Faisal Devji’s essay in the Open Magazine (August 2025) entitled ‘The End of Islam’ and subtitled ‘Is the religion’s journey as an agent of history over?’, introduces readers to his recently published volume, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam. In his opening reflections, Devji explains his choice of title as an index of the book’s import. He states that the current title replaces the ‘provocative’ original, The End of Islam, which well-wishers feared could expose him to attacks from ‘irate Muslims’. Devji assents, but less from fear of reprisals than from concern that the original caption could ‘inadvertently win [him] readers among anti-Islam activists rather than those interested in the role of ideas in history’. Waning Crescent then consciously targets the cognoscenti, serious scholars of intellectual history rather than Islamophobes (a term he avoids using) seeking more grist to the mill. But does it succeed in this aim?

Devji’s avowed refusal to pander to Islamophobes will reassure readers contemplating the late or postcolonial Islamicate beyond Eurocentric, Westoxicated, and Orientalist frames of analysis. Nonetheless, they may find the replacement title, with its Orientalist notes of evanescence and decline puzzling, and ask, what precisely is the discursive distance between The End of Islam and Waning Crescent, especially as Devji salvages the original, contentious title for his essay. Is the change substantive or tonal; and how might the essay, unlike the book, deter ‘anti-Islam’ visitors? The essay’s silence on these points, and its failure to signpost a robust counter-Islamophobia strategy leaves the book’s methodological and political investments in doubt.

Moving from audiences to aims, the essay notes that Waning Crescent will narrate the process whereby Islam became ‘a protagonist in history, which in the 19th century took the form of a civilisation, conceptualised in Euro­pean thought as an abstract agent whose rise and fall played out on a global stage’. This means delineating Islam’s conversion under colonial rule from being ‘a verbal noun describing a set of ritual practices’ to an agent of history, a subject in itself that ‘for the first time faced the possibility of its end’. ‘Having been born in history it [Islam] could now be imagined dying in it’. Other assertions follow from this intimation of mortality, which Devji weaves into his tableau of Islam’s terminal decline: the displacement of ‘God’s theological agency’, the transposition of idolatry to political formations such as monarchy, the removal of sovereignty from the human domain, the erasure of Muslim agency, and lastly but hardly least, the irrevocable trajectory of failure attending attempts at ‘joining religion to politics’. And this in a magazine that extols the virtues of this sacred project with reference to Hinduism.

Interestingly, Devji’s cascading reflections on Islam’s epochal transformation stem, at least in the essay, from his reading of two couplets, one by Mir (the 18th century Urdu poet who putatively forsakes Islam for saffron in the temple) and another by Hali, the 19th century poet-reformer of Delhi, whose oeuvre laments the decline of Muslim rule under colonialism. Mir and Hali may have been bemused that their poetic utterances in 18th-19th century Delhi would undergird a narrative of irrevocable decline crafted centuries later by a diasporic author housed in an elite metropolitan institution at a moment when the colonial episteme encounters significant damage. Devji begins constructing his edifice of historical rupture on such poetic iterations, but finds he cannot proceed without the Eurocentric scaffolding of teleology (from telos or ultimate goal – the doctrine that history is driven by a singular logic that predetermines the ends that events will take). Nailing civilisational and agential fixtures to his analytical frame with no acknowledgement of the onerous colonial baggage they carry, he undertakes a survey of Islam in colonial India, which subsequently extends to our contemporary ‘global stage’. The essay’s opening, then, suggests that Waning Crescent, notwithstanding the title shift, illustrates the hazards of doing history in an orientalist straitjacket, and stumbling into a teleological trap. Regrettably, the remaining text confirms this. How does this transpire?

Firstly, the argument is tendentious from the outset. The ‘agent in history’ template welds Enlightenment teleology, including a rather impoverished reworking of Hegel, to Orientalism in its purview of Islam. Devji’s analysis disregards the fact that in the 19th century, the ostensible moment of rupture, the Ottoman empire and the Caliphate were still intact, and resistance to European imperial domination flared routinely in Muslim lands, not least British India in 1857. Allied to this wilful myopia is the refusal to explain the exceptionalism ascribed to European colonialism in procuring Islam’s transformation into an agent of history. What of other downturns in Islamicate history, namely the fall of Baghdad, the Crusades, the temporary loss of al Quds, the Iberian Inquisition and their narration by contemporary Islamicate thinkers, for example, Ibn Khaldun? Conversely, what of Islam’s agential, world-making triumphs, such as the formation of vast multiethnic, multifaith imperial states buttressed by elaborate legal, political, constitutional, and administrative apparatuses; the burgeoning corpus of knowledge production, artistic and architectural endeavours; the impressive record of ecumenicalism and pluralism, and so on? And is it really the case that ‘Islam’ only embodied ‘ritual’? What then of rubrics such as dar ul Islam or padshah-i-Islam

The anomalies multiply when Devji, still equipped with the teleological-orientalist toolkit, examines the ‘global’ arena in the postcolonial 20^th century. Curiously, the essay’s account of a historically conditioned Islam marked by the loss of political sovereignty or the transposition of idolatry at this juncture proceeds in a virtually decontextualised vacuum sidestepping the remaking of world order in the 20th century. The cumulative impact of seismic events on the rearticulation of Islam in a transformed world is overlooked. These include two world wars, Ottoman collapse; the abolition of the 1300-year-old Caliphate; the advent of Zionism; the spread of decolonisation; the rise of US supremacy; the outbreak of superpower rivalry; and Soviet collapse. The essay, however, does resurrect, the cliche of 20th century Islam rebranding as ideology or Islamism ‘on the pattern of communism’, reinforcing the conceptualisation of ‘abstract agency in history’. Although the coinage portends univocality, it indexes instead Islam’s multivocality amidst the loss of political sovereignty: ‘the more open Islam became to such claims in the absence of Muslim political power, the less could it be possessed by any single group or polity’. Devji does not interrogate the relation between ideology, multivocality, and sovereignty nor does he explore the significance of Islamism. Teleology coupled with orientalist essentialism in the essay reduces the tapestry of Islamicate history and its possible futures to a monolithic tale of decline.

Secondly, the essay does not escape conceptual laxity. Again, the problem appears at the outset when Devji grapples with the unenviable task of translating the allusive, metaphorical oeuvre of the Delhi poets into prosaic English. The most visible dissonance appears in his conflation of ‘deen’ with ‘religion’, glossed as the domain of ritual, and subsequently mobilised in the etymological caricature of pre-colonial Islam as a ‘verbal noun’ encapsulating this sphere. The lack of criticality regarding the Eurocentric, Enlightenment origins of the term ‘religion’ is concerning. Scholars such as Talal Asad have undertaken pathbreaking work that documents the gendered, Eurocentric, Christian-specific roots of the term as well as its generative role in furthering the colonial mission. These red flags do not disturb Devji’s text, which inscribes ‘Islam’ with a frozen etymological meaning for 14 centuries preceding the Delhi poets’ lamentations, and the intensifying heat of the colonial telos. The possibility that Islam may be more than the sum of its etymological parts, and that it may be part of a discursive tradition spanning 1400 years is something that Devji considers belatedly in the context of postcolonial multivocality when he can append it to this thesis of decline.

Thirdly, Devji’s concluding representation of Muslim political subjectivity in the present day aggregates the pitfalls of the analysis thus far, notably the influence of teleology, orientalism, the preoccupation with abstraction, and the denial of agency. He states,

Rather than the increasing power of its adherents …, Islam’s globalisation represents their weakness. Its personification as much as expansion into an agent of history suggests both their marginalisation and inability to control this new idea and experi­ence of Islam, one whose agency confiscated that of Muslims themselves to the extent of rendering it illegitimate.

This assumption-laden statement begs myriad questions: what is ‘globalisation’? How is it regulated and by whom? If Islam is indeed globalised, who is/are its agent(s)? Who are its ‘adherents’? Are they the surveilled, suppressed, displaced, detained, tortured, slaughtered millions targeted by postcolonial wars of terror, insidious apparatuses of Islamophobic lawfare, western-backed autocrats and liberal scions promoting genocide, aided by accomplices in the media, higher education, the corporate world and elsewhere? Is it the case that Islam is globalised but Islamophobia is not? Does Devji address Islamophobia beyond the niceties of title-setting? Does he interrogate what a global order upholding livestream genocide betokens for Muslim agency?

Devji’s essay does not entertain such questions. Rather, it takes the genre of declinist writing about Islam, represented especially by Bernard Lewis and Olivier Roy, to new levels of incredulity by applying its familiar fixations to new contexts. One striking example obtains towards the essay’s end when Devji draws together disparate events – the Arab spring, anti-state protests in Iran, and the Green movement – to demonstrate that ‘Islam is no longer a subject in these events’. Given the near universally acknowledged fact that counter-revolutionary regimes challenged by the Arab spring singled out political Islam, specifically the Muslim Brotherhood, as a scourge, and pursued its elimination as a core national security and foreign policy goal, it becomes difficult to imagine how the ‘End of Islam’ and Waning Crescent could materialise without forsaking the rigours of scholarship in the ivory tower for the ritual comforts of orientalism, teleology, and eurocentrism.