Turkey Book Talk #268 – Faisal Devji, professor of global and imperial history at Balliol College, Oxford, on “Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam” (Yale University Press)
The book argues that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Islam stopped being primarily a religious movement focused on scripture and the divine, instead transforming into a modern ideological system like capitalism or communism. In countries including Turkey, that process paved the intellectual path for Islamism’s emergence as a political force, reshaping the trajectories of those states.
However, it also suggests that the limits of this transnational moment were reached long ago, and that we are now seeing the results of a crisis of political Islam in Turkey and elsewhere.
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