Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously 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: an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics had 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. Its existence as a civilizational and later ideological subject also deprived figures like God and 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 contemporary Muslim world.

Author

Faisal Devji

Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History and a Fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford. He is the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. His work focuses on the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia, with particular attention to violence and non-violence, Islam as a global political category, and efforts to think beyond the nation-state in the postcolonial world.

Discussants

David Motadel

David Motadel is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on modern Europe and Europe’s global entanglements, with particular attention to empire, war, sovereignty, and world order. He is the author of Muslims under German Rule in the Second World War (Harvard University Press) and The Shah’s Great Tour: Global Monarchy in the Imperial Age (Oxford University Press), and the editor or co-editor of several volumes on global and imperial history. His current work examines Europe’s empires in the era of the Second World War and the global structures of authority in the age of empire. Motadel’s scholarship seeks to place European history in comparative and global perspective, drawing on multi-archival research across continents.

Karthick Ram Manoharan

Karthick Ram Manoharan is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the National Law School of India University and is currently a Smuts Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge (October 2025–June 2026). His work lies at the intersection of political theory, identity, and critical thought, with research spanning caste, religion, political atheism, and political violence. He is the author of Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism and Frantz Fanon: Identity and Resistance, and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Periyar. His current research examines the Indian Emergency and its implications for political theory, engaging critically with thinkers such as Carl Schmitt.