Reading Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, 280 Pages, 2025, that traces how Islam ceased to function as a political actor, why the Muselmann reveals the truth of our age, and what forms of Muslim agency may emerge once ideology dissolves and ethical life returns to the centre.
For almost a decade, I have returned to what now strikes me as the most urgent philosophical question of our time: who is the Muselmann? (I retain the historical spelling used by Primo Levi and other survivors.) For Levi, writing in Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), the Muselmann is not as metaphor, nor as archival remnant, but as diagnostic. The figure exposes a political order capable of reducing the human to the brink of disappearance. Much inquiry into Islam and modernity rests on the assumption that Islam remains a political subject of history, able to act, resist, choose, or fail. Yet our century increasingly strains that premise. The decisive question is no longer whether Islam will modernise, democratise, radicalise, decline, or revive, but the one Levi posed in a different register: who is the Muselmann? Giorgio Agamben later made this figure central to his account of modern sovereignty. For him, the Muselmann reveals what power becomes once its moral fictions fall away: the unconscious of modernity, the figure through whom its violence is laid bare.
To begin with, the Muselmann today is to recognise that our political present is structured by forms of abandonment that are global in scale, juridical in mechanism, and racialised in their targets. When entire populations are rendered killable in slow motion, when borders naturalise hierarchy, and when legal vocabularies collapse in the face of mass civilian death, Levi’s categories return.
In this context, asking “Who is a Muselmann?” becomes inseparable from the more urgent question: “Who is a Muslim?” Faisal Devji’s proposition in Waning Crescent suggests that Islam, as a modern political actor, has reached the end of its historical role, highlighting the shift from political agency to ethical sensibility.
Not the end of belief. Not the disappearance of Muslims. But the exhaustion of a secular imagination that required Islam to function as a coherent ideological subject of history.
To understand what ends, and what takes its place, we must begin not in theology but in the political unconscious of modernity, where the Muselmann stands as the emblem of a world that no longer believes in its own universal claims.
Devji and the End of Islam as Historical Agent
No sooner has Levi’s Muselmann forced us to confront the bleakest recess of modernity than another figure intrudes from a different theatre of historical imagination: Francis Fukuyama, announcing in 1989 that history itself had reached its terminus. The Berlin Wall had fallen, communism had crumpled, and liberal democracy—clean, confident, impossibly self-assured—was declared the final vocabulary of human political aspiration. It was a moment thick with triumphalism, a moment in which the West mistook geopolitical contingency for metaphysical certainty. Fukuyama wrote as though the world’s contradictions had not merely paused but resolved themselves; as though the twentieth century, with all its ruins and betrayals, had delivered a conclusive verdict in favour of universal liberalism. It was an argument elegant in form and fantastical in content, a theory of history that required one to ignore most of the world to celebrate the rest. If Fukuyama mistook geopolitical contingency for the end of history, Devji’s intervention shows what happens when endist thinking migrates into the study of Islam itself, producing the illusion that Islam possesses a singular narrative arc capable of rising and declining.
Faisal Devji will have none of this. Waning Crescent refuses the seductions of such endist thinking. Devji is not in the business of declaring epochs closed or certainties achieved. Where Fukuyama offers a victory hymn to liberal modernity, Devji offers a diagnostic excavation: a study of how Islam was transformed into a political protagonist, how that protagonist came to bear impossible conceptual burdens, and why its narrative arc may now be approaching exhaustion. Fukuyama saw an ending and mistook it for a universal horizon; Devji sees an ending and recognises it as the conclusion of a specific, constructed, and contingent narrative form.
Problem of abstraction
Devji’s work has long revolved around a single conceptual anxiety: abstraction. In his earlier books, the question was how a political community becomes unmoored from place, memory or institutional form. In Muslim Zion he showed how Pakistan’s constitutional imagination was deliberately lifted out of history and territory, unlike India’s nationalism, which drew legitimacy from land, soil and myth. Waning Crescent extends this concern to Islam itself, tracing how the shift marks one of the most consequential mutations of modernity.
This problem of abstraction is why the book’s original title, The End of Islam, named the argument more precisely. Devji had in mind a distinctly modern question: not whether Islam could be defeated theologically, but whether a religious tradition that had been remade as a historical agent could imagine its own end in historical time. The “end” thus carried a doubled meaning. It referred both to the culmination of Islam’s global mission and to the exhaustion of Islam as a protagonist capable of shaping world events. The press intervened, wary that the phrase would be misunderstood, yet Devji continues to use it in public because it more directly captures the conceptual riddle: a religion whose very abstraction renders it vulnerable to obsolescence.
To understand how Islam becomes a historical subject, Devji begins, characteristically, with poetry. In Mir Taqi Mir’s eighteenth-century verse,“He has daubed saffron on his forehead and sits in a temple, having long abandoned Islam”, devotion appears as an act of longing rather than identity. Islam is a verb, not a category. By the nineteenth century, that fluidity vanishes. Under colonial modernity, Islam acquires a capital “I” and enters the realm of civilizational discourse. Altaf Hussain Hali’s Madd-o-Jazr-e-Islam marks the rupture. Where Mir expressed personal transcendence, Hali mourned Islam’s decline as a collective subject. Devji reads this moment as revolutionary. Islam becomes something that rises and falls, something that acts and can therefore fail. It becomes comparable to “the West,” to “Christendom,” to “civilization.”
Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular provides the essential armature of this transition. Asad shows how modernity renders religion an object of classification, governance, and abstraction. It becomes “a thing,” detachable from ritual life. Devji inhabits this insight and extends it: once Islam is reimagined as a global abstraction, its theological core is hollowed out. God recedes to the margins; Islam itself becomes an impersonal force, a metaphysical sovereign without metaphysics. It resembles God but can be defeated. It becomes something to be defended and worshipped, yet also something whose defeat can be mourned. A theological category becomes a political protagonist.
The consequences are profound. When Islam assumes the burden of agency, traditional theological authorities weaken. The collapse of kings and clerics produces a vacuum into which new actors step. Reformers, bureaucrats, military men and emergent capitalist classes begin to speak in Islam’s name precisely because Islam has been unmoored from the institutions that once grounded it. As Islam becomes an ideology, its rivals—capitalism, communism, monarchy—also become abstractions. The terrain of struggle shifts from normative theology to metaphysical competition between systems.
The Paradox
Devji’s analyses of sovereignty in Pakistan and Iran expose the paradox. When Abul A‘la Maududi insisted that sovereignty belongs to God alone, he effectively expelled sovereignty from the political order. Invested in God rather than the people, sovereignty reappeared spectrally in the form of the military coup and the Schmittian exception. In Iran, Khomeini, with the doctrine of velayat-e faqih ,went the other way, vesting sovereignty in the state itself, even permitting the suspension of Islamic law in the name of welfare. In both cases, Islam as historical subject displaced God as theological sovereign, producing a politics in which the sacred was hollow yet omnipresent.
Violence follows not from theological excess but from ideological dislocation. The gap between Islam’s inflated ideological agency and Muslims’ shrinking political agency creates a space in which violence becomes a compensatory act. It is the residue of a world in which Muslims are expected to carry the weight of an abstraction that no longer corresponds to their lived moral universe.
This is where Wael Hallaq and Devji map the problem from opposite sides. For Hallaq, Maududi’s project embodies the central contradiction of Islamic modernism. The modern state is not neutral, he argues; it is a comprehensive episteme that absorbs law, ethics, and social life under a single sovereign authority. No invocation of divine sovereignty can undo the structural reality that the state, in the Schmittian sense, remains the final arbiter. Where Hallaq diagnoses the structural impossibility and Devji charts the historical arc. For Devji, the emergence of “Islam” as a sovereign-like global actor, from anti-colonial movements to political Islam, was a historical improvisation forced by the collapse of Muslim empires. Thus, what Devji calls the “end of Islam” today is, in part, the exhaustion of this sovereign posture: Islam no longer functioning as the central protagonist of political struggle.
Devji reads this not as Islamic fanaticism but as modern impotence: violence emerges where political agency collapses. At the centre of Waning Crescent is the figure Devji names the anti-political Muslim subject. This believer renounces state power not out of quietism but out of ethical suspicion. This subject refuses sovereignty to protect transcendence, knowing that power contaminates the sacred. This is not a resignation. It is a moral refusal.
This, for Devji, marks the juncture at which his work departs from that of Cemil Aydin. Aydın charts the emergence of the “Muslim world” as a civilisational category forged under imperial and colonial pressures. He maps the construction of the idea. Devji takes the next step: he maps the moment when that idea begins to act, when Islam becomes a historical subject endowed with agency, vulnerability, and ideological rivals. And he traces the slow dissolution of that subject into market rationality, global capitalism, diasporic cultural forms, and the post-sovereign figures who inherit its debris. Aydın gives the discursive genealogy; Devji gives the arc of agency, abstraction, and decline. Their projects meet in the contemporary terrain of Muslim globality, where capital, culture, and diplomacy replace the older universals of empire and ideology, and where Islam’s afterlife unfolds not as a programme but as a dispersed moral sensibility.\
It is against this backdrop that the problem of Gaza becomes legible. Devji argues that Islam’s long career as a world-making subject is now in eclipse. The modernist, Islamist and jihadist projects he examines sought to fold Muslim life into a universal Islamic agency. Today, those projects appear spent. Across the uprisings of the twenty-first century—from Cairo and Tehran to Delhi and, most recently, the global mobilisations for Gaza—the political imagination no longer invokes Islam as banner or battleground. The dominant language has become that of human rights, genocide, international law and global justice. Even in a catastrophe saturated with Islamic affect, Islam itself is not the organising principle of political action. The few exceptions, such as the Iranian state, only underline the rule.
But what happens when a tradition shaped by such suspicion encounters the storms of the modern world? What becomes of agency when believers refuse the only political forms on offer?
Devji answers that the end of Islam marks the end of a particular secular fantasy, not the end of Muslim political life.
Islam Beyond Sovereignty, Beyond Ideology
Devji shows that modern Islam and the modern West were forged in a peculiar intimacy, epitomised by figures like Wilfrid Blunt who imagined Islam as Britain’s civilisational counterpart. What is now ending is not Islam as faith or practice but a distinctly modern, secular-historicist fantasy—initiated by Blunt and later amplified by reformers, anti-colonial nationalists, and Islamist ideologues—that casts Islam as a unified geopolitical actor capable of rivalling the great “isms” of the twentieth century. Modern states, international law, and global governance reproduced this fiction by treating Islam as a civilisational unit whose reactions could be predicted, managed, or securitised. Devji’s insight is that this structure, never entirely accurate, has finally collapsed: Islam no longer appears as a coherent actor because the stage that once required such a performance has shifted. The script that sustained it has lost credibility.
If Blunt represents the moment when Islam first becomes thinkable as a political protagonist, Devji’s intervention begins where that moment ends. Waning Crescent is not concerned with the fate of belief, nor with the sociology of Muslim life, but with the exhaustion of the narrative form that allowed Islam to be conscripted into the role of a world-historical subject. What collapses is not a religion but a conceit: the idea of Islam as a civilisational actor, capable of intention, rise and decline, and imagined as a rival to the ideologies of the twentieth century. The fading of that imaginary does not leave conceptual wreckage; it clears intellectual space for forms of agency and ethical presence obscured by a century of ideological projection.
It is at this juncture, when the ideological brightness has dimmed and the scaffolding of sovereignty no longer holds, that Devji’s argument becomes most pointed.
The conceptual terrain Devji traverses resonates with three major interlocutors of contemporary Islamic thought: Talal Asad, Wael Hallaq, Taha Abderrahmane and Asef Bayat. Each helps clarify a different dimension of his argument, and together they map the intellectual horizon against which Waning Crescent takes shape. As well, for each reveals, in a different vocabulary, what may survive the eclipse of Islam-as-protagonist.
Against both the incompatibility thesis and the sovereign arc, Abderrahmane offers a conceptual alternative. His ethics of amāna, trusteeship, rejects the sovereignty paradigm altogether. Political authority is not the power to decide but a moral responsibility rooted in divine trust. In Abderrahmane’s vision, Islam’s political future is neither the Schmittian state Maududi imagined nor the sovereign mask Devji historicizes, but a post-sovereign ethic in which governance is grounded in moral vocation rather than sovereign command.
Islam After Representation and After the State
Asad’s challenge goes to the root. Asad, the anthropologist whose work on secularism and discursive tradition reshaped the study of religion, reminds us that “Islam,” understood as a unified and comparable entity, is not an ancient given but a category shaped by the secular–religious distinctions through which modern governance orders the world. Speaking of Islam’s “future” or “decline” repeats the assumption that Islam exists as a single object moving through historical time. Asad’s anthropology reveals a different order of continuity: Islam as a discursive tradition sustained through practice, prayer, discipline, memory, and argument, rather than through ideological coherence or political form.
Islam ceases to appear as a protagonist because the secular frame that once required religions to behave as historical actors has itself weakened. What fades is the representational fiction; what persists is the lived tradition.
If Asad deconstructs the category, Hallaq dismantles the political form that sought to embody it. Hallaq, the leading scholar of Islamic law and a theorist of modernity’s structural limits, demonstrates that the Islamic state, central to twentieth-century Muslim political aspiration, is not an unrealised ideal but a structural impossibility. The modern state monopolises violence, manufactures subjects, and absorbs normative authority into its bureaucracy, whereas Sharia historically dispersed authority among jurists and communities, resisting the centralisation and sovereignty demands. Seen through this lens, the waning of ideological Islam coincides with the exhaustion of the very political form into which Muslims attempted to pour their aspirations. Devji’s “anti-political Muslim subject” becomes legible not as resignation but as recognition: the state cannot sustain the ethical architecture Muslims hoped to revive. Withdrawal becomes fidelity, not defeat.
Where Hallaq diagnoses, Taha Abderrahmane proposes. Abderrahmane, the Moroccan philosopher of ethics and language, advances an ethics of amāna—trusteeship—that imagines political life grounded in responsibility rather than sovereignty. For Abderrahmane, moral action precedes and exceeds institutional form; it cannot be nationalised or absorbed by the state. Trusteeship offers a language for Muslim political agency that does not depend on state power or ideological programme. It is an ethics without architecture, a politics without the burden of representation. While Devji does not articulate such a vocabulary directly, Abderrahmane reveals the register at which Devji’s argument resonates: Islam may endure not through civilisational assertion but through ethical inhabitation, not through sovereignty but through responsibility.
Agency Without Ideology
Asef Bayat shifts attention away from the state altogether. Bayat, the sociologist of social movements and everyday urban life, shows in his accounts of post-Islamism, street politics, and daily encroachment that agency emerges in the ordinary adjustments through which people bend rigid structures to their needs. Political Islam may wane as an ideology. Bayat offers the sociological counterpart to Devji’s conceptual argument: once ideology recedes, agency does not disappear. It fragments, relocates, and thrives where no grand narrative announces its presence. It is in this register of ordinary, ethical agency, rather than ideological assertion, that figures like Zohran Mamdani. become legible as inheritors of Islam’s moral grammar without its civilisational burden.
His politics is not “Islamic” in formal terms, yet it is shaped by an ethical inheritance recognisable within the Islamic tradition: an orientation toward justice, care, and responsibility. Mamdani exemplifies the post-ideological Muslim subject Devji intimates, a civic actor neither stewarding an abstraction nor performing a civilisational claim, but embodying an ethical sensibility that does its work without needing to declare itself.
Gaza Genocide and the Gulf States’ Tightrope walk
Gaza reveals the divergence between state actors operating within a post-Islamic geopolitical order and Muslims acting through ethical conscience. The strategic silence of many Gulf states during the Gaza war becomes legible, for much of the twentieth century, these states claimed a custodial role over Islam as a civilisational project, speaking in the name of an abstract “Islamic world” whose political destiny they were presumed to guide. Devji shows that this mode of agency has waned. Islam no longer functions as a collective subject of history, the bearer of a universal programme capable of organising political life.
What now animates political action, instead, is the figure of the Muslim: not an ideological formation but a dispersed ethical presence whose responses emerge from conscience rather than institutional authority. Gaza exposed this shift with unusual clarity. Gulf governments calibrated their silence through the calculus of alliances, investment flows, modernisation projects, and external security guarantees. Their language was procedural and humanitarian, but deliberately insulated from religious solidarity—signalling their full embedment in the infrastructures of the contemporary international order. They acted not as representatives of Islam but as post-Islamic states whose legitimacy now depends on global markets, security architectures and technocratic modernity.
Meanwhile, their publics responded as Muslims. They acted from moral injury, historical memory, and an affective sense of belonging that exceeds the state’s diplomatic scripts. The tension between official restraint and popular outrage thus marks precisely the transition Devji describes: Islam recedes as a civilisational actor at the very moment that Muslim ethical life becomes more visible, more global, and more politically resonant. Gaza lays bare the fracture between the geopolitical rationalities of the state and the ethical intuitions of the Muslim, revealing a world in which ideology has faded but moral agency has not.
The Productive Limits of Devji’s Method
My critique extends Devji’s argument by showing that his conceptual history, while elegant, risks eliding the lived terrain in which the Muselmann reappears—not as metaphor but as the embodied cost of abstraction. Positioning Devji alongside Talal Asad, Wael Hallaq, and Asef Bayat clarifies not only the reach of his argument but also the contours of its limits.
The first of these limits is methodological. Devji writes with a crystalline precision that gives his narrative its philosophical beauty, but it also thins the historical atmosphere in which his concepts operate. After reading him against Asad, Hallaq, and Bayat, the contrast becomes unmistakable. Devji offers the metaphysics of Islam’s transformation, not its social or institutional thickness. He illuminates how the idea of Islam becomes an actor, but less how that abstraction is lived, resisted, or reconfigured by the communities who inhabit it.
This leads directly to the second limitation: sovereignty. Against the backdrop of Hallaq’s frontal dismantling of modern sovereignty’s compatibility with Islamic governance, Devji’s treatment of sovereignty appears over-theorised and under-historicised. He brilliantly exposes the conceptual paradoxes of Pakistan’s divine sovereignty clause or Iran’s hyper-statist velayat-e faqih, yet these analyses remain at a high altitude. Absent are the administrative and bureaucratic histories that made such forms of sovereignty possible: Ottoman legal reform, British codification, French colonial bureaucracy, and the postcolonial consolidation of petro-authoritarian rule. Devji gestures to these worlds, but he rarely lingers in them.
A third limitation becomes visible when held against Bayat’s work. If Bayat’s Post-Islamism maps the everyday textures—the ethics, improvisations, and social worlds—through which Muslims navigate the exhaustion of Islamist politics, Devji renders the same shift in conceptual silhouette. In his hands, Islam as a universal subject becomes an elegant but disembodied figure. We see its abstraction, its ideological rivalries, its displacement of God and the Prophet, but less the affective and devotional landscapes through which ordinary believers experience these transformations. This absence is deliberate, but it leaves a conceptual chassis without the weight of lived practice.
Finally, Devji’s commitment to a decline narrative, Islam’s waning as a global protagonist—risks flattening the complexity of the contemporary Muslim world. The conceptual arc is persuasive, yet it sits uneasily beside the rise of Muslim-majority middle powers such as Turkey, Qatar, and Indonesia; the digital explosion of Islamic discourse; the growth of feminist and reformist movements within Islam; and the renewed political salience of Islam in India, China, and Europe. These trends do not necessarily contradict Devji’s thesis, but they complicate it. They show a world where Islam’s universalism may be waning as political project even as Muslim agency proliferates across new institutional, economic, and cultural forms.
Taken together, these limitations are not defects but invitations. They mark the point where conceptual history meets the demand for thicker historical texture. They open the space into which the final movement of your essay naturally enters: the shift from Islam as historical subject to the Muslim as ethical and political horizon, a shift rendered unmistakable in the mobilisations around Gaza.
What Remains
Devji does not instruct Muslims on what should replace ideological Islam. He performs a different task. He clears the conceptual debris of the twentieth century so that other futures may be imagined. If the twentieth century conscripted Islam into ideological sovereignty, and the twenty-first exposes the ruins of that conscription, the Muselmann reveals the moral cost of that history. He forces us to recognise that the future of Muslim politics cannot lie in abstraction, representation or civilisational postures, but only in an ethics attentive to vulnerability, responsibility and the fragility of life itself.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.
