subjects of France and Russia (and possibly Germany) at the time as well. There was also increasing Western influence on the Ottoman Empire in this period, but the author ignores those issues as well.
The author provides insights on many different issues, including blasphemy laws, relationships between men and women, depictions of Muhammad, and Islamic law. The author argues that Muslims moved from a focus on theology to a focus on protecting their rights related to these issues, and looks at how they used various aspects of British law and custom to justify these changes. However, the author never really explains what the more traditional theological position on these topics would be, so the contrast with new, anti-colonial thinking is not as great.
I think the author's overall point was that Muslims were often more concerned about discrimination than they were about traditional theology, and saw their situation more as that of a minority that was being discriminated against than as people facing theological hostility. In many ways, Muslims' views seem to have developed under the British Empire during the Victorian period, and they maintained Victorian attitudes about some of these values (particularly about men and women) long after they had lost support in the West.
The author also argues that the basics of Islamic thought have not changed much since the 19th century. He argues that this will mean the eclipse of Islamism in the medium term. I am not sure about this, as many ideologies from the 19th and 20th centuries seem to be making a comeback, and truly novel ideologies are in short supply. The book itself focuses mostly on the 19th century, and includes much shorter sections on developments on each topic in the 20th and 21st centuries. I thought this was a missed opportunity, because while the history is fascinating, it didn't really bring up the issues to the present day. The author seemed to jump from one topic to another quickly and without adequate transition between topics. Still, it provides excellent insights into the British / South Asian connection, and the history behind it.
The author focuses on South Asian Muslims living under the British Empire, who are definitely important in this story, but I thought the author should have considered other interactions between Muslims and the West. For example, there were many Muslims living as colonial subjects of France and Russia (and possibly Germany) at the time as well. There was also increasing Western influence on the Ottoman Empire in this period, but the author ignores those issues as well.
The author provides insights on many different issues, including blasphemy laws, relationships between men and women, depictions of Muhammad, and Islamic law. The author argues that Muslims moved from a focus on theology to a focus on protecting their rights related to these issues, and looks at how they used various aspects of British law and custom to justify these changes. However, the author never really explains what the more traditional theological position on these topics would be, so the contrast with new, anti-colonial thinking is not as great.
I think the author's overall point was that Muslims were often more concerned about discrimination than they were about traditional theology, and saw their situation more as that of a minority that was being discriminated against than as people facing theological hostility. In many ways, Muslims' views seem to have developed under the British Empire during the Victorian period, and they maintained Victorian attitudes about some of these values (particularly about men and women) long after they had lost support in the West.
The author also argues that the basics of Islamic thought have not changed much since the 19th century. He argues that this will mean the eclipse of Islamism in the medium term. I am not sure about this, as many ideologies from the 19th and 20th centuries seem to be making a comeback, and truly novel ideologies are in short supply. The book itself focuses mostly on the 19th century, and includes much shorter sections on developments on each topic in the 20th and 21st centuries. I thought this was a missed opportunity, because while the history is fascinating, it didn't really bring up the issues to the present day. The author seemed to jump from one topic to another quickly and without adequate transition between topics. Still, it provides excellent insights into the British / South Asian connection, and the history behind it.
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April 6, 2026What 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.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Nile Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Nile Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews