Faisal Devji's "Waning Crescent"

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.

Devji applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, and reported the following:

A reader chancing on page 99 of my book would get a good idea of its argument. The book tells the story of how Islam came to be understood as a protagonist in history. From the second half of the 19 th century, it steadily lost meaning as a word describing Muslim acts of devotion to become a subject in its own right. Coinciding with the diminution of Muslim sovereignty within European empires, this new understanding of Islam not only displaced the political agency of Muslims but also the theological agency they attributed to God and Muhammad. On page 99 I deal with one way in which both these forms of agency were rendered impossible.

Unlike the generality of colonised intellectuals who sought to recover their sovereignty, Islamist thinkers were deeply suspicious of its unregulated violence in colonial and other modern states. Like the anarchists from whom many Islamists took inspiration, they wanted to deprive the nation-states succeeding colonial rule of the violent potential of sovereignty. And they did so by claiming that sovereignty, seen as the authority to create as much as suspend and override the law, could only belong to God. As such it could not be exercised by men, with the state having to conform instead to the divine law as interpreted by Muslim scholars who worked outside its remit and so represented society or rather social as opposed to political power.

Pakistan, which became the world’s first Islamic Republic in 1956, has therefore been extraordinarily innovative by abjuring sovereignty in all three of its constitutions. Rather than preventing its exercise, however, the refusal to vest sovereignty in any institution or, indeed, the people, ended up making it a free-floating possibility that has continued to haunt Pakistani politics. There it is manifested most frequently in the military coup, ironically the purest or most excessive act of sovereign power outside the law. The workings of Pakistani politics, of course, are not determined by this constitutional feature alone, but are nevertheless legitimised and make thinkable by it.

The constitutional history of Pakistan shows us how a sovereignty handed into God’s keeping is not only denied its citizens but premised upon God’s own expulsion from political life. For the divine law is meant to be seen as a form of self-governance by and within society and not the state. And it represents not the people, who are as liable to usurp God’s sovereignty as any politician or general, but Islam itself as the true subject of Muslim history.

Learn more about Waning Crescent at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Impossible Indian.

--Marshal Zeringue