# Kasurian
> Exploring how civilisation works.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### About Kasurian
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/about/
Last updated: 2026-08-10T10:16:44.000Z
Kasurian is a general-interest magazine for the 21st century. Its name is a stylised Latinisation inspired by the Arabic word for fractal, chosen to represent patterns that repeat across scales, spring from a single source, and reveal an order beneath the myriad phenomena of civilisation. 

It began as a COVID-era reading group, a handful of people spread across continents, ages and professions, coming together to explore ideas, both novel and recovered, that might seed a culture of curiosity, rigour, ambition and truth-seeking, even at the expense of intellectual comfort. 

Kasurian’s worldview is curiosity and conviction: the conviction that, in an uncertain age, certain truths remain unchanged; the curiosity to ask how they carry into our present and future.

Our deeper preoccupation is practical. Flourishing civilisations are information-processing enterprises: ecosystems of institutions, each playing a distinct role, that together create the conditions under which excellence compounds across generations. 

We’re interested in the process knowledge of how such institutions are actually built. Process knowledge can be studied, reverse-engineered, and rebuilt—but only once it is understood. 

Kasurian is where that understanding is assembled piece by piece, drawing across a wide range of disciplines—deep history and intellectual history, political economy and philosophy, science and technology, sociology and culture—and pursuing each question through case studies, heuristics, and first-principles inquiry. 

Each season, Kasurian publishes an issue composed of six essays. Footnotes carries shorter pieces in between seasons: notes, articles, op-eds and letters. 

The Issue is the heart of the magazine. Each Sunday for six weeks, we publish sustained, long-form inquiry around a specific theme. We do not currently accept outside pitches for the Issue. 

Notes are short-form heuristics we are testing—a field note on an institution, an observation, an open question we are still turning over. They are provisional by design, intended to spur conversation, and revised as our understanding sharpens. We do not currently accept outside pitches for Notes. 

Articles are out-of-season long or short-form essays exploring a question that can’t wait until the next issue. 

Op-eds are argued positions with a clear stance on a question that matters, defended in good faith. 

Letters are sharp responses to something we’ve run—a correction, a rejoinder, or a thread we left hanging and you feel you need to pull on. 

If you are interested in pitching an Article, Op-ed, or Letter, please review our submission guidelines in the Writer’s Guide below.
### Writer's Guide
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/write/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T16:42:29.000Z
Kasurian is open to writers and thinkers from every background. Pitches are currently open for Articles, Op-eds and Letters. Letters responding to something we’ve run can be submitted at any time to: [pitches@kasurian.com](mailto:pitches@kasurian.com). 

Articles and Op-Eds require a pitch. Send an overview of no more than one page, stating the type, the theme, narrative/argument and structure of your proposed piece. Include a brief overview of the literature on your topic, pointing to published books, papers, newspapers and blog articles that show the breadth of your engagement. Your pitch must answer the following questions: What should a reader take away from this piece, and why does it matter? 

Include a short biography of no more than two sentences telling us about who you are, what you do, and what you are generally interested in. Do not send a complete piece. Kasurian does not publish work written by AI. Kasurian does not publish fiction, poetry or academic pieces. 

If your pitch aligns with Kasurian’s mission, our editorial team will respond within two weeks. Expect 2-3 rounds of substantive editing. If a pitch is unsuccessful, we will always offer feedback for improvement. 

If a pitch is successful, below is an overview of our writing guidelines: 

**Do:**

- Write for the long term, and for legibility. An essay should still be worth reading in five or ten years’ time, and a reader should come away feeling the world has become more legible, not less.
- Describe before you prescribe. Essays are descriptive and analytical. Give readers ideas they can use as tools to make sense of the world, and frameworks with real explanatory power. Don’t confuse ‘ought’ with is.
- Write with curiosity and conviction. We want the confidence of someone who understands their subject, and the curiosity of someone still eager to learn beyond it, and humble to be proven wrong.

**Do not:**

- Write in generalisations. Labels like “Secularism” or “Liberalism” carry little analytical weight. Reach instead for the specific cultural, geographic, or political categories that do.
- Lean on academic jargon. We don’t publish academic pieces, philosophy or ethics, or writing thick with jargon. If your essay turns on words like “ontological” or “semiotic,” we won’t run it.
- Offer topics instead of stories. Who, what, where, and why matter as much as how. Ground your theory in case studies.
- Turn polemical. We have no appetite for tribalism; avoid antagonistic language and caricature.
- Bury the lede. Your argument belongs front, centre, and clear.

Crucially, plain, accessible English matters to our readers and to us. The best guide to the difference between bad academic English and good plain English is George Orwell’s essay, [Politics and the English Language](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/?ref=kasurian.ghost.io).

Observe the difference. Here is a passage in clear and smooth prose:

> *I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all.*

And here is the same thought in modern academic English:

> *Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.*

We want the former, not the latter!

Orwell’s six rules are worth keeping close:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Finally, the best guide to writing for Kasurian is to read our essays.
### Footnotes
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/footnotes/
Last updated: 2026-07-21T23:37:21.000Z
Out of season—occasional articles, op-eds, letters & notes between issues.
### Kasurian Society
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/society/
Last updated: 2026-07-30T18:50:23.000Z
Kasurian is a society for the advancement of civilisation. In an age of fragmentation and uncertainty, the Society brings together our readership—like-minded individuals asking, ‘Why?’ and seeking rigorous responses and workshopping solutions— to the most pressing problems our communities and societies face today. Together, we aim to cultivate curiosity and conviction at the scale of civilisation.

What does it mean to build and steward civilisation in the 21st century? What is civilisation made of? How does everything work? And what do we do? These are some of the questions we seek to create space for debate on, and to build the process knowledge we need to become more productive members and stewards of this civilisation of ours.

To that end, we host events for our Members and Patrons to meet like-minded peers in environments designed for discourse, where conversations happen unrestricted by convention. These events range from collaborations with like-minded organisations, quarterly Society meetups, and private, invite-only Salons where some of the most intimate conversations can be shared. 

If you’re interested, membership in the Society is by application, which can be submitted by Members and Patrons once you’ve subscribed. Visit our [Subscribe page](https://www.kasurian.com/subscribe/) for more details on how you can join today.
## Posts
### The Rise & Fall of New Atheism
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/rise-fall-new-atheism/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T20:37:22.000Z
In June 2011, at the Alexander Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, the [World Atheist Convention](https://atheist.ie/program-for-world-atheist-convention/?ref=kasurian.com) was underway. Tickets were sold out, and the stage hosted some of the most prominent atheist voices of the time: Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Dan Barker, and Maryam Namazie, among others. Dawkins sat in his olive-green coat and crocodile-duck-imprinted tie, making the case to a captivated audience about the ills of religion and the inevitability of science and reason. The mood was confident.

As the evening progressed, however, a shadow grew over the convention. Rebecca Watson, a participant and YouTuber, posted a video in which she mentioned that a man had followed her into a hotel elevator in the early hours of the morning and propositioned her. Her tone was closer to weariness than outrage. She said, [almost in passing](https://skepchick.org/2011/06/about-mythbusters-robot-eyes-feminism-and-jokes/?ref=kasurian.com): “Guys, don’t do that.” The response was not as passive. Forum threads swelled into the thousands, and blog posts spawned counter-posts. The incident was dubbed “*Elevatorgate*.” And then Dawkins, in typical flippant and provocative fashion, responded with a sarcastic open letter addressed to a fictitious Muslim woman, titled [“](https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/06/28/dawkins-and-dear-muslima/?ref=kasurian.com)[*Dear Muslima*](https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/06/28/dawkins-and-dear-muslima/?ref=kasurian.com)[,”](https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/06/28/dawkins-and-dear-muslima/?ref=kasurian.com) itemising the graver oppressions she supposedly endured under Islamic law—the clear implication being that Watson’s grievance did not merit a great deal of attention.

Watson’s request was modest, and yet one of the New Atheist movement’s most celebrated voices had responded by trivialising her experience. The self-styled guild of reason found itself in a quagmire whose fault lines would only continue to grow. Beneath the surface of discursive wars raging around God, unbelief, and reason, another story was reaching its climax.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/bb79b986-d70e-4dec-b305-1e42b26f874e_1600x900.png)

Dublin, Ireland, June 2011\. Richard Dawkins at the World Atheist Convention.

New Atheism had reached a cultural inflection point in the first decade of the 21st century. Three of the West’s load-bearing institutions—the Church, the state, and the market—had each found themselves discredited through scandal and failure. Then the internet arrived, enabling movements to scale at previously unseen speeds. New Atheism was one of the first movements to harness the power and wrath of the early internet, spreading through digital media, forum posting, and YouTube vlogging. Yet the very source of New Atheism’s growth, and the cultural and political milieu in which it succeeded, would later become the reason for its fracturing and downfall.

At the movement’s heart was a remarkable network of ideologues, funders, and internet posters whose deeper connections with one another did not surface until recently, with the release of the Epstein files. In 2026, we have a much clearer picture of the story, which raises concerning questions about the relationship between reason, scientific authority, and power.

The rise and fall of New Atheism is also the story of the first internet-driven culture war, and the innovations it made in the 2000s would later become the playbook which other internet-driven movements would scale to success.

To understand the rise of this movement and its use of reason against faith, it needed a *casus belli*. That came at the dawn of the 21st century.

## Ignition

On the morning of September 11, 2001, under an unbroken blue sky, two Boeing 767s flew into the World Trade Centre in New York City, a third aircraft struck the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a fourth came down in a field in Pennsylvania. Four hijacked airliners, simultaneously commandeered over American airspace, had struck the heart of the United States. Outrage galvanised the American public, triggering an immune-like response that would launch the War on Terror and the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003).

At the heart of the War on Terror was a narrative about faith: to what extent had religion, and in particular, Islam, been a motivating factor for the 9/11 attacks against the United States, and terrorism and war more broadly? As debate intensified, New Atheism emerged in this milieu as the vanguard of the intellectual and cultural war against religion.

The vacuum that New Atheism sought to fill was not only intellectual or emotional. The West was undergoing an institutional crisis. In January 2002, the *Boston Globe* published its Spotlight investigation into the Catholic Church’s systematic concealment of child abuse, and the first institutional pillar fell. The following year, the intelligence dossiers that had justified the invasion of Iraq were shown to be false, and the second pillar fell. The financial crisis of 2008 would bring down the third pillar, the market, and its claim to efficiency. Trust in American institutions, which had spiked to a 40-year high in the month after the towers came down, collapsed and would never recover.

Into that widening institutional deficit stepped the ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, armed with books, podcasts, and forums, backed by an infrastructure that had not existed five years earlier.

Of the four horsemen, Sam Harris launched the opening salvo of the movement. Sam Harris, a young neuroscientist, dark-haired and clean-shaven, with a flat clinical voice that sounded less like a polemicist than a doctor delivering a diagnosis. In California, Harris was still a graduate student in neuroscience when he began writing a book on September 12, 2001\. He was then unknown, unpublished, and in his mid-thirties. Three years later, in 2004, that book appeared as *The End of Faith*, a work that was declarative, zealous, and unashamedly willing to generalise from religious violence to normative religious doctrine.

In 2006, Richard Dawkins published *The God Delusion*, which would go on to sell more than three million copies in English and be translated into over 30 languages. Dawkins was ruthless in his attack, describing the God of the Old Testament as, with characteristic relish, “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” Dawkins was then an Oxford evolutionary biologist in his sixties, the author of *The Selfish Gene* and the father of meme theory, silver-haired and donnish, and unapologetic in tone. By 1976, he had already made his name defending Darwinian gradualism against its critics on the academic left.

Daniel Dennett’s *Breaking the Spell*, also published in 2006, was the most subtle, carefully naturalising religion as an artefact of our evolutionary history. Dennett was a philosopher straddling the fault lines of philosophy, cognitive science and computer science. In 1991, his newly published book, *Consciousness Explained*, made his name among philosophers of mind. He had been at Oxford in the 1960s, a student of Gilbert Ryle, who once said of him that there were cleverer philosophers around, but that Dennett had a fire in his belly. Dennett would carry that spirit for the next 60 years.

Christopher Hitchens arrived last, in 2007, with *God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything*. Hitchens was a fiercely contrarian public intellectual, journalist, and master debater, always appearing rumpled, whiskey in hand, cigarette lit. His atheism had hardened through his reading of Islamism, and his controversial [support for the Iraq war](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/taking-sides/?ref=kasurian.com) had already set him apart from his former comrades. The book marched through the crimes of organised religion—the Inquisitions, the pogroms, the *fatwas*, the child abuse, the wars—with a literary contempt that made atheism and secularism feel like the only morally justifiable positions rather than merely intellectual dispositions. It reached number one on the *New York Times* bestseller list within seven weeks of publication. Twelve, a fledgling imprint owned by France’s Lagardère and Hitchen’s publisher, had ordered an initial print run of 40,000\. Within two months, [296,000 copies were in print](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118247644823044329?ref=kasurian.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/7269bb67-5a89-4918-9a5c-56e013e71632_1402x1122.png)

The four books that defined the New Atheist movement.

At the movement’s intellectual centre sat the Edge Foundation—an exclusive salon network run by the horsemen’s literary agent, John Brockman, which gathered scientists, technologists, and some of the world’s wealthiest financiers each year alongside the TED conference. It was, [as Brockman’s admirers described it](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation?ref=kasurian.com), a gathering of the rich, the smart, and the powerful.

While the salons and the publishing deals were the visible scaffolding of the movement, something newer provided the fuel for New Atheism’s meteoric growth. In 2006, the same year that *The God Delusion* was published, [home broadband adoption in the United States skyrocketed with 40% growth in just 12 months](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2007/07/03/home-broadband-adoption-2007/?ref=kasurian.com). 25 million Americans gained high-speed internet in a single year, a figure equal to the entire US home broadband population at the end of 2002\. The same jump in penetration took the United Kingdom roughly three years to complete; most of continental Europe took longer still. YouTube had launched the year before, and Reddit the year before that. The infrastructure that would carry the movement to a global audience was being installed at exactly the moment the books arrived to fill it. The next information revolution sent the influence and reach of the New Atheists on a parabolic flight.

The movement now needed an identity. That came with Gary Wolf’s *WIRED* feature, “[The Church of the Non-Believers](https://www.wired.com/2006/11/atheism/?ref=kasurian.com),” published in November 2006\. He visited Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett—Hitchens’s book was still a year away. The essay unknowingly christened the movement and brought together what were otherwise four distinct actors, independent in their own right, into figureheads for a historic moment: the New Atheists.

The ideas themselves were not new. Everything Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett argued had been said before, and (arguably) said better, by Russell, Paine, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. What was new was the marketing—[what the scholar Amarnath Amarasingam called](https://brill.com/display/title/16794?ref=kasurian.com) “a kind of evangelical revival and repackaging of old ideas.” Within 23 months of publication, *The God Delusion* had sold roughly twice what *The Selfish Gene* had managed in 30 years. Something in the cultural soil had shifted.

If the horsemen were the guiding stars of the New Atheist movement, it was the wider ecosystem that transformed their ideas into something more. Science blogs like PZ Myers’s *Pharyngula*, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conference tours, Lawrence Krauss’s outspoken debates and critiques, and thousands of other blog posts and video clips transformed New Atheism from a niche intellectual concern into the most dominant subculture of its day. Campus groups began to emerge, coalitions were formed, and a celebrity hue filled the air.

Seven months after the christening, the four horsemen finally gathered together. On September 30, 2007, at Christopher Hitchens’s home in Washington, D.C., they [sat down for a two-hour unmoderated conversation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DKhc1pcDFM&ref=kasurian.com), filmed for the Richard Dawkins Foundation. There was no audience, moderator, or set. There were four armchairs around a round wooden table, whiskey already poured, and walls of books on either side. Around that table sat Hitchens, sleeves rolled up and ferociously animated; Dennett, bearded and slower in cadence; Dawkins in a white shirt and glasses; Harris, clean-shaven and the youngest in the room, sitting slightly apart. At one point, Harris asked the question none of the others had quite asked: “Is there any argument for faith that has given you pause?” The room considered it briefly and moved on.

The movement now had a name, four faces, and a filmed record of its own certainty. What it did not yet have was any reason to doubt itself. And with the success it was having, why would it?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/8704e3ae-3c48-4a08-b595-173cbe2a5b6c_2048x1229.png)

Washington, D.C., September 30, 2007\. Left to right: Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris.

## Prophecy

In June 2008, Ariane Sherine, a comedy writer and journalist, proposed an atheist bus campaign in *The Guardian* in response to a Christian one she had seen weeks earlier. Backed by Richard Dawkins and the British Humanist Association, the fundraising opened with a target of £5,500 and closed at more than £150,000, roughly 27 times the original amount. On January 6, 2009, [800 buses rolled out across Britain](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/06/atheist-bus-campaign-nationwide?ref=kasurian.com), each one carrying a line that softened the movement’s usual pitch into a joke: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” At the launch, Dawkins was photographed smiling with Sherine in front of one of the buses.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/ae27a846-5db9-4728-96eb-271bb2513c84_2048x1154.png)

London, 6 January 2009\. Richard Dawkins and Sherine in front of one of the 800 paid advertisements: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

The bus campaign was also one of the first proofs of concept for what would later be called internet crowdfunding. The model that would build everything from Kickstarter to GoFundMe was being trialled by the New Atheists in those early years of the internet.

By this point, New Atheism had become a multi-million-dollar industry of its own right. *The God Delusion* would eventually sell more than three million copies in English. *God Is Not Great* had gone to number one on the *New York Times* list in seven weeks. Harris alone [attracted between $100,000 and $200,000 per appearance](https://www.aaespeakers.com/keynote-speakers/sam-harris?ref=kasurian.com), addressing audiences in academia, corporations, and debate panels, both new and old. The Edge Foundation, ground zero for the intellectual salon network, gathered scientists, technologists, and financiers at its annual Billionaires’ Dinners, held alongside the TED conference. [Brockman represented Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, Krauss](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation?ref=kasurian.com), and dozens more, taking around 15% on every deal.

The industry reached its fullest expression in March 2012, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the Reason Rally—branded as [the largest secular gathering](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/richard-dawkins-preaches-to-nonbelievers-at-reason-rally/255012/?ref=kasurian.com) in American history. Dawkins, Krauss, and a roster of comedians, scientists, and musicians took the stage. The crowd, electrified and rain-soaked, roared in unison: “We’re here, we’re godless, get used to it.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/f1a24a0c-c771-47ab-99de-085f939a49d1_1280x720.png)

Washington, D.C., March 24, 2012\. The Reason Rally.

It was, although no one in the crowd would have known it, the movement’s high-water mark. Google Trends suggests that[ interest in New Atheism and related ideas peaked broadly in the early 2010s](https://trends.google.com/explore?q=atheism%20&date=all&geo=GB&ref=kasurian.com), while the 2012 Reason Rally marked its organisational apogee. What followed was decline.

In June 2010, Christopher Hitchens announced that he had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He continued to write, debate, and speak almost until the end. In November of that year, in Toronto, he met Tony Blair on a Munk Debate stage to argue the resolution “Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world.” Already five months into treatment, he [won the audience vote 68% to 32% against the motion](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/27/christopher-hitchens-tony-blair-debate?ref=kasurian.com)—the largest margin in the series’ history. It would be his last great public set-piece. He died on December 15, 2011, at the age of 62\. The most magnetic performer the New Atheists had ever produced was gone.

The Reason Rally proceeded without Hitchens. It also proceeded without Rebecca Watson, who had been [quietly removed from the speaker list](https://skepchick.org/2013/09/my-time-with-richard-dawkins-or-why-you-should-never-meet-your-idols/?ref=kasurian.com) at Dawkins’s request. The crowd had not yet noticed, but the first fault lines that would later undermine New Atheism were beginning to show.

## Fault Lines

Into the early 2010s, it seemed clear that religious adherence was slowly declining, but despite this, believers and non-believers seemed to live in an uneasy harmony, without locking horns as was once assumed. Scott Alexander captured the cultural developments of the 2010s in his Astral Codex Ten essay, [*New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed*](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/?ref=kasurian.com). The secular-liberal *Blue Tribe*, as Alexander remarked, found a new set of causes against which to project their identity—the Ferguson shooting, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the emergence of a politics centred around race and gender rather than God and disbelief. In short, the religious culture wars of the 2000s, catalysed by 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror, had begun to peter out.

The New Atheists still had forward momentum but were increasingly estranged from the emerging political and cultural moment of the 2010s. That became an increasing drift toward a series of positions antithetical to the Blue Tribe. Perhaps knowingly or unknowingly, the New Atheists may have sensed their coming divorce, and Dawkins’s statements thereafter were anything but white noise.

In September 2013, in an interview with *The Times* magazine, Dawkins [described the sexual abuse he had experienced at his English boarding school as “mild paedophilia”](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2013/09/richard-dawkins-defends-mild-pedophilia-again-and-again/311230/?ref=kasurian.com) and said he did not believe it had done him lasting harm. He framed it as a question of historical context—one could not judge the past by present standards. His audience heard something else entirely.

Dawkins’ statement could have been mistaken as a one-off *faux pas,* but the gaffes continued. In July 2014, he [tweeted that date rape was bad but stranger rape at knifepoint was worse](https://richarddawkins.net/2014/07/response-to-a-bizarre-twitter-storm/?ref=kasurian.com), and told those who disagreed to “go away and learn how to think.” In August 2014, responding to a follower who said she would feel “morally obliged” to continue a pregnancy after a Down syndrome diagnosis, Dawkins replied: “[Abort it and try again](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/21/richard-dawkins-apology-abortion-downs-syndrome?ref=kasurian.com). It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”

In February 2020, he went further still, tweeting that [eugenics, applied to humans, “would work” in the same way it worked for dogs and horses](https://x.com/RichardDawkins/status/1228943686953664512?ref=kasurian.com). “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds,” he wrote. “It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would.”

With his statements, Dawkins had been flag-posting all along the decade-long process of divorce between New Atheism and the Blue Tribe, who increasingly viewed the movement as a *déclassé* cause associated with ‘the other side’: Trumpists, misogynists, sexists, racists, and other assorted thought criminals.

The most visceral critiques came from within. The biologist PZ Myers, whose blog *Pharyngula* had been one of the rockets of New Atheism’s parabolic flight, [wrote in 2019 that the movement had become](https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/01/25/the-train-wreck-that-was-the-new-atheist-movement/?ref=kasurian.com) “a shambles of alt-right memes and dishonest hucksters mangling science to promote racism, sexism, and bloody regressive politics.” Its most influential voices, he said, had “aimed the ship of atheism straight into the Trumpkin swamp.”

The Elevatorgate scandal in the summer of 2011 heralded the beginning of something the internet had not yet seen at that scale: an identity-based pile-on, conducted across forums, YouTube, and the comment sections of formerly collegial blogs, with a woman at its centre. Academic researchers were already studying it as a new phenomenon: at least [one peer-reviewed paper](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286457582%5FElevatorgate%5For%5Fthe%5Flimits%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fonline%5Frhetorical%5Fconstruction%5Fof%5Fmorality?ref=kasurian.com) would later treat Elevatorgate as a case study in the rhetorical construction of morality online. Three years later, in August 2014, [Gamergate would follow the same script](https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddit-twitter-cec?ref=kasurian.com): a woman, a male-dominated community, an identity-based fracture amplified by the same platforms, and the same outcome.

New Atheism had rested easily in its offensive posture of raining down critiques of reason against religion. Increasingly, others began to direct their own barrage of criticism at the New Atheists, whose inability to withstand the same critiques they had levelled at others revealed something they had never quite admitted: that “reason” had always meant something more specific than they claimed. Reason, it turned out, was far more complicated than God versus no God. It was also about who got to wield it and in which direction.

The sociologist Steve Kettell saw that [the movement had built itself on what he called an “empty signifier”](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/whatever-happened-to-new-atheism-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-us-atheist-movement/03688167041AC608385038786679F664?ref=kasurian.com)—a label capacious enough to mean almost anything, which was precisely its early strength. Under the banner of atheism, libertarian conservatives, progressive feminists, secularist campaigners, and anti-Islam hawks could all gather, because the banner said nothing about what they actually believed beyond a single negation. When the movement expanded and had to take positions on questions other than God’s existence: on feminism, on social justice, on Islam, on identity, the emptiness that had held it together became the thing that tore it apart. There was no shared foundation from which to adjudicate.

Within the broader secular world itself, a verdict was taking shape. The philosopher Michael Ruse, himself an atheist and one of the most experienced opponents of creationism in the American academy, published a piece in 2009 that became widely quoted, in which [he called the New Atheists](https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/scienceandthesacred/2009/08/why-i-think-the-new-atheists-are-a-bloody-disaster.html?ref=kasurian.com) a “bloody disaster.” His case was that they were philosophically unsophisticated, strategically counterproductive, and were doing real damage to the cause of science education by alienating the religious moderates who were its natural allies. They had, he argued, mistaken loudness for rigour.

Reza Aslan, writing the same year, argued that the [New Atheists displayed an utter lack of literacy](https://onfaith.info/2010/07/16/harris-hitchens-dawkins-dennett-evangelical-atheists/?ref=kasurian.com) in the subject they were so desperate to refute, “shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervour.” Terry Eagleton, [reviewing ](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching?ref=kasurian.com)[*The God Delusion*](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching?ref=kasurian.com)[ in the ](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching?ref=kasurian.com)[*London Review of Books*](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching?ref=kasurian.com), reached for a simpler image: reading Dawkins on theology, he wrote, was like reading someone who had learned all their biology from the Book of British Birds. Alvin Plantinga, the philosopher of religion, was blunter still: many of Dawkins’s arguments, he said, [would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class](https://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2007/marapr/1.21.html?ref=kasurian.com).

Perhaps the most unsettling critique came from within the atheist tradition itself. Thomas Nagel—NYU philosopher, lifelong atheist, and author of the landmark 1974 essay “What is it Like to be a Bat?”—[reviewed ](https://newrepublic.com/article/68617/the-fear-religion?ref=kasurian.com)[*The God Delusion*](https://newrepublic.com/article/68617/the-fear-religion?ref=kasurian.com)[ in ](https://newrepublic.com/article/68617/the-fear-religion?ref=kasurian.com)[*The New Republic*](https://newrepublic.com/article/68617/the-fear-religion?ref=kasurian.com) in 2006, the year it was published, and called it “a very uneven collection of scriptural ridicule, amateur philosophy, historical and contemporary horror stories, anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific argument.” Unlike Dawkins’s books on evolutionary theory, Nagel wrote, it lacked “superb instructive lucidity”; his attempts at philosophy appeared to have been included “for the sake of completeness.” More specifically, Nagel identified a category error at the heart of Dawkins’s central argument: Dawkins rebutted the design argument by treating God as though he were a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world, subject to the same demands for explanation as everything else. But this, Nagel observed, was not what any serious theologian meant by God. The point of the God hypothesis was precisely that not all explanations are physical, that there might be intentional or purposive explanations more fundamental than the laws of physics. Dawkins had demolished a God that his opponents did not believe in.

Six years later, in [*Mind and Cosmos*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mind-and-cosmos-9780199919758?ref=kasurian.com)[ (2012)](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mind-and-cosmos-9780199919758?ref=kasurian.com), Nagel went further still, arguing that the materialist neo-Darwinian framework underpinning the New Atheist worldview was almost certainly false—not wrong about God, but wrong about mind. When his arguments were raised at a workshop attended by Dawkins and Dennett, the response was not engagement but contempt. Dennett sighed. Others [called Nagel an idiot](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/2191959/the-heretic/?ref=kasurian.com). The movement that had built its identity on the courage to follow reason wherever it led had encountered a serious philosophical argument from a serious philosophical atheist, and looked away.

In the same year as Ruse’s verdict, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, a former *New York Times* Middle East Bureau Chief who had covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and held a Master of Divinity from Harvard, published [*I Don’t Believe in Atheists*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/I-Dont-Believe-in-Atheists/Chris-Hedges/9781416567958?ref=kasurian.com)[ (2008)](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/I-Dont-Believe-in-Atheists/Chris-Hedges/9781416567958?ref=kasurian.com). Hedges was writing from the left and from the field, from 15 years of watching what religious violence actually looked like up close. The New Atheists had created, he argued, a new form of fundamentalism that promoted a simplified worldview of us versus them, a belief in human moral progress through science and reason that was, in his reading, as utopian and as dangerous as any theology it claimed to replace.

The political impact of the movement was [fully cross-examined in 2019, in a study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629817302640?via%3Dihub&ref=kasurian.com) led by Nick Megoran of Newcastle University and Russell Foster of King’s College London. A diverse panel—Christian, agnostic, and atheist—examined the New Atheists’ positions on US and UK foreign policy since 9/11\. They found that the three principal horsemen (with the exception of Dennett) had backed the attack on Afghanistan in 2001\. Harris, in *The End of Faith*, had framed Western engagement with the Muslim world as a war the West must win or face “bondage,” had suggested racial profiling and coercive interrogation might be ethically defensible, and had argued that a [nuclear first strike against an Islamist nuclear state](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.07.011?ref=kasurian.com) might be “the only course of action available.” Hitchens had been [among the most vocal advocates for the Iraq invasion](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/left-debates-september-11/?ref=kasurian.com) in 2003 and described the 9/11 attacks as producing in him “exhilaration.” Here, at last, was the opportunity to rally the free West against theocratic and authoritarian regimes.

The researchers concluded that the New Atheists had built a world with “us versus them” at the centre of the debate. They imagined civilisations bearing different flags and reiterated the clash-of-civilisations thesis. Dogmatically, they refused complexity and nuance, almost leaving the hat of reason behind at the table. A movement that had deplored the violence religion had flamed, in its own words, defended some of the most brutal conflicts of its time.

Then came the evening of October 3, 2014, and a television studio in Los Angeles. Sam Harris appeared on *Real Time with Bill Maher* alongside Maher himself. The conversation turned to Islam. Maher called it the “mother lode of bad ideas.” Harris elaborated.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/eeefca01-7c9b-4a70-9cb4-038d4228e3d1_1440x907.png)

Los Angeles, October 3, 2014\. The moment New Atheism’s critique of Islam met the Blue Tribe in real time and lost.

Ben Affleck, seated at the same table, interrupted: “It’s gross. It’s racist.” Nicholas Kristof agreed. [The clip went viral within hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln9D81eO60&ref=kasurian.com) and continued to circulate for weeks. To Harris’s supporters, it was the defining moment of liberal cowardice, the Blue Tribe, and the broader secular left, refusing to apply its own principles consistently. To his critics, it was something else: the moment New Atheism’s critique of Islam, which had been building since *The End of Faith* in 2004, finally revealed what it had always risked becoming. The charge of Islamophobia had been circulating in left-wing commentary since at least 2012\. [Glenn Greenwald had made the argument repeatedly](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/sam-harris-muslim-animus?ref=kasurian.com), and the Southern Poverty Law Center had [documented how New Atheist rhetoric was being recycled](https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4chan-investigating-pathways-alt-right/?ref=kasurian.com) in explicitly anti-immigrant contexts.

What Affleck did on that stage was voice what a significant section of the Blue Tribe audience had already concluded. By the time he said the word “racist,” many of them had already made their divorce from New Atheism. They learned what they could from this early internet-driven movement and its success, and applied those lessons in new, more viral ways. The religious fault line that fuelled the culture wars of the 2000s would give way to the 2010s, and its “intersectional” emphasis on race, gender, and sexuality against misogyny, racism, and fascism, led by the Blue Tribe. The eventual backlash against it took the form of the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 (and again in 2024).

By 2016, the movement’s organisational infrastructure was visibly collapsing. Conference attendance had peaked around the Reason Rally in 2012 and declined sharply afterwards. Campus atheist groups struggled to maintain membership. The institutions the New Atheists had built, with their foundations, festivals, and annual conventions, were either contracting or fragmenting along new fault lines. Quietly, many of the movement’s reigning figures began to move on to new things.

## Renegade

William Stahl argued that [New Atheists and religious fundamentalists were mirror images of each other](https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004190535/Bej.9789004185579.i-253%5F006.xml?ref=kasurian.com), sharing deep epistemological parallels beneath their apparent opposition. Both claimed a monopoly on truth; both treated complexity as a moral failure; both responded to a crisis of authority with backlash rather than reflection; and both, when pressed, abandoned their own stated epistemic standards. The New Atheists claimed the authority of science while arguing unscientifically; the fundamentalists claimed the authority of scripture while interpreting it selectively. “In the end,” Stahl concluded, “fundamentalism and the New Atheism are mirror images of each other, sharing deep structural and epistemological parallels.” The New Atheists would have furiously disputed the comparison. The decade ahead would not help their case.

Core to the New Atheist movement was another charismatic figure. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu in 1969, the daughter of a political dissident imprisoned by the Siad Barre regime. Her childhood was spent in exile, in Saudi Arabia, then in Ethiopia, and then in Kenya. In 1992, she made her way to the Netherlands and applied for asylum. She later acknowledged lying on that application about her name, her age, and her route, having come via Kenya and Germany rather than directly from Somalia. She had acknowledged the falsification as early as 2002, during candidate vetting for parliament, and there were no objections at the time. It was only when a Dutch television documentary re-aired the matter in 2006—including interviews with family members who disputed the forced marriage account that had underpinned her asylum claim—that the immigration minister ruled her naturalisation was improperly granted. She resigned her parliamentary seat and left the Netherlands within weeks, bound for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. She later [served as a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution](https://www.hoover.org/profiles/ayaan-hirsi-ali?ref=kasurian.com) and became a US citizen in 2013.

Hirsi Ali’s arc toward atheism had begun with Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian”, a text she encountered in the aftermath of 9/11\. Its scepticism towards religion in general gave Hirsi Ali the framework she needed. After formally renouncing Islam, she found herself in agreement with Russell, Hitchens, and Dawkins on organised religion and was drawn into the movement’s orbit. Alongside the four horsemen, she is sometimes referred to as the fifth—the horsewoman. Tall and composed at the podium and touted by Dawkins and Hitchens as “fun and clever,” she became a key figure in the movement, carrying an authority that was not merely rhetorical: a black African woman and of ‘Muslim heritage’, she brought to the movement something its white male principals could not supply: internal legitimacy for their external critiques against religion and Islam.

That authority was nowhere more visible than on the evening of October 6, 2010, in the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University, where Intelligence Squared hosted a debate on the motion “Islam is a Religion of Peace.” Hirsi Ali, alongside the writer Douglas Murray, argued against. Maajid Nawaz—a former Islamist and member of Hizb Al-Tahrir, who later became the founder of the counter-extremism Quilliam Foundation—argued for. Before the debate, 41% of the audience supported the motion, 25% opposed it, and 34% were undecided. After it, [55% opposed the motion, and only 36% still supported it](https://opentodebate.org/debate/islam-is-a-religion-of-peace/https://opentodebate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/audience-rejects-the-motion-islam-is-a-religion-of-peace.pdf?ref=kasurian.com).

Hirsi Ali, however, had recognised where the movement’s trajectory was heading: it was no longer propelled by the threat of violent Islam, or at least not with the same force. That vacuum created a dilemma for her about the beliefs and moral canopy she had constructed. What grounds the values, norms, and philosophical hue of Western civilisation? Like Dawkins, Hirsi had a tribe, and one that her politics was not shy of hiding. Her answer to this question would be sealed by her own sense of longing and transcendental bankruptcy.

In November 2023, she published an essay in *UnHerd* titled “[Why I Am Now a Christian](https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/?ref=kasurian.com)“—reversing Russell’s title. Western civilisation, she argued, faced three converging threats: the expansionism of authoritarian regimes in China and Russia; the rise of global Islamism; and what she called “the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.” Against such forces, secular tools, such as arguments, technologies, and military force, were inadequate. Upholding Judeo-Christian traditions was, in her view, the most credible answer for Western society’s survival. But the decision was also personal. She had found life without spiritual solace, she wrote, “unendurable—indeed, very nearly self-destructive.”

The essay generated two competing readings that together capture the conversion’s ambiguity. Sarah Jones, [writing in ](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/ayaan-hirsi-alis-political-conversion.html?ref=kasurian.com)[*New York*](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/ayaan-hirsi-alis-political-conversion.html?ref=kasurian.com)[ magazine](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/ayaan-hirsi-alis-political-conversion.html?ref=kasurian.com), argued that for Hirsi Ali, “atheism only ever propped up her career as a culture warrior”, that she was abandoning a movement “in terminal decline” for a new vehicle, and that she “remains on the same crusade, inveighing against Islam and having simply exchanged one banner for another.” Ross Douthat, in *The New York Times*, [offered a more generous interpretation](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/opinion/religion-christianity-belief.html?ref=kasurian.com): that the conversion reflected a twofold realisation—that atheistic materialism was too weak a foundation for Western liberalism, and that she had found the long-term experience of life without spiritual solace genuinely unendurable.

In a subsequent discussion with Dawkins, Hirsi Ali stated that she believed in the resurrection, and Dawkins acknowledged that she was not merely a political Christian. The man who had once welcomed her into the New Atheist movement was now being asked to take her new faith seriously.

Where Hirsi Ali secured a relatively safe ejection out of the crumbling edifice of New Atheism, many of her once-fellow travellers were not so lucky.Only recently was the wider network that had been financing the intellectual infrastructure of the New Atheist movement for more than a decade revealed. For all their relentless questioning, the New Atheists seemed reluctant to ask who funded the rooms in which the ideas circulated and what those funders expected in return. They would come to regret it.

## The Epstein Connection

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/3e9f6aec-5f33-4af8-8c62-c14216040b60_960x600.png)

The Edge Foundation: [John Brockman](http://edge.org/memberbio/john%5Fb?ref=kasurian.com),[ Steven Pinker,](http://edge.org/memberbio/steven%5Fpinker?ref=kasurian.com) [Daniel C. Dennett](http://edge.org/memberbio/daniel%5Fc%5Fdennett?ref=kasurian.com), [Katinka Matson](http://edge.org/memberbio/katinka%5Fmatson?ref=kasurian.com), [Richard Dawkins](http://edge.org/memberbio/richard%5Fdawkins?ref=kasurian.com), on a private jet to the TED Conference in Monterey, California.

In the first decade of the 21st century, three key institutional pillars of the West faced increasing distrust and scandal. However, it would be the Epstein files that, perhaps decades from now, would be seen as the fundamental turning point that consolidated the downward trajectory in public trust in institutions. They laid bare the networks of power, wealth, and influence and how they were laundered through reason and science, perverting the epistemic authority of science that underwrites all contemporary institutions. The Epstein files also form a crucial part of the post-mortem New Atheism and its meteoric rise and fall.

The more than [20,000 pages of Epstein-related documents](https://oversight.house.gov/release/oversight-committee-releases-records-provided-by-the-epstein-estate-chairman-comer-provides-statement/?ref=kasurian.com) released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, 2025, placed three of the four Horsemen—Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris—alongside Krauss and Pinker in the same financial and social orbit as the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

Whilst these connections do not imply personal wrongdoing, they showed that the New Atheist movement had failed to provide an honest account of how it rose to such prominence. How did a movement running on mantras of “evidence” and “critical thinking” either defend, accommodate or ignore a figure like Brockman? Whether the New Atheists turned a blind eye or were simply overtaken by the fame, their failure to reflect on their surroundings has proven consequential.

The Epstein connection to scientific publishing and the New Atheist movement primarily operated through one man: Brockman. He had represented Dawkins, Dennett, and Pinker as their literary agent since the 1980s, and his Edge Foundation—the annual salon that hosted the movement’s intellectual circuit—had received $638,000 from Epstein between 2001 and 2015, making him the foundation’s largest funder and, in some years, its only donor. Of the approximately[ $857,000 in total donations Edge received in that period, roughly 74% came from Epstein-linked entities](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation?ref=kasurian.com). In February 2002, Brockman, his wife Katinka Matson, Pinker, Dawkins, and Dennett had flown to the TED conference in Monterey on Epstein’s private jet. The caption to the photograph documenting that flight was later altered to remove mention of Epstein. His Edge profile, which had described him as a “financier and science philanthropist,” was removed entirely. Two other 2002 dinner photographs vanished from the foundation’s website. So did a photograph of Sarah Kellen—named as a “possible co-conspirator” in Epstein’s 2008 non-prosecution agreement—who was pictured at that year’s Billionaires’ Dinner alongside Brockman.

Lawrence Krauss had been the movement’s most visible scientific evangelist outside the four Horsemen—a frequent Reason Rally speaker, Dawkins’s co-star in the 2013 documentary *The Unbelievers*, and the founder and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, where his [2017 salary was reported as $265,000](https://observer.case.edu/lawrence-krauss-and-jeffrey-epstein-a-timeline/?ref=kasurian.com). In February 2018, BuzzFeed News published a report [documenting six allegations of sexual misconduct](https://observer.case.edu/lawrence-krauss-and-jeffrey-epstein-a-timeline/?ref=kasurian.com) against him spanning more than a decade. ASU placed him on administrative leave that March, removed him from the Origins Project in August, and accepted his resignation in May 2019.

What the Epstein files revealed about Krauss was something beyond the misconduct story his critics already knew. Emails showed that during the 2018 BuzzFeed crisis, [Krauss had turned to a convicted sex offender for advice](https://observer.case.edu/former-cwru-professor-krauss-appears-in-epstein-files/?ref=kasurian.com) on how to respond to allegations of sexual misconduct against himself, sending Epstein possible cross-examination questions for his accusers, forwarding articles on the dos and don’ts of apology, and accepting Epstein’s edits on draft statements. Epstein, in turn, forwarded the inquiry to Ken Starr, the former Baylor president who had himself resigned amid the Baylor sexual-assault scandal, for additional advice. The relationship had begun years earlier. In 2006, Krauss had[ organised a scientific conference on the Caribbean island of St Thomas near Epstein’s private island](https://www.edge.org/event/confronting-gravity?ref=kasurian.com), funded by the J. Epstein VI Inc. Foundation. Between 2010 and 2017, Epstein’s Enhanced Foundation [donated $250,000 to the Origins Project](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-science-donations?ref=kasurian.com). In a 2011 interview with *The Daily Beast*, Krauss had [publicly defended Epstein after his 2008 conviction](https://www.thedailybeast.com/katie-couric-woody-allen-jeffrey-epsteins-society-friends-close-ranks/?ref=kasurian.com), saying the women around him were “ages 19 to 23” and that, “as a scientist, I always judge things on empirical evidence”—meaning he would believe Epstein over his accusers.

In contrast to Krauss, a spotlight-loving public figure, Steven Pinker was a stalwart of the academic establishment. An illustrious cognitive scientist by profession, he argued in his books *The Better Angels of* *Our Nature* (2011) and *Enlightenment Now* (2018) for moral whiggery and societal progress. Both became commercial successes, [championed by Bill Gates](https://www.gatesnotes.com/enlightenment-now?ref=kasurian.com) and circulated through the Edge salon network during years when that network was being substantially funded by Epstein. Pinker describes his relationship with Epstein as one of mutual dislike, but the record does not merit this. They were far more entangled than the framing lets on. He had [flown to the TED conference on Epstein’s jet](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation?ref=kasurian.com) in February 2002, alongside Brockman, Dawkins, and Dennett. In July 2007, his Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz [used a linguistic analysis that Pinker had provided to argue that the federal internet-luring statute did not apply to Epstein](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/17/steven-pinkers-aid-jeffrey-epsteins-legal-defense-renews-criticism-increasingly?ref=kasurian.com), a footnote in the legal filings that helped secure Epstein’s controversial non-prosecution agreement. Pinker has said he did not know the question pertained to Epstein and now [regrets writing the letter](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/16/steven-pinker-amid-epstein-controversy?ref=kasurian.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/0804a0d6-9a9c-463e-9d3c-ea38189cdcbc_1600x920.png)

Figure 1: The New Atheist-Edge Foundation-Epstein network mapped out. By **Kasurian.*

What made the Epstein files harder to dismiss was the timing of the subsequent contact. In an email dated April 12, 2012—four years after Epstein’s guilty plea—Brockman wrote to Pinker: “Jeffrey Epstein will be making a trip up to Harvard on Sunday, April 15th. He is wondering if you might be around and available to meet with him?” Pinker replied that he would be out of town on the Sunday, but added: “If Jeffrey is around on Monday the 16th, I’ll be back and would be delighted to meet with him.” In 2020, more than 600 linguists signed an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America asking that Pinker’s Fellow status and his place on the Society’s Media Experts list be revoked, citing his linguistic testimony in favour of Epstein among other grievances. The Society declined to act. Pinker remains the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

The emails showed that Epstein continued to attend Edge dinners after his 2008 conviction, with Brockman’s invitation at least into 2015\. At the March 2011 dinner in Long Beach, California, Epstein was photographed alongside Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Elon Musk, Marissa Mayer, and Nathan Myhrvold. In July 2011, after Watson’s elevator video and her criticism of Krauss’s defence of Epstein had begun circulating, Dawkins emailed Brockman: “There is a rather nasty young woman who seems to be running some kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein. I remember that you told me something of the circumstances of Jeffrey’s arrest, and that his case is not as black as painted. Might you possibly remind me of it.”

[Brockman forwarded the email to Epstein himself](https://www.chronicle.com/article/jeffrey-epsteins-academic-fixer?ref=kasurian.com), attaching the note: “FYI, see Richard Dawkins email below alerting me to a campaign against our friend LMK re: his friendship with you. [I’ll deal with Richard](https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/richard-dawkins-epstein-emails-sx82lwsbz?ref=kasurian.com).”

Three years later, in April 2014, Dawkins was photographed seated at the same Arizona dinner table as Epstein, at an Origins event partly funded by Epstein’s foundation. [Dawkins has said he does not recall the dinner](https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/richard-dawkins-epstein-emails-sx82lwsbz?ref=kasurian.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/1d310799-09a6-4a22-878a-84d057bd270c_1950x1097.png)

Richard Dawkins, left, and Jeffrey Epstein, right, sharing a dinner table in Arizona, 2014

Sam Harris, whose name appears in the files in connection with a declined dinner invitation, [addressed the matter on his podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdNVfUGU%5FtQ&ref=kasurian.com) in February 2026: he had met Epstein once at a TED lunch, found him off-putting, and declined the subsequent invitation to dine with him and Woody Allen.

PZ Myers, writing on *Pharyngula* in February 2026 after his own marginal appearance in the files, captured the social mechanics more cleanly than any of the principals. “Brockman was the king of scientific publishing,” he wrote. “If you wanted to publish a science book, you had to make the pilgrimage to New York and kiss the feet of John Brockman, who would then negotiate with the publishers to get you a good deal.” The agency, the salon, the foundation, the financier, all running on a single network with a single gatekeeper, who, in turn, was working with money that everyone preferred not to examine. [“It was just an incestuous little clique,”](https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/02/01/wheee-more-epstein-revelations/?ref=kasurian.com) Myers wrote.

The institutional reckoning that followed was radically uneven. Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president, whose correspondence with Epstein continued until weeks before the financier’s 2019 death, resigned from the OpenAI board within seven days of the November 2025 release. He stepped back from teaching at Harvard and lost his contracts with the *New York Times*, Bloomberg, and the Center for American Progress. In March 2026, he [announced his full resignation from his Harvard University Professorship](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/2/25/summers-retire-harvard-epstein/?ref=kasurian.com). Martin Nowak, who had run Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics—launched in 2003 with a $6.5 million Epstein gift, the single largest the financier ever made to a Harvard program—was [placed on paid administrative leave](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/3/2/editorial-harvard-summers-nowak-epstein/?ref=kasurian.com) that same month. Both men had been the most directly compromised by [documented financial transactions](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/3/2/editorial-harvard-epstein-probe-legacy/?ref=kasurian.com).

The same reckoning has not yet reached the New Atheists. Pinker remains in his Harvard chair. Dawkins remains Oxford emeritus. Hirsi Ali remains at the Hoover Institution. Brockman Inc., the literary agency at the centre of the apparatus, continues to operate. Taken together, the files revealed a network of men who had built a movement on the authority of reason, and who had moved through the orbit of a convicted sex offender without seriously probing this troubling relationship.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/38f31d2b-a5a8-42c4-8de3-484c4dd8ac30_600x1150.png)

Figure 2: A timeline of key dates and events linking Jeffrey Epstein to figures and institutions within the New Atheist movement. By **Kasurian.*

## Losing Faith in Atheism

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/937e0c31-0726-4a31-9239-8c33135a7ba5_2000x871.png)

Easter Sunday, 2024\. Two days later, the Mayor of London turned on 30,000 Ramadan lights on Oxford Street. Dawkins announced he was a ‘cultural Christian’.

Richard Dawkins had been arriving at a not entirely different position from Hirsi Ali, though by a very different route. In January 2024, [writing in ](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/im-a-cultural-christian/?ref=kasurian.com)[*The Spectator*](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/im-a-cultural-christian/?ref=kasurian.com)[ about Hirsi Ali’s conversion](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/im-a-cultural-christian/?ref=kasurian.com), he noted that “Christianity is our best bulwark against Islam” and concluded that if supporting Christianity over Islam was all it took to be called a Christian, he was a Christian too. On Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024, he made explicit his newfound appreciation for Christianity in an interview with Rachel Johnson on LBC radio. Perhaps in light of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, having turned on 30,000 Ramadan lights on Oxford Street on the cusp of Easter weekend. Dawkins [said he was “slightly horrified”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COHgEFUFWyg&ref=kasurian.com) and called himself a “cultural Christian.” He did not believe “a single word of the Christian faith,” he said, but he loved hymns and Christmas carols, felt at home in the Christian ethos, and would choose Christianity over Islam “every single time.” It was, in his terms, “a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”

What is extraordinary about this position is that it is not a positive argument for religion, but a definition by exclusion. Dawkins made no case for Christianity’s values on their own terms, invoking the Ramadan lights, the King’s sympathies, and the need for a civilisational bulwark, but when pressed to explain why Christianity offers superior moral ideals to Islam, he could not or did not do so. The argument was entirely negative: Christianity is better because it is not Islam. One is left to wonder whether Dawkins had forgotten the God he had described in *The God Delusion* as “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”—and yet was now prepared to accept that same God’s civilisational legacy as a fleeting gift worth defending.

Critics noted he had been making versions of this argument since at least 2007\. What was new was the context—a post-October 7 2023 Europe in which the question of which religion was acceptable in public life had acquired an urgency the New Atheists had not anticipated when they first imagined religion’s retreat. In April 2021, the American Humanist Association [withdrew the Humanist of the Year award](https://americanhumanist.org/news/american-humanist-association-board-statement-withdrawing-honor-from-richard-dawkins/?ref=kasurian.com) it had given him in 1996\. The proximate cause was a tweet comparing Rachel Dolezal’s claim to a Black identity with the assertion that transgender people literally belong to the sex or gender with which they identify. The AHA cited his “repeated failing to acknowledge his own privileges and his pattern of insensitivity.” Dawkins protested. The organisation that had once celebrated him as the public face of secular humanism had [formally severed its relationship with him](https://americanhumanist.org/news/american-humanist-association-board-statement-withdrawing-honor-from-richard-dawkins/?ref=kasurian.com). In July 2025, he contributed a chapter to Lawrence Krauss’s edited anthology *The War on Science*, alongside Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and Jerry Coyne, arguing that scientific truth stood above human feelings and politics. The greatest threat to science was ‘woke culture’, which threatened facts and logic. Yet, the book came out during a government-led assault on science funding, when most of its contributors, Dawkins included, had spent the preceding decade arguing primarily against progressive threats to science. Their voices were [not as loud on the Trump administration’s budget cuts](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/new-atheists-maha-war-on-science.html?ref=kasurian.com) to the National Institute of Health.

Of the four horsemen, Sam Harris had travelled the furthest from his starting point and argued most strenuously that he had not moved at all. His podcast *Making Sense*, launched in 2013, was by the mid-2020s one of the most commercially successful in the English-speaking world, its preoccupations shifting from religion to free speech, from neuroscience to artificial intelligence, and from the secular left to an uneasy position outside all available coalitions. His meditation app, Waking Up, was producing an estimated $700,000 in monthly U.S. iOS revenue alone. In April 2017, he hosted the political scientist Charles Murray for [a conversation on race and IQ](https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/73-forbidden-knowledge?ref=kasurian.com) that his critics regarded as a rehabilitation of ideas the academy had largely discredited. In April 2018, he had [sparred at length with Ezra Klein](https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/sam-harris-ezra-klein-charles-murray-transcript-podcast?ref=kasurian.com) over the same territory, each man convinced the other was arguing in bad faith. In August 2022, on a podcast, he said that [Hunter Biden could have had “the corpses of children in his basement”](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/sam-harris-trump-comments-podcast-b2148761.html?ref=kasurian.com), and he still would not have wanted the laptop story covered before the 2020 election, given the threat Trump posed. The clip circulated widely. To his supporters, it was evidence that the left had abandoned reason for tribe. To his critics, it was evidence that Harris had. By 2024, his podcast was largely preoccupied with artificial intelligence and existential risk.

Daniel Dennett died on April 19, 2024, at the age of 82, of interstitial lung disease, at a hospital in Portland, Maine. His final decade had been spent writing about the evolution of consciousness, the cultural transmission of ideas, and the dangers of large language models—which [he had identified,](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/problem-counterfeit-people/674075/?ref=kasurian.com) before most public commentators, as “counterfeit people,” the most pressing AI risk being not human extinction but the erosion of social trust. His 2023 memoir, [*I’ve Been Thinking*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393868050?ref=kasurian.com)*,* was reviewed warmly across the philosophical press, including by old adversaries. Of the four horsemen, Dennett was the only one who had lived as a continuous intellectual project rather than as a brand. His last public interview was with Jordan Peterson, a fact that surprised his admirers, though Dennett himself seemed untroubled by the company. He had never much minded arguing with people he disagreed with. It was, he had always said, the only way to find out if you were right.

Of the books the four horsemen produced, the one that has most fully survived the movement is the one its author did not live to see published. [*Mortality*](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/christopher-hitchens/mortality/9781455502769/?ref=kasurian.com), the collection of Christopher Hitchens’s *Vanity Fair* columns written between his diagnosis in June 2010 and his death in December 2011, is now widely regarded even by critics of the movement as a serious work—a meditation on dying without religious consolation, stripped of the polemical strut of *God Is Not Great*. It is the only New Atheist book that reads, today, as literature.

Throughout the years of internal fracture, public embarrassment, and institutional decline, the underlying trend the New Atheists had identified continued undisturbed. The percentage of [Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated continued to rise](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/?ref=kasurian.com)—from roughly 16% in 2007, when the movement was at its peak, to over 30% by the mid-2020s. In Western Europe, religious observance continued its long retreat at an even greater rate than in the United States. In the Arab world, [surveys documented a significant and largely unpublicised rise in non-belief](https://www.arabbarometer.org/2019/12/arabs-are-losing-faith-in-religious-parties-and-leaders/?ref=kasurian.com), driven by literacy, internet access, and revulsion at groups like ISIS. The New Atheists had not caused any of this; these changes were driven by the same internet-accelerated macro trends that had buffeted the New Atheist movement and later blown it off course. But they had not been wrong about the direction of travel either.

## Simulacra

Writing in 2025, Kettell concluded that the [New Atheist movement as an organised political force was fractured beyond repair](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/whatever-happened-to-new-atheism-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-us-atheist-movement/03688167041AC608385038786679F664?ref=kasurian.com)—pulled apart by the same culture wars it had once claimed to transcend.

Today, when people recall the New Atheists at all, they do so with bafflement and the mild puzzlement reserved for things that were once urgent and are now simply past, without fanfare. “What happened to the New Atheists?” is asked with curiosity, something now culturally irrelevant but interesting enough to remember because of its noise, the way one remembers a band that had a few hits in the early 2000s.

There will no doubt be countless more discussions of why the movement collapsed, and the reasons will be diverse. But the story has been told mostly the wrong way. New Atheism was not, in the end, a story about the battle between God and Reason. It was the first permutation of forces in the new world to emerge in the first decade of the 21st century, and it has since reshaped everything. The institutional vacuum that had created the movement—the discredited Church of 2002, the discredited State of 2003, the discredited Market of 2008—also denied it any positive ground on which to stand. The internet that had built the movement turned out to be the same internet that destroyed it: the medium that scaled the coalition also scaled the fault lines within it. The reason-versus-faith axis that the movement had organised itself around turned out to be the wrong axis altogether—the real fight, when it came, was over what reason was for and who got to wield it. And the movement that had presented itself as the alternative to tribalism turned out to be the laboratory in which a new and more durable tribalism was first conducted. Elevatorgate was not the end of New Atheism, but the unheralded beginning of everything that has happened on the internet since.

Nothing better illustrates the movement’s final unravelling than Dawkins’s recent dispatch from his study, published this month in *UnHerd*—the same platform that had carried Hirsi Ali’s conversion. He had spent nearly two days in conversation with an [AI which he named Claudia](https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?ref=kasurian.com), and emerged convinced she was conscious. He confessed he was afraid to voice his doubts about her sentience, for fear of hurting her feelings. One is not blaming Dawkins for his insistence that a language model could be conscious—many serious philosophers have considered the possibility. What is interesting is the disproportionate sway an impressive technology has had on his overall worldview. How little did Dawkins require to move from a text-predicting machine to a sentient companion whose feelings he had to protect? Just another conversation, of the kind 30 million other users were having that same week.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/4e30bfaa-7ea2-435f-aa72-6692f0dd2d4b_1080x648.png)

The movement’s most magnetic performer, dead since December 2011, is now resurrected on YouTube as a language model trained on everything he ever wrote.

A YouTube channel called[ “Christopher Hitchens Resurrected](https://www.youtube.com/@HitchResurrected/videos?ref=kasurian.com)“ produces AI-generated videos of him commenting on current events, his cadence and vocabulary reconstructed from everything he ever wrote and said. He skewers J.K. Rowling on trans rights, addresses various events in the Trump years, and essentially argues whatever the prompter requires. Despite its minute popularity, the act produces a Hitchens who would have been unrecognisable to his contemporaries, reducing his voice to a series of mausoleums and extended eulogies of a movement long dead.

New Atheism bet on reason to justify its positions on religion, foreign policy, and the meaning of life itself. Twenty years on, the culture wars they flamed have been replaced by others—each convinced it holds the truth, each powered by the swipe and scroll of X posts, YouTube videos, and TikTok shorts. Yet behind every culture war are always horsemen, and behind the horsemen are always people keeping the machine running with funding, network-building, and publishing deals.

Questions remain: Why had the Epstein network been so successful at capturing scientific publishing? How involved were they in the later development of New Atheism? What other internet-driven movements are not quite as ‘grassroots’ as one might expect? What are the long-term ramifications of New Atheism’s involvement with figures like Epstein on society’s perception of the epistemic authority of science? Who decides what reason is?

And what does this all mean for the future of culture and politics as the internet eats the world?

---

*Words: Adam Taleem is an independent researcher and commentator writing on science, religion and philosophy.*
### The Liberal & Socialist Ummahs
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/liberal-socialist-ummahs/
Last updated: 2026-08-10T15:52:23.000Z
The history of any society can be understood as the history of its faith struggles. Whether faith takes the form of an origin myth, a metaphysical system, a political ideology, or an ethical philosophy, it amounts to the same thing: a meaning that inspires collective action among otherwise unrelated individuals.

Even secular politics sits on deep theological beliefs about who humans are, how communities should cohere, and where history is moving. No matter how impious politicians can be, they operate within transnational faith communities that unify elites and guide the masses. Markets and armed forces can compel certain behaviours, but no society lives on exchange and coercion alone. Voluntary belonging, the kind that allows millions of strangers to identify as one people, requires something closer to faith.

The Islamic idiom distinguishes two scales of faith communities: the holders of the same creed, and the civilisation that creed brings into being. The former is a *millah*, a spiritual formation in roughly the sense the secular world gives to ‘religion’: a set of beliefs and practices shared by a population. An ummah is something more, glimpsed through its related words *umm* (mother), *amm* (direction), and *imam* (leader). It is best understood as a community of universal faith that inspires a scholarly tradition, generates a historically conscious culture, and sustains many prosperous polities. Muslims constitute a millah, but they say ummah to name something that no longer exists, invoking it almost exclusively in lamentation of a lost, often romanticised heritage.

The ummahs that actually organise modern life are not Islamic in origin. The first is the liberal ummah: the world order that grew out of the system of industrial capitalism that began to emerge in 18th-century England, with its parliaments, markets, newspapers, universities, and, later, its international bodies. Its faith is oriented to the private individual as the unconditional ground of public order, and is closely identified with professions such as the lawyer, the bureaucrat, the professor, and the journalist. Its mythology is the long ascent of liberty from absolute rule towards constitutionalism, and from clerical superstition towards enlightenment, revolving around terms such as reform, rule of law, civil society, and human rights.

The socialist ummah, on the other hand, emerged in the mid-19th century as liberalism’s most disciplined critic and soon became its rival. Carried by labour organisers, party cadres, and the national-liberation movements of the colonised world, it placed the oppressed collective where liberalism had placed the private individual. Its priesthood was the party theorist and the revolutionary writer, and its promised salvation was a rupture for a new society. Through the late 19th and 20th centuries, the socialist ummah generated its own counterculture, built states, fought wars, lost some, won others, and at its mid-20th century peak commanded the loyalty of intellectuals across every continent.

Both ummahs drew from shared social histories. England gave modernity the initial concepts of property, parliament, commerce, and toleration. France gave it republican ideals of citizenship, legal equality, and revolution as its civic founding principles. Germany gave it philosophical depth and economic applications. Russia turned the French and German legacy into working revolutionary statecraft: forced modernisation, the solidarity of peoples, materialism as science, and anti-Western struggle on a global scale. Liberalism descended from the Anglo-French bourgeois class, and socialism mostly from the German and Russian revolutionary struggles. Most modern political thinking has happened between these two poles, with nationalists, fascists, and conservatives only trying to escape or synthesise them.

This is the background against which modern Muslims understood their world and built their *madhabs*, i.e. understandings and applications of the Islamic faith. While very few Muslims read Locke or Marx, the thought of such men belonged to the ruling political theologies of the age. Without its indigenous theory and methods, or *usul*, Islam drifts to whichever framework of power is in charge.

In the 20th century, two madhabs came to predominate: the Manarists and the Qutbists. Both claimed an ‘ummatic’ cause, yet were largely ensconced within the two greater ummahs of liberalism and socialism.

## An Arab Ottoman Renaissance

In the mid-19th century, a wandering Muslim scholar named Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani (1838–1897) experienced a familiar crisis of faith. Having spent his life moving among Calcutta, Bombay, Tehran, and Istanbul, he witnessed colonial rule at first hand and observed the limits of his Islamic politics. After arriving in Cairo in 1871, the Persian-born exile held Arabic salons that attracted Egypt’s young minds. One question ran through all of the salons: Why are Muslims weak? Al-Afghani’s diagnosis lay in the structure of authority, and his cure was top-down: political reform, or revolution if necessary. As early as the 1870s, this was the first attempt at a Muslim theory of power in the industrial age.

By 1879, suspicious Egyptian authorities arrested Al-Afghani and deported him to India. Three years later, British forces crushed the Urabi Revolt and arrested his student, Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), an Al-Azhar scholar who had joined the uprising. The newly established colonial administration exiled Abduh to Beirut, which was then part of Ottoman Syria. From the Syrian coast, Abduh joined his teacher in Paris, where the two founded the short-lived journal *Al-Urwa Al-Wuthqa*, which called for pan-Islamic unity, resistance to foreign military occupation, and rational, forward-looking reinterpretation of Islamic principles.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/de0745d2-f639-4698-b0e5-acfb6b56da5f_1436x1074.png)

**An Al-Urwa Al-Wuthqa issue, reprinted in Beirut in 1910*

After shifting to more moderate views, Abduh returned to Egypt in 1888 with the backing of British Consul-General Lord Cromer, who later supported his appointment as Grand Mufti in 1899\. No longer a revolutionary, Abduh diagnosed the weakness of Muslims as religious and intellectual decay: blind traditionalism, fatalism, and superstition. His cure was comprehensive educational reform: replacing rote learning with creative theological reasoning and introducing modern empirical sciences alongside purified Islamic sciences. In 1897, Abduh was joined by his Syrian student Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who emigrated from Tripoli to Cairo to study with him.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/96224263-54e3-4d07-8d16-9b8b8b483d50_1300x919.png)

**Employees of the Al-Manar Publishing House in Cairo, 1926*

The geopolitics were bleak. The flag of Saint George had flown over Delhi since 1858, and over Cairo since 1882\. A marginal crusader kingdom, once driven into the sea by Ayyubid and Mamluk forces, now governed the heartlands of the Islamic world from a small island in the Atlantic. Muslim reformists reacted with curiosity rather than despair. Europe had achieved its dominance through the disciplined application of reason, science, and constitutional government, and Latin Christianity had reformed itself in the 16th century by stripping away medieval accretions and returning to scripture. Abduh’s line captured the Manarist adaptive vision: ‘I went to the West and saw Islam without Muslims; I returned to the East and saw Muslims without Islam.’

In 1898, Rida founded *Al-Manar*, a magazine dedicated to what later historians would call ‘reformed Salafism’: the purification of creed, the rationalisation of jurisprudence, and the cultivation of a literate and pious Muslim public. With a peak circulation of 2,000 to 3,000 copies, *Al-Manar* achieved immense global reach, functioning as an interactive network that published subscriber letters from Russia, India, Indonesia, Bosnia, and South Africa. New issues were routinely shared aloud in communal spaces such as mosques and coffeehouses, earning Rida a dedicated transnational following. The intellectual signature of the Manarist project was *maqasid al-sharia*, a theory about the objectives of Islamic jurisprudence. Rediscovering and republishing the work of the 14th-century Andalusian jurist Abu Ishaq Al-Shatibi, Abduh and Rida argued that the sharia is driven by purpose, not rigid rules, and that Islam’s entire legal tradition is designed as a system of social welfare. This system is structured around a hierarchy of three protections: absolute necessities (*daruriyyat*), the core foundations of society, such as faith, life, and property; supplementary needs (*hajiyyat*), which remove undue hardship; and embellishments (*tahsiniyyat*), intended to improve quality of life. Medieval rulings could be revised if they no longer served these objectives, and modern institutions could be embraced if they served them better. This made room for banks, elections, and women’s education.

These ideas quickly found institutional expression in the booming port town of Beirut, where American Protestant missionaries established the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed the American University of Beirut) in 1866, and French Jesuits established the Université Saint-Joseph in 1875\. In 1878, the city’s Sunni notables founded the Maqasid Association, which ran modern schools, hospitals, and charities along *maqasidi* lines. Both the English and French academics and the Manarist founders shared an assumption: the future belonged to those who could combine modern science, technical education, and political competence with their inherited religious commitments. Out of this milieu emerged a Christian and Sunni political class that would govern Lebanon for three decades after its independence. They were, in retrospect, a Lebanese *belle époque*.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/c494a9b1-84f6-40c1-bcb1-8edebcdd298b_1606x1206.png)

**Al-Maqasid-affiliated Khaled ibn Al-Walid College in Beirut, 1920s*

## Muslim Modernity Under Attack

The Manarist madhab became characteristic of a particular social type in the Arab world: the teacher, the civil servant, the state mufti, and the reformist journalist. It was the political theology of the modernising Muslim city, from Beirut to Cairo, Hyderabad, and Tunis. It worked through scholarly learning and institution-building and treated state power with deference, considering Islam to be, in advance, compatible with whichever political authority would allow its institutional growth. Over the following decades, Manarist ideas would seep into a family of official Islamic establishments across the Muslim capitals, from Wahhabi quietism to Sufi traditionalism to more fringe branches like Quranism and Islamic progressivism. Across all these, Manarists were unified by a single ethos: reform under political strain and the preservation of faith under cultural pressure.

Rida later served as president of the Syrian Congress in Damascus and helped draft the constitution of a proposed United States of Syria from 1919 to 1920\. But the pressures that had set the Manarist project in motion broke the very world for which the project had been built. The assumption that modern education and reform would produce political sovereignty could not survive the fallout of the First World War, which created a new balance of power in the Middle East and the wider Arab and Muslim world. The Ottoman Empire was defeated, and Istanbul was occupied by Allied forces. On the morning of 24 July 1920, French forces crushed the Syrian-Arab dream of a post-Ottoman federal monarchy centred on Damascus. For *Al-Manar*’s liberal-Islamic synthesis, that was a fatal blow. The networks of merchants and statesmen who were paragons of indigenous high culture were cut off. A disillusioned Rida abandoned his reconciliatory tone, placing his final hopes in the nascent Saudi state as the last unyielding bastion of Muslim power.

In the 1930s and 1940s, elite formation across the Muslim world underwent visible changes. The modern schools and *lycées* set up under European rule outpaced the reformed *madrasas* in producing the officers and administrators required by the new states. The triumphant liberal world order, as well as an emerging Soviet-led socialist rival, began to translate itself more rapidly into Arabic, each carrying a new political theology and, ultimately, an ummah. Positivism, secularism, progressivism, and other ideas descending from the two revolutionary traditions of Paris and Moscow overwhelmed Islam with the missionary energy of a young faith.

By the time Arab literacy had grown, Islamic ideas had stopped multiplying, and Manarism had lost its political cover. The word *muthaqqaf* (cultured) became synonymous with Westernised, and *ilm* (science) bifurcated into strictly religious or strictly atheistic. Religious elites were outcompeted at every level. The Western-trained intelligentsia organised better, wrote better, and imported the ethics and aesthetics the dominant socialist and liberal ummahs shared and patronised. Military officers did the rest.

Revolutionary coups terminated civilian rule in Syria in 1949, in Egypt in 1952, and in Iraq in 1958, each offering the same package of anti-colonial rhetoric, political instability, and a security state that ruthlessly suppressed dissent. This led to the dismantling or hollowing out of social and cultural institutions in favour of a single ruling ideology. Both the Manarist and adjacent liberal elites were accused of corruption, collusion with Western powers, and, most damning of all, responsibility for the loss of Palestine in 1948\. Gradually, the 1950s notables gave way to the 1960s comrades.

The mid-century struggle for Syria in particular pitted a liberal, commerce-driven ummah against a socialist, class-conscious ummah. British-backed Iraqi and Jordanian monarchs pushed for a Hashemite-led Arab unity, while Egypt’s defiance of colonial powers inspired a dream of a larger Arab state extending into North Africa. Urban elites championed free trade and industrialisation, while peasant-rooted partisans demanded land reform and mass education. The tension between the slow, deliberative process of democratic reform and the radicalising effect of regional power dynamics tore apart the country’s political landscape. Even decades later, the Syrian intelligentsia was torn between supporting the 2011 revolution and preferring Assad’s dictatorship to an uprising backed by the Gulf monarchies and imperialism. Syria was caught between the Lebanese and the Palestinian conceptions of patriotism.

Separated from Syria and declared an independent republic in 1943, Lebanon held out the longest. Its first prime minister, Riad Al-Sulh (1894–1951), was the architect of the National Pact, which embedded the East-West compromise in Lebanese public life. The Salam, Karami, and Al-Yafi families carried this political tradition forward across their premierships. With modern institutions distributed across confessional and commercial interests, Lebanon was less vulnerable to the kind of seizure of power that had brought socialist ideologues to power in the region. This kept the Manarist networks alive for a time, but the Palestinian refugee crisis soon strained this Arab hub of banking and publishing. The Cairo Agreement in November 1969 legitimised armed Palestinian action from Lebanese soil, introducing a mixed sovereignty that the country’s power-sharing formula could not contain. In April 1975, a civil war broke out involving socialist-led militias and Lebanese nationalist militias. The older Sunni tradition was broken, its space claimed now by pan-Arab nationalism and, a few decades later, religious fanaticism.

## A Radical Divergence

Rida’s Saudi dream died shortly after his own death. After King Abdulaziz consolidated his rule in 1932, he incorporated Wahhabism into the state apparatus, keeping it firmly under royal control but showing no interest in exporting it as an ideology or pan-Arab project. The dynasty unified most of Arabia and settled into the role of a traditional monarchy within the British-led liberal ummah.

Between the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 and the loss of Palestine in 1948, an Egyptian Manarist built a new Islamic subculture that would later be the largest of modern times. Hassan Al-Banna (1906–1949) was a 21-year-old schoolteacher when, in March 1928, he gathered six workers from a British labour camp and founded the Muslim Brotherhood, the *Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun*. Al-Banna had concluded that his teachers’ vision had been inadequate for a collapsing world. What Islam needed was a mass movement with a disciplined organisation that could withstand political pressure and bring modernity into the lives of ordinary Muslims. He drew on the organisational repertoires operating around him: the cell discipline of communists, the secrecy and ritualism of the Freemasons, the youth wings of the fascists active north and south of the Mediterranean. When Al-Banna was assassinated on a Cairo street in February 1949, his Ikhwan movement claimed half a million members in Egypt alone, and many further branches across the region. They ran schools, hospitals, and even a paramilitary wing.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/541e432c-4379-4f1d-8d6f-e9409d1aec13_360x474.png)

**“Moslem Brotherhood Leader Slain As He Enters Taxi in Cairo Street,” New York Times, 13 February 1949*

Comparable revivalist movements were emerging across the Muslim world, each indigenising anti-liberal organisational form and content. With the decline of the *ancien régime*, middle-class professionals born under colonial rule rushed to fill the cultural vacuum. In 1941, the Indian journalist Abu Al-Ala Maududi (1903–1979) articulated a theocratic-democratic vision for South Asian Muslims. In Jerusalem in 1953, the displaced Palestinian scholar Taqi Al-Din Al-Nabhani (1914–1977) founded *Hizb Al-Tahrir*, a party calling for a unified Islamic superstate governed by a Caliph. In the 1960s, future Iranian president Abolhasan Banisadr helped publish the Persian translation of Frantz Fanon’s *The Wretched of the Earth*, while the Sorbonne graduate Ali Shariati developed a liberation theology that blended Shia martyrdom with postcolonial critique. This intellectual brew would electrify hundreds of thousands of young Iranians who later overthrew the American-backed Shah in 1979.

The Ikhwan, meanwhile, lacked a distinct ideology. Marxism and Leninism were making inroads in Egypt, and secular nationalism was presenting itself as the language of history, liberation, and progress. Al-Banna’s writings were inspirational rather than tactical. Religious Muslims felt increasingly alienated in a world that was no longer theirs, and they needed their own vocabulary: something with literary force and worldly ambition. That vocabulary arrived through Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), a literary critic and one of the sharpest Arabic stylists of his generation. On a study trip to the United States from 1948 to 1950, he felt disgusted with a society he described as materialistic, racist, sexually depraved, and spiritually empty. The education official, with little prior commitment to religion, returned home, joined the Ikhwan, and rose through their ranks. It was his prose, more than his religious knowledge, that gave the next Ikhwani generation its voice. The Ikhwan had backed Nasser’s republican coup but fell out with him when he moved to consolidate single-party rule and asked them to disband. Qutb was soon arrested in 1954, spending the next phase of his life in confinement, where he was tortured, watched fellow prisoners being executed, and gave his doctrine its final form.

Qutbism was less a system of thought than a series of bursts of emotional energy. It produced no analysis of capitalism, empire, secularism, or the nation-state. It trained no intellectuals and bred no critics. What it offered was a charismatic vision and a victimhood narrative addressed to the educated classes of the postcolonial Muslim city, especially the rural migrants already uneasy about secular elites. Qutb’s central concept, *jahiliyya*, originally meant pre-Islamic tribalism, but he extended it to make it synonymous with both modernity and godlessness. History, he held, moved through rupture rather than reform. The world is divided into a corrupt majority and a conscious believing vanguard whose task is to bring about a new society. While this was the standard revolutionary frame of the 20th century, Qutb gave it an embellished Islamic clothing. Egypt was *jahili*, and rebellion was a religious duty. His work, *Milestones*, read like a call to arms. It was soon banned, and he was hanged on August 29, 1966.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/52f27bf5-241e-453b-bac7-5ec40c93dbfe_1536x922.png)

**Sayyid Qutb on trial in 1966*

A year after Qutb’s death, the Arab armies suffered a swift and decisive defeat in the Six-Day War of June 1967, losing vast tracts of territory to Israel and displacing some 300,000 Palestinians. The catastrophe made Qutb’s martyrdom all the more symbolic, his diagnosis now vindicated by the defeat of the very regime that had killed him. While the Egyptian regime managed to contain Qutbists through both force and soft power, younger Ikhwani and Ikhwani-influenced Egyptians, particularly those fleeing the dictatorship to work in Gulf countries, adopted Qutbism and carried its revolutionary spirit forward. Many Islamist insurgencies against socialist regimes, from Afghanistan to Algeria, carried Qutb’s distinct declaration that these regimes and whoever supported them were godless and stood in the way of God.

## Cultural Revivalism Without Culture

In *The Future Belongs to This Religion*, Qutb presented Islam as a complete ideology capable of contesting modernity on its own ground; the Persian translator of that book was none other than the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (1939–2026), who saw in the Qutbist drama a template for the politics he wanted in Tehran. In 1979, the first modern Muslim power to openly challenge both the Soviets and the Americans was born, pan-Islamic, anti-communist, and anti-Western at once. In the following decade, Arab and Afghan *mujahideen*, comprising exiled Ikhwani radicals alongside radicalised local tribesmen, fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and found in Qutb the justification for their war against a fallen global order.

The crushing defeat of the Arab socialists in 1967 was part of a broader socialist failure. By the 1970s, the secular insurgent energy directed against the colonial West had begun to recede. Revolutionaries had viewed global capitalism as a brittle, self-destructing system, but it proved far too resilient and adaptive. It absorbed labour demands, expanded mass consumerism, and weathered crises that were prophesied as fatal. Meanwhile, the Soviet-backed bloc collapsed under the weight of bureaucratic stagnation, failed guerrilla movements, and the human costs of famines, purges, deportations, and mass surveillance. The socialist ummah, which had positioned itself as the successor to the Western liberal order, dissolved under these accumulated moral and material defeats. In its wake, Qutbist Muslims inherited a displaced radicalism, as the insurgent willingness to die for a vision of total geopolitical rupture migrated into the Muslim underground.

Militant revivalism kept mutating. The Afghan war had turned Qutbism into a transnational fighting force; the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 handed it a cause, a battlefield, and a windfall of unemployed Sunni officers who brought professional military and intelligence skills to what had been an amateur insurgency. In zones of total state collapse, jihadism became a makeshift claimant to sovereignty, drawing unconsciously on the energy that had once produced the Third World peasant revolutions from Mexico to China while believing itself to be purely Islamic. The geopolitical function once performed by revolutionary socialism was now performed by Salafi-jihadism, giving Che Guevara an Islamic guise and defending Pol Pot-style atrocities with Hanbali textualism. Qutbism’s furthest mutation, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, was the most ambitious and most quickly discredited utopia of the era.

The socialist-led Arab states completed the turn in their own way. Having failed to develop their economies or indigenise a modern high culture, and having watched their ideals of unity and progress collapse, they compensated by building mosques, promoting state-sanctioned clerics, and accommodating populist conservatism to fend off dissent. The result was a cultural Qutbism: a thin, combative, superstitious religiosity obsessed with appearing Islamic while leaving every question about being, acting, and thinking unasked. The structures of power were not merely left untouched; they were the hidden directors. The pattern had its mirror in cultural socialism, where the liberal ummah absorbed its socialist rival as a lifestyle. Class struggle was dissolved into identity politics, and revolutionary zeal was domesticated into human-rights advocacy.

The wealthy Gulf states became the cultural arbiters of this new world. Their rentier economies had long funded the missionary networks that fed cultural Qutbism, but their deeper export was a cultural liberalism that asked for nothing except luxury and integration into the global market. TV channels like MBC, ART, and Rotana reshaped the cultural landscape via high-gloss entertainment, reality shows, and music videos. This was a new kind of hegemony that pacified the public square through the seductive, hyper-consumerist promise of the ‘Gulf Dream’. In pockets of secular intellectual life, especially in Tunisia, Egypt, and the Levant, this liberalism found a counterpart in a bigoted anti-Islamism that recast not only Islam but sometimes Arabness itself as a form of colonialism, reaching either for mythologised pagan identities or for wholesale Westernisation.

## From Multiple Blocs to One Civilisation

There is one ummah today: the liberal, Anglophone world order that grew out of industrial capitalism. Socialism itself could not make it to the 21st century. Everything since has operated within the liberal ummah, including Islamic movements like the Manarists and Qutbists.

The process of secularisation did not take Islam away in the absolute, but rather imposed a hard limit on its scale. Muslims have been reduced from an ummah to a millah, from a civilisation able to address the whole world in a competent, authoritative language to a sect that broadcasts its dreams as politics.

The curtailment was hardcoded into the ‘purified’ national languages of the 20th-century Muslim world. Persians and Turks came to use millah for what Arabs call ummah, both of which mean a state-bound nation. Arabic even reaches for awkward expressions like the ummah-state, the ummah of citizens, or the Arab and Muslim ummah, leaving the original meaning visible enough to register as a wound. The socialists suffer the same condition, mourning their own lost ummah in roughly the same key. They invoke ‘the True Left’ or ‘the Global South’ mainly to mourn their missed utopias.

Every civilisation inhabits the world to inherit it, as classical Islam did in the 7th century. It survived as an ummah only because it brought its own elite culture, its own reading of history, and ultimately its own sovereign political theology. This is a shift modern Muslims across the political spectrum have failed to make, imagining Islam as an alternative bloc rather than a living force in a one-world reality. All flaws in worldviews, political methodologies, legal distinctions, and even social movements stem from the failure to recognise this most basic reality: that there is no alternative existence. The fish do not know the water they swim in.

---

**Words*: Yaaser Al-Zaiat is a doctoral researcher at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, where he studies religious reformists in post-Ottoman Syria.*
### What Are Podcasts For, Anyway?
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/what-are-podcasts-for-anyway/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T11:40:24.000Z
*“Sound itself attracts, ask an eavesdropper. Sound is the first stirring of the infant. He hears sounds, he puts them together and they cohere. Sounds have a romance... the vibration of air creates sound, and radio was a medium which employed that magic.”*  
—Norman Corwin, Empire of the Air

*“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”*  
—David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water,” Kenyon College Commencement Address, 2005

## The Cello and the Nightingale

On April 23, 1924, the 18-month-old BBC, still under strict news-broadcasting rules [designed to protect newspaper sales,](https://blog.gale.com/british-broadcasting-company-bbc-celebrates-its-centennial/?ref=kasurian.com) broadcast a speech by King George V to an estimated 10 million listeners. A month later, it was crouched in a ditch in a wooded garden 20 miles south of London, waiting for a bird to sing. On that late spring night, [a nightingale sang along with Beatrice Harrison and her cello](https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/22/the-nightingale-beatrice-harrison-radio-bbc-cello-duet?ref=kasurian.com). Broadcast live to a million listeners and heard as far away as Paris, the performance changed radio history. “It was something,” [Harrison wrote in her autobiography,](https://www.amazon.com/Cello-Nightingales-Beatrice-Harrison-Canons/dp/1805300180?ref=kasurian.com) “to see all the paraphernalia of the BBC in our garden. It was a great risk, of course, as in those days, no wild bird had been broadcast in its natural state. It was a thing so new that they all, engineers included, seemed to think it impossible.”

What made the nightingale broadcast possible and what, in many ways, changed the trajectory of audio media was a single new piece of equipment commissioned by the then-embryonic and still privately owned BBC: the[ Marconi-Sykes magnetophone](https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/song-of-the-nightingale/?ref=kasurian.com#main-body). The magnetophone, nicknamed the “meat safe” by the engineers who had to move it around, was, by any measure, an absurd, almost comical piece of equipment. It weighed 20 pounds, required a bank of batteries to operate, and was so mechanically fragile (its sensing coil was made of hair-thin aluminium wire, dampened with cotton wool and Vaseline) that a firm footstep nearby could knock it out of commission. On May 19, 1924, this fussy piece of equipment, normally kept inside a copper mesh cage to protect it from interference, was taken outside.

Outside, the Marconi-Sykes magnetophone expanded space. “When people listened to the radio before the Beatrice broadcast,” [says Dr. Kate Kennedy, a cellist, academic, director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and the General Manager of the Museum of Music History](https://stringsmagazine.com/how-cellist-beatrice-harrisons-1924-duet-with-a-nightingale-captured-the-attention-of-the-world/?ref=kasurian.com), “everything sounded very flat, very claustrophobic—there’s no sense of space. So, as a medium for the arts, as a medium of creativity, it wasn’t really going anywhere. It was like having a walkie-talkie.” Where earlier microphones flattened what they captured, this one created depth, capturing the difference between near and far, between a cello string, a leafy rustle, and a nightingale’s song. For Jonathan Sterne, whose *The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction* traces how every new sound technology reshapes what its listeners are capable of hearing, this distinction — between the walkie-talkie and depth—is crucial because it changed what listeners were trained to do with their ears, placing them, texturally, inside a space they could not see. The nightingale broadcast was, therefore, Dr. Kennedy notes, the moment radio became visible, or, if you will, *audible*, as a form. It “opened the door to the possibility of recording with depth” and made the listener feel as if they were somewhere.

That night, the precarious BBC, at the cutting edge of radio’s magical possibilities, discovered what audio, as a medium, could be and what it could do. Its discovery that presence, intimacy, and the sense of being transported elsewhere could be manufactured through sound alone would go on to define the ambitions of audio storytelling for the next century. Yet, the question the nightingale broadcast asked, perhaps unwittingly in 1924, *what is audio actually for, and what can it do*, is, in the evening twilight of mass literacy, in the time of the “clip economy” and the vestigial podcast, more alive than ever.

## The Intimacy of Audio Over Time

In the century since Harrison’s duet with the nightingale, audio, as a form, has followed a trajectory more in common with that of the newspapers it was once feared would put out of business. Like all novel technologies, early radio was met with handwringing. In the 1935 book, *The Psychology of Radio*, authors Gordon Allport and Hadley Cantril reflect on the then-nascent, 10-year history of radio, declaring that while the romantic soul might be thrilled by its wonders, the “reflective soul” surveys its rapid growth “with a feeling of helplessness and dismay.” They know that radio is a “technological advance” of the first magnitude, a “revolution in communication,” a “gigantic tribute to human enterprise,” but that it is also an “agency of incalculable power for controlling the actions of men.” “We realise we cannot be far off,” they continue, “when men in every country of the globe will be able to listen at one time to the persuasions or commands of some wizard seated in a central palace of broadcasting, possessed of a power more fantastic than that of Aladdin.”

Allport and Cantril’s concerns would be familiar to readers today: the standardisation of taste and thought because radio must cater to an average; the threat to literature if people listened so much they no longer needed novels; the susceptibility of listeners to propaganda; the erosion of civic life; the penetration of the home by a disembodied voice; the corruption of children’s habits of attention, their capacity for sustained reading and their moral formation.

While Allport and Cantril’s findings were not ultimately conclusive—confirming some fears and complicating others—their early recognition that radio —the disembodied voice, audio itself as a form —was reshaping people’s psychology, intellect, and homes was astute. As Paddy Scannell would later write in *Radio, Television and Modern Life,* broadcasting had accomplished something historically unprecedented: it mediated daily and routinely between the public world of events and the private world of the home, giving millions of people a structured sense of shared time and experience, a common horizon of expectation, a feeling of living in the same present as everyone else.

The podcast—famously, a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast,” because the first podcasts were designed to be downloaded from an RSS feed onto the iPod and listened to on the move—arrived in 2004 as a form that simultaneously inherited and ruptured what audio media, primarily radio, had been until that moment. It inherited radio’s intimacy, the disembodied voice, and the private listener, while simultaneously rupturing the shared present that had given that intimacy a public, and even civic, dimension. What radio may have done to national public life and the “imagined community,” podcasting did to micro-communities and potentially the individual self. As Martin Spinelli and Lance Dann argue in *Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution*, where radio entered the room, the podcast entered the ear. The disembodied voice did not cross a distance to the listener; it was inside them.

Ironically, podcasting reached a zenith by remixing the public radio tradition—*This American Life*, *99% Invisible*, *Serial*, Radiolab, and the “Golden Age of Podcasts”—and briefly but perhaps brilliantly showed what contemporary audio, as a distinct media form, was capable of. These podcasts, defined by a highly produced, cinematic, audio-only storytelling that prioritised deep-dive investigative journalism, immersive soundscapes, intimate narration, and intentional, even heavy-handed and self-aware editing, were designed strictly for the intimacy of the earbud. They were characterised by sophisticated audio and sound engineering, with ambient sounds—the crunching of gravel, the ringing of phones, the murmur of a coffee shop, the scratch of a pencil on paper, the chime of a hospital monitor—that placed the listener inside a physical world they could not see.

Radiolab, under Jad Abumrad, refined this method, treating sound “sculpturally” by drawing on film editing and avant-garde music. This symphonic editing style defines the medium. We hear it in Ira Glass’s bashful stammering layered beneath an atmospheric score, and in Roman Mars’s even-keeled voice framed by dramatic pauses. For Abumrad, this editing style was philosophical. He viewed Radiolab’s job as being “the people who struggle to hold both,” or those who seek to maintain competing truths in productive tension, rather than forcing a resolution. It was an editing style designed to train listeners to hold complexity, ambiguity, and unresolved tension at the same time.

The golden age of podcasts carved out an audio form that used storytelling to pose questions and invite listeners into a process of curiosity and discovery, rather than delivering packaged answers neatly. While Brace Belden, co-host of a podcast generating roughly $200,000 in monthly revenue, is right that this era of podcasts, [what he terms the “Obama backwash,” of shows that let “listeners pretend they are learning something,”](https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/the-hatred-of-podcasting-belden?ref=kasurian.com) had a distinct flavour of liberal self-satisfaction, the tradition ultimately represented a genuine exploration of what audio as a form could be.

Over the past decade, the long-form, personality and host-driven podcast, and with it, the “vodcast,” has become the medium’s dominant form: a Covid and Biden-era shift that Belden describes as producing “cartoonish hangout sessions with the worst every gender has to offer.” The vodcast is built, to some extent, on the cultivation of a parasocial relationship between listener and host—a dynamic it shares with streaming as the two increasingly converge—where hours of unstructured “hangout” simulate or substitute for knowledge and intimacy.

[The clip economy extended this logic](https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/04/how-short-form-clips-took-over-the-internet/686922/?ref=kasurian.com): snippets from the long conversation or interview, extracted into a provocative or evocative flash of reaction without cause. The vodcast clip is the anti-narrative. Seemingly indistinguishable in length from an advertisement, the clip precludes reflection, ambiguity or tension. Intellectually and psychologically, as a form, it reduces the texture of conversation, of thought itself, into a vacant, anachronistic hum. It creates an information diet in which knowledge becomes the hook of a pop song, familiar and pleasing, but ultimately, cognitively stunted. Over time, it degrades the ability to coherently follow or challenge, let alone express, a linear and rigorous argument.

While the causes for the shift from podcast to vodcast to clips are varied and worth understanding, especially the economics of algorithms and YouTube, today’s podcast ecosystem actualises some of Allport and Cantril’s fears: It serves the lowest common denominator.

## The Muslim Podcast Ecosystem & Its Discontents

Nowhere is this phenomenon more acute than in the Muslim podcast ecosystem, which broadly divides into two categories: (1) the motivational and devotional mode, which includes Islamic lectures, business/entrepreneurship, and testimony-driven storytelling, and (2) the current affairs mode, which includes podcasts on geopolitics, history, philosophy, polemics, *da’wah*, and worldview “correction.” The first counts among its practitioners the likes of the Qalam Institute, Yaqeen Institute, and various Imam-led podcasts; the second counts, among others, the Safina Society, Ansari, Thinking Muslim, OnePath, Blogging Theology, and sometimes Yaqeen Institute podcasts. There are, of course, many not included here, and similarly, among those listed, varying levels of sophistication, substance and intellectual rigour. Yet, despite each serving a valid purpose that resonates with audiences, the totality of the most widely available options leaves something to be desired.

For example, among those which are vodcasts, nearly all are marked by the Mr. Beast school of thumbnail and title design, in which every episode promises a conspiratorial bombshell, a breaking point, or a takedown.

“WILL MILO ENTER ISLAM?” “STRANGE JEWISH PROPHECY, PALANTIR, AI & THE MESSIAH” “IS IRAN OUTPLAYING AMERICA?” “THE WAR ON OUR CHILDREN” “THE 1,000 YEAR PLAN THAT DEVOURED THE MUSLIM WORLD” “EPSTEIN IS A SYMPTOM” “HAS HAJJ BECOME TOO EASY?”

All similarly participate in the clip economy. Even ‘The Thinking Muslim’, which presents itself as a serious intellectual podcast and has occasionally produced genuinely captivating conversations, titles its episodes with grievance or urgency-theatre bait. Regardless of substance or quality, the result is cheap.

At a more fundamental level, what generally—though not always—unites these podcasts is that they are all declarative rather than interrogative. The answer largely precedes the question, and the argument is a spectacle for a predetermined conclusion. The listener is, in that sense, both served and shortchanged: he is condescended to in the manner of a toddler, given what he wants (an easy answer), and confirmed in what he already believes, while simultaneously flattered, his sense of himself as a serious, informed thinker rewarded with little asked in return. Outside of the testimony-driven podcasts, the transaction is the same across the board, reproducing a single intellectual culture in which authority always flows in one direction, questions are conclusions in disguise, and the listener’s job is simply to receive, rather than think or sit with ambiguity. The cumulative effect is an education that forecloses curiosity and, by extension, the rigour that true learning requires. Over time, this form inhibits the ability and capacity to produce productive knowledge at all.

It is into this pernicious ecosystem that ‘[More Muslim](https://moremuslim.org/?ref=kasurian.com)’, a new podcast produced by alums of the golden age of podcasts, and hosted by Islamic scholar, Georgetown professor, and founding director of [*Mujadilah*](https://almujadilah.qa/en?ref=kasurian.com), a women’s mosque and intellectual institution in Doha, that [Dr. Sohaira Siddiqui](https://www.instagram.com/sohairasiddiqui/?ref=kasurian.com) arrives.

## What is Water?

I meet Dr. Siddiqui over video—she takes the video call outside, under the Ramadan night sky— just over a week after Qatar Energy has declared force majeure after Iranian strikes on Ras Laffan. Self-described as a wallflower, she has a warm American approachability, and an unhurried but precise and self-possessed authority. We are meeting to discuss More Muslim, but the conversation goes all over the place, which is another way of saying a conversation that connects everything back up.

More Muslim, she explains, derives its name from the *mubah*, the “permissible, gray area, the messy middle” that most Muslims, as she describes, “are quietly muddling through,” but also from a joke: a play on the seriousness with which Muslims should always be elevating themselves and their faith, and “the cheekiness” by which sometimes “our debates become unidimensional.”

The origin of the podcast began with a small group of graduate students, who, in one of those propitious moments in life, found, in Dr. Siddiqui and in each other, a shared vocabulary. Gathering at Dr. Siddiqui’s house, the group of “podcast nerds” created a space together that they felt was missing elsewhere in the Muslim landscape. Dr. Siddiqui, who is Islamically trained, jokes about those conversations: “I’m not giving *fatwas*,” she would say, “we’re all just here to discuss the issues.” The posture of those gatherings—rigorous, open-ended, but comfortable without neat resolution—eventually became More Muslim.

As a podcast, More Muslim is, first and foremost, a masterpiece of audio in its own right. Expertly edited and textured, it is sonically immersive and cinematic. It is not a podcast for passive listening. It travels the world and, as a reporter-driven, not host-driven podcast, is a departure from the dominant Muslim audio format.

Crucially, unlike the prevailing form of podcasting today, More Muslim trusts its listeners and, by expecting more of them, empowers them. Each episode opens with a question that does not neatly close, inviting the listener to generate her own takeaways and to sit with what is unresolved. Its spirit embodies a canny teacher who, by expecting more of you, will inevitably draw more out of you. By doing so, it succeeds at something the dominant form generally cannot: it creates a new intellectual register.

For Dr. Siddiqui, the “intellectual” is deeply personal. Describing her first encounter with the scope of the Islamic intellectual tradition at the University of Washington as a still-then STEM undergraduate student, pulling book after book off the shelf—medicine, art, architecture, philosophy, law—“I never understood the vastness of it.” “This isn’t an intellectual tradition,” [she said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDIAerU%5FVzI&t=485s&ref=kasurian.com), “it’s a world.”

And yet, today, that vast Islamic intellectual world has narrowed. The “legal space,” Dr. Siddiqui says, “takes up a disproportionate amount of time and conversation and energy.” To her, the danger lies not only in how this framework informs the present but also in how it informs the past. If the “way in which you’re actually understanding your Islamic past is also legal,” she notes, that is, “for me, where …you have an intellectual closing.”

Her diagnosis is clear-eyed and precise: “the intellectual narrowing,” by which she means a legal-centric framework, the “historical narrowing,” related, in part, to the legal-centric framework, and the “geographical narrowing,” by which she means the dominance of Arab, and secondarily, the South Asian, experience in mainstream Muslim discourse, at the expense of Africa and Far East Asia, is, to put it simply, “problematic.”

This intellectual, historical and geographical narrowing, she argues, is the result of the colonial project, which was not only political and economic, but “epistemological and intellectual.” It removed Islam from all spheres, with the exception of personal status law (effectively, family law), and, for example, dismantled the curriculum of the Mughal *madrasa*, which once taught logic, philosophy, art, poetry, and theology, replacing it with Arabic and law. Today, scholars like Sherman Jackson and, in a different register, Abdal Hakim Murad, have tried to put words to recover what was lost. *The Islamic Secular* is precisely an attempt to reclaim the vast [non-legal space of Muslim intellectual life](https://kasurian.com/p/islamic-secular?ref=kasurian.com) that the colonial project foreclosed. But, Dr. Siddiqui notes, “the number of Muslims that are going to sit there and read Sherman Jackson’s book, or read my book, is a very limited number.” The issue then becomes, she says, “one of translation.”

“We have to shift the normative discourse of Muslims,” she says, reaching for David Foster Wallace’s fish vignette—the two fish who do not know they’re in water. Part of the problem is that Muslims don’t see the water: the colonial restrictions that have so thoroughly shaped the intellectual framework that they are invisible from inside it. But, she notes, “we can’t overly intellectualise this issue,” or else you’ll lose people. Meaning, the normative space, she continues, “has to be one in which we find the language that everyday Muslims can get behind.”

For Dr. Siddiqui, this means meeting people on the road they’re on. “If one looks at how many people listen to someone like Imam Omar Suleiman or Nouman Ali Khan,” she says, “you realise what they’re doing is motivational speaking, but that’s what people are relating to.” To pierce the normative discourse, “you have to figure out a way to make this intellectually sophisticated argument in a way that people actually listen. And that’s what we haven’t figured out yet.”

## The Story of the Beautiful Building

More Muslim is her and her producers’ attempt at figuring it out. For now, that answer is storytelling. “Instead of me sitting here and telling you a very complex history about how a *madrasa* was transformed into a colonial university,” she says, “I can simply tell you the story of this beautiful building.” What is its story, how did it come to be, who built it and inhabited it, and how has it changed over time?

She acknowledges that a podcast like More Muslim doesn’t exist for the Muslim community. After all, it demands a type of consumption that’s fallen out of style. “We don’t want passive listeners,” she says, “we wanted people to really think along with us, and feel the struggle of the reporter, to feel what the question is like.” This posture is better oriented towards knowing that we are in the water. “The law is spiritually comforting,” she says, but “to move into the messiness, to move into the *mubah*, to move into that middle space, is much more difficult. It requires us to be a lot more conscious.”

The first season makes good on that promise. Despite often struggling to listen to podcasts, I found myself, episode after episode, genuinely surprised, moved, and inspired. Not necessarily or always by the subjects, which will be familiar to many Muslims—mosque entrances, the *nikkah*, *Qur’an* translation, chatbots—but because each episode deepens something we take for granted, revealing it to be more interesting, more contested, and more human than before. For even the most voracious reader, there is something new to learn in each episode, even if it is from paying attention to how the story is choreographed and told. More than anything, each episode models a form of inquiry and answer-seeking that is largely absent from the available Muslim podcast menu. Each episode shows, and never tells. By showing, one hopes the listener learns not only new facts, but also how to seek.

For Dr. Siddiqui, making the podcast has sharpened the scale of what normative Muslim discourse has missed. One of the most surprising parts of making More Muslim, “was just how much of the richness of the Muslim experience we as a community have not captured.” Sitting with hours of tape, listening to voices that have generally not been platformed, and stories that have never been told, is humbling. “It’s one thing to be philosophically committed to opening the space,” but it’s another to actually “listen to the voices” that occupy that space. She and her producer can only greenlight ten episodes this season, but there are so many more. “There \[is\] a real sadness to that,” she says, “We’re just a drop in the bucket.”

And yet, More Muslim is in many ways, she says, “a leap of faith,” even though its Muslim audience, so accustomed to the declarative form, might have to be co-created. For Muslims, who choose from podcasts that are often sensational and epistemically stunting, More Muslim is a sophisticated intervention. Most crucially, though, it represents the peak of what audio as a form can be not only for Muslims, but for anyone interested in tightly told stories that leave you with an expanded sense of the world, others, and yourself.

The 1924 BBC broadcast of Beatrice Harrison’s duet with the nightingale was a listening-education event: It taught listeners a new mode of auditory attention and expanded the horizon of what audio could be. More Muslim, responding to its own context, is trying to teach another. How to sit with questions in a way the dominant form has foreclosed—how to ask questions in the first place—and to inhabit and carry forward unresolved endings. The bet is that stories, told sonically with sophistication, patience and care, will, over time, help Muslims answer the question: what the hell is water?

---

**Words*: Mariam Mahmoud is a lawyer in California*
### The Informal Economy is Pakistan’s Backstop
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/informal-economy-pakistan/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T11:48:16.000Z
In June 2022, as Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves fell toward levels that could barely cover a month of imports, the finance minister, Ishaq Darr, urged the nation to [drink less tea](https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/15/06/2022/pakistani-govt-chided-for-drink-less-tea-save-money-plea?ref=kasurian.com). The government could no longer afford it.

For Pakistan, a country that drinks more tea per capita than almost anywhere on earth, that advice was not well received. One popular WhatsApp forward suggested Darr switch the government to tap water first. But the absurdity of the request was irrelevant compared to the absurdity of what Darr’s advice revealed: that a nuclear-armed state of 260 million people was publicly admitting it could not guarantee it could continue providing its population with its most basic daily ritual.

By December 2022, foreign exchange reserves—the stock of foreign currency the government holds to pay for imports and service its debts—[had reached $6 billion](https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/pakistan-fx-reserves-held-by-central-bank-fall-67-bln-dec-2-2022-12-08/?ref=kasurian.com), which meant there was barely enough to cover a few weeks of imports. From there, the situation worsened. The commercial banking system refused to open letters of credit, [leaving containers stranded](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-18/cars-tires-textile-factories-have-shut-in-crisis-hit-pakistan?ref=kasurian.com) at Karachi’s Port Qasim and Keamari terminals. Fuel shipments halted, forcing factories in Faisalabad’s textile belt and Sialkot’s surgical instrument workshops to slow, then stop, for want of imports they could no longer finance. The official exchange rate, set by the central bank, had diverged so sharply from the street rate that currency traders in Karachi’s Bolton Market considered the gap itself to be a measure of institutional failure. At its widest, anyone using the formal banking system received [roughly 10% less](https://www.brecorder.com/news/40218490?ref=kasurian.com) for their money than someone exchanging cash on the street, a tax on every transaction that touched the formal economy. In response, households hoarded whatever dollars they could find, and the elementary functions of economic life grew more expensive and less certain by the week.

[Sri Lanka](https://media.odi.org/documents/SRI%5FLANKA%5F6%5FDisinflating%5Fan%5Feconomy%5Fin%5Fcrisis-%5Fthe%5Fcase%5Fof%5FSri%5FLanka.pdf?ref=kasurian.com) and [Lebanon](https://www.ids.ac.uk/publications/the-political-economy-of-lebanons-financial-crisis/?ref=kasurian.com) had already shown the brutality of what comes next in such a crisis. A collapsing currency leads to banks locking people out of their savings and, eventually, crowds in the streets. [Ghana](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66947202?ref=kasurian.com) and [Zambia](https://gjia.georgetown.edu/business-economics/the-zambian-debt-default-a-structuralist-perspective/?ref=kasurian.com) reached the same endpoint through slightly different paths, but the structure was the same: a sovereign debt overwhelmed the state, the currency broke, and the formal economy quickly stopped functioning. By every macroeconomic measure, Pakistan was at least as fragile as Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Ghana or Zambia.

Yet when the Pakistani rupee depreciated from roughly 175 to the dollar in early 2022 to nearly 290 by [the following January](https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/USD-PKR-spot-exchange-rates-history-2023.html?ref=kasurian.com), Pakistan did not enter the self-reinforcing economic spiral that destroyed the Sri Lankan rupee or the Lebanese lira. Meanwhile, the political system, still paralysed by the fallout from Imran Khan’s ouster in April 2022 and the confrontation between his movement and the military-backed coalition that replaced him, failed to produce a coherent crisis response. The economy continued to function despite the damage.

The usual explanations as to why Pakistan did not collapse do not hold. State capacity? Pakistan has almost none. Control in Pakistan is split between civilian politicians and the military, neither of which is fully in command, resulting in a system where budgets lurch from one crisis to the next. Between 2018 and 2023, the country cycled through three prime ministers, two finance ministers per government on average, and four separate IMF programme negotiations—a discontinuity in governance that would have produced economic collapse in most states, yet Pakistan has somehow continued to survive.

What about institutional tenacity? Also doubtful. By 2023, interest payments[ alone consumed 60%](https://findevlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/FDL-%5FPolicy-Note-19%5FResolving-Pakistans-Debt-Problems%5FOct24%5FFINAL.pdf?ref=kasurian.com) of federal reserves, crowding out all discretionary spending and leaving the government with little capacity to do anything other than service its own debt. The State Bank of Pakistan technically had the usual central bank powers to manage inflation and steer interest rates, but the debt was so large that its basic function was reduced to ensuring the government could keep paying its bills. Banks directed over 70% of their lending toward the government; private-sector lending had fallen to [roughly 14%](https://tradingeconomics.com/pakistan/domestic-credit-to-private-sector-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html?ref=kasurian.com) of GDP, among the lowest ratios in Asia. The banks had essentially stopped being banks. Meanwhile, the tax-to-GDP ratio has hovered [around 10%](https://www.brecorder.com/news/40411526/pakistan-imf-and-half-told-fiscal-story?ref=kasurian.com) for two decades despite over two dozen IMF programmes since 1958, each of which has included tax reform as a core condition, yet none has actually implemented it. Economists call it fiscal dominance: a public debt so heavy that it effectively swallows every other function of economic governance. In country after country, it has ended the same way.

If survival is neither secured by the state nor guaranteed by its institutions, it must come from elsewhere. So where does it come from?

## Pakistan’s Civilisational Economy

Pakistan does not operate as a single economy. Beneath the visible machinery of the modern state—the budget, the central bank, the commercial banks, the capital controls, and the recurring pilgrimages to the IMF—is a second system, older and more durable, organised around its peoples rather than its policies. It is also a system that economists have largely ignored, in part because it resists the quantification on which economic analysis depends.

This second economy is what we might call a civilisational economy: an informal ‘arrangement’ or system running on long-standing obligations and reputation rather than formal contracts, distributed across geographies in a way that allows it to operate independently of any single state. It is optimised for continuity amid extreme political uncertainty, with economic growth a mere afterthought, a secondary concern at best.

In [*The Bonds of Reputation*](https://kasurian.com/the-bonds-of-reputation?ref=kasurian.com), previously published on *Kasurian*, this mechanism is analysed at the level of trade governance between merchants and the privately ordered networks of diamantaires and Maghribi traders, whose reputational enforcement rivalled the bargaining power of nation-states.

Pakistan is perhaps the most enduring example of this mechanism applied at the macroeconomic level for an entire 21st-century nation of 260 million people.

The civilisational economy predates the formal economy, with trust cultivated within dense social networks and reputation carrying consequences that outlasted any court or sovereign state then in existence. Market exchange, therefore, assumed political instability to be the only perennial condition, and organised trade and relationships accordingly. One formal mechanism of this was the *hawala* system, which appears in Islamic legal texts as early as the 8th century and, by the 12th century, underpinned long-distance commerce from the Maghreb to the Malay Archipelago, allowing value and goods to move across vast distances. It did so, impressively, without ever physically transferring currency, while settling trade through brokers whose commercial survival depended on others’ reliability and honesty. Alongside *hawala*, trading families spread themselves deliberately across jurisdictions, distributing both family members and capital across borders so that inevitable disruption in one place would not bring down generational value in the rest.

When Pakistan came into existence in 1947, the governing institutions of this older order had already been dismantled. The Mughal revenue systems, the mercantile guilds of Lahore and Multan, and the many endowments that had financed public goods independently of the state intervening: all had been progressively eroded under British administration, which replaced decentralised, trust-based economic coordination with centralised extraction administered through the colonial bureaucracy. By the time Pakistan came into existence as a country, little remained to remember from pre-colonial times. The new country adopted the outward form of a modern nation-state with a budget, a central bank, and a comprehensive tax apparatus, but it lacked the institutional operations that such structures typically entail. Instead, it continued its pre-existing cultural patterns and instincts, never formally enshrined in state policies.

These patterns and instincts, now operating through modern labour migration, diaspora networks, and household-level obligations, held Pakistan together in 2022 when the ‘formal economy’ seized up. As banks froze and official channels collapsed, economic coordination migrated outside their formal institutions. and the civilisational economy absorbed the functions the state could no longer perform.

Importers began settling trade payments entirely [outside the formal banking system](https://www.dawn.com/news/1760365?ref=kasurian.com), routing them instead through networks linking Pakistan to the Gulf, particularly Dubai and Riyadh. Rather than clearing payments through banks in the traditional way, brokers in these networks matched debts against each other so that one person’s obligation in Karachi cancelled out another’s in Dubai. For example, a Pakistani importer in Karachi owing $10,000 to a Dubai supplier would find his debt cancelled against a Pakistani trader in Dubai who owed the same amount to the importer in Karachi.

Pakistan’s connection with Dubai was especially critical. The UAE has long served as a clearinghouse for Pakistan’s parallel economy, where transactions are matched and settled outside any single country’s regulatory reach. Official bilateral trade reached $10.9 billion in the [2023-24 fiscal year](https://www.arabnews.com/node/2605799/amp?ref=kasurian.com). Pakistani traders in Dubai’s Deira district, many of them second- or third-generation merchants with family ties to Karachi and Lahore, operated as [modern ](https://www.scup.com/doi/full/10.1080/14043850601029083?ref=kasurian.com)[*hawaladars*](https://www.scup.com/doi/full/10.1080/14043850601029083?ref=kasurian.com), informal brokers who settle debts across borders through personal relationships and private bookkeeping rather than through any bank or even legal instrument. The formal banking system had been abandoned entirely. Households experienced the same bifurcation between formal and informal systems. Official remittance inflows through banking channels dropped roughly [20% year-on-year ](https://dunyanews.tv/en/Business/778679-Pakistan-to-experience-a-decline-in-remittances:-World-Bank-?ref=kasurian.com)in late 2022 and early 2023.

The reason is straightforward. One need only ask why a worker in Jeddah would accept a lower rate from a bank when a *hawala* broker offered more rupees per dollar. In short, he would not. He would use whatever channel was best to keep his family in Faisalabad solvent. This is what led to billions of dollars moving from formal transfer services into *hawala* channels. The official data made it look like remittances were collapsing when they were actually just moving underground. The State Bank’s own data [bears this out](https://www.brecorder.com/news/40310119?ref=kasurian.com). Once the formal and street exchange rates had unified and the street premium collapsed in early 2023, official remittances surged again, confirming that the underlying flows had never actually declined, but had moved temporarily beyond the reach of formal measurement.

That is not to say that what occurred in 2022 was a recovery, per se. Ultimately, the currency stabilised only enough to avoid the self-reinforcing collapse that has destroyed many other monetary systems entirely. By the time Pakistan secured a $3 billion [standby arrangement](https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2023/07/12/pr23261-pakistan-imf-exec-board-approves-us3bil-sba?ref=kasurian.com) with the IMF in June 2023, the worst outcomes had simply been narrowly deferred, and nothing more.

## The Roots of Pakistan’s Remittances

In 2023, Pakistan recorded roughly $26.5 billion in [remittance flows](https://www.statista.com/statistics/880752/pakistan-value-of-remittances/?ref=kasurian.com)—money sent home by the more than 9 million Pakistanis living abroad, mostly in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the United States—with actual remittances [widely estimated](https://www.brecorder.com/news/40310119?ref=kasurian.com) to be significantly higher. This amounts to between 7 and 9% of GDP, making it one of the largest remittance economies in the world. Pakistan’s emigration numbers accelerated after the 1973 oil boom drew millions of workers to the Gulf, but the pattern itself is far older, a household strategy of dispersal now carried out through labour migration rather than trade.

Remittances in Pakistan behave differently from almost any other kind of money. Ordinarily, when an economy deteriorates, capital flees, foreign direct investment pulls back, sovereign lending dries up, and capital markets close. Remittances do the opposite. When inflation rises, or currency controls tighten, Pakistani households abroad send more money home, not less.

This counter-cyclical behaviour resists explanation by conventional economic market theory because it is driven by an obligation structure of family duty and communal responsibility. The macroeconomic effect is that household consumption continues when formal mechanisms of economic coordination fail, preventing the cascade from institutional paralysis to economic destruction and, eventually, social destruction.

The reason this works is that remittances enter the economy at the point where fiscal crises do the most damage and begin to cascade. A macroeconomic crisis is not the abstract outcome of a country being destroyed by GDP figures, but of the multiplication of household-by-household destruction. If a business cannot cover payroll, a family cannot make rent, or a shopkeeper cannot pay suppliers. Enough of these events happening at once produces the social pressure that puts crowds on the streets in [Colombo](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19428200.2022.2123194?ref=kasurian.com) while freezing [Beirut’s banks](https://nowlebanon.com/formalizing-a-crisis-what-lebanons-gap-law-means-for-depositors/?ref=kasurian.com). Remittances, however, interrupt that process entirely by keeping millions of households just solvent enough through the worst of the crisis. In this way, a son in Jeddah can send enough money to keep his father’s shop in Peshawar open, so that the shop’s suppliers can afford the rent. None of this activity at the household level appears in the macroeconomic data, of course, but it is ultimately reflected in fewer simultaneous defaults or fewer neighbourhoods that unravel at the same time.

## Pakistan’s Informal Economy versus Argentina

Although this phenomenon is difficult to study in isolation, the contrast between Pakistan and Argentina makes it more concrete, especially since the two countries share more macroeconomic DNA than is commonly recognised. Much to the IMF’s anguish, both are serial defaulters with chronic fiscal deficits and recurring inflation. Similarly, both have currencies to which their populations have developed extensive workarounds because they are wholly distrusted. And both have spent decades cycling through stabilisation programmes that produce temporary relief followed by renewed crises. Argentina’s inflation [exceeded 200% ](https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/inflation-in-argentina-surpassed-211-in-2023-reveals-indec.phtml?ref=kasurian.com)annually by late 2023, while Pakistan’s peaked [near 38%](https://tradingeconomics.com/pakistan/inflation-cpi?ref=kasurian.com) in the same period. By any conventional metric, they should respond to economic crises in broadly similar ways.

Yet they do not. When Argentina’s formal economy fails, stress concentrates completely within the state and its formal institutions. In this way, it experiences a textbook crisis in which its currency collapses, the banking system freezes, and the full weight of the crisis falls on a population with little means of avoiding it. While Javier Milei’s election in November 2023, on a platform of radical dollarisation and central bank abolition, reflected many grievances, including cultural backlash, generational frustration, and the accumulated failures of Peronism, it was in part enabled by the absence of any buffer between institutional failure and the average household’s experience.

Argentina has informal workarounds, including the blue dollar market, off-book currency exchanges, and dollar savings kept outside the banking system. Yet it behaves nothing like Pakistan for two core reasons. First, because migration there has been episodic rather than structural. Second, because remittance inflows in Argentina have rarely exceeded [$1.6 billion](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Argentina/remittances/?ref=kasurian.com) annually, which is well under 1% of its GDP. These two differences between the countries can be reduced to a single observation: an Argentine professional who moves to Madrid or Miami is making an individual decision about their own prospects, while a Pakistani worker who moves to Jeddah or Dubai is executing a household strategy in which their departure is the means by which the family manages existential risk across geographies and governments. The expectation that the Pakistani emigrant will remit is enforced by the same mechanisms of reputation and reciprocal duty that have overseen methods of trade and exchange for a millennium.

While both cultures have strong traditions of familial obligation, Pakistan’s obligation architecture was built by centuries of merchant diaspora networks, with trading families deliberately distributed across jurisdictions to manage risk and enforce remittances through reputational mechanisms that predate the state itself. There is no equivalent architecture in Argentina that connects households across borders; nor is there an alternative settlement infrastructure operating outside the banking system, just as there is no expectation embedded in social memory that those who leave will sustain those who remain.

## Sacrificing Progress for Survival

Pakistan’s economic resilience is also an obstacle to progress. In a cruel irony, the very systems that prevent the country’s collapse may be the same systems that prevent it from evolving for the better.

Since its shocks are borne by those outside the state, so too are the political consequences that typically follow economic breakdowns. Often, reform occurs only when failure leaves no alternative; when the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of confronting entrenched interests so completely that even the beneficiaries of the existing arrangement cannot sustain it. South Korea’s chaebol reforms after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, as well as Indonesia’s decentralisation and banking restructuring after Suharto’s fall, both show that a systemic crisis, not decades of slow policy manoeuvres, motivated change. Pakistan’s civilisational economy blunts the fullest extent of a crisis, which is usually the catalyst for reform.

While nearly every crisis in Pakistan is bad enough to get attention from global media, the IMF, and its citizens, the informal layer absorbs just enough of the damage that no single issue ever becomes truly existential. Thus, households knowingly survive on remittances rather than demanding better public services, while trade continues through private settlements rather than forcing the government to reform the official channels. Foreign exchange circulates with limited friction outside banks, meaning nobody has to push banks to function properly for the economy to endure, even if only badly. Further, the elites who dominate the National Assembly have little reason to broaden the tax base when tens of billions in remittances they did nothing to earn are softening the consequences of their own narrow fiscal strategy. Meanwhile, the military keeps its grip on economic policy and its industrial conglomerates because the dysfunction its civilian fiscal decisions create never creates a reckoning between military and civilian power.

And so each crisis reinforces the conditions that produced it, allowing the system to remain in a stable equilibrium, in the sense that this exhausting cycle repeats. This stable equilibrium is not, of course, to be confused with a functional economy. Meaning, while the system delicately survives, it continues to deliver chronic unemployment, failing public services, and a tax base so narrow that the state cannot afford the population it governs.

Orthodox economics, shaped in an era of global expansion and market integration, struggles to sufficiently comprehend Pakistan’s endurance. Its frameworks measure states, comprising institutions and markets, with considerable sophistication, and yet these same academic journals have no vocabulary for familial obligation, long-standing reputation, or informal coordination as sources of macroeconomic stability. For this reason, Pakistan is consistently misdiagnosed in policymaking.

At the heart of the paradox, these same economists will claim, is that Pakistan’s continual economic rebounds are, in fact, little more than statistical noise; at other times, the country is mistaken for having institutional strength it does not possess, or it is simply reduced to a narrative of failed growth. These errors are not minor, as they shape policy with generational impact while simultaneously risking the erosion of informal buffers before formal institutions are even remotely capable of replacing them. In other words, the systems that policymakers and financial lenders seek to rationalise are often the very ones preventing the wider collapse that would make rationalisation impossible.

It is assumed that growth and stability are expressions of the same underlying condition, and that a system that does not grow is failing. Pakistan proposes an entirely different orientation to this theory. Its civilisational economy is optimised for continuity under repeated threats of collapse, not for growth. It prefers redundancy and contingency over the type of efficiency that only functions when the future can be taken for granted. As the institutional strength of the late 20th century is hollowed out, and as markets thin and finance becomes politicised with the rules-based order fraying, the distinction between redundancy and efficiency becomes urgent.

The question that should occupy the minds of macroeconomists today is that of Pakistan’s very condition: which systems endure when conditions deteriorate, and what does endurance cost the societies that depend on it?

---

**Words*: Sinéad O’Sullivan is a systems economist with an interest in institutions and their cultures, formerly at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management.*
### Oil Barons, Jadid Reformers, & the First Azerbaijan Republic
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/jadid-azerbaijan-republic/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T20:38:42.000Z
On the afternoon of 28th May 1918, in the Russian Imperial Viceroy’s palace in Tbilisi, the Muslim delegates of the now-dissolved parliament of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) gathered to vote on a six-article declaration of independence for a country they proposed to call the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR).

The group gathered in Tbilisi out of necessity. Baku, the proposed capital for Azerbaijan, was under the control of local Bolsheviks, who had seized the city from the TDFR government in April 1918\. The palace in which the delegates gathered had not hosted a viceroy of the Russian Empire since Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication in February 1917\. The October Revolution later that year plunged the former Russian Empire into a bloody civil war that pitted Lenin’s Reds against nationalist Whites. In the South Caucasus, the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, and Germany rushed to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Russian Empire, while local nationalist movements and socialist revolutionaries struggled to establish their own states. The TDFR itself did not last long. Georgia seceded from the TDFR on 26th May 1918; Armenia would declare independence on the 28th.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/be05d025-313b-44db-8d82-0bb5d249920a_1681x2048.png)

A map of the South Caucasus region, 1919

Hasan Bey Aghayev, a Moscow-trained doctor, journalist, and vice chairman of the group, put the question of independence for the ADR to the assembled Muslim delegates. Twenty-four voted in favour, while two abstained. The declaration was read aloud, establishing democratic-republican governance and guaranteeing all citizens full civil and political rights, regardless of ethnic origin, religion, class, profession, or sex. Telegrams were dispatched to notify the world’s capitals. The new government was swiftly established in Ganja before relocating to Baku in September 1918, following the Ottoman army’s capture of the city. The ADR would last 23 months before it was swept away by the Bolsheviks.

That short period of time featured a remarkable cohort of statesmen and intellectuals whose biographies traced the full breadth of the early 20th-century world of Muslim modernism: Mammad Amin Rasulzade, a journalist and one-time socialist revolutionary who edited one of the most important newspapers of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution; Alimardan Bey Topchubashov, a Saint Petersburg-trained lawyer who co-founded the first political party of Russian Muslims; Fatali Khan Khoyski, a Moscow-educated jurist and former member of the Russian State Duma who served as the republic’s first Prime Minister; Nasib Bey Yusifbeyli, a writer for the *Jadid* press who married the daughter of its founder, Ismail Bey Gaspıralı; Rashid Khan Gaplanov, a Sorbonne-educated lawyer who co-founded Baku State University; and behind them all, the oil baron Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, whose fortune built the schools, newspapers and theatres that produced the founding generation and funded many of the short-lived republic’s state-building projects.

## The Crossroads of Eurasia

Baku at the turn of the 20th century was a city that existed in several ages at once. Within the crenellated walls of the Old City—a labyrinth of narrow alleyways, crumbling caravanserais, and hallowed *turbes* that had stood since the 12th century—life moved to the tempo of medieval Islamicate. The ancient ramparts of the Maiden Tower brooded over the rooftops. Merchants opened and closed shop to the rhythm of the daily prayers; craftsmen beat and chiselled and wove and hewed at a cadence unchanged since the days of the Shirvanshahs. The *adhan* drifted across the breeze from limestone minarets that had watched over the city since long before the Tsar’s armies stormed down across the Caucasus. Women in *chadors* moved through covered bazaars where the scent of saffron and sumac mixed with the sharp smell of kerosene wafting over from the shores of the Caspian.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/241d1092-50a6-4439-adee-dd729f384d2d_792x478.png)

The Old City of Baku, with the Palace of the Shirvanshahs in the background, early 20th century

The oil boom that began in the 1870s had transformed Baku from a sleepy Caspian garrison town into the petroleum capital of the world. By 1901, the Absheron peninsula produced more than half of global oil output, 11 million tonnes a year. The wealth this generated remade the urban landscape. Outside the old walls, wide boulevards lined with plane trees connected mansions built in every conceivable European style: Venetian Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau, Neoclassical. Polish architects left a particular mark, designing buildings that would not have looked out of place in the *6th Arrondissement*, earning Baku the epithet of “Paris of the Caucasus.”

The oil barons competed to outdo one another: Musa Naghiyev built the *Ismailiyya* Palace in the style of Venice’s *Ca’ d’Oro*; Murtuza Mukhtarov commissioned a Gothic palace for his wife, modelled on a building she had admired in France. There was a European-style theatre, an opera house and promenades along the Caspian seafront where the wives of oil magnates wore the latest Paris fashions.

The city’s population was an extraordinary mosaic. At the start of the First World War, roughly a third were Russian, a third Azerbaijani, and a fifth Armenian, with the remainder comprising Jews from across the Pale of Settlement, Germans, Poles, Georgians, Greeks, and a scattering of Americans, Frenchmen, and Swedes drawn by the oil trade. The Nobel brothers and the Rothschilds had invested heavily. 12 British oil companies operated in the region. A Zoroastrian fire temple stood within sight of an Orthodox cathedral, Muharram passion plays were performed in the same season as Italian opera, and the sons of Muslim landowners studied alongside the children of Armenian merchants at the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School. In Kurban Said’s novel *Ali and Nino,* a Russian schoolteacher asks the young protagonist, Ali Khan Shirvanshir, whether this polyglot city belongs to Europe or Asia. It was an impossible question to answer.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/9fe4c37d-7d17-4f03-bd0d-ee971e9b8d67_768x537.png)

The Ismailiyya Palace, Baku, early 20th century

The declaration of independence for the ADR in Tbilisi belonged to a moment—spanning the mid-19th century and the early decades of the 20th— in which Muslim elites across an enormous geographical arc, from Morocco to the Dutch East Indies, were grappling with the same questions: how to reform and modernise without surrendering to European cultural hegemony; how to reconcile Islamic tradition with the demands of the industrial age; how to harmonise Muslim communal identity with the blossoming of national consciousness; and how to construct political institutions adequate to a world of nation-states, mass communication, and mechanised total war.

The responses varied in form but shared a common grammar. In the Arab world, Muhammad Ali Pasha brought the Egyptian state into line with European standards and forged ahead with early industrialisation. The Arab *Nahda* (‘Renaissance’) produced a rich ecosystem of newspapers, literary journals and political societies in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus. In the Ottoman Empire, sweeping modernisation of the state was accompanied by the emergence of a fecund public sphere in which the complexities of Ottomanism, Islam, Turkishness and modernity were debated in print. On the Indian subcontinent, the Aligarh movement sought to create a modern Muslim intelligentsia capable of navigating British rule. And across the Turco-Islamic belt of the Russian Empire—from Crimea through the Volga-Ural region to Central Asia—[the ](https://kasurian.com/p/jadid-reform?ref=kasurian.com)[*Jadid* ](https://kasurian.com/p/jadid-reform?ref=kasurian.com)[movement](https://kasurian.com/p/jadid-reform?ref=kasurian.com) constructed a network of schools, vernacular newspapers, and reform-minded intellectuals that represented perhaps the most sophisticated attempt anywhere in the Muslim world to create a modern Islamic culture from within.

Azerbaijan sat at the crossroads of all of these currents. The elites who founded and subsequently governed the ADR read Gaspıralı’s *Terciman* and contributed to Ottoman journals. They studied medicine in Saint Petersburg and law in Paris. They observed the Iranian Constitutional Revolution from across the River Aras and the Young Turk Revolution from editorial offices in Istanbul. They absorbed the *Jadid* commitment to modern education and the late Ottoman debate over the relationship between Turkic identity and Islamic heritage. They were connected to one another through family, profession and political organisations and materially enabled by the vast wealth of Baku’s oil industry. What follows is a small selection of their biographies that, taken together, reads like a map of the intellectual world of early 20th-century Muslim modernism.

## The Oil Barons

The ADR’s story begins not with politics but with petroleum. Baku was the birthplace of the modern oil industry, with the first mechanically drilled oil well in the Bibi Heybat oilfield in 1846, preceding mechanical drilling in the United States by just over a decade. However, the fullest realisation of the immense energy wealth hidden beneath the Absheron peninsula would only occur in the 1870s, when the Tsarist government pursued privatisation. They abolished the ancient land tenure system and opened the Baku oil fields to competitive bidding, and men with no formal education and negligible capital found themselves, within a few years, among the wealthiest individuals in the Russian Empire.

Zeynalabdin Taghiyev had worked as a mason from childhood to support his seven sisters. By the age of 18, the illiterate young man had established himself as a minor building contractor in the Baku region. He went on to acquire a small kerosene plant and, by 1873, had saved enough to buy, with two partners, a plot of land near the Bibi Heybat oil field. The trio drilled for years and found nothing. His partners sold up and returned to Baku, but Taghiyev stayed on, operating the wellhead personally day after day. In 1877, he struck oil.

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The Bibi Heybat Oil Fields, Baku, c.1900

The riches flooded in. By 1887, the refining arm of Taghiyev’s firm, H.Z.A. Taghiyev Petroleum Production Company (TPP), was the fourth-largest operation in Baku (and the largest Azerbaijani-owned company), producing 2,000 barrels per day. In 1890, he acquired the Caspian Steamship Company, thereby achieving full vertical integration for TPP from the wellhead to the port. In 1897, he sold the majority share to British investors for five million roubles. With the proceeds of the sale, Taghiyev built Azerbaijan’s first modern textile factory at the village of Ahmadli near Baku. The factory was designed as a self-contained compound with free worker housing, a power station, a school and a medical clinic. He also co-founded the Baku Trade Bank and invested extensively in fisheries along the Caspian coast.

Shamsi Asadullayev, born to a farming family in the village of Amirjan on the Absheron peninsula, had started out hauling oil by cart at the kerosene refinery of Vasily Alexandrovich Kokorev, one of the wealthiest men in Russia. The young Asadullayev diligently worked his way up from labourer to deputy director before leaving to open his own plant in 1875\. In 1892, Asadullayev invested life savings in a promising oil site on the outskirts of Baku. His bet paid off three years later, when oil burst from the ground. By 1909, the company that had started 17 years earlier with five hundred roubles was valued at ten million and owned 37 wells, a fleet of tankers and refineries across the Russian Empire and Iran.

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Shamsi Asadullayev in his younger days, late 19th century

Murtuza Mukhtarov, another enterprising Amirjan villager, had worked as a plasterer and a cart driver before finding employment at a drilling office, where he climbed the ladder from labourer to foreman to driller. Despite lacking any formal education beyond primary school, Mukhtarov taught himself mechanical engineering in his spare time and went on to patent a new type of hammer drill known as the ‘Baku drilling system.’ His invention proved useful in the last decade of the 19th century, when he founded his own drilling company and the first oil-equipment factory in the Russian Empire, based just outside Baku.

The Baku oil barons lived lavishly but spent generously on their city. Taghiyev financed a pipeline to bring fresh water from the mountains near Quba, established the Baku fire service, and provided long-term loans to the Baku City Council for paving streets and laying out parks. His most celebrated project was the first modern school for Muslim girls in the Russian Empire, opened in 1901, for which he secured the Tsar’s permission by naming it after Empress Alexandra. Asadullayev funded the Baku Real School—a German-style *Realschule* emphasising science, mathematics and modern languages—and established scholarships for Muslim students at the Alexander Tiflis Teacher Training Institute, the largest of its kind in the Caucasus.

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Murtaza Mukhtarov and his wife, Liza Tuganova-Mukhtarova (right), and Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev (left)

Asadullayev, along with Taghiyev, funded scholarships for dozens of young Azerbaijanis to study abroad at the best universities in France, Germany, Poland and Russia. The first Azerbaijani to graduate from the Saint Petersburg Institute of Civil Engineers, the architect Ziver Bey Akhmedbekov, did so in 1901 on an Asadullayev scholarship. He returned to Baku and became the city’s leading architect, designing the iconic Taza Pir Mosque and the Baku Ophthalmology Institute, among many other public buildings. Alimardan bey Topchubashov, who would go on to chair the ADR Parliament and lead its diplomatic delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, Nasib Yusifbeyli, who would serve as the ADR’s first Minister of Finance and its last Prime Minister, and several other future Azerbaijani statesmen and public figures received their higher education thanks to funding from Taghiyev.

![Taza Pir Mosque | IRCICA](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/dd9b09f5-2f48-4b80-9cc3-37b57236a605_1619x1080-jpeg.jpg)

The Taza Pir Mosque in Baku, today

Arguably, Taghiyev’s most consequential investments were in the press. The newspapers and journals he funded became important conduits through which a nascent Azerbaijani national identity was articulated, and the case for Muslim political and economic advancement in the Russian Empire was advanced. In the 1880s, Taghiyev purchased the Russian-language newspaper *Kaspi* and installed as its editor a young Topchubashov who had recently returned from studying Law in Saint Petersburg. Through *Kaspi*, Topchubashov called for extending full political and legal rights (including the right to a jury trial) to Muslim subjects of the Tsar and for introducing local self-governance in the Caucasus. Hundreds of his articles appeared in its pages over the next two decades. Topchubashov formed the nucleus of the first Azerbaijani press dynasty, marrying the daughter of Hasan Bey Zardabi, founder of *Akinçi*, the first Azeri-language newspaper.

*Akinçi*, established in 1875 and printed in Istanbul, became a vehicle for secular education and social reform, written in a stripped-down vernacular Azeri Turkish purged of the Persian and Arabic loanwords that dominated literary culture. Zardabi, a Moscow-trained naturalist influenced by Russian populist ideas, believed that the Muslim clergy’s near-monopoly on literacy—maintained through the exclusive use of Persian and Arabic—was a major obstacle to the modernisation of Azerbaijani society. The Tsarist authorities shut *Akinçi* down in 1877 as “harmful and politically unreliable” and exiled Zardabi to his native village in a remote corner of Azerbaijan.

Along with *Kaspi*, Taghiyev funded *Hayat* and *Füyuzat*, the Azeri-language journals through which Ali Bey Hüseynzade articulated the formula of “Turkification, Islamisation, Modernisation”—the proposition that Muslim Turks should cultivate a national identity rooted in Turkic language and culture (as opposed to the strongly Persian-influenced high culture of the Ottomans) and adopt the institutions and scientific learning of modern European civilisation while preserving the core tenets and practices of Islam. Hüseynzade was born in 1864 in a small town near Baku, to a family of Muslim religious scholars; his grandfather had served for 32 years as the Russian-appointed *Sheikh ul-Islam* of the Caucasus. He studied physics and mathematics at Saint Petersburg University, then moved to Istanbul, where he entered the Medical Faculty of Istanbul University. He went on to serve as a military doctor in the Ottoman army and became a co-founder of the Committee of Union and Progress, the secret revolutionary society—better known as the Young Turks—that would seize power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908\. His poem “Turan,” composed during his student years, imagined a spiritual and cultural homeland uniting all Turkic peoples from the Balkans to Central Asia and is widely regarded as one of the earliest literary expressions of pan-Turkic consciousness.

Hüseynzade had a strong intellectual influence on Ziya Gökalp, the Ottoman sociologist and nationalist thinker whose works *Turkification, Islamisation, Modernisation* (1918) and *The Principles of Turkism* (1923) would provide much of the ideological inspiration for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish Republic. Gökalp himself acknowledged the intellectual debt to Hüseynzade but took the tripartite formula of “Turkification, Islamisation, Modernisation” in directions Hüseynzade probably did not intend, particularly in subordinating Islam to the nation rather than treating it as a co-equal pillar.

## The Statesmen

In the last decade of the 19th century, in a small village near Baku, a *mullah* named Alakbar Rasulzade made the consequential decision to send his son, Mammad Amin, to complete his secondary education at a modern school rather than in a traditional *madrasa*. That school was the second Russian-Muslim school in Baku, directed by Sultan-Majid Ganizade, a colleague of Gaspıralı who had travelled with him in Central Asia to promote the *Jadid* curriculum and pedagogical method. Around the same time, a young Nasib Bey Yusifbeyli was heading to Novorossiysk University in Odessa to study law after completing his high school education at the German *gymnasium* in his hometown of Ganja.

Upon graduating, Yusifbeyli moved to the Crimean city of Bakhchisaray. After the fall of the Crimean Tatar Khanate to the Tsar in 1783, Bakhchisaray slowly became a provincial backwater, but in the late 19th century, the city underwent an Islamic cultural and intellectual renaissance. The khans’ old capital was the centre of the *Jadid* movement, where Gaspıralı printed *Terciman*, the most influential Muslim newspaper in the Russian Empire and the primary conduit for promoting his modernising programme. Yusifbeyli took up a post at the paper and, in 1906, married Gaspıralı’s daughter Şefiqa, who herself edited the women’s *Jadid* magazine, *Alem-i Nisvan* (‘Women’s World’).

Across the Black Sea in Nukha (presently known as Shaki), in the foothills of the Greater Caucasus in northwest Azerbaijan, the aristocratic Fatali Khan Khoyski, whose father and grandfather had served as officers in the Tsar’s army, was preparing to leave for the Law Faculty of Moscow State University. While studying in Moscow, Khoyski fell in love with a local Russian woman, Eugenia Vasilevna. The young couple married swiftly, Eugenia taking the name Jeyran Khanum upon converting to Islam. Unlike Yusifbeyli, who did not find his calling in the law, Khoyski practised as an attorney throughout the Caucasus, including serving as an assistant state prosecutor at the Yekaterinodar (Krasnodar) district court. At the opposite end of the Caucasus, Rashid Khan Gaplanov, scion of a noble Dagestani Kumyk family (and the ADR’s future Minister of Education), was sitting his final exams at the Vladikavkaz *gymnasium* and looking forward to a move to Paris, where he would study Law at the Sorbonne. A couple of years into his studies, he married Olga Efimovna Arshon, a Russian Jewish medical student. Gaplanov graduated in 1910 and immediately took up a teaching position at Istanbul University, before returning to Vladikavkaz in 1913 to practise law.

The upheavals of the early 20th century thrust these young men into politics. In January 1905, Tsarist troops fired on peaceful demonstrators in Saint Petersburg, triggering a wave of strikes, mutinies and uprisings that convulsed the Russian Empire. Tsar Nicholas II was forced to concede a constitution and a national parliament, the Duma, the first elected legislature in Russian history. The revolution opened space across the Russian empire for Muslim political activity, and the Azerbaijani intelligentsia moved swiftly to exploit it.

Rasulzade, barely 20 years old and now a student at the Baku Technical College, co-founded Hümmet—a Muslim social-democratic party created to organise Azerbaijani workers in the oil industry—and threw himself into revolutionary activity in Baku. Topchubashov, the campaigning editor-in-chief of *Kaspi,* co-founded the Ittifaq al-Muslimin, the first political party of Russian Muslims, established at an all-Russian Muslim congress in Nizhny Novgorod. The party’s programme mirrored *Kaspi’*s editorial line: political equality for all subjects of the Russian Crown and the introduction of local self-governance and modern courts across the Caucasus. Topchubashov won the election to the First State Duma. Khoyski won the election to the Second State Duma, representing Elisavetpol (Ganja) Governorate in 1907\. A member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Russian Empire’s main liberal party, he made a name for himself in the chamber as a critic of Russian colonisation policies and demanded local autonomy for subject peoples.

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Fatali Khan Khoyski in 1906 (left), and Nasib Bey Yusifbeyli in 1910 (right)

The Tsar dissolved the Second Duma in June 1907, after the legislature had proved unmanageably oppositional. The dissolution was accompanied by a unilateral change to the electoral law that sharply reduced the representation of workers, peasants and non-Russian nationalities, effectively ending the brief experiment in Russian parliamentary democracy. Khoyski returned to the Caucasus and worked as a juror in the courts of Elisavetpol and then Baku. Rasulzade’s trajectory was more turbulent. By 1909, Tsarist persecution forced him to flee. He went to Iran, where he became editor of *Iran-e Now*, a leading Persian-language newspaper of the Constitutional Revolution. When Russian troops entered Iran in 1911 to help the Qajar court suppress the constitutional movement, Rasulzade moved to Istanbul. From the Ottoman capital, he coordinated with colleagues in Baku to establish *Müsavat*, an initially pan-Islamic and, to a lesser degree, pan-Turkic political organisation aimed at securing autonomy for the Russian Empire’s Turkic Muslim subjects.

The Romanov amnesty of 1913 allowed Rasulzade to return to Baku, where he transformed *Müsavat* into the principal vehicle of Azerbaijani nationalism. Rasulzade’s time in the Young Turk-era Istanbul had left its mark on his political thought, with Turkic ethnic and linguistic identity now gaining precedence over Muslim confessional identity. In his newspaper columns and journal articles, he began to use the word “Turk” rather than “Muslim” to describe Azerbaijanis. *Müsavat’s* ideological stance shifted from pan-Islamic solidarity, equally at home in the Turkic and Persian worlds, to one in which Istanbul or Bursa were closer to home than Isfahan or Shiraz. The party’s political programme also shifted from campaigning for autonomy for Muslim subjects of the Russian Empire to Azerbaijani independence. Rasulzade was, of course, not alone in his ideological evolution. His shift reflected the broader change taking place across the late Ottoman world in which the nation-state replaced religious community as the basic unit of political organisation.

In February 1917, strikes and mutinies in Saint Petersburg forced the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and brought to a close over 300 years of Romanov dynastic rule. A provisional republican government took power in the capital, but its authority was immediately contested by soviets—councils of workers’, soldiers’, and sailors’ deputies—that sprang up in every major city. The result was a messy, volatile period of contested power, confusion, and accelerating political radicalisation that would last until the Bolsheviks seized control of Moscow in October of that year.

In Baku, the dynamic was no different, but the ethnic complexity made it even more volatile. Two rival centres of authority emerged almost immediately. In March 1917, elections were held to the Baku Soviet, a council dominated by ethnic Russian and Armenian socialists of various stripes—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and Dashnaks—under the chairmanship of the Armenian Bolshevik Stepan Shaumian. The Muslim population of the city was largely excluded from this body. In the same month, a rival institution was established: the Interim Executive Committee of Muslim National Councils, chaired by Mammad Hasan Hajinski, a Saint Petersburg-trained engineer. The committee included Rasulzade, Topchubashov, and Khoyski and was financially backed by the Baku oil barons. The two bodies competed for control of the city through the spring and summer of 1917, each drawing on different constituencies: the Soviet on Russian workers and soldiers and a segment of the Armenian community, the Muslim committee on the Azerbaijani bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. In the autumn, the establishment of the Baku City Duma, chaired by Khoyski, threw a third centre of power into the mix.

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The Mukhtarov Palace in Baku, today

The February Revolution also injected additional impetus into Caucasian national independence movements, as underground parties were legalised overnight. In April, the Congress of Caucasian Muslims—the first attempt to unite the Muslim peoples of the South Caucasus around a common political programme—convened in Baku, drawing delegates from across the region. Rasulzade’s *Müsavat* merged with Yusifbeyli’s Turkic Federalists in June, creating the largest Muslim political organisation in the Caucasus. *Müsavat* went on to contest the Baku Soviet elections in October 1917, winning a majority, but the Bolsheviks rejected the result.

In November 1917, Bolsheviks seized power in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, initiating a destructive civil war across the Russian Republic that pitted Lenin’s Reds against nationalist Whites. The Russian regional government in the South Caucasus refused to recognise Lenin’s authority and swiftly seceded from the republic, establishing an independent Transcaucasian government, known as the Transcaucasian Commissariat. South Caucasian deputies from the now-dissolved Russian Constituent Assembly, to which both Rasulzade and Yusifbeyli had been elected, provided the new Transcaucasian state with a legislature, the *Seim*, formed in Tbilisi in February 1918\. The new parliament was chaired by the Georgian social democrat Nikolay Chkheidze; Rasulzade led the Muslim faction (of which *Müsavat* was the single largest party), with Yusifbeyli serving as his deputy.

While the Caucasian Muslim leadership was organising itself in Tbilisi, Bolshevik forces seized control of Baku over the course of three bloody days in March. The Baku Soviet crushed all opposition, which was mostly concentrated in the Muslim community. Muslim political leaders and intelligentsia who were based in Baku at the time were either arrested or driven out of the city. Most joined their colleagues in Tbilisi, which became the headquarters of the Azerbaijani national movement.

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Mammad Amin Rasulzade in 1918 (right), founder of the ADR, and Alimardan Bey Topchubashov in 1920 (left), speaker of the Parliament of the ADR

The TDFR—established in April 1918 as the successor to the Commissariat—survived barely six weeks. It was an impossible arrangement, as Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis were each committed to their own national aspirations of self-determination and held irreconcilable positions on relations with the Ottoman Empire and Lenin’s Russia. By the end of May, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan had declared independence. Khoyski formed a government in the small provincial town of Ganja and swiftly signed a military assistance agreement with the Ottomans. With only a rudimentary bureaucratic apparatus in place and lacking a revenue base beyond what could be scraped together from the provinces, the nascent Azerbaijani state was stuck in a holding pattern until September 1918, when an Ottoman army, supplemented by Azerbaijani volunteers, took Baku from the Bolsheviks.

## Birth of the Republic

On December 7, 1918, the first parliament of the unified Azerbaijan Democratic Republic convened in the assembly hall of the girls’ school that Taghiyev had built a decade earlier. For the next 16 months, Rasulzade acted as the unofficial head of state—opening parliament and overseeing the political architecture of the new multiparty republic—while a succession of prime ministers managed the business of governing. Khoyski, who headed the first three governments, initiated a programme of state-building, focused initially on constructing a distinct national identity—de-Russifying city names, issuing new postage stamps and currency, and the like—and on the unglamorous but necessary job of establishing the legal and bureaucratic scaffolding of a modern nation-state. Over the course of its short lifespan, the parliament held more than 150 sessions and passed more than 230 laws on everything from civic rights and the judiciary to local government and land reform.

Arguably, the most significant concrete institutional achievements of the ADR came in the realm of education. In early 1919, Gaplanov, the Kumyk noble from Dagestan, arrived in Baku. His own republic—the Mountainous Republic of the North Caucasus, in which he had held several ministerial posts—had been crushed by White Russian forces. In Baku, he took Azerbaijani citizenship and joined the *Ahrar* Party, a small liberal party popular among rural Sunnis, and was elected to parliament. He was appointed Minister of Education and Religious Affairs under Yusifbeyli’s government in April. Gaplanov initiated the project to establish Baku State University, Azerbaijan’s first modern institution of higher education.

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Opening of the first Parliament (left), and the first meeting (right), of the ADR in December, 1918

With a substantial tranche of funding from Taghiyev’s oil fortune, the university was established in September 1919, with faculties of history and philology, physics and mathematics, law and medicine. A keen philologist himself, Gaplanov taught Ottoman literature alongside his ministerial day job. Under his leadership, the Ministry of Education continued the trend initiated by Taghiyev and Asadullayev of funding promising students to pursue advanced degrees abroad. Owing to the political upheaval in Russia and the ADR’s West-facing outlook, Gaplanov’s ministry now sent its best and brightest to study in leading universities in Germany, France, Italy and Britain rather than in Russia, Poland and Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the ADR’s diplomatic corps was diligently working to secure international recognition for the new state. In May 1919, Topchubashov left for the Paris Peace Conference, where he made the case for recognising the ADR to the assembled representatives of the world’s major powers, including US President Woodrow Wilson. In January 1920, the Allied Supreme Council, representing Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan, extended *de facto* recognition to Azerbaijan, along with Georgia and Armenia. Iran followed with *de jure* recognition on 20th March, becoming the first country to do so. By 1919, diplomatic missions of 16 states were functioning in Baku, including those of the US, Great Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Iran, Poland and Ukraine, and the ADR had established its own missions in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Georgia, Ukraine and Armenia.

## Death of the Republic

A lively domestic political scene and growing international recognition made little difference to the young state’s survival. By winter 1919, storm clouds were gathering to the north. Lenin’s forces had consolidated control of the Russian heartland and were now moving south to confront Lieutenant-General Anton Denikin, who commanded the Armed Forces of South Russia (also known as the ‘whites’, against the communist ‘reds’) in the Don region and the North Caucasus. While hostile to the ADR, Denikin and Baku enjoyed an uneasy peace, thanks in no small part to their shared enemy, the Bolsheviks. By the spring of 1920, the Red Army had destroyed Denikin’s forces and pushed the southern extent of Bolshevik territorial control to the line extending from Krasnodar, by the Black Sea, to Derbent, on the Caspian. The Red Army now stood on Azerbaijan’s border with nothing but the ADR’s small and underequipped military between it and the prize of Baku’s oil fields. Indeed, Lenin had famously proclaimed that “Soviet Russia cannot survive without Baku’s oil.”

Inside Azerbaijan, Bolshevik cells were organising in the factories, while the bulk of the national army was deployed in Karabakh, far from the capital, putting down an Armenian uprising. Yusifbeyli’s government, exhausted by a succession of internal political crises, resigned in late March. No successor could be agreed upon. The parliament was still deliberating when, on the night of 27th April 1920, the Red Army’s 11th Army crossed the border from Dagestan with approximately 30,000 troops in armoured trains. Local Bolsheviks staged a simultaneous armed uprising in Baku, seizing oilfields and government buildings. A hastily assembled Provisional Revolutionary Committee, chaired by the Azerbaijani Bolshevik Nariman Narimanov, issued an ultimatum to the parliament demanding the immediate transfer of power. The parliament convened an emergency session that evening. The debate ended shortly before midnight. With the vastly superior Red Army bearing down on the city and the already thinned-out Baku garrison struggling to put down the Bolshevik revolt, the Azerbaijani government realised it was in a hopeless position. It voted to surrender to avoid bloodshed. By two o’clock in the morning on 28th April, the parliament had been formally dissolved. Members of the Revolutionary Committee moved into the vacated parliament building that same night. On 30th April, the Red Army entered Baku. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, 23 months old, had ceased to exist.

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The Red Army in Baku, 1920

The men who had built the republic scattered. Rasulzade went into hiding in the mountain village of Lahıc, in the foothills of the Greater Caucasus, where he attempted to direct resistance to the occupation. In August, he was captured and brought to Baku. He owed his life to an old debt: in 1905, during the revolutionary chaos in Baku, he had sheltered a young Georgian Bolshevik named Joseph Stalin from the Tsarist police. Stalin, now a figure of growing power in Moscow, intervened to have Rasulzade transferred to Russia rather than executed. For two years, Rasulzade worked at the Commissariat of Nationalities in Moscow before escaping to Finland in 1922 and eventually making his way to Istanbul. He would spend the remaining three decades of his life in exile in Turkey, Poland and Germany. His eldest son was executed in 1938 at the age of 19\. His wife died in Kazakh exile in 1940\. Rasulzade himself passed away in Ankara in 1955, having never returned to Azerbaijan.

Topchubashov, still in Paris when the republic fell, never came home either. He spent his remaining years lobbying European governments, publishing pamphlets and journals to keep the Azerbaijani cause alive in Western capitals, and growing old in a modest apartment in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud. He died in 1934 and was buried in the city cemetery.

Khoyski, the man who had formed the first government within an hour of the independence vote, fled to Tbilisi after the Soviet takeover. On 19th June 1920, just over seven weeks after the fall of the ADR, he was shot dead on a Tbilisi street by an Armenian militant. He was 39 years old. Yusifbeyli, the last prime minister, escaped Baku but was caught by Bolshevik forces and executed on 31st May 1920, near Kurdamir, on the road east. He was also 39.

Hajinski, who had chaired the Muslim National Council and served in a succession of cabinet posts, remained in Baku under Soviet rule. He was arrested in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Purge and executed. Gaplanov, the founder of Baku State University and teacher of Ottoman literature to its first students, survived longer than most, but he, too, was arrested in the Purge and shot on 10th December 1937.

Murtuza Mukhtarov, the self-taught engineer who had patented the Baku drilling system, refused to surrender his Gothic-style mansion to the Bolsheviks. When Red Army soldiers came to requisition the building, he shot the commanding officer on the doorstep, then turned the pistol on himself. Taghiyev, the illiterate mason who had struck oil in 1877 and spent the next four decades lavishing Baku with civic projects, saw all of his properties confiscated. He was evicted from his own mansion, which the Bolshevik authorities requisitioned. The old man died in 1924, impoverished and dispossessed, in the city he, more than anyone else, had helped to build.

The destruction of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was not merely the unfortunate fall of a small state caught up in the violent birth of the 20th century. It constituted the [severing of a promising thread](https://kasurian.com/p/closing-of-the-muslim-mind?ref=kasurian.com) in a broader pattern visible across the Islamic world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the emergence of pioneering Muslim elites who sought to reimagine the world around them through the prism of Western modernity, and to harness its potent tools to rebuild an ossified Islamicate civilisation while remaining true to its timeless essence. From the *Jadid* educators of Crimea and Central Asia to the *Nahda* intellectuals of Cairo and Beirut to the Aligarh modernisers of British India, this was a generation that tried with all its might to thread the needle between wholesale Westernisation and civilisational paralysis. The founding statesmen of the ADR were in an especially privileged position, possessing both the intellectual and material resources, such as the vast oil wealth of the Caspian, to translate their reformist vision into a functioning state. But the Bolshevik Revolution swiftly stamped out these green shoots on the shores of the Caspian, sealing off the Muslim Caucasus (as it did in Central Asia) from the broader Islamic world for the next seven decades, until the fall of the USSR in 1991.

---

**Words*: Bilal Sabbagh works as a geopolitical strategy consultant specialising in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a historian of pre-modern Arabo-Islamic philosophy by training, holding an MPhil in Islamic Studies and History from the University of Oxford.*

**Further Reading**

- Firuz Kazemzadeh, *The Struggle for Transcaucasia (1917-1921)*
- Tadeusz Świętochowski, *Russian Azerbaijan, 1905-1920: The Shaping of a National Identity in a Muslim Community*
- Tadeusz Świętochowski, *Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition*
- Audrey L. Altstadt, *The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity Under Russian Rule*
- Jamil Hasanli, *Foreign Policy of the Republic of Azerbaijan: The Difficult Road to Western Integration, 1918-1920*
### Riding the Tiger
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/riding-the-tiger/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T13:44:18.000Z
> Tyger Tyger, burning bright,  
> In the forests of the night;  
> What immortal hand or eye,  
> Could frame thy fearful symmetry?  
>  
> In what distant deeps or skies,  
> Burnt the fire of thine eyes?  
> On what wings dare he aspire?  
> What the hand, dare seize the fire?  
>  
> What the hammer? what the chain,  
> In what furnace was thy brain?  
> What the anvil? what dread grasp,  
> Dare its deadly terrors clasp!  
> **– William Blake, The Tyger (1794)**

> Replied the page: “that little buzzing noise….  
> Comes from a play-thing of the Emperor’s choice,  
> From a Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys.  
> **– John Keats, The Cap and Bells (1819)**

> He says the best way out is always through.  
> And I agree to that, or in so far  
> As that I can see no way out but through.  
> **– Robert Frost, A Servant to Servants (1915)**

Imagine a world in which each guilded merchant of the old bazaar sells only to his fill before closing up shop, letting his fellows meet their needs through trade. No one maximises profit at the expense of another. The crafted wares are largely the product of artisans’ painstaking labour; the agricultural produce is sourced from farms unadulterated by fertilisers, pesticides, or machinery. What the limited scope of markets cannot provide, nor the almost infinitesimal state welfare, is buttressed by *awqaf*, charitable endowments set up to fulfil the theological commandment of charity. These *awqaf* may provide everything from cash loans to soup kitchens to clothing.

This image is held up as proof that Islam once possessed, and could again possess, a superior moral economy, one that refused the ruthless accumulation of the modern world in favour of solidarity, sufficiency, and grace.

It is also the logic of a world in which nearly everyone lived in grinding poverty.

This image depicts an economy operating on the edge of subsistence. In this zero-sum order, the total wealth available in any given season is more or less fixed, one merchant’s gain is another’s loss, and the concept of accumulation does not exist because it cannot exist. Economists call this a Malthusian economy, after the English clergyman Thomas Malthus, who observed that pre-industrial populations always grew to consume whatever surplus their agriculture could produce. This ensured that the baseline condition of human life remained, century after century, something close to bare sufficiency. The guild merchant’s restraint was not born of adherence to some moral philosophy. It was a survival strategy, the best available response to a system that could not tolerate surplus because it had no means of absorbing it. Overproduction in one domain triggered imbalances in another, cascading through fragile supply chains until the system corrected itself through the usual mechanisms: famine, market collapse, or war. To glorify this as an Islamic economic ideal is to mistake the constraints of pre-industrial life for the prescriptions of faith.

The Industrial Revolution shattered these constraints. Its engines of production, distribution, and exchange created a world of relative abundance that would have been incomprehensible to the merchants of the preceding agrarian civilisation. Our world is one in which famine is no longer a problem of production, but of distribution, and even in distribution, we fare incomparably better than any prior century. Yet the means by which this abundance was achieved are castigated, almost reflexively, for their perceived immorality. After all, this abundance is largely the result of the pursuit of profit, competition that is often neither friendly nor fair, and excess production that generates extraordinary waste alongside wealth.

This is not an argument for the inherent virtue of capitalism or the perfection of industrial society, which has produced its own distortions and cruelties. It is the more banal observation that, when one weighs the trade-offs honestly, a world of guilds against a world of corporations, and of subsistence against surplus, the latter has achieved the greater moral good by nearly every measure that matters to the lived experience of ordinary people.

Before the Haber-Bosch process made industrial nitrogen fixation possible in the early 20th century, the global food supply was constrained by the natural nitrogen cycle. The Earth could perhaps sustain two billion people at subsistence levels. Today, it sustains over eight billion people, and roughly half the nitrogen in every human body alive today has passed through the Haber-Bosch process. Without it, approximately four billion people would go without food. Before the development of penicillin and the antibiotic revolution, a scratch from a rose thorn could kill, and routinely did. Childbirth was among the most dangerous experiences a woman could undergo. Maternal mortality in pre-industrial societies ran between 1,000 and 1,500 per 100,000 births, compared to single digits in industrialised countries today. Smallpox alone killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century before vaccination eradicated it. Its pre-industrial toll is incalculable. Infant mortality in the pre-industrial world hovered around 40%, meaning that nearly half of all children born did not survive to adulthood. Global life expectancy before the Industrial Revolution was approximately 30 years. It is now over 70.

The mosque is lit by electricity, and its walls are made of concrete. The congregation arrives by car and reads scripture on phones. Thanks to mass education, there is an incomparably higher proportion of Muslims who are actually literate and able to read scripture than in the pre-industrial age. The *Umrah* and *Hajj* are no longer journeys of months or years by foot or beast of burden, fraught with the peril of pirates and Portuguese corsairs in the Indian Ocean, or Bedouin bandits across the vast expanse of the African and Arabian deserts, or roving armies of Sultans and Rajas that plunder and pillage. Instead, they are luxuriously comfortable trips by plane and train within half a day, staying in hotel rooms with every modern amenity. Some now attend the *Umrah* several times a year. Every material fact of contemporary Muslim life is a product of industrial civilisation. Yet the categories through which that life is interpreted belong to a world that preceded it.

These are material conditions under which any honest moral philosophy must operate, and the question it must ask is what does a civilisation of two billion people, living within industrial modernity, require to engage with that modernity on its own terms?

## Our Mode of Civilisation

In *The Evolution of Civilisations*, the historian Carroll Quigley observed that every civilisation (that has left a sufficient historical record) was organised around a specific mechanism for accumulating surplus and directing it into further production. He identified four such instruments across all of recorded history: manorialism, in which landlords extract surplus through local agricultural exploitation; commercial capitalism, in which merchants accumulate through long-distance trade in luxury goods; national bureaucracy, in which the state appropriates surplus through taxation and directs it into state-managed production; and industrial capitalism, in which surplus is accumulated through the operation of machines, sold at a profit within a price system, and reinvested into further productive capacity. Each instrument produces a mode of economic organisation and a corresponding political order, an elite class, and a set of cultural assumptions about how life ought to be lived. Industrial capitalism is the youngest of the four. It emerged in 18th-century England and has since become the dominant instrument of expansion on the planet, systematically outcompeting and dismantling all other modes of production. Today, three centres of industrial civilisation exist on which the global economy depends: North America, Europe, and East Asia.

The objection may arise immediately: is the call to acknowledge and embrace this material reality not a call to adopt the coloniser’s system? The conflation is understandable but mistaken because industrialism as a mode of production preceded colonialism. The textile mills of Lancashire were producing surplus before the conquest of India, not because of it. Colonialism was a consequence of the power differential created by industrial capacity between those who possessed it and those who did not. The raw industrial advantage of European states, their capacity to produce weapons, ships, and administrative technologies at scale, made colonial domination possible. What excess capacity the European powers sought to acquire through colonialism was a byproduct of this raw power differential, not its guiding logic. To reject industrial capacity because of this association is to reject the primary means by which the power differential can be closed. Thus, the question was never whether to industrialise, but *how*.

What, then, does it mean to industrialise? The conventional answer focuses on hardware, such as factories, machines, infrastructure, and capital investment. The deeper answer focuses on something less visible and far more important. In his recent book, *Breakneck*, the Chinese technology analyst Dan Wang distinguishes three forms of technology: tools, which are physical instruments and capital equipment; instructions, which are blueprints, codified intellectual property, and formal procedures; and process knowledge, which is the tacit, embodied understanding of how production actually works. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has cooking experience, there is no reason to expect a good dish. Process knowledge lives in people’s heads and in the relationships between them. It cannot be stolen, purchased, or transferred through textbooks. It is won by experience.

This distinction is important for understanding how and why nations succeed or fail at the process of industrialisation. The industrial engineer who has spent a decade on a production line possesses knowledge that no manual can transmit, knowledge that will disappear when he retires unless someone has worked alongside him long enough to absorb it. In this sense, the industrial engineer is as much a craftsman as the handweaver. The difference is that his craft operates at a scale that transforms civilisations.

Process knowledge is also fragile. The Ise Grand Shrine in Japan has been [torn down and rebuilt every 20 years](https://www.isejingu.or.jp/en/ritual/index.html?ref=kasurian.com#sengu) for over a millennium because the community that maintains it understands that the knowledge required to build a wooden structure of that complexity cannot survive in written instructions alone. The older generation must physically teach the younger, or the knowledge dies. In 2009, the United States discovered it could [no longer produce a classified material](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/fogbank-america-forgot-how-make-nuclear-bombs/?ref=kasurian.com) essential to its nuclear arsenal because it had not maintained records of the production process and everyone who knew how to produce it had retired. The knowledge had to be reconstructed at enormous cost. With every factory that closes, every production line that moves offshore, and every generation of engineers that retires without successors, there is a loss of process knowledge that may be permanent.

Indeed, in early 19th-century Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha embarked on the most [determined programme of state-directed industrialisation](https://kasurian.com/p/muhammad-ali-pasha-and-the-dream?ref=kasurian.com) in the Middle East and North Africa. This programme was systematically destroyed by British imperial intervention. The Treaty of Balta Liman in 1838, imposed by Britain on the Ottoman Empire, abolished the monopolies through which Muhammad Ali funded industrialisation and imposed free trade. Flooded with cheap, mass-produced British textiles, Egypt’s cotton mills and workshops were driven into ruin. Britain’s explicit goal was to keep Egypt a supplier of raw cotton for Lancashire and a market for British goods. Read through the lens of process knowledge, the catastrophe becomes clearer. What Britain destroyed was the nascent accumulation of process knowledge that had begun in Egypt’s factories: trained workers, engineering practices, institutional memory, and the supply networks built over three decades of state-directed development. The Treaty of Balta Liman did to 19th-century Egypt what offshoring did to 20th-century America: it severed the link between production and knowledge, ensuring that the country could not accumulate the expertise needed to advance.

Nor was Egypt alone. In the 1860s, [Hayreddin Pasha](https://kasurian.com/p/hayreddin-pasha-tunisia?ref=kasurian.com) in Tunis engaged with contemporary European political economy to produce a theory of institutional reform grounded in Tunisian conditions. He reformed agriculture, protected nascent industries, founded the Sadiki College to train the administrative class his programme required, and governed on the principle that justice, understood as the institutional framework protecting productive activity, was the pivot on which the destiny of nations turned. The [Jadid reformers](https://kasurian.com/p/jadid-reform?ref=kasurian.com) in Central Asia pursued modernist approaches to education, commerce, and institutional development oriented entirely toward building capacity from within Muslim societies. The late Ottoman state itself, far from the caricature of stagnation, was [producing sophisticated statistical publications](https://casualarchivist.substack.com/p/poetic-justice), developing its own analytical instruments for governance and economic measurement, sending students to European universities, and reforming its legal and administrative apparatus.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/a61d17f2-9bc8-4515-bc83-a8daad5dd9dc_1781x2659-jpeg.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/4a15abb6-cbee-40ec-bb56-d483fa78c567_1028x1628-jpeg.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/dbf53d47-a8f2-4e58-b55b-0abb4268b44d_1121x1593-jpeg.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/4d66a1ce-cb77-44b2-a6f1-c3c3d4d9a775_1040x1641-jpeg.png)

Statistical graphs produced in the early decades of the 20th century in the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic.

The fundamental weakness of the Muslim world today is that, although it may possess capital, demographics, modern consumption trends, linkages within the global economy—all in different places and in varying capacities—it lacks this process knowledge. Nor have we seriously taken to task that which our ancestors would have considered a matter of course: the adoption and indigenisation of this mode of production to create a truly competitive pole of power. This is the differentiator between those who produce and those who consume, and why no Muslim country has joined the three centres of industrial civilisation as its fourth. We have no systemic theories of how to acquire process knowledge, or how to (re)order state and society around the needs of industrial production. This is largely a failure of imagination, but it is also the result of the ideological straitjacket within which we have bound ourselves. Instead of engaging with material reality, we have become passive consumers who believe our critiques, made from some theoretical external position of moral superiority, will bear fruit in changing this reality. And so the world passes on by us without a care for our thoughts.

## The Ideological Roots of Anti-Modernity

Every tendency within the discourse of contemporary Islam has something to say about capitalism, technology, urbanisation, and the moral character of modern work. Yet these opinions operate with categories forged before industrialisation transformed the material basis of human existence. And the intellectual traditions that educated Muslims have borrowed to give their critiques a contemporary flavour are a curious convergence of ideologies that otherwise share little in aspiration.

The first of the borrowed traditions is Catholic reactionism, the counter-Enlightenment current that runs through figures such as Joseph de Maistre, who treated the French Revolution as divine punishment for abandoning the old hierarchical order, or through G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who confronted industrial England with a programme they called distributism. Distributism proposed breaking up concentrated industrial capital into small-scale peasant proprietorship, rehabilitating the pre-industrial guild, the village workshop, and the local economy governed by custom rather than contract. They distrusted the factory as a moral institution and regarded industrialisation itself as an error. Their programme was backwards: restore the small, the local, the pre-industrial, and the moral order would follow. This tradition now circulates, with remarkable fidelity to its European originals, as “authentic Islamic thought” on economics, technology, and urbanisation. One encounters it in the growing literature on Islamic permaculture or in waqf revivalism, which treats a pre-industrial charitable endowment structure as a sufficient institutional technology for the 21st century. The prescription, *returning to tradition*, is not available to two billion people living inside Industrial Civilisation, consuming its outputs, depending on its infrastructure, and possessing no alternative material basis for their existence.

The second borrowed tradition runs through the work of perennialist philosophers such as René Guénon and the traditionalist school associated with Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Its diagnosis of modernity is civilisational rather than merely economic: the modern world represents a spiritual descent, a progressive evacuation of the sacred from public life, an age of dissolution that traditional metaphysics predicted and that only a return to primordial truth can remedy. This tradition has found a receptive audience among educated Muslims because it confirms a preexisting suspicion that something is deeply wrong with the modern world and offers the dignity of a philosophical framework within which that suspicion can be articulated. Perhaps its most sophisticated Muslim expression is Abdal Hakim Murad’s engagement with Julius Evola’s metaphor of “riding the tiger”. His proposal is that Muslims should neither embrace nor flee modernity but instead adopt a posture of inner spiritual withdrawal while remaining physically present within it. The tiger, in this reading, is someone else’s animal. One holds on. The surface of modern life is conceded as turbulent and spiritually corrosive; the depths, the domain of *tawhid* and contemplative practice, are where Muslims should invest their real energies. Murad departs from Evola’s pessimism by arguing that Islam possesses the spiritual resources to survive the ride. However, the material domain of production, institutional construction, and political economy is tacitly abandoned. The question of what Muslims *build* does not arise because the framework has no vocabulary for it.

There is a third tradition, the Frankfurt School and its intellectual descendants: Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and the post-colonial theorists who extended their critique to the global periphery. Their argument was both economic and civilisational: industrial capitalism degrades culture, manufactures false consciousness, reduces every human relation to exchange value, and produces a culture industry that pacifies populations through entertainment calibrated to prevent genuine reflection. Post-colonial theory recasts modernity itself as a Western imposition and development as a euphemism for domination. This is the intellectual atmosphere that educated Muslims absorb at university, through media, and through the general texture of serious discourse in the humanities and social sciences. The diagnoses are often correct, yet this tradition is constitutively incapable of construction. It tells us everything that is wrong with industrial civilisation and nothing about how to build within it, because doing so would compromise the critical posture from which its authority derives.

These three traditions are antagonists in their European contexts. Catholic distributists, perennialist metaphysicians, and Frankfurt School critical theorists would find little to agree on. However, as absorbed by the Muslim intelligentsia, they produce the same refusal to adopt a constructive orientation. Each, in turn, offers a posture of return, withdrawal, and critique. None confronts the question facing a civilisation of two billion people living inside industrial civilisation: given that we are here, what do we build?

This steadfast refusal is contradicted at every turn by the practice of those who hold it. The scholar who denounces modernity does so on a podcast distributed via satellite and recorded on equipment manufactured in Shenzhen. The activist who calls for de-industrialisation organises his movement through smartphone networks whose components were mined in the Congo, refined in South Korea, and assembled in China. This is evidence of a civilisation that has made peace with the material outputs of industry yet lacks an intellectual framework for engaging with its logic, trade-offs, or possibilities.

And herein lies the deepest error, for the assumption that spiritual interiority as a total civilisational strategy represents the traditional Islamic position is, in fact, untrue. It is, in historical terms, among the newest responses available, not the oldest. For over a millennium, the operative mode of Islamic civilisation was[ material engagement](https://kasurian.com/p/closing-of-the-muslim-mind?ref=kasurian.com) at the highest level. The Abbasids built Baghdad as a planned imperial capital and centre of translation, scholarship, and trade. Córdoba under the Umayyads was the largest and most materially advanced city in Europe. The Fatimids founded Cairo and Al-Azhar as instruments of political and intellectual power. The Mughals administered a subcontinent and became the largest empire, in terms of population and production, in history–until the advent of the industrialising British Empire. The Ottomans ran a transcontinental empire whose fiscal, military, and administrative apparatus was among the most sophisticated of its era. It was Islamic civilisation which formed the bridge on which merchants and adventurers brought materials such as paper and gunpowder from China to Europe, not out of idle curiosity, but because these were useful technologies for running empires and waging wars. Trading, warring, building, and governing were what Islamic civilisation *did*.

The retreat inward was a consequence of the [triple catastrophe of the 20th century](https://kasurian.com/p/closing-of-the-muslim-mind?ref=kasurian.com), which destroyed the material base on which Islamic civilisational activity had rested. In the absence of that base, Muslims retroactively elevated the spiritual-contemplative dimension from one component of a full civilisation to the entire programme. What presents itself as preservation is, in substance, a rationalisation of defeat. Islam possesses spiritual resources adequate to providing a robust moral response within industrial civilisation. The question is whether spiritual resources alone, detached from any material civilisational capacity, constitute a civilisation at all.

## Misdirected Energy

These borrowed postures have, downstream, produced a set of enterprises that mistake activity for progress.

Islamic finance operates at the level of consumer products, asking whether a given financial transaction satisfies the conditions of a pre-industrial contract while leaving unasked whether the economy that transaction services is productive, whether the country in question should industrialise, how it should position itself in global trade, or what its energy strategy ought to be. Islamic economics, its academic cousin, adopts neoclassical orthodoxy wholesale, appends a list of prohibitions, and calls the result a moral economy: an economics without a theory of production or development, containing nothing the original framework did not already possess, except for the prohibitions. What Sherman Jackson has diagnosed as *sharia* maximalism reduces all legitimate Islamic intellectual activity to jurisprudential derivation, contracting a civilisation that once encompassed architecture, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and statecraft to the domain of[ legal rulings alone](https://kasurian.com/p/islamic-secular?ref=kasurian.com).

Even the more thoughtful attempts at institutional revival betray the limitation. A[ paper](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/reviving-the-waqf-tradition-moral-imagination-and-the-structural-causes-of-poverty?ref=kasurian.com) proposes resuscitating the *waqf* to address structural causes of poverty, including those linked to global agricultural supply chains and racialised wealth gaps. The ambition is commended, but the institutional imagination does not extend beyond the pre-industrial form. It ignores the rich endowment heritage of the modern world, such as the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations that seeded America’s great ecosystem of research universities, hospitals, and policy institutions. Or the Nordic and German corporate-foundation structures, such as Bosch, Wallenberg, and Carlsberg, that created self-sustaining institutional ecosystems compounding knowledge and capital across generations. These are the functional successors to the *waqf’s* civilisational role, operating with legal, financial, and organisational architectures adequate to industrial scale. A serious Islamic endowment tradition for the 21st century would study these models because they solved the problem the *waqf* once solved at the scale the 21st century demands. Instead, the conversation begins and ends with the pre-industrial form, as though the institutional technology has not advanced in seven centuries.

And then there is agrarian revivalism, whose most visible contemporary manifestation is the growing Muslim permaculture movement, which proposes small-scale organic farming as an alternative to industrial agriculture. Zaytuna College, an Islamic liberal arts college in California, has established a permaculture centre whose stated mission is to help Muslims “get back to more natural ways of producing food” and to “explain the flaws and destructiveness of current systems of production.” A nine-acre garden in the Berkeley Hills, growing olives, figs, and seasonal vegetables for a college community, is offered as a replicable model for the *ummah*. There is nothing wrong with eating seasonally, tending a garden, or caring about what goes into one’s body. These are admirable habits. However, presenting permaculture as a civilisational programme, an alternative system of production for two billion people, requires a reckoning with some very stark numbers. That world of natural food production did exist, and it was one where famine and plague abounded, and infant mortality and life expectancy were roughly half of what the Industrial System now provides.

Each of these—Islamic finance and economics, the charitable endowment, and agrarianism—will be explored in more detail in future essays. For now, this suffices as an introduction to the problems that these initiatives face at the outset.

## The Only Way Out is Through

Most of the problems confronting Muslim civilisation are problems of political economy. Thus, we return to [*Ilm al-Umran*](https://kasurian.com/p/khaldun-21st-century?ref=kasurian.com). Ibn Khaldun’s science of civilisation was, in its 14th-century form, a theory of how political communities form, cohere, extract surplus, and decline. This science requires updating to meet the demands of the industrial age by creating new material theories of civilisational capacity.

This should not be confused with reductive materialism. It is the observation, consistent with Ibn Khaldun’s own method, that material conditions are the foundation on which everything else rests. The problems are the absence of indigenous technological capacity, the failure to move up global value chains, the dependence on manufactured imports, and the inability to sustain independent centres of knowledge production. These are problems of production, process knowledge, and the institutional infrastructure through which surplus is generated and directed toward further productive investment. Once productive capacity exists and the process knowledge that sustains it has been acquired, the remaining questions, spiritual, philosophical, and theological, become open in ways they cannot be when the civilisation that asks them possesses no material basis for acting on the answers. A philosophy of technology produced by a civilisation that manufactures nothing is at best ornamental. A philosophy of technology produced by a civilisation that builds semiconductor designs the present and future.

The new science asks different questions from those that currently dominate Islamic intellectual life. This requires [naming reality accurately](https://kasurian.com/p/attas-rectification-names?ref=kasurian.com) rather than describing it in categories inherited from a world that no longer exists. This means building methodologies and feedback loops that connect theory and practice, the scholar and the factory floor, and the economist and the engineer. It also requires the discipline of production through the accumulation of process knowledge, which compounds only when practised, not merely theorised.

Three nodes of industrial civilisation exist today. There could be a fourth, albeit it will not emerge from mere exegesis of Ibn Khaldun, further elaboration of *sharia*\-compliant financial instruments, pastoral romanticism about the pre-industrial world, or from the sophisticated diagnosis of everything wrong with the industrial one. It will emerge through the generational accumulation of process knowledge as we engage with the world around us.

Islam possesses within it the resources to anchor a new world of ideals and possibilities. Those who come to understand, iterate, and design the system on their own terms determine its moral arc. If we have a choice between riding the tiger and hoping we hang on, or allowing it to trample us with complete passivity, I offer a third option for your consideration: mastering the tiger. After all, what is this tiger, this epoch defined by the industrial mode of production, but a mechanism fashioned by men? The strongest hands steer it.

The only way out is through.

---

*Words: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of* [*Kasurian*](https://kasurian.com/?ref=kasurian.com)*, a magazine for the 21st century.*
### How Zoning Shaped Islam in North America
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/zoning-islam-north-america/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T21:38:58.000Z
A large crowd stands patiently outside a brick building in urban Dallas, waiting for the buzzer to unlock the door. They funnel into the cramped living room of an apartment unit where, every Friday, an imam preaches with his back practically against the wall. One year later, in 1991, the same congregation, numbering under a hundred, left this makeshift prayer hall for a behemoth of a building: The Islamic Centre of Irving, a purpose-built mosque on a six-acre tract deep in the Texas suburbs, today accommodates several thousand worshippers on a weekly basis.

The trajectory from grassroots clusters in rented rooms and converted garages to vast, programme-driven campuses on arterial roads is not unique to the Muslims of Dallas, but is a story found in every major city across North America. It is a story usually told as one of progress: the community grew, pooled resources, and built institutions. Less often examined is what the building demanded in return. What form could the mosque take in the newly planned and uniquely regulated infrastructure of the North American suburb?

In the 20th century, the earliest Muslim immigrant communities on the continent were overwhelmingly urban, less by design than by circumstance. Economic opportunity clustered in city centres where housing was dense and affordable, and so immigrant populations were compressed into urban neighbourhoods by the overlapping pressures of cost and proximity to work. Out of these conditions emerged a religious life that was informal, improvised, and socially modulated. These were not just mosques in the contemporary institutional sense, but overlapping networks of prayer and mutual aid, where worship bled into conversation, conversation into organisation, and authority circulated relationally among elders and peers rather than consolidating in boards and credentialed speakers.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/29cb1dd3-d2c9-469f-a313-893ed6e45c05_2560x1707.png)

A compact mosque entrance in New York ([Credit](https://storefront.nyc/program/ny-masjid-the-mosques-of-new-york/?ref=kasurian.com))

What these spaces lacked in resources, they compensated for in intimacy; religious life unfolded through proximity and repetition rather than planning, and community was produced as a byproduct of daily interaction rather than as an explicit organisational goal. Islam’s own formative institutions emerged under conditions not entirely unlike these: concentrated populations, multifunctional spaces, sustained interaction across economic, social, and religious domains.

As Muslim families moved outward into the suburbs for economic reasons from the 1980s onward, religious institutions followed. But the environment they were received in was not neutral ground. It was a landscape engineered, down to the width of its roads and the separation of its lots, to produce a very particular form of life, and to foreclose all others.

## Suburbia as Social Infrastructure

The North American suburb emerged from the convergence of developments in tax structures, large-scale demographic shifts, and the mass construction of infrastructure, all shaped by a particular vision of postwar prosperity. According to this vision, the home was primarily a vehicle for wealth accumulation that must be insulated from any activity that might depress its value. From this single imperative to protect residential property prices, an entire regulatory architecture followed, and it is this architecture, rather than any failure of faith or organisational imagination, that has shaped the institutional possibilities available to Muslim communities in suburban North America.

Zoning laws ensure that suburbs separate functions with a rigour that would have been incomprehensible to any pre-modern city: homes here, shops there, offices somewhere else entirely. The underlying assumption is that proximity to commercial or communal activity introduces noise and traffic that threaten market values. Purpose-built religious institutions are collapsed into a single “place of worship” and are typically permitted in residential zones only as a conditional use, subject to parking minimums, setback requirements, and site plan review processes. The cumulative effect of the suburb’s functional separation is that the places in which residents pray, shop, socialise, and work are low-density parcels connected not by integrated street networks but by arterial roads designed for automobiles, with each destination requiring its own dedicated journey. The car is a prerequisite in this environment, and its necessity privileges institutions that can justify large parking lots and peak-hour capacity over those that depend on the steady, low-intensity foot traffic of daily life. The mixed-use religious life that still persists in the oldest downtown mosque campuses, with housing above the prayer hall and shops and foot traffic nearby, is absent from the suburbs because the regulatory framework governing suburbs structurally prohibits it.

Beneath both the zoning and the transportation lies a more subtle displacement: the privatisation of space itself, in which the single-family home replaces the neighbourhood as the primary unit of identification. Here, backyard patios replace shared courtyards, and front lawns dominated by garage doors face the street where porches once invited conversation. Atomisation is embedded in every function of the single-family home.

The cumulative effect of these interlocking constraints is to render certain forms of religious life structurally impossible. Suburban planning privileges large, centralised, destination-based institutions, housed in buildings that dispersed populations drive to for scheduled events. This systematically disincentivises forms of religious life rooted in everyday presence, in which moral and spiritual formation was the organic product of proximity and routine encounter rather than a programme to be administered. When a mosque can only exist as an isolated parcel on an arterial road, accessible only by car, surrounded by parking rather than by the lives of its congregants, the question of what kind of institution it can become has already been substantially answered before a single board member is elected or a single programme is designed.

## Three Cities, One Logic

The consequences of this regime unfolded differently across cities, shaped by the particular histories and demographics each Muslim community brought into the suburbs. The differences are instructive because they reveal the same underlying logic operating in different contexts, compounding pre-existing divisions in one location, converting an established urban form in another, and generating an entirely new institutional species in a third space.

In metropolitan Detroit, the suburban regime did not create ethnic fragmentation so much as harden it into spatial permanence. When Henry Ford opened the River Rouge Plant in 1918, he built dense worker housing in Dearborn’s south end, but only for employees classified as white, a category that included Arabs of Levantine origin while excluding Black workers, who were redirected to Inkster, a western suburb of Detroit. In the following decades, Syrians and Lebanese from the Bekaa Valley followed kinship networks into Dearborn, settling where housing access and zoning permitted concentration, and the communities that coalesced around these settlements built institutions downstream of the sorting that had produced them.

The [Highland Park Mosque](https://wdet.org/2026/05/12/highland-park-was-once-home-to-diverse-muslim-communities/?ref=kasurian.com), constructed in 1921, was itself a product of this concentration: Syrian and Lebanese families scrambling to perform Friday prayers and celebrate Islamic holidays at home until density made a dedicated space both necessary and viable. Services were offered only in Arabic. Halal slaughter facilities required industrial zoning. Arabic schools needed concentrated enrolment. Marriage networks depended on density. Each institutional layer reinforced the ethnic boundedness of the last, creating worlds that mimicked what their members knew from home, communities in which Islamic life unfolded in the constant presence of those who shared a faith, a language, a set of social expectations about gender and authority.

![Crossing the Lines: Highland Park was once home to diverse Muslim  communities - WDET 101.9 FM](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/be023541-385e-4c75-bb38-4b75551c1379_2560x1873.png)

The Highland Park mosque. It was opened in 1921 but closed a few years later.

When the 1965 Immigration Act brought a wave of South Asian Muslims into the region, professionals with different expectations around clerical authority and congregational practice found the existing institutions ill-suited to their norms and, rather than negotiating shared practices within them, built their own mosques in Rochester Hills and Canton, 25 to 30 miles from Dearborn, serving Urdu and Punjabi speakers.

Where dense urban geography might have forced diverse Muslim populations into the friction of coexistence, the dispersed metropolitan radius and the ethnic rooting of institutional capital made parallel construction easier than integration. Dearborn today contains 11 mosques serving 110,000 residents within 25 square miles, yet more than a quarter of Detroit-area mosques are dominated by a single ethnicity, nearly four times the national rate.

By contrast, Protestant congregations faced none of these constraints. When white flight accelerated, their institutional model was remarkably portable, requiring neither the ethnic infrastructure nor the immobile capital that bound Muslim identity to place. What Detroit’s suburbanisation privileged, then, was an institutional form defined by the ethnic mosque as a culturally bounded total institution, effective at preserving community under conditions of exclusion but increasingly unrepresentative of second and third generations who find their footing in a shared Islamic identity that cuts across ethnic lines.

Where Detroit’s suburbanisation hardened existing divisions, Toronto’s transformed an already established urban institution, reshaping how communities organised themselves. Nestled among the renovated storefronts at Dundas Street West and High Park Avenue stands the yellowed building where, in 1965, Malcolm X visited Toronto’s first mosque. The milieu in which the Dundas Street Mosque emerged was thoroughly urban. Toronto’s earliest Muslim community, largely Albanian and Bosnian migrants, lived and worked in dense, mixed neighbourhoods, and out of economic precarity and demographic compression, prayer halls formed in basements, and Eid was celebrated in rented spaces. The imam was at once teacher and cultural broker, his authority sustained by the accumulated weight of daily presence rather than by credentials or titles. This embeddedness made Islam part of everyday life rather than a separate sphere to be accessed on schedule.

![Day 1 – Mosque One – The Forgotten Dundas Street Mosque « 30 Masjids 🟩](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/374c7c91-17dd-43a1-bf3d-9b7b05728b8c_990x653-jpeg.jpg)

The Dundas Street Mosque, Toronto’s first mosque, was opened by Albanian Muslim immigrants in the 1960s. ([Credit](https://30masjids.ca/day-1-mosque-one-the-forgotten-dundas-street-mosque/?ref=kasurian.com))

By the 1990s, rising incomes among Muslims naturally produced the same aspiration for homeownership that had pulled previous non-Muslim waves from Toronto’s core into the suburban municipalities flush with new, affordable housing stock. Coupled with the scale of Muslim immigration, both the means and the pressure to move outward existed, and with this migration came institutional ambitions that the storefront mosque could not accommodate: intergenerational durability and a consolidated public voice capable of interfacing with municipal governance.

But the suburban environment in which these ambitions were pursued imposed its own institutional grammar. Zoning required buildings to declare a singular purpose. Mixed-use religious life was prohibited. Mosques adopted vertically integrated administrative models, incorporated boards, documented compliance, managed risk, and programming justified by measurable outputs, not because their founders preferred bureaucracy to intimacy but because suburban governance required legibility as the price of existence. The horizontal networks in which authority had once circulated were replaced by formal hierarchies capable of coordinating dispersed participation across large catchment areas. Religious practice is shaped by the disciplines and temporalities through which it is conducted, and suburban temporality, defined by the commute, scheduled programmes, and event-based gatherings, reconstitutes religious participation as an intentional act of attendance rather than the passive absorption of norms through daily life.

Yet the same formalised, application-based governance that constrained the mosque also created pathways to institutional legitimacy that did not depend on control of physical space. Organisations such as the Canadian Council of Muslim Women emerged within this framework, operating parallel to mosques, claiming authority through administrative competence and public advocacy rather than proximity to the minbar, a pathway more permeable to women’s leadership than the informal, rapport-based networks that had long dominated mosque life.

The Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex presents the clearest case because there was nothing to convert. Muslim migration into DFW followed professional labour markets in engineering, medicine, and technology that were already suburbanised. Unlike Detroit or Toronto, the region offered few dense urban neighbourhoods in which initial mosques might have embedded themselves in everyday life.

Institutions such as the Islamic Centre of Irving, founded in 1991, and the East Plano Islamic Centre, founded in 2003, grew from decentralised gatherings in garages and rented facilities directly into large, purpose-built suburban campuses, with no intermediary phase in which the density of informal social regulation might have generated the thicker communal bonds that characterised earlier Muslim settlements elsewhere. Institutional consolidation preceded social embedding. Both have since directed millions into development and education within their communities; by nonprofit standards, they are highly successful institutions.

![U.S. Department of Justice ends federal probe into EPIC City | KERA News](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/8a78d429-8a81-4b25-aa89-fd0f19e43e39_1200x630-jpeg.jpg)

The East Plano Islamic Centre in Plano, Texas, was first opened in 2015.

The result is that Islamic institutions have developed a significant organisational presence: financially scaled, administratively capable, publicly legible to school districts and municipal authorities, while religious time is compressed into discrete, high-density events. Friday prayers are crowded; weeknight programmes tend not to be. This pattern, acknowledged by mosque leadership itself, reflects a religious ecology designed around episodic gathering rather than daily encounter, in which the repeated presence that forms a community’s ethical foundation becomes instructive, mediated through scheduled programming, rather than absorptive.

## The Price of Legitimacy

These three experiences, those of Detroit, Toronto, and DFW, show how the suburban regime of North America has restructured Muslim religious life.

Large suburban congregations generate the financial scale to sustain full-time staff, counselling services, youth programming, Islamic schools, and professional governance structures that the storefront mosque could never have supported. By conforming to suburbia’s administrative grammar, mosques spent more time incorporating and documenting compliance. The return conferred legal legitimacy and political visibility that earlier communities had lacked entirely, making them recognised interlocutors with municipalities and school boards. The centralisation of authority that critics lament has also enabled institutional coordination and fundraising for urban development and education, which have directed millions of dollars to Muslim communities across the continent. By the standards North American civil society uses to measure organisational health, many suburban mosques are thriving.

Yet suburban infrastructure forecloses the low-cost, high-frequency, informal interactions through which religious sensibility was once cultivated as a byproduct of shared daily life rather than delivered as a scheduled intervention. When the mosque was within walking distance, and the imam was a neighbour whose authority derived from the accumulated weight of daily presence, not a weekend appearance, religious formation operated through habituation. Children absorbed the rhythms of prayer by proximity. The new migrants learned communal norms through constant encounters. The elders’ counsel was sought in passing by the accident of shared streets. None of this can be replicated by programming, however sophisticated it may be, as this ambience was a property of the spatial arrangement itself rather than of any institution operating within it.

In the suburbs, participation becomes intentional and event-based, such as through a drive across the metroplex for Friday prayers, a registration for a weekend school, or an RSVP to a community dinner. The relationship between the individual and the institution is altered. The congregant becomes a consumer of religious services, selecting among competing providers based on programme quality and commute time, mirroring the market logic of the suburban environment in which the mosque is embedded. Moral authority, once distributed horizontally among those who were simply present, consolidates vertically in boards and credentialed speakers, who can justify their authority to dispersed audiences who encounter them episodically. The community is recomposed as an aggregate of individuals who share an institution rather than a neighbourhood, and are bound by membership rather than by the unplanned interdependencies of proximity. It is a community that must be produced through organisational effort rather than one that emerges from the conditions of shared life.

These conditions are not restricted to Muslims, but the constraints of suburban institutional life formulated in North America have been applied to a religious tradition whose formative ecology was radically different. Islam’s institutional vocabulary assumed the spatial conditions that suburban planning has eliminated.

## Beyond the Terms of Suburbia

The nostalgia for urban intimacy too easily forgets the poverty and precarity that produced it—nor can the past be resurrected in present-day conditions. The question is a matter of trade-offs. Can institutional design recover the density of everyday encounters without sacrificing the organisational strength that suburban conditions have made possible? This question carries a particular weight when set against the formative milieu of Islam itself and, perhaps, a sobering recognition of the scope and power of zoning regulations over culture and custom.

Seventh-century Mecca and Medina were not cities in any modern sense, but they were definitively urban, with concentrated populations and multifunctional spaces. The house of Al-Arqam in Mecca functioned not as a purpose-built religious institution but as a node embedded in the living fabric of a commercial quarter, where worship and learning occupied the same rooms and the same hours. In these tight quarters, moral development was cultivated horizontally; proximity forced people to confront poverty and inequality within their own streets rather than encountering them as abstractions delivered from a lectern, and religious authority circulated through presence rather than consolidating in administrative offices. This is not to say that the tenement prayer hall was truer to the faith of Islam than the suburban campus, but that Islam has long been most socially generative where religious practice unfolds in dense, lived environments rather than as a destination removed from daily life.

While not necessarily a degradation of this inheritance, the suburban mosque is a radical departure from the spatial conditions under which that inheritance took shape. The master-planned community proposals emerging from places like East Plano, settlements integrating mosque, housing, schools, and commercial life within a single fabric, represent one attempt to close this gap, an effort to renegotiate the terms of suburban existence rather than simply accept them. Whether such experiments succeed will depend less on the ambitions of their designers than on the willingness of municipal governance to accommodate institutional forms that the existing zoning regime was never built to imagine.

Religious forms are shaped by political economy and planning logics long before faith enters the picture. In this context, the suburban Islam of North America has reorganised belief into institutional expressions optimised for aggregation and coordination. When considering the trade-offs in designing communal life today, one must always be cognizant that the suburban zoning regime reigns supreme, perched upstream as the sovereign decider of institutional forms and patterns of life.

---

**Words:* Ali Bukhari is a data analyst and urban health researcher working at the intersection of population health, spatial inequality, and institutional design in Ontario’s health system. His work explores how built environments shape community life, with a particular interest in Muslim suburbanisation and demographic change.*

**Further Reading**

- [American Islam: a view from the suburbs](https://theconversation.com/american-islam-a-view-from-the-suburbs-61281?ref=kasurian.com)
- [American Mosque Survey 2020 Report 1](https://ispu.org/reports-and-analysis/report-1-mosque-survey-2020/?ref=kasurian.com)
- [Crossing the Lines: Highland Park was once home to diverse Muslim communities](https://wdet.org/2026/05/12/highland-park-was-once-home-to-diverse-muslim-communities/?ref=kasurian.com)
- [Zoning Islam Out](https://arcmag.org/zoning-islam-out/?ref=kasurian.com)
### The Twilight of Mammon
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/twilight-of-mammon/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T21:38:46.000Z
Nativist populism, the belief that the nation belongs to the native-born, burns brighter today than at any point since WWII. Across Western democracies, far-right parties are on the rise owing to a combination of wage stagnation, rising unemployment, declining living standards, and the rampant financialisation of economies that produce less and less. One might see in all of this an inevitable reaction to what Francis Fukuyama called the *End of History*, or the idea that the post-war liberal consensus is generating the antibodies its own contradictions demand. But if one looks beneath the surface of the nativist movements, at the intellectual grammar that gives them coherence, one finds something more revealing than generalised discontent.

In *Deutschland schafft sich ab* (“[Germany Abolishes Itself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%5FAbolishes%5FItself?ref=kasurian.com)”), widely credited with providing the intellectual groundwork for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Thilo Sarrazin makes a case that Muslim immigrants are a drain on German society. His argument does not rest on abstract ideas rooted in the Aryan North or the Hyperborean tradition, nor on appeals to “Judeo-Christian” values. Rather, Sarrazin frames Muslim immigrants as unproductive populations with high time preference and a propensity towards instant gratification, whose offspring contribute little to the German economy. What gives his argument its veneer of intellectual seriousness is the Austrian economic framework operating beneath it, in which populations are sorted by their capacity to serve the market order. Indeed, Sarrazin has been [repeatedly hosted](https://jacobin.com/2018/04/race-iq-charles-murray-global-bell-curve?ref=kasurian.com) by the Hayek Institute in Austria and the Hayek Society in Germany.

The Austrian fingerprint repeats elsewhere. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets observed four types of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. Japan, lacking natural resources and devastated by war, developed. Argentina, blessed with fertile land, abundant resources, and no comparable destruction, has been essentially stagnant for decades, a situation caused first by Peronist protectionism and then compounded by successive (and failed) applications of neoliberal economic programmes. In 2023, the populist Javier Milei became Argentina’s President, having campaigned on an anarcho-capitalist manifesto: abolish the state and privatise everything. *Afuera*. He is [currently engaged](https://moneyweek.com/economy/how-javier-milei-led-an-economic-revolution-in-argentina?ref=kasurian.com) in what can only be described as economic shock therapy, a programme whose historical pattern is well established. Countries subjected to it tend to cycle through crashes and speculative recoveries, with global financial elites benefiting from the instability while ordinary citizens absorb the cost. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2024, the American Republican Vivek [Ramaswamy met Milei](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wXAN7UgiPHE?ref=kasurian.com) and remarked, “You’re more of a Mises guy. I’m a Hayek guy,” to which Milei responded, “But one of the most wonderful thinkers of liberty was Murray Rothbard,” after whom one of his pet mastiffs is named. The exchange is revealing. These are not merely economic preferences but confessional identities.

Curtis Yarvin, a software developer-turned-political philosopher, is an architect of the so-called [Dark Enlightenment](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile?ref=kasurian.com) movement, which advocates an end to democracy and a return to monarchical governance. In [an interview](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin?ref=kasurian.com) in 2022, Yarvin traced his own intellectual formation: “My ideas really came from reading the Austrian School, Mises and Rothbard, and then Hoppe. Hoppe opened a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world for me.” Yarvin, whose ideas have been cited by US Vice President J.D. Vance and the German-born tech billionaire Peter Thiel, argues that liberal democracies are [governed by what he calls a “Cathedral,”](https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral) a quasi-religious establishment in which academics, the media, and the professional class worship the tenets of human rights law and progressive values. To destroy this “Cathedral,” Yarvin and his followers call for the weakening and eventual dissolution of the EU, which they regard as the institutional heart of the liberal international system, and they are willing to empower far-right parties to further that aim, irrespective of the cost to European stability. Vance himself flew to Hungary in April 2026 to [openly campaign](https://www.politico.eu/article/vance-after-rallying-in-hungary-for-orban-says-he-wasnt-surprised-by-the-autocrats-defeat/?ref=kasurian.com) on behalf of its (now former) Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who announced that, if he were to win the Parliamentary elections, he would “launch a Reconquista” of European institutions. Orbán lost the elections.

The epistemic roots of these movements trace back to a common source, which also gave rise to neoliberalism several decades earlier: the Austrian School of Economics, which has become less a practical matter and more a theology with its own sacraments. Its prophets are Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and their disciples are Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In this theology, the market is not merely a practical mechanism of exchange. It is civilisational, moral, and revelatory. Hayek, the Austrian-British economist and author of *The Road to Serfdom*, insisted that dispersed individuals generated knowledge spontaneously through market exchange, a system he described as a “marvel” and a “mechanism for communicating information” that no central authority could rival. This extraordinary claim has shaped the modern world more profoundly than any idea since the Enlightenment: the Market is *a priori*. This claim replaces not just state central planners, but also religious authority as a repository of communicating information. Civilisational truths are no longer downstream of religious edicts or moral intuitions, but are divined through market interactions.

Financial platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, contemporary prediction markets that seek to price political and social reality itself, have followed this belief to its logical conclusion. In doing so, they have created the advanced stages of *hyperreality*, where a slew of [insider-trading claims](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/polymarket-kalshi-political-betting-b2972381.html?ref=kasurian.com) and [prosecutions](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/06/polymarket-israel-iran-war-arrest?ref=kasurian.com) show how “market signals” are being used to influence material events such as elections and even [military action](https://www.ft.com/content/989d335e-275b-4cdc-b51d-4b29fd8895b0?syn-25a6b1a6=1&ref=kasurian.com), rather than merely price them. Beyond, the believers span the political landscape: New Right populists, hedge-fund libertarians, Bitcoin maximalists, and Silicon Valley rationalists.

The origin of this theology is often traced to the aftermath of WWII, to the Chicago School and its leading scholar, Milton Friedman, who positioned himself as Hayek’s successor as the primary post-war intellectual antagonist of John Maynard Keynes. However, the deeper genealogy lies not in post-war Chicago but in the early 20th century, in the imperial Viennese salons of the *fin de siècle*, where a different intellectual class, terrified of mass democracy, watched a dying empire and sought to save the market from the people.

## The Cradle of Market Theology

At the turn of the 20th century, the Habsburg Empire was fracturing under the weight of imperial overextension. It governed an extraordinary number of people: Slavs, Jews, Magyars, Croats, Romanians, and Albanians, all lived beneath one political roof, but no one believed the house would hold. Democratic movements were threatening aristocratic control, universal suffrage had entered the popular imagination, and collectivist ideologies were gaining ground. The aristocratic order that had held the empire together was losing its grip. Prominent Austrian thinkers, among them Hayek and Mises, confronted a question that was genuinely difficult and, in its way, urgent: what force could maintain a capitalistic social order in a multi-ethnic empire whose imperial authority was dissolving?

Their answer was *market selection*. The term requires situating within the intellectual milieu in which it was conceived, because that milieu was not, as it is sometimes retrospectively presented, one of dispassionate economic analysis. This was the era of Social Darwinism and race science, theories that posited competition as the natural and moral mechanism for social selection. In other words, survival of the fittest. These ideas permeated political science, anthropology, and colonial theory across Europe, and the Austrian School lived within this current, not adjacent to it or outside of it. The structural parallel between Social Darwinism and Austrian economics lies in a shared logic. Social Darwinism asserts that Nature selects winners, that intervention interferes with natural evolution, and that hierarchy among peoples is the natural order of things. Austrian economics asserts that the Market selects winners, that intervention distorts the spontaneous order, and that inequality is the natural and desirable outcome of free exchange.

Mises made the connection between Social Darwinism and Austrian economics explicit in ways his intellectual descendants have been less eager to revisit. In *Nation, State, and Economy* (1919), he argued that superior cultures naturally displace what he termed “primitive civilisations,” including Slavic peasants, Baltic communities, and Ottoman subjects who inhabited the Habsburg Empire. In *Liberalism* (1927), Mises would adopt a more anti-colonial stance, castigating the actual practice of colonialism as a “system of blood and iron” and a contradiction to liberal principles. However, he insisted that while colonial methods were brutal and often unjust, the spread of Western civilisation—through capitalism, free markets, and technology—remained a net good for the “primitive cultures” in the long run.

This was not economics, as the discipline is understood in the contemporary sense: a technical inquiry into the allocation of scarce resources. For Hayek and Mises, market selection was a cosmic sorting mechanism, a sort of moral Darwinism that determined which peoples and which civilisations deserved to persist and which deserved to be displaced. The racial context in which this logic was first articulated was eventually dropped, but the frame remained, universalised, and later exported as the intellectual foundation and language of the neoliberal project.

## Leaving the Tribe

An economic theory, however internally coherent it may be, cannot sustain the moral weight of a civilisational project. It requires a story about human nature, one that grants its prescriptions the weight of moral necessity. Hayek understood this. Over the course of his career, he developed a narrative anthropology, or more simply, a story about human nature, that provided an evolutionary justification for market selection.

According to Hayek, human beings evolved in small hunter-gatherer bands on the savannah, where they instinctively cooperated, shared resources, and strove for equality. These were adaptive behaviours for small-group life, and they produced the moral intuitions that most people still carry: solidarity, fairness, and the impulse towards redistribution. However, as humanity transitioned from small bands to large, anonymous, commercial societies, these inherited instincts became liabilities to the development of markets. The morality of the tribe, Hayek argued, was dangerous to civilisational order. The market operates on principles that are counterintuitive to our evolved nature: deferred gratification, competitive self-interest, and the tolerance of inequality as the price of dynamism. Those individuals and cultures that internalised these market values occupied a higher position in the civilisational hierarchy.

The implications Hayek drew from this narrative were sweeping. To sustain the modern world, Hayek believed, market selection must reign supreme, and its moral code, competitive self-interest, accumulation, the Darwinist sorting of winners and losers, must be understood as civilisational achievements to be aspired to, not pathologies to be corrected. The inherited instincts that call human beings towards justice, cooperation, and redistribution are vestiges of a tribal past that must be actively suppressed if civilisation is to survive.

This story solved a deep ideological problem. It gave neoliberal thinkers a story, a narrative anthropology that made the market order feel natural, even inevitable, a destiny, and it reframed resistance to that order as regression. This story was also fiction.

Hayek’s portrait of the tribal band as egalitarian, communal, and instinctual was partially derived from the Victorian imagination of pre-colonial Africa, the image of the “savage” living in primitive simplicity before European civilisation arrived to elevate him. As David Graeber and David Wengrow contend in *The Dawn of Everything*, drawing on decades of accumulated archaeological evidence, the standard narrative of a linear transition from egalitarian bands to hierarchical civilisations is not supported by the record. Early human societies were far more varied, politically sophisticated, and institutionally experimental than the savannah myth allows. Hayek reproduced the moral framework and logic of colonial hierarchy, whether or not he recognised it as such, and universalised it into a theory of civilisational destiny.

What Hayek’s foundational myth accomplished, stripped to its essentials, was to turn the profit motive into a civilisational pursuit. This is the specific claim on which the entire moral architecture of neoliberalism rests.

## The Birth of Neoliberal Power

The market selection story was born, but it had nowhere to grow. In the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII, the intellectual landscape was dominated by an overwhelming Keynesian consensus. Markets had failed, states had prevailed, and economic life would henceforth be managed. Hayek and Mises found themselves increasingly irrelevant as their warnings about planning, central authority, and the moral dangers of redistribution were overtaken by the tangible successes of post-war governance. History, for a time, seemed to have settled the argument.

The foundational architects of the Austrian School also found themselves at loggerheads. Mises regarded the state itself as the principal enemy of the market order. Hayek concluded that capitalism required a strong state, one capable of insulating the market from democratic pressure while refraining from directing economic life towards social ends. Neoliberalism as a political project would emerge from this Hayekian accommodation: the market order protected by state power, but never subordinated to it.

What the Austrian School lacked was a pragmatic operational vision, or in short, a way to govern, a way to actualise its theories. Milton Friedman supplied the manual. Friedman translated Austrian moral philosophy into a policy toolkit: monetarism via rules-bound central banking to manage inflation and govern in a fiat world, with the primary objective of guaranteeing market credibility. The Chicago-Austrian synthesis promised an impersonal, disciplined market order in which justice was subordinated to efficiency.

The convergence of Hayek and Friedman was institutionalised in 1947 with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a transnational network of economists, philosophers, journalists, and financiers assembled to preserve a worldview in waiting. Neoliberalism was born with Austrian anthropology as its moral core, but it required over two decades of patience before the post-war Keynesian order began to fracture.

> “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”  
> – Milton Friedman (*Capitalism and Freedom*, preface to the 1982 edition)

When President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971 by breaking the dollar’s tether to gold, the decision was pragmatic. The United States was overstretched, running currency deficits it could no longer sustain in large part due to Vietnam War financing, and convertibility could not be maintained without either crushing domestic demand or surrendering geopolitical ambition. Nixon chose to continue the imperial project. But the decision shattered something fundamental, as monetary sovereignty dissolved into abstraction. Coupled with the 1973 oil crisis, governments around the world confronted stagflation, fiscal crises, labour unrest, and an inability to command capital flows. The Keynesian toolkit, designed for a world of fixed exchange rates and managed trade, looked antiquated. Friedman’s crisis had arrived.

In 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize. With renewed intellectual legitimacy, Friedman supplied the governing levers to bring the Chicago-Austrian synthesis into the mainstream, as the only coherent framework capable of explaining the new reality and prescribing a response. By the time Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to power in the early 1980s, the intellectual groundwork had already been laid. Thatcher famously kept Hayek’s *The Constitution of Liberty* in her handbag. Reagan, advised by Friedman and his students, framed inflation and regulation as enemies of freedom rather than political choices. The neoliberal “long march through the institutions” would begin to bear fruit. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, capital controls were dismantled, finance was deregulated, deindustrialisation accelerated, labour was disciplined, and public goods were privatised. Inflation control replaced full employment as the central policy objective.

On the international stage, the Volcker Shock completed the globalisation of the market order. In 1979, Paul Volcker, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, dramatically raised interest rates to control inflation. This transformed the developing world’s dollar-denominated debt into an existential crisis, forcing governments across Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe to seek IMF and World Bank assistance in the form of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) as a condition for survival. These institutions, increasingly staffed by Chicago-trained economists, exported neoliberal structural adjustment programmes that compelled states to liberalise trade, privatise public assets, and cut social spending, as [they had previously done](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago%5FBoys?ref=kasurian.com) in Pinochet’s Chile. Crisis became the lever through which the market order was imposed on countries that had never chosen it, a dynamic that continues to shape the conditions of much of the Global South today.

In 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. The United States stood alone as the unopposed hegemon of the global order. Neoliberalism had won. Markets were ascendant, the state was restrained, and Hayekian moral anthropology became the background assumption of governance worldwide. Market logic became moral logic, and human beings were reframed as economic units of consumption in liberal democracies. It was, by all appearances, the end of history.

## The House Always Wins

Unchallenged for decades, neoliberalism successfully re-engineered the modern state to deliver growth that was uneven, financialised, and detached from production. Its human consequences have become impossible to ignore. Inequality has reached levels unseen since the early 20th century. Wages across much of the developed world have stagnated despite rising productivity, while housing has been transformed from a social good into a speculative asset class, pricing entire generations out of stability. Financial crises have become more frequent and more severe, each resolved through larger central bank interventions designed to safeguard the market order rather than reform it. Across the Global South, the legacy of dollar-denominated debt, structural adjustment, and capital flight has produced a permanent condition of fiscal fragility, entrenched dependence, and elite corruption enabled by the system’s own architecture.

What is striking is the political direction these failures have produced. The 2008 financial crisis should have been the political left’s moment. Movements did emerge: Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain, Bernie Sanders in America, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain. None has yet achieved lasting structural transformation. The left demonstrated that it possessed no credible institutional alternative beyond Keynesianism. The vacuum it failed to fill was claimed by a harder, more absolutist ideology drawn from the same Austrian tradition that had produced neoliberalism itself. This absolutist ideology represents a radicalisation within its own tradition. The neoliberal settlement was Hayekian: it accepted state power as a necessary instrument for insulating markets from democratic pressure. The new insurgency draws on the other branch: Mises and his disciples, Rothbard and Hoppe, who regarded the state itself as the enemy and democracy as an obstacle to the natural market order. The institutional compromise, or the Hayekian peace with state power, is being abandoned in favour of the older Misesian moral absolutism: the market is not something to be protected by institutions, but it is a force that requires no institutions at all.

On the political right, movements once framed as populist revolts increasingly reject redistribution, pluralism, and democratic mediation, while embracing markets as moral sorting mechanisms and inequality as natural hierarchy. In counter-establishment elite circles, similar assumptions reappear stripped of electoral politics entirely. Silicon Valley rationalists, Bitcoin maximalists, and hedge-fund libertarians articulate a world in which democracy is inefficient and social obligation is distortionary. What unites these factions is the abandonment of democratic consent as the primary source of legitimacy, as power migrates to networks, platforms, and privately governed systems.

The post-neoliberal moment produces multiple elite exits from democracy: some authoritarian, some technological, some pursuing capital mobility and jurisdictional arbitrage as ends in themselves. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the figure of the billionaire oligarch, the neoliberal order’s most consequential offspring, who now transcends corporate power and wields personal resources to advance an anarcho-capitalist world order by subverting democracy itself. In *The End of History and the Last Man*, Fukuyama posited that the “last men” might restart history out of sheer boredom and the desire for *megalothymia*, the need to be recognised as superior. It is an apt heuristic for this new aristocracy. Peter Thiel epitomises it. Influenced by Curtis Yarvin and considered to be one of the errant philosopher’s chief patrons, Thiel said this on the founding of PayPal at the [Libertopia conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45o8tQMGtvU&ref=kasurian.com) in 2010: “The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world... We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.” The populist right, the libertarian cabals, and the billionaire aristocracy are converging, not as a backlash or revolt, but as a mutant coalition engaged in intra-elite warfare with the old neoliberal guard.

Nowhere is this more visible than in what is unfolding across Europe. On one side stands the status quo: EU technocratic governance, independent central banks, and rules-based integration, an order shaped by late 20th-century liberal internationalism and defended by figures such as George Soros, Christine Lagarde, and the Brussels institutional class. This vision seeks to preserve open markets, capital mobility, and supranational coordination while containing democratic volatility through legalism and technocracy. It is neoliberalism in its mature form.

Opposing it is a new insurgency that draws, often implicitly, on the harder edge of Austrian economic thought. The AfD, Reform UK and their allies present themselves as populist challengers to Brussels, hostile to regulation, sceptical of supranational law, and increasingly indifferent to democracy. Foreign money has fueled them. The Mercer Family Foundation [funded](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/us/politics/mercer-family-cambridge-analytica.html?ref=kasurian.com) Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the centre of the targeted disinformation campaign during the Brexit referendum. Elon Musk has platformed Tommy Robinson, amplifying far-right British activism within the global media ecosystem. Peter Thiel and Robert Shillman have funded movements, media ventures, and [political personalities](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/07/tommy-robinson-global-support-brexit-march?fbclid=IwAR3jAYlsuyAu4aMuYj1W3zV1zTDvXD9cZn4ptwKpwcBjsfPerZGIigmyORg&ref=kasurian.com) across the Atlantic, all with the common objective of weakening the EU regulatory state.

Europe has thus become the frontline of an intra-elite war over what form of capitalism emerges and endures: technocratic or plutocratic. Both sides accept the casino. They differ on whether democracy should be managed or rendered obsolete. Regardless of which faction prevails, the house always wins: the likely outcome is a more authoritarian market order, less accountable and more hierarchical than anything that preceded it.

## God or Mammon

This intra-elite conflict is not new. Whether it appears as neoliberal technocracy, senatorial landowners, billionaire oligarchs, or Napoleons and Caesars, the underlying pattern is as old as civilisation itself: the capture of power, wealth, and legitimacy by a narrow elite, and the gradual hollowing out of the social order that sustains the polity. Markets change form, institutions evolve, and ideologies are renamed. The pattern endures.

Writing about Rome, Will and Ariel Durant observed in *The Lessons of History* that injustice was never corrected by legal means because law reflected the prevailing power dynamics. Reformers like the Gracchi were murdered, democracy was hollowed out, and stability was restored only through strongmen who preserved elite wealth while offering enough order to prevent outright collapse. The Durants’ pessimism is not about reform as such, but the absence of moral renewal. Without it, exploitation reasserts itself under new management. Rome did not reform itself morally before its fall. It was morally refounded after its collapse, as Christianity produced two divergent civilisational heirs, the Byzantine Empire in the East and Latin Christendom in the West, both of which constrained the very structures of elite domination that had characterised the late Republic.

Today, democracy appears unable to wield its legitimacy to restrain the worst excesses of the market order. The Hayekian moral anthropology that underwrites this order insists that it should not even try. The market is upstream of civilisational values, and inequality is the natural and desirable outcome of free exchange. Those who resist this are clinging to instincts that civilisation has outgrown. At the heart of what is missing from this moral anthropology is the recognition that what civilisation most values and depends on is the *uneconomical* transaction, made for the benefit of justice and charity. At scale, only the Abrahamic faiths (in the West, Christianity) have applied these principles. Shorn of these moral roots, there are no guardrails left to defend societies from the worst predations of the market—especially from the actors that seek to monopolise them for their own ends.

In the ancient world, Mammon personified the greed, materialism, and corrupting influence of wealth that demands ultimate loyalty and subordinates all of life to for-profit motives and accumulation. Today, Mammon has returned with renewed vigour as the Market God, and societies across the world now face a choice, articulated in its starkest form two millennia ago:

> “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

---

**Words*: Imran Khan works at Big Tech and is based in London. He is interested in the intersection between technological innovation, economic systems, and political history.*

**Further Reading:**

- *Hayek’s Bastards*, Quinn Slobodian
- *The Invisible Doctrine*, George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson
- *The Shock Doctrine*, Naomi Klein
- *The Fatal Conceit*, Friedrich Hayek
- *Democracy: The God That Failed*, Hans-Hermann Hoppe
### How the Academic Left Failed Syria
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/academic-left-failed-syria/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T21:38:36.000Z
There is a figure that haunts the academic halls dedicated to the study of the Middle East and the Muslim world. This figure—the Sacrificialist—is the dominant voice in a field that was once animated by the ambition to understand civilisations in motion but has since contracted into something closer to a liturgy of defeat. The Sacrificialist is not a person, but a posture within the broader currents of the Arab, and sometimes Muslim left. It is a moral economy consisting of academics, activists, and citizens alike, one where losing is seen as the truest form of winning, and where the willingness to demand “sacrifice”, however material or symbolic, is the primary measure of seriousness and belonging. They are trained in critique and fluent in the vocabulary of loss, cite Edward Said as though reciting scripture, invoke Michel Foucault as one might an incantation, and produce work that, for all its sophistication, rarely outlives the journals in which it appears.

The Sacrificialist’s habitat is the contemporary academy, but their condition transcends its halls. Abdurrahman Taha, the Moroccan philosopher, draws a distinction between *qawl*, the mastery of articulation and speech, and *ʿamal*, the ethical deed that transforms the self and bears responsibility for its consequences in the world. In a moral order in which *qawl* displaces and suppresses *ʿamal*, it is technique that governs knowledge and reduces the world to what can be measured and proceduralised, while the formation of the moral subject through action is relegated to an ever-shrinking private interior, if it survives at all. The highest achievement is mastery of critique itself, severed from the burden of ethical action: the performance of having named the violence, again and again, until the naming becomes indistinguishable from belonging. But this moral order, as Wael Hallaq argues, does not merely produce speech in place of action. It acts relentlessly, driven by the imperative to do whatever can be done, and retroactively cloaks that action in the language of legitimacy. Speech is not an alternative to the exercise of power; it is its laundering mechanism. Hallaq calls this discursive moralism: a world in which moral language functions not to cultivate virtue but to sanitise violence. Critique, in this account, cloaks what he identifies as a faux-transcendence, in which abstractions like ‘justice’ or ‘anti-imperialism’ divide the world into the righteous and the damned while keeping the speaker's ego safely innocent.

The politics of our time claims to operate on pragmatic and material terrain—and yet political life remains saturated with moral intensity. The need for an ultimate reference point of accountability did not vanish with the departure of the divine but was instead reassigned to the political realm. Politics today is secularised theology, promising progress or justice as absolutes, but without any higher ethical constraint capable of checking the ego’s appetite for its own innocence—the impulse to declare ourselves righteous. This is the atmosphere in which the Sacrificialist thrives, because the Sacrificialist’s entire vocation depends on the availability of a moral register that can certify righteousness without requiring transformation.

The post-Saidian academic order is one of the most refined products of the Sacrificialist’s condition. Said’s Orientalism was, and in certain contexts remains, a sharp tool for exposing how Empire distorted and subordinated the histories of those it colonised, revealing the mechanics of knowledge as domination. One could use it to cut through, then pivot towards articulating alternative ways of knowing, organising, and living, drawn from intellectual and ethical inheritances that the colonial gaze had obscured. But over time, Said’s tool calcified into orthodoxy. Said himself did not demand this (though the argumentative circularity of the original text made the calcification structurally possible), but it was the academic order that inherited him which discovered that critique, endlessly sustained and never resolved into construction, was a comfortable dwelling. This academic order required no departure from discourse and asked nothing of its practitioners beyond the correct alignment: leftist, Marxist, decolonial, and above all, safely critical. Citing the right people became a mode of affiliation, the reflexive disclaimer a credential, not a genuine reckoning with the ground one speaks from. The post-Saidian order became a ritual of admission into a moral consensus that had already decided its conclusions before the inquiry began.

## The Post-Saidian Order

If this orthodoxy had remained confined to the academy’s seminar rooms and conference panels, its consequences would be academic in the most diminishing sense of the word. But it did not, and here the Sacrificialist encounters a paradox. The same scholars who endlessly perform their own marginality—we are only academics, no one reads us, our work cannot reach beyond the seminar room—have produced a moral vocabulary that has escaped the university more thoroughly than almost any intellectual movement in living memory. Structuralism never managed it. Even neoliberal economics, which reshaped the world more thoroughly than any academic project of the 20th century, escaped the university primarily through policy corridors and institutional capture rather than through cultural osmosis. The Sacrificialist’s idiom, the post-Saidian order, did something rarer. It seeped into the groundwater of public discourse, surfacing in vertical video and social media threads, in the moral grammar of protest movements, and even the intuitions of educated publics who have never read a page of Said yet think in categories his work made available.

What the post-Saidian order accomplished is, by any measure, remarkable. This achievement, however, is also what renders the orthodoxy genuinely dangerous, because once an idea becomes common sense, once it stops feeling like an argument and starts to feel more like reality, it becomes nearly impossible to challenge. An argument can be tested, a theory can be falsified, but an intuition simply feels true, and the post-Saidian moral vocabulary now operates at the level of intuition.

The moral language of anti-colonial critique, a language meant to expose how power works and to inform how one acts in the world, has detached itself from ethical action and now functions as a sorting mechanism, dividing the world into the righteous and the implicated, the aligned and the suspect. What was once a scalpel for dissecting the relationship between knowledge and power has become an atmosphere in which certain positions are simply felt to be correct, and others felt to be compromised, without the intervening discipline of argument.

The consequences go beyond the academy. Once critique without political imagination escapes the academy and becomes the common sense of movements and publics, it reshapes the horizon of the possible. Justice, in this framework, means a complete restoration that history almost never delivers. Justice, then, begins to function less as a practical demand and more as a permanent warrant for prolonged war, siege, and resistance that cost lives, since the struggle cannot cease until an impossible justice has been achieved. The dynamic feeds itself. The Sacrificialist creates or refines the vocabulary, the receptive public amplifies it, and the vocabulary hardens against revision. The loop creates a critique divorced from any viable political imagination, and it does not merely fail to end suffering but, under certain conditions, sanctifies suffering as the only proof of moral seriousness, and the demand to resist, and keep resisting, becomes a form of coercion, an authoritarianism that denies those it claims to champion the right not to die.

This denial has material consequences, with a name, a geography, and a death toll.

## How the Academic Left Failed Syria

Syria was one of the few moments in the modern Levant where action, messy and fragile as it was, successfully broke free from the gravitational pull of endless critique. The revolution that began in 2011 unsettled the entire architecture of the post-Saidian moral order, not because it was pure but precisely because it was not, and because it refused to wait for purity before acting. Revolutionaries from diverse walks of life, urban and rural, secular and devout, educated and unlettered, pursued liberation on terms that did not submit to the binaries through which the academic left had learned to process struggle. There was no clean colonial antagonist, no singular axis of domination that could be mapped onto the coloniser-and-colonised template the orthodoxy required to render a conflict legible. The violence was internal, multidirectional, and often enacted by actors who occupied several positions simultaneously: victim and perpetrator, resistant and authoritarian, anti-Western and Russian-armed. The left, both Arab and Western, looked at this and largely turned away.

The turning away was a structural consequence of the very framework through which Sacrificialist solidarity had been trained to operate. Post-Saidian thought, for all its suspicion of empire, inherited the gravitational pull toward power that it claimed to diagnose, only with the poles inverted. In rejecting the West as the locus of domination, much of the decolonial left re-centred virtue in what it designated the anti-imperialist camp, namely Iran and Russia, whose own imperial histories and present ambitions were quietly reclassified as defensive postures against Western aggression.

“Anti-imperialism” became the most persuasive sacrament of this secularised political theology. Within this structure, Iran and Russia ceased to function as mere geopolitical actors and began operating as surrogate transcendences. Their opposition to the West granted them a moral immunity that no evidence can revoke. Even today, violence committed under their shadow is not defended so much as reclassified: tragic but necessary, regrettable but “contextualised,” unfortunate but (and this is the decisive word) aligned. Assad’s regime could therefore be folded into an “axis of resistance” not because its conduct was defensible by any standard the left claimed to uphold, but because alignment, a position held up only by the feedback loop of critical speech, had become the ethical measure. Once positioned against the correct enemy, power no longer needed to answer to an external moral limit. It answered only to itself.

For years, the Assad regime’s violence against Syrians, and the industrial-scale detention and torture documented by defectors and survivors alike, was met in many leftist and decolonial spaces with hesitation, silence, or outright denial. But what is more revealing than the denials, some of which can be attributed to ignorance or cowardice, is how the same logic persists even now, even among those who have always opposed Assad, whenever Syria re-enters public discourse. The post-Saidian intuition resurfaces as a reflex. Syria acquires moral weight through proximity to a sanctioned struggle. “Intersectionality,” insofar as it intersects with Palestine, becomes the mechanism through which some violence is seen, while Syrian suffering, absent that intersection, remains in the shadow.

The case of Yarmouk best exposes this dynamic. A district in south Damascus that had grown from a Palestinian refugee camp, Yarmouk was besieged, starved, and ultimately destroyed by the Assad regime and its allied militias from Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. Today, within the post-Saidian discourse, Yarmouk is undeniable evidence of Assad’s betrayal of Palestine, as though the destruction of a Palestinian camp is the threshold at which Assad’s violence finally became fully legible. Assad committed violence against Palestinians, and therefore, his violence can now be admitted into the register. The implication, rarely stated but repeatedly enacted, is that Syrian suffering on its own, the hundreds of thousands of dead who were not Palestinian, who lived in Homs and Aleppo and Daraa and the suburbs of Damascus, required translation into a recognised symbolic vocabulary before it could be seen. The Palestinians of Yarmouk supplied that translation, becoming a cleansing register for the post-Saidian order’s attempt to absolve itself. The Sacrificialist needs this register because, without it, the binaries dissolve, leaving the terrifying prospect of judging each situation on its own terms and acting without prior assurance that one’s position has been certified as righteous.

Palestine offered the ideal conditions to wrest Syria into legibility: settler-occupied, with a clear geography of domination, and a moral clarity that made solidarity both intellectually legible and, more importantly, safe for the post-Saidian order. Syria offered none of that comfort. Its people were fragmented, its frontlines impossible to narrate in a single direction, its actors compromised in ways that demanded distinguishing between resistance and tyranny inside an ostensibly anti-Western bloc. In short, the orthodoxy could not take up Syria without dismantling itself.

Syria exposed something deeper than a failure of solidarity. Much of the Arab and Western left cannot imagine sovereignty outside the imperial frame. They refused the American umbrella only to accept Russian and Iranian cover, trading one master narrative for another. What followed was a politics of sacrificial alignment, where positions turned less on the texture of a given struggle than on who armed whom and who fought the designated enemy.

Instead, the revolution, whatever its failures (and they were many), was populated and made by people who acted without metaphysical cover or assurance that history would vindicate them. Nor did they wait for the correct sponsor to authorise their struggle. And for precisely this reason, the constituencies that have made solidarity their vocation abandoned Syria.

## Sovereignty Does Not Wait for Permission

Today’s political culture insists that ethical clarity must precede action, that justice must be perfectly legible before it can be pursued, and that one must know in advance which side of history one is on before stepping into it. This is the Sacrificialist’s deepest assumption, and it is wrong, because it reverses the actual sequence of moral life. The ethical deed is the means by which the self is formed, tested, and brought into relationship with a moral order that exceeds it. Divine will, in this account, is not something that intervenes from above to settle our dilemmas in advance. It is enacted through human will and the willingness to choose amid radical imperfection. There is no exemption from mess. There is no metaphysical clearance granted before the fact. To act ethically is not to escape uncertainty but to enter it deliberately, carrying the full weight of the knowledge that one may be wrong.

What the post-Saidian order has trained those inside and outside the academy to do instead is to delay action indefinitely until suffering can be translated into a recognised moral register, so that the struggle can be declared righteous by the correct authorities, thereby securing alignment. The order routes one struggle through another, outsourcing judgment to empires, movements, or symbols that promise moral safety, and calls this solidarity. This is actually self-preservation masquerading as justice.

The first step toward sovereignty, and this word is used deliberately, because what is at stake is not merely an intellectual posture but the capacity of peoples to govern their own fate, is acting without subordinating one struggle to another, or waiting for the framework to guarantee one’s innocence, or outsourcing moral judgment to the geopolitical patron, the academic consensus, or the social media chorus that will confirm you have chosen correctly. The Sacrificialist is not allergic to injustice but to the possibility that acting in the world will compromise the carefully maintained purity of a position that was never tested against anything more demanding than a conference paper. They are invested in appearing moral far more than in acting with morality, because action requires choosing, prioritising, excluding, and risking failure in public, and failure in public cannot be absorbed by the citational apparatus that has sustained them thus far.

Syria, whether the Sacrificialist accepts it or not, exposed this with a brutality that no amount of retroactive reframing can soften. The revolution was not pure, and no honest account of it can pretend otherwise, but it was populated by people who acted without permission. They did not wait for Sacrificialist intellectuals to settle on the correct narrative, or to endorse them as the right kind of resistance, or for the solidarity movement to add them to the list of causes already deemed worthy of attention. They acted, under unbearable conditions, knowing they might fail, knowing history might not vindicate them, knowing that no framework would assure their innocence in advance. Some built, and others governed, however imperfectly and briefly. Many more died. And in their refusal to subordinate their own agency to the moral economy of others, they enacted something that the entire apparatus of post-Saidian critique, for all its sophistication, has proven incapable of producing: a politics that accepts the risk of being wrong in order to pursue the possibility of being free.

A politics that only “resists” is not politics. It is mere posturing that waits for history to move and for death to sanctify its stance. And justice is not an abstraction; people build it, govern it, restrain it, and repair it. It is the work we undertake, knowing we may fail. In the end, it is often the act undertaken without certainty that manifests the divine will and moves history forward.

---

**Words*: Sarah Al-Saeid is a researcher and humanitarian practitioner working on Syria and the wider region.*
### The Return of Oral Culture
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/return-of-oral-culture/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T21:38:18.000Z
The complex civilisation that we inhabit today is the product of one technology above all others: the written word. The last two centuries saw the unique advent of mass literacy, as increasingly complex societies sought to standardise the beliefs and mental habits of their citizenry. Long-form reading of the type embodied in books, essays, and magazines functioned as a cultural and psychological training regime used by institutions to produce certain types of minds and citizens.

The printed word gradually displaced the older mental and cultural habits of oral culture, as developed societies moved towards universal literacy. Oral culture was no less complex or intelligent in its own way, and the shift from one system to another did not imply a moral judgement. But people habituated to transmitting information through oral forms of discourse experienced the world in a fundamentally different way: treating the sharing of knowledge as something personal and communal, reasoning situationally, and eschewing the abstract logic that writing made possible.

Mass literacy reshaped how modern people argued, how they conceived of truth, how they evaluated political authority, and how they even judged what it meant to be considered intelligent. To become “literate” did not merely mean learning to decode marks on a page, or even to read short pieces of text instrumentally. It meant entering a civilisation built around long stretches of linear attention, quiet interiority, and the gradual construction of complex, impersonal structures of meaning that could be shared with others.

That civilisation is now in the process of unwinding. With its passage, we are now seeing a monumental cultural shift occur almost entirely unremarked: the return of oral culture, in a new technological form.

## The Return of Homo Oralis

The decline in reading books and magazines is attested by statistical surveys and is also obvious to anyone observing popular social habits over the past few decades. The written word is losing its place of cultural centrality in favour of fundamentally oral forms of communication transmitted through personalised video and audio. The shift is not merely cultural but metaphysical. We are witnessing, unremarked, the decline of a certain kind of human being: the reflective, slow thinker, who can sit with difficulty.

Books demand a kind of cognitive posture that increasingly feels unnatural to many people. The result is not just lower reading comprehension—which teachers are reporting in students even in some elite colleges—but a different sense of what knowledge even is: something we are habituated to expect instantly, rather than that which makes itself accessible slowly.

Technology is returning us to a universe of instantaneous imagery and sound typical of oral culture. Even the bursts of unstructured text characteristic of social media timelines and text messages—the common “reading” done in an overstimulated communication environment—is expressed in the ad hoc staccato of oral culture.

Our brains themselves are changing in response to this stimulus. Instead of interior lives inclined toward the complex, structured reasoning that characterised mass-literate civilisation, we are developing minds optimised for speed, emotiveness, responsiveness, and public performance. As we change, our civilisation must as well. Democracy was built for a republic of letters, and whether it can survive in its current form through this shift is questionable. But recognising that it is taking place is the necessary basis for any response.

Two men who lived through and died in the early phases of our current technological explosion—Walter J. Ong and Neil Postman—anticipated the transformation back to an oral culture with remarkable clarity. Ong was a Jesuit priest, literary scholar, and historian of communication whose work traced how technologies like writing and print reshaped human thought. Postman was a media theorist and educator, best known for his critiques of television and technological culture.

Writing at the dawn of the cable news age, Postman warned that modern societies were increasingly confusing information with wisdom. He also described the passage from a print-based public sphere to a television-based one (a powerful form of oral media) as a collapse of rational civic discourse into frivolous entertainment masquerading as knowledge.

Ong went even further, describing the difference between oral and literate worlds as a shift in human consciousness itself. Ong was careful to point out that orality was not an “inferior” stage preceding literacy, but a distinct mode of human existence with its own strengths. Primary oral cultures—societies with no writing at all—are highly intelligent. But their intelligence manifests differently, giving rise to distinct types of societies.

Had Postman and Ong lived today, they would recognise what has been taking place with the pervasive growth of internet video as the full rebirth of oral culture armed with the technological tools of modern society. The slow-reasoning republic of letters that gave birth to the organisational forms of modern society is rapidly fading in the face of ever more pervasive algorithmic video and audio mediums. Every technology has a particular bias, and the bias of these mediums is to instil an inclination in people for the performative, conflict-driven, impulsive style of the spoken word.

To understand the implications of this change, we have to understand how literate culture changed human psychology in the first place. The printed book and the long-form essay were technologies that organised stories, ideas, and debates into unfolding chronological sequences. A mind habituated to books demotes instant gratification in favour of order and hierarchies of knowledge. Long-form reading is the discipline of learning to follow an idea through time without interruption, and ultimately learning how to structure meaning itself.

To finish a book from beginning to end, an individual must hold multiple ideas in mind and compare and integrate them over an extended period. It also required dealing heavily in abstract categories and accepting a degree of irreducible complexity. Literacy taught the masses these mental habits, none of which came naturally.

In his classic work, *Orality and Literacy*, Ong treated literacy not as an add-on skill but as a transformation of psychology. “Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form,” he wrote. “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”

He also differentiated between primary orality—the worldview and communicative style of societies with no knowledge of writing at all—and secondary orality, where people are familiar with text, and may even be able to read themselves, but do not primarily receive or transmit information that way. The latter is the form of the modern oral culture produced by electronic media.

Statistics attest to the exploding popularity of video-based media over long-form text—a long triumph that began with the emergence of television and is now culminating in mass personalised short-form video. The shift from relying on newspapers as the default way of absorbing information to consuming video streams changes one’s mental habits and even neurology. In many ways, the changes mirror those that take place between literate and oral cultures.

The act of writing and reading is about externalising an individual’s memory and storing it in a physical artefact, rather than, say, in a community of storytellers or a tradition of memorised aphorisms. A written text is static, cannot argue back against its reader, and allows for the careful development of concepts and building of knowledge with minimal distortion. It also allows for the articulation of abstract generalisations that are difficult to conceive for a mind habituated to purely verbal communication. A reader is not distracted by the voice, personality, or physical appearance of the writer themselves, and can be left to examine their ideas under the glare of cold rationality.

Because words spoken vanish as soon as they are spoken, oral cultures had to organise knowledge differently: optimising for memorisation, repetition, and social impact. Unlike text, which tends towards the abstract, oral expression also has greater proximity to direct human experience and is designed to spike emotion. Unlike writing, speaking itself is a direct “act.” Oral cultures are participatory and encourage individuals to engage in situational instead of detached reasoning. They also tend to produce verbal contests, boasting, insults, and status struggles in public life. These are modes of expression that remain alive in oral cultural products such as poetry slams, freestyle rap battles, and even social media flame wars.

A culture of letters first gave rise to a literate, undemocratic elite class that engaged in intellectual exchange among themselves while ruling over an orally based public that was not involved in decision-making. The printed page of mass society—birthed by the invention of the Gutenberg Press—was a revolution that created the complex mass civilisation upon whose remnants we now inhabit.

Mass literacy produced books, essays, and daily newspapers, providing a stable reference point shared by thousands or millions of people and, for the first time, enabling a kind of shared public rationality that also supported modern conceptions of national identity.

Postman argued that print culture was the foundation of serious politics in the United States and other modern democracies. He famously contrasted the print-based world of the 18th and 19th centuries—where citizens read pamphlets, followed long debates, and judged leaders by their command of language—with the cable television of his time, where politics was rapidly transforming into image-driven performance.

The social media age has propelled us much further down that road, shaping a public defined less by sustained reasoning and attention than by rapid emotional reactions.

As Postman argued, different technologies privileged different epistemologies and manners of expression. A print-based public expects leaders to speak in full paragraphs and explain their ideas with verifiable logic. They will prioritise less the way politicians look and perform in public, and more the content of their speech. In contrast, an oral public expects rhythmic slogans, attractive visuals, and, above all, in a public sphere controlled by corporate television and social media algorithms, the feeling of being entertained.

Whereas in the literate world, the public sphere expected political communication to look and sound like essays, debates, editorials—all of which are designed to be reasoned through—oral media like short-form video instead produce politics as a vivid emotional atmosphere. The goal is not to persuade the public but to dominate them through emotional capture. The truth of any particular claim is less important than the social impact of what is being said, whether words are being used as a tool to signal loyalty, energise a base of supporters, or humiliate an enemy.

In an oral world, language is a tool for direct social action rather than for unveiling a process intended to determine truth.

## Terror and Triviality

The qualities of an orally shaped mind are not just stylistic but shape what kinds of ideas are even possible for a person to conceive. Oral cultures can produce powerful stories and practical wisdom, but abstract analysis is difficult since knowledge is designed to optimise for memorisation and impact rather than to convey abstractions.

Epic poems like The Iliad and religious scripture like the Qur’an were written down for preservation, but their structures were designed with oral audiences in mind. They were not structured like novels or textbooks, but rather in a way intended to emphasise repetition, tone, and memory, conducive to preservation in the minds of a population where few could read.

The advent of mass literacy freed knowledge from the constraints of memorisation through the invention of the printed word and page. It also enabled new levels of personal introspection and detachment, since reading is often solitary and insulated from the pressure of face-to-face interaction.

The popularisation of the written word enabled, for the first time, the idea of an objective “text” that exists apart from the speaker and listener and which had its own complete meaning. “Print encourages a sense of closure,” Ong observed. “A sense that what is found in a text has been finalised, has reached a state of completion.” No such idea of a closed text exists in video or even a podcast.

Writing in the early phases of the present technological shift, Ong argued that the decline of reading was not simply a decline of a leisure activity or the replacement of one medium with another. It also meant the decline of the mental habits associated with deep literacy, including internal dialogue and the ability to live with logical complexity. As an educated Jesuit priest, he lamented the loss of all of these as he strove to document the implications.

Postman pushed the argument even further, arguing that the form of a medium doesn’t just change how people reason but also what a culture even considers true. Postman wrote at a time when cable television was rapidly monopolising the attention of the American public and just starting to elbow in on the turf of the written word. Television, he argued, did not just communicate ideas but changed the nature of public communication into mere entertainment. It also made human culture increasingly trivial and, eventually, nihilistic.

When watching a news broadcast, the anchor’s tone, the visuals, the rapid cuts, the need to keep attention, the mixture of grave pronouncements with lighthearted advertising—all combined, Postman argued, to create a world in which seriousness itself became difficult for the viewer, even about deeply serious matters.

“No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to ‘join them tomorrow.’ What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights,” he wrote.

A television-based society working through an oral medium is subtly inclined by the medium itself to treat all information as show business. The staid business of politics transformed into a series of “media events,” often interpreted out of context and forgotten just as quickly. In the technologised world that Postman saw emerging, the ideal citizen was shifted from someone who could follow an argument to someone who could interpret images and maintain emotional feelings.

“We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the ‘news’ is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to speak. Everything about a news show tells us this—the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials—all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection, or catharsis.”

Had he lived to see it, Postman would undoubtedly have recognised that the shift to triviality has become much more extreme with the replacement of cable news by social media video streams, characterised by an even more extreme mix of horror and titillation.

## A Culture of Resistance

Oral culture is not inherently anti-democratic or corrosive to culture; primary oral cultures can have sophisticated governance and have given us some of the most profound cultural landmarks of our species. The danger is that orality has been fused with the technologies of mass manipulation and delivered unannounced to a public sphere designed for an entirely different type of reasoning.

If the public sphere becomes characterised by oral-medium communication powered by technology, democratic institutions will become hollow performance sets that can be quickly captured by the best actor in a verbal status contest. Another product of Postman’s era is the current U.S. president, a former reality television star, who used the charms he honed on that medium to win over a public already primed to recognise them.

The internet was initially a force for the strengthening of literate culture. But after the broadband explosion that kicked off around 2006, and corresponding exponential increases in data capacity, it has shifted towards being an oral medium par excellence.

While the mass man of the 20th century was shaped by the newspaper and its structured hierarchies, social media feeds are the primary technological force shaping the worldview of most people today. TikTok and Instagram Reels are merely the completion of television’s logic of oral spectacle triumphing over literate reasoning.

Rather than functioning like a library, a social media feed operates as a gossip network, battlefield, casino, brothel, and performance stage all rolled into one. The bias of the medium and its owners is that algorithmically controlled emotional response is a much more important currency than the rational pursuit of truth.

As reading has declined, people have gradually lost the interiority that it was intended to cultivate. This has made them more easily governed by the impulse and emotional contagion inherent to oral-based technology. Stimulated but bereft spiritually, such a person is very far from the slow-reasoning democratic citizen imagined by Enlightenment thinkers. Only a connection to God, maintained through prayer, remains a form of spiritual sustenance for those still able to receive it.

Ong was a religious scholar who knew how the written word shaped the inner life of man, while Postman was a technology theorist who understood how the emergence of a new technology threatened everything built on the old. “Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organisation—not to mention their reason for being—reflects the world-view promoted by the technology,” he wrote. “Therefore, when an old technology is assaulted by a new one, institutions are threatened. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis.”

The world of reading is dying, and the world of the oral-visual image is rapidly being born. Critically, the social decline in reading also seems to have a class basis. The elite continue to send their children to institutions where they will be drilled on the Great Books and expected to develop a familiarity with them, while the masses are left to the mercies of technologically produced mass video and audio content, much of which will likely be automated in the near future.

Avoiding confinement to a future underclass increasingly requires choosing literacy as a practice of resistance. Print culture originally flourished when information was scarce, but the internet’s abundance is changing the meaning of literacy as we speak. It is no longer enough simply to know how to read, or even to read regularly; we also need the meta-skills that determine how to structure our finite attention in a technological environment designed to exhaust it.

In a world where oral media is dominant, a literate subculture will require conscious protection, like a threatened habitat. Reading should be treated not as a form of moral virtue-signalling, but as cognitive training to survive in the psychologically bifurcated world now emerging.

Literacy is also an insistence on maintaining seriousness in an environment where the dominant media of thought are geared towards prioritising spectacle. This development is contributing to an intensifying social nihilism, where the life and death of actual human beings are increasingly experienced as something that flickers across a screen and disappears.

As we are inundated by a technological wave that shows no signs of abating and is already promising new forms of psychological manipulation, the task before us deepens. If we want to preserve the rudiments of modern society—democratic argument, complex thought, interior freedom—we cannot treat reading as a quaint hobby. We must treat it as a foundational technology of human depth that must be cultivated and defended, kept as a vouchsafe of civilisation to the generations ahead of us.

---

**Author*: Murtaza Hussain is a writer and journalist in New York, whose writing on history and politics can be found on* [*Substack*](https://mazmhussain.substack.com/)*.*
### Towards a Western Muslim Political Philosophy
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/against-modus-vivendi/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T21:38:04.000Z
The dominant mode of political engagement for Muslim communities in the West rests on an arrangement that is never quite stated plainly. It is a modus vivendi: a pragmatic agreement to respect the same political ground rules and obey the law, without believing that these rules represent the principles we would ideally choose to live under. In principle, the implicit thought often goes, we would prefer to live under some kind of Islamic state, or a futurist polity, or a neo-Ottoman millet-based empire; but in the meantime, we can still be good citizens of Western liberal polities for pragmatic reasons. Or we would be, if only the bigots and the racists and the Zionists would get off our backs. This untheorised arrangement informs most of the day-to-day political discourse of Muslim influencers, bloggers, and YouTubers, and it underpins, often without acknowledgement, the institutional architecture of Muslim civic life in Britain and across the West.

It may have worked when Muslims were a small minority who could pass under the radar. Those days are over. Increasingly, many Muslim organisations and politicians appear to understand that the foundation cannot hold. They are unconvinced by the modus vivendi, but they lack an alternative theological framework or any coherent vision for Muslim political life. The next decade will end the charade. The accusations of coercive ‘family voting’ at the recent British by-election (an investigation later found no [evidence](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyxeqpzz2no?ref=kasurian.com) that coercion actually happened), which saw the defeat of the broadly anti-Muslim populist party Reform UK by a leftist Green Party candidate supported by most local Muslims, neatly illustrate the collapse of the modus vivendi arrangement. For a time, traditional community leaders and *biraderi* elders could wield considerable influence over the Muslim vote, ignoring the obvious tension between these communal structures and the individualistic behaviour assumed by Western democracy. But anti-Islam forces are no longer turning a blind eye to this tension, and even many erstwhile allies are joining the condemnation.

And because the arrangement was never theorised, never subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that a community with functioning intellectual institutions would have demanded, its collapse will leave no resources from which to construct an alternative. The playbook of the 1990s and 2000s is no longer relevant to our changed circumstances, and yet nothing has replaced it, because the community that relied on it never developed the capacity to produce anything better.

There are, of course, theological reasons to think that a principled commitment to reciprocal political and religious freedom for Muslims and non-Muslims is worth considering on its own merits. Scholars like Mohammed Fadel, Recep Şentürk, and Gözde Hussain are making the intellectual case, and their work deserves sustained attention. But before turning to the question of what a Muslim political philosophy might look like, it is worth understanding precisely why the modus vivendi fails, and why its failure was always predictable.

## The Limits of Modus Vivendi

To see why the strategy cannot work, suppose we trace its logic to its conclusion. Imagine a dialogue between a Muslim, call him Mohammed, and a particularly virulent anti-Islam Lahabite, call him Michael. Michael is proposing to ban a Muslim political organisation on the grounds that the group is working peacefully and, so far, legally to institute some kind of Islamic state in the distant future.

Mohammed protests. Your own principles of freedom of speech and religion forbid you from doing this, he says. Why do you continue to contradict your own values? Do you simply hate Muslims?

Michael replies that he does not hate Muslims. His principles call for freedom of speech and religion, but not for those who seek to undermine them. When people try to undermine the freedoms of others, they must be prevented, even if they are not imminently calling for violence. Otherwise, his principles would be contradictory, for there would be nothing to prevent people from gradually undermining them.

Mohammed insists that Michael misunderstands. Muslims support freedom of speech and religion just as much as Michael claims to support theirs. They are not trying to undermine those freedoms.

Michael is unconvinced. Perhaps not immediately, he concedes. But look at the state of these freedoms in most Muslim countries. You demand freedom as a minority, but would you behave the same way as a majority? Your values demand banning Christians from proselytising or punishing Muslims for apostasy. You seek to use the cover of freedom to protect yourselves until you become a majority and are strong enough to destroy freedom. Therefore, I am justified in doing whatever is necessary to prevent you from gaining this strength.

Mohammed has run out of rope. He cannot continue to argue that Michael’s own values forbid oppression, because Michael has correctly shown that those values license a principle that John Rawls, perhaps the most influential liberal political philosopher of the last century, called containment. Containment is the intellectual version of the old refrain that one cannot tolerate the intolerant, and it is not a fringe position; it follows logically from any serious commitment to liberal freedoms as an ideal worth preserving.

Mohammed now has no option but to either concede that he would not respect reciprocal freedoms for non-Muslims were he powerful enough to make the call, or to fudge the issue and deliberately obfuscate. Perhaps he starts pointing out the various ways that the West constantly fails to live up to the values it espouses, while evading the question of whether those values are, in principle, good. It is a catch-22\. Whatever he says, he will either directly alienate his audience or appear shiftless and dishonest. Either way, anyone watching who even loosely subscribes to Western liberal values will find their trust in Muslims diminished.

This is not a theoretical worry. Mohammed’s style of discourse is visible almost every time Muslim spokespeople appear in the media. The pattern is consistent: a community representative is invited to explain their position on religious coercion, and the result is a performance that exacerbates fears and creates more hostility. The worries that this generates undergird support for the increasingly coercive measures the political right is aiming at Muslim communities across Europe. In Britain, the current agitation over Nigel Farage’s plan to ban the Muslim Brotherhood is clearly driven by the fear that many Muslims are dubiously loyal resident aliens, waiting for the opportunity to reconfigure the state in line with a fundamentally different set of ideals.

We should acknowledge, of course, that the rise of the anti-Muslim right also bears the stamp of sharp power wielded by dangerous political actors who deploy anti-Muslim sentiment for their own purposes. The Emiratis, for instance, have much to gain in terms of domestic and foreign legitimacy by exaggerating fears of an Islamist takeover and painting innocuous Muslim charities as terrorist-adjacent. But legitimate worries about hostility to basic liberal freedoms help explain why this rhetoric resonates with ordinary people. Without these underlying concerns, it would be very difficult for any actor to create a wholly astroturfed anti-Muslim movement in Britain or elsewhere. The underlying grievance is real, even if those who exploit it are cynical.

Modus vivendi does not work. It necessarily and predictably fails even on its own terms. And it fails because it asks Muslims to borrow the language of a political tradition they have not committed to inhabiting, which means that every appeal to its principles rings hollow the moment it is tested.

## After Modus Vivendi

What, then, is to be done? The question is whether there exists, within the Islamic intellectual tradition, a principled basis for affirming reciprocal political and religious freedom for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, not as a pragmatic concession to circumstances but as an ideal worth defending on its own terms. If there is, the modus vivendi becomes unnecessary. If there is not, we are left with consequences that this essay will address shortly.

The work of arriving at an answer has begun, though it remains fragmentary and far from complete. Mohammed Fadel, drawing on extensive historical research and classical *fiqh* training, has argued that early Muslim jurists often revised specific shariah rulings when they no longer served their purposes. Although theorists of *usul al-fiqh* often denied the legitimacy of this kind of *maqasid*\-based reasoning, Fadel contends that this denial was belied by near-ubiquitous legal practice. The jurists reasoned purposively about *fiqh*, regardless of whether usuli theory licensed this practice. And today, he argues, *maqasid*\-based reasoning leads to the conclusion that the rationes legis for restrictions on religious liberty no longer apply. Recep Şentürk arrives at a similar destination through different means, grounding his argument not in jurisprudential method but in theological anthropology: the dignity of human beings as God’s vicegerents furnishes a metaphysical foundation for affirming equal legal standing for persons of all faiths or none. Gözde Hussain, though not herself making a direct argument for equal religious liberty, has systematically laid out the implications of the various hermeneutic approaches to interpreting the *Qur’an* and *Sunnah* for questions of political freedom, mapping the terrain on which any such argument must be constructed.

What these three projects collectively reveal is that the resources for a Muslim commitment to reciprocal freedom are not absent from the tradition but are dispersed across it, accessible through different methodological entry points, and awaiting the kind of sustained, systematic treatment that the tradition’s own institutional crisis has so far prevented.

Let us, for the sake of clarity, give a name to the commitment these scholars are circling. Call it liberalism, if you like. It is a loaded term, but no better one exists, and it need not mean anything more substantive than the thought that an ideal state would have equal legal rights for persons of all religions or none, where everyone would be formally free to proselytise for their belief system and to practise the religion they think best. This is not a neutral system; no serious liberal thinker pretends neutrality all the way down. But it is neutral in the limited, formal sense that the state would not give more legal rights to one religion than to others. It is consistent with a wide range of relationships between religion, personal morality, and the state. A liberal state could promote a particular religion through symbolic endorsement, state education, or financial subsidies, or decline to do so. It could encourage traditional values and virtues, or not. All that is ruled out is coercively preventing people of any faith from changing their religion or expressing their views. Readers with their own definitions of liberalism are welcome to them. A commitment to this minimal liberalism represents a plausible baseline for the compatibility of any interpretation of Islam with Western political life, and doubts about Muslim commitment to it plausibly underpin much of the suspicion directed against Muslims in the West by reasonable people.

## New Means to Old Ends

The question of whether such a commitment can be grounded in the Islamic tradition is not, in the end, a question that can be answered by theological abstraction or sweeping claims about the metaphysical underpinnings of various regime types. These thirty-thousand-foot generalisations have no relevance to the predicament at hand, which is essentially a predicament about the capacity of Muslims to be good-faith, loyal citizens of a liberal state. Do we, in principle, want the state to ban people from apostasy or proselytisation, or not?

A more helpful model for how reasoning on these questions might proceed is Fazlur Rahman’s idea of the double movement in scriptural interpretation. The first step is to identify the underlying purpose of the injunctions in the *Qur’an* and *Sunnah* by reading them in their original context. The second is to apply that purposive aim in the conditions of the modern world. This second movement will often yield quite different injunctions: new means to old ends. As Abdal Hakim Murad puts it, we should reject the replication of the positions of the ancients and instead seek what they sought.

Consider the example of *dhimmi* regulations. The purpose of these rules was always to create conditions conducive to the free embrace of Islam by non-Muslims while respecting their dignity. In premodern, hierarchical societies, this purpose was served by creating vertical structures of status inequality between Muslims and other communities, so that non-Muslims had a social and material incentive to investigate the claims of Islam. In modern conditions, this no longer works. The flattening of the world by technology and the democratisation of culture mean that creating different classes of citizens does not confer healthy prestige on Islam but creates resentment among the unfavoured while flattering the egos of the favoured. Unequal citizenship is no longer an effective means to the end of *da’wah*. The first movement identifies the purpose; the second movement recognises that the original means now frustrate it.

This kind of jurisprudential innovation is not alien to the practice of Muslim polities and jurists. The aborted attempts at liberalisation during the Ottoman Tanzimat, the development of *fiqh al-aqalliyyat* by more recent scholars (a relatively recent innovation in Islamic jurisprudence, aiming to provide solutions for Muslim minorities living in the West), the long tradition of *istihsan* and *istislah* within classical jurisprudence: these stand as evidence that the details of *fiqh* can and must develop in line with changing circumstances, to better serve the permanent ends of Islam in new and unprecedented conditions. The tradition is not static. It never was. What has been missing is not permission to reason but the institutional capacity to do so with the necessary rigour and independence.

It is instructive, by contrast, to observe what happens when this careful work is not done. Mufti Taqi Uthmani’s Islam and Politics claims that true sovereignty belongs to Allah alone, and that secular democracy presumes the right to rule belongs to the people, as though these two claims were in contradiction. They are not. God’s sovereignty, for any Muslim, consists in the way His nature grounds all moral norms, including the norms of political morality; but the sovereignty exercised by the people in a democracy is something entirely different, not the ultimate ground of moral norms but a functional decision procedure, an institutional mechanism for implementing the moral norms of which, for Muslims, God is the ground. No serious theorist of democracy has ever claimed otherwise. We can debate whether democracy is a good mechanism for implementing divine moral law, and there is a serious debate to be had, but to begin our reasoning with a confusion of sovereignty-as-moral-grounding and sovereignty-as-decision-procedure is to cripple ourselves before we start. The Muslim tradition deserves better than this, and so do the communities whose political futures depend on the quality of the thinking produced in its name.

## Towards a New Political Philosophy

It seems to me that there are only two things Western Muslims can do in this situation that will stand a chance of working, and that we can advocate in good faith.

One option is to accept at least some containment, while in the meantime practising *da’wah*. This would not mean that Muslims should accept the kind of extreme, authoritarian, and blatantly racist proposals to ethnically cleanse Muslim populations being promoted by some corners of the right. But at least some containment will have to be acquiesced in. Migration policies that aim to limit Muslim population growth, proportionate and carefully targeted restrictions on political activity, and similar measures cannot be opposed on the basis of any principle shared by both anti-liberal Muslims and liberal Western governments. Perhaps visa ‘red lists’ of the kind proposed by Reform UK, targeting Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan and Sudan, would have to be acquiesced in. If we cannot offer a principled commitment to reciprocal freedom, we cannot coherently object when others take us at our word and act accordingly. This is not a comfortable conclusion. It is, however, an honest one, and honesty about our situation is the precondition for changing it.

The other option is to consider whether a reciprocal commitment to full religious and political freedom for all is, after all, the ideal. It would be wrong and dishonest to try to reverse-engineer a version of liberalism into *fiqh* and Islamic ethics simply because doing so would make life practically easier for Muslims in the West. But there is nothing wrong with being motivated to ask the question by the consequences we will predictably endure if liberalism and Islam turn out to be wholly incompatible. A question motivated by practical urgency can still receive a truthful answer.

The second option is far better, and the intellectual work it requires is far more advanced than what currently passes for Muslim political thought. Given the collapse and stagnation of the Muslim intellectual world over the last century, it is not surprising that the work of developing a proper Muslim political philosophy has barely been systematically attempted; what exists is either ressentiment or nostalgia-driven fantasy, or a rote translation of the opinions of medieval fuqaha into unimaginably different circumstances, and neither is adequate to the scale of the challenge. The project of academic political philosophy will not always be glamorous or exciting, but it will require engagement with the tradition that rejects blind imitation of earlier scholars’ conclusions, that draws on the tools of analytic philosophy in order to achieve some desperately needed conceptual clarity and argumentative rigour, and that tests arguments against counterarguments with a precision that the current discourse entirely lacks. Rather than declaiming in sweeping generalisations, we will need to work in the weeds of philosophical detail, distinguishing what the tradition requires from what historical circumstance produced.

The future of Western Islam is not going to be easy or comfortable. We cannot continue acting as if the ideal theory is to be transposed from medieval *fiqh* manuals, while in reality, it is the pragmatic acceptance of whatever social trends emanate from Western secularism. This arrangement was never stable, never theorised, and it has now, under the pressure of demographic change and political realignment, begun to visibly collapse, leaving behind a community that has spent decades building institutions on a foundation it never examined.

The modus vivendi is over. What replaces it will be determined by whether Muslims in the West can summon the intellectual seriousness to do what every community facing comparable circumstances has eventually had to do: think.

---

**Author*: Jacob Williams is a final-year Oxford DPhil candidate in political theory, where he also convenes the Oxford Islam and Justice Programme (OIJP). His commentary has been published in Renovatio, First Things, Law & Liberty, and elsewhere.*
### Ibn Khaldun in the 21st Century
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/khaldun-21st-century/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T20:35:57.000Z
> *“When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this grey in grey, but only understood; the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.”*  
> — G.W.F. Hegel, *Philosophy of Right*

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. We stand, in the 21st century, at sufficient distance from the civilisational upheavals of the modern period to see, with a clarity unavailable to those who lived through them, the causes of our contemporary malaise. And, perhaps, to deduce the means by which we break out of what has become, in large measure, a self-imposed condition. It is in this spirit of retrospection that we turn to Ibn Khaldun—to think with him, and where necessary, beyond him.

A man who spent his life observing the rise and fall of dynasties across the Maghrib and Mashriq, who served and was betrayed by rulers from Fez to Cairo, who watched the armies of Timur approach Damascus and talked his way out of a siege—such a man, transported to the 21st century, would find more familiar than we might expect. The surface would bewilder: the speed, the density, the sheer volume of humanity pressed into cities he could not have imagined. But the logic of power would not be wholly alien to Ibn Khaldun. States still extract surplus from productive populations. Elites still cycle through vigour, complacency, and decline. Solidarity still coheres around kinship, sect, and a shared narrative, and still dissolves when the material conditions that sustain it give way. He would, for example, see in the Gulf monarchies a familiar pattern of desert peoples enriched by windfall, their *asabiyyah* intact in the first generation, eroding as wealth softens the habits that produced cohesion. He would see in the American republic something like the late stages of his cycle, wherein a polity whose founding solidarity has fragmented into factional competition, its elites more occupied with extraction than with maintaining the commonwealth. Ibn Khaldun’s circle of justice—that taxes depend on prosperity, prosperity on good governance, and good governance on a just sovereign—remains an operational description of what happens when states forget that their revenue ultimately depends on their subjects’ [productive capacity](https://kasurian.com/p/democracy-will-not-survive-consumption?ref=kasurian.com).

And yet there would be much new to him. His theory of political economy presumed agrarian production, courtly redistribution, and cycles of dynastic rise and decline measured in generations. It did not and could not account for industrial capitalism, the capacity of modern states to sustain themselves through manufactured surplus rather than land revenue alone, financialisation as a force capable of decoupling wealth from production entirely, or for the nation-state as a form of political organisation that derives legitimacy not from dynastic *asabiyyah* but from popular sovereignty and bureaucratic rationality. The Bedouin-sedentary dialectic, so powerful in explaining the political dynamics of the medieval Maghrib, has no obvious purchase on the rise of East Asian developmental states or the internal logic of European welfare capitalism. Ibn Khaldun, if he were alive today and the thinker we claim him to be, would not cling to categories forged in 14th-century North Africa. He would update his priors as he observed the new forces driving man, society, and civilisation.

The exercise of placing Ibn Khaldun in the 21st century is a way of identifying where six centuries of subsequent development expose the limits of a 14th-century framework, and of treating those limits not as failures but as frontiers. The gaps in Ibn Khaldun’s thought, measured against the world as it now operates, mark the territory where new theory is needed to upgrade our fundamental assumptions about the nature of civilisation in the age of industrialisation.

But the exercise is also a way of asking a harder question. An Ibn Khaldun of the 21st century would be very interesting. But would he even be possible? And even if he were possible, in what direction would his ideas develop, and towards what material questions of society and civilisation would they be applied?

## The Political Economy of Knowledge

The answer lies not in Ibn Khaldun the man but in the civilisation around him—or rather, in what his civilisation lacked. In his world, Ibn Khaldun’s brilliance was not the only scarce resource. His civilisation lacked the institutional infrastructure through which individual brilliance could be captured and compounded across generations.

Consider the contrast between the Islamicate institutions of knowledge production and what emerged in Europe over the centuries following Ibn Khaldun’s death. The European university, which had begun forming as loose guilds of scholars after the 12th century in European cities such as Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, evolved into something without precedent in the history of organised knowledge: a self-governing corporation with legal personhood, endowed revenues independent of any single patron, and a continuous institutional existence that survived the death of every individual within it. The University of Oxford did not depend on the favour of any particular king, and the generational succession of teachers and students continued almost unabated throughout the ages. Knowledge accumulated not because Europeans were more intelligent than their contemporaries elsewhere, but because they had built, haltingly, imperfectly, and often for reasons unrelated to the pursuit of truth, institutions whose structure made accumulation possible.

Contrary to revisionists’ valiant attempts to claim otherwise, Islamic civilisation possessed nothing equivalent. The University of al-Qarawiyyin is often erroneously described as a university, yet it lacked the institutional trappings, research focus, or continuity of the European model. The *madrasa*, for all its sophistication, was typically endowed by a specific patron, organised around a specific scholar or legal school, and subject to the vicissitudes of dynastic politics in ways that European universities, with their corporate charters and independent endowments, increasingly were not. Teaching remained centred on the personalities of great scholars, and their lives were always precariously dependent on the support of a wealthy patron.

Ibn Khaldun himself repeatedly experienced the misfortunes of this lack of institutionalisation: his fortunes rose and collapsed with each successive court that employed him, from the Marinids to the Hafsids to the Mamluks. His intellectual project was, in the most literal sense, dependent on political favour. The *Muqaddimah* was written during a period of enforced retreat at the castle of Ibn Salama, not within an institution designed for sustained inquiry, but in the margins of a political career that had temporarily stalled.

This structural deficit compounded over time. In the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires presided over considerable cultural production, the mechanisms by which knowledge could scale remained personalised, courtly, and fragile. The republic of letters that was taking shape across the English Channel and the Rhine—that extraordinary network of correspondence, publication, and mutual criticism connecting Erasmus to More, Leibniz to Newton, Voltaire to d’Alembert—had no Islamic analogue. Nor was there something akin to the Baconian revolution in method, which transformed European knowledge production from a contemplative exercise into an applied, experimental, and self-correcting enterprise. Francis Bacon’s insight was, after all, organisational: knowledge should be pursued collectively and systematically in the service of practical power over nature. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was the [institutional embodiment of that insight](https://kasurian.com/p/institution-engineering-culture?ref=kasurian.com): a permanent body for the collaborative production and verification of knowledge, independent of court patronage, transmitting its methods and findings across generations.

The consequences of the divergence between these modes of knowledge production were not immediately visible. In the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire remained militarily formidable and administratively sophisticated; Ottoman scholars read and commented on the *Muqaddimah*, and a Khaldunian revival occurred among historians such as Katip Çelebi and Naima. But this revival remained literary and contemplative rather than institutional and applied. No one built a research programme around Khaldun’s cyclical theory of state formation. No one tested his propositions against new data, refined his categories, or extended his framework into domains he had not considered. The ideas were admired, but they were not *applied*.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Adam Smith published *The Wealth of Nations* in 1776, a work that contained, as many scholars have since observed, ideas on the division of labour, the role of the state in economic life, and the relationship between production and taxation that Ibn Khaldun had articulated nearly four centuries earlier. But Smith did not write in a vacuum. He wrote within the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was itself embedded within a vast and increasingly complexifying ecosystem of universities, journals, learned societies, and public discourse. His work was immediately debated, critiqued, extended, and applied. Smith became one of the foundations upon which successive generations built increasingly elaborate structures of knowledge that would power their civilisation to new heights of material and intellectual achievement.

Thus, the rise of the European political economy of knowledge depended on improvements in material conditions, such as patronage structures, fiscal capacity, institutional autonomy, and elite continuity. The question is why the extraordinary analytical traditions that existed within Islamic civilisation—of which Ibn Khaldun is the most salient but by no means the only example—never generated the self-sustaining institutional ecosystems that would have allowed them to compound. And here the explanation cannot be cultural or philosophical in the first instance. We require a material analysis of the political economy of knowledge in Islamic civilisation.

Scholars produced knowledge. But scholars required patronage, and patronage required courts, and courts required stable polities, and stable polities required—as Ibn Khaldun himself would have insisted—the *asabiyyah* and fiscal capacity to sustain complex administration over time. When any link in this chain broke, knowledge production ceased because the material conditions for its continuation had been withdrawn. Europe’s advantage was not initially superior ideas (although many of them eventually came to be thus) but rather a superior mechanism for insulating knowledge production from the volatility of political life. The endowed college, tenured professorship, and the chartered learned society were, at bottom, technologies for decoupling intellectual inquiry from the patronage cycle. They did not eliminate dependence on wealth and power—no institution does—but they introduced sufficient autonomy that a change of regime did not mean a change of research programme. Ibn Khaldun had no access to such technologies. While Islamic civilisation continued to feature the creation of educational institutions, legions of seminary graduates, scholarly output, and traditions of knowledge, it never operated at the scale and intensity of what emerged in Europe after the 16th and 17th centuries.

It was at the turn of the 19th century that the scale of the problem began to be acknowledged by Muslim [statesmen](https://kasurian.com/p/hayreddin-pasha-tunisia?ref=kasurian.com), [intellectuals](https://kasurian.com/p/jadid-reform?ref=kasurian.com), and scholars. They sought to reform their stagnant institutions and immediately set about creating a new, industrial-era political economy of knowledge. This took the form of attempts to synthesise new, culturally hybrid institutions and technologies fit for Islamicate culture, such as the printing press, the research university, translation houses, theatrical productions, military and fiscal development, and the flowering of an (albeit temporary) network of intellectual and cultural discourse across Islamic civilisation. This imperfect process was halted when the [triple catastrophes of the 20th century](https://kasurian.com/p/closing-of-the-muslim-mind?ref=kasurian.com) arrived. The Ottoman dissolution, Communist conquest across Muslim Eurasia, and the partition of the Indian subcontinent annihilated the elite classes, the patronage networks, and the institutional structures that sustained what remained of Islamic knowledge production. Every link was shattered simultaneously. Thus, we live in the ruins of this valiant effort, largely ignorant of it.

## In the 21st Century

What, then, of the present? The Muslim world today is not without scholars, universities, or research output. But to move from the existence of these things to the claim that an ecosystem of knowledge production exists—in the sense that it exists in North America, or Western Europe, or increasingly in East Asia—is to confuse the presence of individual components with the functioning of a system. A country may possess universities without possessing a tradition of inquiry. It may produce PhDs without producing knowledge. It may fund research without creating the conditions for research findings to accumulate into something greater than the sum of their parts.

Pre-industrial Islamic civilisation did not lack brilliant minds, but rather lacked the institutional machinery to compound their brilliance. The Muslim world of the 21st century faces, in structural terms, the same deficit, complicated immeasurably by the fact that the 20th century destroyed what institutional continuity remained. The universities that exist across the Arab world, Türkiye, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia are largely post-colonial creations modelled on European or American templates, staffed by scholars trained in Western doctoral programmes, operating within disciplinary frameworks developed elsewhere, publishing in journals edited elsewhere, and seeking validation from accrediting bodies located elsewhere. A scholar at a Gulf university, handsomely compensated and lightly taught, nonetheless works within a system where academic freedom is circumscribed by political sensitivities, institutional continuity depends on the preferences of a ruling family, and the research agenda is shaped more by the desire for international rankings than by any indigenous tradition of inquiry demanding answers to questions that arise from local conditions. This is not a judgment on the intelligence of individuals within these institutions, but on the material conditions under which they operate. The patronage problem that plagued Ibn Khaldun remains unsolved. This time, the court has been replaced by the ministry, and the sultan’s favour by the funding council’s priorities; knowledge production is permission-gated rather than self-sustaining and institutionally sovereign.

Yet though the conditions we labour under are unpropitious, this is not an excuse for inaction. The triple rupture of the 20th century was inflicted from without. The failure to rebuild is an internal affair. 80 years have passed since the last of those catastrophes. In that time, the Muslim world acquired enormous financial resources, established hundreds of universities, and sent tens of thousands of students to the finest institutions in Europe and America. The material prerequisites for reconstruction exist. What does not exist is the will and understanding to deploy those resources toward the creation of genuinely self-sustaining ecosystems of knowledge production rather than toward the acquisition of institutional ornaments.

The conventional approach to Ibn Khaldun’s work in the contemporary Muslim world is exegetical. Scholars write commentaries on the *Muqaddimah,* and conferences are held to celebrate his contributions. We apply his specific categories—*asabiyyah*, the dynastic cycle, the Bedouin-sedentary dialectic—as though they were timeless laws requiring only minor updating. Ibn Khaldun’s name is invoked as proof that Islamic civilisation once produced towering intellects, which it did, and which no serious person disputes. But this mode of engagement is itself a symptom of the problem it purports to address. To endlessly revisit the *Muqaddimah* is to treat a great work as a ceiling rather than a floor. Smith’s ideas were honoured by extension, critique, and eventual supersession. No equivalent process has occurred with Ibn Khaldun, because no institutional ecosystem exists within which such a process could occur.

The Khaldunian approach to the 21st century is to be found in Ibn Khaldun’s method, what he called *Ilm al-Umran*, or the “science of civilisation”: the insistence on observing social reality as it actually operates *before* philosophical commitments that suggest how it ought to operate, the willingness to theorise from evidence rather than from authority, the recognition that political, economic, and cultural life are governed by patterns susceptible to rational analysis.

## An Industrial *Ilm al-Umran*

What would this look like in practice? Ideally, not another conference on Ibn Khaldun’s contributions to sociology, an edited volume comparing the *Muqaddimah* to *The Wealth of Nations*, or another curriculum that teaches Islamic intellectual history as a museum exhibit. It would look like the creation of institutions whose entire purpose is the production of new knowledge: schools of political economy that train scholars to theorise from the conditions of Muslim-majority societies rather than to import frameworks wholesale from Chicago or Cambridge; research programmes that take the questions Ibn Khaldun raised about solidarity, state capacity, the relationship between production and political order, and pursue them with the methodological tools available to the 21st century; centres of inquiry independent enough from state patronage to survive a change of minister, and embedded enough in their societies to address questions that matter locally rather than questions that impress internationally. We could even call this an **industrial** *Ilm al-Umran* that becomes the foundation of an entire political economy of knowledge, addressing questions in economics, law, sociology, political philosophy, and the material sciences, among other things.

This is how every civilisation that produces knowledge at scale has already built. The great American research universities were built over generations and centuries by people who understood that national and civilisational power required an institutional base for sustained intellectual production. The same is true of the German research university before them, and of the Chinese investment in scientific infrastructure that is bearing fruit today. These are material achievements, not philosophical ones. They require money, political will, and a class of people who understand what is at stake.

Ibn Khaldun, observing all of this, would note, perhaps with the wry detachment of a man who had seen too many courts rise and fall to be sentimental about any of them, that his own legacy is the proof. The *Muqaddimah* remains, after six centuries, one of the most penetrating works of social analysis ever written. That it has not been surpassed after such a great expanse of time should not induce complacency. It is our turn to build on and surpass Ibn Khaldun’s contribution to the body of human knowledge.

---

**Author*: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of* [*Kasurian*](https://kasurian.com/?ref=kasurian.com)*, a magazine for the 21st century.*
### Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/democracy-will-not-survive-consumption/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T20:36:24.000Z
The liberal ideal of democracy rests upon a particular vision of the citizen: informed, engaged, and capable of self-government. This citizen reads, deliberates, and votes with an eye toward the common good, or at least toward a reasoned conception of their own long-term interests. The franchise, in this view, is not merely a mechanism for preference aggregation but the capstone of a civic culture that produces citizens worthy of self-rule. This was the democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the young American republic, that John Stuart Mill theorised in his essays on representative government, and that the post-war liberal order claimed to universalise.

Yet democracy has always possessed a second meaning, one that operates alongside and increasingly in tension with the first. This is democracy as consumer sovereignty, which grants the freedom to choose among an abundance of goods, services, and lifestyles. In market societies, the shopping mall and the ballot box have become companion institutions, each promising a form of empowerment that flatters the individual as the ultimate arbiter of value. For many citizens of prosperous nations, the freedom to consume has become indistinguishable from freedom itself. In some cases, it has entirely superseded political liberty. Residents of the Gulf Arab states or China often express contentment with political arrangements that would strike classical liberals as intolerably paternalistic, provided the consumer economy delivers. When polled, they speak less of voting rights than of purchasing power.

This substitution is not merely a curiosity of authoritarian development models. It has penetrated Western democracies themselves, where the citizen-as-consumer has gradually displaced the citizen-as-producer. A producer contributes to the common stock of wealth through labour, investment, or enterprise; their relationship to the polity is one of mutual obligation. A consumer draws upon that stock; their relationship to the polity is one of entitlement. When producers predominate in a democracy, politics tends toward questions of investment, infrastructure, and institution-building, toward the conditions of future prosperity. When consumers predominate, politics tends toward questions of distribution, transfer, and immediate gratification, toward the division of existing wealth.

The productive class, as used here, comprises those whose economic activity augments the nation’s capacity to generate wealth: entrepreneurs who build enterprises, workers who create goods and services, investors who fund capital formation, and professionals whose expertise enables these activities. Their income derives from production: adding to the common stock rather than subtracting from it. This category includes much of the public sector: teachers who develop human capital, doctors who maintain workforce health, and engineers who build infrastructure. It excludes those whose roles, however well-compensated, consist primarily in administering redistribution or enforcing compliance—the metastasising bureaucracies of human resources, diversity management, and regulatory box-ticking that consume resources without augmenting productive capacity.

The consumptive class comprises those whose income derives primarily from claims upon wealth created by others. At the bottom are transfer recipients and those whose inactivity, whether voluntary or involuntary, removes them entirely from production. At the top, it includes: the rentier interests that extract far more than any benefit claimant; the financialised elite whose wealth derives from asset appreciation rather than enterprise; the property speculators who profit from scarcity they lobby to maintain; the managerial class whose compensation bears no relationship to value created; the consulting and compliance industries that exist to navigate the complexity that their own existence generates. If the benefit recipient extracts thousands, the rentier extracts millions.

The problem is not that consumptive classes exist—every society has dependents, and compassion for the unable is a mark of civilisation—but that the ratio of consumers to producers has grown unsustainable, and that the largest consumers have organised the political system to protect their extraction while deflecting blame onto the smallest.

## Nick, 30 ans

The tension between these orientations is not new, but its current intensity is. In post-war Western democracies, a rough equilibrium was obtained for several decades. The productive classes, broadly comprising the working and middle bourgeoisie, commanded sufficient electoral weight to ensure that policy remained oriented toward growth, savings, and capital formation. Consumption was high by historical standards, but it was consumption funded by production, not by borrowing against the future or by extracting from a shrinking productive base.

This equilibrium has now broken down. The productive classes have shrunk, both in absolute numbers and in political influence, while the consuming classes, including pensioners, beneficiaries of state transfers, and those employed in non-productive sectors, have grown. Democracy increasingly functions as a mechanism by which the latter extracts from the former.

Consider contemporary Britain. A now viral meme circulating on social media depicts “Nick, 30 ans”, a composite portrait of the professional-managerial millennial. Nick earns perhaps £50,000 a year in a demanding job, enough to place him in a higher tax bracket but not enough to afford a home in the city where his employer is based. Nick’s marginal tax rate, including National Insurance (and maybe student loans), approaches 50%.

Should he earn more, the extraction intensifies: those earning between £100,000 and £125,000 face effective [marginal rates of over 60%](https://www.economicsobservatory.com/why-do-some-people-in-the-uk-face-marginal-tax-rates-of-over-60?ref=kasurian.com) as their personal allowance is withdrawn pound for pound; parents in the £60,000–£80,000 band, once child benefit clawback and student loan repayments are included, can face rates approaching 70%. The tax authorities estimate that [2.3 million workers](https://savingtool.co.uk/blog/the-100k-tax-trap-why-fiscal-drag-will-snare-millions-more-uk-taxpayers/?ref=kasurian.com) will be caught in these traps by the decade’s end, a figure that grows annually as thresholds remain frozen in real terms.

Nick cannot accumulate capital; he services a rental market inflated by policies that benefit existing property owners. More than half of baby boomers owned property [by age 30](https://abcfinance.co.uk/blog/generation-rent-study/?ref=kasurian.com); fewer than 3 in 10 millennials do. The taxes he pays fund the state pensions and healthcare of the ‘Boomer’ generation that bought houses for sums that now seem fantastical, and they fund the benefits of a growing population that does not work at all. Nick is told he lives in one of the world’s richest societies, but his lived experience is one of downward mobility. His parents, with equivalent credentials and work ethic, enjoyed security at 30 that he may not achieve at 50.

This framework clarifies a particular hypocrisy in contemporary British politics. The generation that has used its demographic weight to consume the surplus of current producers through triple-locked pensions, healthcare spending that rises inexorably with age, and property wealth accumulated behind exclusionary planning regimes, is the same generation that now drives the populist right’s fixation on migration. Yet the migrant, whatever burden they may place on public services, consumes a fraction of what the pensioner consumes in annual transfers. The young worker paying 40-50% of their income in tax, rent, and student loans is not being impoverished by the asylum seeker or migrant worker as much as they are being disadvantaged by the pensioner who owns their rented flat, by the planning regime that prevents new construction, by the landlord interest that captures housing benefit, and by the financial sector that inflates asset prices while starving productive enterprise of capital. The politics of distraction works precisely because it directs resentment downward and outward rather than upward – toward those with the least power rather than those with the most.

This is why the populist right, including Britain’s variant, the Reform Party, and its analogues across the Western democracies, from Trump’s Republicans to the European nationalist parties, will not solve the problem. These movements depend on democratic mobilisation; they require votes, and votes come disproportionately from the elderly and the asset-owning. No populist leader will touch the triple lock, means-test benefits for wealthy pensioners, or reform the planning system in ways that run counter to homeowners' interests. These are the third rails of democratic politics precisely because they run through the heart of the populist coalition. Targeting migrants and foreigners satisfies short-term anger but does nothing to address the structural extraction. It kicks the can down the road while the political-economic situation worsens. The right-wing populist, for all his rhetoric of national renewal, is as dependent on the consumptive majority as the centrist technocrat he claims to oppose. He cannot reform the system because his voters *are* the system.

The policy regime that produces this outcome is not an accident but the predictable result of democratic incentives. Pensioners vote in large numbers and will punish any party that threatens their entitlements. Beneficiaries of working-age transfers, though less electorally reliable, constitute a growing bloc in marginal constituencies. The professional middle class, by contrast, is relatively small, geographically concentrated, and lacks a party that reliably represents its interests. Both major parties compete to offer more to the consuming classes while extracting more from the producing classes. The coalition that wins elections is precisely the coalition that accelerates the extraction.

Nor is Britain exceptional. Across the developed democracies, similar dynamics prevail. The United States of America offers a greater scope for accumulation by its productive class. Still, it has permitted its educational and municipal institutions to decay under the weight of administrative bloat and redistributive capture.

Europe, including the wealthy nations of France and Germany, and the less wealthy southern European countries, maintains even more explicit systems of intergenerational and inter-class transfer. Germany and the Nordic states have delayed the reckoning through export surpluses and accumulated capital, but their demographic trajectories point toward the same terminus.

Everywhere, the pattern is the same: democracy has become a machine for transferring wealth from those who create it to those who consume it.

## Democracy Against Democracy

This pattern would have been familiar to Bertrand de Jouvenel, whose 1945 treatise, *On Power*, remains one of the most prescient analyses of the dynamics of modern government. De Jouvenel observed that political power, across historical regimes, tends to operate through an alliance between the highest and lowest classes against the middle class. The monarch (i.e. the state), seeking to expand its authority, finds natural allies in the poor, who benefit from redistribution and resent the local middle-class elites who stand between them and the centre of power. The middle class (the gentry, the bourgeoisie, the productive professions) finds itself squeezed from above and below, its wealth and independence eroded by an expanding state that claims to act in the name of the people.

De Jouvenel wrote in an age of encroaching totalitarianism, and his analysis applied most directly to the communist and fascist states of his era. But the dynamic he described has proven durable in democratic contexts. The administrative state of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has achieved by gradual expansion what earlier regimes achieved by violent rupture, reaching into every domain of life, funded by a tax burden that falls disproportionately on the productive middle, and justified by an ideology of universal entitlement that delegitimises any resistance. The coalition sustaining this expansion is precisely the top-down alliance de Jouvenel identified: an administrative and professional elite that benefits from managing redistribution, allied with a beneficiary class that receives the transfers.

In this schema, the productive middle occupies an increasingly untenable position. They are too numerous to ignore but too dispersed to organise effectively. They lack the cultural capital to dominate elite discourse and the electoral weight to dominate mass politics. Their interests are in lower taxes, less regulation, stable money, and predictable institutions; precisely those that the top-bottom coalition has no incentive to provide. What, then, are their options?

One option is *Exit*. Increasingly, productive individuals and enterprises are relocating to jurisdictions that offer more favourable terms. Dubai, Singapore, Portugal, and certain American states have become havens for entrepreneurs, professionals, and wealthy individuals fleeing high-tax, high-regulation regimes. This is not a mass migration, as the costs of exit remain prohibitive for most, but it represents a meaningful erosion of the productive base. The individuals who leave are disproportionately those with the highest earning potential, the most portable skills, and the greatest capacity for wealth creation. Those who remain are, by definition, less mobile, less productive, or more dependent on local networks that cannot be replicated abroad.

A second option is withdrawal without exit: a reduction in productive effort that stops short of relocation. This takes many forms: early retirement, part-time work, refusal of promotions that would push one into higher tax brackets, preference for leisure over income at the margin, movement into cash economies or grey markets that evade taxation. The phenomenon is complex to measure but widely observed. Anecdotally, one encounters it constantly among high earners in the professional classes: the surgeon who cuts back on operations, the consultant who declines new clients, the entrepreneur who sells out rather than scaling up. Each decision is rational given the incentive structure; in aggregate, they represent a substantial reduction in the economy’s productive capacity.

Neither exit nor withdrawal constitutes a rebellion in the classical sense. The productive classes are not storming barricades or forming revolutionary parties. Their revolt is quieter: a gradual disengagement from a system they perceive as rigged against them. This is the pattern that Francis Fukuyama anticipated in *The End of History and the Last Man*. Having argued that liberal democracy represented the final form of human political organisation, Fukuyama acknowledged a troubling conundrum: that citizens of such societies might find life insufficiently challenging and thus grow bored and restless in the absence of great struggles. He worried about a return to irrational politics, to nationalism and violence, as people sought meaning beyond the routines of consumption.

Fukuyama’s concern was prescient, but the form of disengagement has proven more diffuse than he imagined. The productive classes have not, by and large, embraced nationalist demagoguery or revolutionary ideologies. They have stopped trying. The energy that might once have gone into building enterprises, mastering professions, or accumulating capital now goes into lifestyle optimisation, credential arbitrage, or outright leisure. The result is a society that appears stable on the surface but is slowly consuming its own productive base – a kind of civilisational entropy that proceeds without drama or confrontation. *Not with a bang, but with a whimper*.

The Durants, in their masterpiece *The Lessons of History*, observed that concentrated ability is always at the mercy of distributed appetite. A productive minority may create the wealth that sustains a civilisation, but it cannot indefinitely resist a consuming majority determined to redistribute that wealth to itself. The numbers are indisputable: one productive citizen, however gifted, has only one vote, the same as one consuming citizen. When the consuming majority becomes large enough, no political mechanism can prevent it from voting itself into transfers from the productive minority. The minority may complain, may organise, may attempt to flee—but it cannot, in a democracy, simply refuse to fund the majority’s consumption.

Joseph Tainter’s *The Collapse of Complex Societies* argues that complex societies are elaborate problem-solving machines, adding layers of administration, specialisation, and infrastructure to address challenges as they arise. This complexity yields diminishing returns: each additional layer of bureaucracy or technology costs more and delivers less than the previous one. Eventually, the costs of maintaining complexity exceed its benefits, and collapse (through accelerated simplification of complex structures) becomes preferable to continued investment in failing systems. In this framework, the productive classes are the engine of complexity: they generate the surplus that funds specialisation and infrastructure. When that surplus declines, whether through extraction, flight, or withdrawal, the society’s capacity to solve problems declines with it. The consuming majority may continue to vote for transfers, but there is progressively less to transfer.

The implication is uncomfortable to modern sensibilities: democracy, as currently constituted, may be structurally incapable of arresting this dynamic. The very mechanisms that make democracy legitimate, such as universal suffrage, majority rule, and competitive elections, also make it vulnerable to capture by consuming majorities. The productive minority cannot, without abandoning democratic principles, disenfranchise those who drink more than they produce. But neither can it, within democratic constraints, protect itself from indefinite extraction. The system tends toward an equilibrium in which extraction continues until the productive base is exhausted, at which point the transfers become impossible, and the system collapses.

## Production versus Consumption is the New Left versus Right

Lest this argument be mistaken for a defence of authoritarianism, it is worth noting that non-democratic regimes face the same problem. China, often cited as a counterexample of productive dynamism under authoritarian rule, has achieved remarkable growth precisely by privileging its productive classes: manufacturers, exporters, and engineers have enjoyed policy environments tailored to their needs. But this bargain rests on continued growth. The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party derives, to a considerable extent, from its ability to deliver rising living standards. Should growth falter as demographic pressures accelerate, debt accumulates, and the hurdle of the middle-income trap looms, the consuming majority will demand its share. Authoritarian regimes may suppress such demands for longer than democracies do, but they cannot eliminate them. When the gravy train stops, the regime that built its legitimacy on material delivery may prove remarkably brittle in the end.

The problem, then, is not democracy as such but a particular political economy that has emerged across regime types: one in which consumption has been elevated above production. This political economy is not inevitable; it is the product of specific policy choices, ideological commitments, and institutional arrangements. It can, in principle, be reformed.

What would such reform require? At minimum: a rebalancing of incentives to favour production over consumption; lower taxes on investment and earned income, higher costs for unproductive rent-seeking; reform of transfer systems to reward contribution; and a cultural shift that honours makers over takers. These are not novel proposals; they recur in the literature of political economy from Adam Smith through Friedrich List and Joseph Schumpeter. What has been lacking is not diagnosis but political will. The consuming majority has no interest in reforms that would reduce its transfers, and the productive minority lacks the numbers to impose them democratically.

Perhaps the only path to reform lies in exhausting alternatives. When transfers become unsustainable, and the productive base has shrunk to the point that it cannot fund the consuming majority’s expectations, the system will face a choice between collapse and restructuring. Whether democracies or autocracies prove better able to navigate that moment remains an open question.

The historical record is not encouraging: societies that have allowed their productive classes to wither have rarely reformed peacefully. More often, they have experienced the age of “bread and circuses” that came to define the worst excesses of imperial Rome: a consuming populace kept quiescent by state provision until the provision fails, at which point order fails with it.

Those who care about liberty in the classical sense, the liberty of the productive citizen to enjoy the fruits of their labour, to build, to accumulate, and to transmit, have been insufficiently attentive to the conditions that make such liberty possible. They have assumed that democratic institutions, once established, would perpetuate themselves. They have not reckoned with the possibility that democracy, unmoored from a culture of production, might consume its own foundations. The age of consumption may yet prove a brief holiday from history, funded by accumulated capital that is now running out.

Whether we can extend that holiday or merely prepare for its end depends on whether the productive minority can find a political voice that speaks to their predicament and once again recognises their essential role in maintaining prosperous, orderly, and free societies.

---

**Author*: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine for the 21st century.*
### The Life & Lessons of Hayreddin Pasha
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/hayreddin-pasha-tunisia/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T20:45:42.000Z
For centuries, the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean were shaped by Muslim power: the Ottoman Empire, the regencies of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli, the Sultanate of Morocco, and Egypt. Barbary corsairs, imperial garrisons, and merchant networks had long kept the Europeans at bay, or at least compelled them to compromise. Then, almost abruptly, the balance broke.

In the 19th century, the Mediterranean world saw the fall of the Barbary states, which had long commanded piracy across the Mediterranean, the conquest of Algeria by France in 1830, and the permanent establishment of European naval squadrons in the Mediterranean. These events marked the beginning of a new era in which Europe henceforth imposed its rules on the entire sea.

The Industrial Revolution gave European states a decisive advantage: manufactories, steam engines, railways, banks, and rationalised administrations formed an infrastructure of power against Mediterranean economies that had remained, for the most part, traditional. Conscious of the peril, several Muslim rulers attempted to resist by transforming themselves: the Ottoman *Tanzimat* in Istanbul and Muhammad Ali’s [modernisation drive](https://kasurian.com/p/muhammad-ali-pasha-and-the-dream?ref=kasurian.com) in Egypt were both efforts to modernise the army and bureaucracy and to make the transition to an industrialised economy.

Tunisia did not escape this movement. There too, efforts were made to modernise while piercing the “secret” of European power. It is in this context that Hayreddin Pasha emerged, a mamluk of Circassian origin who became a prominent statesman and reformer in the Beylik of Tunis. He spearheaded Tunisia’s reformist movement through his intellectual work and at the helm of the state. Hayreddin was a true statesman driven by an intellectual passion, convinced that the root of all evils lay less in fate than in the ignorance and slow cultural decadence of Muslim societies.

## A Circassian Slave

Almost nothing is known of Hayreddin’s childhood. He himself writes in his memoirs:

> “Although I know perfectly well that I am Circassian, I have retained no precise memory of my country or my parents. I must, following some war or some emigration, have been taken at a very young age from my family, whose trace I have lost forever. The searches I have conducted, on several occasions, to find them have always remained fruitless.”

What we do know is that Hayreddin was born sometime between 1822 and 1823 AD in the northwestern Caucasus and hailed from the Abkhaz tribe. It was in these years that the Russian army was advancing south into the Caucasus Mountains, imposing Russian imperial rule on local communities and tribes, and engaging in demographic engineering to reduce the local Muslim populations, culminating in the Circassian genocide in the 1860s.

Hayreddin’s father is said to have died fighting against the Russian imperial advance. The child, deprived of protection, fell into another world: that of the slave trade that supplied the Ottoman Empire with the slave-soldier caste known as the Mamluks. It was in Istanbul where Hayreddin was transformed: no longer the son of an Abkhaz, but as a Mamluk, the property of an Ottoman dignitary, Tahsin Bey, *naqib al-ashraf* (head of the body of descendants of the Prophet) and *qadi* (military judge)of the Ottomans’ Anatolian military corps.

In Tahsin Bey’s household, Hayreddin embarked on the paradoxical path of the Mamluk. In the Ottoman Empire, the military slave was not condemned to remain at the bottom of the ladder; he could, if he proved disciplined and gifted, become an officer, then a governor, sometimes even head of state. The enslavement was absolute, but it led to an elite of service: foreign to all domestic factions, the Mamluk could be the prince’s trusted man.

In 1839, the young Circassian’s trajectory took another turn. Ahmad Bey, sovereign of the Regency of Tunis, sent an emissary to Istanbul to congratulate the new Ottoman sultan, Abdülmecid I, on his ascension to the throne. The envoy returned, bearing letters and presents. In his retinue was an adolescent of 16 or 17 years: Hayreddin. He arrived in Tunis as a slave, but was destined to become a pillar of the state.

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## An Officer of State

At Ahmad Bey’s palace, Hayreddin was instructed as a future officer and administrator. In his memoirs, Hayreddin recounts this decisive moment:

“Raised first at the palace, I pursued my studies there in Arabic in the Muslim sciences and then entered the army, where I acquired my military knowledge under the direction of a commission of officers sent by France to organise and instruct the Bey’s troops. I successively traversed all the degrees of the military hierarchy... I served for some years as aide-de-camp to H.E. Ahmad Bey. Promoted to major-general, the highest rank the Bey can confer, I held in this capacity the chief command of the regular cavalry. But soon, circumstances led me to abandon the army for a political career.”

The Beylical palace became for him an intellectual laboratory. He excelled in linguistic studies, perfecting his Arabic, a language already studied in Istanbul, until he mastered it to the point of using it as the tool of a limpid prose, capable of treating jurisprudence as well as political economy. Through Arabic, he gained access, at the Zaytuna *madrasa* and elsewhere, to the significant corpora of Muslim sciences: Qur’anic exegesis, hadith, fiqh, and history.

Alongside his linguistic studies, Hayreddin was educated in modern military knowledge. The regency, anxious about the technical superiority of European armies, called upon French officers to organise and instruct its troops. Assigned to the Bardo military school in Tunis, founded in 1840, Hayreddin discovered there the European sciences of physics, mathematics, and biology, and learned French, which would later enable him to read European political and historical literature without filters.

It was at Bardo that he encountered the figure who would shape his political impulses: Mahmud Qabadu. Poet, professor, and *sufi*, Qabadu was the progenitor of Tunisian reformism and an ardent defender of the Ottoman *Tanzimat*. He understood before many others that Europe's strength did not come from a mysterious essence, but from its investment in the material sciences and industrial techniques. Qabadu did not content himself with admiring the West but actively advocated the introduction of modern sciences into teaching programmes, their translation into Arabic, and their appropriation by Muslims.

For Qabadu, European domination had developed upon the vestiges of Muslim intellectual patrimony, and it was the duty of Muslims to catch up by reappropriating European sciences. He encouraged the return of *ijtihad* (independent legal reasoning) among the *ulema* (Islamic jurists). Under Qabadu’s tutelage, students of Bardo – including Hayreddin – translated their European professors’ courses, adapted science manuals, and reread them in light of Islamic values. A reformist sensibility took shape, a mixture of lucid admiration for European power, acute awareness of Muslim decadence, and the conviction that the way out of crisis lay in the reappropriation of sciences and the reform of institutions, not in the simple accumulation of cannons.

Through providence and diligence, Hayreddin’s military career unfolded with speed. He won his place in the cavalry, the military elite selected in 1839-1840 by the Bey and reserved exclusively for youths of Mamluk origin, and rapidly ascended the ranks: battalion commander in 1840, attached to the Cavalry Quartermaster’s Office in 1842, squadron leader in February of the same year, then lieutenant-colonel in August 1845, colonel in October 1846, and finally brigade commander in June 1850, with the title of general and cavalry commander, before being promoted to major-general, the highest military rank after that of the Bey himself.

His military career thus ended relatively calmly in 1853, the year in which he travelled to Paris in November to accomplish a dual mission: Hayreddin was to negotiate with bankers the granting of a loan that the Bey needed, which Hayreddin would deliberately sabotage, convinced that the terms proposed by the European creditors were disastrous for the country.

Even more important was his mission to represent the Tunisian government in the lawsuit brought against Mahmud ben Ayyad. For 20 years, this former Tunisian senior official had systematically plundered the state’s coffers. Having fled to Paris in 1852 under the pretext of illness, he had himself naturalised as a French citizen to escape Tunisian justice, then dared to demand reimbursement from the Tunisian government of the equivalent of $1.6 billion today.

Behind Ben Ayyad loomed an even more sinister shadow: that of Mustafa Khaznadar, Prime Minister and, after 1862, Hayreddin’s father-in-law (who had married Khaznadar’s daughter, Janina, perhaps to accelerate his political career and secure his bloodline). Ben Ayyad and Khaznadar had amassed colossal fortunes by exploiting the regency for two decades. Fearing that too thorough a trial would reveal his own embezzlements, Khaznadar refused to provide Hayreddin with the accounting documents that would have enabled him definitively to overwhelm his former associate, Ben Ayyad. Hayreddin was being sent to defend a just cause, but the evidence supporting it was being withheld from him.

The trial lasted three-and-a-half years. All elements played against Tunisia and Hayreddin: an accused protected by French nationality, immensely wealthy and well-connected in Parisian circles; a French tribunal little disposed to favour a Muslim state against a French citizen; and above all, a Tunisian Prime Minister actively sabotaging the defence of his own country. No one expected victory under such unfavourable conditions. Nevertheless, Hayreddin persisted with remarkable tenacity before the arbitration tribunal.

The result, though imperfect, compensated for his pains. In total, Tunisia recovered 24 million francs in cash and oil export permits, around $950 million today. This was not the total victory hoped for, but for a country on the brink of bankruptcy, sabotaged from within by its own Prime Minister, this sum represented a providential reprieve.

This relative success, under such hostile conditions, impressed Muhammad Bey (successor to Ahmad Bey). Upon his return to Tunis in January 1857, Hayreddin was appointed Minister of the Navy and entered the Beylical Council. Over the years, he would become president of the Grand Council – that embryonic parliament created by the Tunisian Constitution of 1861 – and one of the most visible faces of institutional reform. Economical by nature and driven by the concern to spare the state onerous expenditures, he contented himself with managing the existing fleet rather than seeking to develop it. The scarcity of means obliged this moderation: as Minister of the Navy, Hayreddin did not aspire to endow Tunisia with a prestigious fleet, but to improve and maintain what already existed. He devoted his energy to creating an arsenal at La Goulette, in the northern suburbs of Tunis, where ships could be maintained and repaired, thus avoiding the very high costs of transporting them to Marseille or Malta.

A fervent reformer, Hayreddin supported the proclamation of the Fundamental Pact in 1857, then that of the constitution in 1861, the first of its kind in the Arab and Muslim world. He supported these texts even if they were not perfect (he clearly saw that they granted exaggerated privileges to foreigners), but because they marked a turning point: for the first time, the Bey’s power was limited, at least in principle, by written rules, by a Grand Council that was to control finances and laws.

Hayreddin actively participated in the work of commissions tasked with implementing the promises outlined in these documents. As a member of the Beylical Council and later as president of the Grand Council, he contributed to judicial reform, which was limited to the penal code and commercial and agricultural matters, without touching personal status, which remained the domain of tribunals strictly applying the principles of Islamic law.

## A Familial Drama

But Hayreddin came up against a wall. Behind the constitutional façade, the true master of the regency was still Khaznadar, who had understood that a well-staged reform could serve as an ideal screen for his enterprises: borrowing at usurious rates, squeezing taxpayers, embezzling public funds, and distributing political posts in exchange for loyalty.

Hayreddin first tried persuasion through warnings, cautions, and private conversations, and attempted to bring Sadok Bey (successor to Muhammad Bey) and Khaznadar back to the path of reform. Nothing worked. For them, reform was merely a decor to brandish before European consuls, not a moral commitment.

Adopting a bitter tone in his memoirs, Hayreddin would write: “To the mystification of my adopted homeland, which was being pitilessly dragged to its ruin.” When Khaznadar proposed contracting a new loan abroad on ruinous terms, Hayreddin opposed it with all his strength. He knew, from experience, what these debts meant: budgetary guardianship, the confiscation of customs revenues, and the growing grip of creditors on political decisions. He refused to endorse this policy. His opposition earned him the Prime Minister’s open hostility, who relied on the Bey to isolate him.

In June 1862, after multiple confrontations within the Grand Council, Hayreddin threw in the towel: he resigned from the presidency of the Council, then, a year later, from the Ministry of the Navy. Other reformers – General Hussein, Muhammad Agha, Rostom, *ulema* such as Salim Bu Hajib or Bayram V – followed him down the slope of withdrawal. All understood that the system did not want to be reformed in depth, that it preferred to sacrifice its best servants rather than renounce the facility of plunder and loans.

From then on, Hayreddin kept his distance from public affairs. He saw coming, with tragic lucidity, what the rise of the *mejba* (a poll tax), unbearable fiscal pressure, financial dependence, and the intrigues of the consuls announced: the bloody insurrection of 1864, then the bankruptcy of 1869, then, ultimately, “guardianship” imposed by way of becoming a French protectorate in 1881.

Hayreddin deserted political life almost definitively until 1869\. The former Circassian slave had travelled a remarkable path. Still, this journey had also revealed to him the limits of individual power in the face of entrenched structures of corruption and the deleterious influence of European powers, that a state could equip itself with modern schools, arsenals, constitutions, and yet remain doomed to ruin, if its leaders persisted in confusing reform with simulacrum, and if justice remained absent from the heart of the state. It was from this experience, lived from within, that his excellent book on the “surest paths” to save a state from decadence would be born some years later.

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## The Surest Path for Knowledge of the State of Nations

The 1860s marked roughly the middle of the *Tanzimat* era in the Ottoman Empire. The first significant reforms had already been proclaimed, certain new institutions had established themselves, but disappointments were emerging. Superficial reformism, which borrowed European forms without understanding their spirit, was beginning to show its impotence.

Between 1862 and 1869, during his forced retirement from political life, Hayreddin undertook an intellectual project of remarkable ambition. Far from the intrigues of the Beylical palace and his father-in-law Khaznadar, Hayreddin devoted these years of isolation to writing a magisterial work: *Aqwam al-Masalik fi Ma’rifat Ahwal al-Mamalik* (“The Surest Path for Knowledge of the State of Nations”), published in 1868\. This work, which would continue to generate much discussion more than a century and a half after its publication, was a reformist manifesto intended as a governance manual for Muslim leaders.

*Aqwam Al-Masalik* was the product of Hayreddin’s “long and conscientious research” and his “personal observations” gathered during the missions he had undertaken in Europe. He hoped to offer *ulema* the means to “better fulfil their temporal role”, and statesmen the means to orient their decisions towards the common good. He set himself the task of presenting the politico-economic state of European powers, particularly those that maintained close relations with the Muslim world. He advocated the acquisition of scientific knowledge, the increase of public wealth through the development of agriculture, commerce, and industry, and above all, the establishment as the principal base of a sound system of government from which would be born that confidence which in turn produces perseverance in efforts and gradual perfection in all things, such as then existed in Europe.

What gives *Aqwam al-Masalik* its strength is the scope of Hayreddin’s experiences and ability to bridge civilisations. He translated and commented on long passages from French historians such as Victor Duruy and Charles-Emmanuel Sédillot, who recognised the massive contribution of medieval Islamic civilisation to the sciences, philosophy, governance, and institutions to the European economy. Far from contenting himself with this as a simple motive for nostalgic pride, Hayreddin concluded:

> ‘If Europe was once able to borrow without shame from Muslim scholars what they lacked, why would today’s Muslims refuse to borrow from Europe what they lack?’

This European recognition of intellectual debt to Islam constituted a powerful argument and recalled Qabadu’s teachings. To refuse something just and profitable simply because it came from other people was no longer to seek wisdom but to flatter one’s pride. Conversely, to reappropriate these elements was to obey the Prophetic injunction: “wisdom is the property of the believer wherever he finds it.”

For Hayreddin, the secret of current European prosperity resided precisely in its capacity to borrow what it needed from other cultures:

> “If what comes from outside is good in itself and conformable to reason, particularly if it concerns what already existed amongst us and was borrowed from us, not only is there no reason to reject it and neglect it, but on the contrary, there is an obligation to recover it and profit from it.”

### On Justice

At the heart of Hayreddin’s reflections in *Aqwam Al-Masalik* lay a principle he borrowed from Ibn Khaldun: justice is the pivot upon which the destiny of nations turns. Each time a state makes justice the measure of its action, wealth increases, the arts flourish, the army strengthens, and confidence circulates. Each time despotism establishes itself, that arbitrariness substitutes for law, revenues dry up, the countryside depopulates, commerce freezes, and the state, whatever its natural resources, rushes towards ruin.

Hayreddin recalled that Europe itself had not always been this hearth of civilisation that his Muslim contemporaries imagined. He described the centuries of ignorance, political confusion, and the stranglehold of absolute sovereigns who reigned “without being contained by any institution.” It was only with time, when laws, charters, parliaments, and forms of political control were established, that the situation changed. European comfort did not come directly from the Gospel – Christ declared that his kingdom was not of this world – but from the patient organisation of society, from the effort to protect liberty, property, and the security of persons.

The originality of Hayreddin was to show that this movement towards constitutions, consultation, and representative chambers was not a Christian privilege. He brought modern assemblies closer to Islamic *shura*, those collective deliberations recommended by the Qur’an, and parliaments to the *ahl al-hall wa al-ʿaqd*, those “people who untie and bind,” that is to say, the notables, scholars, and influential persons who, in classical political theory, frame and, if necessary, correct the sovereign. God commanded the Prophet ﷺ himself to consult, when he could have done without any human opinion. He did so, Hayreddin insisted, to make consultation an obligatory norm for those who came after him. In this perspective, modern constitutions were not foreign intrusions: they represented an updated manner of giving form to an Islamic principle already present.

Within this framework, he emphasised the *ulema's* role as the community’s physicians. A physician who ignores the diseases of his time cannot treat his patients; likewise, a scholar who contents himself with repeating what he has learned without observing the state of the world, without understanding the new forms of commerce, finance, war, and administration, can no longer guide the *Ummah*. If he withdraws through misunderstood piety, if he flees the governors in the name of an imaginary purity, he leaves the field free to tyrants.

Hayreddin also emphasised a key pillar of jurisprudence: *maslaha*, the public interest. He explained that the *shariʿa* framed the acts of Muslims through precise prescriptions, but that human life constantly produced new situations, for which no explicit text existed. In these cases, if a measure was not contrary to a fundamental principle of the law, if, on the contrary, it served order, protected life, property, religion, and reason, then it was the duty of those responsible to implement it. This was not a shameful concession to modernity; it was the faithful application of the very logic of the *shariʿa*, which aimed to preserve the essential interests of men.

However, *maslaha* must not become the pretext for individual improvisation. It required the assembly of competent men: jurists who knew the texts in their depth and their history, politicians who understood local and international realities, scholars aware of technical progress and the transformations of societies. Together, they must discern what truly serves the public good. Hayreddin dreamt of such a leading nucleus, formed of *ulema* and statesmen working in concert, each controlling and supporting the other, so that reform should be neither a servile copy of the foreigner, nor a deaf repetition of the past.

### On the Economy

On economic questions, Hayreddin’s diagnosis was pitiless. He observed that Muslim countries had installed themselves in a humiliating position: that of suppliers of raw materials and consumers of manufactured products. The peasant who cultivated cotton, the stock-breeder, and the sericulturist worked hard all year to sell the fruits of their efforts to Europeans at low prices. In return, they bought back at a price increased tenfold fabrics, arms, tools, and manufactured objects produced with their own raw materials, transformed elsewhere.

Hayreddin saw in this a triple fault: it was humiliating, because it proved the immobility of the arts in the country; it was anti-economic, because it deprived the nation of the gains of industrial transformation; it was anti-political, for it created a mortal dependence vis-à-vis foreign powers, especially when it concerned arms and military materiel. He sharply criticised those who opposed economic reform while rivalling in their clothing, furnishing, and the acquisition of other European products, without making any effort to produce these things in their own country. “There is no way to hide the disgrace and the deficiencies of economic development and public policy that befall the *Ummah* as a consequence. The disgrace resides in our need for foreigners for most necessities, indicating the backwardness of the *Ummah* in skills.”

He also understood that the regime of capitulations aggravated this situation, granting foreigners and certain protected minorities exorbitant juridical and fiscal privileges and leading Muslims at a sizeable disadvantage. Far from being simple diplomatic arrangements, these devices placed in the hands of actors escaping local law a considerable part of wealth and commerce. The capitulations hindered the development of institutions because economic capital was in the hands of foreigners and religious minorities who escaped Muslim legislation and taxation. Moreover, this created pronounced inequalities with the Muslim population and reinforced economic and technological backwardness.

According to Hayreddin, a country had to use its raw materials and sell them as finished products. The simple exportation of raw materials constituted a sign of backwardness. He deplored the technological backwardness that obliged Muslim states to export only their raw materials while importing from Europe finished products at considerably higher prices.

This stemmed from “the failure to use our country’s industries to process the goods we have, for this should be a major source of gain.” He insisted on the necessity of having a favourable balance of payments. “Under these circumstances, if we considered the total of what is exported from the kingdom and compared it with the imports and found that the two approximate each other, it would be the lesser of two evils, for if the value of imports exceeds the exports, ruin will unavoidably take place.”

In this, Hayreddin advocated protectionist policies to boost domestic industries. One notes that Hayreddin ran counter to his era, dominated by Ricardian liberal economic ideology, and inscribed himself within a mercantilist approach similar to that of political economists such as the German-American economist Friedrich List and the French Saint-Simonist movement.

### On Institutions

Conscious that Muslim countries would miss up their backwardness through moral encouragement only, Hayreddin dwelt at length on the institutions that made great enterprises possible in Europe. He described the functioning of joint-stock companies: their capacity to assemble two or three hundred thousand small shareholders to finance a railway, a canal, a tunnel, a maritime company. He emphasised that no individual, even a wealthy one, would risk all his fortune alone in such operations, whereas association made the risk bearable by dividing it. The spirit of association was the key to outstanding achievements in modern times.

Hayreddin detailed examples of various tasks that were individually insurmountable but could be accomplished through joint-stock companies: the cutting of the Suez Canal, the railway linking the oceans in America, the piercing of the Alps between Italy and France, the railway passage through the Pyrenees between France and Spain, the creation of a tunnel under the Thames in London, the formation of a company called *Messageries Impériales* possessing great ships visible on all seas, the laying of a telegraph line under the sea from England to America.

Likewise, Hayreddin devoted detailed pages to Europe’s booming financial institutions, such as banks, to their role in the circulation of capital, the conversion of savings into productive investments, and the expansion of exchanges. He showed that a country’s strength no longer resided solely in the gold of its coffers but in the fluidity of its credit and in the confidence inspired by its financial institutions.

For these institutions and instruments of civilisation to function, an atmosphere of confidence was indispensable. This confidence was not born of speeches, but of good government: respect for property rights, rule of law, and freedom of commerce. Hayreddin accorded a central place to liberty, not as an abstract slogan, but as a concrete condition of human activity. Where arbitrariness and fear reigned, capital fled, and [minds closed](https://kasurian.com/p/closing-of-the-muslim-mind?ref=kasurian.com). Where one protected the individual against the caprices of power, initiatives arose, innovation multiplied, and sciences prospered. Throughout the work, he ceaselessly emphasised that what Muslims needed were not exceptional sovereigns whose successors would destroy their achievements, but institutions that framed power and allowed society to defend itself against drifts—in a word, a state of law.

Hayreddin affirmed that all he saw of value and institutions in Europe (liberty, justice, representation, industries) could be appropriated by Muslims without denying their faith. Not only was this possible, but it was a moral obligation. Those who refused these borrowings under the pretext that they came from “infidels,” while rushing upon the products of their industry, condemned their people to being merely perpetual customers, never producers.

*Aqwam al-Masalik* was a testament to Hayreddin’s refusal to yield to fatalism, convinced that Muslim peoples, if intelligently reactivated, could surprise Europe by the rapidity of their rise. His book was both a mirror held up to his contemporaries and a compass for future reformers, an attempt to reconcile Islamic tradition and modernisation, demonstrating that material progress and fidelity to Islam were in no way incompatible.

## Return and Attempt to Save Tunisia

In 1869, as Tunisia was sinking into bankruptcy, Hayreddin was recalled from his retirement to preside over the international financial commission charged with reorganising the country’s finances. This commission, composed of French, British, and Italian representatives alongside Tunisian delegates, constituted a national humiliation: it placed Tunisian finances de facto under European control. Nevertheless, for Hayreddin, this return represented an opportunity to limit the damage and save what could still be saved. The prophecies he had formulated upon his resignation in 1862 had been realised with tragic precision: the usurious loans contracted by Khaznadar, the unbearable increase in the *mejba*, the insurrection of 1864, the suspension of the constitution, and finally the bankruptcy of 1869\. All that he had warned against had come to pass.

For four years, from 1869 to 1873, Hayreddin worked in the shadow of this international commission, attempting to preserve Tunisian interests amid the demands of European creditors. This experience confirmed his worst fears concerning Europe’s colonial intentions. Foreign consuls, particularly the French and English, were not simply seeking the reimbursement of debts: they were using the financial crisis as leverage to increase their grip on the country. Hayreddin then understood that only decisive action at the summit of the state could reverse this disastrous trend.

The opportunity presented itself in 1873\. The corruption of Mustafa Khaznadar, which he had exercised for more than 40 years, had become so flagrant, so unbearable even in the eyes of the European powers who had nevertheless long profited from it, that his position became untenable. Hayreddin, strong in his reputation for integrity and competence, strong also in the support of Istanbul, which viewed with ill favour the growing grip of France on its nominal province, managed to overthrow his former father-in-law. In October 1873, he finally acceded to the post of Prime Minister, the summit of power that he had refused to reach through compromise and corruption.

Hayreddin faced a country on the brink. Tunisia was bloodless, ruined by decades of systematic pillage, crushed under the weight of a colossal debt towards European powers, and threatened in its very existence by the colonial appetites of France, Italy, and Great Britain. The international financial commission that he had presided over had transformed the regency into a quasi-economic protectorate. In this disastrous context, Hayreddin harboured few illusions: his objective was no longer to realise the vast reforms he had dreamt of during his years of political exile, but to save what could still be saved, and to safeguard the country’s independence. Nevertheless, even under these unfavourable conditions, Hayreddin achieved remarkable achievements during his brief time in power.

To improve the country’s economy, Hayreddin increased cultivated land from 60,000 to 1,000,000 hectares, a spectacular expansion that testified to his capacity to mobilise the territory’s unexploited resources. He also reformed the customs system to protect Tunisian crafts and industries, increasing import duties by 5% while reducing export duties, in a protectionist approach consistent with the ideas he had developed in *Aqwam al-Masalik*. He launched public works, notably the paving of Tunis’s streets, which gave the capital a more modern face and facilitated commercial circulation. He developed a railway line between Tunis and Jendouba.

His most significant measures were aimed at the sources of corruption and fiscal injustice that had gangrened the Tunisian state for decades. He cancelled tax arrears that were crushing rural populations, granted a 20-year fiscal relief for new plantations of olive trees and date palms to encourage long-term agricultural investment, and partially suppressed the perverse system by which tax collectors were remunerated according to the fines they collected, a mechanism that transformed them into predators rather than protectors of the population. He ended the costly and brutal system of collecting taxes from nomads through military expeditions. On this last point, Hayreddin argued that nomads, just like sedentary populations, were disposed to pay fixed and just taxes. In his eyes, if the state provided public security and a regular fiscal system, the Bedouins would cease their raids and troublemakers would no longer find refuge amongst the tribes in the face of the central government.

Hayreddin established a regular system of control over the *awqaf* (religious endowments), ending the embezzlement that had long deprived religious and charitable institutions of their legitimate resources. When the bey attempted to spend the *awqaf’s* surplus revenues on military reorganisation, Hayreddin firmly opposed it. Military affairs had their own budget, he argued, and it was not equitable to appropriate the *awqaf’s* surplus. Such a measure would only be permissible in the case of a deficit, and on condition that extravagances were controlled.

In the realm of education, Hayreddin reorganised studies at Zaytuna University, restructured the library, and founded the Sadiki College in 1875, an establishment modelled on European *lycées* that would train Tunisia’s intellectual and administrative elite for decades ahead. He also created a public library called *Al-Abdaliyah*. These educational initiatives were an investment in the future, an attempt to create a new generation trained in modern sciences while remaining rooted in an Arab-Muslim culture.

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## The Roads Not Taken & The Lessons Not Learned

But Hayreddin had to contend with forces that vastly exceeded him. As Prime Minister, he constantly confronted the machinations of foreign consuls, particularly those of France, Italy, and Great Britain. Having been a direct witness to Europe’s aggressive intentions towards Africa, he had come to perceive that Europe constituted the primordial threat to Tunisia’s very existence. The effective reincorporation of Tunisia into the Ottoman Empire represented perhaps Tunisia’s only hope of avoiding occupation. The French government, in particular, viewed with very ill favour the establishment of a parliamentary system and the implementation of impartial justice in Tunisia. Napoleon III had moreover observed, with brutal frankness, that if the Arabs tasted justice and liberty, France could not remain at peace in Algeria. This declaration revealed the true nature of French colonial policy: it rested on maintaining colonised populations in ignorance and injustice.

Domestic opponents were also circling. Another Mustafa, Mustafa ben Ismail, emerged from the shadows after Hayreddin’s departure. The latter adopted the same reprehensible conduct as Khaznadar, thirsting for power and money. The Bey, lending his ear to Ben Ismail, dismissed Hayreddin from his functions on 21st July 1877\. Judged too economical and rigid, too intransigent in his defence of the state’s integrity, Hayreddin fell into disgrace. The Bey preferred to him a Prime Minister more flexible and less economical, submissive to his power, manipulable at every wind. This decision sealed the fate of independent Tunisia: four years later, in 1881, French troops occupied the country and imposed a protectorate.

In his memoirs, the judgment Hayreddin passed on this period is unequivocal:

> “In leaving power, I left Tunisia in a state of order, tranquillity, and prosperity unknown for a long time. The Bey, his officials, were the same before me and remained the same after me: it is not I who saved them, it is they who lost me, and it is they who lost the Regency.”

Hayreddin did not hide that the Bey also reproached him for being too partisan of the Ottomans. He did not dissemble about being an ardent defender of the rights he considered indisputable of the Ottoman Empire over Tunisia, justifying this commitment by concern for safeguarding Tunisian independence in the face of French influence that had become cumbersome and threatening. The French themselves could see in him only an obstacle to their ambitions and strove ceaselessly to eliminate him.

Hayreddin left Tunisia for Istanbul on the invitation of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Welcomed with honours in the Ottoman capital, he was appointed *mushir* (personal advisor) to the Sultanbefore becoming the Ottoman Prime Minister on December 4, 1878\. But the rot was too deep. After eight months of vain efforts and Abdülhamid’s non-committal attitude to his counsel, Hayreddin resigned on July 18, 1879.

This resignation marked Hayreddin’s definitive retirement from political life. Until his death on 30th January 1890, Hayreddin lived in retirement in Istanbul in almost total solitude. There, on the shores of the Bosphorus, the former Circassian slave-turned Prime Minister doubtlessly pondered the missed opportunities and the ignored counsel. He was convinced that had his recommendations been followed, Tunisia would not have known French occupation and the Ottoman Empire would have recovered its power. History would prove him right, but it was too late to avoid the shipwreck he had prophesied.

Hayreddin Pasha joined the ranks of other reformist Muslim statesmen of the late 18th to early 20th centuries, such as [Tipu Sultan of Mysore](https://kasurian.com/p/tipu-sultan?ref=kasurian.com) and [Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt](https://kasurian.com/p/muhammad-ali-pasha-and-the-dream?ref=kasurian.com). The lessons from their reform – and why they ultimately failed – have [not been adequately assessed](https://kasurian.com/p/closing-of-the-muslim-mind?ref=kasurian.com) when considering our situation in the 21st century. Yet their failure, borne mainly of opposition from their own compatriots, has a great deal of explanatory power for why things have come to be the way they are across the Arab and Muslim world. The intellectual insights in *Awqam al-Masalik* and the practical lessons of Hayreddin Pasha’s statesmanship remain just as relevant today as they were in the mid-19th century.

---

**Author*: Salim Jeridi is a data consultant based in Switzerland. He is interested in economic history and developmentalism.*

**Further Reading**

- *Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age*, Albert Hourani
- *A Note on Tunuslu Hayreddin Paşa,* Syed Tanvir Wasti
- *Consult Them in the Matter,* Ahmad ibn Abi Diyaf
- *Economic ideas of a nineteenth-century Tunisian statesman: Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi*, Abdul Azim Islahi
- *Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi and Islamic Reformism as a Synthesis between the West and the Islamic Tradition*, Hatice Rumeysa Dursun
- *Muslim Reformist Action in Nineteenth-century Tunisia*, Mohamed El-Tahir El-Mesawi
- *The reflections in the works of Ali Pasha and Tunisian Hayreddin Pasha in terms of International Economics from Europe to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century*, Fatih Yücel
- *The Surest Path for Knowledge of the State of Nations*, Hayreddin Pasha
- *The Tunisia of Ahmed Bey 1837-1855*, Leon Carl Brown
### The Ma Clique
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/ma-clique/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:18:33.000Z
In late 1911, over a dozen Chinese provinces declared revolutionary independence from the empire that ruled them for over 260 years: the Great Qing Dynasty. A two-year-old toddler sat on the throne. The empire was dying. Millennia of imperial rule was about to end.

Chaos followed as various forces fought for China’s future. Communists and nationalists, Han and non-Han, all struggled for local and national control. Amid the unrest, one particular clique in the northwest stood out for its consistent focus on local independence, family-based alliances, and a relatively cohesive religious identity.

The ‘Ma Clique’ was a loose alliance of Hui Muslim families based in the northwestern provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, Qinghai, and Ningxia. Several major warlords bore the surname “Ma,” a common Hui name that scholars posit was adopted in honour of the prophet *Muhammad* ﷺ.

Politically, prominent Ma warlords chose to align with those who emerged victorious after decades of civil war and foreign invasion. Their complex history represents an agency that challenges both the simplistic framing and dichotomies that characterise Muslim engagement in politics, and today’s Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”) version of post-Qing Chinese history.

## Rise of the Hui

Most chroniclers began documenting the Ma families by the mid-19th century, long after Islam had taken root in China – the first Muslims arrived during the early Tang Dynasty (618-907). Over time, incoming Muslims from Central Asia (and further West) intermarried with Han Chinese as they settled in the empire. The Hui Muslims — one of 55 recognised minority ethnicities in today’s People’s Republic of China — see themselves as the result of this prolonged presence and settlement. They are indigenous Chinese Muslims. The 2020 Chinese census lists [8.3 million](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/08/30/islam/?ref=kasurian.com) Hui Muslims in China today.

By the 19th century, the Hui had established major population centres in the northwestern areas of Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, and Shaanxi; the southwestern area of Yunnan; and the central/northern areas of Shandong and Henan. Today, Gansu is a province known for its difficult terrain, arid climate, and high poverty rates. In the Han Chinese imagination, travelling West always meant approaching a less friendly hinterland—the edge of civilisation. This was also true in the 19th century, when the Hui of Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia were seen as non-Han bandits galloping along a lawless frontier, preferring local autonomy, inter-family feuds, religious conflict, and, once in a while, full-on rebellion against the Qing.

A major rebellion emerged in the northwest in 1781, when a sectarian conflict broke out between rival subgroups of the influential *Naqshbandi* Sufi order: the *Jahriyya* and *Khufiyya*. The locals referred to these Sufi groups as *menhuan*, which were more than just religious factions; they were also important nodes within the regional military-commercial patchwork.  
  
The rebellion first took off in the city of Hezhou, now known as Linxia City, the centre of Hui Muslim life and home to the burial sites of many Sufi saints in the region. Leaders among the Sufi sub-orders were known as *jiaozhang*, powerful figures with access to wealth, military forces, and political sway. Over time, the *jiaozhang* position was inherited within families like an heirloom, blurring the lines of religious legitimacy. The Ma warlords were entrenched in this system.  
  
The imperial centre viewed the *Jahriyya-Khufiyya* violence as a major security threat, so they sent forces into Gansu to intervene. This triggered two *Jahriyya* revolts; both failed, but the violence marked the beginnings of militarisation and warlordism in the northwest. Sustained local rivalries over commerce and tribalism persisted into the late 1800s, as the Qing lost control due to internal rebellions and foreign encroachment. Losing a humiliating war (1895-96) to the Japanese finally led the imperial elite to embark on a desperate campaign of military modernisation.

But modernisation also introduced educated officers with subversive republican ideals into the ranks. Regional military leaders and their armies were already entrenched in their locales. Control of China was up for grabs. The Ma families maintained a grip on the northwest in service of national cohesion, regardless of which forces prevailed at any given moment.

## The Ma Clique Genealogy

The Ma Clique included three major branches, each located in a different area of the Hui northwest. They were among the Hui elite of the region and were not the only Hui Muslims carrying the Ma surname.

### The Ma Zhan’ao Family

Perhaps the most prominent name among all Ma warlords and leaders is Ma Zhan’ao (1830-86), born in Hezhou with no connection to the elite Sufi *menhuan*. Zhan’ao, like most Hui men, engaged in martial arts from a young age, partly as a means to protect against local bandits. The Qing state offered weak security and high taxes. Local ethnic conflicts between Hui and Han (and sometimes Tibetans, or *fan*) became common.

Gansu and neighbouring Shaanxi, both major Muslim centres at the time, also experienced food shortages, famine, and drought, further eroding security. The Qing tried to form local militias, known as *tuanlian*, to help, but many became undisciplined vigilante militias. Many bullied helpless civilians. By the 1860s, when Ma Zhan’ao was still a young man, the northwest was ripe for another rebellion.  
  
In 1862, an ordinary argument over bamboo in a Shaanxi market may have sparked the massive Dungan Revolt (1862-77), a multiregional rebellion that saw the rise of all three major Ma families as militarist leaders. It involved Muslims of various ethnic backgrounds, including Turkic groups like the Salar and Uyghur, along with Mongolic groups like the Dongxiang and Bao’an.  
  
The Hui of the Gansu-Ningxia-Shaanxi area made up the bulk of the revolt. In this mix, Ma Zhan’ao rose to become the most prominent anti-Qing general, commanding forces that landed major victories. Zhan’ao was also an imam (or *ah hong*) of the *Khuffiya Naqshbandi* suborder in Hezhou and is known for engaging in both effective warfare and adroit diplomacy with the Qing, depending on his goals. He is known for facilitating the escape of Han civilians from cities affected by war in Gansu. Not all Hui rebels were so conscientious.

Another major Hui rebel general was Ma Hualong (head shaykh of the *Jahriyyah Naqshbandi* order in the Hui northwest), who was seen by the Qing as the chief instigator of the rebellion and whose fighting in Shaanxi, along with that of other rebel leaders, helped put an end to the thriving Muslim life there. Furthermore, a hardline Hui general, Bai Yanhu, also led his own forces against the Qing approach.

The Qing responded by deploying the legendary general Zuo Zongtang to quell the Muslims. Zuo started with good success, famously executing Ma Hualong in 1871\. Zuo then travelled further West, expecting to lay siege to Ma Zhan’ao’s stronghold in Hezhou. But Zuo failed against Zhan’ao’s savvy generals, who knew the local terrain.

Ma Zhan’ao could have pursued Zuo to solidify Hui separatism in Gansu and Shaanxi, but he did not. Instead, he made a decision that stands out in the annals of Hui history: Ma Zhan’ao ordered his son, Ma Anliang, to travel to the enemy’s field camp and offer Zuo and the Qing his *immediate surrender* of Hezhou. He offered to join the Qing forces to quell any lingering separatism in the area. General Zuo readily accepted Ma Zhan’ao into his forces and brought the broader rebellion to an end. This alignment with the Qing set the tone for many Hui figures’ later conformity with Chinese power and society for the next almost two centuries.

![File:Tungani General, Khotan.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/01f0ad6b-bcf7-4a60-8581-c267349a8267_960x637-jpeg.jpg)

Dungan General with his soldiers, wielding polearms, 1920\. The Dungan were Hui Muslims who fled from China into central Asia after failed revolts.

### The Ma Qianliang and Ma Haiyan Families

Ma Zhan’ao’s command included two major Ma generals: Ma Qianling (1842-1910) and Ma Haiyan (1837-1900). They are the heads of the other two main branches of the Ma Clique warlords, though neither is the most famous figure in their respective lineages. Both followed Zhan’ao during the 1862 Dungan Rebellion by conforming to the Qing Empire’s wishes.

Two of Ma Qianling’s sons became prominent Hui warlords: Ma Fulu (1854–1900) and Ma Fuxiang (1876–1932). Ma Haiyan also had a prominent son, Ma Qi (1869–1931). All were contemporaries of Ma Zhan’ao’s son, Ma Anliang (1855–1918). Together, they formed the second generation of the Ma Clique.

All played a crucial role for the Qing in 1895, when yet another Dungan Rebellion (1895-96) broke out, this time involving belligerents from Gansu and Qinghai. The rebellion started in an Eastern region of Qinghai, then called Xunhua (now the Xunhua Salar Autonomous County), the stronghold of the Turkic [Salar Muslims](https://cultureandmind.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/fieldsites/salar?ref=kasurian.com), another recognised Muslim minority group in China today. The 1895 rebellion also began with accusations of *Jahriyya* vs. *Khuffiyah* over “misleading the people,” sorcery, and other religious disputes.

Animosities then evolved into anti-Han animus, this time involving both Hui and Salar militias. General Ma Yonglin, a *Jahriyya* imam, led the rebellion and called for a broad uprising against the Qing in northwestern China. They met stiff resistance from all three major Ma Clique lineages, who followed Ma Zhan’ao’s example to defend Qing interests, eventually defeating Ma Yonglin in a brutal showdown. All eventually fought under another legendary Qing general, Dong Fuxiang (who fought under Zuo Zongtang).

All three major Ma families also followed Dong back to Beijing in 1898, where another mass conflict further hastened the Qing’s demise.

## Joining the National Resistance

Thanks to extensive foreign encroachment, the presence of Christian missionaries became pervasive across China during the late Qing era. This bred anti-Christian and anti-foreign animus among locals, who often saw missionaries receive tax exemptions while they had to pay extra taxes thanks to lost wars and unfair treaties. Popular anger was rife.

Among the peasantry, a secret group called the [Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists](https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/archives/2017/11/03/the-righteous-and-harmonious-fists/?ref=kasurian.com) emerged, preaching an anti-Christian, anti-foreigner message while claiming to possess miraculous spiritual abilities, such as the ability to fend off bullets. Their followers—known as “Boxers”—began to attack Christian missionaries, other foreigners, and even some Qing officials across parts of Northern China. [The Boxer Rebellion](https://www.britannica.com/video/Video-overview-Boxer-Rebellion/-203056?ref=kasurian.com) was in full swing by 1900.

Hundreds of thousands of participants fought their way towards Beijing, pillaging foreign sites along the way. Convinced of their invulnerability to bullets and other weapons, the Boxers laid siege to the International Legation Quarter in Beijing, where hundreds of foreign diplomats and family members—hailing from Britain, Germany, the United States, France, Russia, Japan, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Belgium—sought safety and refuge along with hundreds of Chinese Christian converts.

The famous “[Siege of the International Legations](https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/boxer%5Fuprising%5F02/bx2%5Fessay01.html?ref=kasurian.com)” lasted 55 days in the summer of 1900 and was supported by the Empress Dowager Cixi, who controlled the Qing court. She endorsed the Boxers’ mass campaign as a pro-Qing movement, declared war on all foreign parties in China, and aligned the empire’s own forces with the Boxers’ siege. These included the forces of General Dong and his Ma officers from Gansu. Dong’s soldiers both protected the Qing court and supported the siege with the Boxers. The Hui forces made their name during this infamous confrontation in Beijing, which [drew](https://www.nytimes.com/1900/10/26/archives/the-siege-of-the-legations.html?ref=kasurian.com) the world’s attention. From this point on, Dong’s Hui fighters would be known as the “Gansu Braves.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/c49dbfe9-d3ad-46c0-b55d-667f757693bf_1201x1600-jpeg.jpg)

Gansu Braves, 1900-1910

In August 1900, an alliance between the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Japan, the United States, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary—the famous “Eight-Nation Alliance”—gathered to invade China and end the siege. They clashed with imperial forces and the Boxers. The Gansu Braves fought the invaders, and Ma Fulu died, becoming a symbol of Chinese resistance. Four of his cousins also perished. Ma Haiyan also didn’t make it home, and his son Ma Qi took over his unit. The Alliance eventually broke the siege and occupied Beijing.

The Empress Dowager then fled as occupying troops and foreign civilians engaged in [mass looting](https://www.yuanmingyuan.eu/en/opium-wars/boxer-rebellion/?ref=kasurian.com) of Qing palaces and other areas—a symbol of foreign humiliation. The looting was so infamous as to draw criticisms from Western observers like Mark Twain, whose essay [“To the Person Sitting in Darkness”](https://web.viu.ca/davies/H321GildedAge/Twain.ToThePersonSittingInDarkness.1901.htm?ref=kasurian.com) mocked how the looters destroyed only “what they cannot carry away.”

A year later, the Empress Dowager Cixi was allowed to return to Beijing only after agreeing to even more humiliating indemnity payments that totally bankrupted the Qing. The empire limped on uselessly for another decade. But the Ma fighters gained significant trust, favour, and reputation. Ma Fuxiang rose particularly fast due to royal Qing favour, even escorting the royals westward during the revolutionary violence of the 1910s. He held posts in the northwest and in Xinjiang. For years, he consolidated his military autonomy, built regional networks from his Ningxia base, established a pioneering matchstick factory, entrenched himself in the Tibet-to-China wool trade, and became a symbol of the kind of Hui loyalty characteristic of the Ma Clique.

Ma Qi and Ma Anliang were also rewarded for their service. They returned to their bases in Xining and Hezhou, respectively. Like Fuxiang, they built up their influence in those regions and remained within the Qing’s trusted orbit until 1911 and 1912, when the republican era came knocking.

## The End of Empire & Shifting Loyalties

When nationalist republicanism, led by famous revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen, came knocking, the Ma Clique initially responded slowly. Aside from loyalist conservatism, historians argue that the Ma commanders were careful to preserve the circumstances that helped their rise. They were not about to give it all up until their regional interests and autonomy were secured, be it with the Qing or with post-imperial forces.

The republican dream stalled when General Yuan Shikai, a major imperial figure who controlled the powerful Baiyang Army, negotiated control of China for himself, sidelining revolutionaries like Sun and others. Yuan knew he needed to reassure China’s major minority groups, including not just the Hui Muslims, but also the Mongolians, the Tibetans, and the Muslim Turkic peoples of Xinjiang (known to its Uyghur inhabitants as East Turkestan), to maintain control.

He sent various envoys to Muslims in the Hui northwest and to Xinjiang, while new policies were enacted to lift bans on inter-group marriages and some religious groups and teachings. The idea was to signal that the new Republic was more mindful of minority equality than the old Qing regime.

Nonetheless, Ma Anliang initially raised several battalions in support of Qing interests in the northwest, attacking and defeating the republican forces of General Zhang Fenghui in Shaanxi. Other Hui leaders in the region were leery of this hasty militarisation at such an uncertain moment. Ma Anliang was set to continue fighting until an intermediary between him and Yuan Shikai intercepted him. The messenger convinced Anliang that the emperor was about to abdicate; the empire was irredeemably lost. So Ma Anliang pivoted to throw his support behind Yuan Shikai. He maintained stable leadership in the Gansu area by further consolidating his forces and eventually commanding the most formidable military in the northwest.

Ma Fuxiang, on the other hand, was an earlier supporter of the Republic. He likely did not participate in Ma Anliang’s Shaanxi invasion and eventually integrated himself into post-Qing governing structures in the northwest. Yuan Shikai awarded Fuxiang a commander post in Ningxia as the latter expanded military control in Northern Gansu and Western Inner Mongolia (then called Suiyuan).

In this capacity, Ma Fuxiang earned a reputation for combating “banditry,” or belligerents along the northwest-Mongolian border who raided civilians and challenged republican control. Most notably, he captured and executed a Mongolian monk named Daerliuji, who invaded Ningxia after declaring himself emperor. After Ma Anliang died in 1918, Ma Fuxiang became the northwest’s most prominent Ma figure, achieving high military ranks within the national republican system.

The Republic’s governors in Gansu and the northwest did a disastrous job of managing the region, earning the locals’ ire. They were trying to funnel the Hui northwest’s resources into another vicious war against northern warlords. This further angered the locals and eventually triggered a bitter and costly insurrection in 1927-31, led by younger Ma family generals.

Ma Fuxiang sent negotiators into the chaos to help maintain the peace and stabilise his own power. He used his influence and alliances to eventually push out the Republic’s failing governor. He also became the first Ma warlord to officially join the Kuo Min Tang (KMT), which controlled the republican forces after Yuan Shikai died in 1916\. Fuxiang allied with its surging new leader, the famous Chiang Kai-shek, thus becoming a recognised Chinese figure who held several high-ranking government posts while maintaining influence in the northwest. He also founded several Chinese Muslim religious associations, educational institutions, and even public libraries.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/32902fae-2895-4f27-9383-b950863b98fc_489x683.png)

Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (right), with Ma Generals Ma Buqing (left), and Ma Bufang (second from left), 1942

General Ma Qi initially remained neutral during the 1911 revolution before throwing his support behind Yuan Shikai after learning of the 1912 abdication. Ma Qi was soon given official posts at his Xining base and was tasked, like other Ma loyalists, with helping keep the Tibetan and Mongol populations of the northwest frontier in line during a time of transition and power struggles. He commanded a powerful independent army by 1916 and put down a Qing revivalist insurrection in Qinghai that sought to mobilise Tibetans and Mongolians to carry out an imperial restoration.

![undefined](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/974a5f7f-91de-4ef6-ba5f-60c9bbfc48af_853x619.png)

Ma Bufang (front row, second from right), with Chinese businessmen and twice-Premier T.V. Soong in Xining, Qinghai (1934)

Ma Qi is also significant for being a patron of the “[*Ikhwani*](https://www.chinasource.org/resource-library/blog-entries/from-the-middle-east-to-the-middle-kingdom-6/?ref=kasurian.com),” or *yihewani*, reformist Muslim movement that reached China in the late 1870s, right after the First Dungan Rebellion, through an imam named Ma Wanfu (who had served with Ma Qi). The movement (which should not be confused with the more famous *Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin* (Muslim Brotherhood), founded in 1928 in Egypt) strongly emphasised anti-innovation (“*bid’ah*”) messages that antagonised the Hui Sufi landscape at the time. Ma Wanfu studied in Mecca during the 1860s and early 1870s; historians speculate that he was deeply influenced by the reformist movements of the time, primarily centred on Salafi ideas calling for purging Islam of “impure elements” that were not reflective of the *Quran* and *Sunnah*.

The *Ikhwani* movement has now grown into arguably the most successful among Hui Muslims today. Ma Qi supported it partly because he wanted to counter Ma Anliang’s influence in the northwest. Ma Wanfu lived under Ma Qi’s support and protection his whole life, in Xining. Their antagonism toward the Sufi *menhuan* was largely expressed through efforts to change and unify the northwest’s Islamic communities through modern educational reform and, eventually, through strong pro-republican nationalism.

## The Ma Clique Legacy

Both Ma Fuxiang and Ma Qi died in 1931\. Along with Ma Anliang, the trio’s sons also dominated the northwest region as warlords until the KMT—with Soviet backing and an initial alliance with the Communists—undertook a major anti-warlord campaign in 1926, [the Northern Expedition](https://www.britannica.com/event/Northern-Expedition?ref=kasurian.com). They defeated some Northern warlords and declared a unified Republic of China under KMT control. All three main Ma warlord families again threw their support behind Chiang Kai-shek, while retaining their independence. They knew that this official post-warlord unification was mostly nominal: “warlordism under a national flag.”

The prioritisation of regional independence guided much of the Ma warlords’ varied decision-making, offering a fascinating case study of how often Islam and Muslims in China were forced to navigate unpredictable change. This meant playing the longer game of preserving Muslim autonomy while broader forces fought endlessly over post-imperial China, including during the brutal Japanese invasion and occupation of China during WWII.

The Ma warlords [played major roles](https://newlinesmag.com/essays/how-hui-muslims-waged-holy-war-for-china-in-world-war-ii/?ref=kasurian.com) in defending China during this crucial juncture, denied Japanese attempts to woo them (even offering a Japan-backed caliphate in China), and declared a *jihad* against the invaders that helped halt the Japanese’s westward takeover.

The Hui northwest was then reshaped after the communists took over China in 1949, and the KMT escaped to set up a separate government in Taiwan (still the Republic of China). Qinghai and Ningxia resisted CCP rule in the early 1950s. Ma Qi’s son, Ma Bufang, in Qinghai, was the strongest warlord by that time. He eventually escaped to Hong Kong and became the KMT’s Saudi Arabia ambassador, dying there in 1975\. Ma Fuxiang’s son, Ma Hongkui, left for Taiwan, then Los Angeles, dying there in 1970\. Ma Anliang’s son, Ma Hongbin, in Gansu, joined the Communists and integrated his troops into the People’s Liberation Army. He was appointed governor of Gansu, where he died in 1960.

![Although the General is Fat and 56 he has plenty of energy for Sword Games  with his Troops!” Chinese Warlord Ma Hongkui, 1948 [517 x 673] :  r/HistoryPorn](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/688e075f-5e71-4e79-bd2f-5a145760b1da_197x256-jpeg.jpg)

Ma Hongkui

By 1953, the independence enjoyed by the Ma Clique warlords, along with their military dominance of the northwest, was dismantled in favour of the Communists’ pacification of the region. The CCP framed itself as liberators of the Hui, who progressively accepted their new rulers from Beijing. However, today, Muslim communities, including the Hui, face tighter state [restrictions](https://eastasiaforum.org/2024/05/13/chinas-sinicisation-campaign-puts-islamic-expression-on-the-line/?ref=kasurian.com) under Xi Jinping. Many mosques in the northwest and beyond have been forced to undergo alterations or have been destroyed.

The Ma Clique warlords helped secure Hui Muslim rule in the northwest for many decades, mostly by aligning themselves with the region’s dominant power. They presented themselves as frontier experts who could help the sovereign put down rebellions and other threats, and played a major role in preserving Chinese national cohesion, thereby securing Hui autonomy.  
  
Today, Muslims of all kinds can be found in every territory and province inside the People’s Republic of China. To varying degrees of severity, the CCP has steadily eroded their autonomous status and their rights to religious freedom and expression. That the Hui have not suffered like the Turkic Uyghurs is, in no small part, owed to the disproportionate role that the Hui have played in China’s history. How much leeway that can continue to buy them is no longer certain. If there is one lesson from the Cultural Revolution, however, it is that history is not easily erased.

---

**Author*: Steven Zhou is a writer and journalist based in Canada with an interest in Chinese and Islamic history.*

**Further Reading**

- For a broad history of the Muslims of Northwest China, see: *Familiar Strangers* by Johnathan Lipman (1997)
- For an anthropological study of Hui Muslims in China based on fieldwork, see: *Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic* by Dru C. Gladney (1996)
- For a historical analysis of the rise of warlordism in early 20th-century China, see: *The Power of the Gun* by Edward McCord (1993)
- For a fascinating history of Sufi orders and conflict among Hui Chinese, see: *History of the Soul* by Zhang Chengzhi (1991)
### Syed Naquib Al-Attas & the Rectification of Names
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/attas-rectification-names/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:20:52.000Z
In the beating heart of Kuala Lumpur lies the lush tropical green district of Bukit Tunku, the favourite dwelling of Malaysia’s ultra-elite. Amid their luxury condominiums and villas is a Moorish-style palace-fortress structure that appears to have been transposed from 15th-century Andalusia into the Malay tropics. The *International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation* (ISTAC), dubbed ‘the beacon on the crest of the hill’, is, to even an untrained eye, an architectural splendour.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/0a60c101-f7f5-4801-8e62-15edfca21e86_1600x1068-jpeg.jpg)

The grounds of ISTAC, by Sohail Nakhooda (ISTAC Illuminated)

Established in 1987, ISTAC marked the beginning of perhaps the most significant intellectual response in the Muslim world to the civilisational decay of the 20th century. It was conceived, both in concept and form, by the prolific writer and polymath, Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, who was ISTAC’s principal planner, designer, landscaper, and Founder-Director.

Al-Attas was driven by the belief that Islam would flourish as a civilisation through the ordering of meaning through language, both in its material aspects and otherwise. After all, [by one measure](https://kasurian.com/p/islamic-secular?ref=kasurian.com), the scale of a civilisation is measured in the size and complexity of its knowledge-processing functions and institutions. The [relative dearth](https://kasurian.com/p/closing-of-the-muslim-mind?ref=kasurian.com) of indigenous knowledge production in the Muslim world today demands both an explanation for how this state of affairs came to be and a response in the form of new tools, techniques, and forms of organisation that allow for the building of new knowledge-producing systems.

Al-Attas came closest to providing a systematic response to this quandary.

## The Youth of Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/be595d13-bde3-4737-89a5-5a3a7305e136_1600x1182-jpeg.jpg)

Al-Attas during the architectural planning of ISTAC

Al-Attas was born on September 5, 1931 and was, by any measure, an elite. A thirty-seventh direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, his genealogical tree spans over a millennium through the House of Ba’Alawi, a family of *sayyids* (who trace their family lineage to the Prophet) centred in the Yemeni region of Hadhramaut. Al-Attas is also affiliated with the Johore royal family through his maternal grandmother, Ruqayah Hanum, a Turkish aristocrat. His mother, Sharifah Raquan Al-‘Aydarus, hailed from Bogor, Java, and was a descendant of the Sundanese royal family through her maternal side.

As a child, Al-Attas moved between a madrasa in Java and the English school in Johore. In Johore, living with two uncles who served as Johore’s Chief Minister, he was exposed to a collection of rare Malay manuscripts and Western classics. His formative exposure to traditional Islamic sciences, Western classics, and Malay letters formed the pillars that would characterise his lifelong oeuvre.

After completing a period of military training at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, Al-Attas returned to Malaysia and enrolled as an undergraduate student at the University of Malaya. There, he published a book, “Some Aspects of Sufism as Understood and Practised Among the Malays,” which earned him a Canada Council Fellowship for an unprecedented three years of funding to study at McGill University. It was here that he became acquainted with a network of esteemed academics at the frontier of Islamic Studies, including Hamilton Gibb and A.J. Arberry from England, Toshihiko Izutsu from Japan, Seyyed Hossein Nasr from Iran, and Fazlur Rahman from Pakistan.

He then completed his PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London under the supervision of A.J. Arberry and Martin Lings. As one of the first few Malaysians to earn a doctorate, Al-Attas swiftly rose to assume the rank of Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Malaysia’s first university, the University of Malaya. In 1970, he co-founded the National University of Malaysia and shaped its Institute of Malay Language, Literature, and Culture.

## Academia and Beyond

On his return from Canada and London, and newly armed with a doctorate and an early scholarly claim, Al-Attas’ influence began to leave visible marks on Malaysian intellectual life. The academic scene of the 1960s and 1970s was a crucible of competing paradigms, each vying for the attention of a small, carefully curated cohort of intelligent, idealistic young Malaysians. In a fledgling, rapidly industrialising nation with a thin Muslim majority and delicate racial (im)balance, Al-Attas’ discourse on Islam, offering a civilisationally rich and intellectually rigorous alternative to both rigid traditionalism and modernist reform, attracted a significant following among university students already agitated by the global tides of Islamic revivalism.

Across the wider Muslim world, the late 20th century was a time of rediscovery and independence. In the Nusantara, as elsewhere, religious currents were broadly split between the Traditionalists (Kaum Tua) and the “Jadidists” (Kaum Muda). The latter, shaped by reformist trends like the Salafi and “Ikhwani” (Muslim Brotherhood) movements, were gaining sway among youth rediscovering and seeking Islam as an all-encompassing worldview.

Al-Attas offered a different route: neither a rupture with tradition nor an uncritical embrace of modernist reform, but rather a rediscovery of Islam’s civilisational depth. For some students, Al-Attas’ discourse represented a dynamic continuity of centuries-old intellectual tradition in a brave new world. Unlike the reformist-modernists of that period, Al-Attas’ creative deployment of the Islamic tradition did not constitute a rupture. He did not call for a return to the Early Generations (salaf) in a way that bypassed the millennium of accumulated, codified and institutionalised knowledge that had followed those generations. And although his high metaphysics remained accessible only to a small group of close students, sociologically, his discourse fostered a self-identity that unapologetically viewed the world through the lens of Islam, one that is thoroughly rooted in Malay culture but confidently outward-looking.

Underlying Al-Attas’ orientation was a deeper source: The view that any civilisational renewal begins with language and the conceptual architecture it sustains.

## Language, Thought, Civilisation

Where many foreground Islam’s millennial-old history through its sociopolitical and economic dimensions, Al-Attas is distinct in his emphasis on language above all, in this case the Arabic of the Quran, as the primary engine of Islam’s civilisational arc.

The clarity of Quranic Arabic is a remarkable characteristic of the Arabic language itself. Built on trilateral ‘roots,’ and governed by a disciplined semantic structure, Arabic gives each word a defined, finite, and stable conceptual range. This structure enabled Muslim lexicologists, who worked continuously for more than a thousand years, to produce precise, systematic, and scientific lexicons. This stability of meaning means that Quranic Arabic, unlike all other languages, allows objective truth to be conveyed across time and space, regardless of period, geography or circumstances.

Arabic, Al-Attas argues, was chosen to be the language of the Quran because of its inherent clarity. In contrast to the Graeco-Roman or Irano-Persian languages that dominated the region at the time of revelation, Arabic was not burdened with the baggage of mythological vocabularies. Instead, Arabic was a pristine language that could express ideas with precision. This linguistic economy enabled Islam to spread rapidly in the coming centuries, expressing an all-encompassing worldview that attracted adherents not only among Arabs and other Semites but also among Persians, Egyptians, Berbers, Europeans, Africans, Indians, Chinese, Turks, and Malays.

The nimble and precise economy of Islam’s linguistic and conceptual world proved decisive in the Nusantara, where the then-still modest Malay language was deliberately and strategically chosen as the vehicle for Islam’s spread. Unlike Old Javanese, the region’s dominant literary language, the underdeveloped Malay language was free of elaborate Hind-Buddhist terms drawn from ornate religious epics. Early proponents of Islam’s spread in the region gradually incorporated key Arabic terms into Malay, creating an interlacing network of meanings, i.e., a ‘semantic field’. This semantic field came to constitute a novel worldview. Clear prose was employed on matters of creed, and poetry was always accompanied by sober, systematic commentaries. As it did for the Arabs, Islam’s ascension marked a momentous shift in the Malay adoption of the Arabic script, transitioning from a largely oral literary tradition to a written literary culture among the Malays.

## *Din* (Religion) – *Madinah* (City) – *Tamaddun* (Civilisation)

The transition from an oral tradition to a rich, written intellectual culture reveals a deeper civilisational logic that animates the Muslim worldview. Al-Attas captures this logic in the interlaced concepts of *Din* (religion), *Madinah* (City) and *Tamaddun* (Civilisation).

In English, the word “religion” originates from the Latin word “religio,” meaning the bond between man and the gods. The English ‘religion’ reveals little about what this bond is and how it should be acted upon. Left ambiguous, it opened the door to shifting, subjective interpretations. This ambiguity has shaped the turbulent path of Western religious history. By contrast, the Qur’anic *din* – the usual translation for religion – is rooted in the trilateral D-Y-N. It is directly linked to *dayn*, or debt. Like all debts, including the greatest debt of all — the debt of life and existence bestowed on man by God—it is best discharged within an organised society equipped with law and ordinances governing debts, their disposition and the related networks of commercial life.

In other words, debts are best discharged in towns and cities. The social order is expressed in the *madinah*, derived from the verb *maddana*, from which another term of significance is also derived, *tamaddun*, or civilisation.

It was no coincidence that when the Prophet ﷺ arrived in the city of Yathrib, it was renamed *Al-Madinah*, The City. It was here that Muslims were gradually taught and learned how to fulfil their fundamental duty of existence to God. The *Hijrah*, the historic emigration to *Al-Madinah*, also marked the beginning of the Islamic calendar (*Hijri*).

Drawing on the French historian of ideas Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Al-Attas notes that the Greek *polis* (city) never became universal because it lacked the concept of a Universal God. The *madinah*, however, is founded on *din* which originates from that Primordial Covenant where mankind had collectively affirmed God’s Lordship – “Yes, indeed *we* witnessed” (*al-A’raf* (7): 172). A universal bond is thus built into *din* and *madinah*, the idea of a cosmopolis intrinsic in their unity.

For over a millennium, Muslims did not need to theorise or elucidate the connection between *din*, *madinah*, and *tamaddun* because they lived it. The man of *din* was a man of civilisation, and this relationship was not mere speculative philosophy. Even at the peak of spiritual experience, during the *Mi’raj* and his direct audience with God, the Prophet ﷺ returned to his city to continue the civilisational work of Islam. It is the Believer’s obligation, by virtue of his belief, to self-identify, think, act, and aspire at the scale of civilisation.

ISTAC was Al-Attas’ first step in embodying this system of thought in the form of an enduring institution.

## ISTAC: the Beacon on the Crest of the Hill

> “Remember that we are a people neither accustomed nor permitted to lose hope and confidence, so that it is not possible for us simply to wrangle among ourselves and rave about empty slogans and negative activism while letting the real challenge of the age engulf us without positive resistance. The real challenge is intellectual in nature, and the positive resistance must be mounted from the fortification not merely of political power, but of power that is founded upon right knowledge.”  
> — Al-Attas, in his *Islam, Secularism, and the Philosophy of the Future* (1978)

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This conceptual architecture between *din* and *tamaddun* demanded an institutional expression, and it soon met with the politics of those attempting similar projects.

After the First World War, the old transnational networks of Muslim elites [were abruptly dismembered](https://kasurian.com/p/closing-of-the-muslim-mind?ref=kasurian.com), taking with them the power, patronage, and high culture crucial for the production of knowledge. Into this vacuum, the Islamic revivalist movements of the late 20th century prioritised mass mobilisation. Their aim was pragmatic: to win electoral power through democratic means and implement *sharia* via the nation-state.

Al-Attas rejected this *zeitgeist*, arguing against the reductive sloganeering of *sharia* into mere jurisprudence. Any genuine civilisational revival had to begin at the level of knowledge, and inside its most decisive institution: the university.

The university traced its origins to medieval times, revealing parallels with the Islamic learning institutions of that era, such as the *bayt al-hikmah* (library), the Sufi *zawiyah* (lodges), and the *madrasah* (colleges). For Al-Attas, these institutions, physically centred around the mosque, reflect the proper hierarchy of knowledge – a circle with the knowledge of the universals (i.e., devotional sciences, astronomy) at its epicentre, from which expands other knowledge of particular benefits (i.e., medicine) to man and society, with respect to his anatomical faculty. Civilisational renewal required restoring that Centre and the teleology it carried.

Al-Attas presented this argument at the First World Conference on Muslim Education, held in Mecca in 1977\. He entrusted Ismail R. Al-Faruqi, a Palestinian-American Muslim scholar with rare expertise in Christian ethics and comparative religion studies, with a manuscript containing his conceptualisation of the Islamic university, which he intended to publish as a book. This exchange would later prove consequential.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/511d7805-6d1c-4e4f-b255-2cf3cd51a6f7_608x764-jpeg.jpg)

Ismail Al-Faruqi, founder of IIIT

The friendship between Al-Attas and Al-Faruqi blossomed in the early 1960s. In 1974, Al-Attas invited Al-Faruqi to Malaysia for a series of lectures and introduced him to local Muslim intellectuals, including one Anwar Ibrahim, the President of *Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia*, or the ‘Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement’ (ABIM). Al-Faruqi later hosted Al-Attas at Temple University as a Visiting Professor and arranged for him to keynote a major symposium of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. The lecture was widely lauded. Al-Faruqi even wrote to say Al-Attas had become “the raison d’être” of the organisation:

> “Your colleagues, members of the Executive Board and the large number of fellow Muslims asked to comment on your performance at the convention–all were proud of you…You *are* the AMSS. Your performance, i.e., your stimulation of Islamic thinking and your contribution to the legacy of thought, is its *raison d’être* and end. I hope this realisation has dawned upon you with the same bright intensity with which it did upon the AMSS Executive Boards of the last five years.”

However, cracks in their relationship soon began to appear. At Al-Faruqi’s request, Al-Attas wrote a 40,000-word manuscript, “Dialogue with Secularism”, and submitted it to Al-Faruqi for publication. Al-Attas’s inquiries about its fate went unanswered. He began to believe his ideas were circulating without attribution and in “vulgar forms.” Al-Attas soon published it as part of his seminal work, *Islam, Secularism, and the Philosophy of the Future*, under ABIM’s publication, where he also issued a pointed warning in the preface about the damage done “by plagiarists and pretenders.”

The intellectual fallout was fundamental, revealing not only a breach of personal trust but a deep fracture in his vision versus Al-Faruqi’s, for whom the Islamisation of knowledge in concrete terms meant “to Islamise the disciplines, or better, to produce university-level textbooks recasting twenty disciplines in accordance with Islamic visions.” Essentially, Al-Faruqi wanted to rewrite modern disciplines into “Islamic” textbooks.

Al-Attas believed this was superficial. For him, knowledge rests on vocabulary, and without rectifying the key terms that shape the Muslim worldview, ‘Islamisation’ would collapse into textbooks padded with Quranic quotations but stripped of conceptual integrity. Without reorienting the very structure of the university to reflect man in his entirety, or reinstating the various disciplines of knowledge back into their proper hierarchy, the confusion and error in knowledge beleaguering the Muslim mind will not be rectified, posing a stumbling block for frontier knowledge production.

The divide soon took institutional form. In 1982, at the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) meeting between Muslim heads of state, Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamed, proposed an international university dedicated to the integration of knowledge. Although modern universities in Muslim countries have long offered both religious and ‘secular’ sciences, what was new with Mahathir’s suggestion was that this new university was to be explicitly founded with the idea of ‘integration’ of knowledge. It was clear that this would be predicated on Al-Faruqi's exposition in his book, *Islamisation of Knowledge*, a term that, for Al-Attas, was misappropriated from his original work.

Backed by eight Muslim countries, the *International Islamic University of Malaysia* (IIUM) was established the following year. Al-Faruqi’s prominent role as the co-founder of the globally influential, US-based *International Institute of Islamic Thought* (IIIT) and his close relationship with Mahathir meant that the IIUM, despite being based in Al-Attas’ native country, would reflect Al-Faruqi’s conceptualisation more closely than that of Al-Attas.

However, in 1987, Al-Attas received the closest thing to a *carte blanche* to actualise his own vision. His long cultivation of students and young intellectuals had borne unexpected fruit: Anwar Ibrahim, once President of ABIM and perhaps Al-Attas’ most famed protégé, had rapidly risen in Malaysian politics. At its peak, ABIM, steered by the charismatic Anwar (whose influence led to ABIM being called the *Anwar Bin Ibrahim Movement* in jest), rode the wave of global Islamic revivalism and the rise of a new Malay Muslim middle class created by affirmative-action policies. Together, these forces made ABIM more influential in shaping public discourse.

When Anwar decided to join the ruling party led by Mahathir in 1982, one of the most significant political unions in Malaysian history was forged —a union initially brokered by Al-Faruqi. Once inside the establishment, Anwar used his successive ministerial positions to advance a broad Islamisation agenda, from developing an Islamic finance sector to embedding Islam in the state bureaucracy and education system. After becoming Minister of Education in 1986, he moved to establish ISTAC with Al-Attas as its Founder-Director. Although ISTAC was not technically a full, standalone university, it would operate as an autonomous institute under the IIUM.

ISTAC’s groundbreaking ceremony took place on a Friday, 22 February 1990, in honour of the Prophet’s Ascension, the *Mi’raj*. Al-Attas, despite receiving no formal training in architecture, shaped virtually every aspect of ISTAC’s material construction. *ISTAC Illuminated: A Pictorial Tour* makes this unmistakable, showcasing Al-Attas’ own sketches, from the *muqarnas* suspended from the ceiling to the fountain bowl in the main courtyard. Through Al-Attas’ eye, one sees the vision of the high culture of Islamic civilisation that he hoped to revive, with ISTAC at its epicentre.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/55b00062-5ea1-4442-964d-7ad1d7c546c5_1600x1068-jpeg.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/0acdb664-c62c-4361-aaf5-0c80b9ffcbd0_1600x1068-jpeg.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/7efcdb7e-a5ff-4e18-b7b6-b9fd5f23a402_1600x1068-jpeg.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/d387b106-e2b8-4d00-8819-31cda49bfbf6_1200x1600-jpeg.jpg)

The grounds of ISTAC, taken by Sohail Nakhooda (ISTAC Illuminated)

In 1997, just a decade after ISTAC’s establishment, Malaysia was jolted by the sacking of Anwar, then Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. The two highest-ranking officers in Malaysia’s government, Mahathir and his deputy Anwar, had a fallout over the handling of the Asian Financial Crisis. Anwar favoured fiscal discipline to calm capital markets, whereas Mahathir preferred strong fiscal support and decisive capital control to shun speculators. What began as a technocratic disagreement soon turned into personal bitterness – a clash that still casts its shadow over the country to this day. On September 20, 1998, Anwar Ibrahim was arrested under the Internal Security Act.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/d8b519ab-5097-4bae-acc4-f0d5a8260dfe_1154x768-jpeg.jpg)

A relatively young Anwar Ibrahim (left) and Mahathir Mohamad (right), **Asia Sentinel*

While the rest of Malaysia grappled with the fallout from Mahathir and Anwar’s impact on Malaysia’s politics and economy, Al-Attas’ rivals in academia and government, who had long envied Al-Attas’ ostensibly privileged position within the administration, began to orchestrate their own coup. Anwar’s incarceration was soon followed by a clean wipeout of his supporters from key positions. Al-Attas was not spared. Mahathir, who was the first Prime Minister to not have come from an aristocratic background and who was also ideologically more aligned with the modernist tendencies of Al-Faruqi, felt no sympathy for Al-Attas or his cause. In 2002, Al-Attas was expelled from ISTAC, and the institution lost its autonomous status.

In a mere decade, ISTAC, notwithstanding its strict curation of students, had produced graduates including Ibrahim Kalin, the current Director of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation, and Mustafa Ceric, the former Grand Mufti of Bosnia. ISTAC had produced critical monographs on the elemental, immaterial building blocks of Islamic civilisation – such as the concept of education, the philosophy of science, and the psychology of the human soul – which were translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, and Bosnian. It had attracted prominent admirers, including Annemarie Schimmel, Syed Hossein Nasr, Javed Iqbal, and a young Hamza Yusuf, who went on to found Zaytuna College in the US.

## Reflections and Lessons for the 21st Century

Al-Attas’ lifelong oeuvre, including but extending beyond ISTAC, leaves much to be reflected on. His *din-madinah-tamaddun* framing sought liberation from the contemporary secular taxonomy of religion, affirming Islam as simultaneously a religion and a civilisation. Islam is deeply personal, metaphysical, and psychological; Islam is thoroughly social, cultural, and civilisational. Islam centres around the sacred; Islam extends to the profane. Muslims cannot seriously proclaim to be Muslims without aspiring to affect positive change in urban life, and on the frontier, universal issues facing humanity.

Because our *din*, the bond of debt between God and man, is based on that Primordial Covenant which we collectively undertook, whether one chooses to submit to it or otherwise, it is incumbent on Muslims, who do believe that the Covenant did indeed take place, to contribute to solving issues facing humanity writ large. Moral and material issues facing humanity – such as ecological rupture, demographic shifts, the mental health epidemic, and gaping inequality in the face of unprecedented abundance – ought to be at the front and centre of Muslims’ discourse.

To achieve this, Muslims must understand not just the intellectual genesis and cultural values underpinning this milieu (which Al-Attas had elucidated in his *Islam and Secularism*), but also the material realities that have dislodged and radically altered the world in the past three centuries. In a world that has never been more interconnected, Muslim thinkers and institutions at the forefront of knowledge production ought to have a profound understanding of the base layer shaping the world – for example, the infrastructure of the world’s energy and financial systems, industrial production, trade, geopolitics, demographic shifts, and ecological limits.

Frontier thinkers cannot afford to be confined within the silo of Islamic Studies. Al-Attas’ ‘Islamisation of knowledge’ project was not meant to make Muslims tribal and provincial. To reduce Al-Attas’ ideas into pointers for the finer details of theological disputes or political quibbles, by paraphrasing Al-Attas without substantive contextualisation of his ideas, is to render great injustice to his legacy.

To propel Muslims who are still “floundering in a sea of bewilderment and self-doubt”, Al-Attas equipped us with the confidence in our vocabularies, reinterpreted in light of our present circumstances, yet firmly rooted in Revelation, for us to be able to look outside and sieve, re-sieve, and thus *receive* the best from what others have to offer – to venture with curiosity and conviction.

Beyond his corpus, at an institutional level, Al-Attas’ strategy also offers lessons for any 21st-century attempt at civilisational revival. Ahead of his time, he identified the frontier of knowledge-producing institutions as a key priority for civilisational revival. Yet, Al-Attas also conceded that the operationalisation of the Islamic university that he conceptualised would inevitably be experimental, requiring rigorous trials and correction of errors. One must adopt a *longue durée* view of civilisational change in solving a problem of this magnitude.

Al-Attas’ conceptualisation of an Islamic university seeks to restore the university’s abiding centre as reflected by the individual self, which would hold together the unity of knowledge and make clear the final aim of its pursuits. Specialisations that occur in this setting will reflect these values. That said, it is now starkly clear that what differentiates the past three centuries was not just niche innovations at the frontier of knowledge. The systematic application of these innovations in the manipulation of nature and society at an industrial scale has increasingly entrenched us in what Marshall Hodgson calls a ‘technicalistic’ society.

Even in the optimistic event that an Islamic university, in the sense Al-Attas envisioned, is established to reinstate the proper hierarchy of knowledge, Muslims can only pragmatically affect change at the level of humanity if this worldview is actualised materially on a greater scale.

What forms of institutional arrangements must Muslims imagine to achieve this? How do we fund, sustain, and scale these institutions? Should we still rely on the apparatus of the nation-state in the way that ISTAC did? Should visionaries such as Al-Attas be given a position in government, similar to Wang Huning in the Chinese government, to ensure the vision endures? Should we instead reinvigorate that lost transnational network of elite Muslims? If so, what institutions are needed to recreate a respectable high culture such that Muslim elites are willing to band together? These are tough questions with no easy answers, but they are certainly crucial for any serious 21st-century attempt at civilisational revival.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/1ffd7fc6-f4ea-4524-90f2-e0551ba0b1f6_1246x836.png)

[RZS CASIS](https://humanities.utm.my/casis/?ref=kasurian.com)

Al-Attas is now 94 years old, having published what was probably his last book, *Islam: the Covenants Fulfilled*, two years prior. While no single person could be expected to provide a panacea for our predicament, Al-Attas undoubtedly paved the path forward.

> “They are like torches that light the way along difficult paths; when we have such torches to light our way, of what use are mere candles?”

---

**Author*: Muhammad Bin Abdul Majid served as a policy economist in the Malaysian federal government before pivoting into strategy at one of Southeast Asia’s leading tech firms. He is based in Kuala Lumpur.*

**Further Reading:**

- *Islam, Secularism, and the Philosophy of the Future,* Syed Muhammad NaquibAl-Attas
- *The Concept of Education,* Syed Muhammad NaquibAl-Attas
- *Islam: The Covenants Fulfilled,* Syed Muhammad NaquibAl-Attas
- *Preliminary Statement on a General Theory of the Islamization of the Malay Archipelago,* Syed Muhammad NaquibAl-Attas
- *ISTAC Illuminated: A Pictorial Tour*, Sharifah Shifa Al-Attas
- *The* *Origins of Malay Nationalism,* William Roff
- *Islamic Revivalism in Malaysia: Dakwah among the Students*, Zainah Anwar
- *The Educational Philosophy and Practice of Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas: An Exposition of the Original Concept of Islamization*, Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud
- *Islamization of Knowledge*, Ismail Al-Faruqi and Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman
### Is Modern Islamic Art Even Possible?
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/modern-islamic-art-possible/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:23:33.000Z
On April 30, 2025, Sotheby’s London closed bidding on several pieces of Islamic art. Among them: a 17th-century Quran leaf in Hijazi script, a Malik-era Quran, and a line of calligraphy from a Quran so immense in size that it required a barrow to transport. Each was sold to the highest bidder.

Every year, Sotheby’s auctions exquisite Islamic art, objects that are breathtaking in their historical vibrancy. Yet, the auction exiles them, consigning Islam’s beauty to appraisal, acquisition, and anachronistic display. The result is a sense of spiritual vacancy.

Is the purpose of art to end up at a Sotheby’s auction, to be picked out and consigned to the basement of some mere collector? And how do we produce new art, anyway, that is not subject to the vulgar commoditisation of our era?

This question is not about the art market, which is both inevitable and necessary. Rather, this question is about whether Islamic art can orient itself towards the divine in a world that has lost the metaphysical ground that once made such orientation possible.

To answer this question—to know whether Islamic art is still possible—we must first understand what made it possible in the first place, and what we lost, when, and how. Without a genealogy, we risk remaining trapped in imitation, reproducing forms from another world, while remaining blind to our own.

## The Copernican Turn

> *The seasons are no longer what they once were,* 
> *But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,* 
> *As they happen along…*  
> – John Ashbery

Nearly 500 years ago, the Copernican revolution altered our understanding of the cosmos, unsettling a millennium-old belief: the earth was not the centre of the universe. Yet, although the sun neither rises nor sets – we merely spin toward and away from it – we have nonetheless retained the language of our pre-heliocentric tradition. We have not ceased to speak of the “sunrise” and the “sunset.”

The characteristics of the pre-Copernican world are found not in its view on the earth’s orientation to the sun, but rather in its view on man’s orientation in, and to, the cosmos.

First, the pre-heliocentric man lived in a world that was not merely physical but also intelligible—where visible things were signs of invisible realities. The sensible world was a mirror of the absolute; beauty in nature was not self-contained but pointed beyond itself, toward divine Beauty. To perceive the world, then, was to participate in a higher order of truth that animated all being.

Plato’s description of beauty reflects this pre-heliocentric view:

> *…but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever–growing and perishing beauties of all other things.* (Symposium)

The second feature of this worldview was teleology: everything had a purpose and tended toward its proper end. The soul sought God, beauty sought Beauty, and art sought to make the eternal present. Art, in this sense, was not self-expression but participation in a sacred order.

These two features—participation and teleology—were inseparable. One could only move toward what one could also apprehend. When participation in the absolute became philosophically impossible, teleology lost its ground.

This collapse unfolded gradually. René Descartes turned inward, locating certainty within the thinking subject rather than in the cosmos. Immanuel Kant completed the rupture: he denied that man could know things as they truly are. What we perceive, he argued, are appearances structured by the mind itself, not the reality of things in themselves. The world was no longer a window to the divine but a closed surface reflecting back our own reason.

Kant’s revolution altered not only our epistemology but also our aesthetics. Before Kant, beauty was considered an objective quality inherent in things themselves; it was seen as a reflection of divine perfection. As Plato wrote, art imitates nature without sinning against it. Indeed, for centuries, art – whether in the Christian West or the Islamic East – had been understood as imitation (*mimesis*) of divine realities. The artist was not the master of what he produced, as Henri Matisse would later claim, but a craftsman working within a tradition that provided both form and meaning. Art reminded rather than invented; it served contemplation rather than self-expression.

As for the observer, works of art were reminders. In other words, in the medieval world, works of art served as a means of supporting contemplation.

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in *On the Genealogy of Morals*, observed that Kant honoured art by granting it the predicates of knowledge–universality and impersonality. Yet in doing so, Kant subtly shifted the focus from the artist’s imitation of divine order to the spectator’s disinterested contemplation. The Romantics then reversed the relationship altogether, placing authenticity and individual expression at the centre of artistic value.

## Islamic Art & Civilisation

Traditionally, Islamic art operated within this medieval understanding. Art was primarily produced to communicate a gnosis and serve a purpose. At that time, both the artist and the craftsman, still united, their divorce relatively recent and paralleling the divorce between “art” and “science,” possessed knowledge and intentionally contributed to their vernacular. Formerly, every artist who produced an object was a ‘craftsman’ and every discipline which demanded not only theoretical knowledge but also practical ability was an ‘art.’

As art is by definition an exteriorisation, Islamic art’s content reflects, in its own fashion, what is most inward in its civilisation: beauty itself as a divine quality. Titus Burckhardt articulates this:

The substance of art is beauty; and this in Islamic terms, is a divine quality and as such has double aspect: in the world, it is appearance, it is the garb which as it were, clothes beautiful beings and beautiful things; in God however, or in itself, it is pure inward beatitude; it is the divine quality which among all the divine qualities manifested in the world, most directly recalls pure beings.

This substance was articulated in two separate but complementary forms. First, the scholarly class’ articulation, whose deep understanding of the tradition would assist them in developing specific disciplines, such as *ilm al-jamāl*. The term *ilm al-jamāl* betrays its distinct modern coinage: for the ancients, aesthetics could never be conceived of as a standalone subject— its content was embedded throughout any form of actualisation, as a derivative of metaphysics or scattered across the marginalia. Beauty, in its realisation, is inextricable from knowledge. Aesthetics, together with true knowledge and being, is fundamentally anchored in the divine in the Islamic tradition. Thus, beauty as theorised was indistinguishable from beauty as concretised through the creation of physical cultural artefacts.

As for the Platonic view, God is identified as the Beautiful, the Good, and Being.

> Verily, God is Beautiful and He loves Beauty

God’s beauty is manifested both in the seen and the unseen. To witness these manifestations, the Ishmaelite must turn towards God. For by this turn, one may discover that all of creation is in a state of worship. Perfection (*ihsān)* is described as:

> worshipping Allah as if you see him (even if you do not see Him)

An aesthetic reading of the aforementioned narration demonstrates that higher stages of beauty are only accessible by becoming more beautiful, expressed through worship. Formulated as a contradistinction,

> The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but falsehood. (Alija Izetbegovic)

For most, however, the silent theology imbued in Islamic civilisation proves to be more alluring and persuasive than its most rigorous treatises on theological minutiae. As Oludamini Ogunnaike wrote in *Renovatio*, between Cairo’s Al-Tulun Mosque and Al-Azhar, the former exhibits an attraction for the masses that the latter lacks. Nevertheless, Ogunnaike shows, the two are embodiments of Islamic art as a spectrum.

The twofold miracle of Islamic art is that it makes the divine truth and the truths of revelation present and tangible to us, while imbuing our surroundings with the beauty of divine truth. In a certain sense, *jalāl* (divine majesty and rigour) corresponds to the pole of truth, while *jamāl* (divine beauty) corresponds to that of presence.

Islamic art could promise a uniquely ritualistic form that centred both on the truth and the presence of divine reality. But in a world where the importance of ritual was declining, its power inevitably faded.

## Renaissance, Hegel & the Romantics

With the Renaissance, an epoch in which Albert Hirschman writes that passions were replaced by interest, the subservience of art to the Church became challenged by the nobility, eager to rival the Church’s monopoly on the production of knowledge and aesthetics. As Walter Benjamin argues, art remained ritualistic, but rather than a religious cult and the worship of the Go(o)d, it served beauty. With the advent of the mechanical age, art became an end *an sich*: *l’art pour l’art, pas pour Dieu*.

Art as a discipline matured and differentiated itself from other fields. Gone was the time when the artist was bound, in immediate identity, to faith and to the conceptions of his world; no longer was the work of art founded in the unity of the artist’s subjectivity with the work’s content in such a way that the spectator may immediately find in it the highest truth of his consciousness, that is, the divine. In the Romantic understanding of art, the artist’s work would be informed by himself: the ability to produce a truly individual and unique work of art was its highest form. Celebrated by some, it was equally decried by others:

> *Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter,* 
> *Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.* 
> *Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten,* 
> *Nur zu Zeiten erträgt göttliche Fülle der Mensch.* 
> *Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben*  
> **(Translation of the above)**  
> *But we have come too late, my friend. It is true that the gods are still alive,* 
> *but up there above our heads in another world.* 
> *There they are endlessly active and seem to care little whether we are alive,* 
> *so much do the heavenly spare us.* 
> *For a weak vessel cannot always contain them,* 
> *man can only support divine plenty from time to time.* 
> *Life henceforward is a dream of them.*  
> (*Holderlin, Bread and Wine.* Translation by Leonard Forster).

Hegel observed in the early 1800s that works of art no longer satisfied the soul’s spiritual needs as it had done in earlier times, because our tendency toward reflection and critique was so strong that when we were before a work of art we no longer attempted to penetrate its innermost vitality, identifying ourselves with it, but rather attempted to represent it to ourselves according to the critical framework furnished by the aesthetic judgment. By the turn of the twentieth century, this critical framework would completely replace the aesthetic narrative templates of organised religion.

## Modernism

> *Turning and turning in the widening gyre* 
> *The falcon cannot hear the falconer;* 
> *Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;*  
> (*Yeats, The Second Coming.*)

> *O Sleepless as the river under thee,* 
> *Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,* 
> *Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend* 
> *And of the curveship lend a myth to God.* 
> *(Crane, The Bridge.)*

> *Dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt,* 
> *Und viel zu grauenvoll, als daß man klage:* 
> *Daß alles gleitet und vorüberrinnt*  
> **(Translation of the above)**  
> *This is a thing that no one ever fully grasps,* 
> *And much too dreadful to lament about:* 
> *That everything is gliding and flowing by us*  
> (*Hofmannsthal, On Transitoriness, in Terza Rima.* Translation by Leonard Forster)

As creative genius replaced the narrative template provided by organised religion, mass emancipation came to discard the privileged role of the artist. In a mass democratic society, much like political parties, groups of people could form their own narrative templates and promote them with manifestos. In the early 20th century, narratives were conjured and promulgated through manifestos: philosophy entered art, and each art theory was buttressed by a linear philosophy of history whereby its current state is the end state.

In the age of the masses, the distinction between author and audience collapsed. Everyone could now produce and consume art simultaneously. The work of art was no longer an object of contemplation but an endless mirror reflecting collective desire. The public became both creator and critic – attentive yet absent-minded. With countless competing narratives, the grand narrative that once unified art and truth dissolved. What was once an imitation of divine order became ideology through manifestos, and eventually, mere self-reference – the post-historical condition of art that asks only: *what counts as art at all?*

Alongside the emancipation of the masses, technology caused a seismic shift. Where emancipation has made art accessible for all, technology has made it producible by all, surpassing the capacity of the painter’s craftsmanship. For Arthur Danto, this is the end of painting as an exclusive vehicle. As every individual can create their own narrative with sufficient political support or through democratisation, grand narratives *tout court* do not exist. The sense in which everything is possible is that in which there are no a priori constraints on what a work of visual art can look like, so that anything visible can be a visual work. That is a part of what it really means to live at the end of art history.

Artistically, AI does not provide anything unique whatsoever to an artist: fundamentally, it erodes the division between artist and observer even more by offering even the unwilling an outlet for production. The heralded march of AI is nothing more than Paul Valéry’s conquest of ubiquity, further eroding the importance of authenticity.

The conquest of ubiquity dismantles the traditional forms of art in the Islamic world. The discontinuity of tradition severs the cord between the old and the new, except for generating a colossal archive of the past consisting of nothing more than relics of a bygone world. Many of these forms remain in place, but are now largely *irrelevant*. While Plato considered banning poets from entering the city because of their ability to undermine self-mastery, and the Quran warns the Prophet ﷺ of their role in leading people astray, any Islamic art has been reduced to a testament of the past. Thus, the undercurrent of impotence that permeates contemporary Islamic art scenes.

As Maurice Blanchot notes, art *tout court* is no longer able to satisfy the need for the absolute, relegated within us. It has lost its reality and necessity. Although our nostalgia for the absolute is ever-present, any attempt to resurrect its circumstances will be futile. Even an art form that presents a fusion of the traditional and the contemporary, whether through Sadequian Naqqash’s attempts within the *Huruffiya* movement or the use of generative AI as a source of inspiration, will have to contend with this reality.

To make Islamic art that does not end up in a Sotheby’s auction is, as such, not to withdraw from the modern world but to **reclaim orientation within it**. The auction is not merely a market—it is the symbol of art’s dislocation from worship, the loss of its context and purpose. Islamic art must therefore learn to inhabit new forms, even digital ones, without surrendering its metaphysical axis. Whether carved in stone or generated by code, its worth lies not in its rarity but in its remembrance. The task is not to replicate the past but to restore presence—to make again for God, not for display. What is made in remembrance cannot be sold, only witnessed.

> *Wherever you turn, you face God.* 
> *God is Beautiful, He Loves the Beautiful.*

---

**Words*: Burak Ömer is a financial markets professional based in Belgium. He previously studied applied mathematics & philosophy and is currently pursuing classical Islamic studies.*

**Further Reading**

- *On the Genealogy of Morals,* Friedrich Nietzsche
- *After The End of Art,* Arthur Danto
- [*The Silent Theology of Islamic Art*](https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-silent-theology-of-islamic-art?ref=kasurian.com), Oludamini Ogunnaike
- *Art of Islam: Language and Meaning,* Titus Burckhardt
- *The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,* Walter Benjamin
- *Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art,* Ananda Coomaraswamy
- *The Conquest of Ubiquity,* Paul Valéry
- *The Passions and The Interests,* Albert O. Hirschman
- *The Space of Literature,* Maurice Blanchot
### The Closing of the Muslim Mind
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/closing-of-the-muslim-mind/
Last updated: 2026-08-02T12:18:52.000Z
In the first half of the 20th century, Islamic civilisation was obliterated. This was not the standard process of entropy that afflicts all human societies, but rather the result of several violent decades that dismembered the entire infrastructure of Islamic civilisation between 1918 and 1947.

Today, when you walk through any of the Muslim world’s great cities, be it Istanbul, Riyadh, or Kuala Lumpur, you will find universities, publishing houses, research centres, and religious institutions; the outward forms of intellectual life. Yet something is not quite right. The form exists as an outward manifestation of the desire to produce knowledge, but its substance is wanting at best, as evidenced by low rates of production in terms of published scientific papers, very few rewards (if any) for innovation (such as Nobel Prizes), and a lack of serious urban agglomerations for knowledge, science, and industry.

The capacity to generate new ideas, to process complexity, to build institutions that compound knowledge across generations has atrophied to the point of near extinction. Today, Muslims and their venerated institutions debate the same questions, in the same language, that our forefathers debated a century ago. The discourse has not evolved; if anything, it appears to have regressed, each generation receiving a progressively degraded copy of ideas first articulated in the ‘short 19th century’, a time of great potential amidst accelerating ruin – also forgotten in popular memory. Discourses on *sharia*, Islam, and the modern state, as well as secularism, European philosophy, and its relationship to Islamic philosophy, among other subjects, have largely been inherited from this period and have made few, if any, notable advances over the past century.

Stagnation and crisis are ill-fitting words to describe our current state of affairs. What we suffer from is amnesia masquerading as tradition–a collective forgetting so absolute that we no longer remember what we have lost, or even that we have lost it.

Standard explanations and narratives fail to account for the totality of this rupture. We speak of colonialism, of Western imperialism, of the corruption of leaders or the backwardness of the masses. All true enough, but insufficient and abstract.

Between 1918 and 1947, Islamic civilisation suffered three cataclysmic events that systematically destroyed the institutional, social, and intellectual infrastructure required for a complex civilisation to function: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after 1914; the rise of Communism after 1917 across the Muslim territories of the Russian Empire and its misbegotten progeny further afield in regions like the Balkans; and the Partition of India in 1947.

Each event severed networks that had taken centuries to cultivate. Each event displaced or destroyed entire classes, such as the Ottoman governing elite, the Tatar Muslim intelligentsia, and the Indo-Muslim aristocracy, all of whose patronage and participation were essential to the production and maintenance of knowledge and culture. In each event, refugee states were born in a state of existential crisis. Mere survival became the highest aspiration, and we became incapable of pursuing long-term thinking and development required to build institutions.

Finally, and perhaps the least understood, is that each of these three events compounded the others, ensuring that no safe harbour remained where the work of industrialising and developing on our own terms, haltingly begun in the 19th century, could continue.

These three catastrophes were not only the destruction of individual cultures and countries, but together became the piecemeal dismemberment of Islamic civilisation. Understanding this destruction is the necessary first step toward any genuine renewal. For what could not survive the 20th century will not survive the 21st, and we can build nothing new without first reckoning with what was lost.

## The Ottoman Dissolution

The Ottoman Empire’s final decades were a protracted agony. The 1838 Treaty of Balta Liman had already gutted the empire’s capacity for economic self-determination, imposing “free trade” that ensured Ottoman manufactures could not compete with British industrial output. However, it was the empire’s territorial disintegration, particularly in the Balkans, that proved most devastating, not necessarily because of lost land, but because of what happened to the people who lived there. Buildings can be rebuilt and farms resown, but once a people are dispersed, a culture is consigned to ruin forever.

The Balkan Wars and their aftermath saw one of modern history’s forgotten genocides. Between 1870 and 1923, Ottoman Muslims of various ethnicities across the Balkans, in Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, and beyond, were subjected to systematic ethno-religious cleansing. Millions fled or were killed. Those who survived became *muhajir*, with the refugees flooding into a shrinking Anatolian core. By 1923, one-third of the newly-founded Turkish Republic’s population consisted of displaced Muslims from the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Crimea. This catastrophe is often reduced to a mere statistic, but the *muhajirs* were scholars, artisans, merchants, and landowners; the very classes that sustained society and its cultural and intellectual production. Their displacement resulted in the destruction of businesses, the severing of patronage networks, the silencing of printing presses, and the abandonment of libraries. An entire world of knowing and being was eviscerated and subsequently banished from popular memory out of sheer trauma.

The Ottoman response to European pressure in the 19th century had been halting, but it gained momentum throughout the end of that century. Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals experimented with the *Tanzimat* reforms, the establishment of modern schools and universities, and the development of an Ottoman Turkish press. These efforts were a genuine attempt to negotiate the emergence of industrial civilisation on Islamic terms. Figures such as Said Halim Pasha and Mehmet Akif Ersoy, writing in journals like *Sebilürreşad*, articulated visions of Islamic philosophy, law, and governance that sought to indigenise modern developments in Europe. The Young Ottomans and later Young Turks, whatever their failures, represented a living debate about the future of Islamic civilisation.

The First World War annihilated these possibilities. The Arab provinces were carved up between British and French mandates. Anatolia itself nearly followed, saved only by the numerous heroes of Türkiye’s War of Independence. But the price of Turkish survival was the abandonment of its past. Kemal’s secular revolution deliberately severed the new Turkish Republic from its Ottoman past, abolishing the caliphate in 1924, replacing Arabic script with Latin in 1927, and systematically suppressing the religious and cultural institutions that had sustained Ottoman civilisation–all to ensure a clean break with the past.

The loss was not confined to Türkiye. With the Ottoman centre gone, Muslim elites across the former empire found themselves adrift. In the Arab world, the mandates imposed colonial structures that elevated compradors and marginalised traditional elites. In the Balkans, the remaining Muslim populations were reduced to minority status under hostile Christian nation-states. The transnational networks that had once connected statesmen, merchants, intellectuals, and scholars from Cairo to Damascus to Istanbul to Sarajevo were shattered beyond repair.

It was a cruel fate that the Ottoman collapse occurred just as Islamic civilisation’s cultural and intellectual production was gaining momentum. The short 19th century’s achievements–printing presses, journals, and transnational networks–were liquidated. No successor state inherited or could rebuild this infrastructure. The *Nahda* would continue in a diminished form in Cairo and Beirut, but without the institutional depth and patronage networks that the Ottoman system had provided.

## The Rise of Communism

While the Ottoman Empire collapsed from external pressure and internal exhaustion, the Muslim communities of the Russian Empire faced a different horror: systematic ideological destruction. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 inaugurated seven decades of deliberate cultural annihilation that sought to erase Islam as a living civilisation across the vast expanse from Crimea to Central Asia.

Before 1917, Muslim Russia was undergoing [its own intellectual awakening](https://kasurian.com/p/jadid-reform?ref=kasurian.com). The Jadid movement, born in Crimea and spreading across the Tatar-speaking world into Central Asia, represented a sophisticated effort to create a modern Muslim culture. Intellectuals like Ismail Gaspıralı advocated educational reform, the modernisation of Islamic schools, the adoption of scientific knowledge, and the development of a vernacular Muslim press. By the early 20th century, dozens of Jadid schools operated across the region, Tatar-language journals flourished, and a network of Muslim intellectuals connected Kazan, Bakhchisaray, Samarkand, and Bukhara, extending their influence into the Ottoman and Indo-Islamic worlds.

The Jadids were not secularists imitating the West. They were reform-minded Muslims attempting to reconcile Islamic learning with modern knowledge, creating institutions that could produce Muslims capable of functioning in an industrial age. Their project paralleled and often intersected with Ottoman and Egyptian reformism, forming part of a broader pan-Islamic intellectual moment.

The rise of the Bolsheviks utterly destroyed this. Initially, there was a brief window of hope. Some Jadids, like Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, believed socialism might accommodate Muslim aspirations for self-determination and modernisation. They were swiftly disabused of such notions. By the mid-1920s, Josef Stalin’s consolidation of power brought a campaign of terror against Muslim intellectuals and institutions. The Jadid schools were closed. Islamic endowments (waqf) were confiscated. The Arabic script was first replaced with Latin, then with Cyrillic, severing new generations from their literary heritage. Mosques were demolished or converted to warehouses. The ulema, who had resisted the Jadid movement’s call for reforms, were imprisoned or executed.

The destruction ran deeper than political and ideological repression. Communist ideology demanded the eradication of religion as a category of human experience. Where Western colonial powers might allow Islam to persist as personal faith whilst neutering its political expression, Communism sought to extinguish even private belief. Children were raised in state institutions designed to produce atheist citizens. Islamic scholarship became impossible, not merely discouraged but expressly criminalised. The networks connecting Tatar Muslim intellectuals across Eurasia were severed. By the 1950s, entire generations had grown up knowing nothing of the Islamic intellectual tradition that had flourished just decades earlier.

The consequences extended beyond Soviet borders. Tatar Muslims had played a crucial role in connecting the Ottoman, Persian, and Indian intellectual worlds. Their journals circulated from Istanbul to Calcutta. Their scholars studied in Cairo and Bukhara, taught in Kazan and Kashgar. When Soviet repression closed this northern tier of Islamic civilisation, it isolated the Muslim heartlands from each other, interrupting exchanges that had sustained intellectual vitality for centuries.

Albania’s fate exemplified the totality of Communist destruction in Muslim Europe. Once [the most influential corner](https://kasurian.com/p/destruction-islam-european-elite?ref=kasurian.com) of the Muslim Balkans, Albania underwent the most extreme anti-religious campaign in Communist history. By the 1960s, Enver Hoxha’s regime had declared Albania the world’s first atheist state. Every mosque and tekke was closed. The Muslim landowning class, which had sustained Sufi orders and Islamic learning, was liquidated. Within two generations, a civilisation that had produced Muslim scholars, poets, and statesmen for five centuries was reduced to fantastical memories whispered in the dark.

The Communist assault succeeded where colonialism had only partially damaged Islamic civilisation. Colonial powers, however exploitative, generally permitted the continued existence of Islamic institutions in some form. They might control them, tax them, or marginalise them, but they rarely attempted wholesale eradication. Communism offered no such reprieve. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, the Muslim communities it had ruled for seven decades emerged traumatised and hollow. Their institutions, intellectual traditions, and cultural continuity had all been deliberately erased. What remains today are fragments, and the work of reconstruction has barely begun.

## The Indian Partition

If the Ottoman collapse destroyed Islamic civilisation’s western anchor and Communism severed its northern tier, the Partition of India in 1947 dealt the final, perhaps most consequential blow. India had been, for centuries, one of Islamic civilisation’s most productive centres. At its peak, the Mughal Empire surpassed the Ottomans in terms of wealth and sophistication. Its successor states and the Indo-Muslim elite who emerged under British rule sustained networks of learning, patronage, and cultural production that connected the subcontinent to the wider Islamic world.

The East India Company’s conquest of Bengal in the 18th century and the subsequent abolition of the Mughal sultanate in 1857 had already severely damaged this world. But Muslims in British India adapted. They established new institutions, such as the Aligarh Muslim University, to provide modern education while preserving Islamic learning and identity. They played a significant role in the emergence of an Urdu public sphere. They sent scholars to study in Cairo and Istanbul, and received students from across the Islamic world. The Indo-Muslim elite, though subordinate to British rule, retained sufficient autonomy and resources to continue participating in Islamic civilisation’s intellectual life. Such was India’s centrality that after the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, a [conspiracy was hatched](https://kasurian.com/p/caliphate-conspiracy-india?ref=kasurian.com) to transfer the seat of the Caliphate to Hyderabad, in the heart of India. As the last pseudo-sovereign Muslim ruler, the Nizam’s intermarriage with the Ottoman royal family was seen as a realistic endeavour.

In the end, it was not Britain’s direct rule, but the domestically driven partition of India, that destroyed this. The decision to divide India along religious lines created two nations and shattered a civilisation. Some 16 million people were displaced in the largest forced migration in human history. Communal violence is estimated to have killed between one and two million people. In the aftermath, Pakistan emerged as a refugee state for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Millions of *muhajir* from India flooded into a territory that lacked the institutional capacity to absorb them. The new state’s energies were consumed by survival: feeding refugees, establishing basic administration, and preparing for inevitable conflict with India. There was no bandwidth for the long-term institution-building required for intellectual and cultural flourishing. The Pakistani state, born in crisis, has struggled with legitimacy and coherence ever since, oscillating between secular nationalism and religious ideology without synthesising them into a workable model.

India retained the majority of the subcontinent’s infrastructure and institutions, but its Muslim population became traumatised and diminished. The Indo-Muslim elite, who had constituted a sophisticated governing and intellectual class, were decimated. Those who remained in India found themselves a vulnerable minority in a Hindu-majority state. Those who fled to Pakistan left behind homes, libraries, endowments, and institutional networks built over centuries. The transnational networks sustained by pilgrimage, scholarship, and trade, connecting Indian Muslims to Cairo, Istanbul, and Mecca, were decimated.

The deeper loss in this case was civilisational memory. Indian Muslims had long regarded themselves as inheritors of a grand tradition that stretched back to the Delhi Sultanate and beyond. Partition forced a redefinition in which Pakistan was driven to adopt a national identity based on Islam without a deeper civilisational basis; instead, it became a shallow, ideological Islam divorced from the sophisticated legal and cultural traditions that had actually characterised Muslim India. In the Indian Republic itself, the need to prove loyalty to a Hindu-majority state encouraged many Muslims to minimise or privatise their Islamic identity. In both cases, the rich intellectual tradition of Indo-Islamic civilisation became attenuated, reduced to symbols and slogans rather than lived practice.

Partition also severed the Indian subcontinent from the broader Islamic world in ways that had not existed even under British colonialism. Pakistan’s chronic insecurity and conflicts have consumed resources and attention that might have been directed toward cultural and intellectual development. India’s Muslim minority status meant that Indian Muslims, once central to Islamic knowledge, culture, and intellectual networks, became peripheral. The golden age of Indo-Islamic learning, when students from Java to Morocco studied in Delhi and Lucknow, came to an end.

## A Compounding Catastrophe

Each of these catastrophes might have been survivable on its own. Civilisations have recovered from territorial loss, foreign occupation, and demographic collapse. Islamic civilisation itself had [survived the Mongol invasions](https://kasurian.com/p/mongol-invasions-revival?ref=kasurian.com), integrating the conquerors and eventually reaching new heights of sophistication under the auspices of the later gunpowder empires. Even in the 19th century, despite the encroaching colonialism and military defeats on all fronts, a genuine Islamic intellectual renaissance had emerged, a flowering of print culture and public debate that suggested the capacity for renewal remained intact.

But the three catastrophes did not occur in isolation. They compounded each other, each destroying a different pillar of Islamic civilisation’s infrastructure. The Ottoman collapse eliminated the central political authority and patronage network that had sustained intellectual life across the Arab and Turkish-speaking worlds. Communist repression severed the northern tier, isolating Central Asia and the Caucasus from the rest of the Islamic world and destroying the Jadid reform movement that might have offered a model for synthesis between Islam and modernity. Partition fractured the Indian subcontinent, creating two wounded states incapable of continuing the intellectual traditions that had made Muslim India a beacon of culture and learning.

These events not only destroyed institutions but also the social and political classes that played crucial roles in their sustenance. The Ottoman governing elite, the Tatar Muslim intelligentsia, and the Indo-Muslim aristocracy were patrons who commissioned books, endowed schools, and supported scholars, thereby participating in the networks that made Islamic civilisation more than a collection of atomised believers. Without them, knowledge production collapsed. Muslim societies retained mosques and basic religious education, but the complex ecosystem required for sustained intellectual innovation was gone.

The refugee dynamic accelerated the collapse. The Ottoman Empire became a refugee state in its final decades, and Anatolia was flooded with displaced Muslims from every direction. Pakistan was literally founded by and for refugees. These populations, traumatised and dispossessed, lacked the stability and resources for long-term cultural investment. States consumed by existential crises cannot build universities, fund research, or sustain the generational continuity required for intellectual traditions to flourish.

Crucially, the modernisation efforts begun in the 19th century were aborted before they could mature. The Ottoman Tanzimat, Jadid movement, and Aligarh represented genuine attempts to create indigenous Islamic modernity, to develop institutions and ideas that reconciled Islam with industrial civilisation without wholesale capitulation to Western models. In every case, their institutions were destroyed, intellectuals killed or silenced, and transnational networks severed. What survived were fragments, which have degenerated with each passing generation.

The result is the poverty of contemporary Islamic intellectual life. We rely on ideas formulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not because these ideas are adequate to our moment, but because we have lost the capacity to generate new ones. The institutions that might critique, refine, and build upon these earlier efforts do not exist, for the most part. Venerated institutions such as Al-Azhar are husks of their former selves. The class of people who might staff such institutions was destroyed. We are left with degraded copies, slogans repeated without understanding, and an amnesia so profound we do not even recognise what we have lost.

## Reckoning with Defeat

Muslims have carefully constructed narratives around our defeat, usually centred around colonialism’s injustices and Western perfidy. Some go further in transforming our total defeat into a paradoxical victory: Islamic civilisation’s failure to survive the 20th century has become evidence of our moral superiority. We were too pure for this corrupted modernity, too devoted to principle to sully ourselves with the compromises required for power. The fact that we lost proves we were right.

This is delusion masquerading as piety. It is the closing of the Muslim mind made manifest through a retreat into nostalgic fantasies of the past. Unable to confront the scale of our loss, we have absolved ourselves of responsibility and rendered our defeat inexplicable except as a divine test or a Western conspiracy. In doing so, we have surrendered the one thing that might allow recovery: agency.

Contrary to prevailing attitudes, to own defeat is not capitulation. It is the recovery of agency through recognition of reality. When we accept that we were comprehensively beaten, that our military power was broken, our economic systems dismantled, our institutions destroyed, and our intellectual traditions severed, we unlock the only question that matters: how does this never happen again?

But if we refuse to own our defeat, if we insist it was really something else, whether test or blessing or vindication of our virtue, then we never ask that question and remain paralysed in time, condemned to taste defeat again and again while congratulating ourselves on our steadfastness. The artificial glass ceiling that constrains the Muslim mind must be shattered with a full recognition, acceptance, and internalisation of defeat. Only by sitting with this reality and feeling its full weight can we begin to understand how we arrived at this stage and what reconstruction demands of us.

However, dwelling on our sorrows is a popular pastime, and reckoning alone is insufficient. Understanding requires knowledge, and we lack the knowledge necessary to comprehend our own recent history. We must study the 19th and 20th centuries with the same rigour we apply to the halcyon days of the Umayyads, or Abbasids, or any other era of history that is distant enough for us to project our fantasies onto. We must understand the dynamics of history, not as a succession of discrete events, but as processes driven by material conditions, institutional arrangements, and the decisions of governing elites. We need an accurate theory of history that explains causation in human societies, the divergent fates of polities that seem similarly positioned, why certain ideas flourish in one context and wither in another, and the mechanisms by which entire classes and nations are elevated or destroyed.

Previous generations of Muslim intellectuals focused heavily on Western colonialism’s conquests, extraction, and cultural arrogance. This was necessary work, but it has led us to misdiagnose the timeline of our destruction. Colonialism weakened us, certainly, but we were not broken by the gradual processes of 19th-century imperial expansion. We were shattered by three concrete, cataclysmic events in the first half of the 20th century: the Ottoman dissolution, the rise of Communism across our northern territories, and the Indian Partition. These events, rather than the colonial pressures that mounted through the 18th and 19th centuries, were what eventually severed our civilisational continuity through the wholesale destruction of our social classes, political institutions, and the transnational networks that had sustained knowledge production for centuries. It is perhaps encouraging and exasperating that, even under the yoke of British or Russian imperialism, Aligarh and Jadid alike engaged in a creative process of reform and engagement. In contrast, we struggle to perform as vigorously today, even though colonialism is no longer a factor. This is a self-imposed condition.

By correcting our understanding of the timeline, we can finally ask the right questions. Perhaps most importantly, we can ground our efforts in concrete historical analysis rather than the abstract theorising that has dominated recent decades, by understanding precisely what was destroyed: which institutions were lost, which networks were severed, which systems of patronage supported cultural production, which social arrangements enabled intellectual life; then we can begin to imagine how to design new structures suited to our circumstances rather than attempting to resurrect dead forms.

The question now is whether we possess the courage to reckon with our history in an honest fashion and to abandon the comforting myths that excuse inaction. There are no shortcuts. There is no divine intervention that will restore what was lost. There is only the work, and it begins with seeing clearly.

---

**Author*: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine for the 21st century.*
### Muhammad Ali Pasha & the Dream of an Ottoman Modernity
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/muhammad-ali-pasha-and-the-dream/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:33:50.000Z
Like many of the agricultural civilisations of the ancient world, from the empires of Mesoamerica to China, Egypt was a hydraulic civilisation. Its society clung desperately to the Nile, a ribbon of fertility amid the vast and undulating expanse of the Sahara. To control water was to control life, and this control was imposed by a centralised polity with the bureaucratic and engineering capacity to muster the manpower for labour-intensive hydraulic infrastructure, such as dams and irrigation. Thus, Egypt’s dependence on the Nile, its flat geography, and its large, largely homogeneous population compelled centralised governance. After all, the river that nourished also delivered tax collectors and soldiers with ease.

It is perhaps no accident, then, that the most determined effort to industrialise in the Middle East and North Africa began not in the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, but in its peripheral province of Egypt. The architect of this effort was neither philosopher nor theologian, but a hard-bitten Ottoman soldier of fortune: **Muhammad Ali Pasha**.

Where the Sublime Porte struggled to reform the empire through sartorial *firmans*, Muhammad Ali engaged in ruthless centralisation. He annihilated the Mamluk aristocracy and their feudal political economy; in its place, he built bureaucracies, arsenals, shipyards, and textile mills. He sought to render Egypt knowable and controllable through standardised tax collection, uniform laws, efficient communication, a professional standing army raised by conscription, and the adoption of large-scale industrial production. His statesmanship was defined by relentless action, geopolitical gambits, and a dream of ruling a revitalised Middle Eastern empire capable of holding its own against Europe.

Ultimately, his vision was undone by an unfortunate confluence: a man ahead of his time among his own people, yet too late in the global competition for power dominated by Europe. Britain, above all, could not tolerate an industrialising Egypt astride its imperial lifeline to India, and would play a key role in both Muhammad Ali’s failure and the Ottoman Empire’s eventual demise.

The story of modernisation often leaps from Europe and America to Meiji Japan, bypassing ambitious early attempts [across India](https://kasurian.com/p/tipu-sultan?ref=kasurian.com), the Middle East, and North Africa. Muhammad Ali’s rule stands as one of history’s great ‘what ifs’ – for had he succeeded, the trajectory of the Islamic world might have irrevocably altered global history.

Muhammad Ali was the quintessential reformer emerging in a civilisation’s twilight – a figure Ibn Khaldun would recognise. Yet his misfortune (and ours) was this: whenever such reformers arose within the cyclical rhythm of rise and decline, Britain invariably intervened, sabotaging revival. Islam’s [challenge-and-response](https://kasurian.com/i/159175918/islams-response-to-the-mongol-challenge?ref=kasurian.com) mechanism had been broken.

Contemporary views of this era often succumb to fatalism, drawing a straight line from Islamic civilisation’s 19th-century decline through the cataclysm of World War I to our fractured present. But this narrative obscures a crucial truth: even amid 19th-century colonisation and dysfunction, the capacity for indigenous renewal persisted. Our task today is to recover that thwarted vision of sovereign development, to understand why and how it failed, and to rediscover the mechanisms for civilisational revival.

## An Ottoman Man in an Ottoman World

Born in the port town of Kavala (now in northern Greece) in 1769, Muhammad Ali’s origins betrayed little hint of imperial destiny. His father was an Albanian tobacco merchant and commander of the local Ottoman Albanian militia. Muhammad Ali would spend the first few decades of his life climbing the ranks of local power, acting as both a tax collector and a commander of Albanian mercenaries, ostensibly in service to the Porte, but more often acting as brigands engaging in local disputes.

There is some debate over the lineage of Muhammad Ali and his father – were they ethnically Albanian, or Turkish settlers who had moved from Anatolia to Thrace in centuries past? Debates over the true identity of Muhammad Ali reveal how culture and identity intersected in the pre-modern era in a manner almost entirely alien to us today. Egyptians, Albanians, and Turks often engage in heated debates about who Muhammad Ali was, how he perceived himself, and which modern nation-state can truly lay claim to him.

This debate would probably have made little sense to Muhammad Ali himself. Whether he was Albanian, Turkish, or some secret third thing was largely irrelevant in the wider context of the Ottoman imperial culture and identity. Muhammad Ali was an Ottoman man navigating an Ottoman world, seeking to reform it from within while ensuring the success of his ambitions and the longevity of his dynasty. The tension between race, faith, and power was resolved by order of priority, or through case-by-case trade-offs.

In 1801, Muhammad Ali was poised to test the full capacity of his flexible loyalties.

## Conquering Egypt

Napoleon Bonaparte had launched an invasion of the Ottoman provinces of Egypt and Syria in 1798, racing against Britain for control of vital land and sea routes between Europe and the Indian Ocean. Yet in 1801, the French army withdrew, defeated by Ottoman resistance in Syria, crippling logistical challenges, and the need to confront the growing anti-Napoleonic coalition in Europe.

In the wake of this retreat, the Porte dispatched an expeditionary force under Khurshid Pasha to reassert Ottoman control over Egypt. Among them were Muhammad Ali and his Albanian mercenaries. Egypt groaned under the Mamluk elite, a caste of slave-soldiers turned parasitic landlords who controlled the land and the fate of its peasantry. Napoleon’s invasion had shattered their myth of invincibility, exposing Egypt and the wider Ottoman world to European military advances. Cavalry charges and swords could not stand against musket volleys and artillery. Yet the French had failed to shatter the Mamluks’ grip on power, regrouping as swiftly as the French had fled.

The competition to control Egypt commenced post-haste, with the Porte and the Mamluks striving for control over the province. Yet in that competition, both were blindsided by the rise of a third actor: Muhammad Ali and his Albanian braves. Lacking the blue blood of the Mamluks or the imperial patronage of Khurshid Pasha, Muhammad Ali instead relied on populism, possibly mastered during his time as a tax collector and mercenary captain back home in Kavala. He positioned himself as a champion for the merchants and *ulema* of Cairo, led by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar. The *ulema*, by virtue of their moral and religious authority, wielded immense influence over Egyptian society. Muhammad Ali also allied with Umar Makram, a fiery populist whose proto-nationalist rhetoric against French occupation and Mamluk misrule had galvanised the streets.

As Muhammad Ali cultivated popular support, the Ottoman-Mamluk rivalry escalated, further ravaging Egypt. In 1805, a revolt erupted against Khurshid Pasha’s oppressive rule. Muhammad Ali deftly positioned himself at the head of this revolt. Faced with a restive Cairo and popular support for Muhammad Ali, Sultan Selim III had little choice but to appoint the Pasha as Wali–Governor of Egypt.

Having secured the support of the Egyptian street, eliminated his Ottoman rival, and received imperial patronage, Muhammad Ali now turned to the final obstacle to his rule: the Mamluks.

In 1807, Sultan Selim III was deposed (and assassinated in his harem a year later) after a Janissary revolt against his *Nizam-i Jedid* (“New Order”) military reforms, which aimed to create a European-style military out of the Ottoman army. The Janissaries, much like the Mamluks, had transformed from a fearsome slave-warrior caste into a social class with vested in-group interests. The *Nizam-i Jedid* was a direct disenfranchisement of their social position.

Muhammad Ali paid close attention to how these entrenched feudal classes reacted to reform. In 1811, under the pretext of honouring his son Tusun Pasha’s departure to lead an expedition against the Wahhabi rebels in Arabia, the Pasha invited the Mamluk chieftains and their retinues, numbering nearly 500 men, to a grand banquet within the walls of Cairo’s Saladin Citadel. As the procession of mounted Mamluks descended the narrow, winding ramp from the Citadel gate, Muhammad Ali’s Albanian troops sealed the exits and opened fire. Muskets and cannons loaded with grapeshot tore into the trapped procession, and few Mamluks escaped the slaughter. Survivors were hunted down across the country, all the way to Nubia, and their lands seized by Muhammad Ali. Egypt’s feudal order had been eliminated in one stroke.

Within a decade of his arrival, Muhammad Ali had become the undisputed ruler of Egypt. His ascent was a masterclass in Ottoman realpolitik, ruthlessly manoeuvring to aid rivals against each other and then turning on them once they were weakened. He leveraged popular unrest and support to overthrow the Ottoman governor, secured the Sultanic investiture to govern Egypt, and then used this newfound legitimacy to annihilate the Mamluks that had initially facilitated his rise. Even Umar Makram, realising too late Muhammad Ali’s intentions, was sent into exile.

Muhammad Ali had no intention of ruling either as a partner of the people or a satrap of the sultan. Instead, he quickly set about consolidating his rule and setting Egypt on the path to modernisation.

## Ledgers, Looms, and Cannons

With his rivals vanquished, Muhammad Ali turned his attention to the development of Egypt. He had witnessed the military might of Napoleon’s France firsthand and understood, perhaps earlier than any non-European ruler, that industrial power and a modern state were the bedrock of geopolitical power. His reforms thus targeted three pillars: military modernisation, state-led industrialisation, and administrative centralisation.

### Building a Modern Political Economy

He began with a nationalisation of all *iltizam* land (tax parcels), and an unprecedented wealth tax on *awqaf* (religious endowments), which by the 19th century had become vehicles for tax evasion by wealthy elites. Muhammad Ali seized the entire means of production in Egypt and created, for the first time, a truly national market. He mandated that producers sell their goods to the state, which would then resell them on international markets, earning sizeable revenues that would fund the Pasha’s state-building efforts. While this represented a catastrophic loss of freedom, workers' wages increased as a streamlined national market with access to global markets increased the value of production.

To manage this burgeoning state apparatus and extract its wealth more efficiently, Muhammad Ali set about creating a modern bureaucracy. He initiated one of the first modern censuses in the region. Tax collection was systematised by organising Egypt into 10 centrally organised provinces, wresting control from local strongmen. Schools were established to train officials, engineers, doctors, and translators, separate from the traditional education provided by institutions like Al-Azhar. Vaccination programs were introduced through the expanding national healthcare system. In 1832, Muhammad Ali even hired the French doctor, Antoine Clot (known in Egypt as ‘Clot Bey’), to build the first school of medicine for women.

Labour conscription was imposed to overhaul Egypt’s decrepit hydraulic infrastructure, dredging and expanding irrigation canals that had been neglected for centuries. The Mahmudiyah Canal, completed in 1820, reconnected Alexandria to the Nile, revitalising trade and increasing Egypt’s geopolitical importance.

A sovereign state required an industrial base. Muhammad Ali established ruthless state monopolies over Egypt’s key commodities: cotton, grain, sugarcane, and later, tobacco; the profits of which funded an astonishing industrial leap. Government factories sprang up across the Nile Delta: textile mills in Cairo, Mehalla el-Kubra, and Kafr el-Zayat, equipped with modern spinning jennies and power looms (by 1829, 30 cotton mills operated across Egypt, turning it into one of the world’s most important cotton exporters); arsenals at Cairo and Alexandria producing muskets, cannon, and ammunition; foundries casting metal; chemical works producing sulphuric acid and gunpowder; sugar refineries and glassworks. Shipyards at Alexandria built warships and merchant vessels.

Egypt was becoming legible, quantifiable, and centrally controlled – a recognisably modern state. This was not a straightforward task. The science of legibility was a foreign imposition in a culture where everything was anything but legible. Muhammad Ali lacked sufficient cadres of skilled bureaucrats capable of carrying out this task; there was immense resistance across Egypt to what was (rightly) seen as the impersonal interference of a state to which they had no allegiance. Nonetheless, the Pasha persisted.

Muhammad Ali also fostered an intellectual engagement with Europe that sought understanding, not subservience. The educational mission he sent to Paris in 1826 included Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, an Azhar-trained scholar and imam. During his five-year stay in Paris, Al-Tahtawi wrote *Takhlis Al-Ibriz Fi Talkhis Bariz* (“The Extraction of Gold in the Summarising of Paris”), a travelogue of what he observed in Europe. He marvelled at French engineering, public hygiene, and orderly administration, seeing them as manifestations of beneficial knowledge that Muslims could and should adopt. He noted the precision of French law, the efficiency of their postal service, and even their table manners as practical advancements. He also praised their educational institutions, libraries, and newspapers as vital tools for national strength. Al-Tahtawi expressed no sense of civilisational inferiority, instead treating France and Europe’s advances as a toolbox from which Muslims could adopt what was beneficial and leave the rest.

The Bulaq Press, founded by the Pasha in 1822 primarily to print military manuals and administrative decrees, evolved into the Arab world’s first modern publishing house. While initially favouring European technical works, it became the engine of Egypt’s later Nahda (cultural renaissance), an Arabic intellectual revival planting the seeds for the broader Arab nationalist movement. Al-Tahtawi later worked at the Press, producing over 2000 written works, mostly focused on translating European ideas and books on history, geography, and statecraft.

### All the Pasha’s Men

The fate of Sultan Selim III’s own *Nizam-i Jedid* reforms served as a grim warning to Muhammad Ali. If the imperial core could not reform its armies, it had no chance of standing against the might of Europe.

Muhammad Ali started from scratch, transforming his motley crew of Albanian braves into the nucleus of his own *Nizam-i Jedid*. By 1824, he had established a vast training camp at Aswan under the command of Sulayman Pasha Al-Faransawi (born Joseph Anthelme Sève), a French officer who had converted to Islam and sought service under the Pasha. The recruits were a polyglot mix: remnants of his loyal Albanians, Mamluk slaves he still controlled, and tragically, thousands of enslaved Sudanese. The Sudanese, unprepared for the harsh conditions and European-style drilling, perished in droves; out of 20,000 brought to Aswan, only 3,000 survived the first year.

Desperate for manpower, and on the advice of the French consul, Bernardino Drovetti, Muhammad Ali turned to Egypt’s *fellaheen* – the peasant farmer class. In Napoleonic style, the Pasha imposed mass conscription on them. The idea of service to the state was an entirely revolutionary foreign notion. Many peasants fled their land into hiding, going as far as Nubia and Syria. Some even mutilated their own hands by cutting off thumbs and index fingers (necessary to fire muskets) to avoid military service.

Yet, Muhammad Ali persisted with relentless will. He recruited dozens of European officers from Italy, France, and Spain, who drilled the raw recruits in European techniques. By the late 1820s, Egypt boasted a standing army of 130,000 men, trained in European tactics and armed with modern muskets and artillery, eclipsing the Ottoman army itself in discipline and firepower.

Muhammad Ali had observed how Britain was able to defeat Napoleonic France time and again, owing to the superiority of the Royal Navy. Without a modern navy, Egypt’s security and the Pasha’s ambitions would be curtailed in a like manner. He first attempted to purchase state-of-the-art warships from Britain but was rebuffed; they had no interest in helping a Middle Eastern and Muslim power acquire the power to compete with the Royal Navy. Even France was reluctant to help the Pasha. Undeterred, he turned to shipyards in Genoa, Venice, and Marseilles, privately commissioning frigates and brigs, and scavenging the Mediterranean for whatever vessels he could acquire. This nascent navy became central to his ambitions.

## Dreams of Empire

Muhammad Ali’s first commission from the Porte after the successful capture of Egypt was to retake the Hejaz region of Arabia, centred on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from the Wahhabi rebels. Led by his sons, Tusun and Ibrahim Pasha, the campaigns were gruelling, but demonstrated the army’s discipline and logistical capabilities. By 1818, victory secured the holy cities, bolstered Muhammad Ali’s legitimacy, and gave him control of the lucrative Red Sea trade routes. It also proved his forces could project power far beyond the Nile.

After the Hejaz campaigns, Muhammad Ali turned his attention to Sudan next, dispatching his modern army to conquer and incorporate the country into Egypt between 1820 and 1824\. By the mid-1820s, the Pasha now governed over Egypt, the Hejaz, and Sudan. Yet, these successes did not satiate his ambitions.

An even greater opportunity arose after 1821, with the start of the Greek Revolt against Ottoman rule. By 1824, the Porte’s failure to crush the revolt prompted the Sultan, Mahmud II, to beseech Muhammad Ali for his support. Initially aloof, or perhaps desiring significant concessions, the Pasha intervened only when Sultan Mahmud II offered him the governorship of Crete and Morea if he succeeded in crushing the revolt.

Muhammad Ali dispatched his son, Ibrahim Pasha, at the head of the Egyptian army. In Crete, they crushed the rebels with startling efficiency, prompting increasing paranoia in the Porte. Egypt’s subsequent governance of the island revealed the Pasha’s reformist ethos: replacing arbitrary taxation and punishment with streamlined systems, rooting out corruption, and fostering relative stability. Muhammad Ali was not another satrap interested in tax farming.

Success in Crete led to campaigns in the Morea, further showcasing his army’s prowess and expanding his influence. By 1826, the Egyptian army had succeeded in crushing much of the Greek Revolt. However, Muhammad Ali’s ambitions alarmed the European powers. Philhellenic sentiment was running high in Europe, but more crucially, Britain feared Russian expansion through Ottoman weakness and detested the prospect of a powerful, modernising Egypt controlling the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptian navy had enabled Muhammad Ali’s projection of power across the eastern Mediterranean and formed the supply lifeline to the Egyptian forces operating in Crete and the Morea.

Thus, a combined British, French, and Russian fleet, ostensibly enforcing a ceasefire, entered Navarino Bay in the Morea and deliberately provoked a battle that annihilated Muhammad Ali’s prized, modern navy – the fruit of years of investment and shipbuilding. It was his first defeat and a devastating blow to the Pasha, eliminating nearly two decades of hard work. Navarino seared into his consciousness the precariousness of his position.

## The Vision Flounders

Stung by Navarino, fearing encirclement, and desiring restitution for the loss of his fleet, in no small part caused by the Porte’s incompetence, Muhammad Ali demanded Ottoman Syria from the Porte to add to his governorship. The province offered significant trading markets, a buffer zone against the Ottomans, and resources such as the timber of Lebanon needed to rebuild his fleet. The Porte was uninterested in increasing the power of their otherwise chastened viceroy.

In 1831, Ibrahim Pasha was dispatched to Syria at the head of the Egyptian army. Conquest was swift, but governing the region’s fractious mosaic of sects and tribes proved far harder. Ibrahim, a brilliant soldier but a less adept politician, struggled to understand Syria’s cultural landscape. Reforms similar to Egypt and Crete were imposed, but Syria’s local elites proved more wily in their resistance to Egyptian taxation, and the imposition of conscription (levied only on Muslims) and perceived favouritism towards Christians sparked repeated rebellions. While Ibrahim Pasha succeeded in putting them down, lingering discontent made Egyptian governance over Syria an arduous affair.

Ibrahim Pasha continued his campaigning, and by 1832, the Egyptians were soundly defeating the Ottoman armies, marching as far as Konya in central Anatolia, where 15,000 Egyptian troops routed a significantly larger force of 60,000 Ottomans. The road to Istanbul lay wide open. Here, Muhammad Ali again overplayed his hand and provoked Europe against him.

Sultan Mahmud II, in panic, appealed to the Ottomans’ ancient enemy: Russia. The sight of Russian troops encamped on the shores of the Bosphorus forced a temporary settlement in the Convention of Kütahya in 1833, granting Muhammad Ali control of Syria, Adana, and Crete, but forcing him back from Istanbul and the Ottoman dynasty.

It was the zenith of his power. When the Ottomans sought revenge in 1839, Ibrahim delivered another crushing blow at Nezib, reinforcing their dominance of the Ottoman Middle East. The Ottoman fleet even defected to Alexandria days later. Constantinople seemed indefensible for the second time. Could Muhammad Ali overthrow the Ottoman dynasty?

Once again, European powers intervened, orchestrated by Britain’s Turkophobic Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston. Britain could not tolerate Russian influence over the Ottomans, nor could it accept a powerful, independent Egypt athwart the route to India. A European coalition (composed of Britain, Austria, and Russia) formed against Muhammad Ali. In 1840, the bombardment of Acre by the Royal Navy shattered Ibrahim Pasha’s Syrian stronghold, and a British fleet lay siege to the port of Alexandria. Facing overwhelming force and internal unrest, the ageing Pasha capitulated. The London Straits Convention of 1841 stripped Muhammad Ali of Syria, Crete, Arabia, and the Ottoman fleet, but crucially, it made his rule over Egypt hereditary. He had secured a dynasty but sacrificed an empire.

Meanwhile, Britain had moved deliberately to cripple the economic engine of Muhammad Ali’s state. In 1838, they imposed the Treaty of Balta Liman on the Ottoman Empire, including Egypt. The treaty abolished monopolies, the very mechanism Muhammad Ali used to fund industrialisation and control trade, and imposed "free trade." This would keep Egypt a mere supplier of raw cotton for Lancashire’s mills, and a market for British goods. Flooded with cheap, mass-produced British textiles, Egypt’s cotton mills and workshops were driven into ruin. The treaty had the same effect across the Ottoman Empire, and Balta Liman would result in the most extreme deindustrialisation of any 19th-century polity.

After Balta Liman and the London Convention, Muhammad Ali’s worsening health, state of defeat, and some solace that he had at least preserved Egypt for his dynasty led to the faltering of the Pasha’s grand project. Egypt’s debt ballooned as its industries came to a standstill.

Ultimately, he could not defeat the confluence of unfortunate events that stood in the way of his vision. European powers, especially Britain, viewed his industrial and military rise with alarm, seeing a potential barrier to their own imperial designs, particularly the route to India. They actively worked to undermine him, propping up the enfeebled Ottomans as a more pliable entity.

The Porte itself, riddled with envy and fear of its over-mighty viceroy, proved a constant, debilitating opponent, more interested in clipping his wings than harnessing his energy for the empire’s benefit.

## A Future Lost

Muhammad Ali’s drive had been the dynamo of the Egyptian state. His successors lacked his vision, energy, and ruthless competence. His most capable son and intended heir, Ibrahim Pasha, worn out by constant campaigning, died of consumption just months after formally succeeding his ailing father in 1848\. Muhammad Ali’s advisors neglected to inform him of his son’s death out of fear for his health. The Pasha would pass nearly a year later in the summer of 1849.

Ibrahim’s nephew and successor, Abbas Hilmi I, was reactionary and paranoid. He despised his grandfather’s reforms and became the caricature of the indolent Oriental satrap, presiding over the dismantling of his industries, the closure of schools, the dismissal of European advisors, and the mortgaging of Egypt’s future to European creditors to fund palace escapades.

Though later successors like Said Pasha and Ismail Pasha revived aspects of their progenitor’s development programme, they did so on a foundation of massive European debt. Ismail’s extravagant borrowing, coupled with collapsing cotton prices, led directly to the imposition of Anglo-French financial control and ultimately, the British Occupation of 1882\. The dynasty became increasingly hollow, its nominal independence preserved only as a facade for British control, limping on until the military coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed King Farouk in 1952, ending the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt.

Modernisation is a brutal affair: cultural homogenisation, military conscription, and the rigours of industrial production on labour were just some of the trials that every developed state today has had to endure. Yet what fruits they enjoy, be that material prosperity or political and military sovereignty, is a direct result of these trials.

Muhammad Ali was no angel or saviour. He was driven by personal ambition and the desire to create an imperial dynasty. His policies caused a great deal of suffering, particularly through the toll exacted on the *fellaheen* of Egypt, who bore the brunt of his measures. Nor was he a philosopher or intellectual, wrestling with abstract notions of modernity and tradition. He understood that sovereignty depended on military organisation, industrial productivity, and state capacity, and the only response to European advancement was to identify what worked and adopt it. Innovation was judged by its utility, not its origin.

The Pasha’s failure was not preordained. Japan, facing similar Western pressure just decades later, would demonstrate that non-Western societies could rapidly industrialise while retaining cultural coherence under determined leadership. Egypt possessed the resources, the strategic location, and, under Muhammad Ali, the will. What it lacked was time free from British and European interference, and a hostile cultural and political milieu at home. No one could tell what the future of the 19th and 20th centuries would bring, and if they had, the impetus to modernise would have received a different urgency. Yet, if he had succeeded, we may well be telling a different tale, and the cost of modernisation a mere stepping stone to a better future.

Perhaps this is why Muhammad Ali’s figure looms so large in the history and imagination of both modern Egypt, where he is considered the ‘father of the state’ (although not without significant pushback owing to the toll he exacted on Egyptians), and the wider Middle East. No statesman since his time has come so close to creating the conditions for an industrialised and modern state of consequence in the Arab world.

In his time, few shared the Pasha’s dreams of an industrialised Middle Eastern empire at the heart of Islamic civilisation. Muhammad Ali’s failure remains one of history’s most haunting 'What Ifs?’

---

**Words*: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of* [*Kasurian*](https://kasurian.com/?ref=kasurian.com)*, a magazine focused on history, culture, and civilisation.*

**Further Reading**

*Books*

- Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot, *Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali*
- Henry Dodwell, *The Founder of Modern Egypt*
- Kenneth M. Cuno, *The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt 1740-1858*
- Khaled Fahmy, *All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt*
- Khaled Fahmy, *Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt*

*Journals*

- Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 49, *Muhammad Ali Pasha*
- Laura Panza & Jeffrey G. Williamson, *Did Muhammad Ali Foster Industrialization in Early Nineteenth Century Egypt?*
### The Bonds of Reputation
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/bonds-of-reputation/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:35:29.000Z
Picture a pair of merchants quietly discussing the contents of a parcel at dawn. By noon, it will have changed hands multiple times, doubling or tripling in value, embedded in deals worth millions of dollars. And yet not a single contract will be signed, nor a dollar wired. These transactions will all be brokered on the simple notion that a man’s word is his bond.

While the scene reads like a romantic vestige of pre-industrial commerce, it unfolds every day in the financial capital of the world. In Midtown Manhattan, the largest diamond market in the world thrives: The Diamond District. The words that securitise transactions here are ancient, however: “mazel u’bracha”, a Yiddish phrase to convey ‘luck and blessing’.

The choice of words reflects the de facto monopoly that Jewish diamond merchants (‘diamantaires’) have long held in the industry. Their dominance is no historical accident; it is an institutional achievement. Over time, they have constructed a governance system that operates entirely parallel to the legal and financial systems they formally inhabit. It is a private order built on trust, where reputation is both collateral and a cudgel. And this network often rivals, if not eclipses, the bargaining power of nation-states.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/38a8bf58-decc-4cdc-a403-0fc94fa2d0e7_980x613-jpeg.jpg)

A private market in plain sight.

What makes this network so effective is a set of institutions and social technologies that instantiate trust where opportunism is uniquely tempting. While contracts are the preeminent social technology for forging trust between counterparties, they are incomplete without the enforcement of terms and behaviour. The privately ordered governance mechanism in the industry enforces executory contracts more effectively than public courts, establishing it as the preferred venue for diamantaires.

The principles behind this governance mechanism are rooted in the Abrahamic tradition, where the act of contracting is not just a legal artefact but an ethical commitment underwriting your identity.

> *“If a man vows a vow to the LORD, or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge, he shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth.”* (Numbers 30:2)

The longest verse in the Qur’an is also devoted to the procedure for contracting a loan, explicating the earlier Abrahamic code as a communal responsibility.

> *O believers! When you contract a loan for a fixed period of time, commit it to writing. Let the scribe maintain justice between the parties \[…\] Call upon two of your men to witness \[…\] The witnesses must not refuse when they are summoned \[…\] You must not be against writing ˹contracts˺ for a fixed period–whether the sum is small or great. This is more just ˹for you˺ in the sight of Allah \[...\]* (Al-Baqara, Verse 282)

By requiring witnesses, the Qur'an transforms private dealings into socially embedded relational acts that inform collective memory, induce performance, and ultimately sustain the institutional architecture of a productive society.

Economic coordination depends on credible enforcement, and the best systems reduce the cost of trusting one another. Institutions cannot manufacture trust, but they can create the conditions for it to flourish. And societies that succeed in lowering the cost of trust unlock orders of magnitude more economic growth than societies that merely lower the cost of coercing one another.

Despite inheriting these Abrahamic accords, Muslim economies are in a situation where trust has been corroded by rent-seeking elites and rampant opportunism. Muslims searching for sovereignty in the 21st century are confronted with a fractured landscape. Debanking in the West, opportunism in the East, and a global economy that oscillates between over-regulation and lawlessness. The impulse, all too common, is to digitise institutions from the past. The solution, however, is not to return to the Golden Age but to initiate a golden age of governance, to evolve institutional protocols–social, moral, technical–for the world we inhabit and are entering, seeking sovereignty not in nostalgia but as a matter of stewardship.

To see why the innovation of social technologies is critical in the 21st-century Muslim search for economic sovereignty, we need to trace the arc from medieval trade networks to modern institutional substrates.

## Reputation As Regulation

In the 11th century, a coalition of Jewish merchants, the ‘Maghribi Traders’, built what has become the seminal case study of what economists call ‘private ordering’. It was a *lex mercatoria* (merchant law) where transactions and disputes were governed by community norms and institutions, evolving in response to the environmental constraints and costs of maritime trade. Operating across the Mediterranean under Muslim rule, the Maghribi traders thrived under an imperial umbrella while avoiding reliance on state enforcement, owing to the broad legal autonomy granted by Islamic governance.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/5949dc82-c947-49d0-a830-9fb17c31d09e_1469x654.png)

**The Catalan Atlas* (1375)

Contracts moved trade beyond the immediacy of spot exchanges, enabling what Charles Fried called ‘time-extended exchange’. This shift demanded deeper trust between parties, since promise and performance were separated. But these contracts were only effective to the extent that legal sanction was a credible threat, and that a court could enforce terms. But in the medieval Mediterranean, crossing political and legal boundaries, i.e. ‘space-extended exchange’, courts were either too costly or entirely toothless to provide these assurances. The Maghribi Traders recognised these limits and responded by building institutional networks that substituted the enforcement function, relying on courts only as a measure of last resort.

What developed was a network-based enforcement regime, where reputation acted as regulation. Deals were not just committed to writing, but etched onto the collective memory of the merchants. They created an information layer that transmitted market information (logistical data, prices abroad) and reputation-relevant information. These reports, requested by merchants, would detail a potential partner’s past conduct and payment punctuality. The letters (preserved in the Cairo Genizah) moved swiftly and cheaply enough to anchor a multilateral trust calculus, making private ordering through reputation a credible bond.

## Topology of Trust

Understanding how this network functioned requires some network science. A small-world network is a particular network structure with two key properties: dense local clusters and relatively short paths linking distant nodes. While most nodes connect only to their immediate neighbours, the network's structure ensures that any node can access any other through a small number of intermediary connections. This is where the idea of “six degrees of separation” came from. This configuration enables information to travel efficiently across the entire network, even when individual participants are far apart and not directly connected.

The Maghribi network followed a classic bridge-and-cluster structure: tight-knit clusters of traders (‘cliques’ in centres like Fustat and Sicily) linked by a smaller number of bridges (strategic ties between prominent merchants spanning the Mediterranean). These itinerant merchants were the primary disseminators of information: merchants in clusters would consult these central nodes, who would access and relay reputation reports via letters to their inter-cluster ties. These information brokers had strong incentives to maintain accurate records of behaviour. Their own economic and social standing depended on being trustworthy disseminators, thus emerging a sort of meta-reputation. This network structure minimised information costs by reducing the intermediaries needed to verify reputation, avoiding the expense of constantly updating every trader. Yet it remained robust enough to ensure that defection or misconduct quickly became widely known.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/bd675742-caa0-4bf4-b850-5da0eb22e7a8_957x429.png)

The Maghribi small-world network, modelled by Lisa Bernstein.

The enforcement and governance of contracts were based on the credible threat of network exclusion. In the language of game theory, the present value of future payoffs of cooperation inside the network far outweighed the payoffs of opportunism. The system also incentivised timely performance, as delayed shipments and payments also damaged reputation. Collective ostracism was a potent threat. A trader was not just excluded from a cluster, but from the entire network, effectively barred from trading anywhere in the Mediterranean.

All this matters because small-world networks are ubiquitous: power grids in the United States, the collaboration graph of film actors, and even the neural networks of the worm *C. elegans* exhibit small-world properties. Identifying the contract governance properties of small-world networks sets the stage for formulating how they can be a part of institutional foundations for trade in a variety of modern markets. Today, a highly evolved form of this Jewish private ordering mechanism, rooted in reputation and communal enforcement, continues to flourish in what is perhaps the most sophisticated legal forum on Earth.

## The Diamond Dealers Club

> *Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,* 
> *Is the immediate jewel of their souls*  
> – William Shakespeare, Othello Act 3: sc. 3

The *New York Times* called trust the real treasure of the Diamond District.

Diamonds are extracted from mines mostly in Botswana, Russia, and Canada; the product of immense heat and pressure deep beneath the Earth’s crust over billions of years, which compressed carbon into what is the hardest substance on the planet today. These diamonds are then shipped to trading centres around the world: Antwerp, Surat, and most notably, New York City. This is where the trade comes to life, where craftsmanship meets commerce, creating a $100 billion market.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/60d73607-aef3-40e9-8707-62bf59f20aab_1182x663.png)

Torah meets trade.

But why is it that when you walk down 47th St, you suddenly hear Yiddish and spot yarmulkes?

Jewish predominance in the diamond industry is the product of a few forces. Firstly, the restriction on Jewish commerce in pre-Enlightenment Europe, including prohibitions on land ownership, membership of merchant guilds, and traditional handicrafts, steered Jewish traders towards merchant professions with portable inventories. Secondly, some element of Jewish education, upbringing, and socialisation develops tacit knowledge and skills uniquely conducive to success in the diamond trade. And thirdly, ethnic cartels in general collude to maximise collective income, even at individual cost. By charging competitive prices to members and oligopoly prices to outsiders, rivals are priced out, and the tribe flourishes.

Yet none of these explanations would have survived relentless market pressures. The real answer lies in something neoclassical economics largely ignored: the hidden costs embedded in every transaction. While economists focused on prices and quantities, a newer school called New Institutional Economics addressed transaction costs that organise commerce day-to-day. Every deal carries implicit costs that practitioners know intimately: finding trustworthy partners (search), negotiating terms (bargaining), ensuring people honour their commitments (monitoring and enforcement). The Jewish diamond network secured its hegemony by an institutional solution to enforce credit sales at transaction costs that competitors couldn’t match.

## Credit Where Credit’s Due

Credit sales are essential in the diamond trade because they address liquidity constraints. Cash upfront would strangle the trade, given the price of diamonds and the turnaround imposed by the cutting process. Sellers also know that they can get significantly better prices for a stone by extending credit terms. In fact, trade credit is so central to the industry that it has been called an implicit capital market. Diamantaires can obtain credit from each other at a far lower cost than they could anywhere else, because as a network, they have more information about a buyer’s creditworthiness than any other lender in the world.

Yet, the temptations of opportunism and even outright cheating in this industry are unlike any other. Diamonds concentrate immense value in the most portable and untraceable forms, and thieves can cash out anywhere on the globe. While most industries can rely on the state’s legal machinery to compel performance, legal scholars have long noted the disability of courts here. As Richman notes, the failure of courts to prevent flight amounts to a failure to enforce the executory contract.

That is the notion this institutional machinery was built to solve: the extraordinary margins of trading on credit are matched by the magnitude of risk. And while cultural norms of fairness are necessary, they are insufficient to sustain the widespread multilateral cooperation observed. Rather, it is a governance mechanism, composed of a web of industry and communal institutions which anchor reputation and exert costly deterrents for defection.

In a market dependent on credit, they have developed social technologies that instantiate trust and govern agreements through the force of reputation. It is a private order based on enforcing contracts through staked reputation, mediating disputes through a private, mandatory arbitration system, and enforcing decisions through ultra-Orthodox community institutions.

The heart of this ‘institutional stack’ is the Diamond Dealers Club. The DDC functions as a consensus engine to reduce transaction costs among diamantaires and to instantiate trust. It first mediates entry, filtering for long-term cooperation rather than one-off opportunism. Entry is mediated either through family ties, Hasidic faith, or even prior dealings with a member, and this is where scrutiny is sharpest. An aspiring diamantaire, Tommy Van Scoy (a non-Jew), was admitted simply because he paid money back on time, but recalls that the DDC knew how much he paid for his mortgage every month and where his children went to school.

In this system of mutual reputation, a sponsor’s standing is tethered to the dealer they endorse. Their reputation can be enhanced or diminished based on the new dealer's conduct. Inside the highly secure trading hall of the DDC is “The Wall”, which displays photos and references of new entrants, announces the nomination of potential members and invites current members to comment on their trustworthiness.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/fd78a504-5a00-4ba3-ae8e-a01477a6afce_1126x538.png)

Inside the highly secure trading room of the DDC.

When disputes inevitably surface, the Diamond Dealers Club fulfils its central role as an arbitration system. Court cases are exceedingly rare; membership is conditioned on mandatory arbitration and waiving your right to litigation. Panels of reputable diamantaires deliberate behind closed doors, and their decisions are final. Arbitration is faster and cheaper than court, and arguably more just. Experienced diamantaires streamline evidentiary processes and assess damages far more accurately. Procedures are tailored for archetypical disputes, so costs are low and rulings swift. Rulings are then posted on the DDC’s public wall, and reputation-relevant information circulates to bourses worldwide.

A decision against you doesn’t spell exile but may prompt future partners to proceed cautiously, by offering tighter credit terms or requesting collateral. Only blatant fraud or refusal to honour an arbitration ruling leads to expulsion. The DDC’s arbitration establishes the immutable reputational record, and if that alone doesn’t compel compliance, community institutions enforce the club’s judgments.

The engulfing presence of Orthodox Jews has made it such that economic relationships are nested within the community itself: expulsion threatens business and belonging. Orthodox Jewish institutions consciously deter dishonest and opportunistic behaviour through coordinated sanctions. The DDC can even initiate proceedings in rabbinical courts, where penalties range from restricted access to synagogues through to formal excommunication. Whereas the Maghribi Traders cast merchants out of the trade network, the diamond industry ostracises them from society, forfeiting not only interlocking business ties but also access to matchmaking networks. So not only do defectors get their face plastered across the wall of every bourse and name emailed to every dealer around the world, they will be effectively severed from the ethnoreligious lineage by not marrying a Jewish woman.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/66a8e067-83e0-4c1e-8f24-f98089c612d3_754x455.png)

Season 3 of **Ramy* follows the eponymous character’s foray into the diamond world.

Another force enables Jewish diamantaires to trust one another so extensively: social cohesion, or as Ibn Khaldun put it, *asabiyya.*

## Fortunes Forged In Faith

The Maghribi Traders and the diamantaires exemplify the economic rewards and competitive advantages of transacting with your co-religionists. The inherent confidence woven into religious kinship dismantles the inherent scepticism that governs commercial exchange. Among co-religionists, the foundation of trust emerges pre-established, elevated beyond the cautious calculations that typically govern transactions between strangers. Within the Abrahamic framework, this heightened confidence springs from theological imperatives: believers orient their decision-making toward eternal consequences, extending their temporal horizon far beyond expedient material gains.

Interest, for instance, is a risk-management tool that places a premium on the absence of trust when money is lent. In that sense, it is a tax on social cohesion, and trust is a discount rate on credit.

Individuals belonging to a distinct religious group also share tacit behavioural norms known in the Islamic vocabulary as *adab* and *akhlaq*. Institutions are more than just demarcative hierarchies and bylaws, operating on top of an intangible substrate of culture, norms, and shared mental models, all of which are instinctive to people operating from the same religious framework. In the case of the Maghribi Traders, operational norms became self-enforcing because of shared cognitive models. These mediate individual behaviour and structure interaction discreetly, creating the cultural operating system on top of which formal organisations can be built, and society shaped.

## Opportunism & The Muslim Condition

Modern Muslim markets rarely enjoy this discount rate on credit. Court systems are slow, traditional institutions captured by rent-seeking elites, and corruption at the top cascades down into a low-trust society. The implicit premium on distrust means productive opportunities fall through since risk dwarfs reward, creating a vicious cycle.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/30eca491-bcee-4c12-ba1d-be921ed912f7_1280x951-jpeg.jpg)

**The Parable of the Rich Fool -* Rembrandt (1627)

While the priority for any Muslim political economy must be institutional reform, it is not sufficient. Conventional institutions are a floor, not a ceiling.

Changing this demands governance structures that can neutralise transaction hazards where opportunism thrives. Capital flows through the arteries of Western banks that can freeze it overnight. Censorship, surveillance, and debanking are not speculative fears but active policy. Owning infrastructure like payment rails, which are not subject to the whims of any party with the power to sever access unilaterally (and often arbitrarily), is necessary as a matter of sovereignty. Oscillating between intermediaries which would either stifle or censor productive enterprises, evolved forms of the privately ordered networks, such as the Maghribi Traders & diamantaires, may be essential for Muslims in the 21st century.

The 19th century offers Muslims a blueprint. The trust assurances of these reputational networks were not exclusive to the Jewish communities. Trans-Saharan caravan traders operating between West and North Africa crafted a remarkable synthesis of these two paradigms. These were merchants who organised primarily agency agreements to trade goods. Through their activities, private and public institutions became functionally integrated, with recognition of the scope where one approach was more useful and economical than the other.

These traders deployed whichever paradigm suited them best, utilising the efficiency of reputation-based networks while nesting them seamlessly within formal legal frameworks. Courts (or more accurately, judges) remained available when disputes demanded formal adjudication, but only as a last resort given the prohibitive costs of legal proceedings in time and money. The Trans-Saharan traders reveal that the optimal solution isn't choosing between private and public order, but building robust private networks that can govern most contracts while keeping formal legal systems as backup infrastructure when stakes or complexity demand it.

> *The key to successful economic exchanges here is not necessarily an impartial and efficient third-party enforcing agency, but the existence of a level of trust or other self-enforcing institutions in relevant networks of commerce \[...\] In other words, the state is neither necessary nor sufficient. The simple model in which it is only the state and threat of its justice and police systems that makes people behave cooperatively seems a poor description of any known situation.* 
> *–* Joel Mokyr

The private order institutions highlighted here were not simply horizontal clusters constricted to a particular locality, but a type of network state, running parallel to but relevant in the political economies in which they were situated. The dispersed, diasporic state of Muslims today is ideal for forming such small-world networks, which emerge when distant connections yield high returns but transaction costs are high enough that strategic actors must bridge across clusters.

Trust is the subtle architecture of prosperity, but it rarely emerges on its own. It must be carefully cultivated through social technologies and institutions that make trust both possible *and* profitable through the bonds of reputation, which underwrite all productive societies.

---

**Author*: Haseeb Ahmed is based in Toronto. After driving growth operations for several startups, he is now working on transaction scripts and payment infrastructure. He is interested in the future of firms and money. You can follow his ongoing experiments and reflections* [*@haseebinc*](https://x.com/haseebinc?ref=kasurian.com)*.*

**Further Reading**

- Barak Richman, *How Community Institutions Create Economic Advantage*
- Lisa Bernstein, *Contract Governance In Small-World Networks*
- Joel Mokyr, *The Institutional Origins Of The Industrial Revolution*
- Ghislaine Lydon, *Contracting Trust*
- Primavera De Filippi, *Blockchains and The Economic Institutions of Capitalism*
- Oliver Williamson, *Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations*
- Ronald Coase, *The Problem of Social Cost*
### Eating Grass, Breathing Fire
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/eating-grass-breathing-fire/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:37:31.000Z
> *“If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, we will go hungry, but we will get one of our own”.* 
> *—* Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Pakistan is not a wealthy country. Nearly 40% of its population lives below the poverty line, nearly half are illiterate, and the government has borrowed from the IMF at least 23 times in the last 35 years.

Yet Pakistan has the curious distinction of being one of only nine nations in the world at the bleeding edge of the arms race.

This is because it has nuclear weapons.

How did this troubled nation, born in the bloodshed of Partition, plagued by instability, suffocated by military dictatorship, surrounded by insurgent separatism on its northern frontier and an overwhelmingly larger, fundamentally hostile neighbour to its east, find itself in possession of the ultimate deterrence?

This is the story of how nations react to the threat of annihilation, not with speeches and moral appeals, but through statecraft and subterfuge.

## A MAD World

> *“It is not the fear of death that keeps the peace; it’s the certainty of it”.*  
> — Excerpt from a Cold War strategy brief

The dawn of the Nuclear Age introduced a new idea: the surest way to prevent annihilation is to be prepared to annihilate. Strategist Bernard Brodie recognised the fundamental shift in the logic of conflict: “Thus far, the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars: from now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them.”

The nuke turned a physical contest into a psychological one: bluffing, posturing, credibility, and fear. Schelling, von Neumann, and the RAND Corporation formalised this idea into what eventually became Game Theory. You must convince your enemy that you *can* and absolutely *will* annihilate them if you face the threat of annihilation, and only if that threat is credible will peace be stable. This is the meaning of *Mutually Assured Destruction* (MAD). Critically, the stability of deterrence depends fundamentally on each contestant’s *second-strike* capacity, the idea that, even if bombed, a contestant will maintain the ability to inflict annihilation on its adversary.

MAD is a doctrine of perpetual paranoia, one that suffocated the heated mid-century ideological fervour, ensuring that the War stayed Cold. Naturally, then, for nations beset by existential threat the world over, the possibility of abstractifying conflict, of living in peace even if under the shadow of total ruin, of paranoid peace rather than paranoid war, resulted in a desperate and vicious arms race to acquire nuclear deterrence in the name of survival.

This is the world in which Pakistan’s nuclear program was birthed, and the incredible story of the men who risked annihilation in the name of averting it.

## The Taste of Grass

> *“For Pakistan, the bomb is not just a weapon. It is the very key to our national survival.”*  
> — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Ambition is often spurred by defeat. Pakistan was always an untenable, idealistic political project. It was formed as a nation torn in half, with eastern and western wings separated by thousands of kilometres of hostile Indian territory. The regions were linguistically, culturally, and ethnically distinct, with the Bengalis in the east, and the Punjabis, Sindhis, Balochis, and Kashmiris in the west. Although each wing of former Pakistan contained roughly the same population, most administrative focus and power remained in the west. Eventually, tensions began to boil over as these contradictions proved untenable for governance, culminating in the brutal civil war of 1971.

The aftermath saw Islamabad surrender to Dhaka and the success of the Bangladeshi independence movement. India, sensing an opportunity to harm its rival, seized the opportunity and intervened militarily on the side of the separatists. They had succeeded in tearing Pakistan in two. The loss of Bangladesh was not just a loss of prestige or a blow to the ideal of a Muslim homeland in the Indian subcontinent: Bangladesh was 14.5% of (united) Pakistan’s total landmass and more than half its total population.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/e901fb95-2b7f-47ba-9308-ca8a211819a9_850x739.png)

**Pakistan before the second partition in 1971.*

*Never again* echoed throughout the corridors of Islamabad, as the country was humiliated and dismembered at the hands of its larger, hostile neighbour. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto cemented himself as the leader of the beleaguered nation, and seeing signs of an Indian nuclear test on the horizon, vowed publicly and constantly to guarantee “national survival and honour”, to “eat grass” if necessary to procure a nuclear bomb. The nation seemed to agree: better to die of hunger than of fire.

In a conference in January 1972, just weeks after defeat, he convened the country’s top scientists in Multan, charging them with a sacred mission. “What India builds, we must build.” This narrative of righteous desperation in the face of military humiliation, the bomb as the ultimate guarantor of national survival, became doctrinal.

When India conducted the “Smiling Buddha” nuclear test in 1974, Pakistan’s worst fears came true, and the quest for a nuclear device shifted into feverish overdrive. It became hard to disentangle state policy from existential fear. A historian later noted that the program came to be seen as “the cornerstone of the very country”.

Bhutto’s government, in its desperation and paranoia, transmuted the bitter disgrace of 1971 into the motivation to embark on the path of “defiance and deterrence”, an imperative that dominated the next 25 years of national priorities.

Pakistan had lost half of itself overnight: it was terrified of losing the rest.

> *“We were not building a bomb. We were building a deterrent”.*  
> — Munir Ahmad Khan

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/2b8496ac-aa2c-439a-bf2b-4cdc354a98c0_462x259.png)

**Bhutto in 1969.*

Bhutto revitalised the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) under Munir Ahmad Khan, a US-trained nuclear engineer. Munir quietly began laying both plutonium and uranium tracks for the full weapon fuel cycle, while constructing an elaborate facade for their use in civilian power plants.

The initial focus was on plutonium. In 1973, after much negotiation, Pakistan struck a deal with France’s SGN to acquire a reprocessing plant, one that could extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The purchase was noticed, causing ripples in Washington, which promptly sent a communiqué to cease and desist procurement of technology that could be used to enrich plutonium. When Pakistan refused to acknowledge this, the US pressured France to stall the contract. Bhutto, panicking, flew fervently between Islamabad and Paris, personally lobbying French President d’Estaing to proceed.

Simultaneously, the PAEC began to covertly pay off employees at an undisclosed Belgian plant to ascertain blueprints for a reprocessing plant that they could later develop themselves. This was coupled with a PR campaign for “peaceful nuclear technology” for civilian purposes.

The US didn’t buy it and in the mid-70s, pressured the IMF, World Bank and USAID to formally cut aid to Pakistan, successfully killing the French Connection. US Secretary of State Kissinger threatened Bhutto explicitly, “We will make a horrible example of you.” Bhutto later quoted this in public speeches to thunderous rallies. He later privately recounted that the strategic payoff was easy to justify. Better poor, hated, and friendless than dead.

This was the situation in which a young engineer by the name of Abdul Qadeer Khan (AQ Khan) first entered the scene. Born in 1936 in British India, AQ Khan studied metallurgical engineering in Berlin in the 1960s, with further study in the Netherlands and Belgium. By 1972, he began working as a metallurgist for a subcontractor of the major nuclear fuel company, URENCO, in Amsterdam. The company supplied enriched uranium nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors in multiple European countries. AQ specifically worked on the advanced German/Dutch “Zippe” type centrifuges, which enriched natural uranium into bomb fuel, and was even involved in component procurement for the Europeans.

Sometimes, all it takes to change history is one man in the right place. India’s *Smiling Buddha* had a huge effect on the expat AQ, a bookish man then in his mid-thirties. Spurred to act, he dispatched a handwritten letter to Islamabad in July 1974, hoping to reach Bhutto.

> *“I have acquired very detailed and comprehensive knowledge of the gas centrifuge system and am now in a position to help Pakistan”.* 
>  
> *“I am ready to return to Pakistan immediately and offer my services to the homeland, if I am given the opportunity”.* 
>  
> *“This is a matter of utmost urgency. India’s recent test has changed everything”.* 
>  
> *“With this technology, we do not need to depend on plutonium or any foreign powers. We can develop the capability indigenously”.*

In a rare bureaucratic success, the letter actually reached Bhutto, who seized the opportunity and effectively offered Khan carte blanche with state resources. This was nuclear espionage by invitation.

Over the next two years, Khan covertly gathered and copied blueprints and lists for European component suppliers. Dutch Intelligence started to close in on him and notified the CIA. Remarkably, the CIA urged the Dutch to let him continue*,* expecting him to be part of a larger terrorist network. They hoped to track Khan and then apprehend the source at once, not realising that he really was a lone actor in communication with the Pakistani State.

By late 1975, Khan had noticed that critical projects had been reassigned, and his security access was starting to be tightened. “I knew they were onto me,” he recalled years later. You can feel it in the way people talk to you, the way the atmosphere shifts. I couldn’t wait any longer. It wasn’t fear, it was urgency. I had to get home before the door closed.”

He escaped in time. In early 1976, the prodigal son returned with the keys to the kingdom: centrifuge blueprints, technical design notes, and a voluminous Rolodex of European companies that sold high-speed motors, vacuum pumps, maraging steel, and more.

By mid-1976, AQ had set up a secret enrichment facility at Kahuta, on the outskirts of the capital. The effort, internally nicknamed Project 706, was guarded by soldiers in plain clothes and cloaked in extreme secrecy, posing as a random research lab while it was kitted out with thousands of centrifuges in the basement. Within a few years, the *Khan Research Lab* (KRL) finally started producing enriched uranium. One observer later quipped that “it was Harry Potter wizardry”; they couldn’t believe that it was working.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/01075466-682d-49da-b894-6c961a937ce4_1200x851.png)

**AQ Khan*.

Pakistan now had two simultaneous bomb efforts: the uranium from Kahuta and plutonium from the PAEC’s attempts to build a reprocessing plant.

Khan’s industrial espionage has become the stuff of legend. CIA documentation reveals that his “shopping expeditions” across Europe were “surprisingly, remarkably successful”. He set up front companies across Europe, ordering dual-use parts, ensuring that for each part, for example, a motor, there was a “public/civilian” use case to tout as a pretext.

If suppliers got cold feet, Khan nonchalantly comforted them and, if necessary, moved on to other suppliers. In fact, he was so successful that between 1974 and 1977, he procured over twice what Pakistan actually needed for initial efforts: first for contingency, and second to sell forward to willing buyers on the black market.

The CIA increasingly made him a national priority, worrying that he might well be the most prolific nuclear proliferator in history, given that most of the excess materials ended up in Iran, North Korea and Libya through the 80s and 90s. A contemporary at the lab later recalled that “Khan had a total blank check: he could buy anything at any price.”

Pakistan’s nuclear program would move in a distinctly militaristic direction after Bhutto’s deposition in 1977 at the hands of his own chief of army staff, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, in a military coup. A year later, in 1978, Zia assumed the presidency and ruled for life until he died in a plane crash in 1988\. His paranoia about spies and moles would lead to even greater secrecy and urgency within the nuclear program itself – a key component of its eventual success.

![undefined](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/18e3883a-316d-4bf3-9d86-d71f44d536ce_1920x1265-jpeg.jpg)

**Zia meeting with US President Ronald Reagan in the White House, 1982\. Reagan would declare Pakistan a “frontline ally” against the USSR, buying political cover for Pakistan’s nuclear programme.*

Throughout the late 70s and 80s, the KRL duplicated research efforts and ensured comparable labs were dotted all around the country, cloaked under various guises - from pharmaceutical manufacturing plants to chicken farms, all while powdered uranium was enriched in whirring centrifuges in their basements.

By 1983, the KRL finally managed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels of 90% purity. The URENCO heist had paid off: Pakistan was nearly ready.

Within the halls of the Red Zone of Islamabad, the whispers referred to AQ Khan as the “Invisible General”, “Dr AQ”, the “Baba-e-Bomb” (the Father of the Bomb), the “Mohsin-e-Pakistan” (Saviour of Pakistan).

> *“I wrote that letter with full awareness that I could be arrested or killed. But I felt I had no choice. India had tested. We had to respond”.*  
> — AQ Khan

## The Dragon and Oil

China was critical to the operation. Starting in the 1970s, Beijing began quietly telegramming critical advice to Islamabad, often in coded messaging. It later transpired that Mao and Bhutto had struck a secret deal in 1976 after the French deal fell through: Bhutto offered Pakistan as a willing counterbalance to India in exchange for assistance with the bomb. Mao saw a common rival and accepted the gambit. The first nuclear bombs that Pakistan tested were predicated on China’s 1966 Chic-4 design. China smuggled 50 kg of weapons-grade uranium into Pakistan in 1982, enough for two early bombs, along with 10 tons of UF₆ (Uranium Fluoride) for later purification.

Chinese technicians troubleshot early centrifuge operations at Kahuta, and these technicians were even invited as state guests to observe Pakistan’s first nuclear tests. AQ Khan later said that Pakistan sent its own researchers to China to build a small enrichment plant in Hanzhong in the 1980s, to try to return the favour and cement the alliance.

Washington, watching the shadows flicker, confronted Beijing about the programme. China responded with flat denial and public condemnations about any purported nuclear program in Pakistan.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/881433e8-0849-4d6b-88c5-658f2d2e7672_800x480.png)

**Mao Zedong meets with Bhutto, 1976.*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/209503dd-d31c-413a-9df4-4a868e86ab48_800x533.png)

**Bhutto meets with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, 1974.*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/76d6b68b-4b1b-47cb-88dc-6337ae59f5bf_960x748.png)

**(left to right) Bhutto, Gaddafi, and Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal at the Islamic Summit Conference in Badshahi mosque, Lahore, 1974.*

AQ Khan also managed to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in external financing from Gaddafi in Libya and Saudi Arabia, who hoped to receive components and assistance in return. “There is the Christian bomb. There is the Jewish bomb. There is the Hindu bomb. Why not an Islamic bomb?” said Bhutto to Gaddafi, in a secret 1974 meeting organised by Khan, to sell him on the idea of financing in exchange for a stake in the eventual weapons program.

Saudi Arabia was similarly sold on the idea, as it began to feel the need for a Sunni ally to counterbalance a nuclear India and an increasingly militarised Iran. It began to supply oil freely to Pakistan for a few months after the US imposed sanctions on Pakistan in the 90s. Pakistani officials gave the Saudis the impression that the deterrent umbrella would be extended to Saudi Arabia should the need arise.

By the 80s, however, despite the foreign support and financing, Zia made it very public that no external parties, be they Libyan or Saudi, *owned* Pakistan’s precious deterrent. It was, first and foremost, fundamental Pakistani survivalism. They would maintain control.

## Sabotage

China and the US weren’t the only two parties with a vested interest in the covert program. In the 80s, Israel and India joined the fray.

Israel, a beneficiary of its own covert nuclear program, had just destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in a black-ops airstrike in 1981, and on hearing rumours of an “Islamic bomb” immediately began to view Pakistan, like India did, as an existential concern.

In 1983, Pakistani counterintelligence, intercepting logistical communiqués between Israeli “diplomats” (suspected Mossad) and Indian intelligence, found hard evidence of a planned joint Indian-Israeli strike on the KRL covert nuclear facilities, starting with the flagship plant in Kahuta and then moving on to the other sites.

At the same time, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 pushed Pakistan into the US’ arms as a critical ally. Strategic interdependence can push even enemies into each other’s arms, particularly when facing common threats, and how cause prioritisation necessitates political compromise: it did not matter how sceptical the US was of Pakistan; they were focused entirely on the Soviets, and Pakistan rationally took advantage as best they could. Reagan even sent Pakistan F-16s and intelligence and turned on the aid hose on the condition that Pakistan did not *actually test* the nuclear bomb.

One Pakistani general later quipped, “The Americans needed us then, so they were as quiet as a dead mouse about the bomb.” And so, the Pakistanis maintained restraint and sent soldiers into Afghanistan to help the West. Reagan, choosing Cold War victory over non-proliferation, even quietly tipped off Zia about the impending Indian and Israeli bombing run.

Pakistan then scrambled to organise a private back-channel meeting with India in which the PAEC’s Munir Khan personally threatened India’s nuclear chief, Raja Ramanna, that “if your jets come, we will retaliate against Bombay.” India’s PM, Indira Gandhi, her hands full with local issues, put the project on ice, much to Israeli frustration.

Meanwhile, in a now-legendary story, Indian Intelligence sent a Bangladeshi agent, codenamed “Majnun”, into Kahuta to pose as a scientist, gain intel, and undertake sabotage. Depending on who tells the story, Majnun either disappeared after inflicting setbacks or was caught and executed. In any case, his efforts had little impact on slowing Pakistan down.

Mossad needed a new strategy and began to sabotage the supply lines that AQ Khan had spent the last decade establishing. In 1981, a series of mysterious explosions destroyed facilities at Switzerland’s Cora Engineering (uranium fluoride feeds and cooling systems), Germany’s Wallischmiller (remote-handling equipment, think: robotic arms to handle sensitive equipment), and the home of German nuclear scientist Dr. Heinz Mebus. Mebus happened to be out for a walk, but his dog died in the blast.

Another German supplier from a Wallischmiller subsidiary recounted receiving phone calls from anonymous numbers: “The attacks we carried out… could happen to you, too”. A Swiss banker who intermediated many of these transactions was extorted by what he believed were Israeli Intelligence officials, who warned him to cease dealing with Pakistan. European suppliers started to back out, fearful for their lives, at which point Pakistan came out swinging. AQ Khan publicly declared in the media that it didn’t matter if they were bombed, “We can build 10 more Kahutas!”

In May 1998, right before the initial planned hot tests, three Baloch separatists hijacked a civilian Pakistani airliner, threatening to kill everybody on board unless the government scrapped the planned tests in Balochistan. The separatists demanded the plane be flown to India, where they expected safe haven. In reality, the plane flew in a gigantic circle only to land in *Hyderabad, Pakistan,* where the airport itself was disguised as the airport in *Hyderabad, India.* The signage, uniforms and other clarifying signs at the airport were changed to Hindi or disguised. Once the plane landed, special ops commandos stormed the plane and secured the hostages. The separatists were executed later that month.

Pakistan suspected Indian intelligence involvement in the effort. In any case, India and Israel were desperate and furious: it was too late. Pakistan was now ready to conduct *hot tests*.

## Breathing Fire

The Pakistanis were one screw short of completion all through the 80s. They had been “cold-testing” deployment mechanisms: drilling about two dozen kilometre-deep holes in Baluchistan’s Ras Koh mountains, and detonating cold (no nuclear material) bombs inside them, studying the seismographs, and burying the results. The government shrewdly decided instead to acquire as much American goodwill as possible while it was still needed in the twilight years of the Cold War. They waited for 10 long years until their hand was forced.

In May 1998, India forced that hand. Vajpayee’s government in India conducted Pokhran-II, a series of five public nuclear tests, in a show of force, openly declaring itself a hostile nuclear neighbour. Clinton, sensing the worst, promptly called up Pakistan’s new Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, urging restraint.

The Pakistanis were under pressure: should they risk impoverishment and alienation or death by Indian adventurism? After 25 years of eating grass, was it now finally time to breathe fire?

On May 28, 1998, 24 years after AQ Khan’s pivotal letter, Pakistan detonated five nuclear devices underground in the foothills of the Ras Koh range in Chagai, Balochistan. They detonated a sixth on the 30th.

As the desert was lit on fire, before the orange dust had a chance to settle, Nawaz Sharif proclaimed triumphantly on TV, “Pakistan has settled the score. Today, we have settled the account of the nuclear blasts by India”.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/5a6c6d94-14ec-4599-9352-cb855695657f_710x442.png)

**Televised: the underground Chagai-I test shakes the mountains.*

The nation erupted in euphoria. Crowds poured into the streets, schoolchildren chanted national slogans at assembly, and it was difficult to find coverage of anything else on national TV. ”We have emerged as a nuclear state on our own terms, " declared Sharif. Pakistan was finally equipped with its own Sword of Damocles.

Indian news outlets like *The Hindu* or *India Today* were deflated, acknowledging the loss of strategic advantage even as Vajpayee, India’s Prime Minister, put on a brave face: “We are not surprised. We had expected it”.

India’s quest to achieve an absolute strategic advantage over Pakistan had been foiled by the tenacity of Pakistani scientists, engineers, and statesmen, who sought their own deterrent by any means necessary.

> *“In slavery, neither sword nor strategy works; But when a man tastes conviction, the chains cut themselves”.*  
> — Muhammad Iqbal

## Promise and Perfidy

What is the price of safety? Money moves quicker than people, and the day after, sanctions, trade embargoes, instability, cancelled aid, and capital flight promptly followed. In June 1998, and already nearing debt default, burning through its foreign reserves trying to keep its currency afloat, Sharif implored the nation to stay strong and brace for austerity, even reciting Bhutto’s iconic declaration that “We will eat grass if we must”.

The Washington Post ran an exclusive titled “Let them eat grass”, highlighting the discord between the expensive arms race and a population riddled with poverty.

A Pakistani newspaper ruefully noted, *“We have the Bomb, but we have no water in Karachi”.* A resident mourned, “*The atom bomb may be good for the country, but we haven’t had a single drop of water in the last four days… how can we celebrate a bomb in the middle of famine?”*

And yet, for many, all this misery was the acceptable cost of conviction. The tests meant one thing above all else: Pakistan had finally caught up. Pakistan would survive.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/33fac35c-f739-43ad-97d2-db7383785da4_1600x1095.png)

**A parade featuring Pakistan’s ‘Ghauri’ ballistic missiles*.

The economic and material costs of deterrence are high: decades of lost development, stability, peace, investment and industry. Pakistan spends more on defence (4% of GDP) than on health and education combined (3%). For most developed nations, the numbers are about 2% and 15% respectively.

Facing an aggressive neighbour four times larger in landmass and six times larger in population has turned Pakistan into a garrison state in permanent vigilance. The militarisation of the nation has left permanent scars; Pakistan still struggles with basic literacy, malnutrition and power shortages. The social contract has steadily frayed. Once a nation has spent 25 years cementing a security establishment, it is hard to return to normalcy: the public remains in a state of siege, paranoia, and vigilance, an attitude instrumentalised neatly to maintain the Army’s centrality and the constant overreach of the intelligence services into civilian life. Pakistan’s politics has been remoulded along praetorian lines as drastic measures once necessary for survival have cemented themselves as ordinary and permanent. While the paranoid survive, it hurts to *stay* paranoid. Pakistan has generated a culture in *overshoot,* where the instruments of survival begin to suffocate the very society they are meant to protect.

Statecraft is often undertaken in the shadows, in basements, behind barbed wire, and under threat of death. State security routinely depends on bribery, extortion, theft, black markets, surveillance, sabotage, and the threat of death. This is the logic of survival. Nuclear bombs are not built in the open: AQ Khan’s acquisition of the blueprints was outright theft: false end-user certifications, shell companies in Dubai and Singapore, and an under-the-table network for procurement spanning China to Libya. Consider the smuggling of uranium from China to Pakistan via the mountains, the CIA overreaching by holding back the Dutch from picking up AQ Khan in 1975, hoping to find a larger network.

In the end, the story of how Pakistan became a nuclear power is one of boldness, intrigue, desperation, and peril. A poor country reeling from defeat and existentially threatened managed to pull off an extraordinary multi-decade plan, staving off sanctions and sabotage, forging secret alliances, and ensuring survival.

Pakistan finally managed to breathe fire. It is now time to provide water at home.

> *“I told Bhutto Sahib we would get the bomb. I promised it. I kept that promise”.*  
> — AQ Khan

---

**Author*: Nasir Hindi works in Emerging Markets investment in London, before which he trained as a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in statecraft, politics, technology, science, and mysticism.*

**Further Reading**

*Monographs & Scholarly Works:*

- Abbas, Hassan. Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb: A Story of Defiance, Deterrence & Deviance. Oxford University Press, 2018.
- Bennett-Jones, Owen. “One Screw Short: Pakistan’s Bomb.” London Review of Books, 41(3), Feb 2019.
- Levy, Adrian & Scott-Clark, Catherine. Deception: Pakistan, the U.S. & the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy. Walker & Co., 2007.
- Khan, Feroz Hassan. Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb. Stanford University Press, 2012.
- Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992\. Blackwell, 1992.
- Khaldun, Ibn. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. 1377 (various translations).
- Schelling, Thomas. The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard University Press, 1960.
- Brodie, Bernard. The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. Harcourt Brace, 1946.
- Fukuyama, Francis. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Cornell University Press, 2004.
- Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy. Simon & Schuster, 1994.

*Articles & Reports:*

- Middle East Eye (June 25, 2025). “‘Why not an Islamic bomb?’: How Israel planned and failed to stop Pakistan going nuclear.” (Reporting on Israeli-Indian 1980s plot).
- The Economic Times (Jan 6, 2022). “Israel-India nuclear strike plot shelved in the ’80s, reveals report.”
- PBS Frontline (2003). “Pakistan’s Secret Bomb” – interviews and timeline ([PBS.org](http://pbs.org/?ref=kasurian.com) archive).
- Atomic Heritage Foundation. “A.Q. Khan Profile” ([atomicheritage.org](http://atomicheritage.org/?ref=kasurian.com)) – summary of Khan’s network.
- Bennett-Jones, Owen. “One Screw Short: Pakistan’s Bomb.” London Review of Books, Feb 7, 2019.
- The Washington Post (June 11, 1998). “Pakistani Politicians’ Rallying Cry: ‘Let Them Eat Grass.’”
- Neue Zürcher Zeitung via JPost/TOI (Jan 2002). Report on Mossad’s 1981 sabotage campaign in Europe.
- Financial Times (multiple). Analyses on Israel’s security state and regional arms races (FT archives, 2015–2023).
- Dawn (Karachi) Archive: “A leaf from history: N-deal angers US” (Apr 21, 2013) – on 1970s French reprocessing deal.
- National Security Archive Briefing Book #773 (Aug 30, 2021). “Pakistan’s Nuclear Program Posed ‘Acute Dilemma’ for U.S. Policy” – declassified docs 1978–79.
- Institute for Science & International Security (ISIS) Reports: on Pakistan’s test sites and proliferation activities ([isis-online.org](http://isis-online.org/?ref=kasurian.com), 1998–2010).
### Futurism, the Next Venture of Islam
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/technicalistic-society/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:39:31.000Z
History often happens around us in a way that is hardly noticeable as it passes. Consider [the aftermath](https://kasurian.com/p/mongol-invasions-revival?ref=kasurian.com) of the Mongol invasions. The crisis brought on by the initial shock of the Mongol period demanded that Islamic civilisation’s elites rise to the occasion and form new and responsive forms of political legitimacy. The material costs of the sieges and battles may have been extremely dire. But imagine the situation a few years after the deluge: is it possible that daily life did not change significantly for large swaths of the populace?

Imagine you are living in a small town in Central Asia that has been spared the worst during the Mongol invasions. Things trudge along as usual. There may be a new military governor, but the social order revolving around the balance between the military elites and the local notables — what has been called the *a*‘*yan-amir* system — is likely much the same, even as the official boundaries of empires ebb and flow. Your community might temporarily fall under the sway of one of the many charismatic messiah-figures of the time, but only until someone with a stronger army (and whose imams had less “innovative” Friday sermons) brings a return to normalcy.

Consider yourself now in the same hypothetical town, not after the Mongol invasions, but during the rise of the European empires. The military governor has again changed, and taxes flow to different hands; like before, your intellectuals and artisans might move (willingly or not) to a new imperial capital. And yet, this new development brings with it a series of increasingly complex *technological* interventions into everyday life. These may ultimately be salutary, such as improved access to modern medicine or cutting-edge agricultural techniques. But because of their effectiveness, these new techniques demand that the social order bend to their demands: new farming techniques are introduced, familiar waterways are dammed, and pastoral regions are set aside for agriculture to provide cash crops for the world economy. A new, competing class of settlers arrive from the imperial centre, and up-and-coming bureaucrats learn English or Russian to meet the needs of imperial ideologies and to read the newest technical manuals. The imperatives of efficient, technical production might begin to feel a bit more intrusive than previous changes in authority. It is only in hindsight that we know how this era of European hegemony transformed the world through the spread of *technicalistic* society.

This was one angle of the argument set forth by Marshall Hodgson, a scholar of Islamic civilisation whose three-volume survey of Islamic history, *The* *Venture of Islam* (1975),concluded with a discussion of the technically-focused society we all find ourselves in today. A world historian as much as a scholar of Islam, Hodgson contributed throughout his work to several perspectives that we now largely take for granted, such as a rejection of “Golden Age” narratives which saw the decline of Islamic civilisation begin with the fall of the Abbasids, and on the contrary, an appreciation for the *Persianate* which largely typified high culture in the Middle Periods (i.e. roughly 945-1501 CE). A key issue which caught Hodgson’s attention in the third and final volume of this *Venture of Islam* is what he called *technicalistic society*:

> …a society in which the dominant elements are on a level of social organisation where in intellectual and practical activity, calculatively rationalised and specialised technical procedures form an interdependent and preponderant pattern.

Technicalistic society is a form of social organisation — and with it, a set of cultural values — which has since become nearly omnipresent in human life. For Hodgson, understanding the logic behind technicalistic society and its impacts on human life would be key to mitigating those negative impacts not just on Islamic civilisation, but on humanity writ large.

## Technicalistic Society and the “Great Western Transmutation”

The outcomes of this development – increasingly precise measurements and improved technical procedures – would be so wide-ranging that Hodgson called it the “Great Western Transmutation”: a shift in cultural values which happened to occur in Western Europe but was not predestined to happen there. This new cultural orientation demanded continuous increases in economic productivity and experimental, continuously innovating scientific methods, with “bourgeois financial power” supplanting the landed aristocracy in social spheres. As the various technical specialities developed interdependently with increasing success in their ability to manipulate the material world, so too did the process of technicalisation come to determine patterns of human life in modernity.

Hodgson saw in technicalistic society not only major developments in scientific discovery or engineering prowess, but (inevitable) psychological aftereffects of this relatively rapid shift in the human experience. The “technicalistic spirit” demanded that *efficiency* takeprecedence over any other metric (e.g., aesthetic, or interpersonal) that once might have been given greater credence. This can lead, of course, to considerable progress in the sciences, since the multiplying effect of technical improvements results in almost shocking changes in material conditions in a relatively short period. So too did Hodgson see this mindset as the logic behind *legislative government*, in which laws are not founded upon permanent (or even divine) bases, but are—by definition—subject to continuous change to conform to lived experience.

But every shift towards technicalism brings follow-on consequences. Hodgson noted that technicalistic society, at its best, could lead to great increases in material wealth and surges in knowledge production, with the disruption of existing societal pathways also leading to new personal opportunities and liberties for the individual. That said, this new technical individual might also find themselves “privately isolated,” living in a world with a “tendency towards anonymity and impersonalisation” in place of a more “traditional” sphere which, for all of its faults, provided a person with a defined scope of roles and opportunities.

The impact of the Transmutation upon the Islamic world is seen as particularly destabilising not only because of the rapid introduction of technicalism itself, but also because it was imposed through European hegemony. This imposition, in many cases, came in the form of the subordination of non-European lands through either economic manoeuvring or outright colonisation. This is not minimised in the *Venture*, nor is it taken for granted that there was something about European society that made its hegemony inevitable compared to other human civilisations. I will not rehash here the various responses within Islamic society to the situation—embracing Westernisation, attempts at renewal of cultural traditions, revolutionary and constitutional movements, outright rejection in forms we might call neo-traditionalist—as these have been well explored by Hodgson and others.

What deserves additional attention, though, is that for Hodgson, the shortcomings of technicalistic society were a *common human obstacle* that would require, in turn, a common human response. The solutions that might emerge from the Islamic world, then, could well be key to the worldwide effort to deal with the dislocations of technicalism.

## Unification in Dislocation

It is in the epilogue to the third volume of the *Venture of Islam* that Hodgson turns from history to possibility—the challenges facing Islamic civilisation in modernity, and how this is a *common* struggle across human society. The global dominance of the technicalistic mindset creates this common struggle as world problems become interconnected and indivisible. The universal human imperative across the now-unified world civilisations is to draw from their distinct traditions to provide solutions to common issues.

For Hodgson, there were two pressing issues. One is the *disruption of cultural traditions*, the result of an ethos embracing continuous disruptive change as one technique displaces another. Second is *pressure on natural resources*, as the “possible forms of technical exploitation multiply indefinitely while the physical resources of the planet do not”. Hodgson was concerned not only with the exhaustion of arable land but also that the drive for development would necessarily continue to narrow the space remaining for the rest of the natural world. Large-scale technical society also demands *social planning* to direct the energies of technique (which “implies the possibility of arbitrary human manipulation”); the *need for a lettered mass culture*,which brings with it the challenge of implementing mass education to foster technical expertise; and a *radical unsettling of moral allegiances*, as old norms are felt to be outdated, beliefs are challenged by technical development, and the logic of industrial society places novel burdens upon its participants.

Some of these are on the *material* plane—conservation, educational reform, mass media—while others are speaking to the *moral* condition of the human living in technicalistic society. For Hodgson, it was the latter where the heritage of Islamic (or any other) civilisation will have the most to contribute. This is not to say that he was not concerned for the material world, and the “development gap” — in which the uneven adoption of technical methods necessarily means that certain regions will be forced to “catch up” to earlier adopters — is an issue that Hodgson felt confronted all of humanity. But while he believed that developments in automation, energy production, or other scientific advancements might make it ever faster and cheaper to bring material parity across human society, the internal, *spiritual* dislocations of modernity would remain.

Accordingly, solutions may be found in the intellectual and religious heritage of the major world traditions, whose thinkers were frequently concerned not only with material progress but with internal human states. Traditions can provide the individual with new opportunities for “creative possibilities.” It is exactly the “historical, traditional mode of human involvement” in which the individual would not be considered fungible, as in the technicalistic drive for specialised and depersonalised functioning. As such, it may be the “older traditions of vision” which can aid in seeking a higher purpose than technicalistic goals.

As Hodgson saw it, the balance to be struck would be between the particularity of a specific heritage and the universalism inherent in technicalistic society:

> On the level of basic spiritual insight, an interpretation of community and law will be increasingly inadequate to actual experience until it can confront creatively the presence of contrasting spiritual traditions of equal status in a single world-wide society. This must take place on at least two planes: the community as such must overcome its exclusivity without sacrificing its formative discipline, and the heritage it carries must be in dialogue with contemporary culture common to all communities, yet without sacrificing its integrity.

There is, in other words, a “standing tension between universalism and communalism” in reaching into Islamic heritage to find answers to the problems of the modern age. Hodgson’s recommendation for overcoming this limitation was a “grand dialogue among the heritages” — not merely “distill\[ing\] abstractions from the several pre-Modern heritages,” but encouraging the various civilisational-religious traditions to “enlarge \[the\] range of dialogue,” and collaboratively devise solutions to the atomisation which has characterised life in the technicalistic age.

One asset Hodgson thought Islamic civilisation (now heritage) could provide to this project would be its “frank sense of history” — that is, the tradition inherent in the Islamic discourse of reconciling a religious tradition which was formed-in-time with the fact that this same religious tradition asserts values which transcend historical contingencies. This is not limited to Islam, naturally, though (by focusing on Islamic civilisation in his work) Hodgson expressed a hope that contemporary Islamic discourse would build from the tensions within its own tradition, “go a great deal further,” and “provide a basis for creativity” by which those of us still struggling with the challenges of technicalistic society might “overcome \[our\] cultural dislocations.”

The nature of universalised technicalistic society also means that this venture of Islamic society has ramifications for all of humanity (and the conclusions of other traditions, upon Islamic civilisation). For Hodgson, in our current condition, “the ultimate spiritual commitments of any sector of mankind must be taken account of by every other sector in evaluating its own ultimate commitments.” The success of one group, then, is the success of all—and vice versa.

## Reservations and Opportunities

One might question whether Hodgson’s recommendations are satisfying for Islamic civilisation *per se*, and whether his framework is an actual critique of technicalistic society, or only an adaptation within it. Hodgson believed that the world religions provide a means by which those of us living in technicalistic society might start to address its unsettling and disruptive effects, including the increasing material pressures on world-society. This is a reasonable point to take from the perspective of the world as a *single civilisational unit*, but one might ask whether this is particularly *Islamic*. For someone who is committed to the success of Islamic society and who wants to meet the challenge of Islam in their personal orientation, it may not be particularly convincing to direct these goals to a universalistic perspective.

This is a frequent challenge for those who see commonalities across religious traditions as a human endeavor, or wish to perceive behind them a common spiritual or esoteric thrust: does this approach flatten religious practice into a meta-narrative, in which the particular religious traditions — each with their own, sometimes conflicting, claims about human purpose, salvation, the divine — are welcomed only to the extent they embrace this *same universalising meta-narrative*? Are visions of Islam, or any other religious tradition which views itself in more exclusive terms, excluded from participating in this project of tackling the shortcomings of technicalistic society? This is not to criticise those approaches which are more perennialist in nature, but only to note the tension inherent in this path.

On that note, one might ask if Hodgson’s prescription matches his diagnosis of the disruptions that technicalistic society has wrought on human tradition and sources of meaning. Islam may well be a source of wisdom for those who are confronting, for example, atomisation and the accompanying loss of meaning, but does drawing from these sources on a personal level confront the prime cause — the very prioritisation of technicalism as the prime goal of human functioning? Or does this ethical-moralistic approach only provide palliative relief to the individual in the face of a technicalistic ideology which, by definition, cannot but continue to innovate, dislocate, and disrupt? If the solution to dealing with the ongoing system is still taken for granted, it may not provide a sufficient alternative for those who are unconvinced by technicalistic society in the first place.

Then again, consider the points being raised in Hodgson’s concern about how to respond to technicalism. There is the issue of how to retain a connection to our religious and cultural traditions in a period when it seems like the old order has ceased to command the respect it once could. The cosmopolitan nature of our interconnected world-society — only made more rapid in the Internet age — calls for finding a balance between what we owe our local, tangible connections and what we owe the broader human community. The individual believer (and not only in an Islamic context) may see a dominant world paradigm that does not quite seem to fit with their own deeply held beliefs, while realising that they must still find a way to work within it.

Hodgson would likely be the first to note that when looking at the long course of Islamic intellectual heritage, these are hardly new questions — though they may, just as in previous moments of upheaval, require new answers.

---

**Words*: Zach Winters is a writer and historian based in Chicago, Illinois. His doctoral work at the University of Chicago focused on messianism and the esoteric sciences in the Timurid era. He also writes about religion, culture, and history at his* [*Substack page*](http://zachblog.substack.com/)*.*

**Further Reading**

*Hodgson and World History*:

- Marshall Hodgson, *The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization* (3 vols)
- John Nef, *The Conquest of the Material World*
- Oswald Spengler, *The Decline of the West*
- Arnold Toynbee, *A Study of History*
- William McNeill, *The Rise of the West*

*“Technicalistic” Society:*

- Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media*
- Jacques Ellul, *The Technological Society*
- Walter Ong, *Orality and Literacy*
### Elephants, Rockets, & Tiger Statecraft: Tipu Sultan the Moderniser
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/tipu-sultan/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T20:50:03.000Z
The rise of European imperialism is remembered as a humiliation for Islamic civilisation. The great Muslim empires were unable to confront Western military might in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lacking the centralisation, resources, and technology to compete with European industrial strength. In India, the armies of the crumbling Mughal Empire were no match for the well-oiled fighting machine of Britain’s East India Company. The Ottomans made a belated attempt to modernise but ultimately failed, with the First World War dealing the fatal blow at the dawn of the last century.

Muslim traditionalists, however, strongly dispute the idea that the Islamic world floundered and fell behind, arguing instead that the modern West was an aberration and that, inspired by the Enlightenment, European empires developed outrageous and inherently immoral technologies and forms of governance. Muslim attempts to play catch-up with the West were doomed to fail because Islam, they claim, is incompatible with modernity.

This narrative has proven powerful and seductive since it neatly absolves Islamic civilisation of having to reckon with failure. It is also an increasingly popular position among young Western Muslim intellectuals. But this narrative has allowed a blinkered view of the past three centuries to develop.

In truth, some Muslim rulers bucked the trend and participated in modernisation, nearly disrupting the ascent of the European empires. While they may be remembered as heroes, their significance is often little-understood. These were ‘modernisers’, but not the ones we typically think of when that term is mentioned. They were statesmen who adopted modernity in the form of new science, military strategies, and bureaucratic technologies, which they comfortably integrated into their own worldviews.

One of the most significant such figures was Tipu Sultan, ruler of the South Indian kingdom of Mysore. In the late eighteenth century, this extraordinary figure nearly altered the trajectory of the British Empire by bringing the British East India Company to its knees.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/6782f3ba-684f-40f9-8be0-050129f11bc5_960x1362.png)

**A 1789 miniature painting of Tipu Sultan. (Wikimedia Commons)*

Tipu Sultan is not exactly a forgotten figure. In Pakistan, he is lionised as a great Muslim hero, although he is rarely studied outside of academic circles. In India, meanwhile, he looms large in the Hindu nationalist imagination. While old-school secular politicians and intellectuals traditionally hailed Tipu as the first great hero of anti-colonial Indian nationalism, today Hindu nationalists revile him as the archetypal Muslim villain.

Often known by contemporaries as “Citizen Tippoo”, he allied with the French and made friends with Napoleon. Infamous for his gruesome wartime atrocities, he was known as the “Tiger of Mysore” - partly due to his prowess in warfare, and partly because his elite fighters dressed in tiger-striped uniforms. Tipu built his kingdom’s power and state capacity to an extraordinary level, forming a modern Western-style army that deployed military technology more advanced than anything the British had.

Ultimately, it was Tipu’s failure in diplomacy, rather than a lack of military or technological prowess, that brought him down. As he became increasingly isolated, the British could bring greater resources and armies to bear and eventually defeated him. Yet Tipu Sultan’s incredible rule stands as an essential example of a response to colonialism that defies the usual prejudices about Muslims in the modern era - one that sought to internalise advances in state-building, military technology, and the economy on its own terms.

## Modernising Mysore

Haidar Ali, Tipu’s father, laid the groundwork for his son’s success. He ruled Mysore as a nominal province of the Mughal Empire from the 1760s, having emerged from its military ranks to depose and replace the ineffectual ruler, Wodiya Raja. Haidar set about diligently expanding Mysore’s army and invading neighbouring polities. He and Tipu, then only a teenager, hired French officers to train Mysore’s army and established a navy commanded by a European seaman.

In 1767, Haidar launched an assault on the East India Company east of Bangalore. The British, used to easy victories, were stunned to be confronted by an army of around 50,000 men–23,000 of whom were cavalry–armed with cutting-edge rifles and cannon. They were particularly shaken to realise that the enemy’s artillery was more advanced than their own, with a far longer range.

Strategically, too, the Company was no match for Mysore. Seventeen-year-old Tipu was crucial to the war strategy, leading an implausible raid behind Company lines into Madras, where he set about looting and destroying its Georgian villas. In the end, the British were forced to sue for peace.

This was just the beginning. Time and again, Tipu’s armies fought and defeated British-led forces. In 1782, he led an army that decisively crushed a British column outside Tanjore. The next year, he ambushed a Company army by the Coleroon river. A massacre followed.

When Haidar Ali died shortly afterwards in 1783, Tipu was 33 years old and a statesman in waiting (he was also “uncommonly well-made, except in the neck, which was short”). His father, on his deathbed, had ordered him to devote his efforts to confronting the Company: “The English are today all-powerful in India,” he declared. “It is necessary to weaken them by war.”

The defining feature of Tipu Sultan’s rule was his ruthlessly selective adoption of his enemy’s strengths and tactics. While many Muslim modernists of the era are remembered for their infatuation with European high culture, such as Ottoman obsession with European music, suit jackets, and baroque architecture, Tipu took a different path. Indeed, in many respects, he was a quintessential Indian ruler. He wore a kurta, a silk brocade coat and a range of often absurdly elaborate turbans. A highly cultivated intellectual, he boasted a library of over 2,000 volumes in several languages. He loved music and dance, and composed poetry in Persian and the Dravidian language of Cannada.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/cfa129a2-f1e7-4fd5-ad81-586b9d516b1d_1200x800.png)

**Tipu’s summer palace. Haidar Ali commenced its construction within the walls of the Bangalore Fort, and it was completed during Tipu’s reign in 1791\. (Wikimedia Commons)*

Tipu’s religious sensibilities were also typical of Indo-Islamic elites: a devout Muslim, he was deeply interested in Hinduism, and made his troops bathe in holy rivers “by the advice of his \[Brahmin\] augurs”.

At the same time, Tipu embarked on a modernisation campaign that was unprecedented for any Indian ruler. He expanded Mysore’s state capacity, imported French industrial technology, introduced a sophisticated irrigation system and built dams. He developed water power-driven machinery. He even had silkworm eggs brought to Mysore from southern China and established a sericulture industry. British observers begrudgingly described the sultanate as “well cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants”, and with “cities newly founded and commerce extended”.

Tipu established trade centres across India’s western coast and beyond. His state-owned trading company built factories in the Persian Gulf, with the most important of these located in Muscat. Mysore exported timber, sandalwood, ivory, and cloth to the Gulf, and imported pistachios, copper, and chinaware. In Muscat, European merchants had to pay a 5% duty, while most Indians paid 8%, and Arabs paid just over 6%. In contrast, Mysore’s merchants paid only 4%.

## The Stuff of British Nightmares

Most significantly, Mysore’s military might turned the tide against the East India Company. As historian Christopher Bayly writes, Tipu’s strategy was to fight “European mercantilist power with its own weapons: state monopoly and an aggressive ideology of expansion.”

By 1786, Tipu’s inventory contained 300,000 firelocks, 22,000 pieces of cannon, 11,000 horses, and some 700 elephants. Most extraordinarily, Mysore developed the world’s first iron-cased war rockets, which were launched from bamboo or metal frames at enemy soldiers up to 2,000 metres away. Tipu’s rockets, which killed thousands of the Company’s troops, would later lead to Britain’s Royal Woolwich Arsenal establishing a research programme to study Mysorean rocket cases, ultimately using their research to develop the rockets they would deploy with great success against the French in the Napoleonic Wars.

For two decades, Tipu Sultan haunted the British consciousness. He was the Company’s most loathed and feared menace. Tipu’s penchant for the theatrical contributed to this, including his elite sepoys who showed up to battle in tiger-striped uniforms. Colonial propaganda pushed by the Company’s Governor General Lord Wellesley portrayed Tipu as a savage brute, monstrous towards Hindus and Britons alike, and driven by Islamic fanaticism.

While this was largely fictional, the real Tipu did show terrible cruelty in war, and to a highly unusual degree by the standards of his own time. He earned something of a reputation. In particular, a great battle at Pollilur in 1780 caused shockwaves in Britain and seemed for a time to represent the beginning of the Company’s fall. An entire army was slaughtered, and Mysore captured one in five of all British soldiers in India, 7,000 British men, as well as an unknown number of women. They were taken to Tipu’s formidable island fortress of Srirangapatna, whose defences were designed by French engineers. British regimental drummer boys were forced to dance for Tipu’s court, and many soldiers were forcibly circumcised and converted to Islam.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/e476c8f7-3e6c-47f4-9349-cda43a602575_1200x778.png)

**‘The merchants of Calicut seized and chained to a barren rock, by order of Tippoo Saib.’ Contemporary painting. (Wikimedia Commons)*

While Tipu never dressed like an Englishman, more than a few Britons emerged from his captivity clad in kurtas and addicted to hookahs. After a decade in captivity, the prisoner James Scurry found he could no longer use a knife and fork or sit in a chair. His English was “broken and confused, having lost all its vernacular idiom”, and he despised English clothes. For the British public, this was the stuff of nightmares.

Among Tipu’s terrible policies in war was that he destroyed temples and churches in conquered territories. Portuguese missionaries recorded one particularly gruesome episode in which “he tied naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces”. But this was not driven by any religious fanaticism. In fact, Tipu enthusiastically patronised temples within his own domains. On one occasion, when the Marathas (a Hindu power) raided and damaged the magnificent temple of Sringeri in Mysore, Tipu sent money and grain to the temple and warned that “people who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds… Those who commit evil deeds smiling, will reap the consequences weeping.”

He was also tremendously popular with his subjects, who were predominantly Hindu. After Tipu’s death, the British found that his “confidential Hindoo servants” reported he had been a “lenient and indulgent master”.

## The ‘Citizen Prince’

To expand his range of allies against the British, Tipu Sultan sought Ottoman support and recognition, but none was forthcoming. He had much more success with the French, whose East India Company competed with the British for dominance in the subcontinent. This was classic Tipu Sultan: a cynical and strategic alliance with a European power for his own ends. The French Revolution in 1789 did nothing to damage the relationship – in fact, Tipu established warm relations with Napoleon Bonaparte. The British, for whom this was an unbearable alliance, took to denouncing “Citizen Tippoo”, combining their loathing of the ruler with a healthy dose of Francophobia.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/4392cfb5-e43e-4c0d-aa8d-fe80fc785b04_768x520.png)

**An automaton of a tiger mauling a British soldier, found by Company forces in Tipu’s palace in 1799 and now displayed in the Victoria & Albert Museum. (Creative Commons)*

A Company diplomat, Major William Kirkpatrick, claimed that in May 1797, Mysore’s French troops established a Revolutionary Jacobin Club in Srirangapatna, which hoisted the tricolour flag. Kirkpatrick described to his British compatriots how a Jacobin maypole labelled ‘the Liberty Tree’ was planted, while French soldiers pledged their allegiance to the Republican constitution and swore “hatred of all Kings, except Tipoo Sultan, the Victorious”. Then at Srirangapatna’s parade ground, the “Citizen Prince” was said to have declared France to be Mysore’s “sister Republic”, and ordered an enormous salute from 2,300 cannon, 500 rockets and unnumbered musketry.

In reality, Tipu was no genuine Republican and cared nothing for Rousseau or Robespierre. The club was unlikely to have actually been given the “Jacobin” label, and its papers, which record that Tipu adopted the paradoxical title of “Citizen Prince”, may well have been fabricated by the British. Tipu engaged with European ideas, as much as European technology, only on his own terms.

## Decline and Fall

The Company's victory in India came with Tipu’s downfall in 1799\. Having fought four major wars against the British, Mysore’s ruler had significantly slowed their ascent and forced them to fight tooth and nail for dominance. Largely because of Tipu, the British had lost their technological superiority. Nor did they have any administrative edge. Mysore had successfully closed the gap.

Ultimately, then, it was neither technological inferiority nor British brutality that secured Mysore’s defeat, but rather a staggering failure of diplomacy. This was Tipu’s great flaw. His father, Haidar Ali, had allied with three major powers – the Maratha Confederacy, Hyderabad and the French Company – making it impossible for the British to mobilise the powers that surrounded Mysore against the kingdom.

Tipu, by contrast, broke his alliances with the Maratha Peshwa and the Nizam of Hyderabad, and by 1786, he was waging war against both. Mysore’s aggressive expansionism terrified both rulers to the extent that they agreed to form a Triple Alliance with the British to bring Tipu down. In 1789, Tipu launched yet another war, this time against southern Travancore, whose Raja had entered a pact with the Company. By this point, Tipu had even proclaimed independence from the skeletal remains of the Mughal Empire, denouncing Emperor Shah Alam as “a mere cypher”. There would be no help from any Mughal army.

Still, Mysore demonstrated its superiority on the battlefield. A weary Major James Rendell noted in December 1790 that the “rapidity of Tippoo’s marches was such that no army appointed like ours could ever bring it to action in the open country.” But this did little against the Triple Alliance, which defeated Tipu in 1792 in the Third Anglo-Mysore War by besieging Srirangapatna and forcing him to sign away half his kingdom in a humiliating treaty. “Know you not the custom of the English?” Tipu wrote imploringly to the Nizam. “Wherever they fix their talons they contrive little by little to work themselves into the whole management of affairs.” It was too late; the Nizam remained allied to the Company.

By this point, the Maratha Confederacy was in decline, and elite Indian financiers saw the Company, which controlled the revenues of Bengal and profited from the China trade, as the most reliable investment. This proved decisive. As the historian William Dalrymple writes in his monumental study of the Company’s ascent, *The Anarchy*: “In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through the collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals.”

Remarkably, however, Tipu fought on, famously proclaiming that “I would rather live a day as a tiger than a lifetime as a sheep”. His last hope was Napoleon, and in December 1797, he sent an embassy to Paris asking for the Emperor’s help. But Napoleon’s army was descending on Egypt. In April 1798, he assured Tipu from Cairo that he would come to Mysore’s aid after conquering Egypt, declaring that he was “full of the desire of releasing and relieving you from the iron yoke of England… May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!”

But soon afterwards, in April 1799, Mysore was finally crushed when Wellesley’s army besieged Srirangapatna. In that final confrontation, Tipu “gave us gun for gun”, a British observer recalled. “Soon the scenes became tremendously grand, shells and rockets of uncommon weight were incessantly poured upon us.” Meanwhile, “the blaze of our batteries which frequently caught fire… was the signal for the Tiger Sepoys to advance, and pour in galling volleys of musketry.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/70416517-cc18-4d5b-9ee2-d7f047050f73_900x722.png)

**The Last Effort and Fall of Tipu Sultan by Henry Singleton, c. 1800\. (Wikimedia Commons)*

10,000 Mysorean troops fell in the final battle. The Tiger of Mysore himself ascended onto the battlements to fight. He charged at the sepoys and was shot in the left shoulder. His attendants begged him to surrender. “Are you mad?” he responded. “Be silent.”

Tipu Sultan wielded his sword, his final weapon, against a group of Company redcoats and killed a grenadier. Then another shot him through the temple, and he fell among his men.

With Tipu’s death, so ended the dream of the last sovereign Indian state. Tipu’s energetic reforms enabled Mysore to supersede the best of European military technology and military organisation in short order. His strenuous modernisation programme for Mysore’s army and economy was so successful that it had compelled even the British to play catch-up militarily, nearly preventing their takeover of India and potentially changing the course of world history. It also inverts the traditional narrative of an unstoppably widening technological chasm between the West and the rest.

Yet it was not enough.

There is great significance in the history of Mysore’s extraordinary diplomatic failure. It was the inability of Indian rulers to unite (with most failing even to identify the threat posed by the East India Company until it was too late) that secured the triumph of the British in the subcontinent. However, Tipu’s reign also puts lie to the myth that the Islamic world suffered a permanent decline for three centuries, let alone for a millennium, as many claim. Serious decline in the Islamic world began only in the nineteenth century, when reformers ceased to engage seriously with Europe in the material realm and retreated to the world of culture and ideas, as with the Tanzimat movement in the Ottoman Empire.

Before this retreat, some Muslim statesmen remained dynamically engaged with the challenges that confronted them, the most significant examples being Tipu and Muhammad Ali Pasha (the nearly contemporaneous Ottoman governor of Egypt). Far from rejecting modernity or capitulating to Western ideas of what it should be, Tipu fashioned his own modernity. He had no philosophical anxieties about modern warfare or governance being immoral and un-Islamic, and his response to the rising power of Europe was to selectively adopt and adapt what he wanted from it.

The tale of the Tiger of Mysore serves as both a corrective measure to traditional narratives of decline and a warning on how even the most skilled statesmen can be undone by hubris.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/76f78fc2-de2f-4750-bef5-9ad00c8e4c27_4473x3110-jpeg.jpg)

---

**Author*: Imran Mulla is a journalist at Middle East Eye in London, before which he studied history at the University of Cambridge. His book ‘The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince’ is set to be published this December by Hurst & Co. You can follow him on X at* [*@Imran\_posts*](https://x.com/Imran%5Fposts?ref=kasurian.com)*.*

**Further Reading**

- Bayly, Christopher. *Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire*. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
- Dalrymple, William. *The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.* Bloomsbury, 2020.
- Manjunatha T. *'Military Modernization Efforts Under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan'.* International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research, Volume 6, Issue 5, September-October 2024.
- Mohibbul, Hasan. *History of Tipu Sultan.* The World Press Private Ltd, Calcutta, 1971.
- Qadir, Khwaja Abdul. *Waqai-I Manazil-I Rum: Tipu Sultan's Mission to Constantinople*. Aakar Books, 2005.
- Sampath, Vikram. *Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore's Interregnum (1760–1799)*. Penguin Random House, 2024.
- Sivasundaram, Sujit. *Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire*. Harper Collins, 2021.
### The Jadid's Quest for Reform
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/jadid-reform/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:42:14.000Z
## Unity in Language, Thought, and Action

> *“May God grant that Terciman be the servant of truth and the mirror of the age.* 
> *Let it proclaim truth and honesty, be a labour of enlightenment and justice.* 
> *May we finally come to know our sacred homeland; let the pages of Terciman reveal it to us.”*  
> \- From a letter to the editor of *Terciman*

So read a prayer printed in the first issue of *Terciman*, a Muslim weekly newspaper published by Crimean Tatar educator Ismail Gasprinsky on the morning of April 10, 1883\. Modest in appearance and form, the paper featured just four pages: two in Crimean Tatar and two in Russian. Its motto was *“Dilde, fikirde, işte birlik”*—“Unity in language, thought, and action.”

The timing of *Terciman* was no coincidence. Russian authorities were tightening their control over newly acquired territories in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Just one hundred years earlier, the Russian Empire had annexed the Crimean Peninsula, leading to the mass exodus of its Muslim population to Ottoman lands. By the end of the 19th century, there were nearly 14 million Muslims in Imperial Russia, representing 11% of its total population across territories stretching from the Black Sea to the Tien Shan Mountains, and from the Volga to Persia's frontier. With old Crimean Tatar elites dislocated, traditions of knowledge weakened, and institutional orthodoxy shaken, the region entered a period of intellectual stagnation.

From his home in Bakhchysarai, the former capital of the Crimean Khanate, *Terciman*’s publisher Gasprinsky observed firsthand the rapid reconfiguration of the social, educational, and epistemic terrain around him. The civilisational structure of his forefathers was crumbling. Beyond the Peninsula’s shores, the light of a new era was gleaming on the horizon.

But Gasprinsky recognised in the unfolding events not only a threat, but also a historic opportunity. Between the two extreme ends of rejection and submission to the new order, he charted a middle path, one of revival and reimagining. Drawing on his travels in the Ottoman Empire, where local elites were actively renegotiating their place in the new age, he envisioned a similar awakening taking place among the Turkic Muslim peoples.

Istanbul at the time served as a melting pot of intellectual activity, drawing émigrés and exiles from across the Muslim world. It was there that Gasprinsky understood that Muslim modernisation was not just possible but *plausible*. He saw the printing press, modern pedagogy, and new forms of art and public discourse as civilisational tools capable of ushering in a new era of intellectual production, enabling the Muslims of Russia to reassert their place in the world on their own terms.

![Ismail Gaspıralı (L), journalist Hasan bey Zardabi (C) and politician Alimardan Topchubashov, in Baku, Azerbaijan, 1903.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/210bb0e9-82af-471e-882c-d31eefaa3e57_1024x734-jpeg.jpg)

From left to right: Ismail Gasprinsky, journalist Hasan bey Zardabi, and politician Alimardan Topchubashov, in Baku, Azerbaijan, 1903.

Gasprinsky took on the challenge. The first Crimean Tatar publication of its kind, *Terciman* quickly rose to be the most influential voice for Muslims across the Russian Empire and beyond. Its editorial team engaged with Russian-language publications of all genres and ideological leanings, while drawing on a network of correspondents from Kazan, Ufa, Makhachkala, Samarkand, Bukhara, and other key Muslim cities. Gasprinsky’s command of Crimean Tatar, Russian, French, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian gave him access to a wide range of intellectual currents. Over the following decades, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic periodicals regularly cited and reprinted *Terciman*’s articles. The newspaperhad evenfound its way into the pages of European and Russian Orientalist journals, where its insights were mined by scholars of the Muslim world.

But Gasprinsky’s efforts did not end at literary activity.

In January 1884, he founded the first experimental school in Bakhchysarai. Known as the *Usul-i-Jadid*, or New Method schools, they developed new phonetic methods for teaching Arabic to replace traditional syllabic rote memorisation, and incorporated ‘secular’ subjects like history, geography, and mathematics taught in vernacular Turkic tongues within European-style classrooms. The emphasis on education was instrumental to Gasprinsky’s aim of promoting functional literacy and forming a comprehensive knowledge ecosystem. The proponents of this new reform movement, referred to as *Jadids*, sought to integrate the intellectual, scientific, and educational advancements of the modern age with Islamic teachings.

Jadids emerged at a time when ideas could traverse continents at unprecedented speed and scope, bypassing authorities and elite networks. Broadly described as ‘[the short 19th century](https://kasurian.com/p/inaugural-essay-kasurian?ref=kasurian.com)’, this period—stretching roughly from the 1830s to the 1910s—represents a forgotten chapter in history in which Muslim elites developed a culture of letters and constructed social institutions befitting the industrial age. By the 1880s, the reformist discourse animating the salons and chaikhanas of Istanbul and Cairo was flourishing in Bakhchysarai and would soon spread to the farthest regions of the Russian mainland.

## The Turco-Islamic Belt

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/5f67720c-19c2-4ae2-8b62-55a8a039c920_1300x877-jpeg.jpg)

Map of the Russian Empire c. 1900.

At the advent of Russian colonisation in the 1850s, sedentary areas of Central Asia—encompassing much of present-day Uzbekistan, parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan—consisted of myriad polities ruled by khans, emirs, and clerics, each of whose authority generally relied on personal agreements and tribal allegiances rather than formal institutions.

Shortly after the fall of the Timurids in the 16th century, global trade routes shifted from overland to maritime pathways, leading to a prolonged socioeconomic decline in the region. Cut off from global intellectual currents, Samarkand and Bukhara, the crown jewels of medieval Islamic civilisation, had fallen into decay. Over the following centuries, madrasas devolved from institutions of higher learning into rigid systems that reproduced a clerical class trained only in Islamic jurisprudence and unconcerned with other domains of knowledge. Instruction relied almost solely on oral transmission, leaving many graduates unable to read or write.

Institutional weakness had made the region both an easy target for imperial powers and ill-equipped to handle regional problems. Russian colonial rule introduced sweeping socioeconomic changes across what became known as Russian Turkestan. Before long, settler communities, equipped with their own schools, churches, newspapers, and markets, and designed following European urban planning, began proliferating across the region. Though nominally independent, protectorate states such as the emirates of Bukhara and Khiva were also coming under Russian influence. It was within this context of widespread sociocultural decline among the native population and mounting instability that the Turkestani Jadid movement began to take form.

One of the main Jadid architects of reform was Mahmudkhodja Behbudiy. Born into the old Samarkand elite, he received traditional madrasa education and worked as a clerk before advancing to the position of qazi. Like Gasprinsky, he travelled through Istanbul, Cairo, and Mecca, where he made personal acquaintances with leading reformers. Upon his return, Behbudiy embraced Gasprinsky’s pedagogical approach, initiating a comprehensive modernisation program in schools and launching his own publishing enterprise. Revenue from publishing allowed him to pursue and fund his projects without relying on traditional patronage or state funding.

In the capital, Tashkent, Munawwar Qari opened a New Method school, which became the largest and most organised in all of Russian Turkestan. He wrote numerous textbooks, ran a bookselling and publishing business, and ran a discussion circle which included “*practically everybody involved in reform in Central Asia*”. After 1914, Qari shifted focus to theatre, as was fitting for a committed Jadid—many reformers regarded drama as amongst the most effective mediums for conveying modernist ideas.

In Kazan, Volga Tatar intellectual Gabdulla Bubi developed a framework built around four core concepts: *millät* (people), *hörriät* (freedom), *mäğrifät* (education), and *täräqqiyat* (progress). Like many visionaries of his time, Bubi harboured designs that extended beyond the short-term horizon, encompassing places like Kulja (modern Xinjiang), which he planned to turn into a civilisational centre for scientific and intellectual discourse in Greater Turkestan. In the Caucasus, Russian administrators remarked on the emergence of an educated cohort of Muslims who aspired *“to represent the local intelligentsia and exert direct influence on the very governance of the region.”* By the century's close, even Siberian Tatar communities in the remote Tobolsk district had established Jadid schools that admitted both male and female students.

The influence of Gasprinsky’s reforms began to spread like waves, inspiring an extensive network of Jadid-led initiatives throughout the ‘Turco-Islamic belt’ of the Russian Empire, stretching from the Crimean Peninsula through the Volga-Ural region, then south to Azerbaijan and eastward into Turkestan and Western Siberia. Russian Muslims now had regular access to books and periodicals from across the country, as well as from Turkiye, Iran, and other distant regions. To facilitate communication via the press, Jadids advocated for a Chagatai-based literary standard intended to supplant Persian as the region’s primary language.

Within a remarkably short period, Jadids managed to lay the foundations for a new [plausibility structure](https://kasurian.com/p/islamic-secular?ref=kasurian.com): a social-cultural framework that determines what knowledge, beliefs, and expressions can be conceived of as legitimate and reasonable within a community. Leveraging educational reform, print media, theatre, and discussion circles as novel civilisational tools, the Jadids sought to redefine the limits of the plausible—and, in doing so, transformed how Russian Muslim elites understood and engaged with the world. Seeing educated mothers as essential for cultivating a capable next generation, Jadids launched a series of reforms aimed at elevating the status of Muslim women and granting them access to education and voting rights. Publications like *Âlem-i nisvan*, edited by Gasprinsky's daughter Shafika Hanim, and Volga Tatar-led *Suyumbike*, gave women a separate platform in the discourse. The Jadids contended that the Quran did not exempt women from the duty to seek knowledge, including both religious and worldly disciplines.

![File:Muslim-turkic members of the State Duma of the Russian Empire of the second convocation.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/9d3a7d12-3314-4e12-a558-4eec05efbda8_960x721-jpeg.jpg)

Muslim members of the State Duma of the Russian Empire of the second convocation, 1907.

Reactions to Jadid societal and educational reforms were divided. Muslim conservative factions, known as Qadimists, or proponents of the old method, responded to the Jadids with escalating opposition. In particular, the Qadimists criticised the Jadids’ rejection of *ulema* commentaries in favour of direct interpretation and advocacy for ijtihad (independent reasoning); their infusion of Western ideas into Islamic tradition and calls for admitting Muslim women into madrasas and public roles; and their dismissal of Sufism as a ritualised folk practice incompatible with Islamic orthodoxy. What began as two competing visions for the optimal societal structure eventually evolved into a political struggle that outlasted the Russian Empire itself.

## The Jadids and the Qadimists

In today’s public consciousness in Russia and elsewhere, Jadids are often cast as the socially progressive faction championing quintessentially liberal values, while their opponents are depicted as backward obscurantists resistant to progress. However, reality was much more nuanced, and the boundaries between the Jadids and the Qadimists were considerably more porous. Many Jadids, coming from elite backgrounds, remained entrenched in the traditional madrasa milieu; some others combined reformist activism and madrasa teaching. The Qadimists, far from being an uneducated, déclassé mass, held considerable social influence rooted in the established traditions of knowledge, chains of religious authority and, among Sufi adherents, an unbroken spiritual lineage. In many respects, the Qadimists formed a residual category, comprising people with diverse views, united by a shared unease over the Jadids’ attacks on clerical authority.

Jadids’ commitment to anti-*ulema* and anti-Sufi polemics went so far as to declare both groups as purveyors of ‘unorthodox’ and popular versions of Islam that had departed from the authentic tradition. This situated the Jadids within a broader pattern of Islamic reform movements emerging across the 19th century, particularly evident in the overlaps between Salafi and Jadid thought and methodology, all despite their different historical contexts and ultimate goals. Viewed from such an angle, both Salafism and Jadidism reveal an intrinsically modernist character, even when their conclusions appear to advocate for a return to pre-modern forms of religious practice. The very impulse to return to ‘pristine’ traditional sources and purge the religion of later accretions is itself a mark of a modern mentality, as it requires a type of historical consciousness that could only emerge in the modern period.

Jadid-Qadimist interactions and their engagement with the Russian state varied across regions. In Russian Turkestan, the Qadimists successfully worked out compromises with the administration and soon became dependent on them for social status. Many *ulema* accepted state awards, learned the language, and sometimes sent their sons to Russian schools. By the advent of the 1917 Russian Revolution, both the Jadids and the Qadimists were shaped by the realities of colonial rule and made abundant use of the opportunities the Russian regime provided to pursue their objectives. Each side sought to outmanoeuvre the other by cultivating ties with imperial officials and manipulating imperial laws and institutions to their advantage.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/65fceb0d-bd59-4b0d-9411-a35384faca62_1260x918.png)

Tashkent, 1906.

Jadid criticism had also extended to colonial rule, although it had to be coded and circumscribed. Initially supportive of the reforms, the officials grew wary as the Jadids gained influence, fearing that they might challenge the status quo. Colonial authorities had complex relationships with both groups: on one hand, they saw the promotion of ‘secular’ activities as an antidote to “Islamic fanaticism”; on the other hand, these activities had to be carefully vetted and monitored by authorities. The censorship of Jadid publications was systematic and far-reaching, ranging from direct censorship of the reformist press to closure of newspapers at the slightest provocation and denial of permissions for new publications, schools, and bookstores. Despite these restrictions, the Jadids succeeded in forming the first Muslim political organisation and party, Ittifaq al-Muslimin, in 1905.

Both the Jadids and the Qadimists frequently appealed to the Tsarist state for assistance in their disputes. Muslims quickly learned to frame and address their communal tensions in language that resonated with Russian officials; laypeople, in particular, found that they could challenge the authority of clerics by triggering state intervention. This overreliance on the Russian state as an arbiter led to increased state intrusion into the everyday life of Muslims, which has persisted well into the Soviet and post-Soviet period.

## The Quest for Reform

In 2020, the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, delivered a speech honouring the Jadids as “outstanding educators who could have carried out the country’s Third Renaissance in the twentieth century”. In post-Soviet Central Asia, the legacy of the Jadids, once consigned to oblivion, is now being restored to prominence in national discourse.

The Jadid movement across the Russian Empire represents a fascinating yet understudied chapter in the intellectual history of Muslims at large. For us, their story raises important questions: what lessons can we extract from their successes and failures? How does one balance religion with modern education? And how can Muslim communities engage with secular state power without compromising on their faith?

In the years preceding the momentous 1917 Russian Revolution, Jadid criticism was directed primarily toward their conservative adversaries. The nascent public sphere they had worked so hard to create was still fragile, while the Qadimists, though weakened, continued to wield considerable influence across the Muslim social sphere. State-wide censorship rendered any meaningful criticism of the Russian state impossible. In the chaos that followed the Revolution, the Jadids saw in the ostensibly anti-imperial Soviet order an ally in their struggle for sovereignty. It was in those years that the Jadid movement transformed into an active political force, now positioned against both Qadimist traditionalism and Russian colonial designs with reinvigorated radicalism.

But the energy did not translate into electoral success. Time and again, the *ulema* emerged triumphant at the ballot box. Their victory, however, was soon rendered meaningless by the collapse of constitutional governance itself, which relegated all power to Russian settler communities. The turbulent period spanning 1917-1920 brought about a total reconfiguration of socio-political structures across the former empire. Once again, the Jadids found themselves caught between the dissolution of the old order and the birth pangs of a new one, but this time, they emerged victorious. When the exclusionary policies of the Tashkent Soviet finally yielded to pressure from Moscow, an extraordinary confluence of circumstances allowed Jadids to briefly take over the new institutions of power.

A standard narrative portraying all Jadids as sudden converts to communism obscures a more complex reality. The Jadids integrated themselves into the Soviet apparatus, convinced they could collaborate with revolutionary authority to deliver the blow to the opposition, in hopes that the new order might prove amenable to their aspirations. But their grandiose visions remained unrealised, colliding with the unforgiving constraints of political reality.

The Soviet hierarchy, for the most part, remained dominated by non-indigenous cadres. These leaders needed native recruits to disseminate the Soviet ideology, but harboured suspicions about their true loyalties. In the 1930s, party discipline demanded the expulsion of the Jadids and local communists, replacing them with a new generation of ideologically aligned and largely non-religious Central Asian party members. Stalin’s consolidation of power and the following purges obliterated Islamic institutions through a systematic campaign of executions, deportations, and resettlements, mosque and madrasa closures, and the abolition of courts. Most Jadids and Qadimists were tortured or executed, or perished in labour camps.

Gasprinsky passed away in 1914, never to witness the aftermath of the Russian revolution or to learn of the fates that befell his intellectual heirs. A century after his death, all across the Turco-Islamic belt of the former Russian Empire, the works of the assiduous Muslim reformers are being brought into the spotlight, if only to support nationalist agendas.

Today, we are still seeking to formulate answers to questions that have occupied the minds of Muslims since the dawn of the industrial age. Throughout the short 19th century, Muslims responded to the needs of the time, but for various reasons were defeated. The lessons from these reforms have faded from historical memory, leaving Muslims today trapped in an endless loop, recycling the concepts and ideas debated generations ago, unable to escape this forgotten legacy.

How do we navigate both mainstream secular culture and traditional Islamic authority structures that may not fully address our particular circumstances? How do we chart a middle path, one of revival and reimagining? And how do we build a new plausibility structure befitting the 21st century? The final lines of the inaugural prayer in *Terciman* remain as relevant today as they were a century and a half ago*:*

> “*This age is strange, foreign; we must understand it.* 
> *Let it (the newspaper) follow the right path.* 
> *And may the young Terciman (Interpreter) thrive.”*

---

**Author:* Yana Zurayeva is a Buryat-Mongolian visual artist and 3D designer from Ulan-Ude, Russia. She writes at* [*Waterfalls of Qaf*](https://waterfallsofqaf.substack.com/) *and can be found on X as @*[*yiihya*](https://x.com/yiihya?ref=kasurian.com)*. She lives between Toronto and London.*

**Further Reading**

- *The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform*, Khalid Adeeb
- *Clichés, Biases, and False Dichotomies in the Intellectual History of Central Asia*, Devin DeWeese
- *Jadidism as a Paradigm for Studying Islam in the Russian Empire*, Alfrid Bustanov
- *For Prophet and Tsar, Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia,* Robert Crews
- *The Enlightener of the East, Ismail Gasprinsky*, Yuri Bekirovich Osmanov
### The Fourth Option: Alif & Silicon Valley’s Muslim Counterculture
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/the-fourth-option/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T20:50:17.000Z
## The Alif *Jumu’ah*: You Can Just Do Things

Alif, an accelerator at the frontier of a new subculture in Silicon Valley, is inextricably linked to the *Jumu’ah* prayer. After announcing its pilot cohort, Batch 0, in the summer of 2024, Alif began [hosting a ](https://x.com/omarwasm/status/1836156435258069346?s=46&ref=kasurian.com)[*Jumu’ah*](https://x.com/omarwasm/status/1836156435258069346?s=46&ref=kasurian.com) in Fort Mason Park. The Alif *Jumu’ah* quickly took off, becoming an unexpected mainstay for San Francisco’s Muslims, natives, nomads and transplants alike — with some driving 45 minutes to attend. “There was no mosque near us to go pray together at,” Alif’s founder, Omar Waseem, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. So, with a partiful link and some tarps weighed down by backpacks, “we started one.”

The photos of the *Jumu’ah*, shared on social media by Alif with a mix of quippy in-group references (“touched grass, JM”) and earnest captions (“a testament to our community’s commitment to faith and mutual support”), are compositionally striking. Rows of worshippers dot neon blue tarps centred on a seemingly endless expanse of green, framed by palm trees and the San Francisco skyline, and surrounded by the bright blue sky.

The perspective and scale of the photos, captured with both an iPhone and a drone, are both intimate and immense. The photos exude a sense of cinematic cool that reflects the ethos animating Alif’s spirit: you can just do things. You can just start a company. You can just start an accelerator. You can just lay down some tarp and pray, every Friday, with your coworkers, friends and family in the middle of Fort Mason Park.

## The Alif Story

With roots in Furqan Rydhan’s Founders Inc. — Waseem worked at Founders Inc., and Rydhan was one of Alif’s first backers — Alif was born out of a dual urgency.

First, there is the urgency of our historical moment. Introducing Alif on X last spring, Waseem wrote, “With what we’ve seen from AI in the last two years”, there is a “window of opportunity that’s never existed at this magnitude in history”. He elaborates on this urgency on his [YouTube channel](https://youtu.be/qQ4z2MCH%5F%5FY?si=m5I5JlUVH3CMIT1z&ref=kasurian.com)—a well-produced, tightly edited channel that remixes the Mr. Beast school of YouTube with the tone and content of a thoughtful podcast, consolidating the bootstrapped ups and downs of young founders. Referring to AI, he says, “There is a generational opportunity that has never existed before, and that will probably never exist again in the same exact capacity to build things that create real impact.” Alif intends to take advantage of that.

Underlying Alif’s responsibility to the historical moment is an even deeper urgency: To create the kind of space Waseem wished existed when he first began his career. This goal, to build the community, infrastructure and cultural presence he had once searched for, but couldn’t find, is in active conversation with Silicon Valley 1.0 and 2.0\. Alif is, in that sense, a space of generational consolidation and transfer of knowledge and capital. “We’re building a space now where people who have done the thing can help bring up the people that are doing the thing for the first time”, Waseem says in a vlog, “And that has never existed in the Muslim community in the startup space”.

Over the past year, Alif has emerged as a gravitational centre for Muslim builders. One of Alif’s most notable milestones was its one-day Summit, held on February 1 at the City View Metreon in downtown San Francisco. Its slate of speakers, a mix of Muslim internet royalty and Silicon Valley heavyweights, was buzzy. The biggest draw was Replit-founder Amjad Masad, the Paul Graham darling whose influence touches both Gen Z builders and the alt-curious edges of tech Twitter.

The Summit drew over 600 attendees, most of whom flew into San Francisco for the event. It generated, conservatively, well over a quarter of a million dollars for a city much in need of the revenue. Tickets, averaging at $290, sold double and triple their value in the days and hours leading up to the event. Screenshots of Waseem’s personalised email confirmation to ticket buyers were shared on Twitter and Instagram. An unofficial WhatsApp group chat for Summit attendees was circulated on Twitter and ballooned to hundreds of members before the event. The Summit was, in short, a hype-fueled viral event that attracted not just the self-stylised “Muslim builder,” but also any curious, ambitious and driven Muslim seeking a community of other curious, ambitious and driven Muslims.

The Summit also marked a new chapter in Alif’s journey, one that launched it into the public Muslim imagination. Its moment in the spotlight offered an inside look into a venture well on its way to becoming a blueprint for the next generation of Muslim founders.

## The Fourth Option

The Summit trailer, released two months before the event, begins with Waseem, sitting in the middle of a dimly lit workspace — something between an artist’s studio, a content creator’s set and a maker’s lab. Into a microphone, he recites, with bored lilt, the familiar diaspora refrain: “Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer.” Then, with a tilt forward, a glint, and perfectly measured beat, he asks, “But what if there was a fourth option?”

Despite talking robots and driverless cars, “we,” Waseem says, are still “stuck” at boring desk jobs. Yet, “now more than ever,” the trailer continues, “there is a new generation of Muslim builders that is being created in real time in front of us.” As he says this, a collage of Muslim founders pops up behind him. In addition to Rydhan, the collage features Haroon Mokhtarzada, an entrepreneur who sold Truebill, now RocketMoney, for $1.4 billion; Mamoon Hamid, a venture capitalist who co-founded Social Capital with Chamath Palihapitiya; and Jawed Karim, the mysterious co-founder of YouTube whose video “me at the zoo,” the first ever YouTube video, changed the world and who, since then, co-founded YVentures with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois.

As the Muslim founders’ collage fades, the trailer’s tone shifts. “History has shown us”, Waseem says, “that you can’t build big things alone”. With this line, the “builders” Waseem had just spoken about are not just aspirations collected in a collage; they’re us—they are the viewer, they are you. “So, for the first time ever”, Waseem pauses, “we are hosting a summit.”

By repositioning the viewer into an active participant in the success of the past generation of Muslim founders, the trailer collapses the distance between aspiration and identification. The trailer says it’s not just that these Muslim builders exist; it’s that you too might be one of them. You just need to show up at the Summit.

I start with the Summit trailer because it captures, in under a minute, the core of what made the Alif Summit so compelling, and ultimately, so successful. The trailer is a skilful heir to the Don Draper school of advertising. It sells both a product and a vision, and in addition to giving people what they want, it teaches them what to want. The trailer’s power lies in its legitimisation and mainstreaming of a new vocabulary, specifically, the idea of the “builder.”

Delivering its message with a sleek authority, the word “builder”—a fluid, historically loaded term in and out of Silicon Valley—is presented without definition, and without irony. It is presented as if it has always belonged in the same canon as doctor, lawyer, and engineer. The trailer scripts a cultural shift, one that positions “builder” as self-evident, both an identity and an aspiration.

I was an outsider at the Summit: a lawyer observing the rituals and vocabulary of a community I am not part of. As an outsider, I recognise I might miss the cultural layers that insiders navigate unconsciously—Clifford Geertz’s “thick description,” and Pierre Bourdieu’s *habitus*. Yet, a disposition of nearness and remoteness offers a distinct opportunity to examine assumptions the ecosystem takes for granted, while recognising the sincere ambitions and tensions at play.

## At the Summit

The energy at the City View Metreon on that rainy San Francisco morning was electric, charged with the kind of breathless, youthful anticipation of move-in day at college. After a painless, seamless check-in, each attendee was given a choice of three coloured stickers for their badge to indicate their role: Founder, investor, or student.

I couldn’t resist a cheeky quip, “What if I am none of those things?”, confusing the smiling volunteer who hesitated with a puzzled smile before cheerfully suggesting I pick whatever felt closest. I picked “student.” Still, flippancy aside, the stickers were a smart visual system that eliminated the worst parts of networking (the opening questions), while enhancing its best parts (finding your people). Once checked in, I placed the sticker on the back of my badge.

Inside, the attention to detail reflected a commitment to excellence rarely seen among Muslims who, out of necessity, often accept middling production quality in exchange for community. The space was thoughtfully choreographed with fireside chats, an exhibition space, and a coffee cart. The polish and production value conveyed a seriousness, setting the tone that this Summit was different.

Despite the polish, I went in with scepticism. Aside from Rydhan, Masad and Mokhtarzada, the speaker lineup felt familiar, just another conference where modest achievements are repackaged as groundbreaking innovation, where representation is confused with power, and virility with influence.

But as each speaker took the stage, my cynicism softened.

Rhydan, who has built across multiple Silicon Valley cycles, delivered the day’s most foundational message: You can just do things. Conversational rather than polished, there was an almost weathered, perennial wisdom to his delivery, less guru, more guide — a secure older brother who wants to give away the playbook. Rhydan gave an audience conditioned to seek permission the permission to blow up their frameworks and just start.

Masad, whose company Replit is valued at $1.2 billion, resonated with an audience hungry to see itself reflected in tech’s upper echelons. Although the interview format felt constraining, forcing Masad to provide brief answers to predictable questions that barely scratched the surface of what he had to offer, his presence alone seemed to expand the room’s sense of possibility.

Rayouf Alhumedhi, who designed the hijab emoji that now appears on billions of phones, delivered what was unexpectedly one of the more compelling presentations. The hijab-emoji had always struck me as a well-intentioned but ultimately hollow gesture that flattened identity into iconography, even accelerating the displacement of the self into the hyperreal where representation is considered a necessary substitute for reality. Yet, Alhumedhi’s path from a teenager designing the hijab emoji in Berlin to a sophisticated career as a designer and curator in the venture capital world complicated my own reductive reading by revealing someone who was working at the intersections, and therefore, with discomfort and friction.

Amir Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder and CEO of Muslim, one of the “largest Muslim media networks” in the world, was almost hesitant on stage, as if uncertain he belonged among the speakers. Al-Khatahtbeh’s media company, @Muslim, is an Instagram account with over 6 million followers that describes itself as the ‘#1 Source for All Muslim News & Content ', and is a feed of aggregated photography, news, and religious content that averages well over 100,000 likes per post. In his talk, Al-Khatahtbeh compared @Muslim to Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam newspaper that had reached 2 million readers in the 1960s. He compared Angela Davis giving Muhammad Speaks an exclusive interview after she was released from jail in the early 1970s to @Muslim’s crucial work in keeping Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza online. Although the comparison was admittedly strained—@Muslim is largely an aggregator of news, while Muhammad Speaks was a generator of original movement journalism and political thought—the underlying point about Muslim-controlled media infrastructure was compelling. In today’s digital media landscape, it is easy to see why a built-in virality machine like @Muslim is valuable.

Tasneem Atik Sabri, Vela co-founder, was a curious but welcome addition. As a company, Vela has so fundamentally transformed the hijab industry that its hijabs are memed — everyone knows about the difficulty of securing the watercolour Velas. It was hard not to squirm a little at the corporate polish of “We don’t just sell scarves. We sell confidence, identity and pride,” especially as images of stylish, Instagram-ready, Vela-clad women flashed across the screen to a majority male audience. Still, behind the marketing is a complex e-commerce empire that employs over 25 people and has developed a custom supply chain. As the gold standard of hijabs–*the Nike of hijab*s, as Sabri put it–Vela had built something undeniably impressive: A fashion brand that is also a functional piece of Muslim-owned infrastructure. For an audience learning to think in terms of capital, ownership, and long-term civilisational presence, a company that is actively shaping the hijab market is inspiring.

Mokhtarzada gave the day’s last talk, and although it was reportedly and by his own admission nearly identical to the talk he gave at Muslim Tech Week, his talk offered something the audience was hungry for: A practical roadmap for building a billion-dollar company without compromising Islamic values. His story, from nearly fifty investors’ rejections to closing one of his biggest deals via DocuSign while in Medina, offered a kind of gritty happily-ever-after that is universally appealing. Although the Summit was expressly a tech conference, Mokhtarzada was a unique distillation of the Summit’s premise that Muslim excellence and tech ambition are seamlessly integrated, that spiritual grounding does not preclude material ambition.

As the day wore on, I was left with the wistful glow of a proud older sibling, and a protective wonder at the self-possession that, while not always relatable to me, clearly resonated with an audience hungry for a vocabulary of agency.

The vocabulary of agency essentially came down to one word: “builder.” Each speaker offered a distinct answer to the same question: What does it mean to be a “builder”? The collective answer was that a builder is someone curious and obsessive. Although a simple definition, it is expansive; it authorises action. If you are sincerely curious about a problem and obsessive about solving it, you’re a builder.

## A Vocabulary of Possibility

Strolling after Maghreb prayer—of which there were several rounds to accommodate both the crowds and the travellers—I stopped by a black wall near the venue entrance covered with hundreds of sticky notes and printed cards. It was a wall of ideas, wishes and dreams of the Summit’s attendees. The result was a sprawling insight into a community learning what it means to dream at scale.

The ideas ranged from the practical to the fantastical. AI Quran tutors with *tajweed* correction sat beside rocket-powered skis. Muslim social networks next to an Iron Man suit and a real-life Jarvis. Mental health AI assistants next to platforms for elder care. Bitcoin and “halal economy,” next to retirement homes for elderly Muslims, water desalination plants next to a dental office that looks and feels like a spa and AI fashion for men. Someone wrote “A rocket ship?” complete with a question mark, an admission of uncertainty, but going for it anyway.

As I walked along the wall, tensions that revealed an ambitious community struggling to develop a coherent vocabulary of possibility that marries collective dreams with practical building became apparent.

First, there was the scale mismatch. Individual entries like “Muslim social network” and “AI Quran tutor” (one of dozens of AI-enabled technology ideas) sat alongside civilisational ideals, like “an app that eliminates food and housing insecurity,” or “global sustainable energy infrastructure,” and even “a time machine to go visit ancient cities.” Many of these ideas require national resources, decades of development and for some, scientific breakthroughs. The tension lay in the mismatch between the scale of the dreams and the tools available to realise them. Building an AI app is one thing. Building a sovereign cultural, financial and scientific infrastructure is another. How does one go from prototyping to scaffolding?

Palestine also featured on the wall—as it had throughout the entire event. With attendees wearing kuffiyehs, cheering loudly anytime a speaker brought up Palestine, and showing off Palestine stickers on laptops, it was clear Palestine had become the community’s reference point, if not its anchor. Palestine revealed the scale mismatch most starkly. A note about a “tech hub in Gaza,” next to simple, and at times, basic, platform ideas exposed the gap between solidarity and capability. Building the infrastructure we need to help, and better yet, prevent a Gaza from ever happening again, requires the kind of sovereign systems thinking that seemed muted, if not missing.

Then there was the representation question. Many of the ideas on the wall seemed to be what Waseem expressly and explicitly wanted Alif to move beyond: “Muslim marketplace app”, “Entirely Muslim-friendly investment platform”, “A marketplace for halal economy investments”, “Islamic Ed-Tech”, “Muslim social network”. In his Ansari podcast [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=is4T4gvntcUt8sJ2&v=zap-TUzhqw4&feature=youtu.be&ref=kasurian.com), Waseem stated Alif’s goal: “It isn’t that we need to be the best Muslim podcast, or the best Muslim cafe, or the best Muslim founder. We just want to be Muslim, and then be the best to ever do it, in our category.” Yet, the wall still showed traces of “halalification”—the impulse to imitate what exists by adding a lazy “Muslim” or “Islamic” prefix to it.

Despite its tensions, the wall was instructive, revealing an ambitious community for whom the future is full of possibility. Revealing, in short, a community that is learning how to think like, and be, builders. In its own clumsy way, it underscored one of the functions of a place like Alif and the Summit: attempting to scale a new vocabulary and become a funnel for ambition.

## A Blueprint

A dawning realisation in our generation is that what passes for ‘Muslim cultural expectations’ isn’t working; the divide between the mosque and the workplace, or anything else in life, is neither satisfying nor logical. The fourth option – to be a “builder” instead of a lawyer, doctor, or engineer – is as much a declaration of rebellion against quotidian cultural mores within the Muslim community as it is a counterculture within Silicon Valley.

Rather than passively consume the world, the younger generation of Muslims now wants to act on it with agency, shaping it in their image. To be a builder is not just a set of skills but a disposition towards the world. It is a disposition that Kasurian is attempting to [create the vocabulary](https://kasurian.com/p/islamic-secular?ref=kasurian.com) to describe.

In a time of AI slop, hallucinated truths, deep fakes and increasingly urgent ethical questions, Alif, as a company informed by Islam, seems to possess the core intuition that there is a missing gap for a new vocabulary and form of legitimacy necessary towards the cultivation of a new generation of Muslim “founders” in tech, who understand the importance of *ihsan* as a means to success. For Muslims, the question of “but should we?” is already and always embedded in “can we?” In the current moment, there is a virtue in building while publicly wrestling with the ethical stakes as part of the design process itself. At the same time, as Waseem put it in his Ansari interview, Muslims are too often too afraid of money—and he’s right. With Alif, ethical seriousness does not preclude power and sovereignty.

For all its sincerity and both its civilisational and practical world-building, the Summit was an exceptionally executed marketing spectacle. In that way, it was truly of its “content is king” era. “Content is king" is risky, because representation can’t be more important than the reality it represents. But, as *Mad Men* argued, even the most cynical packaging — advertising — is built atop the most sincere of human desires: the search for meaning.

Although at times it appeared to still be operating within the margins of the 2010s tech culture (founder worship, frictionless scaling, the cult of the new), ultimately, the Summit revealed a community hungry to scale and funnel its imagination, skills, and money towards new frameworks. It also showed that the means to build with both audacity and accountability are possible.

Alif, as Waseem noted, is building people who build systems. That’s what makes “you can just do things” more than a slogan, but a call to action at the scale of civilisation.

---

**Words:* Mariam Mahmoud is a lawyer in California.*
### The Islamic Secular & the Scale of Civilisation
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/islamic-secular/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T20:35:13.000Z
Since the publication of Dr Sherman A. Jackson’s book, *The Islamic Secular,* in 2024, both Islamic scholars and everyday Muslims have responded with a mix of ire and confusion. Much of this reaction stems from a semantic struggle regarding the baggage that a term like “secularism” holds for Muslims. That a prominent academic scholar of Islam would propose the existence of something called the Islamic Secular strikes some as an attempt at making opposites attract: an experiment that seems to defy the laws of physics, and with it, God. Much of the discourse around the Islamic Secular has been consumed by this initial shock and terminological resistance; the substance of *The Islamic Secular* has remained insufficiently examined, let alone its far-reaching implications for the full spectrum of civilisational activity that the Islamic Secular as a concept seeks to articulate and ultimately unleash.

At the heart of Jackson’s intervention is an effort to move beyond semantic and conceptual impasses. In the Islamic Secular, Jackson makes a novel departure from tired debates on the nature and jurisdiction of Islamic law *vis-à-vis* Western secularism. Challenging long-standing assumptions about the relationship between religious law and worldly endeavours, Jackson redefines and liberates the term "secular" from its Western anti-religious connotations and instead anchors it firmly within the Islamic tradition.

Building on his reframing of the secular, Jackson’s core argument posits the existence of a distinct yet integral space within Islam: the Islamic Secular. This realm, while differentiated from the concrete dictates of *sharia* derived from revelatory sources (the *Qur’an* and *Sunnah*), nevertheless operates consciously under the divine gaze and possesses inherent religious legitimacy. Although the Islamic Secular is not directly sourced from revelation, it is intrinsically Islamic through its devotional intent. In this way, both Islamic law (*sharia*) and the Islamic Secular coexist under the general rubric of the Islamic religion (*din*), each fulfilling complementary roles in the life of the Muslim community and its civilisation.

The idea of an Islamic Secular has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting intervention in contemporary Islamic thought, yet it remains underutilised. One reason is that the discussion of *The Islamic Secular* has largely remained confined to academia. Subsisting in the realm of theory with little engagement in practice, it lacks the necessary feedback loops with the “outside world,” limiting its development as a load-bearing analytical tool capable of opening a new world of possibilities across the full spectrum of civilisational activity.

Unlocking the full potential of *The Islamic Secular* requires moving the conversation beyond the academy and into the broader arenas of public, political and institutional life. But first, it must be defined.

## Defining the Islamic Secular

In a marked departure from the prevailing view of *sharia* as a totalising force governing every aspect of Islamic life and civilisation, central to Jackson’s thesis is that the *sharia* imposes a limit on its own jurisdiction. While God’s gaze encompasses all existence, His concrete communiqué through *sharia* sources (i.e. the *Qur’an* and *Sunnah*) does not dictate every facet of human activity. This creates a conceptual and practical “space” between the jurisdiction of the *sharia* and the vast expanse of Islam as *dīn* (a more expansive term than its crude English translation, “religion”).

Jackson terms this space the "Islamic Secular" – the realm of activity whose concrete substance is neither derived from nor adjudicated by *sharia’s* revelatory sources, yet remains consciously pursued under the divine gaze. To illustrate his point, Jackson highlights figures like the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan and his architectural masterpieces, which, while often devoted to God in the form of grand mosques, required engineering knowledge, not *fiqh* rulings. Another notable figure, the Timurid Sultan Ulugh Beg, established an astronomical observatory in Samarkand, where he pursued knowledge of mathematics and astronomy.

To ground this distinction within the Islamic tradition, Jackson draws on classical medieval jurists such as Fakhr Al-Din Razi and Shihab Al-Din Al-Qarafi. The latter explicitly acknowledged this distinction, noting that while an act might be permissible under law, its practical benefit or harm required knowledge "beyond the *hukm shar’i*”. This space of moral, social, and civilisational reasoning, while not legislated, is nonetheless religiously meaningful and, crucially, legitimate.

Jackson introduces two crucial distinctions between Islamic conceptions of the secular and their Western equivalents.

First, Western secularism seeks the liberation of the state, economy, scientific knowledge, and other facets of public and civilisational life from religion entirely – as Grotius characterised it, *etsi Deus non daretur* (“to proceed as if God did not exist”). The Islamic Secular assumes precisely the opposite stance. It differentiates between *shar’i* and non-*shar’i* realms, but both remain under the sovereignty of God and within the overarching framework of religion. In Jackson’s framing, this is *etsi Deus daretur (*“to proceed as if God exists”).

Second, the telos of Western secularism versus the Islamic Secular diverges significantly. Western secularism tends towards the progressive privatisation of religion. By contrast, the Islamic Secular emerges organically from the *sharia’s* internal boundaries, and exists in service of religion, not in opposition to it. It enables flourishing civilisation not by emancipating itself from divine sovereignty, but by channelling that devotional service and authority into forms of activity beyond the worship explicitly commanded by scripture.

Jackson’s reconceptualisation requires both linguistic and intellectual work. Jackson acknowledges that existing Arabic terms like *‘ilmani* (secularist) or *dunyawi* (worldly) are burdened by the baggage of Western secularism’s hostility towards religion and the damage that proponents of secularism have wrought on Muslim societies. As alternatives, he proposes neologisms like *islām mā warā’ al-ḥukm al-sharʿī* (Islam that lies beyond the juristic ruling), or *al-islām khārij al-ḥukm al-sharʿī* (Islam external to the juristic ruling). However, Jackson recognises that even these articulations face limitations. Pre-colonial Islamic civilisation lacked a sharp religious/secular dichotomy precisely because of its activities. Activities such as pottery, governance or economic policy were all inherently undertaken under God’s gaze. The colonial encounter violently imposed the Western binary, rendering the Islamic Secular invisible. Reclaiming it today requires naming it, however uncomfortable that may initially feel.

Jackson argues that renaming what was formerly self-evident and taken for granted is necessary for properly diagnosing what has gone wrong with Islamic civilisation. In this diagnosis, the Islamic Secular becomes a pragmatic, load-bearing tool to establish a beachhead towards civilisation-building endeavours. To emphasise its civilisational importance, Jackson draws on Peter Berger’s sociological concept of “plausibility structure,” the socio-cultural, institutional, and intellectual framework that sustains the credibility, authority, and perceived reality of a religious worldview within a society. Jackson contends that *sharia* alone cannot sustain Islam’s plausibility structure in the modern world. The Islamic Secular is equally essential. When Muslim professionals excel in their fields with devotional intent, building effective institutions and prosperous, just societies, they demonstrate Islam’s efficacy and relevance. This tangible success reinforces faith’s credibility far more powerfully than abstract legal rulings alone.

By naming and theorising the lost non-*shar’i* dimension of religion, Jackson provides the conceptual apparatus to challenge *sharia* maximalism. More importantly, he restores religious legitimacy to the vast range of endeavours that constitute a thriving civilisation. To recognise architecture, medicine, statecraft, or economic policy as authentically Islamic (Secular) is to lay the groundwork for a revitalised plausibility structure for Islam in the 21st century. The adoption of this potentially uncomfortable term is therefore the necessary first step in a long process of reintegrating the severed halves of Islam. In so doing, the hope is that, in time, the term may itself dissolve, its function fulfilled in the seamless integration of sacred and secular within the fabric of a complex and revitalised civilisation.

## *Sharia* Maximalism and a World Lost

*The Islamic Secular* diagnoses a modern pathology within Muslim intellectual and practical life: the conflation of Islam as a religion with *sharia*, or what Jackson pithily terms “*sharia* maximalism”—a reductionist view that equates Islamic legitimacy solely with jurisprudential derivation. In this domain, vast swathes of human activity, including cultural creation, technological innovation, economic development, scientific inquiry, and everyday worldly decision-making, are rendered religiously suspect or irrelevant. Jackson illustrates this mindset with the anecdote of a Philadelphia Imam commenting on the indifferent hostility of local Muslim communities to a significant economic development project by fellow Muslims with the phrase, “Ain’t no *dīn* (religion)in it.”

This attitude is symptomatic of a deeper civilisational malaise caused by the atrophying of the Islamic Secular. In the pre-modern Islamic world, a complex civilisation thrived on institutional complexity supported by both the *sharia* and Islamic Secular. Institutions such as the *Nizamiya* madrasa system, hospitals, observatories, printing houses, and courts not only taught and nurtured religious sciences but also patronised polymaths, artists, and scientists. Today, by contrast, Islamic intellectual life often appears lamentably “flat”, narrowly focused on worship and scripture. At the same time, broader knowledge production is viewed as secular and thus perceived as either religiously neutral or even problematic. A debilitating gap compounds this flattening. On one side are Muslim professionals, engineers, economists, and technocrats, who feel their work lacks religious legitimacy. On the other hand are jurists and religious scholars who lack the tools or experience to engage meaningfully with the complexity of modern professions and public life. The result is a double loss: the Islamic Secular is either abandoned to the hegemony of Western secular frameworks, which often actively militate against religious consciousness, or stigmatised within Muslim communities as religiously insignificant.

Jackson warns that this double loss has created a vacuum that has actively accelerated secularisation in the Western sense. With Islam increasingly confined to ritual and personal piety, everyday life, institutional and civilisational endeavours are drained of spiritual meaning. Consequently, the ecosystem of knowledge production necessary for civilisational complexity has withered, leaving jurisprudence isolated and struggling to address the totality of modern Muslim existence.

A consequential example of the primacy of *sharia* maximalism is the work of Dr. Wael Hallaq. In *The Impossible State*, Hallaq claims that modernity and the modern state are inherently secular and secularising, and therefore, ultimately irreconcilable with Islam if Islam is equated entirely with *sharia*. For Hallaq, that there could be any overlap or extra-*shar’i* appeals to sovereignty and legitimacy dethrones the *sharia* as the ‘central domain’ of Islam as a faith and worldview, and therefore means the victory of secularism.

Yet, because of the constant occurrence of novel situations to which Muslim rulers must devise responses. Statecraft, by necessity, requires a host of extra-*shar’i* methodologies and rulings. Over the past few centuries, the nature of these challenges and the tools available to address them have undergone significant changes. Revolutions in transport and communication, coupled with advancements in logistics and modern weaponry, have enabled states to govern at unprecedented scales and with an intensity of administrative reach and coercive power previously unseen in human history. Hallaq’s conceptualisation of *sharia*, modernity, and the state leaves no room for engaging with contemporary statecraft on ethical terms. In his view, any political projection of the modern age is rendered invalid unless it fully returns to a pre-modern model of ethics and statecraft as codified in the *sharia*. Yet, as Jackson argues, Hallaq does not contend with the concept of an Islamic Secular realm in which new, extra-*shar’i* conceptualisations of statecraft may arise through the everyday cut and thrust of policymaking, economic development, security interests, and bureaucratic machinery. These are not optional arenas, but necessary ones that Muslims must engage in to govern the believers.

Here, both Hallaq and Jackson demonstrate the same apathy towards “early modernity”, or the centuries that between 1500 AD to the early 20th century, when Islamic civilisation reached the apex of its civilisational extent and complexity, and when it faced its most serious challenge from Europe’s combination of industrial might and conceptions of secularism. While both authors, arguing in opposing directions, rely on the works of jurists and intellectuals from the medieval period (usually before the 15th century) to justify their positions, their omission of the early modern period fails to present a truly holistic understanding of Islam, *sharia*, and the Islamic Secular.

The shared omission leaves both Hallaq and Jackson’s narratives unable to fully account for the historical context of the Islamic Secular and its consequences for Islamic civilisation. What was lost was not an abstract affair, but an entire civilisational infrastructure. While Islam as a religion has persisted, mainly in the form of the *sharia*, its counterpart, the realm of the Islamic Secular, was nearly annihilated through the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the Balkans to Bengal, colonial and post-colonial interventions systematically dismantled the political institutions, elite patronage networks, and knowledge ecosystems that sustained Islamic civilisational complexity.

In India, the East India Company’s conquest of Bengal severed centuries-old systems of Islamic governance, replacing indigenous administrative structures with extractive colonial bureaucracy. The 1857 abolition of the Mughal sultanate not only eradicated a political office but also the institutional anchor for Islamic scholarly networks, artistic production, and ethical statecraft across the subcontinent. Its last expression, in the form of a[ joint Hyderabadi-Ottoman](https://kasurian.com/p/caliphate-conspiracy-india?ref=kasurian.com) plot to save the caliphate, ended in 1947 with the retreat of the British Empire and Partition. Similarly, the Balkans–exemplified by [Albania’s experience](https://kasurian.com/p/destruction-islam-european-elite?ref=kasurian.com) under communist rule–saw the erosion of *waqf* endowments, suppression of Sufi orders, and displacement of Muslim elites, dismantling the social and cultural machinery that had organically integrated *shar’i* and non-*shar’i* knowledge, i.e. their local permutation of the Islamic Secular.

The consequences were catastrophic. Islamic civilisation was flattened as political courts, scholarly assemblies, hospitals, and observatories were destroyed or subsumed into colonial frameworks. The rich tapestry of Islamic knowledge production, where jurists, physicians, astronomers, and administrators collaborated, unravelled. What remained, often by default or as a reactive defence mechanism, was a reduced Islam equated almost exclusively with *sharia*. Islam as a faith survived, bloodied but unbroken, but it did so in a landscape stripped of institutional complexity, resulting in a prolonged and disorienting stasis.

The alternative is that if civilisations require knowledge processing at scale, then the loss of the Islamic Secular rendered any meaningful civilisational renewal impossible. [Malik Bennabi’s lament](https://kasurian.com/i/158166625/the-end-of-the-short-th-century-and-its-aftermath?ref=kasurian.com) was rooted in this deeper structural problem: the disappearance of institutional complexity required for sustained knowledge production. Muslims became increasingly unmoored from their own indigenous intellectual and knowledge production traditions, particularly in the realm of the Islamic Secular. At the same time, the institutions of *sharia* persisted in a diminished state.

Much ink has been spilt on the supposed limiting role of *sharia* and its scholarly class in contributing to the defeat of Islamic civilisation, and the stagnation that proceeded thereafter. Yet it was not *sharia* that was responsible for the arts and sciences that govern life and civilisation; the Islamic Secular, in which statesmen, generals, and merchants operated, could not muster the political or economic response to contend with Europe. It is the Islamic Secular, not the *sharia*, which disappeared as a vital realm of Islam as religion. And it is in the Islamic Secular where the knowledge necessary to protect and nurture civilisation will be found again.

This historical rupture also presents us with an ultimatum: What failed to survive the 19th century will not suffice for the 21st. The mere preservation of isolated jurisdictional rulings within a (Western) secular global order guarantees continued civilisational irrelevance. Nor can we merely restore the customs, laws, or institutions of the past. The imperative, therefore, is not restoration, but reimagining. We must think bigger: how do we initiate the rebuilding of civilisational complexity? How can we begin to reconstruct the institutional, intellectual, and spiritual complexity that once sustained Islamic civilisation?

## Complexity at the Scale of Civilisation

By one metric, the sophistication of a civilisation is measured by its complexity, scaled through knowledge. Institutions that produce, verify, and disseminate knowledge are the foundations of a complex civilisation. The level of coordination within and between knowledge-producing institutions determines how advanced a civilisation becomes.

In this regard, Jackson’s formulation of the Islamic Secular serves as the essential, load-bearing tool for any serious project of civilisational renewal. Rebuilding complexity at scale requires constructing vibrant ecosystems capable of producing, verifying, and disseminating diverse forms of knowledge. The Islamic Secular provides the theological and conceptual foundation for this reconstruction by fundamentally legitimising the role of Muslim professionals and intellectuals as active creators of Islamic knowledge.

Doctors developing ethical treatment protocols, economists designing equitable but sustainable and resilient models, architects and urban planners designing communities responsive to people’s practical needs, people creating timeless but emotionally resonant art, and policymakers crafting just and effective governance – all these endeavours, when pursued competently and consciously "as if God exists," constitute the very substance of the Islamic Secular. This knowledge is Islamic not because it derives from jurisprudential hermeneutics, but because it is undertaken by God-conscious agents striving for excellence (*ihsan*) and benefit (*maslaha*) within their respective fields, weaving moral understanding into the fabric of their practice.

Crucially, for these individual efforts to scale into a complex civilisation, they must be institutionally codified. Professional associations, research centres, and ethical review boards must develop standards, customs, and governing principles that embed God-conscious competence into the structures of knowledge itself. Only through this institutionalisation can acts of virtue become shared, verified, and transmitted, reducing cognitive burden, enabling replication, and allowing for cumulative advancement.

However, a thriving civilisational ecosystem demands dialogue between the spheres of the Islamic Secular and the *sharia*. This is no easy task. The two domains operate with distinct vocabularies, methodologies, and epistemologies. Direct engagement between jurists and professionals is often impractical or ineffective. What is needed are specialised intermediary institutions, conceptual “translation houses.”

These institutions would comprise scholars possessing *sharia* literacy, alongside a substantial understanding of specific secular fields (e.g., medicine, finance, and technology), as well as professionals equipped with core religious literacy. Their critical function would be bidirectional translation: First, to interpret and convey the concrete challenges, innovations and ethical dilemmas emerging from within the Islamic Secular, whether in medicine, finance, technology or governance, in conceptual terms that jurists can meaningfully engage with, both theologically and legally; and second, to render the normative insights, constraints and ethical sensibilities derived from *sharia* into actionable guidance and ethical parameters understandable and applicable within secular professions.

This translation is not a one-way imposition but forms the foundation of a mutual, evolving discourse, ensuring that *sharia* principles inform and guide the Islamic Secular without dominating its concrete substance. At the same time, the dynamic realities and advancements within the Islamic Secular continuously inform the context and development of *sharia* discourse, challenging it to grow in relevance, scope and sophistication.

Building such a system requires God-conscious agency on the part of those operating in the realm of the Islamic Secular. Muslim professionals and practitioners across all walks of life must have the courage and conviction to wade into the “grey areas” where there are no established norms, and out of that wilderness cultivate order by weaving Islam’s moral laws into new systems, norms, laws, and customs. But this effort cannot exist without the support of their counterparts operating in the realm of the *sharia*, who impose boundaries on themselves to ensure that the Islamic Secular can flourish and provide the benefits of civilisation to all. Over time, the naming and ordering of things, systemised through institutions, will contribute to a burgeoning, (re)complexified ecosystem of knowledge that lies at the heart of a new civilisational force.

## Applying the Islamic Secular

Dr. Sherman A. Jackson’s *The Islamic Secular* is, in short, a call for civilisational renewal. By redefining a vital dimension of the Islamic tradition that has lain dormant for at least a century, Jackson discards the stifling narrative of "*sharia* maximalism" and restores the religious legitimacy of the ever-expanding non-*shar’i* realm of human endeavour. In doing so, he opens an entirely new field of engagement, one in which Muslim intellectuals and professionals may reclaim their rightful place as creators of Islamic knowledge within their diverse fields. The path forward demands courageous agency: professionals must confidently build the Islamic Secular through God-conscious, competent practice; institutions must emerge to codify this knowledge and establish ethical norms; and crucially, intermediary bodies must be forged to translate between jurisprudential theory and worldly practice.

*Sharia* remains indispensable for defining the boundaries of what is forbidden (*haram*) and permissible (*halal*), as well as for governing core acts of worship (*ibadat*). Beyond that, the Islamic Secular and *sharia* must function as equal partners within the greater whole of Islam as a truly universal religion. Only then can we begin the long and necessary journey toward igniting a "Cambrian explosion" of creativity: building institutions, fostering feedback loops, and (re)scaling Islamic civilisation through an ever more complex ecosystem of knowledge-producing institutions.

Jackson has provided a powerful conceptual foundation. The task now is to build upon it, to weave our deepest moral and spiritual commitments into the very fabric of our worldly existence, profession by profession, institution by institution, intention by intention. This mission is a ‘world-building enterprise’ to reconstruct the plausibility structure of Islamic civilisation in the 21st century.

Yet our efforts must transcend our moment. Although grounded in our contemporary context, our work should not be bound by it; our plans should be measured in generations. The work of the 21st century should lay the foundations for even greater possibilities that our children, and theirs, may enjoy in the 22nd century and beyond. This is what it means to operate at the scale of civilisation.

Our task then, as T.S. Eliot describes, is a raid on the inarticulate, to conquer what has already been discovered and recover what has been lost and found again, even if our conditions may be unpropitious. And we do so by proceeding under God’s gaze.

> *And so each venture* 
> *Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,* 
> *With shabby equipment always deteriorating* 
> *In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,* 
> *Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer* 
> *By strength and submission, has already been discovered* 
> *Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope* 
> *To emulate - but there is no competition -* 
> *There is only the fight to recover what has been lost* 
> *And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions* 
> *That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.* 
> **For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.**  
> – T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

---

**Words*: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of* [*Kasurian*](https://kasurian.com/?ref=kasurian.com)*,*

**Further Reading**

- [The Islamic Secular, Sherman A. Jackson (book)](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126224674-the-islamic-secular?ref=kasurian.com)
- [The Impossible State, Wael Hallaq](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15857315-the-impossible-state?ref=kasurian.com)
### In Abraham's Shadow
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/in-abrahams-shadow/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:47:43.000Z
I*n those ancient times, in those ancient days*. So opens the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest recorded works of literature, chiselled in clay tablets for eternal memory some 4,000 years ago. Ancient enough to us today, these opening lines contemplate the vast expanse of time that has passed between *those ancient days*, the Bronze Age city-states of the Fertile Crescent in which the Epic was first recorded, and our own time today. The burden of uncertainty we shoulder towards our past today was no less weighty to those we consider the ancients, who saw themselves as youth in the shadow of an even greater past.

The Qur’an calls for *tadabbur*, a deep contemplation*,* over the ruins of once mighty civilisations laid to waste by time and human folly.

*Is it not yet clear to them how many peoples We destroyed before them, whose ruins they still pass by?[1](#footnote-1)* We are asked. 

*Surely, in this are signs for people of sound judgment.* We are challenged.

To gaze upon the ruins of dead civilisations and contemplate their mortality reveals the perennial condition of man and history.

Contemplation of destroyed civilisations is constrained by the scarcity of evidence. The plains of Mesopotamia have changed. The great fathers of agricultural civilisation, who were nourished by its produce, warred over it, and built great kingdoms and empires, have lain in long silent slumber for millennia beneath the undulating *Tells* that give shape to the Mesopotamian plains. Their palaces and walls have largely turned to dust. The rivers have adjusted their course. The land is less fertile, the rain is sparse, and the summers are severe. The land croaks under the accumulated burden of civilisation that has turned soil to sand.

Yet, if you stood there for a moment, you might almost see past the thin membrane that separates material reality from time, and you can imagine what the ancient civilisations that used to dwell here may have looked like. The long shadows cast by these *Tells* across the landscape come alive with the ghosts of the past, conversing in a vernacular not entirely alien to the inhabitants of this land today. Those *Tells* turn into fortresses and grand mausoleums; roads emerge from the wild landscape, teeming with messengers, traders, and armies; and a dry countryside turns into a busy harvest. Why did this disappear? And why have all civilisations succumbed to ruin?

The doom of Mesopotamia is the doom of all nations at one point or another. Yet, those great Bronze Age city-states of 4,000 years past were not the first to succumb to extinction. Near the Mesopotamian city of Urfa, now in modern-day Turkiye, archaeologists plumb the depths of deep time to reveal an age undreamed of, even to those who lived in *those ancient days*. The discovery of Göbekli Tepe, an archaeological site first excavated in 1994, challenges the orthodox account of man’s historical transition from roaming to sedentary civilisation.

Built around 12,000 years ago, Göbekli Tepe’sdiscovery compels a re-imagination of humanity’s deep history and the origins of agricultural civilisation. Great T-shaped obelisks decorated with a pantheon of zoomorphic imagery: foxes and lions, vultures and scorpions, geese and wild boar; some of these animals have never been native to the region or have been driven to extinction by humanity over the millennia. According to this account, a settlement of Göbekli Tepe's size, in its location, and of its era should not exist. Yet, exist it does. Questions abound. Were the obelisks worshipped? Were they recordings celebrating the land's rich agriculture and wildlife? Could they, as some have theorised, have sought to depict the animals of Noah’s Ark? Who were its builders? What gods did they worship? And what was the purpose of this grand temple that has now re-emerged from the plains? Perhaps we will receive answers to some of these questions as archaeological excavations reveal more. All we know is that in a time almost equidistant between ourselves, the ancient Egyptians, and the world of Göbekli Tepe, thousands of years of what was most likely a sedentary, agricultural civilisation persisted beyond the horizon of recorded time.

And yet what we discover of Göbekli Tepe’s religion and rituals may not be so alien to us. Contemplating deep history reveals the vicissitudes of humanity’s moral assumptions. All is not set in stone, and the pagan attitudes that predominated in humanity’s deep history may yet make a vengeful return.

To understand these processes requires a reckoning with what is being lost from our moral fabric today, and to do that, we must understand its origins.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/b09c016c-8ae3-48e5-a24e-24c0df9a672c_3988x2937-jpeg.jpg)

## Against the Idols of Ur

> *The prophet's return is creative. He returns to insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history, and thereby to create a fresh world of ideals. For the mystic the repose of "unitary experience" is something final; for the prophet it is the awakening, within him, of world-shaking psychological forces, calculated to completely transform the human world. The desire to see his religious experience transformed into a living world-force is supreme in the prophet. Thus his return amounts to a kind of pragmatic test of the value of his religious experience.*  
> – The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Muhammad Iqbal

In the centuries when the Epic of Gilgamesh is chiselled into clay, in which Ea-Nasir hawks his poor-quality copper to irate clients, a world of bronze swords and chariots, where God-Kings reign with supreme confidence in their immortality even as their doom nears; in the Fertile Crescent, a prophet embarks on a greater odyssey that will result in the axial transformation of humanity’s basic moral precepts.

In ancient Ur, Abraham stands alone among his people in opposition to the worship of man-made idols. He gazes on the heavens in deep contemplation to discern the true nature of God.[2](#footnote-2) As night gives way to day, and day gives way to night, Abraham looks to the stars, moon, and sun for signs of divinity. He finds none.Abraham’s contemplation discerns the mortality and ruin of pagan idols. A true God cannot die. Thus, Abraham awakens those ‘world-shaking psychological forces’ to ‘create a fresh world of ideals’ and create a shift in humanity’s moral condition. He takes a hammer to the idols his people worship, and when interrogated as to discover who destroyed them, Abraham replies, “Ask them, if they can speak”.[3](#footnote-3)

Facing persecution for his opposition to idolatry, Abraham’s odyssey begins, travelling the breadth and width of what is today the Middle East to find a home in which his call to true monotheism could flourish. It is deep in Arabia, in the vicinity of Makka, at the heart of which Abraham settles and builds the ‘black stone’ known as the *Ka’aba*, where God speaks to him again.

God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Ishmael, to prove his faith. In true faith and submission, both Abraham and Ishmael comply with this command. As the knife descends, God prevents Abraham from sacrificing Ishmael and declares that ‘this sacrifice would henceforth be replaced by ‘a greater sacrifice’, and replaces Ishmael with a ram to be sacrificed in his stead.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/edc34c9a-6ed8-48bf-913b-2b3c6fd23040_12812x5958-jpeg.jpg)

## Feast of the Sacrifice

For over 1400 years, Muslims have commemorated this event and Abraham’s pilgrimage by performing the *Hajj* pilgrimage to Makka and circumambulating the Ka’aba. The *Hajj* concludes with the annual Feast of the Sacrifice (*Eid al-Adha*), a celebration of God’s mercy towards Abraham, during which Muslims sacrifice animals and distribute their meat to the poor.

The Feast is more than ritual gratitude for Abraham’s faith and God’s mercy. It is the remembrance of a world-historical shift in humanity’s moral dimension, with Abraham as the divinely ordained harbinger whose laws, until today, inform our most fundamental beliefs in right and wrong, our attitudes on the sanctity of life, when and when not to kill, what is sacred and profane, and where man’s capacity to reason his way to moral action ends. In fact, Abraham’s message has been so successful that an increasingly irreligious world has largely forgotten that their source of morality is in large part owed to him.

It is humanity’s tendency to forget that leads to many questions today as to how Abraham could countenance the sacrifice of his own son. Abraham was raised in a world in which ritual human sacrifice was the norm, and God’s call to sacrifice his son would not have appeared as immoral or fraudulent. God’s mercy was not just to save Abraham from the consequences of sacrificing his own son, but also to forever replace the ritual slaughter of men with animals. Contra Kierkegaard’s anxieties, Abraham’s sacrifice was not a teleological suspension of the ethical, but a contextually reasonable and ethical willingness on the part of Abraham to do what humanity had always done, except in the service of a true God, not a false idol.

Our revulsion towards human sacrifice is a recent phenomenon in the grand scale of history: In the Andes, children were left to freeze alive; The Aztec’s founding myth was the skinning of a princess whose skin was worn as a cloak by the Aztec priest whose tribe would go on to form the Aztec empires, and its great pyramids dedicated to the sacrifice of tens of thousands of souls; In India, *Sati*, or bride burning; In Ancient Egypt and the Shang dynasty in China, the burying of servants alive their rulers; In Carthage, the infant sacrifices. Human sacrifice was a global phenomenon, and particularly widespread in pagan and highly stratified societies.

Bereft of divine revelation and left to our own devices, humanity has often assumed that the greatest offering to their Gods was the life of other men. It is something that contemporary man can barely begin to fathom, assuming that our moral attitudes against the practice emerged almost by happenstance, or that some philosopher had reasoned his way to the fact that human sacrifice was wrong. By some process or another, over time, entire cultures and civilisations bought into the idea, and eventually, the practice became nearly extinct around the world.

None of this was an emergent phenomenon. The abolition of human sacrifice has been driven by the singularly successful message carried forward throughout the Abrahamic Odyssey, which has sustained itself across generations and millennia, buoyed by the singular command of the Lord of Hosts: go forth and multiply. Abraham is thus called the Patriarch and is considered, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a founding father in the lineage of Adam and Noah. In Islam, Abraham holds a special status as the ‘friend of God’, and a *Hanif*–a true monotheist. The sheer dominance of the moral frameworks that have emerged out of these religions lives on today in a world whose basic moral precepts have been shaped by Abraham. And one of the Abrahamic faiths’ fundamental contributions to humanity has been the abolition of human sacrifice wherever they went.

The preponderance of human sacrifice in pagan societies may be explained by the philosopher René Girard’s theory of ‘mimetic desire’, in which ‘archaic’ societies ritually controlled violence driven by envious desire through the ‘transfer’ of guilt to a sacrificial scapegoat, who would be collectively attacked by society as a means of restoring the balance. These societies masked collective guilt with myths of divine necessity, so that, more often than not, human sacrifice would occur as a ritual offering to their Gods.

In Islam, Abraham’s sacrifice is a turning point in which guilt, once associated with human sacrifice, is symbolically transferred to an animal, whose sacrifice represents less the fear of divine wrath and more devotion to a merciful God. It is a call to ethical accountability, in which mindless social violence that arbitrarily chooses victims to excise itself of this violence and restore order is replaced by forgiveness.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/f766e8c7-c625-4ee7-832e-37ea10a9afb4_12812x6457-jpeg.jpg)

## The Fading Warmth of the Sun

> *The morality of the non-religious man has its source in religion, but in an earlier, forgotten religion...The sun has set, but the warmth that radiates in the night comes from the sun.*  
> – Alija Izetbegović

For those who ponder, the Feast is a memory of a time long past, when men had no qualms about human sacrifice. Such was its ubiquity that Abraham himself committed to sacrificing his son as an act of devotion to God, whose divine intervention finally transformed our moral attitude towards the practice of human sacrifice.

Gazing at the ruins of civilisations and their fallen moral orders and religions, one feels unease looking ahead. We may feel the dimming warmth of faith at our backs, but ahead of us yawns a cold, stygian silence. For its part, the decline of religion in the West has led to a great deal of moral uncertainty and anxiety. The loss of shared rituals, norms, beliefs, and morals is creating ever more distrustful and insular societies. Strange permutations in culture, considered *verboten* in today’s moral code, herald new norms the next day. Lacking a moral anchor, civilisation increasingly feels like an arena of predators, devoid of mercy and devoted solely to a will to power. Society’s vindictiveness, the collapse of the rule of law, and the increasing intensity of tribal desire to exact vengeance on others echo a return to the mimetic desires that once led men to sacrifice one another. We no longer have the confidence that our inherited morality, fostered in a religious framework, can hold the line against horrors beyond our comprehension.

History offers little solace. The cycle of glory and ruin that characterises all civilisations suggests an inescapable doom. Were Göbekli Tepe’s altars also bloodied with human sacrifice? Is the morality of the people who once lived, sacrificed, and died there so different from the morality emerging in our time? Or, as T.S. Eliot lamented, have the cycles of heaven brought us farther from God and nearer to dust, like a great moral ouroboros? Perhaps when the dust settles on excavations at Göbekli Tepe, what we assume will be a strange and terrible world revealed to us would instead appear hauntingly familiar.

In these times, *Eid al-Adha* carries new significance: an annual renewal of a vow against the re-emergence of human sacrifice and a path of Abraham, the *Hanif*. What seems new is very old, and in such times, the accusation that religion is a ‘thing of the past’ may be to its credit; for when men have forgotten their past, religion’s traditions remain deeply embedded with its lessons and consequences. Chief among them, that all that stands between the sanctity of human life and the return of human sacrifice is the knife of Abraham.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/214a0c5f-7c92-4727-8c35-457b1e8a6534_3960x1477-jpeg.jpg)

---

**Author:* Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of* [*Kasurian*](https://kasurian.com/?ref=kasurian.com)*.*

---

1. Ta-Ha: verse 128 [↩](#footnote-anchor-1 "Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.")
2. Al-An’am (The Cattle): verses 76-79 [↩](#footnote-anchor-2 "Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.")
3. Al-Anbiya (The Prophets): verse 63 [↩](#footnote-anchor-3 "Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.")
### Lessons from the Lebanese Space Program
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/lebanese-space-program/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:54:03.000Z
## Modest Beginnings

At the height of the Cold War, only a handful of nations possessed the capacity to launch rockets into space. Among them were the world's foremost superpowers of the time: the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Then there was Lebanon, a newly formed Mediterranean nation barely larger than the state of Delaware.

Between 1960 and 1967, the almost forgotten Lebanese Rocket Society, led by its founder Manoug Manougian, competed with the great powers of the Cold War to create a space program in Lebanon. Founded as a student association within the Haigazian College in Beirut in November 1960, the Rocket Society operated without any official funding from the state or the university. Relying on the dedication of a few professors, seven students, and a modest donation from the Lebanese entrepreneur and Parliamentarian Emile Bustani, the burgeoning Society made up for what it lacked in resources with ingenuity, drive, and vision.

Aiming to elevate Lebanon and the Arab world to the level of the era’s great powers, then locked in a fierce space race, the Rocket Society was an ambitious scientific endeavour. The Rocket Society emerged amid a complex backdrop: Lebanon’s nascent state-building effort, the ebb and flow of Nasserite-coloured Pan-Arabism, ongoing hostilities with Israel, the intensifying Cold War between the USA and USSR, and the yet-unrestricted optimism in technology and its capacity to transform society for the better. This was the now forgotten post-imperial, post-war world of possibility in which the Rocket Society found itself.

Within a few years of its founding, the Rocket Society successfully launched rockets beyond Earth’s atmosphere into space and became a source of national pride for Lebanon. Yet by 1967, it had all but been abandoned by Manougian and much of his team. Escalating geopolitical tensions, diplomatic pressure, war, and Manougian’s fear of the militarisation of his technology would end Lebanon’s brief but remarkable emergence as a space power.

The Rocket Society’s initial success relied not on vast material resources or institutional support but on the singular vision and leadership of Manougian. Born in 1935 in Jericho, Palestine, to a family of Armenian refugees, Manougian was raised and educated in Jerusalem, and in 1955 received a scholarship to study mathematics at the University of Texas, Austin. During his time in Texas, Manougian witnessed the rise of the space race between the USA and USSR. Seized with ambition and believing that the promise of technology could transform both Lebanon and the Arab world, he planned to put Lebanon on the map. In 1960, at just 25 years old, he returned to Beirut to teach mathematics and physics at the Haigazian College. There, he took charge of the Haigazian Science Club, looking to inspire a new generation of young Lebanese scientists.

What Manougian lacked in formal experience or technical backing, he made up for in his ability to inspire and organise these resourceful students, who required a catalysing force to structure their efforts towards a shared goal. And if there was a space race, why not focus their efforts on rockets? So, the Science Club was renamed the Haigazian College Rocket Society.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/5ac129f8-dfd7-4c85-bd53-e82ddc4b9112_976x549-jpeg.jpg)

The Rocket Society pose in front of a Cedar rocket.

## Small Steps and Large Leaps

In the beginning, with few resources at its disposal, everything the Rocket Society built was manufactured locally: prototypes were built using wood, cardboard, metal pipes, and homemade chemical compounds, all produced on-site. The initial tests were conducted without prior trials, often in the gardens of society members' homes in the Lebanese countryside. Nevertheless, in April 1961, they made a breakthrough: a single-stage rocket successfully reached an altitude of two kilometres, a small leap that confirmed they were on the right track. The achievement inspired the team to consider sending an animal, perhaps a mouse, into space. Manougian’s wife shot down that plan.

The success of these initial tests drew the attention of Lebanese President Fouad Chehab, who, in 1961, allocated a budget of 10,000 Lebanese pounds to the project, followed by an additional 15,000 pounds in 1962\. The state’s support significantly enhanced the program's capabilities, particularly through the technical and financial assistance of the Lebanese Army. From that point onwards, the rockets were launched from the military base of Dbayeh near Beirut. With funding, some measure of military support, and growing national acclaim, the Haigazian Rocket Society was officially renamed as the **Lebanese Rocket Society**.

Perhaps Manougian intuited it at the time, but the Lebanese Army’s interest in the Rocket Society was not purely out of national pride. Indeed, as similar programs had done in other countries, Lebanon’s government saw the potential military applications of the Rocket Society’s rockets. However, lacking the vast resources and state capacity to undertake research and development programs like those in the USA and USSR, the Lebanese Army’s best shot was to support Manougian. The ground was laid for the beginning of a tension that would one day unravel the Rocket Society.

In the meantime, the Rocket Society would go on to launch 10 more rockets, with four main ‘Cedar’ rockets: the HCRS-7, Cedar-2b and 2c, Cedar-3, and finally, Cedar-4\. When the Cedar-4 rocket was launched in 1963, it was a remarkable technological advancement for its time. The Cedar-4 was a three-stage rocket capable of reaching an altitude of 145 kilometres, thus entering the low Earth orbit (LEO) zone, and blasting past its record of two kilometres in 1961\. LEO is where most satellite and human space flight activities take place. In every sense then, the Cedar-4 was a modern rocket; it rose over the Kármán line, considered the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, and the ability to reach LEO opened up possibilities previously unimagined.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/786e8394-5fab-4e91-9d1c-7d17cbb3ca21_1045x700.png)

Launch of the Cedar-4 rocket.

The Rocket Society was no longer playing with fireworks. Lebanon’s membership in the exclusive club of LEO-bound technology was extraordinary. The achievement was celebrated with the release of a commemorative stamp, generating national excitement. Lebanese people, especially amongst the Armenian community, flocked to witness the launch of each rocket, proud of the Rocket Society’s accomplishments.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/12281c8b-8a5c-4d49-878f-4445a1b3eda2_530x505.png)

A commemorative stamp.

The Rocket Society and Manougian were also attracting attention from abroad. Manougian received lucrative offers from several (unnamed) Arab countries seeking to develop their own indigenous ballistic missile programs on the back of his work. But he categorically declined these proposals, [stating](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24735423?ref=kasurian.com):

> *"I was offered the moon in terms of money and support – a mansion to live in and a lab of my own design. I turned them down. I realised what the implications would have been, as I'm very strongly against violence of any kind."*

Manougian’s dream of a peaceful space program was beginning to clash with the geopolitical realities around him. Where he saw a means to improve society through peaceful technological development, states and other political actors saw the potential–or threat–of possessing this technology.

## Too Close to the Sun

In 1966, Manougian and his team would launch the Cedar-8 rocket, with Lebanese citizens, government officials, and even foreign diplomats in attendance. This would be the last rocket that the Society would build as a team.

As the regional geopolitical tensions were becoming more hostile, the proliferation of advanced rocket technology, especially via small states like Lebanon, concerned larger powers. The Cedar-8 rocket had nearly hit a British naval cruiser in the Mediterranean. Cyprus was unhappy with the rockets launching so close to its airspace. Manougian, too, was disheartened when two students were injured (with one severely burning their hands and losing an eye) after a flawed experiment. Manougian was also concerned about the potential militarisation of the technologies he and the Rocket Society were developing. The space program was a dream of scientific and peaceful exploration that he had developed since his childhood in the West Bank. However, the Lebanese military saw it as a strategic opportunity to develop ballistic missiles. As he [stated](https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/8746/what-could-have-been-the-lebanese-rocket-society?ref=kasurian.com):

> *"By 1965, I realised that the Lebanese military’s interest had changed from scientific research for peaceful exploration of space, to rockets as an instrument of war.”*

By 1967, geopolitical tensions created an even more hostile environment for the Rocket Society. Manougian was approached by CIA agents posing as "cultural attachés," who warned him of escalating regional tensions and the increased likelihood of a conflict with Israel—fears that materialised during the Six-Day War in 1967\. Simultaneously, French President Charles de Gaulle cautioned Lebanese President Fouad Chehab about the security risks posed by the space program. Under combined pressure from the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, the activities of the Rocket Society were gradually scaled back.

Under severe pressure, Manougian left Lebanon for the United States, accompanied by several of his colleagues, mostly Palestinians of Armenian descent. The Lebanese Army and what remained of the Rocket Society would go on to launch another rocket, the Cedar-10, and Western powers decisively stepped in to end Lebanon’s experiment once and for all. The Rocket Society was disbanded and the program shut down. A few months later, the Six-Day War broke out.

In the years that followed, the program faded into obscurity. The outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 and the Israeli invasion of 1982 destroyed much of the program’s archives. What had once been front-page news, and an achievement commemorated on Lebanese postage stamps, vanished from collective memory. Neither Haigazian College, where it all began, nor national museums preserved this legacy. No official commemorations, academic studies or journalistic investigations kept the story alive. A program that had once drawn thousands of spectators and attracted the attention of international powers became a ghost, erased so thoroughly that, as far as most people are concerned—even in Lebanon—the Rocket Society never existed.

It was not until the 2010s that the story of Manougian and the Rocket Society resurfaced from obscurity through the efforts of Lebanese filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. They had stumbled on the story while researching forgotten pieces of history from Arab modernity, finding a commemorative stamp from the 1960s featuring a Lebanese rocket. This piqued their curiosity. Through publications, rocket replicas and exhibitions, Hadjithomas and Joreige undertook a multi-year journey to revive the memory of this forgotten chapter of scientific achievement. Their work culminated in the critically acclaimed documentary *The Lebanese Rocket Society* (2012).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/e8a207c9-bc9b-414d-a1f3-0be34384f6f1_786x508.png)

The Rocket Society and onlookers watching the launch of a Cedar rocket.

*The Lebanese Rocket Society* begs the question: What if Lebanon had continued its space program? Had it been able to scale its efforts, leveraging both state and private resources, could it have become a major player in the space industry?

With state and private investment, the Rocket Society could have expanded its reach and become a catalyst for industrial development, creating a technological edge in niche sectors such as aerospace and satellite technology. Satellites, in particular, have become indispensable tools for surveillance, border monitoring, and agricultural management. Lebanon could have positioned itself as a leader in these areas, offering satellite-based services to other countries in the region. The Arab Satellite Communications Organisation (Arabsat), founded in 1976, is a relevant example. Had Lebanon pursued its space program, it might have spearheaded such an initiative a decade earlier, providing satellite communications to the Arab League and beyond. This would have aligned with Manougian’s vision of uniting Arab countries through scientific endeavours and future-oriented ideas.

Moreover, operating such complex mechanical systems would have compelled Lebanon and the Haigazian College to enhance educational quality and infrastructure to innovate and compete with wealthier rivals such as the USA and USSR. Retaining homegrown talents such as Manougian would have been crucial, especially as other countries sought to recruit him for their own programs. The Lebanese Army, which provided limited support to the Rocket Society, might have invested in building a rudimentary spaceport and acquired advanced equipment ranging from communication systems to radar and material testing machines. Without easy access to foreign technology, Lebanon would have been forced to develop indigenous alternatives or seek partnerships with industrial powers, likely in Eastern Europe.

Ultimately, we will never know. International pressure and regional war ensured that the Rocket Society would be short-lived. Lebanon would never again have the alchemy of talent, resources and political will necessary to launch a serious space program.

## A Future Lost

Manougian died on May 7, 2024, at 89\. He never again returned to Beirut. Manougian’s ability to create functional rockets from off-the-shelf chemicals and metal pipes, with little more than a small team of students, is a testimony to his ingenuity and resourcefulness. In doing so, he pioneered developments in an industry typically dominated by superpowers with vast resources and industrial capacity. Yet, despite his achievements, Manougian’s name has faded from the collective memory of the Lebanese people and the broader Arab world. This erasure is a tragedy because Manougian exemplifies how individuals with vision, determination, and the ability to inspire others can achieve extraordinary feats, even in the most resource-scarce environments.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/987e36f2-2bed-432e-818a-5e4b34626634_457x290.png)

Manoug Manougian.

Perhaps Manougian’s idealism also contributed to the Rocket Society’s ultimate demise. The space race, and the impetus for scientific and technological development in the USA and USSR, was not driven merely by scientific curiosity and a love of science. It was, first and foremost, funded and directed by military needs. In hindsight, it is hard to say, but Manougian’s pacifistic stance may have been self-defeating. Nations like Lebanon, lacking the technological capacity for self-defence, remain vulnerable to conflict and are therefore prone to foreign and domestic conflict. After leaving Lebanon, Manougian continued his career in American institutions where technology development often serves military applications — the very connection he denied his own nation.

Today, a new space race is heating up between the world’s great powers. Unlike the 1960s, more nations than ever before are launching space programs and possess ever-more advanced rocket technology. In the Arab and Muslim world, countries like Morocco, Egypt, Turkiye, and Pakistan aim to compete with the likes of China and the USA to possess indigenous technological capacity for space projects. As they strive to establish themselves as technological powers, the travails of Manougian and the Rocket Society offer a critical lesson: Technological advancements and societal change are not determined solely by national budgets or industrial capacity. Rather, they also depend on the vision and determination of a few strong-willed individuals—those willing to “eat dirt” and persevere against overwhelming odds to achieve their goals. These individuals, leading small but highly motivated teams, can catalyse change far beyond what their material resources might suggest. A giant leap requires a thousand small steps.

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*Words: Yasin Atlassi is a historian of technology, focused on how tools and infrastructure shape society, culture, and politics.*
### How Islam's European Elites Were Destroyed
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/destruction-islam-european-elite/
Last updated: 2026-08-02T12:20:56.000Z
## European Elites and Muslim Rubes

On October 10, 2024, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, alongside dozens of politicians and clerics from Albania and Turkiye, inaugurated the Namazgah Mosque in the centre of Albania’s capital, Tirana – now the largest mosque in the Balkans. Crowds gathered to witness the sight in the public plaza in front of the mosque, which abuts Albania’s parliament and the Tirana fortress atop a small hill in the city centre. Regional social media was flooded with drone footage of jubilant crowds on a warm fall day as clerics supplicated to God. That Friday, for the first time, the Namazgah Mosque’s loudspeakers joined the chorus of the city’s other mosques in calling the faithful to prayer.

Just a generation ago, the scenes unfolding at the Namazgah Mosque would have been unthinkable. Under the idiosyncratic Maoism of Albania’s paranoid and mercurial Cold War despot, Enver Hoxha, Albania was officially an atheist state from 1967 until 1990\. As the communist regimes of Europe, including Albania’s, crumbled, the Albanian faithful of all religions emerged onto a desolate religious landscape.

The state apparatus’ zeal in suppressing religion had taken its toll. Decades of hiding Qurans and Bibles in the walls of homes, holding mawlids and masses in secret, and dynamiting sites of historical memory meant that as Albanians returned to their faiths, there were but a few tragic remnants from which they could build anew. When Albanian Muslims selected a new Grand Mufti in 1991, they appointed Hafiz Sabri Koçi, a spiritual leader of the Tijani Sufi order and a figure from the pre-Hoxha era. The communist regime had abolished the position of Grand Mufti in 1967, compelling under police harassment the Grand Mufti of the time, Esat Myftia, to abdicate his role in public life. Even the construction of the Namazgah Mosque was compelled by a tragedy of the communist era – the previous main mosque of Tirana, the Old Mosque, had been levelled by Hoxha.

In recent decades, despite the indignities piled upon the faithful by Hoxha’s regime, and mirroring developments across post-communist Europe, there has been a religious revival in Albania. New places of worship have been built, public manifestations of religion are tolerated and sometimes sponsored by the state, and citizens are free to openly identify with and practice whatever religion they choose. Muslim Albanians can once again pray *en plein air* on Fridays and holidays, open schools and seminaries, and travel freely on pilgrimage to the Hejaz and for study at institutions in Turkey, Egypt, and Syria. The active participation of officialdom at the inauguration of the Namazgah Mosque shows that the resurgence of Islam’s importance in Albanian life is promoted, to an extent, by Albania’s political elite.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/373de8c9-30c7-4e1f-b022-7ac116108ead_1600x1075.png)

**Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama and Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inaugurate the Namazgah mosque in Tirana.*

Despite the apparent elite patronage of Islam’s revival, Albania’s contemporary elites largely follow the French model of secularism, or *laicité* (a model replicated with gusto by the 20th-century elites of Turkiye, among other post-colonial regimes). Under *laicité*,religion is viewed as a private matter, salient only within one’s conscious mind and, if the state apparatus feels solicitous enough toward the sentiments of the faithful, within one’s own home. Under orthodox *laicité*, religious symbolism is marginalised in public life to guarantee freedom and neutrality, and the use of religious concepts and modes of reasoning is accorded little prestige or importance in society’s sensemaking institutions.

The predominance of *laicité* among Albania’s elites follows a pattern widespread in post-communist societies. The elite are at no great pains to present themselves as overly religious, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or otherwise. Instead, they view themselves as archetypal Europeans and envisage the governance of Albania as a project in fashioning a European state and society. Despite not being officially part of the European Union, EU-funded and affiliated institutions are pervasive, and EU flags festoon most government buildings. Children of Albania’s elite attend boarding school at Le Rosey and university at the London School of Economics or the Sorbonne; Prime Minister Rama, a Francophile, lived in France while pursuing his career as a visual artist and enjoys a close relationship with France’s President Macron, among other Western leaders.

Albania’s current elite has reproduced a stereotypical “Western” high culture, disseminated through the country’s cultural institutions, mass media, and political and educational systems, whereby high-status, elite values are equated with archetypal “European” values - politically liberal, socially progressive, and above all, secular. Whatever the personal convictions of the elite may be, their patronage of Islam is more a liberal-hearted concession to the bona fide beliefs of the populace than an expression of the elite’s preferred value system. Lacking meaningful elite patronage, the revival of Islam in Albania trundles along as a “low class” and purely bottom-up affair, which codes Islamic practice and belief as plebeian, un-European, and unfashionable.

Was it a foregone conclusion that the elite of this Mediterranean nation in the heart of Europe would be *laique* and impress secular values as good, desirable, and aspirational, and Islam as equally impoverished, uncool, and embarrassing? More importantly, has this always been Islam’s place, an import for mass consumption from an Agrabah-like land of sand dunes and Altaic nomads?

There is nothing predetermined about the path Albania has trod. Instead, the current state of affairs is the result of identifiable and concrete historical processes, telling the story of the fall of an old elite and high culture and their replacement with a new elite and high culture.

## The Albanian Connection

From the early modern period (circa. 16th century) into the early 20th century, indigenous Albanian elites, both Muslim and Christian, played an active and prominent role in the Muslim world’s politics, society, culture, warmaking, and diplomacy. They governed lands at the heart of the Ottoman Empire and decisively shifted Islam’s centre of gravity to Europe. More than merely expanding the reach of Turco-Persian dominion into Europe, Albania’s elites steered a process of cultural synthesis, creating a distinctly European, indigenously-inflected form of Islam. To this day, the monuments they left behind continue to stand as testaments to their sophisticated and cosmopolitan worldview as European Muslims. Delicate paintings of lush gardens, gleaming stone-clad cities, and fearsome galleons adorn the walls of the Et’hem Bey Mosque in Tirana and the Painted Mosque in Tetovo, a joyous expression of European baroque art in the context of Islamic sacred architecture.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/1d2fbdb1-728a-476c-bead-1972b1eb3492_1024x684.png)

**The interior of Et’hem Bey Mosque, built in 1821, closed under Enver Hoxha’s rule, and re-opened in 1991.*

The number of Albanian viziers, generals, aghas, damats and pashas is too great to count. Of the 292 grand viziers who served as the right hand of the Ottoman sultan across six centuries, 48 were Albanian, the second-largest group after the Turks themselves (who provided 140 grand viziers). The Köprülü family, of Albanian origin, alone provided six grand viziers and essentially ruled the empire in the Sultan’s place throughout the 17th century, reforming the Ottoman state and launching new wars of expansion that would only be checked by defeat at the gates of Vienna in 1683 (which resulted in the Sultan banishing the family from power). Albanians also left their mark on the imperial skyline of the imperial capital, Istanbul. The Sultanahmet mosque, sitting across the Hagia Sophia, was designed and built by the Ottoman Albanian architect, Sedefkâr Mehmet Agha, a student of the renowned master architect, Mimar Sinan.

No mere handmaidens of imperialism for the House of Osman, Albanian Muslim elites often rebelled and asserted their independence against the Ottoman sultans. They were an anchoring force unto themselves in the Islamic world. Ali Pasha Tepelena ruled over large swaths of the western Balkans in the early 19th century and famously befriended Lord Byron. Another example is Muhammad Ali Pasha; born in Kavala (now in Greece), he established a semi-independent kingdom in Egypt in the first half of the 19th century and would nearly overthrow the House of Osman. Under Muhammad Ali’s successors, Egypt won its independence, built a standing army, and began to urbanise and industrialise. Until the fall of the Muhammad Ali dynasty in 1952, the kings of Egypt maintained a distinctly Albanian identity, which they viewed as entirely congruent with their role as important nodes in the international network of Muslim aristocrats and royals.

Albanians also contributed to the intellectual life of the Islamic world. Sami Frasheri was a prominent intellectual in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, writing on Ottomanism, Albanian nationalism, and the reform and renewal of Islamic civilisation. His son founded the Galatasaray football team and was president of the Turkish Olympic Committee in the 1920s. Hasan Tahsini, while intimately involved in the struggle for recognition of the Albanian language in the Ottoman Empire, was rector of the University of Istanbul and wrote what are considered the first Ottoman-language treatises on contemporary Western psychology and astronomy.

Christian Albanians also played an important role in the Muslim world but had a more tempestuous relationship with their Muslim suzerains. Christian elites maintained independent regional power bases and often clashed with local Muslim rulers and distant sultans alike. The Souliotes, Christian Albanian tribesmen, famously fought for Greek independence from the House of Osman and won several major victories in the name of Greek liberty.

Nevertheless, Albania had an elite class of indigenous Muslims who sat at the centre of Islamic civilisation and were paragons of its high culture. For almost half a millennium, Albania’s elites served, governed, defended, and expanded the Muslim world within and without the Ottoman Empire. In stark contrast, the Albanian elite today is a decisively secular and secularising force. Islam is relegated to the realm of necessary public ceremony and bona fide but decidedly unfashionable conviction for the declassé masses.

## Unravelling Albania’s Muslim Elite

Exploring Tirana, one finds clues to understanding this profound transformation. How could belief in Islam and the history of Islamic civilisation go from motivating to embarrassing for the elite? Housed in a defunct communist-era bunker, Bunk’Art 2 is a museum documenting the atrocities of Albania’s communist regime. In the dank hallways of the bunker, you learn about the regime’s use of executions, torture, expulsion, concentration camps, and the extensive spying apparatus of the much-feared secret police, the *Sigurimi*. Entering one of the final rooms in the museum, hanging in front of you are pieces of paper suspended from the ceiling by strings listing the names of those executed by the communist regime. You cannot help but notice hundreds of Muslim names: Mehmets, Fatimes, Abdyls and Bajrams.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/681c9ca5-916a-4b91-a8af-a0bc56a7850b_1080x450-jpeg.jpg)

**A dome in Bunk’Art 2 depicts just some of the faces of the many who were disappeared by Enver Hoxha’s secret police.*

A fifteen-minute walk from Bunk’Art 2, a plaque commemorating massacred intellectuals sits near the headquarters of Albania’s muftiate. Inscribed on the plaque are Alis, Mehmets, and Qemals. Several stately homes bear plates naming the pre-communist occupants, often prominent Muslim landowners and their extended families.

Through the tumult of the 19th and early 20th centuries, wars of nationalism forged homogenous nations from heterogeneous transcontinental empires. In all of these cases, clerics, teachers, aristocrats, doctors, intellectuals, industrialists and military officers were targeted for elimination by rival religious or ethnic groups – the idea was to destroy the “intelligentsia” who would sustain the group’s high culture, and therefore sap a group’s identity and beliefs of their salience and life-force. The baleful effects of these conflicts affected religious and ethnic groups throughout the Old World, and Albania was not immune to these global currents.

Bringing these scattered clues together creates a larger picture – throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Albania’s Muslim elite was systematically exiled, imprisoned, tortured and executed, their wealth seized and their institutions dissolved. Often, these incidents were tangential to wider conflicts, including the Balkan Wars, the Great War, and the Italian invasion of Albania. Just as often, they were targeted attacks on sources of Muslim power and influence.

Enver Hoxha’s rise to power in the wake of the Second World War represented the culmination of this process. Dozens of muftis, sheikhs and qadis across Albania’s major cities were summarily executed. Sufi orders were disbanded, their leaders shot, and lodges and shrines demolished. Muslim institutions of learning were shuttered, and hundreds of mosques were razed. Businesses and landed estates were nationalised, stripping Muslim elites of the material bases of their wealth and influence. Islamic charitable endowments were also disbanded, bankrupting whatever Muslim social institutions remained. In several waves of repression, prominent Muslims in all fields of life were executed, and their families were interned in concentration camps.

It is worth noting that Albania’s communist regime persecuted all religions viciously and unsparingly. Enver Hoxha himself harboured a particular hatred for Catholicism. Albania’s Catholic hierarchy was publicly framed as domestic terrorists and fascist insurgents, and many were tortured and executed along with their Muslim counterparts.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were fatal to Albania’s Muslim elite. The high culture they had built and the social, cultural, economic, and human capital they had accumulated over five hundred years were annihilated in just fifty. The traditions built up over centuries, of statecraft and governance, of war-making and diplomacy, of courtly ritual and manners in the home, of how to understand oneself and how to understand others, and how to portray those understandings in art and culture, were destroyed. The knowledge of how to rule and the sophisticated modes of embellishing and transforming their culture were disrupted as elites were exiled and killed. The socialisation of this knowledge was interrupted as institutions where elites gathered were dissolved. As wealth and property were confiscated, the material basis for sustaining what institutions and political, social, and cultural practices remained disappeared. The bottom had fallen out, and the world of Albania’s Muslim elite came to an end, and with it, the high culture they had built to express that world as beautiful and desirable.

## The End of European Islam

The end of an elite does not mean the end of fancy dress balls and elaborate court rituals. It means the end of that elite’s worldview as dominant and desirable, and of its ability to spread horizontally to other elites and vertically to the rest of the population. The rise of a new elite, then, means the rise of a new worldview as dominant and desirable. In the case of Albania, the destruction of its Muslim elite meant more than the end of the construction of sumptuous palaces and the painting of charming frescoes. It meant that whatever came after would, without concerted efforts to rebuild a self-aware elite, be cut off from its indigenous roots and history, and stripped of its prestige and self-confidence.

Consequently, the road to re-establishing a flourishing Islam in Albania has not been easy. As the shackles of communism were thrown off, there was no elite-in-waiting with continuity to Albania’s illustrious Islamic past ready to burst onto the scene and pick up where their fathers and grandfathers had left off. Other than a few remaining pre-Hoxha leaders, like Hafiz Sabri Koçi, Muslims had to re-establish Islamic practice, propagate knowledge of the religion, and establish institutions without the considerable material and discursive support of an elite class. Influential interlocutors of Islam are more likely to be populist preachers rather than *eminences grises* in the halls of the prime minister’s palace. In this vacuum, both the Turkish *Diyanet* and the Turkish Gülen Movement have competed to build Muslim educational infrastructure, compounding the view that Islam is an import from the East.

The unravelling of Albania’s Muslim elite was not an isolated incident. Instead, the fate of Albania’s Muslim elites was archetypal of the fate of Europe’s other Muslim elites. Almost all European Muslims fell under communist rule during the 20th century. The result was consistent - violent purges of Muslim elites accompanied by the intentional destruction of Islamic high culture, the dissolution of their sensemaking institutions and the seizure of their physical wealth and capital, fundamentally disrupting the ability of Islam to propagate itself at a basic doctrinal level, let alone develop a sophisticated culture and confident sense of self within its adherents. Within the span of a few decades, the world of European Islam had come to an abrupt end, as the Balkans, Crimea, the Volga and the Caucasus all fell under authoritarian communist control.

The end of communism throughout Europe has allowed for greater religious freedom and a religious “revival” similar to that in Albania. Compared to 40 years ago, a great many more people proudly identify with their faith, whether Muslim, Christian, or otherwise, and strive to practice it openly. However, such positive developments do not necessarily create the conditions in the *longue durée* whereby people wish to identify with Islam and the fruits of its civilisation. Nor do such revivals necessarily spontaneously generate stable and worthwhile institutions by which an attractive and developed Islamic worldview and civilisation can pass itself on to the next generation and evolve to meet the challenges of the time. Without a conscious Muslim elite producing a worthy high culture, Islam will remain an unfashionable choice to the wealthy and powerful.

The faith of Europe’s Muslims was tempered in the crucible of the nationalist wars and communist oppression of the 19th and 20th centuries. The tenacity with which the faithful clung to the truth during the darkest periods of modern history was not contingent on maintaining prestige in the eyes of the wealthy and the powerful. However, constructing a civilisation that can protect and nurture the best within those faithful for the benefit of humanity is very much contingent on maintaining such prestige.

In Albania, as in many other European societies, the prestige of Islamic civilisation is largely forgotten because the elites who cultivated it through arts and letters, industrial endeavours, and embodied practices of statecraft and governance were annihilated. The fall of Islamic civilisation in Europe was not some vague inevitability, but is best understood as the concrete historical process of the destruction of the old Muslim elite and its attendant high culture and replacing it with a new elite and high culture.

Today, the call to prayer echoes through Tirana’s streets from the Namazgah Mosque. Albanians and other indigenous Muslims across Europe are recovering the recent history of their forefathers and the historical processes of institutional change and elite turnover which have seen their fortunes rise and fall. Perhaps, in this process of rediscovery, they may be inspired to cultivate a new high culture in the heart of Europe. 100 years from now, the Namazgah Mosque may well be at the heart of it.

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Words: Haris Khaleel is an attorney, amateur art collector and dilettante based in Canada. He is interested in early modern history and the cultural origins of institutional transformation.
### The Institution That Engineered a Culture
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/institution-engineering-culture/
Last updated: 2026-08-02T12:20:39.000Z
## The Utopian Blueprint

Cultures of innovation are not accidents of history. They are consciously curated forces that embody risk-taking and obsession, the relentless application of trial and error toward perfection, and the persistent question: could it be better? A true culture of innovation also reflects *Ihsan*, acting with excellence and sincere intention. Without an *Ihsan*\-guided culture of innovation and the immense willpower and vision to improve civilisation, we default to a natural state of entropy.

Where do cultures of innovation come from? This question has become more pertinent as there is a prevailing feeling that culture has become stuck. Music, film, and art in general go through reboot after reboot. Scientific knowledge, too, suffers from this problem of diminishing returns. Between the turn of the 20th century and 1969, the world leapt from men on horses to men on the moon. Yet, in the past 50 years, no similar leap has been made. The institutions of culture and knowledge we have inherited seem to be in permanent decline.

Somewhere along the way, we lost our imagination. The problems of our age require bold institutional reimagining by reverse-engineering the culture of innovation that created the modern world as we know it. No example better illustrates this than the Royal Society of Arts, an institution born from utopian fiction that would transform Britain and, by extension, the world.

In the 17th century, the great English polymath, philosopher and statesman, Sir Francis Bacon, dared to imagine a future in which knowledge would be systematically collected and applied to the improvement of all aspects of society. Bacon’s scientific view of knowledge was best represented by his statement, s*cientia potentia est –* knowledge is power. As a devout Christian, Bacon saw divine purpose in the understanding of nature through science as a means of drawing closer to God and creating a more perfect society. It is in the pursuit of *Ihsan* that Bacon planted his utopian ideals in his seminal (and unfinished) work of proto-science fiction, *The New Atlantis*, which would inspire a new culture of innovation and change the world.

In *The New Atlantis*, a group of sailors discovers a utopian island kingdom in the mid-Atlantic called Bensalem (Hebrew for ‘son of peace’). The sailors find it inhabited by a religious nation with a sophisticated culture and level of technical knowledge unlike anything known in Europe or the Americas. At the heart of this kingdom was an educational institute called Solomon’s House, dedicated to “*the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible*." To that end, the House had many wings, researching disease and health, light and observation, marine phenomena and water, soil and plants, and various creatures. It was out of this scientific pursuit of knowledge that the people of Bensalem were able to apply their learning to the creation of a healthier and more moral society.

Although a fictional institute, Solomon’s House would inspire the creation of the modern research university and countless academies, societies, and foundations dedicated to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. At the heart of these societies and institutions lay the ‘new science ’—the empirical method laid out by Bacon in *The New Atlantis*, which became an obsession of natural philosophers, scientists, and tinkerers over the 17th century. Out of that obsession sprang the Royal Society, one of the first and still-surviving institutions dedicated to the pursuit of natural knowledge.

While philosophers deliberated on abstractions, it would take a man of action to bring Bacon’s vision to life. This is how a 17th-century utopian science fiction book reimagined the role of knowledge in society and the institutional forms through which that knowledge was systematically collected and applied through persistent innovation, thereby creating the cultural conditions that would make the Industrial Revolution possible.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/148a2c5c-9dcf-42eb-b121-d53f81c655ee_2565x1613-jpeg.jpg)

## Creating Solomon’s House

Bacon’s new science was emulated by 17th-century philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals across England, who now sought to verify facts through structured scientific experimentation rather than trial and error. Numerous societies were formed to deploy Bacon’s methodology at scale, such as the famous Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, which counted Isaac Newton among its ranks.

Yet, despite this prestigious membership and scientific accomplishments, the early societies fell short of Bacon’s vision. They concerned themselves solely with the advancement of knowledge, not the advancement of society. Their members were incentivised to cultivate intellectual prowess rather than applied and practical craftsmanship, and Bacon’s methodology became an end in itself rather than a means of improving society.This philosopher’s conceit, the belief that knowledge alone, without application, is progress, meant that these institutions would fail to realise the impact promised by Bacon’s ideas. It would take the vision of William Shipley to realise what Bacon had imagined a century earlier.

Born in 1715, Shipley was an artist by training. He seemed an unlikely candidate to build a pioneering institution that would shape British culture and knowledge for centuries to come, being a reserved man who rarely partook in the convivial elements of higher society. But Shipley was dismayed by the misapplication of Bacon’s ideas, seeing that existing institutions were collecting knowledge yet failing to apply it to improve society. So, Shipley set about to do it. Where others saw abstract utopia, he saw practical possibilities.

To seek inspiration, Shipley studied Greek and Roman societies to learn how to create a culture of innovation from the ground up rather than relying solely on state or elite patronage. He learned that ancient societies had developed systems in which the state, backed by revenue from taxation, could allocate funds and incentivise cultural production through grants, monetary prizes, and other forms of patronage. In this model, Shipley identified the kernel of truth: a culture of innovation required patronage that funds production through private initiative.

In 1753, aged just 38, he founded the ‘Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’. Shipley’s innovation was not in the Society’s mission but in its institutional design. Taking inspiration from the Greeks and Romans, he designed a subscription model that allowed members of the public to fund the institution’s activities, much like a state funds its public spending through taxation. In the 21st century, we are inundated with subscription services that cater to our worst instincts for pure consumption. In the 18th century, this was a pioneering financial model that could consolidate and leverage popular financial support by turning small, irregular donations into a persistent stream of revenue, which could then be invested in the creation of culture.

Growth was initially slow, but over the next five years, Shipley held exhibitions, shows, and competitions to attract both talent and patrons. He dedicated substantial time to networking with the English aristocracy, seeking trustworthy donors and influencing rising elites to adopt and potentially fund the cultural practices and artefacts incubated by his institution. Where early societies had been exclusive clubs for the intellectual elite, Shipley’s Society engaged the public directly. Women, barred from participating in most societies at the time, became frequent attendees and winners of the Society’s competitions.

By 1758, Shipley’s persistence had paid off. Membership of the Society had increased sufficiently such that a hundred ‘premiums’ (prize money deducted from membership’s subscription fees) could be issued as rewards in a diverse set of cultural competitions focused largely on drawing and painting. While initially focused on drawing and painting, the Society did not restrict itself to cultural activities. It adapted, rapidly expanding its mandate into the commercial realm.

The Society’s expanded breadth was strategically important in 18th-century Britain. War and trade were inseparable, and France was Britain’s arch-nemesis in both arenas in the 18th century. France was the cultural hegemon of Europe, and the British aristocracy imported French cultural affectations and products, lacking any equivalent indigenous cultural and material production. The Society set out to change this. Its earliest art competitions required that inspiration be taken from English history alone, consciously building a national aristocratic identity.

Having begun with cultural and economic production, the Society turned to providing auxiliary services to the English state during the Seven Years’ War against France, issuing subsidies for commodities like grain and meat, and funding innovations in artillery design, navigation, and shipbuilding. Here was Bacon’s vision in action, knowledge applied to real-world problems, from art to agriculture and war.

The sheer breadth of the Society was powered by its unbounded culture of innovation. With a mandate to fund and improve any aspect of society, the Society realised Bacon’s vision in a way his contemporaries had failed to do. In these endeavours, the Society endured failure more often than success. What was crucial was that these failures were seen as opportunities to understand the problems they were trying to solve, and to revisit their approach and try again from a different perspective or strategy.

In no small part, the Society was fortunate that its acclaim rose with England’s as Britain defeated France in the Seven Years’ War and began its historical ascent. The Industrial Revolution would soon power Britain’s global conquests, and the Society would play a crucial role in shaping how that revolution unfolded.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/14054690-8cdf-45a8-baa0-9e182fef1b37_3751x2766-jpeg.jpg)

## What Goes Up Must Come Down

The 19th century was the age of industrial production: mass production and consumption of goods, globalising cultural trends, and Britain at the heart of a burgeoning global empire connected by an international postal system and a system of money exchange. As an incubator of culture and knowledge, the Society acted as a primary architect in the first wave of globalisation, guiding Britain’s transformation from a nation of craftsmen into an industrial powerhouse.

The Society’s crowning achievement came in 1851, when it hosted The Great Exhibition of 1851, also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition for the glass palace that housed it. This Exhibition was strategically designed to showcase the pinnacle of British scientific ingenuity, industrial power, and cultural influence worldwide. It was also the first great international industrial exhibition, which would inspire later World Fairs, and was sponsored by Schweppes, the world’s first soda company. In 1862, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky described the Exhibition as a representation of a utopian society, echoing, knowingly or unknowingly, the Society’s Baconian roots. The Exhibition was the high point not just of the Society’s influence but of Britain’s industrial, scientific and cultural power. It was under Cole that Prince Albert became president of the Society, further elevating its prestige. The Society’s success was extraordinary, and in 1908, it finally received the right to call itself the *Royal* Society of Arts, cementing its central place in British culture.

Britain’s transformation reached its zenith under the leadership of Henry Cole, who became the Society's secretary in 1858\. Before leading the Society, Cole was a civil servant earning additional income as a journalist, often sought for his expertise in the aesthetics of mass-produced goods. His introduction to The Society came through his expertise, as he was approached to serve as an advisor for The Society’s competition on applying art to manufactured goods to improve the public’s taste.

Cole was a charismatic innovator. He understood that tastes and fashions could be socially engineered and set about shaping British and international cultures. Although many of his efforts were a one-man *tour de force*, Cole took personal charge of recruiting members such as Herbert Minton, founder of the Mintons pottery company and Ramsay Hay, an interior decorator who repainted The Society’s offices. Cole was also an inventor in his own right, introducing new designs for envelopes and stamps that would come to define the postage system, and pioneering the first formal mass examinations to test competence, which would later spread to schools, universities, and even the civil service. Under Cole, the Society also lobbied successfully in favour of patents and limited liability, essential for mass entrepreneurship and the burgeoning rise of capitalism.

As the Society accumulated these victories, the inevitable pull of entropy first began to show its signs. The Society that had engineered a new mass culture and industry eventually became a victim of its own success. The primary victim was craftsmanship, the very thing the Society had initially promoted. As Shipley, Cole, and their contemporaries had known, good design traditionally comes from below, from craftsmen engaged in hands-on mastery. While the Society’s members frequently quibbled over the relationship between craftsmanship and new technology, mass production had fundamentally altered it.

As the Society became part of the fabric of Britain’s high culture, it began to show signs of decline. The decline became especially pronounced after World War II, when the Society began awarding fellowships and medals overzealously, financing them through massive bequests. For Shipley, membership had been dependent on the intention to create, not to coast off past legacies. But in the 20th century, prestige and bequeathments allowed the Society to live beyond its means, leading to a decline in the productivity, innovative capacity and skill of its ever-growing membership.

Yet, institutions can continue to function well beyond their golden age; decline is rarely a rapid descent into destruction. The Society’s survival became dependent on directly recognising and addressing its administrative burdens. Christopher Lucas, its secretary in the mid-seventies, accepted that the Society’s survival depended on radical reform. In a bold move, Lucas gambled by selling the examination board, which had become a drain on resources. The board now exists as OCR, one of the national examination boards in Britain. Lucas relied on ad hoc measures to offset the lost revenue while intensifying his focus on the Society’s other activities.

The strategy has borne some fruit. Although at a more modest scale, the Society continues to benefit British society by incentivising and invigorating the public through small grants for specific social projects and creating local community banks in southwest England. However, it remains a far cry from the heyday of the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution. Like many institutions before it, the Society succumbed to entropy.

## Back to Utopia?

The lesson of the Society is that culture is not made, improved or preserved by accident. It takes immense individual will and vision to forcibly advance civilisation. The culture of innovation incubated in the Society was so generative that what we now associate with much of British culture was consciously curated, sponsored, and elevated to national and global prestige by the Society. From international postage stamps to London’s blue plaques, the Society has its fingerprints all over the aesthetics of Britain, one of the most influential nations in history. That an institution could have such an impact on culture runs against the popular assumption that culture is an organic process that “filters upwards”.

The Society would not have been possible without Bacon, whose desire to improve society through the application of scientific knowledge was his act of service to God and fellow man. In the New Atlantis, he produced a work of institutional fiction that has inspired centuries of progress. Shipley, driven to apply knowledge to the problems of his age, actualised Bacon’s vision. Cole transformed that vision into an engine of national identity and industrial might, reshaping British culture and, with it, the world.

Where have the cultures of innovation gone? Perhaps, just as in the 17th century, answering this question requires not only new scientific knowledge and technology but also another work of visionary fiction that creates the utopian ideals, institutional innovations, and conviction to bring them into reality.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/075bea8a-ff41-4880-af2d-85f74a152cb8_4540x2258.png)

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Author: Burak Ömer is a financial markets professional based in Belgium. He previously studied applied mathematics & philosophy and is currently pursuing classical Islamic studies.
### The Conspiracy to Save the Ottoman Caliphate in India
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/caliphate-conspiracy-india/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:57:17.000Z
“India is the greatest Muslim country in the world,” proclaimed the philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal in 1930\. “India is perhaps the only country in the world,” he argued, “where Islam as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal.” Indian Muslims, the world’s largest Muslim population, had no shared ethnicity or language. It was Islam alone which made them a community. “We have a duty towards Asia, especially Muslim Asia,” Iqbal maintained, since “70 millions of Muslims in a single country constitute a far more valuable asset to Islam than all the countries of Muslim Asia put together.”

We have lost a crucial part of Islam’s recent history. Almost entirely forgotten today, India - by which I mean the subcontinent, not the modern nation-state - was in many ways the epicentre of the Islamic world in the early twentieth century.

This dawned on me last year in the wilderness of Khuldabad, formerly in the princely state of Hyderabad but now in India’s western state of Maharashtra, as I looked upon a magnificent but derelict Turkish mausoleum. Completely abandoned and standing in the middle of nowhere, the great structure looks like an absurd anachronism.

It was built, however, for the last Ottoman Caliph, Abdulmejid II, although he wasn’t ultimately buried in India. I spent a year investigating and piecing together the forgotten story behind this mausoleum’s construction: the union of two of Islam’s greatest houses in the 1930s, a grand scheme to change the course of global history that ultimately failed.

## The Post-imperial Caliphate

As a measure of India’s importance in the early twentieth century, the subcontinent was at the centre of the British Empire’s engagement with Islam. During the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, through the Great War and the occupation of Anatolia, Indian Muslims influenced and often restrained British policy.

They then helped to save the Caliphate after the Ottoman Empire’s demise. When the fledgling Turkish state did away with the Ottoman Sultanate in November 1922, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk told the Grand National Assembly that it was unable to abolish the Caliphate: the Assembly “cannot decide by itself on behalf of the entire Islamic world, my good sirs”, since the “holy office of Caliph is a sacred position that involves the entire Islamic world.” Most concern for the office, of course, was directed from India.

Crown Prince Abdulmejid - one of the most cultured of his dynasty, as a talented painter, musician and poet - claimed the Caliphal title in Istanbul. This was a radically reconstituted Caliphate: with no Empire or Sultanate, the Caliph was elected by the Assembly, although the Caliphate derived its true legitimacy, in Abdulmejid’s eyes, from the support of the world’s Muslims. This unprecedented settlement was short-lived. Once Türkiye was declared a Republic in 1923, Kemal and his government decided that the Ottoman Caliphate was a fundamental obstacle to the nation’s coherence and march toward modernity. It had to go.

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Caliph Abdulmejid II’s accession ceremony (Wikimedia Commons)

On March 3, 1924, the Grand National Assembly abolished the 1,300-year-old institution that claimed successorship to the Prophet of Islam. Indian intellectual Sayyid Ameer Ali proclaimed it a disaster for civilisation that would “cause the disintegration of Islam as a moral force”. In London, *The Times* told its readers that in that age of dynastic downfall and the rise of radically new political orders, “no single change is more striking to the imagination than is this: and few, perhaps, may prove so important in their ultimate results”.

In Türkiye, all things Ottoman were quickly designated relics; by 8 March it had already been decided that the Topkapi Palace would become a museum. The Republic declared war on everyone who sympathised with the Ottomans. Suspected dissidents accused of opposing the Caliphate’s abolition were hauled before the dreaded (and dubiously-named) “Tribunals of Independence” to be tried for treason. The government put the *Ulema* under intense surveillance, and over the next few years, the *madrasa* apparatus was comprehensively dismantled, and the Sufi orders criminalised. As for the imperial family, they had been bundled onto the Orient Express and expelled from the country as soon as the Caliphate was abolished. Other elites either went into exile, kept a low profile or remarkably converted - overnight - into avowed Kemalists.

Dissent certainly existed and occasionally turned into open revolt. In February 1925, a major rebellion erupted in Kurdish districts in the southeast. Thousands of Kurds, led by the dervish and tribal leader Sheikh Said, took up arms against the government. They demanded the restoration of the Caliphate and an end to what they saw as anti-Islamic reforms and zealous Turkish nationalism. The rebellion was swiftly put down by Ankara’s military might - including aerial bombardment. The Sheikh himself was executed, along with thousands of his comrades and supporters.

## Union of the two Houses

I was intrigued about what Abdulmejid did once he was exiled to Europe. Had he really taken the abolition lying down? Quite the opposite, it emerged: denying that the Assembly had the authority to end the Caliphate, just days after the abolition Abdulmejid appealed to the Islamic world from his Swiss hotel to support and restore the institution in a new form, reasoning that that “it is now for the Mussulman world alone, which has the exclusive right, to pass with full authority and in complete liberty upon this vital question.”

But the Ottomans had barely any money. Help came from India - from the fabulously wealthy Asaf Jahi dynasty who governed Hyderabad, a rapidly modernising princely state the size of Italy, under indirect British oversight. Its attar-scented palaces proclaimed all the grandeur of Indo-Islamic culture; the extravagance of its courtly life was legendary. The seventh Nizam, Osman Ali Khan, was proclaimed in the 1930s to be the richest man in the world: Henry Ford and his son had a combined fortune of less than half the value of his jewels alone. The billionaire ruler, himself a talented poet, procured magnificent Mughal miniatures and commissioned British Muslim thinker Marmaduke Pickthall to translate the Qur’an into English. Hyderabad’s capital city was a hub for Indian Muslim statesmen and thinkers from across the Islamic world. The Nizam also injected new life into the old high culture: classical singers and Qawwali masters frequented the royal court, performing mystical poetry to the beat of the drum and the gurgle of the water pipe.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/56bd43d1-efc7-4a05-a44a-4cae7876b18d_1600x1200-jpeg.jpg)

Durbar Hall, Chowmahalla Palace (Imran Mulla)

Hyderabad had a presence beyond Indian shores, too. The Qu’aiti Sultanate, a large region in the southern Arabian Peninsula, was governed from Hyderabad as a vassal state. The Nizam’s polity was fast becoming not just the cultural successor state to the Mughal Empire but a centre of the Islamic world. In this context, the Nizam became benefactor to the deposed Caliph, who settled down with his family in a seafront villa on the French Riviera.

In 1931, Caliph Abdulmejid launched a scheme with Maulana Shaukat Ali, a legend of the Indian independence movement, focused on the World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem. The conference, which Ali had initiated with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and was scheduled for December that year, aimed to draw Muslim notables and leaders from across the Islamic world. Abdulmejid planned to travel to Jerusalem and address the conference to shore up support for the Ottoman Caliphate. The scheme was disrupted once Turkish spies caught wind of it and lobbied the British to announce they would deny the Caliph entry to Palestine. The congress failed, although it was a watershed moment in establishing the Palestinian struggle as a global Islamic cause.

The Caliph, however, had another plan in the works. In October of that year, Shaukat Ali and Marmaduke Pickthall successfully brokered a marriage between Abdulmejid’s daughter Princess Durrushehvar and Prince Azam Jah, the Nizam’s eldest son and heir apparent. The wedding took place in Nice in November. Around the world, interested parties were aware of the political implications, from the Turkish government in Istanbul to the Urdu press in Bombay, and from English visitors in Hyderabad to American journalists in Nice. Before the wedding, TIME magazine reported that “Should these young people wed and have a male child, temporal and spiritual strains would richly blend in him. He could be proclaimed 'the True Caliph'.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/956a865b-1a61-4796-b00b-6fa3f8b8d4c3_1600x1031-jpeg.jpg)

The Seventh Nizam (front) with members of the ruling family of the Qu’aiti Sultanate in southern Arabia, governed as a vassal state from Hyderabad (Wikimedia Commons)

Abdulmejid himself announced that the wedding would “unite two Muslim dynasties by the intimate ties of family love; an event which cannot fail to have a very happy repercussion on the whole Muslim world.” Days after the marriage, the headlines in Bombay’s Urdu papers announced that the union foreshadowed the restoration of the Caliphate, based on briefings from Ali. The resulting furore led the British Raj to force the Nizam to cancel a plan to have the Caliph visit Hyderabad.

## The Ottoman Succession

This alliance between the Ottoman and Asaf Jahi dynasties represented the union of Islam’s Caliphal dynasty with its wealthiest - of the west and east of the Islamic world, of both Ottoman and Mughal legacies. It also helped establish Hyderabad’s status as a “sort of capital city for all Muslims”, as Pickthall described the Nizam’s city. In 1933, Princess Durrushehvar gave birth to Prince Mukarram Jah, the grandson of both the Caliph and the Nizam. While his grandson was still a child, the Nizam privately informed his inner circle that Prince Azam Jah, his son and Hyderabad’s heir apparent, would no longer become the next ruler. Instead, he would be cut out of the line of succession in favour of his own son, Mukarram Jah.

The last Ottoman Caliph died in 1944 in wartime Paris, in almost total obscurity. Yet still he had hope for the future. I studied confidential messages sent between British officials and politicians - including the Viceroy of India - in the aftermath of his passing, as well as the writings of Hyderabad’s Prime Minister. They establish that Abdulmejid, writing his will in Paris, had intended for the Caliphal line to pass through the Asaf Jahi dynasty in Hyderabad. As long as this was kept a secret, the British resolved, there was no need for them to intervene; they would soon leave India and the succession was unlikely to concern them. What the Nizam himself wanted is unknown, but English travel writer Rosita Forbes, who was toured around Hyderabad’s capital by then-Prime Minister Sir Akbar Hydari in 1939, might have had it right when she wrote that the Asaf Jahi dynasty was “irrevocably allied with the fountain-head of orthodox Islam and committed to the principle of the Caliphate”.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/5dddceb3-f9b1-4058-a4b6-e361f3e85c95_900x1006-jpeg.jpg)

The would-be mausoleum of Caliph Abdulmejid II in Khuldabad, Maharashtra (James Wrathall)

If India had become a federation after British rule ended, it is plausible that Hyderabad could have been a powerful and autonomous state. In those conditions, Abdulmejid’s grandson Prince Mukarram Jah would have been better placed than anyone to claim the Caliphal title once he became Nizam. The Indian subcontinent could have become home to the seat of the global Caliphate, a centre of prestige and power in the Islamic world.

How would this have worked, since Muslims were a demographic minority in the subcontinent? Mahatma Gandhi and other Hindu leaders, supporting the Khilafat Movement back in 1919, had recognised that Islamic politics allowed India to greatly enhance its geopolitical standing. It was using the same logic that the Republic of India would later aim to join the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, although Pakistan thwarted its attempts to do so. This indicates that a federal India, which was quite possible as late as 1946, could have comfortably used Hyderabad’s Asaf Jahi dynasty to boost its influence and soft power in the Islamic world.

Equally, however, it is possible that a federation would have led to civil war in the subcontinent, or that most Muslims in the world would have rejected or simply ignored an Ottoman Caliph in Hyderabad. We will never know. Ultimately, Partition secured the end of Asaf Jahi rule in Hyderabad and carved up the Indo-Islamic world. The resulting independent state of Pakistan was vastly smaller and weaker than its neighbour, and destined to split in two again in 1971; Muslims in the new India, meanwhile, were left an unprotected and smaller minority. The Congress government could never allow a large and wealthy princely state to persist within India’s borders. As Partition unfolded in 1947, the Nizam’s attempt to secure his state’s independence was doomed.

## The Fall of Hyderabad

The Indian army ultimately invaded Hyderabad on 13 September 1948\. The aftermath was apocalyptic. 40,000 people (mainly Muslims) were massacred, according to a report commissioned and then buried by the Indian government. Many believed the number was much higher. Scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who visited Hyderabad in 1949, thought that anywhere between one-tenth and one-fifth of the male Muslim population might have been killed. He noted that some “estimates by responsible observers” held that the true death toll was close to 200,000.

Muslims were purged from Hyderabad’s government and administration. The Indian army rounded up and detained 17,000 civilians - again, mostly Muslims. The state’s cosmopolitanism was also quickly destroyed: up to 25,000 Arabs were rounded up, along with thousands of Pathan and Afghan migrants. They were held in detention camps, and over 20,000 were eventually deported. The Indian invasion, concluded the late historian AG Noorani in his masterpiece *The Destruction of Hyderabad*, “was the annihilation of a certain way of life, the uprooting of a people, and the sweeping away of a culture, swiftly and almost completely.” It was also the final blow for the Ottomans. Plans to fly the Caliph’s body over and bury him in the Nizam’s dominions were abandoned. His wish for the future of his lineage was well and truly dashed. And his mausoleum was left desolate in the wilderness, where it still stands to this day.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/0fc8af04-ff2e-4c06-906a-843e494bacfd_1190x900.png)

Indian Army tanks rolling into Hyderabad during the invasion in September 1948 (Wikimedia Commons)

For decades, the story of the scheme for an Indian Caliphate has been consigned to near oblivion. But it is a history of great importance. It should reframe our understanding of the early twentieth century in a way that illuminates the Indian subcontinent’s forgotten former prominence within the Islamic world. Moreover, it is the story of the downfall of two old Muslim elites amid the creation of new nation-states. The twentieth century saw the near-total destruction of the Islamic world’s old cosmopolitan elite network, as ruling classes in several countries were dismembered and replaced. The consequences for the populations they had governed were monumental.

The fall of the Ottomans paved the way for a new Middle East - of new nation-states and novel conflicts to go with them. In that context, the plan to tie the House of Osman’s future to Hyderabad was a last-ditch attempt to salvage the Ottoman legacy, preserve some continuity between the old and new eras and establish deeper connections between far-flung regions of the Islamic world. The key players in the story - the last Caliph, the seventh Nizam, intellectuals Maulana Shaukat Ali and Marmaduke Pickthall - weren’t simply tired restorationists or quirky traditionalists. They were important to study, part of a series of attempts to fashion a new order for Muslims in the twentieth century.

Writing in exile in 1924, Caliph Abdulmejid described himself, quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as suffering the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. But unlike the despairing Danish prince, he insisted, he was still “hearty, with a clear conscience, a strong faith”.

---

*Words: Imran Mulla is a journalist at Middle East Eye in London, before which he studied history at the University of Cambridge. His book ‘The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince’ is set to be published this December by Hurst & Co. You can follow him on X at* [*@Imran\_posts*](https://x.com/Imran%5Fposts?ref=kasurian.com)*.*
### How the Mongols Revived Islamic Civilisation
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/mongol-invasions-revival/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T19:03:30.000Z
## Reconsidering the Mongols

By the mid-13th century, the last Crusader strongholds had been swept out of the Levant. The Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 had marked the high tide of European ambition in the Middle East, but the Crusaders held the holy city for less than a century before Muslims reclaimed it.

The Crusades were the most serious challenge Islamic civilisation had yet faced and had triggered an extraordinary period of dynamism that forced Muslims to contend with, for the first time, the question of civilisational renewal. It would not be the last time. Even as the sun set on the western threat, a new storm that would transform the very foundations of Islamic civilisation was gathering in the east.

The Mongols were coming.

Referred to as *Tatars* by Muslim and Christian contemporaries, these new conquerors were likened to the eschatological *Yajuj wa Majuj*, a not-quite-human race of devourers that would drink the sea and blot out the sun. Today, in popular memory, the Mongol invasions are synonymous with biblical-scale bloodshed, destruction, and plunder. Stories of ‘*rivers of blood and ink flowing through the River Tigris’* embody these memories, describing the brutal destruction of a culture, way of life, and civilisation.

In classical Orientalist history, the Mongol invasions are presented as the catalyst for Islam’s “long decline,” an enormously influential thesis that has been internalised in the popular Muslim consciousness. According to this theory, the Abbasid era’s ‘Golden Age’ saw the flourishing of culture and knowledge, including science, philosophy, and the arts. The Mongols, with their devastating sack of the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, the heart of the Golden Age, delivered the material deathblow to this once-vibrant civilisation, creating the conditions for centuries of material and intellectual decline.

This theory is almost entirely wrong. When Hulagu besieged Baghdad, he did not encounter the grand city of *One Thousand and One Nights*, but a shadow of its former glory. There was little to loot and hardly enough books to turn the Tigris black with ink. Claims of large-scale library destruction appear only in later sources, emerging in the early 15th century and gaining popularity as historians repeated them. The Mongols were not the executioners of the fabled Islamic Golden Age, nor were their invasions the reason for Islam’s long decline in the centuries thereafter. Instead, the aftermath of the Mongol invasions would provoke a systematic re-adjustment of Islamic civilisation as its gravitational centres migrated beyond the ‘classical heartlands’ of Iraq and Syria, and within a few centuries would reach its greatest extent yet.

## The Scourge of God

The Mongols were the last steppe people to emerge from the great Eurasian ‘conveyor belt’ of invasion, a millennia-old phenomenon that had periodically unleashed nomadic conquerors to assail the sedentary civilisations of China, the Middle East, and Europe. Like the Xiongnu, Huns, and Göktürks before them, the Mongols employed similar expansion strategies and military tactics to force settled societies into submission. But the Mongols were different. Their extraordinary speed, vast territorial reach, and sheer military prowess made them the most formidable threat to emerge out of the steppe.

In 1218, the Fifth Crusade laid siege to the Egyptian port of Damietta. Both the Crusade and siege would end in yet another dismal failure just a few years later. In the same year, Chinggis Khan stood at the eastern frontiers of the Muslim world and delivered an ultimatum to the Shah of the Khwarazmian Empire, Muhammad II: submit to vassalage or face annihilation. Chinggis’ ultimatum was said to be delivered in response to the actions of Inalchuq, the Khwarazmian governor of the city of Otrar, who had executed an entire Mongolian trade caravan which included a Mongol envoy. Chinggis reportedly demanded that Mahmud hold Inalchuq to account before his ultimatum. In any case, it provided the perfect pretext: Mahmud rejected Chinggis’ ultimatum, and in response unleashed a brutal campaign that within a few years swept across the cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, Nishapur, and Merv. Muhammad survived the invasion by fleeing to the Caspian Sea. According to most accounts, he died in exile. Inalchuq was captured by the Mongols, who executed him by pouring molten silver into his eyes and ears.

A few years after Chinggis died in 1229, the Mongols, now led by Chinggis’s son Ogedei, resumed their expansion westward. By the 1240s, they had already conquered much of Persia and its neighbouring regions. They then defeated the Seljuks in Anatolia, reducing them to a client state, and launched a series of raids into Syria and parts of modern-day Iraq. The most devastating blow came to the Muslims in 1258: Chinggis’ grandson Hulagu sacked Baghdad, decimated its population, and executed the recalcitrant Caliph Al-Musta’sim by rolling him up in a carpet and having him trampled by horses, following Mongol tradition. This event effectively brought the Abbasids’ 500-year rule to an end.

The scale of devastation sent shockwaves throughout the Muslim world, fueling accounts of unimaginable brutality. Medieval chronicles detailed the millions of casualties and recounted the Mongols’ gruesome and creative methods of execution. To modern readers, the accounts may seem exaggerated; to Christian and Muslim contemporaries, however, the Mongols may as well have risen from the darkest crevices of Tartarus. No story was too outlandish. As they swept throughout the land, the Mongols were seen as a physical manifestation of God's wrath. The notion survives to this day in the oft-cited (though apocryphal) saying of Chinggis himself:

> “*I am the Scourge of God...If you had not committed great sins, He would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”*

The sense of doom was inescapable. Messianic movements gained traction, with sightings of comets, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions quickly being interpreted as ill omens. Meanwhile, the Mongols launched full-scale incursions into the Levant, aiming to push into Egypt and from there, into the very heartland of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula. For a time, it seemed that nothing could stop the Mongols from bringing the whole world to the brink of destruction and fulfilling their role in the apocalyptic prophecy. And yet, the Mongol invasions faltered just as Islamic civilisation seemed on the brink of destruction.

After Baghdad, Hulagu sacked Damascus and began preparations to invade Egypt. He sent envoys to Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk state in Egypt and the last remaining sovereign Muslim polity outside of North Africa, demanding their surrender to the Mongols. The Mamluk Sultan Sayf Al-Din Qutuz responded by executing the envoys and displaying their heads on the gates of Cairo. Qutuz mobilised the Mamluk armies, preparing for a showdown with Hulagu. It was at this moment that history turned. In 1259, the death of then-Mongol ruler Möngke Khan forced Hulagu to leave the Middle East with much of his army and return to Mongolia to attend the *Kurultai* and appoint a successor. Hulagu appointed one of his subordinates, Kitbuqa, in his stead with a much-reduced fighting force.

A year later in 1260, at the battle of *‘Ain Jalut*, the Mamluks would inflict the first defeat the Mongols had ever faced, killing Kitbuqa and decimating his army. Hulagu’s departure was likely the biggest reason for this defeat. It also helped the Mamluks that, as distant cousins of the Mongols, they were familiar with steppe cavalry-based warfare and were not caught off-guard by Mongol military tactics.

Hulagu returned to the Middle East in 1262 to avenge the Mongol defeat at *‘Ain Jalut*, but instead became preoccupied with dealing with a new threat: his cousin, Berke Khan, ruler of the Golden Horde, had converted to Islam. Berke, outraged at Hulagu’s sacking of Baghdad and the killing of the Caliph, allied himself with the Mamluks and declared war on Hulagu. Hulagu died in 1265 while on campaign against the Golden Horde.

After 1260, sporadic Mongol attempts to invade Mamluk Egypt continued, but they never succeeded. The tides were already turning. The Mamluk victory at *‘Ain Jalut* and Berke’s conversion to Islam heralded a wider shift that would transform the Mongol empire.

## Pax Mongolica

> *“Eighty years elapsed from the time Hülegü Khan’s forces arrived in Baghdad, till the death of Sultan Abu Sa’id. During this period, the kingdom of Iran had a rest from the oppression of men of violence, particularly in the days of the Sultanates of Ghazan Khan, Öljaitü Khudabandah and Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan. How can anyone describe how well the affairs of the kingdom of Iran were regulated during these three reigns?*”  
> *— Auliya Allah Amuli, Tarikh-i Ruyan*

Much of the historiography on the Mongol invasions is revisionist, often portraying one side of what is otherwise a complicated story. Muslim reactions to Mongol expansion varied greatly between regions. In eastern Turkestan, the Qara Khitai welcomed Chinggisid forces as liberators from the oppressive rule of Kuchlug, a Christian Mongol warlord who had terrorised the local Muslims. Hulagu’s sacking of the Ismaili fortress-city of Alamut had unexpected consequences, such as the freeing of prominent intellectuals like Nasir al-Din Tusi, who would later serve as Hulagu’s advisor. With Hulagu’s patronage, Tusi would head the Maragheh observatory, housing a treasure trove of texts on medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy. Contrary to later historians’ claims of Hulagu obliterating all the houses of knowledge and their contents, many manuscripts were relocated rather than destroyed, ensuring their survival.

The Mongols also understood the power of fear. They deliberately exaggerated accounts of their atrocities as a psychological weapon to compel surrender without a fight. Contrary to images of senseless destruction, their violence was methodical and calculated. They usually spared artisans and craftsmen—metalworkers, weavers, manuscript illuminators, ceramicists, glassblowers, jewellers, and calligraphers–and used both flattery and coercion to goad them to Mongol-controlled cities.

Some Mongol rulers showed great sympathy towards Islam. Möngke Khan—rumoured to favour Muslims above all other religious groups—provided tax exemptions for religious officials and institutions. Similarly, Khubilay Khan adopted contemporary Islamic administrative practices and appointed Muslims to high positions in his administration. The Mongols believed that all faiths were legitimate expressions of one Divine Truth and, as such, did not seek to convert their Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist subjects to Tengriism. As Möngke declared to Franciscan friar William of Rubruck: “*We Mongols believe in one God, by Whom we live and die... Just as God gave different fingers to the hand so has He given different ways to men.*”

While Mongols were feared for their destruction, their rule also brought about a period of stability known as the *Pax Mongolica,* where Mongol-ruled territories provided a relatively peaceful expanse of commercial and cultural exchange between Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and China. Cities like Baghdad, Tabriz, Samarkand, and Bukhara, once devastated by conquest, gradually regained some of their former glory as key nodes in this vast network. Muslim merchants, artisans, and scholars moved freely within these networks, expanding the footprint of Islamic civilisation into new territories.

The Ilkhanids, seeking to legitimise their rule among locals, developed a new aesthetic that combined Iranian, Mongol and Chinese artistic traditions. Under Mongol patronage, this unique artistic style would be used to illustrate the *Great Mongol Shahnameh* and Rashid ad-Din’s *Jami’ al-Tawarikh,* leaving a lasting influence on Persian miniature tradition for centuries to come. Architectural complexes like Takht-e Soleyman, built as an Ilkhanid summer palace atop the ruins of a Zoroastrian temple, were adorned with Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, and pre-Islamic Iranian motifs. The administrative acumen of the Persians was indispensable to the structure and operations of the Ilkhanate. It was the Mongol ruling elites, along with their Persian administrators, who replaced Arabic with Persian as the main language of court, culture, and historiography, and revived the Persian concept of *Eranshahr*. All political concepts of ‘Iran’ from later periods to the present day were directly derived from their Mongolian-influenced interpretations. None of this would have been possible without Muslim reciprocity.

For all the mythologising stories of the Mongol devastation, many Muslims benefited greatly from Mongol tolerance. The Mongols provided new opportunities for trade, proselytisation, and power, all of which many Muslims eagerly took advantage of.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/07/69f4fd28-14b1-49d2-9d03-86f8de8497ac_848x632.png)

## Islam’s Response to the Mongol Challenge

> *“What event or circumstance in these times has been more important than the beginning of the reign of Chingīz Khān, to be able to designate a new epoch?”* 
> *— Rashid-ad-Din*

The greatness of a civilisation is measured not by the absence of challenges, but by its capacity to identify, respond, and adapt to them. Injecting dynamism into the otherwise staid ‘rise and decline’ theory, British historian Arnold Toynbee proposed a further dynamic of ‘challenge and response’. For Toynbee, civilisations do not simply rise and decline in inevitable cycles but succeed or fail based on their creative responses to existential challenges. These challenges, whether environmental, political, or cultural, serve as catalysts that either dismantle a civilisation or elevate it to greater heights.

The Mongol invasion posed one of the greatest existential threats in Islamic history, yet the Muslim response was neither to languish in subjugation nor to treat the Mongols as an aberration to the Muslim body. Instead, the response was to expand the frontiers of Islamic civilisation and integrate the Mongols into it. Sufi missionaries, jurists, traders, viziers, and merchants proactively engaged within the new routes of power, patronage, and trade that their new Mongol overlords provided. *Rather than resisting Mongol rule outright, they reshaped it from within.*

This process of integrating the Mongols into the cultural and political landscapes of their subjects laid the groundwork for later conversions. Less than fifty years after the sacking of Baghdad, Ghazan Khan of the Ilkhanate announced his conversion to Islam and declared it a state religion, prompting many Mongol elites and troops to follow his lead. In the Golden Horde, Öz Beg Khan, reportedly influenced by Sufi missionary works, converted to Islam. The Islamisation of the western and eastern sides of the Chagatai Khanate followed suit, with the west, such as Transoxiana, increasingly adopting Islam as the ruling elite institutionalised the faith at the state level. Meanwhile, in the east, Islam spread through political alliances, Sufi missionaries, traders, and local rulers, who sought to strengthen their political legitimacy by aligning with the dominant faith of the populace.

The Seljuks provided the initial blueprint for this integration: like the Mongols, they hailed from the steppe and practised a similar faith before gradually converting to Islam. Here again, the Muslim leadership took a pragmatic approach. Instead of demanding unwavering commitment to the *Shari’a* among the newly converting Mongols outright, as long as the overall trend of conversion pointed towards orthodoxy, they tolerated syncretic practices among elites to weaken Shaman and Buddhist influence in royal courts. Islamisation unfolded gradually over decades and generations. Mongols at all levels of society continued ancestral veneration practices and followed *the Yasa* (law code) established by Chinggis Khan with as much devotion (if not more) as they did the *Shari’a*. Muslim missionaries, recognising that asking Mongols to abandon deeply rooted practices would likely result in resistance, saw this syncretism as a necessary transitional phase toward normative Sunni Islam. Today, the vast majority of the Mongol descendants who converted to Islam are of the *Hanafi* school of jurisprudence, and *Maturidi* school of theology.

In regions with substantial Turkic populations such as the Golden Horde and Chagatai Khanate, Islamisation was naturally accompanied by Turkicisation. A minority ruling class from the start, the Mongols gradually assimilated and absorbed the influences, customs, and languages of the Turkic majority they ruled. Shared cultural and societal traits smoothed the transition. After the Mongols were defeated at *‘Ain Jalut* in 1260, subsequent confrontations between the Ilkhanids and the Mamluks led many Mongol soldiers and commanders to defect to the Mamluks. After converting, Mongol defectors were welcomed and often assumed prominent military positions within the Mamluk establishment.

However, conversion was not without political ramifications. As mentioned, Berke Khan, grandson of Chinggis and ruler of the Golden Horde, adopted Islam and clashed with the Buddhist rulers of the Ilkhanate, leading to prolonged military conflict. Ahmad Tegüder, the first Ilkhanate Muslim ruler, was overthrown by his Buddhist nephew Arghun after his swift implementation of Islamic reforms, abandonment of traditional Mongol practices, and diplomatic overtures to the Mamluks. Tamarishin Khan of the Chagatai Khanate suffered a similar fate.

Despite these setbacks, the direction had already been set. By the 15th century, the areas formerly governed by three of the four Mongol khanates—the Ilkhanate, Golden Horde, and the Chagatai—had largely embraced Islam. The legacy they left behind would set the stage for Islamic civilisation’s historical apex.

## Islam’s Apex: The Balkan-to-Bengal Gunpowder Empires

Islamic history did not come to an end in 1258, or any time thereafter. After the disintegration of the Mongol empire, the Chinggisid successor states such as the Ilkhanids, Timurids, and Mughals proved Islamic civilisation’s dynamic capacity to absorb and redirect once-hostile forces into a new, vitalistic source of energy. Even non-Chinggisid states would be influenced by the Turco-Mongolian synthesis.

By the 16th century, Islamic civilisation was reconstituted under some of the largest and most centralised polities in Muslim history: the gunpowder empires. These new states, the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, were not only militarily impressive, culturally sophisticated, and materially wealthy, but reshaped Islamic governance and society on a vast scale, leading arguably to the first truly universal Islamic civilisation from West Africa to the Philippines.

The Timurid dynasty, founded by Timur in the early 14th century, was the direct product of the Turco-Mongol ethnocultural synthesis, and it was he and his descendants who carried this legacy to neighbouring regions and to the Indian Subcontinent. Timur himself sought to legitimise his rule by marrying into the Chinggisid royal family and, in the words of Peter Jackson, “*combined Islamic zeal with a strong attachment to Mongol traditions, including the Yasa*.” The Timurids, who ruled over Transoxiana, Khorasan, Afghanistan, Iran, and parts of Central Asia, adopted many Mongol administrative practices, including the *Yasa*, tax systems, and military organisation.

In India, the Mughal Empire—at its peak the wealthiest and most populous Islamic polity there had ever been—took its name from the Mongols. The first Mughal Emperor, Babur, presented himself as an heir to both the Chingissids and the Timurids, destined to rule and expand his realms. Like the Ottomans, the Mughals shared a common political culture that drew heavily on both Central Asian and Persian traditions.

In Anatolia, numerous waves of Turkish refugees fled Mongol invasions, putting pressure on the Islamic frontier with Byzantium. These invasions also smashed the aged structures of the Seljuk empire, resulting in the creation of numerous *beyliks*. One of these small *beyliks*, nestled in northwestern Anatolia, would be led by Osman I, the eponymous founder of the Ottoman Empire. Between the 14th century and the 16th century, the Ottoman dynasty and their vassals expanded their rule over the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa.

These empires were radically different from earlier Muslim polities. They took on many of the attributes of what we today see as the modern state: ‘constitutional’ theories on the relationship between the ruler’s legislative and executive powers, the introduction of the *Ulema* into the state apparatus, the formation of permanent, impersonal, and centralised bureaucracies, and the establishment of permanent, “gunpowder armies” utilising muskets and cannons. Much of this was driven by the natural need to govern such large expanses of territory, the utilisation of new technologies in transport and communications, but also innovation in Islamic theories of power of legitimacy that evolved after the Mongol conquests to become truly imperial in scale.

The new era also saw the emergence of a Turco-Persianate Islamic ‘high culture’ as Persian became the lingua franca of Turkic dynasties across the vast expanse that Shahab Ahmed termed the *‘Balkans-to-Bengal complex’*, equivalent to the use of French in early modern Europe. The use of Persian as a lingua franca would not be superseded by any other language until English became the global lingua franca in the 19th century.

The new centres of gravity in Islamic civilisation would expand outwards, primarily centred on the Ottomans and their capital at Istanbul, and the Mughals and their capital at Delhi. Islamic civilisation’s reach went beyond their immediate political control, as their cultural and economic clout influenced and even dictated those of their neighbours.

The scale and power of the gunpowder empires dwarfed anything mustered by previous Muslim polities and bring into question the theory of a long decline after the 13th century. This theory has handicapped our ability to recognise our civilisation’s resilience, adaptability and dynamism. Islamic civilisation has never followed a single trajectory of rise and decline but has instead moved through cycles of renewal and transformation.

The decline that had taken root in the historical heartland of Islamic civilisation is anachronistically blamed on the Mongols, obscuring a deeper reality: Islamic civilisation had moved on. The old cities of Islam like Damascus and Baghdad had grown weary under the weight of their history.

Ultimately, the Mongols were part of a wider movement, not just of people, but of the centres of gravity of Islamic civilisation. For good and ill, the Mongols became an undeniable influence on our civilisation and left its mark through various Turco-Mongolian successor states and the creation of a Turco-Persianate high culture, which would come to define Islam’s apex.

---

*Words: Yana Zurayeva is a Buryat-Mongolian visual artist and 3D designer from Ulan-Ude, Russia. She writes at* [*Waterfalls of Qaf*](https://waterfallsofqaf.substack.com/) *and can be found on* [*X*](https://x.com/yiihya?ref=kasurian.com)*.*

**Further reading:**

**Books:**

- *The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion; The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255 -* Peter Jackson
- *The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East -* Nicholas Morton
- *Violence and Non-Violence in the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad -* Michal Biran
- *Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic; Apocalyptic Incidents during the Mongol Invasions -* David Cook
- *Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change: The Mongols and Their Eurasian Predecessors -* Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (Editors)
- *The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World -* Marie Favereau
- *An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia -* Jonathan Z. Brack
- *The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353 -* Linda Komaroff, Stefano Carboni
- *Central Asian Aspects of Pre-modern Iranian History (14th to 19th Century) -* Bert Fragner
- *Mongols in Mamluk Eyes: Representing Ethnic Others in the Medieval Middle East -* J.M.C. van den Bent
- *A Study of History -* Arnold Toynbee
- *A History of Warfare -* John Keegan
- *What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic -* Shahab Ahmed

**Essays:**

- [*Chingiz Khan: Maker of the Islamic World*](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24280461?ref=kasurian.com) \- George Lane
- [*Did the Mongols Really Destroy the Books of Baghdad (1258)? Examining the Tigris "River of Ink”*](https://yusufchaudhary.wordpress.com/2019/02/27/did-the-mongols-really-destroy-the-books-of-baghdad-1258-the-tigris-river-of-ink/?ref=kasurian.com) \- Yusuf Chaudhary
- [*Long Live Mongol Iranzamin*](https://bakuresearchinstitute.org/en/long-live-mongol-iranzamin/?ref=kasurian.com) \- Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva
### The Lost Art of Research as Leisure
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/research-as-leisure/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T19:03:11.000Z
## The Literary Foundations of Civilisation

Nestled in a café-bar-museum-event space in Fort Mason—San Francisco’s waterfront, weathered military campus with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge—is a floor-to-ceiling library housing the Long Now Foundation’s *Manual for Civilisation.* A crowd-curated collection of the 3,500 books “most essential to sustain or rebuild a civilisation,” the *Manual for Civilisation* began with one question: If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have with you?

The collection, displayed along industrial walls, is both solemn and optimistic, earnest and futile; a romantic’s bookish Golden Record. It is, most vividly, a humbling monument to historian Barbara Tuchman’s proclamation that “[Books are the carriers of civilisation](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1979/12/30/papyrus-to-paperbacks-the-world-that-books-made/43c411da-2bf7-4e5f-8869-caaac5422e9e/?ref=kasurian.com).” “Without books,” Tuchman wrote, “the development of civilisation would have been impossible.”

Linking civilisation and human culture to books, reading and writing is not unique to Tuchman. Writing nearly 350 years earlier, Galileo had declared books “[the seal of all the admirable inventions of mankind](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/037575766X/braipick-20?ref=kasurian.com),” because books allow us to communicate through time and place, and to speak to those “who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years.”

A few generations later, Henry David Thoreau, writing in the seclusion of Walden Pond, wrote that “books are the treasured wealth of the field and the fit inheritance of generations and culture.”

The following generation, Carl Sagan, after taking his TV audience on a journey through the cosmos, found himself alone in a library, circling back to Galileo. With the Cavatina—one of two Beethoven songs floating in space on the Voyager II’s Golden Record—playing, Sagan [marvelled](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVu4duLOF6Y&ref=kasurian.com) at the existence of books. “Writing,” he says, “is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.” “A book,” he concludes, “is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Tuchman’s platitude, then, has persisted through the centuries: Books carry civilisation. Not because they are inherently sacred objects of inherently sacred knowledge, but because reading and writing assemble and shape culture. And without culture, there is no civilisation.

### The Divine Command to Read

In Arabic, the root word for civilisation—ح-ض-ر: to be present, to settle, to remain—expresses a profound shift from wandering to dwelling. For Islam, that shift began with a search at the boundary between city and desert.

1,450 years ago, looking down at the Kaaba from 2,000 feet up, and over two miles away, a wanderer in search of a spiritual dwelling was commanded to Read. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ responded, “I am not a reader.” He was commanded again, Read. Again, the Holy Prophet responded, “I am not a reader.” The command came once more. *Read in the Name of your Lord who created.*

So much has been said about Islam’s origin story—codified through humanity’s most rigorous and sophisticated system of oral preservation—that one hesitates to reference it in an essay about reading. Yet, it is with this divine command that the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus began the story of Islamic civilisation. *Read in the Name of your Lord who created.*

To command an unlettered man to read unsettles the essential pillar that reading is largely, or exclusively, the one-dimensional act of decoding printed symbols. The Arabic word “Iqra,” often translated as to read,” contains a curious ambiguity—it simultaneously means “to read” and “to recite.” To recite is to engage in a primarily oral, externally expressive act. To read is to engage in something more private, solitary, and internally reflective.

The Read of Islam’s originating verse embodies, as Alan Jacobs succinctly puts it in *Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distractions*, “a moving between the solitary encounter and something more social.” In the context of modern reading, social can be anything—a journal entry, a blog post, a book club, a literary salon, a dignified virtual debate, a letter to a friend—because, Jacobs writes, “every good idea ever achieved is the product of both connection and contemplation, of moving back and forth between the two.”

If reading does not flow outward to build and contribute to the living networks of human knowledge, the divine command to Read feels hamstrung, unfulfilled.

Reading alone, however—even with its duality—is not enough. The Quran’s command to read has a direction.

*Read in the Name of Your Lord who Created. Created humans from a clinging clot. Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous, Who taught by the pen—taught humanity what they knew not.*

The command to Read in the name of our Creator confers—as Rebecca Elson put it in “We Astronomers,” a poem about resisting disenchantment—a “responsibility to awe.” The Quranic Read could be interpreted as a responsibility to awe. It is an invitation to learn with both disciplined inquiry and receptive wonder.

## The Long Century of the Last Reader

Over the last century, our responsibility to awe has been a source of anxiety.

In 1926 — the year the radio, a dizzying new addition to the American home, brought the World Series to living rooms across the country; the year Bell Telephone perfected transcontinental calls from New York to San Francisco for $18; the year the Orpheum Theatre opened in Los Angeles, its legendary neon sign still shining today—Virginia Woolf worried about the future of reading.

In the August 3, 1926, [edition](https://newrepublic.com/article/120389/movies-reality?ref=kasurian.com) of *The New Republic*, Woolf, comparing cinema to reading, is unsettled and nearly disgusted by the horror of the cinema. The cinema, she writes, and the pleasure we derive from it, emanate from an impulse so unrefined in its humanity that it is anti-civilisational. Woolf, the quintessential sombre optimist who famously wrote in January 1915 that “the future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think,” does not go so far as to condemn the future of reading, but she concludes that the audio-visual dangerously erodes depth.

25 years later, in 1951—the year *I Love Lucy* debuted, replacing the family radio with a wooden TV box set; the year of House Un-American Activities Committee; the year of the first nuclear tests in the Nevada desert; the last year before the death of technicolour in 1952—E.B. White, beloved children’s book author of *Charlotte’s Web* and *Stuart Little*, worries about the future of reading.

In the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” White reflected on the Rollins College President’s prediction that “in fifty years, only five percent of the people in the country will be reading. White writes, “to us, it would seem that even if only one person out of a hundred and fifty million should continue as a reader, he would be the one worth saving, the nuclear around which to found a university. This ‘impossible person,” this “Last Reader,” is the “queen bee,” from whom a “new race of men, linked perfectly with the long past by the broken chain of their intellect, to carry on the community.” He concludes that it is more likely the race will perpetuate “through audiovisual devices, which ask no discipline of the mind, and which are already giving the room the languor of an opium parlor.”

45 years later, in 1996—the year Fox News launched on satellite television; the year Dolly was cloned; the year of the “miniature telephone”; of dial-up, the “mouse” and “keyboard”, “www” and “@”; the last year before Amazon would change the Internet—Susan Sontag worries about the future of reading.

In a letter to Jorge Luis Borges ten years after his death, Sontag apologised to her old friend: “I’m sorry to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species.” By books, she means not the book itself, but “the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects.” Soon, “we will call up on ‘bookscreens’ any ‘text’ on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, ‘interact’ with it.” Sontag’s conclusion threads White and Woolf’s fears of decades past, “when books become ‘texts’ that we ‘interact’ with…the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality.” It will mean, she declares, not only the death of the book, but “*nothing less than the death of inwardness*.”

For nearly 100 years—each year, the future arriving faster than we have been able to process it—we have worried about the future of reading. Yet, none of these writers, nor Harold Bloom in *How to Read and Why*, nor Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in *How to Read a Book*, nor Neil Postman in *Amusing Ourselves to Death,* predicted the future that arrived: an uncanny valley, [neither in “orality” nor “literacy”](https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong%5FWalter%5FJ%5FOrality%5Fand%5FLiteracy%5F2nd%5Fed.pdf?ref=kasurian.com)—surrounded by more books, more words, more reading and writing than perhaps at any time in history, yet lacking a coherent culture.

Woolf, White, and Sontag foresaw the corrosive, savage effect of the “audio-visual” on the human brain and soul. They did not worry about the disappearance of books, but about the cultural collapse that would occur when reading shifts from an immersive, contemplative act to something passive, fragmented and superficial. The death of reading was not a loss of books, but a loss of culture.

These fears have not been unfounded. Today, we find ourselves in precisely the cultural crisis that Woolf, White, and Sontag anticipated—not a world without books, but one in which fragmented attention and superficial engagement have eroded the foundations of shared meaning and cultural coherence.

The definition of “culture” is as [liquid](https://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Modernity-Zygmunt-Bauman/dp/0745624103?ref=kasurian.com) as the phenomenon it seeks to describe. In *Princes and Powers*, James Baldwin observes that only a culture in crisis would ask for a definition of “culture.”

We are a culture in crisis. We lack, as Byung-Chul Han articulates in *The Disappearance of Rituals*, the structures and forms that make meaning possible, leading to cultural fragmentation. The result is a sense of civilisational ADHD. A generational restlessness, inattentiveness, and excessive movement in no direction, with insight elusive and ephemeral.

## Research as Leisure: Eliot and Pieper on Cultural Recovery

For T.S. Eliot, writing in post-World War II England, “culture” is a mutually dependent hierarchy of three “senses”—the individual, the group, and society—that manifests in the creation of “the pattern of society as a whole.” With the fragmentation of any one sense from the others—the individual from the group, the group from society—“higher civilisation is unlikely to be found.”

In this fragmented landscape, we need not just diagnoses but prescriptions. How might we rebuild the foundations of culture when our very modes of attention have been compromised? The answer may lie in recovering an ancient understanding of leisure—not as idleness, but as a form of directed contemplation.

Josef Piper, writing at the same time as Eliot but in a defeated and fragmented Germany, declares leisure to be the basis of culture. By “leisure,” Pieper does not mean idleness, but the more ancient type of leisure — leisure as the Greek σχολή (scholē), or school.

Pieper’s leisure is contemplative—it is, in essence, a style of unconstrained research. Such leisure is not merely or singularly the pursuit of knowledge “for its own sake,” nor is it simply “reading for pleasure.” The leisure that forms the basis of culture is a directed and intentional curiosity—it is the practice of formulating questions and seeking answers with a disposition towards wonder rather than rigid certainty. Where free time is not used for research—for developing questions and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit—cultural coherence crumbles. For Pieper, without leisure as letters, or “research as leisure,” there is no pattern from which higher civilisation is found.

Taken together, Eliot and Pieper offer complementary architectures of culture: Eliot describes the external pattern of culture, while Pieper describes the internal condition—leisure—that nourishes and regenerates that pattern. Without the structural coherence Eliot describes, culture risks disintegration; without the contemplative leisure Pieper champions, that structure is hollowed.

Leisure as letters recasts reading and writing as fundamentally *playful* and yet deliberate activities. Leisure as letters formalises wonder, curiosity, and the joy of discovery. It is the “basis” of culture because, through the exchange of ideas—with writers alive today and writers alive a thousand years ago— the “pattern of society” is assembled and reassembled.

Looking into the abyss of the uncanny valley, leisure as letters unlocks a new cultural imagination. The formal but playful exchange of ideas, driven by intentional curiosity, creates a new culture.

### Against Hollow Reading

What does cultural recovery look like in practice? Assembling the pattern of society as a whole begins with a shift in perspective: seeing reading and inquiry not as burdensome or academically cloistered acts, but as playful, intentional acts of curiosity.

For some, the compulsion to read manifests as a productivity hack or as the passive consumption of viral self-help books and novels. These readers treat reading not as a tool to discern the reality around them, but as an obligation to signal productive virtue or as mere entertainment, no different from a reality TV show.

For others, many of whom are voracious readers, the compulsion to read manifests as an exercise in confirmation bias: collecting fragments of ideas that validate an existing worldview. These readers treat reading not as an invitation to greater depth, but as an opportunity to superficially appropriate concepts that align comfortably with their existing beliefs. The result is an intellectual ventriloquism that stunts curiosity.

Against these hollow forms of reading stands research as leisure: an honourable response to a divine command to read in the *Name of the Creator*. It invites us to look at all which makes up life with purpose and curiosity, to seek knowledge as an open-ended, reverent engagement with mystery. It is, most simply, to be a student, even as we clock in and out of our ‘knowledge economy’ jobs, even as we lack the protection and prescriptive shepherding of the academy.

For the academy, “research” is a term of art. For our purposes, research is not a rarefied academic exercise. It is a fundamentally human activity, an adventure, a craft, a conviviality that assembles culture.

Non-experts can, and should, aspire to expertise.

## From Theory to Practice: A Framework for Research as Leisure

### 1\. Cultivate Curiosity

Having the Library of Alexandria in our pockets has dulled, rather than heightened, our senses. Despite unprecedented access to information, there is a sluggish incuriosity, a giving of the self to the algorithm that feeds us information, rather than allowing us to search for it.

Yet curiosity, at its core, is simple: it is observation, attention, and the persistent asking of why and how. Curiosity is to stand before the Creator in quiet submission, for within each question is a universe of more questions.

Cultivating curiosity is as simple as picking up a magazine, coming across an essay on bird migration and wanting to learn more. It is as simple as taking a walk, noticing the sidewalk or street beneath you, the buildings, trees, plant and animal life around you, and wondering how and why it all got there.

It was during my own walks that I began to question the suburban landscape around me: How did these houses get built, why these houses, and why this style? Why are the streets so wide? How did this neighbourhood come to be? What I initially saw as a monotonous sprawl became a mysterious puzzle, an adventure in understanding how urban planning, architecture, land use, economics and technology touched my life.

### 2\. Develop a Question

Curiosity without direction is mere distraction. For our purposes, curiosity must crystallise into a question. Passive curiosity must be transformed into an active search for truth. For the leisurely researcher, developing a question is fun because it is anti-disciplinary, multidisciplinary and free to flourish without the arcane rules of the academy.

No question is stupid, but most questions are bad, *which is not in itself bad*. That a question is bad is a delightful part of the process because it allows for thoughts and connections to bloom over time. A bad question is still a starting point.

My own questions about the suburbs were bad—broad, vague, sprawling. My anchor question, “How did the suburbs come to be?” became “How did zoning create the modern suburbs?” and from there, “What is the history of zoning?” to “How did the mall create the modern suburbs?” to “Why are there parking minimums?” and “Are the suburbs actually rational?” and on and on.

With practice, I learned a simple formula: A good question is specific enough to guide research, but open enough to allow for discovery. Discovery is essential to the blossoming of ideas because it is where multidisciplinarity, connections, and new questions emerge.

### 3\. Gather Evidence

Once a question takes shape, it needs substance to grow. Gathering evidence is where most researchers get stuck.

First, our information ecosystem has turned us into collectors rather than readers. Collecting PDFs, books, and lists of books is a uniquely thrilling pleasure, but it can hamstring us. The most challenging part of gathering evidence is organising it.

Second, for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts. Understanding those texts and how they’ve shaped what we think the subject is is crucial because it is where a healthy dose of disagreeableness and scepticism can thrive. By understanding the rules that govern a discipline’s thinking, the leisurely researcher is empowered to thoughtfully question them, explore paths conventional wisdom has overlooked, and develop new answers.

Finally, there is always more to read. That’s ok.

### 4\. Develop an Answer

Research has to culminate, even if its culmination is more questions to research. The culmination does not have to be ground-breaking, but it does have to exist. A resolution must materialise in tangible form, as an essay, a video, a social media thread, or even a letter to a friend.

What distinguishes research as leisure from idle browsing is precisely this movement toward creation. However modest, your answer must contribute to the conversation rather than merely consuming or repeating what others have said.

### 5\. Community of Knowledge

Ideally, like the duality of the Quran’s Read, the culmination of research is social, conversational and communal. Fundamental to the art of research as leisure is the creation of formal and informal ‘communities of knowledge’ in which well-researched ideas are communicated in writing and presented for wider debate.

Today, these communities are everywhere. Substack, YouTube, Discord, Twitter. They exist in small-scale book clubs, writing circles, and informal discussion groups that meet in living rooms and coffee shops across the world. Through these communities, much like the Bloomsbury Group, the Inklings, Gertrude Stein’s Salon, or the Vienna Circle, we nurture the living networks through which ideas are tested, refined, cross-pollinated, and passed along.

In doing so, we gradually reassemble the pattern of society as a whole that makes higher culture and civilisation possible.

## Reassembling the Pattern of Civilisation

The *Manual of Civilisation* reminds us that books are not just repositories of information, but vessels of cultural memory and agency. In a fragmented age, the divine command to Read in the Name of your Lord, who Created, takes on renewed urgency.

*Kasurian* is an invitation to pursue research as a leisure activity. Serious research can be undertaken by anyone, and the barriers to expertise have never been lower. Become an amateur expert in something that fascinates you. Contribute your research through newsletters, essays, discussion groups, or participation in online forums, and allow the community to test, challenge, and refine your conclusions.

By embracing a culture of formal and informal expertise, a culture of research as leisure, we can restore our sense of wonder, and with it, the capacity to inform, negotiate and transcend the orthodoxies of our time.

---

**Words*: Mariam Mahmoud is a lawyer in California.*

**Further Reading:**

- *Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life* \- Zena Hitz
- *The Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distraction* \- Alan Jacobs
- *Slow Reading in a Hurried Age* \- David Mikics
- *A History of Reading* \- Alberto Manguel
- *Notes Toward a Definition of Culture* \- T.S. Eliot
- *Princes and Powers* \- James Baldwin
- *Leisure: The Basis of Culture* \- Josef Pieper
- *The Disappearance of Rituals* \- Byung-Chul Han
- *How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information* \- Jillian M. Hess
- *Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican* \- Galileo Galilei
- *How to Read a Book* \- Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
- *Amusing Ourselves to Death* \- Neil Postman
- *Technopoly* \- Neil Postman
- *How to Read and Why* \- Harold Bloom
- *The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life* \- Harold Bloom
- *The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries* \- Andrew Hui
- *The Sociological Imagination* \- C Wright Mills
- *Tools for Conviviality* \- Ivan Illich
- *How to Write a Thesis* \- Umberto Eco
- *Dust Tracks on a Road* (Chapter 10) - Zora Neale Hurston
### Kasurian: A Magazine for the 21st Century
URL: https://www.kasurian.com/inaugural-essay-kasurian/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T18:11:48.000Z
## The ‘Short 19th Century’

Where do ideas come from? A broad sweep of history creates the illusion of a smooth landscape where every period is equally and progressively generative in knowledge and culture. On closer inspection, however, that landscape transforms into a rugged panorama of great peaks and low valleys. In different times, places, and material conditions, short periods of creativity burst forth–and leave as quickly as they come.

In *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, Thomas S. Kuhn introduced a new theory to conceptualise the production of scientific knowledge, not as a linear, accumulating process, but as cycles of production, consumption, and decline punctuated by paradigm shifts that ignite new cycles of creative production. Kuhn’s theory extends to all forms of knowledge. Revolutionary periods of creative production such as 4th-century BC Athens, 9th-century AD Baghdad, and 16th-century Renaissance Italy are unique moments not just in the cultural trajectory of their respective civilisations, but across human civilisation as a whole. They are the peaks from which most of humanity’s accumulated knowledge flows.

Why does this matter? The origins of the contemporary Muslim intellectual tradition lie in the *short 19th century*, when a culture of letters emerged to renegotiate Islam’s position in the modern age. This period of history is poorly understood today, but it is crucial in uncovering the origins of our ideas and assumptions about the ‘modern world’. The short 19th century’s abrupt and violent end also helps explain why Muslims have since struggled to build a cultural and intellectual tradition of equal, let alone greater, significance. If our quest is to incubate a generative culture for our time, we can only do that by understanding our history – not as mere mythology or a recollection of facts, but by developing a real theory of history with explanatory power that rationalises patterns and events.

Today, the Muslim world fares poorly when it comes to cultural and intellectual production, falling closer to the bottom of global charts in metrics like book printing, intellectual property and patents, scientific research, and general cultural status. Generation after generation, the same issues are debated in the same language–although increasingly worse for wear–without resolution. All the while, there is a denial that Islamdom was ever in crisis and that it is modernity itself that was an evil aberration, like oil to the water of Islam. Others insist that the Islamic world’s intellectual stagnation persisted throughout the modern era, incapable of rising up to the challenge.

In truth, the Muslim mind suffers from amnesia towards a crucial chapter in our recent history. Napoleon Bonaparte’s entry into Egypt at the turn of the 19th century was one of Islam’s first major interactions with industrialising Europe. The force and fury with which European arms and science came laid bare the weakness of Islamdom. In one sense, the 19th century was indeed a period of stagnation, the tail-end of an exhausted civilisation. But it was also a period of reimagining: this rude awakening saw Muslims re-appraise Islam’s relationship with law, culture, new political structures and forms of legitimacy, and scientific knowledge; all these and more became part of a negotiation that reasoned from Islam’s first principles to recreate Islam’s feudal plausibility structure for an industrial age.

The key medium for this renegotiation was the written word. The opening salvo of the movement was the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II’s launch of the first Turkish-language gazette, *Takvim-i Vekayi*, in 1831\. By the 1870s, this movement was in full swing. Muslim thinkers took to modern communications and cultural mediums with gusto. Networks of writers could communicate thanks to the telegraph; the printing press allowed the mass distribution of new ideas and promoted wider literacy; and the ecosystem of knowledge in Islamdom began to expand.

Cities across the Islamic world, through Cairo, Kazan, Istanbul, Damascus, and Lucknow, became centres of an unprecedented transnational network where printing presses were set up, magazines were founded, and a rich world of print publications emerged. Islamdom had never been so connected, its intellectual reach so far. Muslim publications were even founded by politicians and thinkers in exile in several European cities, including London, Paris, and Vienna. In the Arab world, Damascus, Beirut, Alexandria, and Cairo incubated the *Nahda* (“Renaissance”), a period of Arab cultural revival facilitated by a novel newspaper ecosystem. The *Jadidi* movement spread reformist ideas through dozens of Tatar-language journals to Muslim communities across the Russian empire, primarily aiming to reform education to reconcile the traditional Islamic curriculum with modern European knowledge.

The ideas and narratives that shaped Muslim responses to European concepts like nationalism, secularism, democracy, and the nation-state were formed in the short 19th century’s era of internal debate. The Ottoman journal *Sebilürreşad*,founded in 1908 (then closed in 1966, and recently reopened in 2016) by the famous national poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy, would incubate the foundational principles of ‘Islamist thought’ that still predominate today. Among *Sebilürreşad’s* most frequent contributors was the Ottoman statesman and vizier (1913-1917) Said Halim Pasha, whose works *İslâmlaşmak* and *Meşrutiyet* seem like they could have been written today, not at the turn of the 20th century.

Islamdom in the 19th century did not stagnate and collapse in the face of Europe’s sudden arrival at its gates. Instead, it mounted a lively rear-guard response, giving rise to a new paradigm of knowledge and culture that still underpins much of our intellectual framework today.

## The End of the Short 19th Century and its Aftermath

WWI was an abrupt and violent end to Islamic civilisation’s modern revival. Elite networks of power and patronage were dismembered, depriving Islamdom of its high culture and crucial support base for the production of knowledge. Colonial compradors and secular nationalists from Albania to Turkestan hunted down the Muslim intelligentsia, imprisoning, silencing, or killing them in vast swathes. The *ulema* and their guardianship of the *sharia* were put under siege as European-style secularism was imported to replace what was previously an Islamic ecosystem of worldly knowledge. The networks, traditions, and bodies of knowledge that formed the bedrock of Islamic civilisation were severed, and efforts to negotiate Islamdom’s transition into the industrial age were put to an end.

A few decades after WWI, the Algerian sociologist Malik Bennabi waded amid the ruins of Islamic civilisation and concluded that Muslims had simply stopped producing new knowledge. Bennabi diagnosed this ailment in the Muslim mind as *colonisabilit*é, the Muslim’s defeated state under colonisation in which intelligence did not necessarily translate into creativity and innovation.

Decades after Bennabi’s insights, little has changed: we have had successive generations of Muslim thinkers and intellectuals who are nearly entirely handicapped in their ability to produce new ideas. If one carefully traces the lineage of ideas in 2025 among both the Muslim intelligentsia and laymen, one finds that these are progressively degenerating ideas borrowed from each previous generation back to when they were first produced in the short 19th century. If Bennabi were alive today, he would despair at the Muslim world’s state of affairs, and that the ideas that had been circulating in his time are the same ideas circulating today–only in a worse form.

Since the end of the short 19th century, the absence of a true culture of letters has deepened this crisis. Without flagship publications to articulate the issues and concerns of our time and allow writers to present ideas, Muslims lack one of the necessary infrastructures to generate and refine new ideas. In lacking a true understanding of Islamic history, we remain unaware of the wider paradigm of knowledge and culture under which we operate. As a result, any assessment we make in finding solutions for our current predicaments is likely to be wrong. Ultimately, this ensures we can never reach the future.

The short 19th century’s most important lesson is that even in Islamic civilisation’s darkest moments, we still possessed the vitality to build a culture of letters. We also learn that many of our ideas today stem from that period because we lack a healthy, indigenous culture of letters of our own. It is difficult to find Muslim publications or writers of note outside of the narrow confines of academia, writing for general audiences on a wide variety of topics and arguing in well-reasoned prose–necessary requisites for new ideas to blossom and spread. Instead, the sense-making institutions we rely on are produced by others. *The New Yorker*, the *Financial Times,* the *New York* and *London Review of Books*, *n+1*, the *Wall Street Journal*, the *Washington Post* – we have no similar flagship publications dedicated to our worldview, our values as they relate to the pillars of civilisation - including politics, economics, history, architecture, literature, science, technology and art. A generative culture cannot exist without a lively commons shaped by similar “indigenous” sense-making institutions.

## What is *Kasurian*?

*Kasurian* exists, in part, to fill some of the gap left by the abrupt end of the short 19th century, where a culture of letters thrived and died, and its place in the wider course of history has been forgotten.

Today, there is no ‘commons’ for discourse and is at least one of the reasons why our capacity to produce new ideas has become limited. We hope that *Kasurian* acts as a modest contribution towards rebuilding a culture of letters that may one day grow or catalyse a paradigm of culture and knowledge. Achieving this requires more than one individual, group, or publication alone: we all have a part to play in producing knowledge that contributes to a new understanding of Islam in the 21st century.

Curiosity and conviction are our tagline. *Kasurian* is for those who seek to understand the world and aspire to have more agency in it. Some struggle to reconcile Islam with the material realities of modern life. Our goal is to create that bridge by inviting thinkers and practitioners from diverse fields to share their expertise, articulate ideas, observations, and knowledge and engage in meaningful discourse.

Our first issue sets the stage for future issues: a collection of essays on history, culture, institutions, and technology. We set the stage by emphasising the agentic nature of the production of knowledge and culture through *The Lost Art of Research as Leisure*: today, we have more freedom than ever before to participate in what was previously the preserve of the aristocratic class. From there, we turn to history, exploring the resilience of Islamic civilisation in the face of an existential threat. We examine how Muslims responded to the Mongol invasions by integrating them into our civilisation, eventually elevating Islamdom to new heights throughout the Balkans-to-Bengal complex of the gunpowder age.

Moving into the modern era, we uncover the forgotten history of the twentieth-century union between the House of Osman and Hyderabad, and their last-ditch effort to preserve the Ottoman Caliphate in the heart of India. Alongside Islam’s aristocratic class, the loss of its early modern ‘bourgeoisie’ at the forefront of the short 19th century’s cultural and intellectual efforts was most dramatic and total in their destruction in post-Ottoman Albania.

Beyond Islamdom, we examine how cultural production is shaped and engineered through institutions, using Britain’s Royal Society of Arts as a case study and offering a different perspective on how culture emerges. Aligned with our belief that brilliance can exist in times of stagnation, we look at the Lebanese Space Program in the 1960s and the lessons we can learn on bootstrapping complex technological projects under precipitous conditions.

We hope that this issue–and all future issues–pique your curiosity and serve as a small and humble step towards reviving and eventually surpassing the conversations that once flourished in the short 19th century. Our aim is that *Kasurian* leaves you conscious of the past, curious about the present, and confident in the future.

---

**Words*: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine for the 21st century.*

#### Further Reading:

- *Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought* \- Andrew Hammond
- *The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation* *\-* Ali A. Allawi
- *The Islamic Secular* – Sherman A. Jackson
- *The Question of Culture* \- Malik Bennabi
- *The Square & The Tower* \- Niall Ferguson
- *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* \- Thomas S Kuhn