Thus concludes Conrad's morbid An Outpost of Progress, written in 1897, just two years before his chef-d'œuvre, Heart of Darkness. Like that seminal work, this story is situated in King Leopold II's Congo Free State, and describes the gruesome realities of colonial exploitation driven not merely by commerce and a belief in progress, but by a mission civilisatrice. Having acquired the region in the Scramble for Africa as a personal possession, Leopold declared that in his new possession he intended to "pierce the darkness that envelopes the whole population," a work worthy of a century of progress. Conrad saw what that piercing looked like on the ground.

Kayerts and Carlier, the story's two protagonists, are tasked with running an ivory trading station three hundred miles from the nearest outpost. Assisted by their local interpreter Makola, their commerce swiftly expands into the selling of their own station men into slavery, as Makola turns this into an immense profit. Flush with this success, the two traders abandon their principal task and squander their days reading cheap fiction and Our Colonial Expansion, a paper celebrating the merits of their predecessors who "went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth." From the outset, Conrad describes both men as "insignificant individuals" whose existence is only made possible "through the high organisation of civilised crowds." Remove the crowd, he suggests, and watch what remains of the man.

What remained is not much. When the steamer carrying their rations is wrecked, disgust and panic ravage the friendship of the two men who once walked hand in hand, and Carlier becomes the fatal victim of a quarrel over some lumps of sugar Kayerts was unwilling to share. Having killed his friend, Kayerts hears at last the call from the river:

Progress was calling to Kayerts from the river. Progress and Civilisation and all the virtues. Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.

Unable to confront his Managing Director, Kayerts follows his companion's fate. Unlike Heart of Darkness, Conrad forgoes Marlow, the quasi-omniscient narrator in so many of his works. The reader is left unguided among these two traders and their adventure, which makes the verdict all the more merciless. And like everything Conrad wrote, the story drew on his own life, a life impressive enough to require three lives.

The First Two Episodes

Born in 1857, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, anglicised upon his arrival in Britain as Joseph Conrad, belonged to a Polish noble family settled in Berdychiv, in today's Ukraine. His father, Apollo, a man of letters who had translated Shakespeare and Victor Hugo into Polish, introduced his only child to French and English literature. By 1861, Apollo's revolutionary activities and fervent advocacy of Polish independence from the Russian Empire had forced the family into exile. Shortly after, Apollo and his wife both died of tuberculosis, rendering Conrad an orphan. He was sent to live with his paternal uncle, from whom he eventually departed at the tender age of 16 for France to begin his life as a sailor. The departure itself, sparked by the writings of Balzac, Hugo, and Maupassant, stemmed from a simpler desire: to escape boredom. Boarding the Vienna express, Conrad would later describe this departure as akin to “a man entering a dream– which still continues.” Intoxicated by the sea novels of J.F. Cooper and Captain Marryat’s vignettes, he followed this dream into a life of adventure.

Marseille, from which he first sailed in 1874, gave him exactly that by the sea. Starting in the Mediterranean, his journeys carried him across the world, from South America to the Malay Archipelago and, like Kayerts and Carlier, to Africa. Conrad felt "a sacred fire burning in him" and relished the sea's language as "an instrument wrought into perfection by ages of experience," which he set out to master. Yet for Conrad the sea remained impenetrable and stingy to its suitors: unlike the earth, it cannot be subjugated. The ship, man's invention for venturing onto the waters, must therefore be respected, and serves in his fiction as a moral anchor of human courage and toil; given the choice, Conrad took the sail over the steamship of the ushering Industrial Age. Two decades of being shipwrecked, crushed by a falling spar, duelling, and falling in love made him a master mariner; by the autumn of 1893 he was ashore in London for good, still wandering, renting with his wife and two sons a series of houses from Kent to London. The second episode of his life as a sailor became the backdrop of the third.

That third episode would be cast in his third language. To another born Briton of Polish roots who did not speak Polish, Conrad once declared: I am more British than you, as you can do nothing about your Britishness. Raised a Francophone, introduced to English through his father's translations of Shakespeare, he grew through the merchant ranks on English course material on seamanship, and his preference for the Anglo world was that of a practical man: it was the largest, the most cosmopolitan, and far less bureaucratic than the French. He became a British citizen in 1886, between duties at sea; the Britain of his era was imperial, and that fact gave him security, employment, and a sense of belonging. In his own accounting, his life fell into three episodes: Poland, the sea, and authorship.

The Third Episode

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
The Hollow Men III - T.S. Eliot

Conrad began writing his first novel, Almayer's Folly, in 1889, a tale set in the Malay Archipelago about a poor trader who dreams of discovering a gold mine and escaping with his daughter to Amsterdam, a story in which, as so often in Conrad, the European is outsmarted. Free to write in Polish, French, or English, he settled on the latter for what he called its plasticity, against the crystallised perfection of French—though the shadow of Gustave Flaubert lies visibly across the book, whose Madame Bovary and L’Éducation Sentimentale Conrad vigorously reread. The manuscript of Almayer's Folly accompanied Conrad on his final journey as a seafarer into the Congo Free State, where he nearly lost it and concocted the mise-en-scène of An Outpost of Progress and Heart of Darkness. The paternal uncle who had financed his embarkment from Marseille and subsidised his lavish spending habits died in 1894, leaving him a year's salary. The inheritance arrived just as the manuscript found its reader.

Submitted to Unwin, Almayer's Folly reached Edward Garnett, a failed novelist turned critic, whose wife Constance is remembered today for her translations of canonical Russian novels. Garnett became a lifelong friend to Conrad, and the key to English literary society; through this door came the celebrated Ford Madox Ford, and with him literary impressionism: the attempt to capture the transitory experience of our lives, embracing human experience as a succession of fragments, on the conviction that no perfect perception is possible. To a friend, Conrad described a work of art as "very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion." Like Saint-Exupéry after him, Conrad made his profession the template of his fiction—though where the Frenchman was a humanist, Conrad remained a Victorian pessimist. The pessimism found its form in Lord Jim.

Lord Jim (1900) was innovative above all for its shift of voices: the omniscient narrator yields to Marlow, who proves far more modest in his understanding. Set again in the Malay Archipelago, it narrates the story of the Patna, a ship bound for Mecca and abandoned at night by its crew (among them Jim) in fear of sinking. The Patna does not sink, however; the crew is prosecuted for negligence; and Jim, vilified and pursued by shame through the publicity of the case, refuses the return to society that Marlow offers him, until Marlow at last settles him as a trade representative on a remote island. The book is Conrad at his highest pitch: the riveting prose, the narrative architecture, the construction of Jim's complex and contradictory character, the questions of free will and responsibility and its principal character's tragic role. It was no bestseller, but London's literary elite recognised what had arrived.

Conrad's career straddles the seam between two ages. The Victorian world made him: its ethic of duty, seamanship, and restraint is the very standard against which Jim is measured. His greatest novels are nonetheless Edwardian products, written into a decade of imperial anxiety, anarchist bombs, and mounting doubt about the civilisational project, their irony knowing, urban, disenchanted. He judged the new century with instruments forged on sailing ships the steam age had made obsolete, which is why his characters so often fail: the code survives, but the world that sustained it has gone.

Nostromo (1904), arguably Conrad's finest long work, was poorly received, which wounded him immensely, as Conrad remained highly sensitive to how his work was received. Set in Costaguana, a fictitious Latin American republic ravaged by constant violence and political unrest, it braids heroism, politics, ethics, and the cycles of history, describing with rare precision the relationship between the colonial elite and capitalism, and the weight of the United States upon Latin America, a pointed critique of American imperial adventurism, written at the century's dawn. And it is Nostromo, more than any other book, that explains why Conrad's most demanding modern reader kept returning to him.

That reader was Edward Said, who counted two great intellectual presences in his life, Bach and Conrad—a cantus firmus against which everything else was counterpoint and who saw in Conrad the predecessor of Naipaul and Rushdie, the first great narrator of exile. For Said, Nostromo was a relentlessly open-ended, aggressively critical inquiry into the mechanisms, presuppositions, and abuses of imperialism; his complaint was Conrad's lack of political action: the tacit acceptance that colonialism was inevitable, the inability to imagine a non-European world on its own terms. Chinua Achebe, in his 1975 Chancellor's Lecture at Amherst, went further: Heart of Darkness, far from being the anti-imperialist masterpiece the Western canon takes it to be, reduces Africa to "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity", "the other world," a darkness against which European interiority can be lit. He anticipated the standard defence: the layered narration, with a frame narrator enclosing Marlow, creates ironic distance and rejects it; the device grants Marlow only "limited liability." Achebe's critics reply that using Africa as a mirror for European self-delusion is the book's purpose, not its failure; the honest verdict is perhaps that Conrad was at once anti-imperialist and imperialist, clear-eyed enough to condemn empire's rapacity yet unable to grant the colonised a narrative future; critiquing the practice of empire from within without ever escaping it. That the debate still burns—that Coppola could transplant the novella whole into Vietnam as Apocalypse Now—is itself the measure of the work; the blank spaces on Marlow's map still stand for our unsolved mysteries.

Conrad's clairvoyance did not stop at empire. He saw terrorism coming, too. The Secret Agent (1907) turns to placid imperial London: Adolf Verloc, a seedy Soho shopkeeper, at once nominal anarchist and paid embassy informer, is ordered to stage a senseless bombing of the Greenwich Observatory, an attack meant to overthrow not merely government but faith in science itself. He enlists his wife's disabled brother Stevie, who is blown to pieces. Verloc sees himself as a respectable man; the narrator, in famous deadpan irony, does not, treating radical and reactionary politics alike as mirror images of vanity and self-deception; humanity is tainted by corruption at every station. Under Western Eyes (1911) carries the theme to St. Petersburg: Razumov, a solitary student who wants only a quiet career under the autocracy, finds the revolutionary Haldin hiding in his rooms after assassinating a minister, and betrays him to the police. The novel is written against Dostoevsky, with Crime and Punishment as its target. Conrad inverts the narrative: Raskolnikov murders from a theory and is redeemed through suffering and faith; Razumov betrays from conformity and ends in deafness and ruin, with no grace offered.

Port After Stormie Seas

On Conrad's grave in Canterbury stand two lines of Spenser:

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

Why, then, read Conrad? Because no writer earned his material more dearly; the savoir-faire of the master mariner and the couleur locale of four continents were not researched but lived, three lives folded into one Odyssean journey from Berdychiv to Canterbury. Because he uniquely enlarged both the techniques of the novel: the shifting voices, the impressionist fragments, the refusal of one exclusive meaning and the fates of its characters, who are tested, like Jim and Kayerts and Razumov, at the exact point where the high organisation of civilised crowds falls away. Because he saw, before the century did, what empire, terrorism, and revolution would make of it, and described them in an adopted language with a precision most native writers never reach. That is why we still ship out with him.

Words: Burak Ömer is a financial markets professional based in Belgium. He previously studied applied mathematics & philosophy.

Kabul offered Shayeq an opportunity to put his Jadid education to work for a reforming Muslim state. Afghanistan lay beyond the movement's principal centres, but its court had already begun drawing on teachers, writers, and technical specialists from elsewhere in the Muslim world. Between the Russian and British empires, Afghan rulers sought to preserve their autonomy while acquiring the knowledge and institutions needed to strengthen the country.

The revolutions of 1917 and the upheavals that followed changed the political world in which the Jadids worked. Some entered new governments and Soviet institutions, hoping to advance their educational and cultural programmes. Their room for independent action subsequently narrowed, and many were eventually imprisoned or killed in the Stalinist purges. Afghanistan followed a different course after securing control over its foreign affairs in 1919. Its reformers developed a constitutional framework, expanded modern schooling, and recruited expertise from abroad. Kabul became a meeting place for exiled intellectuals, Ottoman officers, and others displaced by collapsing empires.

Shayeq was one of the intellectuals who helped shape this changing Afghanistan. Trained in Bukhara’s madrasas and Istanbul’s institutions of higher education, he came to Kabul as a diplomat and stayed to work in education, editing, and literature. In 1932, he published Panzdah Sal Qabl, an early work of modern Afghan short fiction.

Early Formation: From Bukhara to Istanbul

Born Muhammad Hashim in Marghilan in 1886, Shayeq was the son of Damla Muhammad Yaqub Mukhlis. His family moved to Bukhara while he was young, where he studied at the Divan Begi and Mir Arab madrasas; the latter had been a centre of Islamic learning since its construction in the 1530s under the Uzbek Khan Ubaydullah Khan Shaybani. There, Shayeq studied Arabic, Persian, Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), logic, and theology, and became a hafiz (memoriser) of the Quran.

It was in Bukhara that the Jadid movement, which spread rapidly through Turkestan under the influence of Ismail Gasprinsky's Usul-i Jadid (‘The New Method’) and local reformers like Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy and Munavvar Qori, reached him. Gasprinsky’s new method became the intellectual spine of an entire generation's ambitions: the conviction that Islamic civilisation could renew itself only through reformed schooling, a living press, and a literature that spoke to the present rather than only the past. In Bukhara, Behbudiy's publication Ayina, published out of Samarkand, was the movement's sharpest voice, circulating through Turkestan as both journal and manifesto. Shayeq was among its readers and correspondents. In issue 12 of 1913, on the final pages of the magazine, a published reply appears, headed Javob Buxoroda janob Shoiqqa!, meaning "Reply to Shayeq in Bukhara!", responding to his complaint that his copies and books had not been reaching him. Behbudiy's editorial office answered with characteristic directness, suggesting that someone along the postal route might have been helping himself to what was not his.

It is a small exchange, almost comic in its mundanity, but it places Shayeq squarely inside the Jadid network, not as a sympathiser at the margins but as someone whose name was already known to the editors of the movement's principal journal, and to whom books were being dispatched as a matter of course.

In Tashkent, meanwhile, Munavvar Qori, whose reformist energy would later be channelled into building the foundations of modern Uzbek education, expressed the same urgency in a different register: plainer, more organisational, no less determined. In fact, archival materials in the Alisher Navoi Library in Tashkent confirm Shayeq's close correspondence with Behbudiy, one of the movement's foremost leaders. The Jadids regarded him as one of their own trained cadres and, in 1911, the Jadid society chapter Tarbiyayi Atfol selected him specifically for advanced study in Istanbul, a selection that was less a scholarship than a commission, an investment the movement fully intended to reclaim.

Between Istanbul and the Caucasus

When Hashim Shayeq arrived in Istanbul in 1911, the city was still being reshaped by the constitutional revolution of 1908, in which the Committee of Union and Progress had played a leading role. The committee’s influence grew amid political conflict, and it consolidated its hold on government in 1913. After seven years of education at the higher Pedagogical Institute in Istanbul, he returned through the Caucasus in 1918, as the First World War was coming to an end.

On that journey, Hashim Shayeq spent time in Baku at the request of local notables, where he taught the children of the elite, bought the 400 volumes that became his first library, and quietly started a family. There, as in Afghanistan, the Jadid movement tried to build a modern state in Azerbaijan. The Jadids in Bukhara, however, insisted on his eventual return, since they had sent him to Turkey to gain a higher education for exactly that purpose. Naturally indebted to them for his schooling, he obeyed their call, but it also meant he would never return to Baku for his first wife, his young daughter Fayeqa Yaqubzada, or his books, as the movement did not want him to leave Bukhara again. They could not let their investment in him be lost, and this familial separation would shape much of his inner life. 

In September 1920, the Red Army took Bukhara after shelling its historic citadel. The last Bukharan amir, Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan, fled east and reached Afghanistan in 1921, where King Amanullah Khan gave him refuge. In October 1920, the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic was proclaimed, and Jadid reformers entered its government.

The Jadids, sensing an opportunity, set about to form a government in the new Bukhara People’s Soviet Republic, believing compromise with the Communists was possible—at least to buy time. Shayeq would serve briefly as its Minister of Foreign Affairs and acting Minister of Education. In the breathing space of that fragile new state, itself in spirit a Jadid project, Shayeq had formally asked Turkey for military instructors for the new state’s officers and army, and had opened his house to various Muslim reformers passing through the city. Munavvar Qori had stayed several days to draw on his judgement as a pedagogy specialist, wanting to know how the new method might be carried across the schools of Turkestan. 

The young republic would not have time to see his plans take root.

In the autumn of 1921, in what proved to be his last months in the city, a notable visitor arrived at his Bukhara home. Enver Pasha, the Young Turk commander and former Ottoman Minister of War, arrived via Baku and Ashgabat with a few of his old Union and Progress companions. Ottoman instructors had been drilling the troops of Amir Habibullah, Amanullah's father, since 1912; an Ottoman colonel ran the war college in Kabul, and from 1909 the Afghan army had been reorganised along visibly Ottoman lines. Enver stayed for 10 days in Shayeq's home before crossing into eastern Bukhara to join the Basmachi resistance against the Bolsheviks. Their weapons came from King Amanullah, whom Enver meant to install at the head of a confederation of Chinese Turkestan, Afghanistan, and Turkey as part of his pan-Turkic and Islamic ambitions.

That same year Shayeq was sent to Kabul as the plenipotentiary minister and ambassador extraordinary of Bukhara, becoming the last independent diplomatic voice of his country on Afghan soil. There he rejoined Muhammad Sharif Khoja, an old friend from his Bukhara madrasa days and his student years in Istanbul, who served as consul. The Kabul to which he had been posted was less a foreign capital than the southern terminus of the intellectual world he had spent his life within.

For more than a decade before his arrival, the Afghan court had quietly been receiving men of Shayeq’s milieu. One such reformer was Mahmud Tarzi, who would later become Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister and was widely remembered as the ‘father of Afghan journalism’. Amir Abdur Rahman Khan had driven Tarzi’s family into exile in the 1880s. Tarzi returned to Afghanistan in the early 1900s, after more than two decades abroad, bringing experience of the intellectual and political life of the Ottoman world.

For decades, Tarzi had encouraged skilled Ottoman exiles, especially those in Egypt, to immigrate to help reform Afghanistan. His ceaseless activism helped to draw printers, military instructors, doctors, engineers, and scholars to the city. By the time Shayeq arrived in 1921, some three dozen Ottoman technocrats had passed through Kabul; several remained to serve the kingdom. Shayeq entered the capital at an auspicious time, when his education and network had immediate value.

The Afghan state that received these reformers was still being consolidated. Amir Abdur Rahman Khan had reigned from 1880 to 1901 and had spent two decades welding a scatter of tribal and regional powers into a single centralised state. He installed governors who answered to Kabul rather than lineage, built the first ministries and a standing army, and brought religious endowments under state control to curb the clergy's independent power. The state Abdur Rahman strengthened was coercive, but his reign substantially extended Kabul’s authority over regional and tribal powers and laid the foundations his successors would build on.

His elder son, Habibullah Khan, succeeded him in 1901 and governed with a lighter hand, opening cautious windows onto the modern world: in 1903 he founded the country's first modern secondary school, the Lycée Habibia, modelled on the Aligarh College of British India and staffed in its early years by Indian and Ottoman teachers, a school in whose classrooms Shayeq would one day teach.

The Ottoman influx had been in the making for a long time. Nasrullah Khan, Habibullah's younger brother, is often remembered as a conservative opponent of reform, but on the Ottoman question he was one of Tarzi's steadier allies at court. Tarzi had sought to recruit Ottoman experts since his return to Afghanistan, but his early approaches met with little success; when his letter finally reached then-CUP exiles in Cairo (at the time, as opponents of then-Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II), Habibullah's long stay in India delayed the answer. It was Nasrullah, deputising for his brother in the winter of 1907, who took it up and backed it, and Tarzi wrote to Cairo that the vice-regent believed no nation but the Ottomans could help Afghanistan in its ascent and progress. 

Consolidating Power

In February 1919, Habibullah was assassinated, and Nasrullah was declared the new emir of Afghanistan at Jalalabad. His reign lasted a mere week. Habibullah's son Amanullah launched a coup against his uncle, secured Kabul, the treasury, and the army, and took the crown. Nasrullah was arrested and died in prison the following year.

Amanullah inherited educational initiatives begun under Habibullah and sought to expand them after taking power in 1919. Under Habibullah, the court had supported both the Habibia and religious institutions, including madrasas drawing on scholars associated with Deoband. These approaches placed different emphasis on religious learning, modern subjects, and the organisation of schooling. Their coexistence in Kabul created opportunities for education, but also disagreements over its purposes and direction.

Within months of his accession, Amanullah had fought the British Empire to a standstill in the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, and, by the treaty signed at Rawalpindi in the summer of 1919, won the right to conduct his own foreign affairs. By November 1921, when Shayeq presented his credentials in Kabul, the British were about to formally seal the deal with a ‘treaty of friendship’, signed in the small palace of Otaq-e Zarnegar, on the edge of the old Murad Khani quarter. The 1919 settlement restored Afghanistan’s full control over its foreign affairs; the Anglo-Afghan treaty of 1921 reaffirmed its independence and established a new basis for relations with Britain. Earlier that same year, in Moscow, Afghanistan also concluded its first treaty with Mustafa Kemal's Turkish nationalist movement, formalising a relationship Tarzi's circle had quietly cultivated for 15 years. The Bukharan-Afghan tie that Shayeq represented was a third axis of an emerging post-imperial constellation of Muslim states.

Bukhara’s new republic offered the Jadids a brief chance to govern, but their room to act narrowed under Soviet control. The Soviets removed many Jadid officials in 1923, and dissolved the republic in 1924. Shayeq’s diplomatic career in Kabul gave way to a longer career in Afghan education, where he was working by 1923. Biographical accounts describe him considering a move to Turkey and Amanullah asking him to remain because Afghanistan needed his knowledge and experience. Kabul became his new home.

Although their dreams for Bukhara were dashed, the Jadid circle that had emerged from that city did not stop working. In June 1923, one member, Zeki Velidi Togan, arrived in Kabul and immediately sought out his former colleagues: Shayeq, Osman Kocaoğlu, the former head of the Bukharan government, Mirza Husamuddin and others. Over three days at the end of June, they plotted together on how to take their work forward. They agreed that Mustafa Shokay would represent Turkestan in Europe and, if the Afghan government permitted, Shayeq would do so in Japan. Shokay, already living in France, continued campaigning for Turkestani independence. In December 1929, he began publishing the journal Yash Turkistan in Berlin. Shayeq remained in Kabul, where his proposed journey to Japan never took place.

Amanullah also helped arrange Shayeq’s marriage to Rabia Ziya’i, the daughter of his cousin Sardar Azizullah Khan Qatil, a poet and member of the royal family who also served as Afghan ambassador to Iran. The marriage connected Shayeq to the Afghan royal dynasty. He and Rabia would raise five daughters: Nafisa, Sajia, Nazifa, Saliqa and Khalida, and a son, Abdul Makin, who died in infancy.

Afghanistan's Brief Moment in the Sun

By 1923, Kabul was feverishly building the institutional skeleton of a modern state, building on the prior decade's work and renewed by the influx of intellectual and technical talent from across the Muslim world. An Educational Council that included the Ottoman cartoonist Mehmed Fazli alongside Indian and Afghan members had drafted the first Habibia regulations in 1913, inaugurated five primary schools, and opened the country's first teacher-training college. The Dar Al-Ta'lif, the bureau of compilation and translation that Hashim Shayeq would soon head, was part of this Ottoman-influenced machine of educational reform. The pace of change would, however, prove to be too fast, and in some instances, too radical for either the conservative components of Afghanistan or even the Jadids themselves.

For the next three decades, Shayeq worked across Afghanistan’s educational institutions. He advised the Ministry of Education, led the Dar Al-Ta’lif, and held senior roles in education and pedagogy. He taught at the Lycée Habibia, Kabul University’s Faculty of Letters, and institutions for women’s higher education. Modern schooling in Afghanistan preceded his arrival, but he became an important contributor to its development, helping prepare curricula, train students, and bring modern pedagogical ideas into teaching.

In Afghanistan, Shayeq could pursue educational reform with state support. Many Jadids in Turkestan had worked under censorship and restrictions on their schools. Under Amanullah, reformers could instead put educational ideas into law. The Basic Codes of the High State of Afghanistan, issued in the early 1920s with Turkish assistance, described the structure of a constitutional monarchy and the rights and duties of its citizens. The government avoided calling it a constitution and being mistaken for a replacement for sharia, which would have provoked conservative opposition. 

The government also planned compulsory schooling for children aged six to 11 and sent promising students abroad to Europe, including female students. This became one of Amanullah's signature policies and drove later events. At the urging of Queen Soraya and her mother, Asma Rasmiya (Tarzi's wife and a tireless champion of women's education), two girls' schools were inaugurated in 1921 alone, three months apart, on opposite banks of the Kabul River. Amanullah also began building Dar Al-Aman, a new capital intended to give his programme an architectural form. These ambitions created the institutions in which Shayeq could work, though the state still had to negotiate religious opposition and limited resources.

In May 1924, the Afghan Ministry of Education revived an earlier magazine titled Ayna-i Irfan, or “Mirror of Gnosis,” with Shayeq as publisher and editor. The periodical began in 1919 as Mo’arref-e Ma’aref and ceased publication in 1922. Under Shayeq, its renewed pages brought readers work on science, philosophy, education, and literature. Readers were introduced to various scientific debates and ideas, philosophy, and literature; they discovered the work of thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, alongside writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens, many for the first time. At the head of every issue, he printed the same hemistich: "I press steel and turn it into mirrors."

Many of his articles and translations appeared under pen names, most often Mukhlis-zada, a name derived from his father's honorific, and sometimes Sharif or Sharif Mukhlis-zada. He also revived the annual Urs-i Bidil gatherings honouring Mirza Abdul Qadir Bidil, the celebrated Indo-Persian poet of Mughal India, helping sustain a culture of poetry, literary discussion, and remembrance.

At his home, Shayeq hosted students and scholars for nights of reading, poetry, discussion, and dinners. His circle included the scholar and thinker Salahuddin Saljuqi, with whom he co-authored a book on literary rules; the poets Malik Al-Shu'ara (‘king of the poets’) Qari Abdullah and Ustad Abdul Haq Bitab; the painter and polymath Professor Ghulam Muhammad Maimanghi and Ustad Khalilullah Khalili, who became one of his closest friends. He also maintained warm scholarly ties with the Iranian literary scholars Said Nafisi and Ali Asghar Hekmat. 

Radicalism and Regression

Amanullah’s reform programme had expanded over much of the 1920s, including schools for girls and a constitutional framework for the state. After his tour of Europe and the Middle East between 1927 and 1928, he announced a more ambitious programme covering education, dress, marriage, and religious authority. Some measures were proposed or contested rather than fully implemented. The speed and symbolism of this new phase alarmed some advisers and opponents.

The rebellion that followed cannot be explained by social reform alone. Tax collection, conscription, the loss of tribal subsidies, and the extension of central authority also threatened established interests. Religious and social objections became powerful arguments against the king, but the groups that rose against him were often more directly affected by these political and economic changes. His government could not hold together the support needed to carry its reforms through.

In November 1928, Shinwari Pashtun tribesmen rose against the government; rebels attacked Jalalabad and destroyed the royal palace there. Meanwhile, Habibullah Kalakani, a former soldier known as Bacha-i Saqao, advanced towards Kabul from the north. Amanullah began withdrawing reforms in January 1929, but could not recover sufficient support. On January 14, he abdicated in favour of his brother Inayatullah, whose reign lasted only three days before Kalakani took power in Kabul. Amanullah withdrew to Kandahar and later attempted to regain the throne. After that campaign failed, he crossed into British India on May 23, 1929 and subsequently settled in Italy.

Kalakani held Kabul for around nine months. Another aspirant to the throne, Nadir Khan, had served Amanullah as Sipah-i-Salar, commander of the armies, before falling out with the king's circle over the pace of reform and being sent (rather, exiled) to France as royal envoy. He returned in February 1929, gathered support from several tribes, and marched on Kabul in October. Kalakani was captured and executed, and Nadir took the throne. He then turned on leading figures from Amanullah’s government. Muhammad Wali Khan Darwazi, the former vice-regent, and Mahmud Sami Beg, the Ottoman officer who had commanded the Kabul region, were accused of aiding Kalakani and tried for treason. Sami was executed; Darwazi’s death sentence was commuted to eight years’ imprisonment. Darwazi was subsequently executed in 1933.

Shayeq was summoned for interrogation, partly because of his close friendship with the former vice-regent Muhammad Wali Khan Darwazi, who had been charged with treason, and partly because he had attended a reception held in honour of Kalakani. Darwazi was an important connection to Amanullah’s court. In his memoirs, Zeki Velidi Togan recalled sending Shayeq an essay on social revolution in the East and subsequently giving a copy to Muhammad Wali Khan. The exchange places Shayeq within a network through which political ideas circulated between exiled Turkestani intellectuals and Afghan officials. Shayeq was interrogated by armed men and gave carefully written testimony, was eventually cleared, and escaped what could have been a fatal accusation.

Nadir Khan kept the girls' schools shut, but allowed male education to continue—albeit under the control of a clerical body of his choosing. He saw the value of a modern education, but was wary of keeping conservatives on his side to secure his grip on power. This, however, meant Shayeq could continue his educational activities in Afghanistan, with some restrictions. He would do so for another 25 years.

Years earlier, in Siraj Al-Akhbar, Tarzi had argued for learning from European science and technology while considering how they could take root in Afghanistan. His distinction between useful knowledge and imitation of outward appearances offers one way to assess Amanullah’s later programme: adopting European dress and public habits could not, by itself, create the institutions that sustained them. Measured against that, much of what came in 1928 was exactly that: symbols of progress, a cinema in the capital and the fixation on dress, which took the efforts and resources that the country's economic development did not. Fyodor Raskolnikov, the Soviet envoy to Afghanistan, concluded that the programme's fundamental flaw was that it had been built without an economic basis.

Mustafa Shokay, whom the Kabul meeting of 1923 had sent to represent Turkestan in Europe, also wrote that Amanullah had chosen to follow in the footsteps of Mustafa Kemal and forgotten that the Turks had been in contact with Europe for centuries and their governing class Europeanised long since, that Turkey had known no tribal regime but a reasonably ordered apparatus of power, and that Kemal had an army loyal to him, none of which Afghanistan possessed at that time. On one side, Shokay wrote, stood a king-reformer who took the Afghans for a single political organism; on the other stood tribes who could comprehend the state only through tribal interest, defended in the name of the sacred Sharia. Kemal himself, according to the British minister in Kabul, agreed with this analysis.

Schools, books, and the press were central to the Jadid project, but the movement did not follow a single political path. Some reformers concentrated on teaching and cultural renewal; others, particularly after 1917, pursued revolutionary politics and sought to remake institutions through government. Afghanistan offered Shayeq a setting where he could continue his educational work, even as reform's fortunes depended on the state’s ability to sustain political support.

From Statesman to a Pioneer of Afghan Letters

After surviving the political upheaval of 1928, Shayeq continued to work in education, and Ayna-i Irfan also gave him a place in Afghan literature. Jadid ambitions for modernisation were compelled to retreat to the sequestered realm of poetry and ideas, rather than a political programme of modernisation.

In 1932, under the pen name Mukhlis-zada, he published the short story Panzdah Sal Qabl, which translates as "Fifteen Years Ago," in Ayna-i Irfan. This work is widely recognised as the first modern short story in Afghan literature, a pioneering piece of realistic prose that blended personal memory, social observation, and psychological insight. He later wrote two other short stories, Bist-u-Siwwum-i Mizan and the unfinished Khiyal, as well as the earlier story-like piece Natija-yi Tahsil, published under the same pen name.

The story opens on a tender spring morning with the courtyard still bearing traces of winter snow and a young boy sharing breakfast with his mother by the orsi (window). She sighs, gives him money for bread and raisins, and announces she is sending him to study with the mullah. The boy's mix of confusion, childish resistance, fleeting daydreams of himself in a white turban and fine black chapan like the students he had seen in the lane, and his eventual acceptance, unfolds with gentle humour and emotional depth. Through elegant, restrained first-person prose, Shayeq captured the bittersweet passage from innocence into the world of knowledge, themes rooted deeply in his own Jadid formation.

Shayeq was also the first writer in Afghanistan to write literary criticism in the modern sense. His essay Munaqqid kist, intiqad chist?, which translates as "Who is the Critic and What is Criticism?" and which was published in the fourth issue of Ayna-i Irfan, opened a tradition of scholarly literary debate that Afghan letters had not previously known.

A Life and Legacy

Shayeq died in Kabul on September 16, 1954, after an illness involving liver disease and high blood pressure. His student Muhammad Rahim Ilham recalled that he continued preparing lectures even during his final illness. The poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili sat beside him in his last days. Shayeq asked Khalili to inscribe his tombstone and bury him at Qol-e Abchakan, on the northern side of Koh-e Asmai above Kabul. Asked why, he said the air from Bukhara would reach him there sooner.

When news of his death reached the Faculty of Letters, students walked to his house. An old man at the door called on them as Shayeq's "spiritual sons" to carry their teacher's coffin. Students, officials, scholars, and writers joined the procession to his grave.

Khalili composed a marthiya (a eulegic poem) for him, of which these are some lines:

Khufta injā Hāshim-i Shāyiq ki dar fazl u 'amal
Qarn-hā shud mādar-i gītī qarīn-i vay nazād
Khānqāh-i Mawlavī rā ākharīn sham'-i umīd
Darsgāh-i Bū 'Alī rā vāpasīn barq-i murād
Rāzdān-i Fakhr-i Rāzī dar umūr-i falsafa
Rah-shinās-i Bū Hanīfa dar maqām-i ijtihād
Az Bukhārā tā ba Kābul v-az Harī tā Kāshghar
Chashm-i arbāb-i nazar gardīd az ū rawshan savād…

Here sleeps Hashim Shayeq, in knowledge and deed
For centuries the mother of the world bore none like him.
The last candle of hope in Mawlana's khanqah,
The final spark of desire in Bu Ali's school.
Knower of Razi's secrets in philosophy,
Guide on Abu Hanifa's path of ijtihad.
From Bukhara to Kabul, from Herat to Kashgar,
The eyes of the perceptive were illuminated by him
(Translation by Younus Ejazi)

In the late 1960s, Shayeq's eldest daughter from his first marriage, Fayeqa Yaqubzada, travelled from Azerbaijan to Kabul and met her Afghan half-sisters for the first time. She had earned a doctorate in early childhood education. She brought a sketch her mother had drawn of Fayeqa's hands when she was one year old. The drawing preserved a link between the family in Baku and the life Shayeq built after he could not return.

The Jadid quest cost many of his closest companions their lives. His own younger brother Naim Yaqubzada, who had taken no part in politics and worked only as a merchant, was arrested in the Soviet purges and shot in Tashkent on September 26, 1937. Their elderly mother spent the rest of her life writing to government offices, asking after a son who, she did not know, was already in the ground.

Shayeq's eldest Afghan daughter, Nafisa Shayeq Mobarez, who inherited her father's reformist spirit, founded the pioneering women's magazine Mirman (Pashto for Lady) and later served in senior government roles.

Shayeq's journey from Bukhara through Istanbul to Kabul joined three kinds of work: teaching, editing, and writing. Exile brought him to Afghanistan, but the schools and journals he helped develop gave his Jadid education a new home. He spent decades preparing curricula, teaching students, publishing prose, and opening his house to others who came to learn. His legacy rests in those institutions and relationships, as well as in the stories and criticism he wrote. The young diplomat who could not return to Bukhara helped make Kabul a place where a new generation could study, argue, and write. At least, for a time.

His life also reveals the varied paths Muslim reformers took in the early twentieth century. Imperial domination, war, revolution, and exile altered both their opportunities and their methods. Educational reform could proceed through classrooms and journals, but its survival also depended on political alliances, institutional resources, and governments' changing priorities. Shayeq’s decades in Afghanistan show how that work could endure, even when the wider political ambitions surrounding it had been defeated.

This history has largely been lost, but efforts have been ongoing, especially in post-Soviet Central Asia, to painstakingly bring together the fragments that remain of this crucial history, to give us a truer insight into what happened, and why the world is as it is today. Perhaps, by remembering this history, we may also break out of many false dichotomies that have hindered reform and uncover new potential alternatives for the near future.

Words: Younus Ejazi was raised in Kabul and is based in Germany, where he works as a software engineer on AI and cloud systems. He is also the great-grandson of Hashim Shayeq Afandi. 

Acknowledgements

This essay was written with the assistance of archival and biographical materials consulted from the following sources:

• Dr Nilab Mobarez, Hashim Shayeq's granddaughter and the former Chairperson and Secretary General of the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) based in Kabul, for consultation and family recollections.

• Sayyid Abdul Hakim Shar'ee Jawzjani (one of Hashim Shayeq's last students), Pages from the Life of the Great Scholar Ustad Hashim Shayeq Afandi, translated from Uzbek into Dari by Rahim Ibrahim (Stockholm: Babur Cultural Society). Dari: Safahātī az zindagī-yi 'allāma ustād Hāshim Shāyiq Afandī

Further Reading

• Faiz Ahmed, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
• Wali Ahmadi, “Fiction, ii(g): In Afghanistan,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 1999 (updated 2013).
• Nile Green, ed., Afghanistan in Ink: Literature Between Diaspora and Nation (London: Hurst, 2012).
• Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969).
• Ahmed-Waleed Kakar, "Afghanistan's Century of Politicised Education," The Afghan Eye, 21 December 2022.
• M. Hasan Kakar, Government and Society in Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir ʿAbd al-Rahman Khan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).
• Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
• Mohammad Hossein Mohammadi, “Contemporary Fiction in Afghanistan,” PEN/Opp, 8 June 2022.
• Senzil Nawid, Religious Response to Social Change in Afghanistan, 1919–29: King Aman-Allah and the Afghan ʿUlama (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1999).
• Michael B. O'Sullivan, "'The Little Brother of the Ottoman State': Ottoman Technocrats in Kabul and Afghanistan's Development in the Ottoman Imagination, 1908–23," Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 6 (2016): 1846–1887.
• Leon B. Poullada, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 1919–1929 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973).
• Thomas Ruttig and Andrei Plastun, "A Garden and a Tomb in Kabul (2): The Fate of the Last Amir of Bukhara and His Country's Relations with Afghanistan," Afghanistan Analysts Network.
• Bilal Sabbagh, Oil Barons, Jadid Reformers, & the First Azerbaijan Republic, Kasurian.
• Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).
• May Schinasi, Afghanistan at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Nationalism and Journalism in Afghanistan (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1979).
• May Schinasi (trans. R. D. McChesney), Kabul: A History 1773–1948 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
• M. Mobin Shorish, “Education, xxvii: In Afghanistan,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 1997 (updated 2016).
• Yana Zurayeva, The Jadid's Quest for Reform, Kasurian.

Romania offered an established production base close to customers in Europe’s large car market, with suppliers already serving Renault’s factory. Then Morocco’s prime minister, Driss Jettou, asked to see Ghosn. In Ghosn’s later account, Jettou came for coffee and made a direct proposition: don’t put the next factory in Eastern Europe; put it in Morocco instead. The Moroccan state would do what was necessary to make the project competitive.

Morocco’s small domestic market offered Renault little room to grow, and its supplier network was much thinner than those around the company’s European factories. Jettou had to persuade Ghosn that the country could support production on a scale it had never attempted. He offered state support to put the conditions for large-scale production in place. Renault would become the anchor of an export industry, with public investment organised around the factory and the suppliers it could attract.

Renault and the Moroccan authorities signed the protocol of intent in September 2007 in the presence of King Mohammed VI. The company established Renault Tanger Méditerranée the following year and began production in 2012. By 2024, Morocco’s automotive exports were worth about US$15.9 billion and roughly a third of Moroccan goods exports. Renault and Stellantis now operate alongside hundreds of suppliers, with factories extending from Casablanca to Tangier. The Tanger Med port handled more than 600,000 vehicles that year. Morocco is now Africa’s largest producer of passenger cars.

The result was one of the few industrial policy success stories of the 21st century. However, it also shows the limits of industrial policy in achieving structural transformation and broader developmental gains across Morocco’s economy and society.

Why Morocco’s First Automotive Industry Stalled

Morocco had tried to manufacture cars before. The Société Marocaine de Construction Automobile (SOMACA) was founded in Casablanca in 1959 as a mixed-ownership assembler, with the Moroccan state and foreign manufacturers among its shareholders. It initially assembled licensed Fiat, Renault, Austin and Opel models, among others. Output reached roughly 30,000 vehicles a year in the mid-1970s. Morocco pursued import-substitution industrialisation through a protected domestic market, where short manufacturing runs gave international suppliers little incentive to establish local production. The limited scale left little room for specialised component firms to develop, while manufacturers lacked the engineering workforce and logistics needed for large export orders. Liberalisation between the 1970s and 1990s exposed the model’s fragility, while cheaper imported used cars further pressured domestic production.

Renault gradually took control of SOMACA from 2003, turning the existing Casablanca operation towards export production. Renault reported output of about 10,000 vehicles at SOMACA in 2005 and projected that it would approach 100,000 in 2024, with two-thirds exported to around 70 destinations globally.

The larger change came at Melloussa, near Tanger Med, where Renault Tanger Méditerranée built a new factory to serve overseas markets from the outset. Its scale required a supplier base and workforce that could reliably meet export orders.

Building an Automotive Ecosystem

Morocco’s proximity to Europe and lower labour costs gave Renault reasons to consider investing. By the time negotiations began, the government was already developing the institutions and infrastructure that could support an export factory.

For the port and surrounding industrial development, the government created a dedicated institution. Established in 2002, the Tanger Med Special Agency (TMSA) received public powers over the port and its free zones. Its remit encompassed raising finance and developing and operating the industrial and logistics zones alongside the port. This placed responsibility for the sites manufacturers would occupy and the infrastructure serving them within the same organisation.

Coordination extended beyond TMSA. A World Bank study of Tangier describes the regional governor, the king’s representative, coordinating national public agencies, with regular meetings bringing public bodies and business representatives together. The study identifies technical capacity within the agencies as another contribution to implementation.

TMSA brought in specialist expertise through international procurement. In 2003, it awarded the first phase of port construction to a consortium comprising Bouygues, its Moroccan subsidiary Bymaro and Saipem. The contract covered design and construction, allowing the agency to draw on the contractors’ marine-engineering expertise. Experienced businesses also took responsibility for terminal operations: a 30-year concession awarded in 2005 brought together APM Terminals and Morocco’s Akwa Group, with the concessionaire investing in terminal equipment and facilities. Morocco was building its ability to commission and coordinate a complex project while drawing on internationally available expertise.

Morocco had an established national railway operator, the Office National des Chemins de Fer (ONCF), which had managed its network since 1963. Its responsibilities included building new lines and operating passenger and freight services. The government could therefore commission the port and factory connections through an existing organisation with railway experience. ONCF’s financing records show successive state capital contributions towards the Tanger Med connection, with funding also allocated specifically to connect Renault’s factory to the network.

Tanger Med connected Renault’s Melloussa factory and its suppliers to European markets. Finished vehicles travel by rail to a dedicated terminal and onto ships serving European distribution networks, with some European ports reachable in under 48 hours. Coordinating transport, customs and production schedules made Morocco’s proximity commercially useful. In 2024, the port shipped 368,843 vehicles from Renault’s Moroccan plants and 170,519 from Stellantis at Kenitra.

The state also committed capital to the manufacturing venture. In 2009, the public financial institution Caisse de Dépôt et de Gestion (CDG), through its subsidiary Fipar, took a 47.6% stake in Renault Tanger Méditerranée, the company holding the project’s industrial assets. Renault retained the majority stake and responsibility for operating the factory. CDG sold its holding to Renault at the end of 2014, after the plant had entered production.

Workforce preparation followed a similar division of responsibilities. The Moroccan state financed the automotive training institute, while Renault designed it and managed its operation under a delegated public-service arrangement. The institute opened in 2011, before factory production began in 2012, allowing training to develop around the plant’s requirements. A financing agreement with the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), France’s development agency, also supported centres serving automotive suppliers in Tangier and Kenitra, extending the programme beyond Renault’s own workforce.

By October 2013, the institute had trained more than 4,500 young people since mid-2011. The institute tested recruits in mathematics, French and manual dexterity before directing them into production jobs, including welding and painting. The four-week programme described at the time trained groups of 200–250 people for specific production jobs, including work at suppliers such as SNOP and Valeo. Training continued as the factory developed: by 2022, the institute had delivered more than 2.6 million training hours, and workers had acquired skills in robot maintenance and vehicle electronics.

Morocco’s trade agreements allowed factories to serve markets far larger than its domestic economy. The European Union (EU)–Morocco Association Agreement, in force from 2000, gave Moroccan industrial goods tariff-free access to Europe while Morocco phased out its own industrial tariffs over 12 years. Its agreement with the United States entered into force in 2006. Rules of origin determined whether vehicles qualified for preferential tariffs, making component sourcing part of the export strategy.

From Anchor Firm to Industrial Cluster

Renault’s commitment gave suppliers a large customer around which to plan their own investments. Firms making components such as seats and wiring could establish operations near the assembly plant, helping build a supplier base other carmakers could also use.

Morocco drew on its experience with Renault to attract Peugeot’s parent group, now part of Stellantis, which signed an agreement with the government in 2015. On the Atlantic industrial corridor north of Rabat, the planned Kenitra plant would extend the industry’s reach, with plans for a research and development (R&D) centre and suppliers nearby.

The government continued negotiating with Renault as the production base expanded. Their 2016 ecosystem agreement set a target of 65% local integration by 2023 and included commitments to increase purchases of Moroccan-made components for Renault’s factories at home and abroad. The ministry and the company later published a progress report, making supplier development an explicit part of their ongoing partnership.

The Tangier factory produced its millionth vehicle in 2017 and set a record of 318,600 vehicles in 2018. Production at Kenitra began in 2019. In 2021, Renault reported that local integration had passed 60% and that its network of direct suppliers in Morocco had grown from 26 to 76. These figures describe production located in Morocco, including foreign-owned suppliers; they do not measure how much income or ownership remained in Moroccan hands.

Measured in dirhams, automotive exports grew to roughly three and a half times their 2014 value by 2024. Stellantis’s new Kenitra plant helped drive the post-2020 surge, doubling annual capacity to 200,000 vehicles in September 2020. European manufacturers also shortened their supply chains and directed more investment and procurement toward nearby Morocco. Office des Changes figures show that exports associated with vehicle construction rose from $4.4 billion in 2021 to $7.1 billion in 2024, while wiring exports increased from $3.3 billion to $5.4 billion.

Morocco was also exporting more complex components. Exports of engines and other parts that power vehicles rose from about $48 million in 2014 to $1.2 billion in 2024. The industry was developing beyond assembly, although production location tells us little about who owns the businesses or controls the technology.

How Moroccan Is a Moroccan Car?

Producing more components in Morocco creates opportunities for workers to develop skills and for suppliers to take on more demanding work. Foreign-owned factories can support both processes, while continuing to rely on technology and decisions made elsewhere. Their contribution to development therefore depends partly on how far Moroccan workers and businesses can use that experience to build their own capabilities.

Some firms have already expanded their work in Morocco. Lear, the US-headquartered supplier of automotive seating and electrical systems, operates a Moroccan engineering centre alongside its factories. Stellantis says its technical ecosystem involves more than 4,000 engineers and senior technicians directly and indirectly, and its Kenitra expansion includes engine assembly and machining. Renault has also expanded its engineering functions.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) counted around 260 automotive factories and 173,000 direct jobs in 2023. It found only about 20 Moroccan-owned firms supplying carmakers or their major suppliers, while foreign firms occupied much of the more sophisticated production.

Domestic businesses face obstacles that the state helped major foreign investors overcome. The OECD finds that smaller firms struggle to obtain finance and receive payments on time, while informality and corruption complicate their operations. Morocco’s success in organising support around Renault raises a further question: how readily can a domestic manufacturer outside that network obtain the finance and institutional support it needs to expand and qualify for automotive contracts?

Neo Motors, Morocco’s first mass-market domestic marque, offers a small example of an attempt to build a locally owned manufacturer. The industry ministry describes a planned annual capacity of 27,000 vehicles, with 580 jobs and 65% local integration. These are project targets; their significance lies in the attempt to use the growing supplier base to develop a Moroccan-owned product.

Wider spillovers would become more visible if Moroccan firms used the experience gained in automotive production to enter other manufacturing activities.

Employment and the Limits of Industrial Growth

A 2019 International Labour Organization (ILO) study reported roughly 90% job placement among 474 graduates tracked by the automotive institutes in Casablanca and Kenitra, where programmes combined classroom learning with substantial time in companies. The same study put average wages in the automotive value chain at about 1.5 times the average across formal private-sector employment. These historical findings suggest that automotive work could significantly improve livelihoods, although they provide no measure of current starting salaries or placement rates.

The scale of these opportunities remains modest beside Morocco’s employment needs. The Haut-Commissariat au Plan, Morocco’s national statistical authority, reported overall unemployment of 13% in 2025 and youth unemployment of 37.2% among 15–24-year-olds. These figures describe a national jobs deficit that extends well beyond the automotive industry.

OECD data show that 400,000 new entrants join the labour market each year, while net job creation since 2000 has averaged only around 110,000 annually. The gap helps explain why even a substantial increase in automotive employment has left many young people with few prospects of formal work.

These figures show the scale of Morocco’s employment challenge, not the automotive industry’s effect on unemployment. The sector has created formal jobs, and evidence suggests better pay for some workers, but broader structural transformation depends on employment gains reaching far more people.

How far these gains spread will also depend on the industry’s ability to sustain production as manufacturers shift towards electric vehicles (EVs).

The EV Stress Test

The shift to EVs changes the production system Morocco spent two decades building. EVs need fewer moving mechanical parts than combustion-engine cars, and more of their value lies in batteries and the electronics and software that control them. Existing suppliers may find new customers or face falling demand for the components they make. The next test is whether the institutions that helped establish conventional vehicle production in Morocco can support the different requirements of battery and EV manufacturing.

Morocco has sought investment from Chinese battery companies to bring new production into the automotive cluster. In 2024, the government signed an agreement with Chinese firm Gotion High-Tech to build a battery gigafactory in Kenitra. The committed first phase is valued at about $1.3 billion and includes 20 GWh of capacity. A possible later build-out could reach 100 GWh and a total investment of about $6.5 billion, though the agreement does not commit the company to that full expansion. Subsequent financing documents describe a smaller initial project: the African Development Bank’s July 2026 project summary identifies a 10 GWh battery-cell factory.

China’s BTR has announced a cathode-materials plant, while other battery-component investments are under development. Stellantis has already built battery-electric micromobility products at Kenitra. At the inauguration of its Kenitra expansion in July 2025, Stellantis reported that charging-equipment production had begun and outlined plans to reach an annual capacity of 535,000 vehicles, including 135,000 micromobility vehicles. It also set a target of 75% local sourcing by 2030. Renault began assembling the hybrid Dacia Jogger in Tangier in 2024, adding hybrid production alongside the country’s early battery-electric projects.

The existing cluster gives Morocco a starting point for this transition, as manufacturers can draw on an experienced workforce and established export connections. Battery production nevertheless brings new technological dependencies, and the investments announced so far leave important questions about how much work will take place locally. Sustained production would provide stronger evidence of the cluster’s ability to adapt.

Development Beyond Industrial Policy

Morocco’s automotive industry is a genuine industrial policy success. The state helped turn a small assembly industry serving the domestic market into an export-oriented cluster. Established public institutions worked alongside agencies created for the task, drawing on foreign expertise to deliver infrastructure and prepare production. Renault’s investment gave suppliers a major customer, while continued public-private cooperation helped deepen the production base and attract more manufacturers.

However, the gains have spread unevenly. Relatively few Moroccan-owned firms have entered the supplier networks, and automotive employment remains modest despite the country’s need for jobs. Export growth also leaves unanswered questions about the returns on the public resources committed to the sector and the extent of spillovers into other manufacturing industries.

For those interested in development, Morocco’s experience shows how a state can build its capacity to deliver industrial policy through sustained work on particular investments. Public institutions gained access to specialist expertise and organised support around manufacturers’ requirements. The difficulty of extending comparable opportunities to domestic businesses helps explain why an internationally competitive industry can coexist with limited structural transformation.

What happens next will become clearer as employment and wages change and Moroccan suppliers take on more demanding work. Deeper localisation would matter especially where it allows domestic firms to develop engineering capabilities they can use beyond a single customer or industry. The battery and EV projects offer a further test of the system Morocco has built: whether it can bring new technologies into sustained production at scale, and whether the resulting opportunities reach more of the economy.

Words: Yasin Atlassi is a historian of technology, focused on how tools and infrastructure shape society, culture, and politics.

25 years after 9/11, the Muslim Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, presided over the memorial ceremony commemorating the tragedy and its victims. Standing vigil at Ground Zero from morning until midnight—the only publicly elected official to do so that day—Mamdani had attended the memorial Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral the previous evening and thanked the Catholic community for its service after the attacks; on the anniversary itself, he also spoke at the rebuilt St. Nicholas church about the New Yorkers who had helped one another through the destruction. 

For a generation of Muslims growing up in the West, the destruction of the World Trade Centre cast a long shadow that has dominated most of our lives: the ensuing War on Terror with a seven-figure death count in several countries across North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, domestic securitisation of Muslim identity, and an increasingly charged atmosphere of fear and racial hatred. We have grown accustomed to the unreasonable demand to be held responsible for the conduct of distant strangers, for which one might be expected to provide an explanation at school, at work, or on television. 

25 years is also enough time for children to become adults, enter professions, acquire authority, and inherit responsibilities that the political vocabulary of their childhood had scarcely permitted them to imagine. The society in which Muslims were so often discussed as a problem has become the society in which some of them serve as public servants. At the site most closely associated with the suspicion of their presence, a Muslim now represents the city.

This does not close the history opened by the 9/11 attacks. Objections to Mamdani’s attendance at the 25th anniversary show that such deep wounds do not easily heal. Nor should one expect them to any time soon. But his presence exposes a widening discrepancy between the categories through which Muslim life in the West is understood and the forms it has begun to assume, which have yet to be articulated. The perpetual outsider, obliged to explain himself before he can speak about nearly anything else, increasingly finds himself responsible for institutions whose problems cannot be answered in the language of identity. Belonging acquires a different meaning when one has to engage in public policy and service. One must speak of the commonwealth and be fluent in the procedural vernacular to deliver solutions to the everyday problems of society.

Across the West, a new generation of Muslims in the public sphere are navigating the development of a new modus vivendi for what it means to be both Western and Muslim. This process is far from clean, and these individuals are certainly not ideologically aligned. The fractious paths these individuals are pioneering reject the defensive posture many adopted in the shadow of 9/11 and advocate a new level of public engagement and negotiation for Muslims in public life in the West. 

Late Culture & Broken Lights

The primary obstacle to a new modus vivendi has been that social integration does not resolve the problem of mixed inheritance. Even if an individual acquires citizenship or gains a share in public authority, they may remain internally divided between accounts of the world that make incompatible demands upon them. 

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes the man ‘of diverse descent’ who carries incompatible inheritances within himself. Opposing instincts and values struggle to possess him. This man of late culture and broken lights longs for the conflict to end and seeks a soothing medicine, some “final unity” in which the exhausting business of being himself can cease. Adopting identitarianism and ideology usually achieves this.

For many in the diaspora born and raised in the West, it is a common predicament. One inherits a religion with universal claims, an internal familial background with cultural expectations, an education that offers another account of human flourishing, and a public culture that regards parts of the whole arrangement with deep suspicion. The languages overlap imperfectly and create internal dissent. Each comes with its own set of judgements. One can spend a lifetime explaining oneself to people who suspect that the explanation given to one place is not necessarily given in another. This modus vivendi is no longer tenable.

Muslims retain a deep historical memory, which adds its own burden. They remember what they once were, or at least know enough to feel a deep humiliation over their current state as a global underclass. This creates a deep malaise that fuels friction between Muslims and others in Western societies. Often, the resulting attitude is: we do not belong, and we can never belong. ‘Diaspora-ness’ becomes a permanent outsider identity, a coagulated remnant of one’s ethnic inheritance, elaborated indefinitely through resentment-fuelled activism, conferences, and the adoption of various hamstrung ideologies that no longer have real power or currency in the world. All this creates an ever-expanding vocabulary of wounds and a shrinking capacity to imagine life beyond them. 

Nietzsche introduces another possibility. The conflict that exhausts one person becomes, in another, an additional “stimulus to life”: with sufficient self-mastery, the contradictory inheritance produces what Nietzsche called those ‘strange, enigmatic individuals’ capable of opening paths others could not imagine. The passage ends with one of Nietzsche’s most important observations: both types, the weak man seeking repose and the enigmatic individual using the conflict within himself to create new things, arise in the same periods and spring from the same causes. One necessarily comes with the other. 

In an age of late culture and broken lights, a different path is possible: the contradictions could serve as a stimulus to innovate and create new forms of culture, belonging, and engagement in the body politic of a city or nation, as a means to serve everyone, rather than one’s in-group alone.

Tanfiris & Lahabites

The quest to create a new modus vivendi for Muslim existence in the West is opposed by two archetypes: Lahabites and Tanfiris. 

To the latter, their internal contradictions indict the world around them. They weaponise religion into a purely Schmittian in-group/out-group distinction, turning every ambiguity into a hard boundary and stripping away the particularities of living culture in pursuit of a prepackaged, legally purified identity. 

At its ugliest, this posture produces the extremist who treats the suffering of strangers as a means of resolving his own inner disorder. More commonly, it produces a religious manner so suspicious, punitive and joyless that anyone approaching it sensibly backs away. In Travelling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe, Abdal Hakim Murad introduces the term Tanfir to capture the dynamic created by this pathological subversion of faith: to repel people from the religion one claims to serve. For Murad, it is Tanfir on the part of certain Muslim elements which is the cause of some (but not all) of the often loosely held ‘Islamophobic’ sentiment towards Muslims across much of the West.

Murad introduces Lahabism to distinguish definitive hatred of Islam and Muslims from the fear, suspicion and repellence often grouped under ‘Islamophobia’. This hatred that characterises Lahabism cannot be attributed to ignorance, which mere familiarity and kindness can resolve.

The anti-Muslim Lahabite and the Muslim Tanfiri have a remarkably durable relationship, usually sharing the same personality type and differing only in affirmed creed and skin colour. They circle and feed off each other, ensuring a steady supply of evidence they each take back to their gaggle of followers: one insists that Muslims are incapable of belonging; the other performs Tanfir as if it were the sixth pillar of Islam. Between them, the space for an ordinary, generous, recognisably human Muslim presence becomes harder to maintain. 

The trap between Tanfir and Lahabism becomes especially effective when the reasonable middle majority loses confidence in its own judgement. People who privately dislike the ugliness of Tanfiris and the subculture that has grown around them in parts of the Muslim community begin defending it because progressive principles require it. A criticism which ought to prompt reflection is rejected because a Lahabite might exploit it toward illiberal ends. Before long, broad accusations against an entire group prompt the defence of things few of them particularly admired until they were attacked.

This does not make the middle majority equally culpable with the extremists, or explain away the agenda of organised hatred. However, a community should be careful not to let its enemies determine its ambitions. If the next hostile provocation is always required to provoke a reaction, our opponents have acquired considerable authority over our lives.

Escaping this reactive cycle where religion has been enlisted in the service of wounded identity requires a new way to position, express and think about Muslim life in the West. Murad’s Travelling Home offers one. “This is what is called tanfir: repelling souls instead of attracting them,” he writes, but the indictment also reaches beyond extremists: an inherited religious culture can become so absorbed in its own preservation that it forgets the neighbours. 

Nietzsche’s exceptional figures include Caesar and Alcibiades, men whose capacities were hardly confined to healing their neighbours. Creative force alone leaves the question of its proper use unanswered. For Nietzsche, Will to Power was a sufficient reason. For those with a higher moral calling, this is insufficient. Nor can we simply follow Nietzsche in suspecting the desire for peace as the product of “slave morality”. Murad joins inward surrender to “an acceptance of His (God’s) command to act to heal the world”, which enables a person to bear difficulty with patience, without transmitting it to everyone nearby. Other people’s hostility no longer provides the organising principle of his existence in a reactionary cycle. 

However, Murad’s call to engage and become healers of the world, Islam’s raison d’être, has not filtered through to the general culture of Islam in the West. We treat the places where we are born and raised almost as a waiting room, where institutions and freedoms are conveniences to be enjoyed. While we may be grateful for what it provides, we remain largely incurious about the work required to sustain it, such as participation in the body politic, beyond pet issues that directly affect ourselves.

Islam’s universality ought to disturb this arrangement. The ummah cannot be reduced to an ethnic coalition whose concern is the defence of its members’ tribal interests. Its religious meaning extends beyond the fortunes of any existing collection of Muslim societies. There are human beings all around us whose lives demand our conscience and good works. 

Yet, consider how much attention is comparatively devoted to some minor insult to Muslim identity, and how little to a ruinous feature of ordinary life that affects everyone. “Islamophobia” has become a cause célèbre among various political activists and lobby groups, reducing the appearance of Muslim talking heads in the media to permanently defensive, narrowly self-interested outsiders threatening freedom of speech. Society around us becomes lonelier, uglier, more exploitative, lower-trust; gambling and pornography are exploding, inequality is rising astronomically, and all the while community spokesmen remain preoccupied with the latest identitarian slight. Eventually we must ask what our presence has made possible for anyone beyond ourselves—before others force this question on us.

The question then is what space Muslims can, and should, negotiate in the public life of Western democracies.

Between Gurbet and Hijra

Negotiating that space requires confronting a persistent feeling that our proper home lies elsewhere. Gurbet is a Turkish word—itself derived from the Arabic term ghurba (غربة)—describing the condition of being away from one’s homeland, with its accompanying alienation and longing. For those born and raised in the West, gurbet is compounded by the fact that one can inherit the feeling of exile without ever having lived in the place imagined as home. Long before the far-right’s enthusiasm for remigration, Muslims have been having their own recurring discussions of departure, explicitly called hijra, driven by the exhaustion induced by the cognitive overload in having to negotiate every (rapidly changing) norm of daily life, of belonging imperfectly—or not belonging at all.

Permanent estrangement and imagined departure share the same premise: our life as real Muslims can only happen somewhere else. A third possibility begins when the place we actually live in, which has given us a certain quality of life—access to healthcare, education, professional advancement, and a rule of law relatively more just than in many of our countries of heritage—becomes a place whose future we accept responsibility for. This requires more than acquiring citizenship or succeeding professionally. It requires entering the arguments, institutions and reciprocal obligations through which a society governs itself.

The public figures considered here—Sadiq Khan, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and Arwa Elrayess—offer uneven examples of this possibility. Their politics differ, and aspects of their conduct or convictions will trouble some, if not many, Muslims. Yet, they need not resolve every contradiction of their inheritance before they can act within it. What matters here is how they exercise public responsibility, and what that responsibility requires them to negotiate.

Sadiq Khan’s mayoralty shows one consequence of belonging: the possibility of being judged unfavourably. Arguments about transport, housing and policing concern how he has used his authority and whether Londoners should continue to entrust him with it. Anti-Muslim hostility remains part of the picture, but it cannot explain every objection to his record. Distinguishing prejudice from an ordinary demand for better government is essential to the political maturity this position requires. A Muslim mayor must be allowed to be a disappointing mayor.

Zohran Mamdani’s “pothole politics” and permanent smile approach the same obligation through New Yorkers’ everyday concerns. Affordability, childcare and functioning services give households with little investment in Muslim identity a reason to care about his programme. They also impose a discipline on his supporters: the gestures that satisfy a political subculture must compete with responsibilities to the whole city. Winning office creates obligations to people who did not vote for you, do not share your convictions, and may never particularly like you.

Abdul El-Sayed’s statewide ambitions require coalition-building beyond the Muslim community’s parochial interests. His campaign emphasises healthcare for all, household costs and corporate power, addressing circumstances shared by people whose religious commitments and foreign-policy views may differ sharply. Such a coalition requires persuasion across those differences and an ability to sustain cooperation without demanding agreement on everything. Muslim concerns enter a wider political argument in which other people also have claims upon the outcome.

The tenacious Arwa Elrayess, who served as the Oxford Union’s president earlier this year, faced a more explicit test of reciprocity when she invited Tommy Robinson to the Oxford Union and defended the invitation against demands to withdraw it. As a 19-year-old student and a Palestinian-Algerian Muslim, she contested his claims on the floor, demonstrating greater courage and social nous than many of her detractors twice or thrice her age, including those within her own community. The freedom that allowed her to speak also accommodated an opponent whose views she had every reason to find objectionable. Taking responsibility for the institution meant upholding that freedom under pressure from her own community, while also using it herself.

These are practical disciplines through which a new belonging can acquire substance. Contrary to the Tanfiri disposition, being likeable matters. Competence, too. There’s a reason someone like Donald Trump cannot help but praise Mamdani and is willing to cooperate with him. People must be able to work with us, disagree with us, and hold us responsible for what we do. None of these figures needs to be a philosophical disciple of Nietzsche or Murad for their experience to illuminate the problem both help us articulate.

These figures also face a more sweeping accusation from the Lahabites: that their participation in Western politics conceals a project to undermine the societies they claim to serve. In this conspiratorial account of “thirdworldism”, Muslims build coalitions and seek office only to advance the interests of an alien bloc, perhaps with an eventual “Caliphate” waiting in the wings. 

Here, the Lahabite and the Tanfiri arrive at the same conclusion: a Muslim cannot truly belong to the West. The possibility these public figures explore is precisely what both deny—that Muslims can participate in good faith, with commitments to the freedoms, institutions, and common life of the societies they inhabit.

Beyond Fear & Subversion 

Nietzsche’s “two types” offer language for the diaspora’s malaise and the possibilities it contains. The same mixed inheritance can produce a retreat into the consolations of identity, or the self-mastery to create new forms of belonging. Both emerge from the same conditions. The contradictions of Muslim life in the West need not be resolved into a theoretically coherent whole before something worthwhile can be made of them.

Murad gives this possibility a moral direction: the capacity to act must serve the work of healing the world. His vocabulary helps us to distinguish what obstructs this mission. Lahabism and Tanfirism articulate what we find reaching fever pitch in social media and public life: two extremes feeding off each other and harming the reasonable middle majority. 

By naming a thing, we can confront organised hostility, answer ordinary suspicion with generosity, and recognise faults for which we must take responsibility. A community needs language adequate to all three if it is to escape the cycle in which every criticism reinforces its sense of persecution and every failure becomes somebody else’s doing.

Khan, Mamdani, El-Sayed and Elrayess are uneven, often contradictory examples of the alternative taking shape. They are only some of the Muslims now emerging as mainstays of Western public life, and do not represent the entire Overton window of Muslim opinion. Their significance does not depend on their satisfying an ideal Muslim archetype, or on our agreeing with every belief or policy they espouse. In different ways, they are attempting to turn mixed inheritances into a capacity for public action. The space they are negotiating requires Muslims to become proactive members of the body politic: to govern competently, be likeable, defend freedom of speech even when it accommodates our opponents, and accept accountability for our own conduct and failures. The commonwealth must become our concern beyond those moments when Muslim interests are directly at stake.

That such a space can be negotiated 25 years after 9/11 should reduce the confidence with which Islam and the West are pronounced mutually exclusive civilisational worlds. Some differences remain, and we must be honest and frank where we agree and disagree, but the lives and obligations being formed between and beyond those differences increasingly exceed those categories. 

At Ground Zero, a Muslim mayor stood among the people of his city, sharing in his public duty of remembrance. That some still regarded him as an intruder made the contradiction visible; the office itself had already placed him inside the obligations of their common life.

Words: Ahmed Askary is Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian.

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: “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 “Dear Muslima,” 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.

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 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.

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, 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. 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,” 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 “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, 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?

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, 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.

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, 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, 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 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.”

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, 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—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 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. 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” 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, 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. 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. “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 “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 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: 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”—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 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 in the subject they were so desperate to refute, “shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervour.” Terry Eagleton, reviewing The God Delusion in the London Review of Books, 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.

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 The God Delusion in The New Republic 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 (2012), 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. 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 (2008). 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 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 might be “the only course of action available.” Hitchens had been among the most vocal advocates for the Iraq invasion 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.

Ben Affleck, seated at the same table, interrupted: “It’s gross. It’s racist.” Nicholas Kristof agreed. The clip went viral within hours 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, and the Southern Poverty Law Center had documented how New Atheist rhetoric was being recycled 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, 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 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.

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“—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 New York magazine, 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: 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

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 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. 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. In February 2018, BuzzFeed News published a report documenting six allegations of sexual misconduct 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 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, funded by the J. Epstein VI Inc. Foundation. Between 2010 and 2017, Epstein’s Enhanced Foundation donated $250,000 to the Origins Project. In a 2011 interview with The Daily Beast, Krauss had publicly defended Epstein after his 2008 conviction, 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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.”

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.

Sam Harris, whose name appears in the files in connection with a declined dinner invitation, addressed the matter on his podcast 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,” 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. 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 that same month. Both men had been the most directly compromised by documented financial transactions.

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.

Losing Faith in Atheism

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 The Spectator about Hirsi Ali’s conversion, 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” 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 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. 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 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 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 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”, 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, 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, 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, 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—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, 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—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, 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.

A YouTube channel called “Christopher Hitchens Resurrected“ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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, 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. 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, “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. 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, “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,” 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: 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’, a new podcast produced by alums of the golden age of podcasts, and hosted by Islamic scholar, Georgetown professor, and founding director of Mujadilah, a women’s mosque and intellectual institution in Doha, that Dr. Sohaira Siddiqui 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, “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 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.

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, 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 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 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 and Lebanon 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 and Zambia 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, 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% 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% 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% 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, 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, 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. 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 hawaladars, 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 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. 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 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—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 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 while freezing Beirut’s banks. 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% annually by late 2023, while Pakistan’s peaked near 38% 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Jadid movement 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, developing its own analytical instruments for governance and economic measurement, sending students to European universities, and reforming its legal and administrative apparatus.

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 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, 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.

Even the more thoughtful attempts at institutional revival betray the limitation. A paper 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. 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 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 Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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
• American Mosque Survey 2020 Report 1
• Crossing the Lines: Highland Park was once home to diverse Muslim communities
• Zoning Islam Out

In Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany Abolishes Itself”), 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 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 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 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 movement, which advocates an end to democracy and a return to monarchical governance. In an interview 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,” 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 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 and prosecutions show how “market signals” are being used to influence material events such as elections and even military action, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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: 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, intellectuals, 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 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, a magazine for the 21st century.

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% 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 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; 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.

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 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.

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.

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. 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.

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 Sultan before 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 and Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt. The lessons from their reform – and why they ultimately failed – have not been adequately assessed 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

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 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.

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, 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 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 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” 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 the world’s attention. From this point on, Dong’s Hui fighters would be known as the “Gansu Braves.”

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 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” 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.

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.

Ma Qi is also significant for being a patron of the “Ikhwani,” 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. 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 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.

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 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)

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, the scale of a civilisation is measured in the size and complexity of its knowledge-processing functions and institutions. The relative dearth 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

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)

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Naquib Al-Attas
• The Concept of Education, Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas
• Islam: The Covenants Fulfilled, Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas
• Preliminary Statement on a General Theory of the Islamization of the Malay Archipelago, Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-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