King's College London

The modern tendency to treat Islam as a globalised historical actor - neither fully religious nor fully political - was at the centre of a wide-ranging discussion led by Professor Faisal Devji in a recent event at King’s College London.

Drawing on his new book, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, Devji examined how, from the late nineteenth century, Islam came to be narrated less as a tradition rooted in scripture and more as an impersonal force moving through world affairs.

Devji, Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford, argued that this shift emerged from the crisis of Muslim sovereignty under European imperial expansion.

As imperial structures eroded, ordinary Muslims came to stand in for Islam itself, while older authorities - monarchs, clerics, and empire - receded from view. Yet this democratisation of representation introduced conceptual tensions.

Once cast as a civilisation or ideology, Devji suggested, Islam becomes harder to define or contain, even as it is pulled into ideological, geopolitical, and cultural conflicts.

A key theme of the event was the political afterlife of this transformation. When Islam is imagined as perpetually under siege, Devji argued, public debate gravitates towards identifying external threats rather than engaging with theological argument. The result is a familiar paradox: heightened moral and legal intensity paired with declining collective agency.

These dynamics, he noted, help illuminate contemporary debates on blasphemy, militant mobilisation, and the recurring depiction of Islam itself - rather than Muslims acting through institutions - as the protagonist of political events.

The conversation brought these ideas into dialogue with wider historical debates through two discussants. Dr David Motadel, Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, reflected on how global crises and modern statecraft helped produce “Islam” as a category within international politics.

Dr Karthick Ram Manoharan, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the National Law School of India University and Smuts Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, highlighted what is obscured when Islam is abstracted from everyday political life and reappears mainly as a universalised idea that can be invoked by states and movements alike.

These discussions took place at an event held on Wednesday 11 February 2026 at the Strand Campus and hosted by the King’s India Institute. An engaged audience took the conversation further during a wide-ranging Q&A, exploring questions of secularism, the limits of “global” categories, and the political spaces that open when older ideological frameworks lose credibility.

While contemporary movements across Muslim societies increasingly mobilise around nationalism, class, or populism, attendees noted the continuing struggle to establish broad-based legitimacy.

The event underscored a growing scholarly interest in how religious traditions become global historical objects - and the political consequences of that transformation for authority, identity, and agency today.