Waning Crescent
The Rise and Fall of Global Islam
Published on 28. October 2025
Book
Hardback
280 pages
978-0-300-27663-3 (ISBN)
Description
A compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
"Devji's book casts floods of light on the changes in the Islamic world and the ways in which Muslims understand it. It is indispensable reading if one is to make sense of contemporary developments in Muslim societies."-Charles Taylor, McGill University"Every book Faisal Devji writes is important. This biography of Islam as an historical actor is daring, learned, occasionally outrageous, invariably revelatory. Here there is no deference to the Western gaze. Devji gives us not only a study of Islam, but a study of modernity that shifts the world on its axis."-Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania
"Waning Crescent is an absolute tour de force about Islam becoming a historical subject and global actor. A keen eye for detail and connections accompanies its crucial theoretical interventions about sovereignty, secularism, gender, and universalism."-Murad Idris, author of War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought
"Faisal Devji has emerged as the preeminent historian of global religion in its most surprising, intractable, and understudied aspects. His newest book is no less original in its stunning and disarming approach. Waning Crescent forms essential reading for a wide audience that will appreciate its erudition and for those rare acute political observers rightly concerned with the present spell cast by our more oppressing spiritual pasts but also intrigued by the normative resources that may yet be found there."-Hent de Vries, author of Miracles et metaphysique and editor of Religion Beyond a Concept
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
526 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-27663-3 (9780300276633)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea.