Soon after the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, which eventually led to the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar criticised the action on her X account, remarking that the US “apparently loves to strike Muslim countries during Ramadan”.

Implicit in her framing is the portrayal of “Muslim countries” exclusively as victims of a non-Muslim US/West. While this narrative is easy and compelling, the reality of world politics, or more specifically, contemporary Muslim politics, is much more complicated. For it is precisely in this holy month of Ramzan that two Muslim countries who also happen to be Islamic states—Pakistan and Afghanistan—are at war with each other.

Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam is an insightful book that highlights the fault lines within what is understood as “global Islam” by Muslim thinkers themselves: a political force with an international mission that required ordinary Muslims to play an active role in its fulfilment.

How does a religion become a modern political idea with an end goal? And who bears the responsibility for acting upon it? Devji begins by contrasting the 18th century Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir of Delhi, for whom “Islam” consisted of ritual practices, with Altaf Hussain Hali, who wrote 70 years later.

By Hali’s time, Islam “had become the proper name of an actor in its own right”. Devji argues that Islam became a subject “by displacing traditionally religious and political forms of authority” at a time of Europe’s rising power. For a medieval thinker like Abu’l Fazl, the author of Ain-i-Akbari, royalty was proof that God loved the earth. For him to imagine the ordinary Muslim as the bearer of responsibility for Islam would have been difficult. But during colonialism, many influential modern Muslim thinkers made a break with older ideas of sovereignty and elevated the ordinary Muslim as the agent responsible for Islam.

Like G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Devji’s Waning Crescent is also structured like a Bildungsroman, albeit a more accessible and exciting one. Over six chapters, Devji traces the birth of global Islam as a historical subject, replete with heroes, villains, open and hidden desires, violent conflicts, transformations, and possible conclusions. Ultimately, the reader realises that the global vision of Islam championed by the Muslim men (and the occasional women) who figure in this book was an unattainable ideal. The displacement of responsibility from a centralised elite to the commons did not produce the intended results.

Pro-Pakistan Muslim thinkers saw Islam as a self-regulating system that needed no sovereign power. Muhammad Iqbal saw the concept of sovereignty as an idol, while for Abul Ala Maududi, Islamic scholar and the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, sovereignty was “a theological rather than a political category and so belonged to God alone”. And thus, Pakistan became the only modern state to renounce sovereignty explicitly in its constitution.

In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini viewed the role of the “Supreme Leader of Iran” as that of the guardian of the Iranian Revolution, and he saw the revolution as a continuing process beyond the state, dispersed among the people.

But it is in practice that the theory is tested. Pakistan’s renunciation of sovereignty has been rhetorical, not real. If we followed the works of Carl Schmitt, a thinker Devji also engages with in the book, sovereignty lies in the ability of a state (or any other actor) to decide who its friends and enemies are. The Pakistani state has been declaring internal and external enemies since its formation. Its recent decision to go to war with Afghanistan is a secular decision, whose sovereign nature cannot be transposed to God.

In Iran, when Khomeini elevated the “people” as co-authors of the revolution, it was only a certain section of the people. Neither monarchists nor anarchists would be considered “people” in Islamic Iran; both, along with other dissidents, suffered after the revolution. The brutal fangs of the regime were bared when people’s protests shook Iran in January 2026. The clampdown led to the deaths of thousands of protesters.

But before the government could stabilise, the ongoing US-Israeli strikes killed Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor, along with several high-profile military and political figures. Only time will tell if the old guard can consolidate or if new people can replace it. Whatever may be the case, the Islamic Revolution is over in Iran.

The brutality of ISIS and Al Qaeda was intended as a means to better all humanity, according to their protagonists. This is not unprecedented and is comparable to the savagery of extreme left groups like the Shining Path or the Khmer Rouge. These are what Devji calls the failed acts of “hollow men”, who resort to nihilistic violence when faced with inevitable defeat.

October 7, 2023 and the consequences of ‘ill-advised’ action

Devji might lose a few friends for calling the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel “ill-advised” and for noting how Hamas “protected its fighters in tunnels while leaving ordinary Palestinians defenceless”. He notes how the language of Hamas after Israel’s fierce retaliation changed from religious vocabulary to humanitarian narratives. The defenders of the October 7 attacks, especially radicals in Western universities, prefer to use secular decolonial language to justify the attacks. Interestingly, some of the most vocal protests for Gaza happened not in Muslim countries but in Western capital cities.

Given the plight of Palestinians, one wonders if radical decolonial rhetoric has replaced theological discourse in a way that serves no constructive purpose. After October 7, the Israeli assault killed over 70,000 Palestinians. Hamas is greatly weakened. Hezbollah is decapitated. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad, a strong supporter of Palestine, was overthrown by an Islamist group that seeks rapprochement with Israel. And now, Iran is being pummelled. One does not celebrate a violent action for spectacle; a political struggle has to weigh it for consequences. That one “ill-advised” terrorist action has redrawn the region in Israel’s favour. Once passions subside, perhaps a sober analysis will take shape.

Global Islam failed to materialise for the same reason that all global ideologies failed. The French thinker Joseph de Maistre put this pithily when he said: “In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians…. But, as for ‘man’, I declare that I have never met him in my life.” Despite the calls for global unity, Muslims live diverse lives as subjects of individual nation states: the primary site of political belonging for the foreseeable future. Just as there is no global “man”, there is no global Muslim. Devji’s concluding discussion of the nature of anti-CAA protests in India and the Kurdish movement in the Middle-East show strong, regionally rooted alternatives to pan-Islamic politics.

A copy of Waning Crescent should be gifted to that controversial French author Michel Houellebecq. In his intelligently “Islamophobic” book Submission, which was published at the time of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, Houellebecq writes about a Muslim political party that takes over France and turns it into an Islamic state. The real target of this state is laïcité, the French idea of secularism. An important character in the book makes two crucial arguments for the rise of Islam. One, laïcité cannot address the problem of anomie (literally, “normlessness”). Two, Islam won because laïcité defeated Christianity. The character makes almost no theological arguments from the Quran. He only tries to prove the political-sociological inevitability of Islam’s success. He could very well be one of the real characters in Devji’s book, who have dislocated God and theology, making Islam instead a subject with a rise and a fall. 

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Karthick Ram Manoharan is Smuts Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.