Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam

Devji, Faisal

ISBN 10: 030027663X / ISBN 13: 9780300276633

Published by Yale University Press, 2025

About this Item

No marks in text. No inscriptions etc. Not a library book. (This description is of this specific book.) Ships today in a cardboard enclosure. Tim's Used Books, open shop in Provincetown, Massachusetts, providing good books at reasonable prices on the same spot since 1991. shelf CL.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 030027663X
• ISBN 13: 9780300276633
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.