Religion Without Politics

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan reviews Faisal Devji’s “Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam.”

By Winnifred Fallers SullivanSeptember 21, 2025

• Politics

• Philosophy & Religion

FOR AMERICANS, one of the most iconic images of Islam can be found in Malcolm X’s description of his 1964 visit to Mecca. Near the end of the 1965 Autobiography, Malcolm recounts how, with money loaned to him by his sister, and encouraged by Mahmoud Shawarbi, a University of Cairo professor in the United States on a Fulbright grant to teach at Fordham University, he traveled to Mecca to make the hajj. He then reports his astonishment at what he describes as an experience of universal brotherhood across difference, particularly racial difference:

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug)—while praying to the same God—with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. […]

We were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the “white” from their minds. 

For the very short remainder of his life, which was to end with his murder less than a year later, Malcolm struggled with the apparent contradiction between the new universalist religion to which he had converted and the racially charged Pan-African political life he was helping to bring into being. Breaking with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, he formed both a new mosque and a new political organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a political coalition inspired by his further stops on his 1964 journey, in Nigeria and Ghana, following his pilgrimage.

Almost immediately after his death, there was an effort to replace Malcolm’s crucial role as national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam with what many took to be his conversion to orthodox Sunni Islam, “real” or “true” Islam, or “global Islam.” This effort at the posthumous tidying-up of Malcolm’s life, as historian Edward E. Curtis IV makes clear in his 2002 book Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought, has had the double effect of depoliticizing and whitening Malcolm, universalizing his religion and separating him from the radical Black politics to which he was also committed. One might say that Malcolm was posthumously converted to the separation of church and state—that is, to an apolitical religion, on one hand, and a secular politics, on the other.

With the premature resolving of what Curtis calls his “dual identity,” Malcolm was then robbed by his murder of the potential for the alternative politics of a Black Islam that was to develop after his death. The violent politics surrounding his assassination also postponed the recognition that such a religious politics was more present in the extended communities of the Nation of Islam than is usually acknowledged, notwithstanding Elijah Muhammad’s instruction to avoid politics.

What we can learn from Faisal Devji’s new book Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam is how and why it was that the universalist Islam to which Malcolm had converted lacked the resources to form a basis for his politics, and why a more straightforwardly political Black Islam was only to develop after his death. There is a sense in which, notwithstanding the shock of recognition Malcolm described, such a universalist Islam has been useful only to those who would suppress his politics.

Global Islam could not do the work of grounding a politics for Malcolm because Islam had come to float free of history and politics in the aftermath of the fall of the Muslim empires and the colonial regimes that followed, creating a crisis of sovereignty. Islam, as Devji explains, rather than referring to a particular mode of Muslim piety (as it once had), had become the name for the whole; it had become a new subject, taking the place of both God and his prophet. Islam as a protagonist on the world stage also took the place of actual Muslims. A universalized Islam could not, however, represent the human race because there is no planetary political context. It is often said by Americans that the trouble with Islam is that it is too political (often that is said, too, of religion more generally). Devji argues that the problem is, rather, that there has been too little politics—that is, small-p politics, politics from below. Such an apolitical Islam has been enormously seductive—and useful to a range of actors—but not, perhaps, to Muslims themselves, including Malcolm.

The words we use to talk about religion today have in many ways become completely exhausted, thinned out, and abstract. No longer able to do the job of bridging the chasm between the promise of religious freedom and the messy determinants of human life, they have stretched out beyond recognition. This is true not just of Islam but of Christianity as well, perhaps of religion itself. Waning Crescent is an updating, or doubling down, on the themes of Devji’s important 2008 work The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics, which exposed the impotent pathos of universal religion for Islamic (and other) terrorists. Now, almost 20 years later, it is even clearer that we are all in the same boat with the terrorists, despairing of secular nation-state politics, as it descends into a toxic nationalism, while also being hyperaware of the failure of global politics, and thus unable to find any political agency.

Devji’s new book offers a complex and illuminating historical account of the many reasons why Islam as a global subject emerged, and why Devji believes that it is declining. One reads with a kind of fascinated wonder, even horror, at how this occurred—both its emergence and its waning—and of the many different people who contributed, sometimes unwittingly. One theme concerns the partnership that emerged between the West and global Islam in the 19th century, beginning perhaps with Napoleon, then in World War I, and up and through President Reagan’s efforts to foster jihad in Afghanistan.

The apotheosis of a literary representation of this Western fantasy, according to Devji, was John Buchan’s best-selling, swashbuckling World War I spy novel Greenmantle (1916), in which a group of British adventurers seek to thwart a German plot to raise up a Muslim prophet who will mobilize the Ottomans and the Arabs on behalf of the Germans. The culmination of this gripping but inescapably blasphemous and racist novel comes when a Lawrence of Arabia–like Englishman impersonates the prophet himself and leads the “Orientals” to defeat the Germans. Both the British and the Germans in this boy’s-own-adventure story, each understanding themselves to be the super race, essay a kind of full appropriation of Islam—global Islam, that is—for their own purposes.

Waning Crescent concludes with reflections on emerging political movements in Muslim-majority countries around the world, none of which have been waged in the name of Islam. As Devji explains, this failure was foretold by poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who observed that the universalization and secularization of Christianity had ended in a perversion of Christian life and saw the same fate in store for Islam.

It is not only religion that is waning. Separated from religion, detheologized, law also has been functionalized, under pressure to serve as the means of universal progress. (In the United States today, the emptiness of that promise is also being laid bare.) Law without culture or history, law without religion, is simply the tool of the strongest. “This was a project,” Devji writes, “of remaking the Muslim self so as to represent Islam through its actions individually rather than in the collective life of cities or kingdoms.” No longer subject to traditional authority, religion was privatized and publicized simultaneously. A parallel problem exists with respect to Christianity, particularly evangelical Protestantism, whose deracination has made it available as a poster child for political trends even when, like Islam, it often lacks a real purchase on grassroots politics. Unexpectedly, perhaps, Devji insists, the rise and fall of global Islam is not a story “about joining religion to politics but instead demonstrates the inability of Muslims to do so.” It was not just Reagan. Presidents Obama, Bush, Biden, and Trump have also posed as Greenmantle.

Importantly, the Islam that Devji says is ending is not the religion of actual Muslims; it is an abstract subject that floats free of embodied lives. Hence its availability to various would-be impersonators, including the German and English imperialists of Greenmantle, as well as the Americans of the 20th century. In the United States, one result of the failure of a depoliticized religion as a global subject has been the revival of political theology, not in the mood of Carl Schmitt but in a disparate and emergent set of efforts to acknowledge the religious politics of those outside the hyper-secularism of the global statist elite. Such hopes are forged in the expectation that, because banishing religion from politics seems not to have achieved justice, perhaps returning to a religious politics might do so. This new political theology is not your grandmother’s religion but a faith chastened by its imperialist and statist adventures, seeking to operate closer to the ground. Such new political theologies are emerging in both local and translocal communities around the world, both in the old religious complexes and in newer ones.