There is a figure that haunts the academic halls dedicated to the study of the Middle East and the Muslim world. This figure—the Sacrificialist—is the dominant voice in a field that was once animated by the ambition to understand civilisations in motion but has since contracted into something closer to a liturgy of defeat. The Sacrificialist is not a person, but a posture within the broader currents of the Arab, and sometimes Muslim left. It is a moral economy consisting of academics, activists, and citizens alike, one where losing is seen as the truest form of winning, and where the willingness to demand “sacrifice”, however material or symbolic, is the primary measure of seriousness and belonging. They are trained in critique and fluent in the vocabulary of loss, cite Edward Said as though reciting scripture, invoke Michel Foucault as one might an incantation, and produce work that, for all its sophistication, rarely outlives the journals in which it appears.

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

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

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

The Post-Saidian Order

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

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

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

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

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

How the Academic Left Failed Syria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sovereignty Does Not Wait for Permission

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Sarah Al-Saeid is a researcher and humanitarian practitioner working on Syria and the wider region.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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The complex civilisation that we inhabit today is the product of one technology above all others: the written word. The last two centuries saw the unique advent of mass literacy, as increasingly complex societies sought to standardise the beliefs and mental habits of their citizenry. Long-form reading of the type embodied in books, essays, and magazines functioned as a cultural and psychological training regime used by institutions to produce certain types of minds and citizens.

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

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

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

The Return of Homo Oralis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ong, in his classic work, Orality and Literacy, 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 akin to a library, a social media feed operated 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.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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The dominant mode of political engagement for Muslim communities in the West rests on an arrangement that is never quite stated plainly. It is a modus vivendi: a pragmatic agreement to respect the same political ground rules and obey the law, without believing that these rules represent the principles we would ideally choose to live under. In principle, the implicit thought often goes, we would prefer to live under some kind of Islamic state, or a futurist polity, or a neo-Ottoman millet-based empire; but in the meantime, we can still be good citizens of Western liberal polities for pragmatic reasons. Or we would be, if only the bigots and the racists and the Zionists would get off our backs. This untheorised arrangement informs most of the day-to-day political discourse of Muslim influencers, bloggers, and YouTubers, and it underpins, often without acknowledgement, the institutional architecture of Muslim civic life in Britain and across the West.

It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the entire swathe of Muslim institutions in the West is built on this unstable foundation. 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, the denial was belied, Fadel contends, 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. The tools exist, but they have not been assembled.

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.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
– William Blake, The Tyger (1794)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the Haber-Bosch process made industrial nitrogen fixation possible in the early 20th century, the global food supply was constrained by the natural nitrogen cycle. The Earth could perhaps sustain two billion people at subsistence levels. Today, it sustains over eight billion people, and roughly half the nitrogen in every human body alive today has passed through the Haber-Bosch process. Without it, approximately 4 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 taken by plane and train within half a day, to stay 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?

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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 twenty years for over a millennium, because the community that maintains it understands that the knowledge of how 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.

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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 while possessing no 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, population and production-wise, in history–until the coming 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.

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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 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.

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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 semiconductors 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 between theory and practice, between the scholar and the factory floor, between 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. This will not be done from the outside. 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 all over us with complete passivity, I proffer 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.

Author: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine for the 21st century.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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“When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this grey in grey, but only understood; the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.”
— G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right

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

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

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 when 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.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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With Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption, Kasurian’s Autumn 2025 issue has concluded.

This issue began with The Closing of the Muslim Mind, which traced the institutional annihilation of Islamic civilisation between 1917 and 1947 through three events: the Ottoman dissolution, the rise of Communism in Russia, and the Partition of India. These catastrophes were devastating, but any one of them might have been survivable on its own. Civilisations have recovered from territorial loss, foreign occupation, and demographic upheaval. Islamic civilisation itself had survived the Mongol invasions, integrating the conquerors and eventually reaching new heights under the gunpowder empires. Even in the 19th century, despite encroaching colonialism and military defeats on all fronts, a genuine intellectual renaissance had emerged with a flowering of print culture, transnational networks, and public debate that suggested the capacity for renewal remained intact. These movements have been discounted simply because they failed. Yet the structural factors that saw the wholesale evisceration of Islamic civilisation in the 20th century should not discount their genuine efforts, successes, or even the lessons of their failures.

The three catastrophes did not occur in isolation. They compounded each other. Each destroyed a different pillar of civilisational infrastructure, and together they ensured that no safe harbour remained where the work of transition into industrial modernity, haltingly begun in the short 19th century, could continue. The Ottoman collapse eliminated the central political authority and patronage networks that had sustained intellectual life across the Arab and Turkish-speaking worlds. Communist repression isolated Central Asia and the Caucasus, destroying and displacing various communities such as the Tatars, Kazakhs, and Circassians, and decapitating the Jadid reform movement that might have offered a model for synthesis. Partition fractured the Indian subcontinent, severing the Indo-Islamic world into two wounded states incapable of continuing the once subcontinent-spanning traditions that had made the region a beacon of Islamic culture and learning. What was lost was not merely ideas but the material basis for producing ideas: the governing elites, the merchant bourgeoisie, the transnational scholarly networks, the systems of patronage and endowment that had sustained knowledge production for centuries.

This material dimension is precisely what is missing from most discussions of why the Muslim world has stagnated over the past century while East Asia, Europe, and North America pulled ahead. We speak of colonialism, of Western imperialism, of the corruption of leaders or the backwardness of the masses – abstractions that fail to account for the totality of the rupture. Knowledge and civilisation are not born solely from philosophical inquiry; they require class structures capable of sustaining them, patronage networks to fund them, and institutions to transmit them across generations. When the Ottoman governing elite, the Tatar Muslim intelligentsia, and the Indo-Muslim aristocracy were dismembered within a single generation, they took with them not merely their titles and estates but the entire ecosystem of high culture they had patronised and participated in. The printing presses fell silent. The journals ceased publication. The networks connecting Cairo, Kazan, Istanbul, and Delhi were severed. What survived was not a diminished civilisation but a civilisation stripped of the infrastructure required to produce new ideas, condemned to recycle, in progressively degraded form, the thinking of the short 19th century.

The question posed in our second essay, Is Modern Islamic Art Even Possible?, becomes legible against this history. Burak Ömer traces the Copernican turn that severed art from its metaphysical grounding, shifting from participation in divine order to self-expression. Yet the deeper problem is not only philosophical but institutional. The infrastructure that once sustained Islamic art as a living tradition – the courts, the endowments, the guilds, the networks of patronage connecting artisans to sovereigns – was precisely what the three catastrophes destroyed. The essay concludes that what is made in remembrance cannot be sold; it can only be witnessed. But witnessing requires communities capable of recognising what they see – communities whose formation is itself an institutional and material problem, not merely a spiritual one.

Syed Naquib Al-Attas understood this. In Muhammad Bin Abdul Majid’s essay, Syed Naquib Al-Attas & the Rectification of Names, we encounter a figure who understood that civilisational renewal must begin with language. It is only with the rectification of names that a people can think clearly about their condition. Al-Attas’ din-madinah-tamaddun framework, linking religion to city to civilisation, was not abstract philosophy but a blueprint for institution-building. ISTAC, his Moorish palace-fortress in Kuala Lumpur, was the embodiment of that vision: an attempt to create a knowledge-producing institution adequate to the scale of the challenge. Political machinations ultimately undid ISTAC, showing that ideas alone cannot sustain themselves. They require political protection, material resources, and coalitions capable of defending them against those who benefit from dysfunction.

Hayreddin Pasha grasped this a century earlier. In The Life and Lessons of Hayreddin Pasha, Salim Jeridi explores the life of the Circassian mamluk who rose to become Tunisia’s Prime Minister in the 19th century. Hayreddin Pasha understood that justice was the pivot upon which the destiny of nations turned, and his seminal book, Aqwam al-Masalik, remains a masterwork of political economy and a practical guide for statecraft. Hayreddin reformed Tunisia’s agriculture, protected its nascent industries, and founded institutions that would train its elite for decades. Yet he was undone in the end, opposed not only by French imperial interests but also by the court machinations at home, chiefly by his own father-in-law, Mustafa Khaznadar, who systematically sabotaged reform to protect his plunder. Within four years of Hayreddin’s fall from power, French troops had imposed a protectorate.

This pattern of reformers undone by their own compatriots echoes through the recent centuries. Kasurian explored another case study in our Summer issue with Tipu Sultan, whose extraordinary modernisation of Mysore was nullified by his failure to maintain the alliances that might have checked British expansion. Muhammad Ali Pasha’s Egypt nearly reformed the Ottoman world from within before British intervention halted his advance. In each case, the material and intellectual capacity for renewal existed. What failed was the political coalition that might have sustained it.

The Ma Clique offers a different model of agency altogether. Steven Zhou’s account of the Hui Muslim warlords who navigated the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the chaos of Republican China is a remarkable story of political pragmatism. The Ma families survived and, at times, thrived by accurately reading the balance of power and positioning themselves accordingly. This political intelligence preserved Hui autonomy for decades. Their example reminds us that agency takes many forms, and that survival itself can be a form of resistance when the alternative is annihilation.

We conclude this issue with a diagnosis that extends beyond any particular civilisation. Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption examines the structural tension between those who produce and those who consume – a tension that, even in mature democracies, increasingly favours the latter. The productive minority, squeezed by extraction from above and below, faces a narrowing set of options: exit, withdrawal, or quiet disengagement. When the consuming majority becomes large enough, no political mechanism can prevent it from voting itself into transfers from the productive minority. This is not a problem unique to any single civilisation. Yet, the fatal conceit of developed democracies is the belief that they possess some innate capacity to evade the repercussions of consumption. What was once a gradual turn is now rapidly culminating in a general crisis of political economy, with no guarantees as to which model or ideology of politics will survive the coming gauntlet.

What to Expect from Kasurian in 2026

Kasurian returns in March 2026 with a new publishing schedule: two issues per year, each comprising twelve essays. The first will run from March through May, the second from September through November.

Until then, we will be hosting salons in London, Toronto, San Francisco, and New York. These gatherings seek to bridge theory and action, past and present, and to bring together those who wish to explore how cultural production, knowledge creation, policymaking, and technology might serve the betterment of civilisation. They are spaces for serious engagement, not just with ideas but with people who are curious about the world, how it works, and how to act on it.

Paid subscribers can expect invitations to the first salons of 2026, to be held in late January, in the coming weeks.

Thank you for reading Kasurian.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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The liberal ideal of democracy rests upon a particular vision of the citizen: informed, engaged, and capable of self-government. This citizen reads, deliberates, and votes with an eye toward the common good, or at least toward a reasoned conception of their own long-term interests. The franchise, in this view, is not merely a mechanism for preference aggregation but the capstone of a civic culture that produces citizens worthy of self-rule. This was the democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the young American republic, that John Stuart Mill theorised in his essays on representative government, and that the post-war liberal order claimed to universalise.

Yet democracy has always possessed a second meaning, one that operates alongside and increasingly in tension with the first. This is democracy as consumer sovereignty, which grants the freedom to choose among an abundance of goods, services, and lifestyles. In market societies, the shopping mall and the ballot box have become companion institutions, each promising a form of empowerment that flatters the individual as the ultimate arbiter of value. For many citizens of prosperous nations, the freedom to consume has become indistinguishable from freedom itself. In some cases, it has superseded political liberty entirely. 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. The distinction matters. 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 form human capital, doctors who maintain the health of the workforce, 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, this includes transfer recipients and those whose inactivity, whether voluntary or involuntary, removes them from production entirely. At the top – and this must be emphasised – 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.

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, 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 the higher tax brackets but not enough to afford a home in the city where his employer is located. 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 against inflation.

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 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 against 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 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.

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 elites of the middle class who stand between them and the centre of power. The middle class (the gentry, the bourgeoisie, the productive professions) find themselves squeezed from above and below, their 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 that sustains this expansion is precisely the top-bottom alliance de Jouvenel identified: an administrative and professional elite that benefits from the management of 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 have begun to relocate toward jurisdictions that offer more favourable terms. Dubai, Singapore, Portugal, and certain American states have become refuges for entrepreneurs, professionals, and wealth-holders fleeing high-tax, high-regulation regimes. This is not a mass migration – 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 mathematics are implacable: 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 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 its predecessor. 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 – universal suffrage, majority rule, 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.

Lest this essay 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 longer than democracies, 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 the exhaustion of alternatives. When the transfers become unsustainable and the productive base has shrunk to the point that it cannot fund the consuming majority’s expectations, then 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 voice in politics 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.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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For centuries, the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean were shaped by Muslim power: the Ottoman Empire, the regencies of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli, the Sultanate of Morocco, and Egypt. Barbary corsairs, imperial garrisons, and merchant networks had long kept the Europeans at bay, or at least compelled them to compromise. Then, almost abruptly, the balance broke.

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

The Industrial Revolution gave European states a decisive advantage: manufactories, steam engines, railways, banks, and rationalised administrations formed an infrastructure of power against Mediterranean economies that had remained, for the most part, traditional. Conscious of the peril, several Muslim rulers attempted to resist by transforming themselves: the Ottoman Tanzimat in Istanbul and Muhammad Ali’s modernisation drive 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.

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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 the strength of Europe did not come from a mysterious essence, but from its investment in the material sciences and techniques of industry. 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 in this matter 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 from the Tunisian government the reimbursement 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 that transporting them to Marseille or Malta would have entailed.

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.

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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.

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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 4th December 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 18th July 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.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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

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In late 1911, over a dozen Chinese provinces declared revolutionary independence from the empire that ruled them for over 260 years: the Great Qing Dynasty. A two-year-old toddler sat on the throne. The empire was dying. Millennia of imperial rule was about to end.

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

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

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

Rise of the Hui

Most chroniclers began documenting the Ma families by the mid-19th century, long after Islam had taken root in China – the first Muslims arrived during the early Tang Dynasty (618-907). Over time, incoming Muslims from Central Asia (and further West) intermarried with Han Chinese as they settled in the empire. The Hui Muslims — one of 55 recognised minority ethnicities in today’s People’s Republic of China — see themselves as the result of this prolonged presence and settlement. They are indigenous Chinese Muslims. The 2020 Chinese census lists 8.3 million 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 emerged a secret group called the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists that preached 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 the equality of minorities 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 with 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 as a governor in 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 frame 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.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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)

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In the beating heart of Kuala Lumpur lies the lush tropical green district of Bukit Tunku, the favourite dwelling of Malaysia’s ultra-elite. Amid their luxury condominiums and villas is a Moorish-styled palace-fortress structure that appears to have been transposed from 15th-century Andalusia into the Malay tropics. The International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (ISTAC), dubbed ‘the beacon on the crest of the hill’, is, to even an untrained eye, an architectural splendour.

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 5 September 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 to be 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 — 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 to 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, Palestinian-American Muslim scholar with a 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 closer 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 20 September 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 at the material level 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 the government, similar to Wang Huning in the Chinese government, to ensure vision endurance? 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.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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

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On 30 April 2025, Sotheby’s London closed bidding on several pieces of Islamic art. Among them: a 17th-century Quran leaf in Hijazi script, a Malik-era Quran, and a line of calligraphy from a Quran so immense in size that it required a barrow to transport. Each was sold to the highest bidder.

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

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

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

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

The Copernican Turn

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

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

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

First, the pre-heliocentric man lived in a world that was not merely physical but also intelligible—where visible things were signs of invisible realities. The sensible world was a mirror of the absolute; beauty in nature was not self-contained but pointed beyond itself, toward divine Beauty. To perceive the world, then, was to participate in a higher order of truth that animated all being.

Plato’s description of beauty reflects this pre-heliocentric view:

…but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever–growing and perishing beauties of all other things. (Symposium)

The second feature of this worldview was teleology: everything had a purpose and tended toward its proper end. The soul sought God, beauty sought Beauty, and art sought to make the eternal present. Art, in this sense, was not self-expression but participation in a sacred order.

These two features — participation and teleology — were inseparable. One could only move toward what one could also apprehend. When participation in the absolute became philosophically impossible, teleology lost its ground.

This collapse unfolded gradually. René Descartes turned inward, locating certainty within the thinking subject rather than in the cosmos. Immanuel Kant completed the rupture: he denied that man could know things as they truly are. What we perceive, he argued, are appearances structured by the mind itself, not the reality of things in themselves. The world was no longer a window to the divine but a closed surface reflecting back our own reason.

Kant’s revolution altered not only our epistemology but also our aesthetics. Before Kant, beauty was considered an objective quality inherent in things themselves; it was seen as a reflection of divine perfection. As Plato wrote, art imitates nature without sinning against it. Indeed, for centuries, art – whether in the Christian West or the Islamic East – had been understood as imitation (mimesis) of divine realities. The artist was not the master of what he produced, as Henri Matisse would later claim, but a craftsman working within a tradition that provided both form and meaning. Art reminded rather than invented; it served contemplation rather than self-expression.

As for the observer, works of art were reminders. In other words, in the medieval world, works of art served as a means of supporting contemplation.

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in On the Genealogy of Morals, observed that Kant honoured art by granting it the predicates of knowledge – universality and impersonality. Yet in doing so, Kant subtly shifted the focus from the artist’s imitation of divine order to the spectator’s disinterested contemplation. The Romantics then reversed the relationship altogether, placing authenticity and individual expression at the centre of artistic value.

Islamic Art & Civilisation

Traditionally, Islamic art operated within this medieval understanding. Art was primarily produced to communicate a gnosis and serve a purpose. At that time, both the artist and the craftsman, still united, their divorce relatively recent and paralleling the divorce between “art” and “science,” possessed knowledge and intentionally contributed to their vernacular. Formerly, every artist who produced an object was a ‘craftsman’ and every discipline which demanded not only theoretical knowledge but also practical ability was an ‘art.’

As art is by definition an exteriorisation, Islamic art’s content reflects, in its own fashion, what is most inward in its civilisation: beauty itself as a divine quality. Titus Burckhardt articulates this:

The substance of art is beauty; and this in Islamic terms, is a divine quality and as such has double aspect: in the world, it is appearance, it is the garb which as it were, clothes beautiful beings and beautiful things; in God however, or in itself, it is pure inward beatitude; it is the divine quality which among all the divine qualities manifested in the world, most directly recalls pure beings.

This substance was articulated in two separate but complementary forms. First, the scholarly class’ articulation, whose deep understanding of the tradition would assist them in developing specific disciplines, such as ilm al-jamāl. The term ilm al-jamāl betrays its distinct modern coinage: for the ancients, aesthetics could never be conceived of as a standalone subject— its content was embedded throughout any form of actualisation, as a derivative of metaphysics or scattered across the marginalia. Beauty, in its realisation, is inextricable from knowledge. Aesthetics, together with true knowledge and being, is fundamentally anchored in the divine in the Islamic tradition. Thus, beauty as theorised was indistinguishable from beauty as concretised through the creation of physical cultural artefacts.

As for the Platonic view, God is identified as the Beautiful, the Good, and Being.

Verily, God is Beautiful and He loves Beauty

God’s beauty is manifested both in the seen and the unseen. To witness these manifestations, the Ishmaelite must turn towards God. For by this turn, one may discover that all of creation is in a state of worship. Perfection (ihsān) is described as:

worshipping Allah as if you see him (even if you do not see Him)

An aesthetic reading of the aforementioned narration demonstrates that higher stages of beauty are only accessible by becoming more beautiful, expressed through worship. Formulated as a contradistinction,

The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but falsehood. (Alija Izetbegovic)

For most, however, the silent theology imbued in Islamic civilisation proves to be more alluring and persuasive than its most rigorous treatises on theological minutiae. As Oludamini Ogunnaike wrote in Renovatio, between Cairo’s Al-Tulun Mosque and Al-Azhar, the former exhibits an attraction for the masses that the latter lacks. Nevertheless, Ogunnaike shows, the two are embodiments of Islamic art as a spectrum.

The twofold miracle of Islamic art is that it makes the divine truth and the truths of revelation present and tangible to us, while imbuing our surroundings with the beauty of divine truth. In a certain sense, jalāl (divine majesty and rigour) corresponds to the pole of truth, while jamāl (divine beauty) corresponds to that of presence.

Islamic art could promise a uniquely ritualistic form that centred both on the truth and the presence of divine reality. But in a world where the importance of ritual was declining, its power inevitably faded.

Renaissance, Hegel & the Romantics

With the Renaissance, an epoch in which Albert Hirschman writes that passions were replaced by interest, the subservience of art to the Church became challenged by the nobility, eager to rival the Church’s monopoly on the production of knowledge and aesthetics. As Walter Benjamin argues, art remained ritualistic, but rather than a religious cult and the worship of the Go(o)d, it served beauty. With the advent of the mechanical age, art became an end an sich: l’art pour l’art, pas pour Dieu.

Art as a discipline matured and differentiated itself from other fields. Gone was the time when the artist was bound, in immediate identity, to faith and to the conceptions of his world; no longer was the work of art founded in the unity of the artist’s subjectivity with the work’s content in such a way that the spectator may immediately find in it the highest truth of his consciousness, that is, the divine. In the Romantic understanding of art, the artist’s work would be informed by himself: the ability to produce a truly individual and unique work of art was its highest form. Celebrated by some, it was equally decried by others:

Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter,
Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.
Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten,
Nur zu Zeiten erträgt göttliche Fülle der Mensch.
Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben
(Translation of the above)
But we have come too late, my friend. It is true that the gods are still alive,
but up there above our heads in another world.
There they are endlessly active and seem to care little whether we are alive,
so much do the heavenly spare us.
For a weak vessel cannot always contain them,
man can only support divine plenty from time to time.
Life henceforward is a dream of them.
(Holderlin, Bread and Wine. Translation by Leonard Forster).

Hegel observed in the early 1800s that works of art no longer satisfied the soul’s spiritual needs as it had done in earlier times, because our tendency toward reflection and critique was so strong that when we were before a work of art we no longer attempted to penetrate its innermost vitality, identifying ourselves with it, but rather attempted to represent it to ourselves according to the critical framework furnished by the aesthetic judgment. By the turn of the twentieth century, this critical framework would completely replace the aesthetic narrative templates of organised religion.

Modernism

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
(Yeats, The Second Coming.)

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
(Crane, The Bridge.)

Dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt,
Und viel zu grauenvoll, als daß man klage:
Daß alles gleitet und vorüberrinnt
(Translation of the above)
This is a thing that no one ever fully grasps,
And much too dreadful to lament about:
That everything is gliding and flowing by us
(Hofmannsthal, On Transitoriness, in Terza Rima. Translation by Leonard Forster)

As creative genius replaced the narrative template provided by organised religion, mass emancipation came to discard the privileged role of the artist. In a mass democratic society, much like political parties, groups of people could form their own narrative templates and promote them with manifestos. In the early 20th century, narratives were conjured and promulgated through manifestos: philosophy entered art, and each art theory was buttressed by a linear philosophy of history whereby its current state is the end state.

In the age of the masses, the distinction between author and audience collapsed. Everyone could now produce and consume art simultaneously. The work of art was no longer an object of contemplation but an endless mirror reflecting collective desire. The public became both creator and critic – attentive yet absent-minded. With countless competing narratives, the grand narrative that once unified art and truth dissolved. What was once an imitation of divine order became ideology through manifestos, and eventually, mere self-reference – the post-historical condition of art that asks only: what counts as art at all?

Alongside the emancipation of the masses, technology caused a seismic shift. Where emancipation has made art accessible for all, technology has made it producible by all, surpassing the capacity of the painter’s craftsmanship. For Arthur Danto, this is the end of painting as an exclusive vehicle. As every individual can create their own narrative with sufficient political support or through democratisation, grand narratives tout court do not exist. The sense in which everything is possible is that in which there are no a priori constraints on what a work of visual art can look like, so that anything visible can be a visual work. That is a part of what it really means to live at the end of art history.

Artistically, AI does not provide anything unique whatsoever to an artist: fundamentally, it erodes the division between artist and observer even more by offering even the unwilling an outlet for production. The heralded march of AI is nothing more than Paul Valéry’s conquest of ubiquity, further eroding the importance of authenticity.

The conquest of ubiquity dismantles the traditional forms of art in the Islamic world. The discontinuity of tradition severs the cord between the old and the new, except for generating a colossal archive of the past consisting of nothing more than relics of a bygone world. Many of these forms remain in place, but are now largely irrelevant. While Plato considered banning poets from entering the city because of their ability to undermine self-mastery, and the Quran warns the Prophet ﷺ of their role in leading people astray, any Islamic art has been reduced to a testament of the past. Thus, the undercurrent of impotence that permeates contemporary Islamic art scenes.

As Maurice Blanchot notes, art tout court is no longer able to satisfy the need for the absolute, relegated within us. It has lost its reality and necessity. Although our nostalgia for the absolute is ever-present, any attempt to resurrect its circumstances will be futile. Even an art form that presents a fusion of the traditional and the contemporary, whether through Sadequian Naqqash’s attempts within the Huruffiya movement or the use of generative AI as a source of inspiration, will have to contend with this reality.

To make Islamic art that does not end up in a Sotheby’s auction is as such not to withdraw from the modern world but to reclaim orientation within it. The auction is not merely a market—it is the symbol of art’s dislocation from worship, the loss of its context and purpose. Islamic art must therefore learn to inhabit new forms, even digital ones, without surrendering its metaphysical axis. Whether carved in stone or generated by code, its worth lies not in its rarity but in its remembrance. The task is not to replicate the past but to restore presence—to make again for God, not for display. What is made in remembrance cannot be sold, only witnessed.

Wherever you turn, you face God.
God is Beautiful, He Loves the Beautiful.

Author: Burak Ömer is a financial markets professional based in Belgium. He previously studied applied mathematics & philosophy and is currently pursuing classical Islamic studies.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

Further Reading

- On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche

- After The End of Art, Arthur Danto

- The Silent Theology of Islamic Art, Oludamini Ogunnaike

- Art of Islam: Language and Meaning, Titus Burckhardt

- The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin

- Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Ananda Coomaraswamy

- The Conquest of Ubiquity, Paul Valéry

- The Passions and The Interests, Albert O. Hirschman

- The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot

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In the first half of the 20th century, Islamic civilisation was obliterated. The obliteration was not the standard process of entropy that afflicts all human endeavours, but rather, the result of several violent decades that dismembered the entire infrastructure of Islamic civilisation between 1918 and 1947.

Today, when you walk through any of the Muslim world’s great cities, be it Istanbul, Riyadh, or Kuala Lumpur, you will find universities, publishing houses, research centres, and religious institutions; the outward forms of intellectual life. Yet something is not quite right. The form exists as an outward manifestation of the desire to produce knowledge, but its substance is wanting at best, as evidenced by low rates of production in terms of published scientific papers, very few rewards (if any) for innovation (such as Nobel Prizes), and a lack of serious urban agglomerations for knowledge, science, and industry.

The capacity to generate new ideas, to process complexity, to build institutions that compound knowledge across generations has atrophied to the point of near extinction. Today, Muslims and their venerated institutions debate the same questions, in the same language, that our forefathers debated a century ago. The discourse has not evolved; if anything, it appears to have regressed, each generation receiving a progressively degraded copy of ideas first articulated in the ‘short 19th century’, a time of great potential amidst accelerating ruin – also forgotten in popular memory. Discourses on sharia, Islam, and the modern state, as well as secularism, European philosophy, and its relationship to Islamic philosophy, among other subjects, have largely been inherited from this period and have made few, if any, notable advances over the past century.

Stagnation and crisis are ill-fitting words to describe our current state of affairs. What we suffer from is amnesia masquerading as tradition – a collective forgetting so absolute that we no longer remember what we have lost, or even that we have lost it.

Standard explanations and narratives fail to account for the totality of this rupture. We speak of colonialism, of Western imperialism, of the corruption of leaders or the backwardness of the masses. All true enough, but insufficient and abstract.

Between 1918 and 1947, Islamic civilisation suffered three cataclysmic events that systematically destroyed the institutional, social, and intellectual infrastructure required for a complex civilisation to function: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after 1914; the rise of Communism after 1917 across the Muslim territories of the Russian Empire and its misbegotten progeny further afield in regions like the Balkans; and the Partition of India in 1947.

Each event severed networks that had taken centuries to cultivate. Each event displaced or destroyed entire classes, such as the Ottoman governing elite, the Tatar Muslim intelligentsia, and the Indo-Muslim aristocracy, all of whose patronage and participation were essential to the production and maintenance of knowledge and culture. In each event, refugee states were born in a state of existential crisis. Mere survival became the highest aspiration, and we became incapable of pursuing long-term thinking and development required to build institutions.

Finally, and perhaps the factor that is the least understood, is that each of these three events compounded the others, ensuring that no safe harbour remained where the work of industrialising and developing on our own terms, haltingly begun in the 19th century, could continue.

These three catastrophes were not only the destruction of individual cultures and countries, but together became the piecemeal dismemberment of Islamic civilisation. Understanding this destruction is the necessary first step toward any genuine renewal. For what could not survive the 20th century will not survive the 21st, and we can build nothing new without first reckoning with what was lost.

The Ottoman Dissolution

The Ottoman Empire’s final decades were a protracted agony. The 1838 Treaty of Balta Liman had already gutted the empire’s capacity for economic self-determination, imposing “free trade” that ensured Ottoman manufactures could not compete with British industrial output. However, it was the empire’s territorial disintegration, particularly in the Balkans, that proved most devastating, not necessarily because of lost land, but because of what happened to the people who lived there. Buildings can be rebuilt and farms resown, but once a people are dispersed, a culture is consigned to ruin forever.

The Balkan Wars and their aftermath saw one of modern history’s forgotten genocides. Between 1870 and 1923, Ottoman Muslims of various ethnicities across the Balkans, in Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, and beyond, were subjected to systematic ethno-religious cleansing. Millions fled or were killed. Those who survived became muhajir, with the refugees flooding into a shrinking Anatolian core. By 1923, one-third of the newly-founded Turkish Republic’s population consisted of displaced Muslims from the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Crimea. This catastrophe is often reduced to a mere statistic, but the muhajirs were scholars, artisans, merchants, and landowners; the very classes that sustained society and its cultural and intellectual production. Their displacement resulted in the destruction of businesses, the severing of patronage networks, the silencing of printing presses, and the abandonment of libraries. An entire world of knowing and being was eviscerated and subsequently banished from popular memory out of sheer trauma.

The Ottoman response to European pressure in the 19th century had been halting, but it gained momentum throughout the end of that century. Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals experimented with the Tanzimat reforms, the establishment of modern schools and universities, and the development of an Ottoman Turkish press. These efforts were a genuine attempt to negotiate the emergence of industrial civilisation on Islamic terms. Figures such as Said Halim Pasha and Mehmet Akif Ersoy, writing in journals like Sebilürreşad, articulated visions of Islamic philosophy, law, and governance that sought to indigenise modern developments in Europe. The Young Ottomans and later Young Turks, whatever their failures, represented a living debate about the future of Islamic civilisation.

The First World War annihilated these possibilities. The Arab provinces were carved up between British and French mandates. Anatolia itself nearly followed, saved only by the numerous heroes of Türkiye’s War of Independence. But the price of Turkish survival was the abandonment of its past. Kemal’s secular revolution deliberately severed the new Turkish Republic from its Ottoman past, abolishing the caliphate in 1924, replacing Arabic script with Latin in 1927, and systematically suppressing the religious and cultural institutions that had sustained Ottoman civilisation – all to ensure a clean break with the past.

The loss was not confined to Türkiye. With the Ottoman centre gone, Muslim elites across the former empire found themselves adrift. In the Arab world, the mandates imposed colonial structures that elevated compradors and marginalised traditional elites. In the Balkans, the remaining Muslim populations were reduced to minority status under hostile Christian nation-states. The transnational networks that had once connected statesmen, merchants, intellectuals, and scholars from Cairo to Damascus to Istanbul to Sarajevo were shattered beyond repair.

It was a cruel fate that the Ottoman collapse occurred just as Islamic civilisation’s cultural and intellectual production was gaining momentum. The short 19th century’s achievements – printing presses, journals, and transnational networks – were liquidated. No successor state inherited or could rebuild this infrastructure. The Nahda would continue in a diminished form in Cairo and Beirut, but without the institutional depth and patronage networks that the Ottoman system had provided.

The Rise of Communism

While the Ottoman Empire collapsed from external pressure and internal exhaustion, the Muslim communities of the Russian Empire faced a different horror: systematic ideological destruction. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 inaugurated seven decades of deliberate cultural annihilation that sought to erase Islam as a living civilisation across the vast expanse from Crimea to Central Asia.

Before 1917, Muslim Russia was undergoing its own intellectual awakening. The Jadid movement, born in Crimea and spreading across the Tatar-speaking world into Central Asia, represented a sophisticated effort to create a modern Muslim culture. Intellectuals like Ismail Gaspıralı advocated educational reform, the modernisation of Islamic schools, the adoption of scientific knowledge, and the development of a vernacular Muslim press. By the early 20th century, dozens of Jadid schools operated across the region, Tatar-language journals flourished, and a network of Muslim intellectuals connected Kazan, Bakhchisaray, Samarkand, and Bukhara, and extended their influence beyond into the Ottoman and Indo-Islamic worlds.

The Jadids were not secularists imitating the West. They were reform-minded Muslims attempting to reconcile Islamic learning with modern knowledge, creating institutions that could produce Muslims capable of functioning in an industrial age. Their project paralleled and often intersected with Ottoman and Egyptian reformism, forming part of a broader pan-Islamic intellectual moment.

The rise of the Bolsheviks utterly destroyed this. Initially, there was a brief window of hope. Some Jadids, like Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, believed socialism might accommodate Muslim aspirations for self-determination and modernisation. They were swiftly disabused of such notions. By the mid-1920s, Josef Stalin’s consolidation of power brought a campaign of terror against Muslim intellectuals and institutions. The Jadid schools were closed. Islamic endowments (waqf) were confiscated. The Arabic script was first replaced with Latin, then with Cyrillic, severing new generations from their literary heritage. Mosques were demolished or converted to warehouses. The ulema, who had resisted the Jadid movement’s call for reforms, were imprisoned or executed.

The destruction ran deeper than political and ideological repression. Communist ideology demanded the eradication of religion as a category of human experience. Where western colonial powers might allow Islam to persist as personal faith whilst neutering its political expression, Communism sought to extinguish even private belief. Children were raised in state institutions designed to produce atheist citizens. Islamic scholarship became impossible, not merely discouraged but expressly criminalised. The networks connecting Tatar Muslim intellectuals across Eurasia were severed. By the 1950s, entire generations had grown up knowing nothing of the Islamic intellectual tradition that had flourished just decades earlier.

The consequences extended beyond Soviet borders. Tatar Muslims had played a crucial role in connecting the Ottoman, Persian, and Indian intellectual worlds. Their journals circulated from Istanbul to Calcutta. Their scholars studied in Cairo and Bukhara, taught in Kazan and Kashgar. When Soviet repression closed this northern tier of Islamic civilisation, it isolated the Muslim heartlands from each other, interrupting exchanges that had sustained intellectual vitality for centuries.

Albania’s fate exemplified the totality of Communist destruction in Muslim Europe. Once the most influential corner of the Muslim Balkans, Albania underwent the most extreme anti-religious campaign in Communist history. By the 1960s, Enver Hoxha’s regime had declared Albania the world’s first atheist state. Every mosque and tekke was closed. The Muslim landowning class, which had sustained Sufi orders and Islamic learning, was liquidated. Within two generations, a civilisation that had produced Muslim scholars, poets, and statesmen for five centuries was reduced to fantastical memories whispered in the dark.

The Communist assault succeeded where colonialism had only partially damaged Islamic civilisation. Colonial powers, however exploitative, generally permitted the continued existence of Islamic institutions in some form. They might control them, tax them, or marginalise them, but they rarely attempted wholesale eradication. Communism offered no such reprieve. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, the Muslim communities it had ruled for seven decades emerged traumatised and hollow. Their institutions, intellectual traditions, and cultural continuity had all been deliberately erased. What remains today are fragments, and the work of reconstruction has barely begun.

The Indian Partition

If the Ottoman collapse destroyed Islamic civilisation’s western anchor and Communism severed its northern tier, the Partition of India in 1947 dealt the final, perhaps most consequential blow. India had been, for centuries, one of Islamic civilisation’s most productive centres. At its peak, the Mughal Empire surpassed the Ottomans in terms of wealth and sophistication. Its successor states and the Indo-Muslim elite who emerged under British rule sustained networks of learning, patronage, and cultural production that connected the subcontinent to the wider Islamic world.

The East India Company’s conquest of Bengal in the 18th century and the subsequent abolition of the Mughal sultanate in 1857 had already severely damaged this world. But Muslims in British India adapted. They established new institutions, such as the Aligarh Muslim University, to provide modern education while preserving Islamic learning and identity. They played a significant role in the emergence of an Urdu public sphere. They sent scholars to study in Cairo and Istanbul, and received students from across the Islamic world. The Indo-Muslim elite, though subordinate to British rule, retained sufficient autonomy and resources to continue participating in Islamic civilisation’s intellectual life. Such was India’s centrality that after the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, a conspiracy was hatched to transfer the seat of the Caliphate to Hyderabad, in the heart of India. As the last pseudo-sovereign Muslim ruler, the Nizam’s intermarriage with the Ottoman royal family was seen as a realistic endeavour.

In the end, it was not Britain’s direct rule, but the domestically driven partition of India, that destroyed this. The decision to divide India along religious lines created two nations and shattered a civilisation. Some 16 million people were displaced in the largest forced migration in human history. Communal violence is estimated to have killed between one and two million people. In the aftermath, Pakistan emerged as a refugee state for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Millions of muhajir from India flooded into a territory that lacked the institutional capacity to absorb them. The new state’s energies were consumed by survival: feeding refugees, establishing basic administration, and preparing for inevitable conflict with India. There was no bandwidth for the long-term institution-building required for intellectual and cultural flourishing. The Pakistani state, born in crisis, has struggled with legitimacy and coherence ever since, oscillating between secular nationalism and religious ideology without synthesising them into a workable model.

India retained the majority of the subcontinent’s infrastructure and institutions, but its Muslim population became traumatised and diminished. The Indo-Muslim elite, who had constituted a sophisticated governing and intellectual class, were decimated. Those who remained in India found themselves a vulnerable minority in a Hindu-majority state. Those who fled to Pakistan left behind homes, libraries, endowments, and institutional networks built over centuries. The transnational networks sustained by pilgrimage, scholarship, and trade, and connecting Indian Muslims to Cairo, Istanbul, and Mecca, were decimated.

The deeper loss in this case was civilisational memory. Indian Muslims had long regarded themselves as inheritors of a grand tradition that stretched back to the Delhi Sultanate and beyond. Partition forced a redefinition in which Pakistan was driven to adopt a national identity based on Islam without a deeper civilisational basis; instead, it became a shallow, ideological Islam divorced from the sophisticated legal and cultural traditions that had actually characterised Muslim India. In the Indian Republic itself, the need to prove loyalty to a Hindu-majority state encouraged many Muslims to minimise or privatise their Islamic identity. In both cases, the rich intellectual tradition of Indo-Islamic civilisation became attenuated, reduced to symbols and slogans rather than lived practice.

Partition also severed the Indian subcontinent from the broader Islamic world in ways that had not existed even under British colonialism. Pakistan’s chronic insecurity and conflicts have consumed resources and attention that might have been directed toward cultural and intellectual development. India’s Muslim minority status meant that Indian Muslims, once central to Islamic knowledge, culture, and intellectual networks, became peripheral. The golden age of Indo-Islamic learning, when students from Java to Morocco studied in Delhi and Lucknow, came to an end.

A Compounding Catastrophe

Each of these catastrophes might have been survivable on its own. Civilisations have recovered from territorial loss, foreign occupation, and demographic collapse. Islamic civilisation itself had survived the Mongol invasions, integrating the conquerors and eventually reaching new heights of sophistication under the auspices of the later gunpowder empires. Even in the 19th century, despite the encroaching colonialism and military defeats on all fronts, a genuine Islamic intellectual renaissance had emerged, a flowering of print culture and public debate that suggested the capacity for renewal remained intact.

But the three catastrophes did not occur in isolation. They compounded each other, each destroying a different pillar of Islamic civilisation’s infrastructure. The Ottoman collapse eliminated the central political authority and patronage network that had sustained intellectual life across the Arab and Turkish-speaking worlds. Communist repression severed the northern tier, isolating Central Asia and the Caucasus from the rest of the Islamic world and destroying the Jadid reform movement that might have offered a model for synthesis between Islam and modernity. Partition fractured the Indian subcontinent, creating two wounded states incapable of continuing the intellectual traditions that had made Muslim India a beacon of culture and learning.

These events not only destroyed institutions but also the social and political classes that played crucial roles in their sustenance. The Ottoman governing elite, the Tatar Muslim intelligentsia, and the Indo-Muslim aristocracy were patrons who commissioned books, endowed schools, and supported scholars, thereby participating in the networks that made Islamic civilisation more than a collection of atomised believers. Without them, knowledge production collapsed. Muslim societies retained mosques and basic religious education, but the complex ecosystem required for sustained intellectual innovation was gone.

The refugee dynamic accelerated the collapse. The Ottoman Empire became a refugee state in its final decades, and Anatolia was flooded with displaced Muslims from every direction. Pakistan was literally founded by and for refugees. These populations, traumatised and dispossessed, lacked the stability and resources for long-term cultural investment. States consumed by existential crises cannot build universities, fund research, or sustain the generational continuity required for intellectual traditions to flourish.

Crucially, the modernisation efforts begun in the 19th century were aborted before they could mature. The Ottoman Tanzimat, Jadid movement, and Aligarh represented genuine attempts to create indigenous Islamic modernity, to develop institutions and ideas that reconciled Islam with industrial civilisation without wholesale capitulation to Western models. In every case, their institutions were destroyed, intellectuals killed or silenced, and transnational networks severed. What survived were fragments, which have degenerated with each passing generation.

The result is the poverty of contemporary Islamic intellectual life. We rely on ideas formulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not because these ideas are adequate to our moment, but because we have lost the capacity to generate new ones. The institutions that might critique, refine, and build upon these earlier efforts do not exist, for the most part. Venerated institutions such as Al-Azhar are husks of their former selves. The class of people who might staff such institutions was destroyed. We are left with degraded copies, slogans repeated without understanding, and an amnesia so profound we do not even recognise what we have lost.

Reckoning with Defeat

Muslims have carefully constructed narratives around our defeat, usually centred around colonialism’s injustices and Western perfidy. Some go further in transforming our total defeat into a paradoxical victory: Islamic civilisation’s failure to survive the 20th century has become evidence of our moral superiority. We were too pure for this corrupted modernity, too devoted to principle to sully ourselves with the compromises required for power. The fact that we lost proves we were right.

This is delusion masquerading as piety. It is the closing of the Muslim mind made manifest through a retreat into nostalgic fantasies of the past. Unable to confront the scale of our loss, we have absolved ourselves of responsibility and rendered our defeat inexplicable except as a divine test or a Western conspiracy. In doing so, we have surrendered the one thing that might allow recovery: agency.

Contrary to prevailing attitudes, to own defeat is not capitulation. It is the recovery of agency through recognition of reality. When we accept that we were comprehensively beaten, that our military power was broken, our economic systems dismantled, our institutions destroyed, and our intellectual traditions severed, we unlock the only question that matters: how does this never happen again?

But if we refuse to own our defeat, if we insist it was really something else, whether test or blessing or vindication of our virtue, then we never ask that question and remain paralysed in time, condemned to taste defeat again and again while congratulating ourselves on our steadfastness. The artificial glass ceiling that constrains the Muslim mind must be shattered with a full recognition, acceptance, and internalisation of defeat. Only by sitting with this reality and feeling its full weight can we begin to understand how we arrived at this stage and what reconstruction demands of us.

However, dwelling on our sorrows is a popular pastime, and reckoning alone is insufficient. Understanding requires knowledge, and we lack the knowledge necessary to comprehend our own recent history. We must study the 19th and 20th centuries with the same rigour we apply to the halcyon days of the Umayyads, or Abbasids, or any other era of history that is distant enough for us to project our fantasies onto. We must understand the dynamics of history, not as a succession of discrete events, but as processes driven by material conditions, institutional arrangements, and the decisions of governing elites. We need an accurate theory of history that explains causation in human societies, the divergent fates of polities that seem similarly positioned, why certain ideas flourish in one context and wither in another, and the mechanisms by which entire classes and nations are elevated or destroyed.

Previous generations of Muslim intellectuals focused heavily on Western colonialism’s conquests, extraction, and cultural arrogance. This was necessary work, but it has led us to misdiagnose the timeline of our destruction. Colonialism weakened us, certainly, but we were not broken by the gradual processes of 19th-century imperial expansion. We were shattered by three concrete, cataclysmic events in the first half of the 20th century: the Ottoman dissolution, the rise of Communism across our northern territories, and the Indian Partition. These events, rather than the colonial pressures that mounted through the 18th and 19th centuries, were what eventually severed our civilisational continuity through the wholesale destruction of our social classes, political institutions, and the transnational networks that had sustained knowledge production for centuries. It is perhaps encouraging and exasperating that, even under the yoke of British or Russian imperialism, Aligarh and Jadid alike engaged in a creative process of reform and engagement. In contrast, we struggle to perform as vigorously today, despite the fact that colonialism is no longer a factor. This is a self-imposed condition.

By correcting our understanding of the timeline, we can finally ask the right questions. Perhaps most importantly, we can ground our efforts in concrete historical analysis rather than the abstract theorising that has dominated recent decades, by understanding precisely what was destroyed: which institutions were lost, which networks were severed, which systems of patronage supported cultural production, which social arrangements enabled intellectual life; then we can begin to imagine how to design new structures suited to our circumstances rather than attempting to resurrect dead forms.

The question now is whether we possess the courage to reckon with our history in an honest fashion and to abandon the comforting myths that excuse inaction. There are no shortcuts. There is no divine intervention that will restore what was lost. There is only the work, and it begins with seeing clearly.

Author: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine for the 21st century.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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We commenced this issue with The Islamic Secular & the Scale of Civilisation, a review of Sherman A. Jackson’s most recent publication. Jackson’s work has been a key inspiration behind the launch of Kasurian, which we hope fills a chasm in public discourse on Islam and civilisation, which has largely failed to escape a Manichean view of history.

All the ills and failures of Islamic civilisation have been laid to bear on modernity (a load-bearing and increasingly unproductive term) in contrast to a more pristine and sovereign pre-modern world. This has had an unfortunate effect on our perspective of civilisation. While Islam is commonly affirmed as an undivided worldview between the sacred and profane, in practice, Islam has become shoehorned through increasingly impractical and abstract debates that make Islam look, at best, like a quaint throwback to a mythological past.

Jackson’s conceptualisation of the Islamic Secular is a crucial and pragmatic tool with which to establish a beachhead towards civilisation-building endeavours. This can only be achieved by rejecting a Manichean worldview and embracing the fundamental complexity and oneness of civilisation – that is, the true meaning of tawhid.

Islam is not merely restricted to law and identity, but is a living spirit embodied in all of our endeavours, material or otherwise. It is something we have lost, yet we are not quite sure how. A closer look at our most recent history may offer some answers. In Kasurian’s inaugural essay, we laid out part of our thesis for the short 19th century, a period of remarkable vigour (and failure) which allows us to (re)imagine our engagement with the world today. This period of history is poorly understood and often reduced to a parody of decline and defeat in the popular imagination. In hindsight, the catastrophic collapse of Islamic civilisation may have seemed inevitable - but it was anything but, in the moment. Some rose to the challenge.

In Rockets, Elephants, and Tiger Statecraft: Tipu Sultan, the Moderniser, Imran Mulla provides a fresh perspective on the reign of India’s last sovereign ruler, Tipu Sultan. In the late 18th century, Tipu took to modernisation with gusto, developing the economic, military, and technological aspects of the Mysorean state to better compete with the British. There was no ideological baggage when developing industries and cannons; there was simply what worked, and what didn’t. Ultimately, Tipu was undone not by his failure to catch up, but by a stunning failure in diplomacy; the British aligned with Tipu’s enemies among the other Indian states and crushed Mysore’s armies.

Tipu was not alone in his struggle. In Muhammad Ali & the Dream of an Ottoman Modernity, Ahmed Askary explores the efforts of another Muslim statesman and reformer, Muhammad Ali Pasha, and his efforts to modernise Egypt in the early 19th century. There, too, Muhammad Ali would experience remarkable success, demonstrating a pragmatic approach to the developments in knowledge, science, and statecraft emerging out of industrialising Europe. Playing catch-up is a brutal affair, and Muhammad Ali almost succeeded; his failure to reform the Ottoman world from within is one of history’s haunting ‘What Ifs?’

Where statesmen floundered, intellectuals moved into the fray. In the short 19th century (roughly comprising the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century), cultural and intellectual movements came to life across the Muslim world. From Kazan to Delhi, Cairo, Istanbul, and even the European capitals, a transnational network communicated via print and telegraph. In The Jadid’s Quest for Reform, Yana Zuray explored the Jadid movement, a critical component of this transnational network. The Jadids’ legacy remains extremely consequential across the Turco-Islamic belt across Russia and Central Asia and continues to inform social and political debate, yet is relatively little known elsewhere in the Muslim world. Yet they grappled with the same issues we face today, and their ideas, debates, and divisions continue to inform our own.

Why does this matter? The genealogy of ideas leading up to the present day has been forgotten, largely owing to the ‘triple trauma’ experienced by Islamic civilisation between 1914-1947. This trauma, consisting of the near-complete Anglo-French colonisation of the Muslim world, Russian communism, and Indian Partition, destroyed what was left of Islamic political sovereignty and dismembered the Muslim elites, nascent bourgeoisie classes, and transnational intellectual networks. As discussed in the spring issue’s How Islam’s European Elites Were Destroyed and The Conspiracy to Save the Ottoman Caliphate in India, what was destroyed was not merely “the end of fancy dress balls and elaborate court rituals,” but an entire worldview sustained by networks of power and patronage.

This abrupt end to the short 19th century and the resulting trauma have kept us in intellectual stasis, rehashing the same ideas and debates of the short 19th century, degenerating generation by generation, until the present day, where we are left with anachronistic ideas unfit for our purposes in the 21st century.

This, too, informs Kasurian’s mission and purpose: to understand what happened, what was lost, and what can be done today. One solution may well be an Islamic Futurism, a theme explored in Futurism, the Next Venture of Islam, where Zach Winters succinctly summarises the work and ideas of Marshall Hodgson, a historian of Islam and author of the three-volume Venture of Islam. Hodgson believed that the vitality of Islamic civilisation depends on its creative capacity to provide solutions (or better trade-offs) to modern ills. This is a theme explored in the spring issue’s third essay, How the Mongols Revived Islamic Civilisation, where Yana Zuray provided a provocative thesis on the challenge of the Mongol invasions, and how Islamic civilisation responded by incorporating the Mongols and reaching its greatest heights just a few centuries later under the gunpowder empires. Today, we face an even greater challenge, yet our history demonstrates that we retain the burden of agency in responding to this challenge with creative solutions.

If an Islamic Futurism exists, it will have to understand the past and offer practical solutions in the present. In The Fourth Option: Alif and Silicon Valley’s Muslim Counterculture, Mariam Mahmoud goes to Silicon Valley to attend the Alif Summit in San Francisco. There, she explored how Muslims in the startup world are attempting to navigate faith and technology by combining moral agency and optimism in the power of technology to provide creative solutions. The missing ingredient, as Mariam deduces, is “the kind of sovereign systems thinking that seemed muted, if not missing.”

What does a sovereign system look like in the 21st century? In The Bonds of Reputation, Haseeb Ahmed looks at the institutional infrastructure behind non-state networks for trade. From the Maghribi Traders to the Diamond Dealers Club, Jewish businessmen have developed solutions for trade, trust, and arbitration from medieval Morocco to modern-day New York City. Where the Muslim world’s economies are mired in low trust, corruption, and dysfunction, Haseeb suggests that ‘private economic orders’ built on trust are how Muslims can organise and build an alternative means of prosperity.

For all their dysfunction, Muslim states can sometimes accomplish remarkable feats when compelled by the demands of sheer survival. In Eating Grass, Breathing Fire, Nasir Al-Hindi digs into the story of statecraft and subterfuge behind Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Its leaders promised to “eat grass”, if necessary, to procure a nuclear bomb. That promise was fulfilled; Pakistan’s economy is mired in poverty, corruption, and dysfunction, yet it continues to hold its ground against its much larger neighbour, India. Prosperity has been sacrificed for survival. Whether this tradeoff has been worthwhile depends on who you ask.

We look forward to returning in September with our autumn issue. Until then, you can revisit the essays we have published in the spring and summer issues. Many of the themes explored therein will continue to be developed in our autumn issue and beyond.

Thank you for reading Kasurian.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

Like many of the agricultural civilisations of the ancient world, from the empires of Mesoamerica to China, Egypt was a hydraulic civilisation. Its society clung desperately to the Nile, a ribbon of fertility amid the vast and undulating expanse of the Sahara. To control water was to control life, and this control was imposed by a centralised polity with the bureaucratic and engineering capacity to muster the manpower for labour-intensive hydraulic infrastructure, such as dams and irrigation. Thus, Egypt’s dependence on the Nile, its flat geography, and its large, largely homogeneous population compelled centralised governance. After all, the river that nourished also delivered tax collectors and soldiers with ease.

It is perhaps no accident, then, that the most determined effort to industrialise in the Middle East and North Africa began not in the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, but in its peripheral province of Egypt. The architect of this effort was neither philosopher nor theologian, but a hard-bitten Ottoman soldier of fortune: Muhammad Ali Pasha.

Where the Sublime Porte struggled to reform the empire through sartorial firmans, Muhammad Ali engaged in ruthless centralisation. He annihilated the Mamluk aristocracy and their feudal political economy; in its place, he built bureaucracies, arsenals, shipyards, and textile mills. He sought to render Egypt knowable and controllable through standardised tax collection, uniform laws, efficient communication, a professional standing army raised by conscription, and the adoption of large-scale industrial production. His statesmanship was defined by relentless action, geopolitical gambits, and a dream of ruling a revitalised Middle Eastern empire capable of holding its own against Europe.

Ultimately, his vision was undone by an unfortunate confluence: a man ahead of his time among his own people, yet too late in the global competition for power dominated by Europe. Britain, above all, could not tolerate an industrialising Egypt astride its imperial lifeline to India, and would play a key role in both Muhammad Ali’s failure and the Ottoman Empire’s eventual demise.

The story of modernisation often leaps from Europe and America to Meiji Japan, bypassing ambitious early attempts across India, the Middle East, and North Africa. Muhammad Ali’s rule stands as one of history’s great ‘what ifs’ – for had he succeeded, the trajectory of the Islamic world might have irrevocably altered global history.

Muhammad Ali was the quintessential reformer emerging in a civilisation’s twilight – a figure Ibn Khaldun would recognise. Yet his misfortune (and ours) was this: whenever such reformers arose within the cyclical rhythm of rise and decline, Britain invariably intervened, sabotaging revival. Islam’s challenge-and-response mechanism had been broken.

Contemporary views of this era often succumb to fatalism, drawing a straight line from Islamic civilisation’s 19th-century decline through the cataclysm of World War I to our fractured present. But this narrative obscures a crucial truth: even amid 19th-century colonisation and dysfunction, the capacity for indigenous renewal persisted. Our task today is to recover that thwarted vision of sovereign development, to understand why and how it failed, and to rediscover the mechanisms for civilisational revival.

An Ottoman Man in an Ottoman World

Born in the port town of Kavala (now in northern Greece) in 1769, Muhammad Ali’s origins betrayed little hint of imperial destiny. His father was an Albanian tobacco merchant and commander of the local Ottoman Albanian militia. Muhammad Ali would spend the first few decades of his life climbing the ranks of local power, acting as both a tax collector and a commander of Albanian mercenaries, ostensibly in service to the Porte, but more often acting as brigands engaging in local disputes.

There is some debate over the lineage of Muhammad Ali and his father – were they ethnically Albanian, or Turkish settlers who had moved from Anatolia to Thrace in centuries past? Debates over the true identity of Muhammad Ali reveal how culture and identity intersected in the pre-modern era in a manner almost entirely alien to us today. Egyptians, Albanians, and Turks often engage in heated debates about who Muhammad Ali was, how he perceived himself, and which modern nation-state can truly lay claim to him.

This debate would probably have made little sense to Muhammad Ali himself. Whether he was Albanian, Turkish, or some secret third thing was largely irrelevant in the wider context of the Ottoman imperial culture and identity. Muhammad Ali was an Ottoman man navigating an Ottoman world, seeking to reform it from within while ensuring the success of his ambitions and the longevity of his dynasty. The tension between race, faith, and power was resolved by order of priority, or through trade-offs made on a case-by-case basis.

In 1801, Muhammad Ali was poised to test the full capacity of his flexible loyalties.

Conquering Egypt

Napoleon Bonaparte had launched an invasion of the Ottoman provinces of Egypt and Syria in 1798, racing against Britain for control of vital land and sea routes between Europe and the Indian Ocean. Yet in 1801, the French army withdrew, defeated by Ottoman resistance in Syria, crippling logistical challenges, and the need to confront the growing anti-Napoleonic coalition in Europe.

In the wake of this retreat, the Porte dispatched an expeditionary force under Khurshid Pasha to reassert Ottoman control over Egypt. Among them were Muhammad Ali and his Albanian mercenaries. Egypt groaned under the Mamluk elite, a caste of slave-soldiers turned parasitic landlords who controlled the land and the fate of its peasantry. Napoleon’s invasion had shattered their myth of invincibility, exposing Egypt and the wider Ottoman world to European military advances. Cavalry charges and swords could not stand against musket volleys and artillery. Yet the French had failed to shatter the Mamluks’ grip on power, regrouping as swiftly as the French had fled.

The competition to control Egypt commenced post-haste, with the Porte and the Mamluks striving for control over the province. Yet in that competition, both were blindsided by the rise of a third actor: Muhammad Ali and his Albanian braves. Lacking the blue blood of the Mamluks or the imperial patronage of Khurshid Pasha, Muhammad Ali instead relied on populism, possibly mastered during his time as a tax collector and mercenary captain back home in Kavala. He positioned himself as a champion for the merchants and ulema of Cairo, led by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar. The ulema in particular, by extension of their moral and religious authority, wielded immense influence over Egyptian society. Muhammad Ali also allied with Umar Makram, a fiery populist whose proto-nationalist rhetoric against French occupation and Mamluk misrule had galvanised the streets.

As Muhammad Ali cultivated popular support, the Ottoman-Mamluk rivalry escalated, further ravaging Egypt. In 1805, a revolt erupted against Khurshid Pasha’s oppressive rule. Muhammad Ali deftly positioned himself at the head of this revolt. Faced with a restive Cairo and popular support for Muhammad Ali, Sultan Selim III had little choice but to appoint the Pasha as Wali – Governor of Egypt.

Having secured the support of the Egyptian street, eliminated his Ottoman rival, and received imperial patronage, Muhammad Ali now turned to the final obstacle to his rule: the Mamluks.

In 1807, Sultan Selim III was deposed (and assassinated in his harem a year later) after a Janissary revolt against his Nizam-i Jedid (“New Order”) military reforms, which aimed to create a European-style military out of the Ottoman army. The Janissaries, much like the Mamluks, had transformed from a fearsome slave-warrior caste into a social class with vested in-group interests. The Nizam-i Jedid was a direct disenfranchisement of their social position.

Muhammad Ali paid close attention to how these entrenched feudal classes reacted to reform. In 1811, under the pretext of honouring his son Tusun Pasha’s departure to lead an expedition against the Wahhabi rebels in Arabia, the Pasha invited the Mamluk chieftains and their retinues, numbering nearly 500 men, to a grand banquet within the walls of Cairo’s Saladin Citadel. As the procession of mounted Mamluks descended the narrow, winding ramp from the Citadel gate, Muhammad Ali’s Albanian troops sealed the exits and opened fire. Muskets and cannons loaded with grapeshot tore into the trapped procession, and few Mamluks escaped the slaughter. Survivors were hunted down across the country, all the way to Nubia, and their lands seized by Muhammad Ali. Egypt’s feudal order had been eliminated in one stroke.

Within a decade of his arrival, Muhammad Ali had become the undisputed ruler of Egypt. His ascent was a masterclass in Ottoman realpolitik, ruthlessly manoeuvring to aid rivals against each other and then turning on them once they were weakened. He leveraged popular unrest and support to overthrow the Ottoman governor, secured the Sultanic investiture to govern Egypt, and then used this newfound legitimacy to annihilate the Mamluks that had initially facilitated his rise. Even Umar Makram, realising too late Muhammad Ali’s intentions, was sent into exile.

Muhammad Ali had no intention of ruling either as a partner of the people or a satrap of the sultan. Instead, he quickly set about to consolidate his rule and set Egypt on the path to modernisation.

Ledgers, Looms, and Cannons

With his rivals vanquished, Muhammad Ali turned his attention to the development of Egypt. He had witnessed the military might of Napoleon’s France firsthand and understood, perhaps earlier than any non-European ruler, that industrial power and a modern state were the bedrock of geopolitical power. His reforms thus targeted three pillars: military modernisation, state-led industrialisation, and administrative centralisation.

Building a Modern Political Economy

He began with a nationalisation of all iltizam land (tax parcels), and an unprecedented wealth tax on awqaf (religious endowments), which by the 19th century had become vehicles for tax evasion by wealthy elites. Muhammad Ali seized the entire means of production in Egypt and created, for the first time, a truly national market. He mandated that producers sell their goods to the state, which would then resell them on international markets, earning sizeable revenues that would fund the Pasha’s state-building efforts. While this represented a catastrophic loss of freedom, workers' wages increased as a streamlined national market with access to global markets increased the value of production.

To manage this burgeoning state apparatus and extract its wealth more efficiently, Muhammad Ali set about creating a modern bureaucracy. He initiated one of the first modern censuses in the region. Tax collection was systematised by organising Egypt into 10 centrally-organised provinces, wresting control from local strongmen. Schools were established to train officials, engineers, doctors, and translators, separate from the traditional education provided by institutions like Al-Azhar. Vaccination programs were introduced, provided by the expanding national healthcare system. In 1832, Muhammad Ali even hired the French doctor, Antoine Clot (known in Egypt as ‘Clot Bey’), to build the first school of medicine for women.

Labour conscription was imposed to overhaul Egypt’s decrepit hydraulic infrastructure, dredging and expanding irrigation canals that had been neglected for centuries. The Mahmudiyah Canal, completed in 1820, reconnected Alexandria to the Nile, revitalising trade and increasing Egypt’s geopolitical importance.

A sovereign state required an industrial base. Muhammad Ali established ruthless state monopolies over Egypt’s key commodities: cotton, grain, sugarcane, and later, tobacco; the profits of which funded an astonishing industrial leap. Government factories sprang up across the Nile Delta: textile mills in Cairo, Mehalla el-Kubra, and Kafr el-Zayat, equipped with modern spinning jennies and power looms (by 1829, 30 cotton mills operated across Egypt, turning it into one of the world’s most important cotton exporters); arsenals at Cairo and Alexandria producing muskets, cannon, and ammunition; foundries casting metal; chemical works producing sulphuric acid and gunpowder; sugar refineries and glassworks. Shipyards at Alexandria built warships and merchant vessels.

Egypt was becoming legible, quantifiable, and centrally controlled – a recognisably modern state. This was not a straightforward task. The science of legibility was a foreign imposition in a culture where everything was anything but legible. Muhammad Ali lacked sufficient cadres of skilled bureaucrats capable of carrying out this task; there was immense resistance across Egypt to what was (rightly) seen as the impersonal interference of a state to which they had no allegiance. Nonetheless, the Pasha persisted.

Muhammad Ali also fostered an intellectual engagement with Europe that sought understanding, not subservience. The educational mission he sent to Paris in 1826 included Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, an Azhar-trained scholar and imam. During his five-year stay in Paris, Al-Tahtawi wrote Takhlis Al-Ibriz Fi Talkhis Bariz ("The Extraction of Gold in the Summarising of Paris"), a travelogue of what he observed in Europe. He marvelled at French engineering, public hygiene, and orderly administration, seeing them as manifestations of beneficial knowledge that Muslims could and should adopt. He noted the precision of French law, the efficiency of their postal service, and even their table manners as practical advancements. He also praised their educational institutions, libraries, and newspapers as vital tools for national strength. Al-Tahtawi expressed no sense of civilisational inferiority, instead treating France and Europe’s advances as a toolbox from which Muslims could adopt what was beneficial and leave the rest.

The Bulaq Press, founded by the Pasha in 1822 primarily to print military manuals and administrative decrees, evolved into the Arab world’s first modern publishing house. While initially favouring European technical works, it became the engine of Egypt’s later Nahda (cultural renaissance), an Arabic intellectual revival planting the seeds for the broader Arab nationalist movement. Al-Tahtawi later worked at the Press, producing over 2000 written works, mostly focused on translating European ideas and books on history, geography, and statecraft.

All the Pasha’s Men

The fate of Sultan Selim III’s own Nizam-i Jedid reforms served as a grim warning to Muhammad Ali. If the imperial core could not reform its armies, it had no chance of standing against the might of Europe.

Muhammad Ali started from scratch, transforming his motley crew of Albanian braves into the nucleus of his own Nizam-i Jedid. By 1824, he had established a vast training camp at Aswan under the command of Sulayman Pasha Al-Faransawi (born Joseph Anthelme Sève), a French officer who had converted to Islam and sought service under the Pasha. The recruits were a polyglot mix: remnants of his loyal Albanians, Mamluk slaves he still controlled, and tragically, thousands of enslaved Sudanese. The Sudanese, unprepared for the harsh conditions and European-style drilling, perished in droves; out of 20,000 brought to Aswan, only 3,000 survived the first year.

Desperate for manpower, and on the advice of the French consul, Bernardino Drovetti, Muhammad Ali turned to Egypt’s fellaheen – the peasant farmer class. In Napoleonic style, the Pasha imposed mass conscription on them. The idea of service to the state was an entirely revolutionary foreign notion. Many peasants fled their land into hiding, going as far as Nubia and Syria. Some even mutilated their own hands by cutting off thumbs and index fingers (necessary to fire muskets) to avoid military service.

Yet, Muhammad Ali persisted with relentless will. He recruited the services of dozens of European officers from Italy, France, and Spain, who drilled the raw recruits in European techniques. By the late 1820s, Egypt boasted a standing army of 130,000 men, trained in European tactics and armed with modern muskets and artillery, eclipsing the Ottoman army itself in discipline and firepower.

Muhammad Ali had observed how Britain was able to defeat Napoleonic France time and again, owing to the superiority of the Royal Navy. Without a modern navy, Egypt’s security and the Pasha’s ambitions would be curtailed in a likewise manner. He first attempted to purchase state-of-the-art warships from Britain but was rebuffed; they had no interest in helping a Middle Eastern and Muslim power acquire the power to compete with the Royal Navy. Even France was reluctant to help the Pasha. Undeterred, he turned to shipyards in Genoa, Venice, and Marseilles, privately commissioning frigates and brigs, and scavenging the Mediterranean for whatever vessels he could acquire. This nascent navy became central to his ambitions.

Dreams of Empire

Muhammad Ali’s first commission from the Porte after the successful capture of Egypt was to retake the Hejaz region of Arabia, centred on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from the Wahhabi rebels. Led by his sons, Tusun and Ibrahim Pasha, the campaigns were gruelling, but demonstrated the army’s discipline and logistical capabilities. By 1818, victory secured the holy cities, bolstered Muhammad Ali’s legitimacy, and gave him control of the lucrative Red Sea trade routes. It also proved his forces could project power far beyond the Nile.

After the Hejaz campaigns, Muhammad Ali turned his attention to Sudan next, dispatching his modern army to conquer and incorporate the country into Egypt between 1820 and 1824. By the mid-1820s, the Pasha now governed over Egypt, the Hejaz, and Sudan. Yet, these successes did not satiate his ambitions.

An even greater opportunity arose after 1821, with the start of the Greek Revolt against Ottoman rule. By 1824, the Porte’s failure to crush the revolt prompted the Sultan, Mahmud II, to beseech Muhammad Ali for his support. Initially aloof, or perhaps desiring significant concessions, the Pasha intervened only when Sultan Mahmud II offered him the governorship of Crete and Morea if he succeeded in crushing the revolt.

Muhammad Ali dispatched his son, Ibrahim Pasha, at the head of the Egyptian army. In Crete, they crushed the rebels with startling efficiency, prompting increasing paranoia in the Porte. Egypt’s subsequent governance of the island revealed the Pasha’s reformist ethos: replacing arbitrary taxation and punishment with streamlined systems, rooting out corruption, and fostering relative stability. Muhammad Ali was not another satrap interested in tax farming.

Success in Crete led to campaigns in the Morea, further showcasing his army’s prowess and expanding his influence. By 1826, the Egyptian army had succeeded in crushing much of the Greek Revolt. However, Muhammad Ali’s ambitions alarmed the European powers. Philhellenic sentiment was running high in Europe, but more crucially, Britain feared Russian expansion through Ottoman weakness and detested the prospect of a powerful, modernising Egypt controlling the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptian navy had enabled Muhammad Ali’s projection of power across the eastern Mediterranean and formed the supply lifeline to the Egyptian forces operating in Crete and the Morea.

Thus, a combined British, French, and Russian fleet, ostensibly enforcing a ceasefire, entered Navarino Bay in the Morea and deliberately provoked a battle that annihilated Muhammad Ali’s prized, modern navy – the fruit of years of investment and shipbuilding. It was his first defeat and a devastating blow to the Pasha, eliminating nearly two decades of hard work. Navarino seared into his consciousness the precariousness of his position.

The Vision Flounders

Stung by Navarino, fearing encirclement, and desiring restitution for the loss of his fleet, in no small part caused by the Porte’s incompetence, Muhammad Ali demanded Ottoman Syria from the Porte to add to his governorship. The province offered significant trading markets, a buffer zone against the Ottomans, and resources such as the timber of Lebanon needed to rebuild his fleet. The Porte was uninterested in increasing the power of their otherwise chastened viceroy.

In 1831, Ibrahim Pasha was dispatched to Syria at the head of the Egyptian army. Conquest was swift, but governing the region's fractious mosaic of sects and tribes proved far harder. Ibrahim, a brilliant soldier but less adept politician, struggled with understanding Syria’s cultural landscape. Reforms similar to Egypt and Crete were imposed, but Syria’s local elites proved more wily in their resistance to Egyptian taxation, and the imposition of conscription (levied only on Muslims) and perceived favouritism towards Christians sparked repeated rebellions. While Ibrahim Pasha succeeded in putting them down, lingering discontent made Egyptian governance over Syria an arduous affair.

Ibrahim Pasha continued his campaigning, and by 1832, the Egyptians were soundly defeating the Ottoman armies, marching as far as Konya in central Anatolia, where 15,000 Egyptian troops routed a significantly larger force of 60,000 Ottomans. The road to Istanbul lay wide open. Here, Muhammad Ali again overplayed his hand and provoked Europe against him.

Sultan Mahmud II, in panic, appealed to the Ottomans’ ancient enemy: Russia. The sight of Russian troops encamped on the shores of the Bosphorus forced a temporary settlement in the Convention of Kütahya in 1833, granting Muhammad Ali control of Syria, Adana, and Crete, but forcing him back from Istanbul and the Ottoman dynasty.

It was the zenith of his power. When the Ottomans sought revenge in 1839, Ibrahim delivered another crushing blow at Nezib in 1839, reinforcing their dominance of the Ottoman Middle East. The Ottoman fleet even defected to Alexandria days later. Constantinople seemed indefensible for the second time. Could Muhammad Ali overthrow the Ottoman dynasty?

Once again, European powers intervened, orchestrated by Britain’s Turkophobic Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston. Britain could not tolerate Russian influence over the Ottomans, nor could it accept a powerful, independent Egypt athwart the route to India. A European coalition (composed of Britain, Austria, and Russia) formed against Muhammad Ali. In 1840, the bombardment of Acre by the Royal Navy shattered Ibrahim Pasha’s Syrian stronghold, and a British fleet lay siege to the port of Alexandria. Facing overwhelming force and internal unrest, the ageing Pasha capitulated. The London Straits Convention of 1841 stripped Muhammad Ali of Syria, Crete, Arabia, and the Ottoman fleet, but crucially, it made his rule over Egypt hereditary. He had secured a dynasty but sacrificed an empire.

Meanwhile, Britain had moved deliberately to cripple the economic engine of Muhammad Ali’s state. In 1838, they imposed the Treaty of Balta Liman on the Ottoman Empire, including Egypt. The treaty abolished monopolies, the very mechanism Muhammad Ali used to fund industrialisation and control trade, and imposed "free trade." This would keep Egypt a mere supplier of raw cotton for Lancashire’s mills, and a market for British goods. Flooded with cheap, mass-produced British textiles, Egypt’s cotton mills and workshops were driven into ruin. The treaty had the same effect across the Ottoman Empire, and Balta Liman would result in the most extreme deindustrialisation of any 19th-century polity.

After Balta Liman and the London Convention, Muhammad Ali’s worsening health, state of defeat, and some solace that he had at least preserved Egypt for his dynasty, led to the faltering of the Pasha’s grand project. Egypt’s debt ballooned as its industries came to a standstill.

Ultimately, he could not defeat the confluence of unfortunate events that stood in the way of his vision. European powers, especially Britain, viewed his industrial and military rise with alarm, seeing a potential barrier to their own imperial designs, particularly the route to India. They actively worked to undermine him, propping up the enfeebled Ottomans as a more pliable entity.

The Porte itself, riddled with envy and fear of its over-mighty viceroy, proved a constant, debilitating opponent, more interested in clipping his wings than harnessing his energy for the empire’s benefit.

A Future Lost

Muhammad Ali’s drive had been the dynamo of the Egyptian state. His successors lacked his vision, energy, and ruthless competence. His most capable son and intended heir, Ibrahim Pasha, worn out by constant campaigning, died of consumption just months after formally succeeding his ailing father in 1848. Muhammad Ali’s advisors neglected to inform him of his son’s death out of fear for his health. The Pasha would pass nearly a year later in the summer of 1849.

Ibrahim’s nephew and successor, Abbas Hilmi I, was reactionary and paranoid. He despised his grandfather’s reforms and became the caricature of the indolent Oriental satrap, presiding over the dismantling of his industries, the closure of schools, the dismissal of European advisors, and the mortgaging of Egypt’s future to European creditors to fund palace escapades.

Though later successors like Said Pasha and Ismail Pasha revived aspects of their progenitor’s development programme, they did so on a foundation of massive European debt. Ismail’s extravagant borrowing, coupled with collapsing cotton prices, led directly to the imposition of Anglo-French financial control and ultimately, the British Occupation of 1882. The dynasty became increasingly hollow, its nominal independence preserved only as a facade for British control, limping on until the military coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed King Farouk in 1952, ending the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt.

Modernisation is a brutal affair: cultural homogenisation, military conscription, and the rigours of industrial production on labour were just some of the trials that every developed state today has had to endure. Yet what fruits they enjoy, be that material prosperity or political and military sovereignty, is a direct result of these trials.

Muhammad Ali was no angel or saviour. He was driven by personal ambition and the desire to create an imperial dynasty. His policies caused a great deal of suffering, particularly through the toll exacted on the fellaheen of Egypt, who bore the brunt of his measures. Nor was he a philosopher or intellectual, wrestling with abstract notions of modernity and tradition. He understood that sovereignty depended on military organisation, industrial productivity, and state capacity, and the only response to European advancement was to identify what worked and adopt it. Innovation was judged by its utility, not its origin.

The Pasha’s failure was not preordained. Japan, facing similar Western pressure just decades later, would demonstrate that non-Western societies could rapidly industrialise while retaining cultural coherence under determined leadership. Egypt possessed the resources, the strategic location, and, under Muhammad Ali, the will. What it lacked was time free from British and European interference, and a hostile cultural and political milieu at home. No one could tell what the future of the 19th and 20th centuries would bring, and if they had, the impetus to modernise would have received a different urgency. Yet, if he had succeeded, we may well be telling a different tale, and the cost of modernisation a mere stepping stone to a better future.

Perhaps this is why Muhammad Ali’s figure looms so large in the history and imagination of both modern Egypt, where he is considered the ‘father of the state’ (although not without significant pushback owing to the toll he exacted on Egyptians), and the wider Middle East. No statesman since his time has come so close to creating the conditions for an industrialised and modern state of consequence in the Arab world.

In his time, few shared the Pasha’s dreams of an industrialised Middle Eastern empire at the heart of Islamic civilisation. Muhammad Ali’s failure remains one of history’s most haunting 'What Ifs?’

Author: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine focused on history, culture, and civilisation.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

Further Reading

Books

• Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali

• Henry Dodwell, The Founder of Modern Egypt

• Kenneth M. Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt 1740-1858

• Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt

• Khaled Fahmy, Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt

Journals

• Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 49, Muhammad Ali Pasha

• Laura Panza & Jeffrey G. Williamson, Did Muhammad Ali Foster Industrialization in Early Nineteenth Century Egypt?

Picture a pair of merchants quietly discussing the contents of a parcel at dawn. By noon, it will have changed hands multiple times, doubling or tripling in value, embedded in deals worth millions of dollars. And yet not a single contract will be signed, nor a dollar wired. These transactions will all be brokered on the simple notion that a man’s word is his bond.

While the scene reads like a romantic vestige of pre-industrial commerce, it unfolds every day in the financial capital of the world. In Midtown Manhattan, the largest diamond market in the world thrives: The Diamond District. The words that securitise transactions here are ancient, however: “mazel u’bracha”, a Yiddish phrase to convey ‘luck and blessing’.

The choice of words reflects the de facto monopoly that Jewish diamond merchants (‘diamantaires’) have long held in the industry. Their dominance is no historical accident; it is an institutional achievement. Over time, they have constructed a governance system that operates entirely parallel to the legal and financial systems they formally inhabit. It is a private order built on trust, where reputation is both collateral and a cudgel. And this network often rivals, if not eclipses, the bargaining power of nation-states.

What makes this network so effective is a set of institutions and social technologies that instantiate trust where opportunism is uniquely tempting. While contracts are the preeminent social technology for forging trust between counterparties, they are incomplete without the enforcement of terms and behaviour. The privately ordered governance mechanism in the industry enforces executory contracts more effectively than public courts, establishing it as the preferred venue for diamantaires.

The principles behind this governance mechanism are rooted in the Abrahamic tradition, where the act of contracting is not just a legal artefact but an ethical commitment underwriting your identity.

“If a man vows a vow to the LORD, or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge, he shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth.” (Numbers 30:2)

The longest verse in the Qur’an is also devoted to the procedure for contracting a loan, explicating the earlier Abrahamic code as a communal responsibility.

O believers! When you contract a loan for a fixed period of time, commit it to writing. Let the scribe maintain justice between the parties […] Call upon two of your men to witness […] The witnesses must not refuse when they are summoned […] You must not be against writing ˹contracts˺ for a fixed period–whether the sum is small or great. This is more just ˹for you˺ in the sight of Allah [...] (Al-Baqara, Verse 282)

By requiring witnesses, the Qur'an transforms private dealings into socially embedded relational acts that inform collective memory, induce performance, and ultimately sustain the institutional architecture of a productive society.

Economic coordination depends on credible enforcement, and the best systems reduce the cost of trusting one another. Institutions cannot manufacture trust, but they can create the conditions for it to flourish. And societies that succeed in lowering the cost of trust unlock orders of magnitude more economic growth than societies that merely lower the cost of coercing one another.

Despite inheriting these Abrahamic accords, Muslim economies are in a situation where trust has been corroded by rent-seeking elites and rampant opportunism. Muslims searching for sovereignty in the 21st century are confronted with a fractured landscape. Debanking in the West, opportunism in the East, and a global economy that oscillates between over-regulation and lawlessness. The impulse, all too common, is to digitise institutions from the past. The solution, however, is not to return to the Golden Age but to initiate a golden age of governance, to evolve institutional protocols – social, moral, technical – for the world we inhabit and are entering, seeking sovereignty not in nostalgia but as a matter of stewardship.

To see why the innovation of social technologies is critical in the 21st-century Muslim search for economic sovereignty, we need to trace the arc from medieval trade networks to modern institutional substrates.

Reputation As Regulation

In the 11th century, a coalition of Jewish merchants, the ‘Maghribi Traders’, built what has become the seminal case study of what economists call ‘private ordering’. It was a lex mercatoria (merchant law) where transactions and disputes were governed by community norms and institutions, evolving in response to the environmental constraints and costs of maritime trade. Operating across the Mediterranean under Muslim rule, the Maghribi traders thrived under an imperial umbrella while avoiding reliance on state enforcement, owing to the broad legal autonomy granted by Islamic governance.

Contracts moved trade beyond the immediacy of spot exchanges, enabling what Charles Fried called ‘time-extended exchange’. This shift demanded deeper trust between parties, since promise and performance were separated. But these contracts were only effective to the extent that legal sanction was a credible threat, and that a court could enforce terms. But in the medieval Mediterranean, crossing political and legal boundaries, i.e. ‘space-extended exchange’, courts were either too costly or entirely toothless to provide these assurances. The Maghribi Traders recognised these limits and responded by building institutional networks that substituted the enforcement function, relying on courts only as a measure of last resort.

What developed was a network-based enforcement regime, where reputation acted as regulation. Deals were not just committed to writing, but etched onto the collective memory of the merchants. They created an information layer that transmitted market information (logistical data, prices abroad) and reputation-relevant information. These reports, requested by merchants, would detail a potential partner's past conduct and payment punctuality. The letters (preserved in the Cairo Genizah) moved swiftly and cheaply enough to anchor a multilateral trust calculus, making private ordering through reputation a credible bond.

Topology of Trust

Understanding how this network functioned requires some network science. A small-world network is a particular network structure with two key properties: dense local clusters and relatively short paths linking distant nodes. While most nodes connect only to their immediate neighbours, the network's structure ensures that any node can access any other through a small number of intermediary connections. This is where the idea of “six degrees of separation” came from. This configuration enables information to travel efficiently across the entire network, even when individual participants are far apart and not directly connected.

The Maghribi network followed a classic bridge-and-cluster structure: tight-knit clusters of traders (‘cliques’ in centres like Fustat and Sicily) linked by a smaller number of bridges (strategic ties between prominent merchants spanning the Mediterranean). These itinerant merchants were the primary disseminators of information: merchants in clusters would consult these central nodes, who would access and relay reputation reports via letters to their inter-cluster ties. These information brokers had strong incentives to maintain accurate records of behaviour. Their own economic and social standing depended on being trustworthy disseminators, thus emerging a sort of meta-reputation. This network structure minimised information costs by reducing the intermediaries needed to verify reputation, avoiding the expense of constantly updating every trader. Yet it remained robust enough to ensure that defection or misconduct quickly became widely known.

The enforcement and governance of contracts were based on the credible threat of network exclusion. In the language of game theory, the present value of future pay-offs of cooperation inside the network far outweighed the payoffs of opportunism. The system also incentivised timely performance, as delayed shipments and payments also damaged reputation. Collective ostracism was a potent threat. A trader was not just excluded from a cluster, but from the entire network, effectively barred from trading anywhere in the Mediterranean.

All this matters because small-world networks are ubiquitous: power grids in the United States, the collaboration graph of film actors, and even the neural networks of the worm C. elegans exhibit small-world properties. Identifying the contract governance properties of small-world networks sets the stage for formulating how they can be a part of institutional foundations for trade in a variety of modern markets. Today, a highly evolved form of this Jewish private ordering mechanism, rooted in reputation and communal enforcement, continues to flourish in what is perhaps the most sophisticated legal forum on Earth.

The Diamond Dealers Club

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls
– William Shakespeare, Othello Act 3: sc. 3

The New York Times called trust the real treasure of the Diamond District.

Diamonds are extracted from mines mostly in Botswana, Russia, and Canada; the product of immense heat and pressure deep beneath the Earth’s crust over billions of years, which compressed carbon into what is the hardest substance on the planet today. These diamonds are then shipped to trading centres around the world: Antwerp, Surat, and most notably, New York City. This is where the trade comes to life, where craftsmanship meets commerce, creating a $100 billion market.

But why is it that when you walk down 47th St, you suddenly hear Yiddish and spot yarmulkes?

Jewish predominance in the diamond industry is the product of a few forces. Firstly, the restriction on Jewish commerce in pre-Enlightenment Europe, including prohibitions on land ownership, membership of merchant guilds, and from traditional handicrafts, steered Jewish traders towards merchant professions with portable inventories. Secondly, some element of Jewish education, upbringing, and socialisation develops tacit knowledge and skills uniquely conducive to success in the diamond trade. And thirdly, ethnic cartels in general collude to maximise collective income, even at individual cost. By charging competitive prices to members and oligopoly prices to outsiders, rivals are priced out and the tribe flourishes.

Yet none of these explanations would have survived relentless market pressures. The real answer lies in something neoclassical economics largely ignored: the hidden costs embedded in every transaction. While economists focused on prices and quantities, a newer school called New Institutional Economics addressed transaction costs that organise commerce day-to-day. Every deal carries implicit costs that practitioners know intimately: finding trustworthy partners (search), negotiating terms (bargaining), ensuring people honour their commitments (monitoring and enforcement). The Jewish diamond network secured its hegemony by an institutional solution to enforce credit sales at transaction costs that competitors couldn’t match.

Credit Where Credit’s Due

Credit sales are essential in the diamond trade because they address liquidity constraints. Cash upfront would strangle the trade, given the price of diamonds and the turnaround imposed by the cutting process. Sellers also know that they can get significantly better prices for a stone by extending credit terms. In fact, trade credit is so central to the industry that it has been called an implicit capital market. Diamantaires can obtain credit from each other at a far lower cost than they could anywhere else, because as a network, they have more information about a buyer’s creditworthiness than any other lender in the world.

Yet, the temptations of opportunism and even outright cheating in this industry are unlike any other. Diamonds concentrate immense value in the most portable and untraceable forms, and thieves can cash out anywhere on the globe. While most industries can rely on the state’s legal machinery to compel performance, legal scholars have long noted the disability of courts here. As Richman notes, the failure of courts to prevent flight amounts to a failure to enforce the executory contract.

That is the notion this institutional machinery was built to solve: the extraordinary margins of trading on credit are matched by the magnitude of risk. And while cultural norms of fairness are necessary, they are insufficient to sustain the widespread multilateral cooperation observed. Rather, it is a governance mechanism, composed of a web of industry and communal institutions which anchor reputation and exert costly deterrents for defection.

In a market dependent on credit, they have developed social technologies that instantiate trust and govern agreements through the force of reputation. It is a private order based on enforcing contracts through staked reputation, mediating disputes through a private, mandatory arbitration system, and enforcing decisions through ultra-Orthodox community institutions.

The heart of this ‘institutional stack’ is the Diamond Dealers Club. The DDC functions as a consensus engine to reduce transaction costs among diamantaires and to instantiate trust. It first mediates entry, filtering for long-term cooperation rather than one-off opportunism. Entry is mediated either through family ties, Hasidic faith, or even prior dealings with a member, and this is where scrutiny is sharpest. An aspiring diamantaire, Tommy Van Scoy (a non-Jew) was admitted simply because he paid money back on time, but recalls that the DDC knew how much he paid for his mortgage every month and where his children went to school.

In this system of mutual reputation, a sponsor’s standing is tethered to the dealer they endorse. Their reputation can be enhanced or diminished based on the new dealer's conduct. Inside the highly secure trading hall of the DDC is “The Wall”, which displays photos and references of new entrants, announces the nomination of potential members and invites current members to comment on their trustworthiness.

When disputes inevitably surface, the Diamond Dealers Club fulfils its central role as an arbitration system. Court cases are exceedingly rare; membership is conditioned on mandatory arbitration and waiving your right to litigation. Panels of reputable diamantaires deliberate behind closed doors, and their decisions are final. Arbitration is faster and cheaper than court, and arguably more just. Experienced diamantaires streamline the evidentiary processes and assessment of damages far more accurately. Procedures are tailored for archetypical disputes, so costs are low and rulings swift. Rulings are then posted on the DDC’s public wall, and reputation-relevant information circulates to bourses worldwide.

A decision against you doesn’t spell exile but may prompt future partners to proceed cautiously, by offering tighter credit terms or requesting collateral. Only blatant fraud or refusal to honour an arbitration ruling leads to expulsion. The DDC’s arbitration establishes the immutable reputational record, and if that alone doesn’t compel compliance, community institutions enforce the club’s judgments.

The engulfing presence of Orthodox Jews has made it such that economic relationships are nested within the community itself: expulsion threatens business and belonging. Orthodox Jewish institutions consciously deter dishonest and opportunistic behaviour through coordinated sanctions. The DDC can even initiate proceedings in rabbinical courts, where penalties range from restricted access to synagogues through to formal excommunication. Whereas the Maghribi Traders cast merchants out of the trade network, the diamond industry ostracises them from society, forfeiting not only interlocking business ties but also access to matchmaking networks. So not only do defectors get their face plastered across the wall of every bourse and name emailed to every dealer around the world, they will be effectively severed from the ethnoreligious lineage by not marrying a Jewish woman.

Another force enables Jewish diamantaires to trust one another so extensively: social cohesion, or as Ibn Khaldun put it, asabiyya.

Fortunes Forged In Faith

The Maghribi Traders and the diamantaires exemplify the economic rewards and competitive advantages of transacting with your co-religionists. The inherent confidence woven into religious kinship dismantles the inherent scepticism that governs commercial exchange. Among co-religionists, the foundation of trust emerges pre-established, elevated beyond the cautious calculations that typically govern transactions between strangers. Within the Abrahamic framework, this heightened confidence springs from theological imperatives: believers orient their decision-making toward eternal consequences, extending their temporal horizon far beyond expedient material gains.

Interest, for instance, is a risk-management tool that places a premium on the absence of trust when money is lent. It is in that sense a tax on social cohesion, and trust is a discount rate on credit.

Individuals belonging to a distinct religious group also share tacit behavioural norms known in the Islamic vocabulary as adab and akhlaq. Institutions are more than just demarcative hierarchies and bylaws, operating on top of an intangible substrate of culture, norms, and shared mental models, all of which are instinctive to people operating from the same religious framework. In the case of the Maghribi Traders, operational norms became self-enforcing because of shared cognitive models. These mediate individual behaviour and structures interaction discreetly, creating the cultural operating system on top of which formal organisations can be built, and society shaped.

Opportunism & The Muslim Condition

Modern Muslim markets rarely enjoy this discount rate on credit. Court systems are slow, traditional institutions captured by rent-seeking elites, and corruption at the top cascades down into a low-trust society. The implicit premium on distrust means productive opportunities fall through since risk dwarfs reward, creating a vicious cycle.

While the priority for any Muslim political economy must be institutional reform, it is not sufficient. Conventional institutions are a floor, not a ceiling.

Changing this demands governance structures that can neutralise transaction hazards where opportunism thrives. Capital flows through the arteries of Western banks that can freeze it overnight. Censorship, surveillance, and debanking are not speculative fears but active policy. Owning infrastructure like payment rails, which are not subject to the whims of any party with the power to sever access unilaterally (and often arbitrarily), is necessary as a matter of sovereignty. Oscillating between intermediaries which would either stifle or censor productive enterprises, evolved forms of the privately ordered networks, such as the Maghribi Traders & diamantaires, may be essential for Muslims in the 21st century.

The 19th century offers Muslims a blueprint. The trust assurances of these reputational networks were not exclusive to the Jewish communities. Trans-Saharan caravan traders operating between West and North Africa crafted a remarkable synthesis of these two paradigms. These were merchants who organised primarily agency agreements to trade goods. Through their activities, private and public institutions became functionally integrated, with recognition of the scope where one approach was more useful and economical than the other.

These traders deployed whichever paradigm suited them best, utilising the efficiency of reputation-based networks while nesting them seamlessly within formal legal frameworks. Courts (or more accurately, judges) remained available when disputes demanded formal adjudication, but only as a last resort given the prohibitive costs of legal proceedings in time and money. The Trans-Saharan traders reveal that the optimal solution isn't choosing between private and public order, but building robust private networks that can govern most contracts while keeping formal legal systems as backup infrastructure when stakes or complexity demand it.

The key to successful economic exchanges here is not necessarily an impartial and efficient third-party enforcing agency, but the existence of a level of trust or other self-enforcing institutions in relevant networks of commerce [...] In other words, the state is neither necessary nor sufficient. The simple model in which it is only the state and threat of its justice and police systems that makes people behave cooperatively seems a poor description of any known situation.
– Joel Mokyr

The private order institutions highlighted here were not simply horizontal clusters constricted to a particular locality, but a type of network state, running parallel to but relevant in the political economies in which they were situated. The dispersed, diasporic state of Muslims today is ideal for forming such small-world networks, which emerge when distant connections yield high returns but transaction costs are high enough that strategic actors must bridge across clusters.

Trust is the subtle architecture of prosperity, but it rarely emerges on its own. It must be carefully cultivated through social technologies and institutions that make trust both possible and profitable through the bonds of reputation, which underwrite all productive societies.

Author: Haseeb Ahmed is based in Toronto. After driving growth operations for several startups, he is now working on transaction scripts and payment infrastructure. He is interested in the future of firms and money. You can follow his ongoing experiments and reflections @haseebinc.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

Further Reading

1. Barak Richman, How Community Institutions Create Economic Advantage

2. Lisa Bernstein, Contract Governance In Small-World Networks

3. Joel Mokyr, The Institutional Origins Of The Industrial Revolution

4. Ghislaine Lydon, Contracting Trust

5. Primavera De Filippi, Blockchains and The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

6. Oliver Williamson, Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations

7. Ronald Coase, The Problem of Social Cost

“If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, we will go hungry, but we will get one of our own”.
— Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Pakistan is not a wealthy country. Nearly 40% of its population lives below the poverty line, nearly half are illiterate, and the government has borrowed from the IMF at least 23 times in the last 35 years.

Yet Pakistan has the curious distinction of being one of only nine nations in the world at the bleeding edge of the arms race.

This is because it has nuclear weapons.

How did this troubled nation, born in the bloodshed of Partition, plagued by instability, suffocated by military dictatorship, surrounded by insurgent separatism on its northern frontier and an overwhelmingly larger, fundamentally hostile neighbour to its east, find itself in possession of the ultimate deterrence?

This is the story of how nations react to the threat of annihilation, not with speeches and moral appeals, but through statecraft and subterfuge.

A MAD World

“It is not the fear of death that keeps the peace; it’s the certainty of it”.
— Excerpt from a Cold War strategy brief

The dawn of the Nuclear Age introduced a new idea: the surest way to prevent annihilation is to be prepared to annihilate. Strategist Bernard Brodie recognised the fundamental shift in the logic of conflict: “Thus far, the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars: from now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them.”

The nuke turned a physical contest into a psychological one: bluffing, posturing, credibility, and fear. Schelling, von Neumann, and the RAND Corporation formalised this idea into what eventually became Game Theory. You must convince your enemy that you can and absolutely will annihilate them if you face the threat of annihilation, and only if that threat is credible will peace be stable. This is the meaning of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Critically, the stability of deterrence depends fundamentally on each contestant’s second-strike capacity, the idea that, even if bombed, a contestant will maintain the ability to inflict annihilation on its adversary.

MAD is a doctrine of perpetual paranoia, one that suffocated the heated mid-century ideological fervour, ensuring that the War stayed Cold. Naturally, then, for nations beset by existential threat the world over, the possibility of abstractifying conflict, of living in peace even if under the shadow of total ruin, of paranoid peace rather than paranoid war, resulted in a desperate and vicious arms race to acquire nuclear deterrence in the name of survival.

This is the world in which Pakistan’s nuclear program was birthed, and the incredible story of the men who risked annihilation in the name of averting it.

The Taste of Grass

“For Pakistan, the bomb is not just a weapon. It is the very key to our national survival.”
— Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Ambition is often spurred by defeat. Pakistan was always an untenable, idealistic political project. It was formed as a nation torn in half, with eastern and western wings separated by thousands of kilometres of hostile Indian territory. The regions were linguistically, culturally, and ethnically distinct, with the Bengalis in the east, and the Punjabis, Sindhis, Balochis, and Kashmiris in the west. Although each wing of former Pakistan contained roughly the same population, most administrative focus and power remained in the west. Eventually, tensions began to boil over as these contradictions proved untenable for governance, culminating in the brutal civil war of 1971.

The aftermath saw Islamabad surrender to Dhaka and the success of the Bangladeshi independence movement. India, sensing an opportunity to harm its rival, seized the opportunity and intervened militarily on the side of the separatists. They had succeeded in tearing Pakistan in two. The loss of Bangladesh was not just a loss of prestige or a blow to the ideal of a Muslim homeland in the Indian subcontinent: Bangladesh was 14.5% of (united) Pakistan’s total landmass and more than half its total population.

Never again echoed throughout the corridors of Islamabad, as the country was humiliated and dismembered at the hands of its larger, hostile neighbour. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, cemented himself as the leader of the beleaguered nation, and seeing signs of an Indian nuclear test on the horizon, vowed publicly and constantly to guarantee “national survival and honour”, to “eat grass” if necessary to procure a nuclear bomb. The nation seemed to agree: better to die of hunger than of fire.

In a conference in January 1972, just weeks after defeat, he convened the country’s top scientists in Multan, charging them with a sacred mission. “What India builds, we must build.” This narrative of righteous desperation in the face of military humiliation, the bomb as the ultimate guarantor of national survival, became doctrinal.

When India conducted the “Smiling Buddha” nuclear test in 1974, Pakistan’s worst fears came true, and the quest for a nuclear device shifted into feverish overdrive. It became hard to disentangle state policy from existential fear. A historian later noted that the program came to be seen as “the cornerstone of the very country”.

Bhutto’s government, in its desperation and paranoia, transmuted the bitter disgrace of 1971 into the motivation to embark on the path of “defiance and deterrence”, an imperative that dominated the next 25 years of national priorities.

Pakistan had lost half of itself overnight: it was terrified of losing the rest.

“We were not building a bomb. We were building a deterrent”.
— Munir Ahmad Khan

Bhutto revitalised the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) under Munir Ahmad Khan, a US-trained nuclear engineer. Munir quietly began laying both plutonium and uranium tracks for the full weapon fuel cycle, while constructing an elaborate facade for their use in civilian power plants.

The initial focus was on plutonium. In 1973, after much negotiation, Pakistan struck a deal with France’s SGN to acquire a reprocessing plant, one that could extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The purchase was noticed, causing ripples in Washington, who promptly sent a communiqué to cease and desist procurement of technology that could be used to enrich plutonium. When Pakistan refused to acknowledge this, the US pressured France to stall the contract. Bhutto, panicking, flew fervently between Islamabad and Paris, personally lobbying French President d’Estaing to proceed.

Simultaneously, the PAEC began to covertly pay off employees at an undisclosed Belgian plant to ascertain blueprints for a reprocessing plant that they could later develop themselves. This was coupled with a PR campaign for “peaceful nuclear technology” for civilian purposes.

The US didn’t buy it and in the mid-70s, pressured the IMF, World Bank and USAID to formally cut aid to Pakistan, successfully killing the French Connection. US Secretary of State Kissinger threatened Bhutto explicitly, “We will make a horrible example of you.” Bhutto later quoted this in public speeches to thunderous rallies. He later privately recounted that the strategic payoff was easy to justify. Better poor, hated, and friendless than dead.

This was the situation in which a young engineer by the name of Abdul Qadeer Khan (AQ Khan) first entered the scene. Born in 1936 in British India, AQ Khan studied metallurgical engineering in Berlin in the 1960s, with further study in the Netherlands and Belgium. By 1972, he began working as a metallurgist for a subcontractor of the major nuclear fuel company, URENCO, in Amsterdam. The company supplied enriched uranium nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors in multiple European countries. AQ specifically worked on the advanced German/Dutch “Zippe” type centrifuges, which enriched natural uranium and turned it into bomb fuel and was even involved in component procurement for the Europeans.

Sometimes, all it takes to change history is one man in the right place. India’s Smiling Buddha had a huge effect on the expat AQ, a bookish man then in his mid-thirties. Spurred to act, he dispatched a handwritten letter to Islamabad in July 1974, hoping to reach Bhutto.

“I have acquired very detailed and comprehensive knowledge of the gas centrifuge system and am now in a position to help Pakistan”.

“I am ready to return to Pakistan immediately and offer my services to the homeland, if I am given the opportunity”.

“This is a matter of utmost urgency. India’s recent test has changed everything”.

“With this technology, we do not need to depend on plutonium or any foreign powers. We can develop the capability indigenously”.

In a rare bureaucratic success, the letter actually reached Bhutto, who seized the opportunity and effectively offered Khan carte blanche with state resources. This was nuclear espionage by invitation.

Over the next two years, Khan covertly gathered and copied blueprints and lists for European component suppliers. Dutch Intelligence started to close in on him and notified the CIA. Remarkably, the CIA urged the Dutch to let him continue, expecting him to be part of a larger terrorist network. They hoped to track Khan and then apprehend the source at once, not realising that he really was a lone actor in communication with the Pakistani State.

By late 1975, Khan had noticed that critical projects had been reassigned, and his security access was starting to be tightened. “I knew they were onto me,” he recalled years later. You can feel it in the way people talk to you, the way the atmosphere shifts. I couldn’t wait any longer. It wasn’t fear, it was urgency. I had to get home before the door closed.”

He escaped in time. In early 1976, the prodigal son returned with the keys to the kingdom: centrifuge blueprints, technical design notes, and a voluminous Rolodex of European companies that sold high-speed motors, vacuum pumps, maraging steel, and more.

By mid-1976, AQ had set up a secret enrichment facility at Kahuta, on the outskirts of the capital. The effort, internally nicknamed Project 706, was guarded by soldiers in plain clothes and cloaked in extreme secrecy, posing as a random research lab while it was kitted out with thousands of centrifuges in the basement. Within a few years, the Khan Research Lab (KRL) finally started producing enriched uranium. One observer later quipped that “it was Harry Potter wizardry”; they couldn’t believe that it was working.

Pakistan now had two simultaneous bomb efforts: the uranium from Kahuta and plutonium from the PAEC’s attempts to build a reprocessing plant.

Khan’s industrial espionage has become the stuff of legend. CIA documentation reveals that his “shopping expeditions” across Europe were “surprisingly, remarkably successful”. He set up front companies across Europe, ordering dual-use parts, ensuring that for each part, for example, a motor, there was a “public/civilian” use case to tout as a pretext.

If suppliers got cold feet, Khan nonchalantly comforted them and, if necessary, moved on to other suppliers. In fact, he was so successful that between 1974 and 1977, he had procured over twice what Pakistan actually needed for initial efforts, firstly for contingency, and secondly, to sell forward to willing buyers on the black market.

The CIA increasingly made him a national priority, worrying that he might well be the most prolific nuclear proliferator in history, given that most of the excess materials ended up in Iran, North Korea and Libya through the 80s and 90s. A contemporary at the lab later recalled that “Khan had a total blank check: he could buy anything at any price.”

Pakistan’s nuclear program would move in a distinctly militaristic direction after Bhutto’s deposition in 1977 at the hands of his own chief of army staff, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, in a military coup. A year later, in 1978, Zia assumed the presidency and ruled for life until he died in a plane crash in 1988. His paranoia about spies and moles would lead to even greater secrecy and urgency within the nuclear program itself – a key component of its eventual success.

Throughout the late 70s and 80s, the KRL duplicated research efforts and ensured comparable labs were dotted all around the country, cloaked under various guises - from pharmaceutical manufacturing plants to chicken farms, all while powdered uranium was enriched in whirring centrifuges in their basements.

By 1983, the KRL finally managed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels of 90% purity. The URENCO heist had paid off: Pakistan was nearly ready.

Within the halls of the Red Zone of Islamabad, the whispers referred to AQ Khan as the “Invisible General”, “Dr AQ”, the “Baba-e-Bomb” (the Father of the Bomb), the “Mohsin-e-Pakistan” (Saviour of Pakistan).

“I wrote that letter with full awareness that I could be arrested or killed. But I felt I had no choice. India had tested. We had to respond”.
— AQ Khan

The Dragon and Oil

China was critical to the operation. Starting in the 1970s, Beijing began quietly telegramming critical advice to Islamabad, often in coded messaging. It later transpired that Mao and Bhutto had struck a secret deal in 1976 after the French deal fell through: Bhutto offered Pakistan as a willing counterbalance to India in exchange for assistance with the bomb. Mao saw a common rival and accepted the gambit. The first nuclear bombs that Pakistan tested were predicated on China’s 1966 Chic-4 design. China smuggled 50 kg of weapons-grade uranium into Pakistan in 1982, enough for two early bombs, along with 10 tons of UF₆ (Uranium Fluoride) for later purification.

Chinese technicians troubleshooted early centrifuge operations at Kahuta, and these technicians were even invited as state guests to observe Pakistan’s first nuclear tests. AQ Khan later said that Pakistan sent its own researchers to China to build a small enrichment plant in Hanzhong in the 1980s, to try to return the favour and cement the alliance.

Washington, watching the shadows flicker, confronted Beijing about the programme. China responded with flat denial and public condemnations about any purported nuclear program in Pakistan.

AQ Khan also managed to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in external financing from Gaddafi in Libya and Saudi Arabia, who hoped to receive components and assistance in return. “There is the Christian bomb. There is the Jewish bomb. There is the Hindu bomb. Why not an Islamic bomb?” said Bhutto to Gaddafi, in a secret 1974 meeting organised by Khan, to sell him on the idea of financing in exchange for a stake in the eventual weapons program.

Saudi Arabia was similarly sold on the idea, as it began to feel the need for a Sunni ally to counterbalance a nuclear India and an increasingly militarised Iran. It began to supply oil freely to Pakistan for a few months after the US imposed sanctions on Pakistan in the 90s. Pakistani officials gave the Saudis the impression that the deterrent umbrella would be extended to Saudi Arabia should the need arise.

By the 80s, however, despite the foreign support and financing, Zia made very publicly clear that no external parties, be they Libyan or Saudi, owned Pakistan’s precious deterrent. It was, first and foremost, fundamental Pakistani survivalism. They would maintain control.

Sabotage

China and the US weren’t the only two parties with a vested interest in the covert program. In the 80s, Israel and India joined the fray.

Israel, a beneficiary of its own covert nuclear program, had just destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in a black-ops airstrike in 1981, and on hearing rumours of an “Islamic bomb” immediately began to view Pakistan, like India did, as an existential concern.

In 1983, Pakistani counterintelligence, intercepting logistical communiqués between Israeli “diplomats” (suspected Mossad) and Indian intelligence, found hard evidence of a planned joint Indian-Israeli strike on the KRL covert nuclear facilities, starting with the flagship plant in Kahuta and then moving on to the other sites.

At the same time, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 pushed Pakistan into the US’ arms as a critical ally. Strategic interdependence can push even enemies into each other’s arms, particularly when facing common threats, and how cause prioritisation necessitates political compromise: it did not matter how sceptical the US was of Pakistan, they were focused entirely on the Soviets, and Pakistan rationally took advantage as best they could. Reagan even sent Pakistan F-16s and intelligence and turned on the aid hose on the condition that Pakistan did not actually test the nuclear bomb.

One Pakistani general later quipped, “The Americans needed us then, so they were as quiet as a dead mouse about the bomb.” And so, the Pakistanis maintained restraint and sent soldiers into Afghanistan to help the West. Reagan, choosing Cold War victory over non-proliferation, even quietly tipped off Zia about the impending Indian and Israeli bombing run.

Pakistan then scrambled to organise a private back-channel meeting with India in which the PAEC’s Munir Khan personally threatened India’s nuclear chief, Raja Ramanna, that “if your jets come, we will retaliate against Bombay.” India’s PM, Indira Gandhi, her hands full with local issues, put the project on ice, much to Israeli frustration.

Meanwhile, in a now-legendary story, Indian Intelligence sent a Bangladeshi agent, codenamed “Majnun”, into Kahuta to pose as a scientist, gain intel, and undertake sabotage. Depending on who tells the story, Majnun either disappeared after inflicting setbacks or was caught and executed. In any case, his efforts had little impact on slowing Pakistan down.

Mossad needed a new strategy and began to sabotage the supply lines that AQ Khan had spent the last decade establishing. In 1981, a series of mysterious explosions destroyed facilities at Switzerland’s Cora Engineering (uranium fluoride feeds and cooling systems), Germany’s Wallischmiller (remote-handling equipment, think: robotic arms to handle sensitive equipment), and the home of German nuclear scientist Dr. Heinz Mebus. Mebus happened to be out for a walk, but his dog died in the blast.

Another German supplier from a Wallischmiller subsidiary recounted receiving phone calls from anonymous numbers: “The attacks we carried out… could happen to you, too”. A Swiss banker who intermediated many of these transactions was extorted by what he believed were Israeli Intelligence officials, who warned him to cease dealing with Pakistan. European suppliers started to back out, fearful for their lives, at which point Pakistan came out swinging. AQ Khan publicly declared in the media that it didn’t matter if they were bombed, “We can build 10 more Kahutas!”

In May 1998, right before the initial planned hot tests, three Baloch separatists hijacked a civilian Pakistani airliner, threatening to kill everybody on board unless the government scrapped the planned tests in Balochistan. The separatists demanded the plane be flown to India, where they expected safe haven. In reality, the plane flew in a gigantic circle only to land in Hyderabad, Pakistan where the airport itself was disguised as the airport in Hyderabad, India. The signage, uniforms and other clarifying signs on the airport were changed to Hindi or disguised. Once the plane landed, special ops commandos stormed the plane and secured the hostages. The separatists were executed later that month.

Pakistan suspected Indian intelligence involvement in the effort. In any case, India and Israel were desperate and furious: it was too late. Pakistan was now ready to conduct hot tests.

Breathing Fire

The Pakistanis were one screw short of completion all through the 80s. They had been “cold-testing” deployment mechanisms: drilling about two dozen kilometre-deep holes in Baluchistan’s Ras Koh mountains, and detonating cold (no nuclear material) bombs inside them, studying the seismographs, and burying the results. The government shrewdly decided instead to acquire as much American goodwill as possible while it was still needed in the twilight years of the Cold War. They waited for 10 long years until their hand was forced.

In May 1998, India forced that hand. Vajpayee’s government in India conducted Pokhran-II, a series of five public nuclear tests, in a show of force, openly declaring itself a hostile nuclear neighbour. Clinton, sensing the worst, promptly called up Pakistan’s new Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, urging restraint.

The Pakistanis were under pressure: should they risk impoverishment and alienation or death by Indian adventurism? After 25 years of eating grass, was it now finally time to breathe fire?

On the 28th of May 1998, 24 years after AQ Khan’s pivotal letter, Pakistan detonated five nuclear devices underground in the foothills of the Ras Koh range in Chagai, Balochistan. They detonated a sixth on the 30th.

As the desert was lit on fire, before the orange dust had a chance to settle, Nawaz Sharif proclaimed triumphantly on TV, “Pakistan has settled the score. Today, we have settled the account of the nuclear blasts by India”.

The nation erupted in euphoria. Crowds poured into the streets, schoolchildren chanted national slogans at assembly, and it was difficult to find coverage of anything else on national TV. ”We have emerged as a nuclear state on our own terms”, declared Sharif. Pakistan was finally equipped with its own Sword of Damocles.

Indian news outlets like the Hindu or India Today were deflated, acknowledging the loss of strategic advantage even as Vajpayee, India’s Prime Minister, put on a brave face, “We are not surprised. We had expected it”.

India’s quest to achieve an absolute strategic advantage over Pakistan had been foiled by the tenacity of Pakistani scientists, engineers, and statesmen, who sought their own deterrent by any means necessary.

“In slavery, neither sword nor strategy works; But when a man tastes conviction, the chains cut themselves”.
— Muhammad Iqbal

Promise and Perfidy

What is the price of safety? Money moves quicker than people, and the day after, sanctions, trade embargoes, instability, cancelled aid, and capital flight promptly followed. In June 1998, and already nearing debt default, burning through its foreign reserves trying to keep its currency afloat, Sharif implored the nation to stay strong, and brace for austerity, even reciting Bhutto’s iconic declaration that “We will eat grass if we must”.

The Washington Post ran an exclusive titled “Let them eat grass”, highlighting the discord between the expensive arms race and a population riddled with poverty.

A Pakistani newspaper ruefully noted, “We have the Bomb, but we have no water in Karachi”. A resident mourned, “The atom bomb may be good for the country, but we haven’t had a single drop of water in the last four days… how can we celebrate a bomb in the middle of famine?”

And yet, for many, all this misery was the acceptable cost of conviction. The tests meant one thing above all else: Pakistan had finally caught up. Pakistan would survive.

The economic and material costs of deterrence are high: decades of lost development, stability, peace, investment and industry. Pakistan spends more on defence (4% of GDP) than on health and education combined (3%). For most developed nations, the numbers are about 2% and 15% respectively.

Facing an aggressive neighbour four times larger in landmass and six times larger in population has turned Pakistan into a garrison state in permanent vigilance. The militarisation of the nation has left permanent scars; Pakistan still struggles with basic literacy, malnutrition and power shortages. The social contract has steadily frayed. Once a nation has spent 25 years cementing a security establishment, it is hard to return to normalcy: the public remains in a state of siege, paranoia, and vigilance, an attitude instrumentalised neatly to maintain the Army’s centrality and the constant overreach of the intelligence services into civilian life. Pakistan’s politics has been remoulded along praetorian lines as drastic measures once necessary for survival have cemented themselves as ordinary and permanent. While the paranoid survive, it hurts to stay paranoid. Pakistan has generated a culture in overshoot, where the instruments of survival begin to suffocate the very society they are meant to protect.

Statecraft is often undertaken in the shadows, in basements, behind barbed wire, and under threat of death. State security routinely depends on bribery, extortion, theft, black markets, surveillance, sabotage, and the threat of death. This is the logic of survival. Nuclear bombs are not built in the open: AQ Khan’s acquisition of the blueprints was outright theft: false end-user certifications, shell companies in Dubai and Singapore, and an under-the-table network for procurement spanning China to Libya. Consider the smuggling of uranium from China to Pakistan via the mountains, the CIA overreaching by holding back the Dutch from picking up AQ Khan in 1975, hoping to find a larger network.

In the end, the story of how Pakistan became a nuclear power is one of boldness, intrigue, desperation, and peril. A poor country reeling from defeat and existentially threatened managed to pull off an extraordinary multi-decade plan, staving off sanctions and sabotage, forging secret alliances, and ensuring survival.

Pakistan finally managed to breathe fire. It is now time to provide water at home.

“I told Bhutto Sahib we would get the bomb. I promised it. I kept that promise”.
— AQ Khan

Author: Nasir Al-Hindi works in Emerging Markets investment in London, before which he trained as a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in statecraft, politics, technology, science, and mysticism.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

Further Reading

Monographs & Scholarly Works:

• Abbas, Hassan. Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb: A Story of Defiance, Deterrence & Deviance. Oxford University Press, 2018.

• Bennett-Jones, Owen. “One Screw Short: Pakistan’s Bomb.” London Review of Books, 41(3), Feb 2019.

• Levy, Adrian & Scott-Clark, Catherine. Deception: Pakistan, the U.S. & the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy. Walker & Co., 2007.

• Khan, Feroz Hassan. Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb. Stanford University Press, 2012.

• Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Blackwell, 1992.

• Khaldun, Ibn. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. 1377 (various translations).

• Schelling, Thomas. The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard University Press, 1960.

• Brodie, Bernard. The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. Harcourt Brace, 1946.

• Fukuyama, Francis. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Cornell University Press, 2004.

• Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy. Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Articles & Reports:

• Middle East Eye (June 25, 2025). “‘Why not an Islamic bomb?’: How Israel planned and failed to stop Pakistan going nuclear.” (Reporting on Israeli-Indian 1980s plot).

• The Economic Times (Jan 6, 2022). “Israel-India nuclear strike plot shelved in the ’80s, reveals report.”

• PBS Frontline (2003). “Pakistan’s Secret Bomb” – interviews and timeline (PBS.org archive).

• Atomic Heritage Foundation. “A.Q. Khan Profile” (atomicheritage.org) – summary of Khan’s network.

• Bennett-Jones, Owen. “One Screw Short: Pakistan’s Bomb.” London Review of Books, Feb 7, 2019.

• The Washington Post (June 11, 1998). “Pakistani Politicians’ Rallying Cry: ‘Let Them Eat Grass.’”

• Neue Zürcher Zeitung via JPost/TOI (Jan 2002). Report on Mossad’s 1981 sabotage campaign in Europe.

• Financial Times (multiple). Analyses on Israel’s security state and regional arms races (FT archives, 2015–2023).

• Dawn (Karachi) Archive: “A leaf from history: N-deal angers US” (Apr 21, 2013) – on 1970s French reprocessing deal.

• National Security Archive Briefing Book #773 (Aug 30, 2021). “Pakistan’s Nuclear Program Posed ‘Acute Dilemma’ for U.S. Policy” – declassified docs 1978–79.

• Institute for Science & International Security (ISIS) Reports: on Pakistan’s test sites and proliferation activities (isis-online.org, 1998–2010).

History often happens around us in a way that is hardly noticeable as it passes. Consider the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. The crisis brought on by the initial shock of the Mongol period demanded that Islamic civilisation’s elites rise to the occasion and form new and responsive forms of political legitimacy. The material costs of the sieges and battles may have been extremely dire. But imagine the situation a few years after the deluge: is it possible that daily life did not change significantly for large swaths of the populace?

Imagine you are living in a small town in Central Asia that has been spared the worst during the Mongol invasions. Things trudge along as usual. There may be a new military governor, but the social order revolving around the balance between the military elites and the local notables — what has been called the a‘yan-amir system — is likely much the same, even as the official boundaries of empires ebb and flow. Your community might temporarily fall under the sway of one of the many charismatic messiah-figures of the time, but only until someone with a stronger army (and whose imams had less “innovative” Friday sermons) brings a return to normalcy.

Consider yourself now in the same hypothetical town, not after the Mongol invasions, but during the rise of the European empires. The military governor has again changed, and taxes flow to different hands; like before, your intellectuals and artisans might move (willingly or not) to a new imperial capital. And yet, this new development brings with it a series of increasingly complex technological interventions into everyday life. These may ultimately be salutary, such as improved access to modern medicine or cutting-edge agricultural techniques. But because of their effectiveness, these new techniques demand that the social order bend to their demands: new farming techniques are introduced, familiar waterways are dammed, and pastoral regions are set aside for agriculture to provide cash crops for the world economy. A new, competing class of settlers arrive from the imperial centre, and up-and-coming bureaucrats learn English or Russian to meet the needs of imperial ideologies and to read the newest technical manuals. The imperatives of efficient, technical production might begin to feel a bit more intrusive than previous changes in authority. It is only in hindsight that we know how this era of European hegemony transformed the world through the spread of technicalistic society.

This was one angle of the argument set forth by Marshall Hodgson, a scholar of Islamic civilisation whose three-volume survey of Islamic history, The Venture of Islam (1975), concluded with a discussion of the technically-focused society we all find ourselves in today. A world historian as much as a scholar of Islam, Hodgson contributed throughout his work to several perspectives that we now largely take for granted, such as a rejection of “Golden Age” narratives which saw the decline of Islamic civilisation begin with the fall of the Abbasids, and on the contrary, an appreciation for the Persianate which largely typified high culture in the Middle Periods (i.e. roughly 945-1501 CE). A key issue which caught Hodgson’s attention in the third and final volume of this Venture of Islam is what he called technicalistic society:

…a society in which the dominant elements are on a level of social organisation where in intellectual and practical activity, calculatively rationalised and specialised technical procedures form an interdependent and preponderant pattern.

Technicalistic society is a form of social organisation — and with it, a set of cultural values — which has since become nearly omnipresent in human life. For Hodgson, understanding the logic behind technicalistic society and its impacts on human life would be key to mitigating those negative impacts not just on Islamic civilisation, but on humanity writ large.

Technicalistic Society and the “Great Western Transmutation”

The outcomes of this development – increasingly precise measurements and improved technical procedures – would be so wide-ranging that Hodgson called it the “Great Western Transmutation”: a shift in cultural values which happened to occur in Western Europe but was not predestined to happen there. This new cultural orientation demanded continuous increases in economic productivity, and experimental and continuously innovating scientific methods, with “bourgeois financial power” supplanting the landed aristocracy in social spheres. As the various technical specialities developed interdependently with increasing success in their ability to manipulate the material world, so too did the process of technicalisation come to determine patterns of human life in modernity.

Hodgson saw in technicalistic society not only major developments in scientific discovery or engineering prowess, but (inevitable) psychological aftereffects of this relatively rapid shift in the human experience. The “technicalistic spirit” demanded that efficiency take precedence over any other metric (e.g., aesthetic, or interpersonal) that once might have been given greater credence. This can lead, of course, to considerable progress in the sciences, since the multiplying effect of technical improvements results in almost shocking changes in material conditions in a relatively short period. So too did Hodgson see this mindset as the logic behind legislative government, in which laws are not founded upon permanent (or even divine) bases, but in which they are — by definition — subject to continuous change to conform to lived experience.

But every shift towards technicalism brings follow-on consequences. Hodgson took note of the fact that technicalistic society at its best could lead to great increases in material wealth and surges in knowledge production, with the disruption of existing societal pathways also leading to new personal opportunities and liberties for the individual. That said, this new technical individual might also find themselves “privately isolated,” living in a world with a “tendency towards anonymity and impersonalisation” in place of a more “traditional” sphere which, for all of its faults, provided a person with a defined scope of roles and opportunities.

The impact of the Transmutation upon the Islamic world is seen as particularly destabilising not only because of the rapid introduction of technicalism itself, but that it was imposed through European hegemony. This imposition, in many cases, came in the form of the subordination of non-European lands through either economic manoeuvring or outright colonisation. This is not minimised in the Venture, nor is it taken for granted that there was something about European society that made its hegemony inevitable compared to other human civilisations. I will not rehash here the various responses within Islamic society to the situation — embrace of Westernisation, attempts at renewal of cultural traditions, revolutionary and constitutional movements, outright rejection in forms we might call neo-traditionalist — as these have been well-explored by Hodgson and others.

What deserves additional attention, though, is that for Hodgson, the shortcomings of technicalistic society were a common human obstacle that would require, in turn, a common human response. The solutions that might emerge from the Islamic world, then, could well be key to the worldwide effort to deal with the dislocations of technicalism.

Unification in Dislocation

It is in the epilogue to the third volume of the Venture of Islam that Hodgson turns from history to possibility — the challenges facing Islamic civilisation in modernity, and how this is a common struggle across human society. The global dominance of the technicalistic mindset creates this common struggle as world problems become interconnected and indivisible. The universal human imperative across the now-unified world civilisations is to draw from their distinct traditions to provide solutions to common issues.

For Hodgson, there were two pressing issues. One is the disruption of cultural traditions, the result of an ethos embracing continuous disruptive change as one technique displaces another. Second is pressure on natural resources, as the “possible forms of technical exploitation multiply indefinitely while the physical resources of the planet do not”. Hodgson was concerned not only with the exhaustion of arable land but also that the drive for development would necessarily continue to narrow the space remaining for the rest of the natural world. Large-scale technical society also demands social planning to direct the energies of technique (which “implies the possibility of arbitrary human manipulation”); the need for a lettered mass culture, which brings with it the challenge of implementing mass education to foster technical expertise; and a radical unsettling of moral allegiances, as old norms are felt to be outdated, beliefs are challenged by technical development, and the logic of industrial society places novel burdens upon its participants.

Some of these are on the material plane — conservation, educational reform, mass media — while others are speaking to the moral condition of the human living in technicalistic society. For Hodgson, it was the latter where the heritage of Islamic (or any other) civilisation will have the most to contribute. This is not to say that he was not concerned for the material world, and the “development gap” — in which the uneven adoption of technical methods necessarily means that certain regions will be forced to “catch up” to earlier adopters — is an issue that Hodgson felt confronted all of humanity. But while he believed that developments in automation, energy production, or other scientific advancements might make it ever faster and cheaper to bring material parity across human society, the internal, spiritual dislocations of modernity would remain.

Accordingly, solutions may be found in the intellectual and religious heritage of the major world traditions, whose thinkers were frequently concerned not only with material progress but with internal human states. Traditions can provide the individual with new opportunities for “creative possibilities.” It is exactly the “historical, traditional mode of human involvement” in which the individual would not be considered fungible, as in the technicalistic drive for specialised and depersonalised functioning. As such, it may be the “older traditions of vision” which can aid in seeking a higher purpose than technicalistic goals.

As Hodgson saw it, the balance to be struck would be between the particularity of a specific heritage and the universalism inherent in technicalistic society:

On the level of basic spiritual insight, an interpretation of community and law will be increasingly inadequate to actual experience until it can confront creatively the presence of contrasting spiritual traditions of equal status in a single world-wide society. This must take place on at least two planes: the community as such must overcome its exclusivity without sacrificing its formative discipline, and the heritage it carries must be in dialogue with contemporary culture common to all communities, yet without sacrificing its integrity.

There is, in other words, a “standing tension between universalism and communalism” in reaching into Islamic heritage to find answers to the problems of the modern age. Hodgson’s recommendation for overcoming this limitation was a “grand dialogue among the heritages” — not merely “distill[ing] abstractions from the several pre-Modern heritages,” but encouraging the various civilisational-religious traditions to “enlarge [the] range of dialogue,” and collaboratively devise solutions to the atomisation which has characterised life in the technicalistic age.

One asset Hodgson thought Islamic civilisation (now heritage) could provide to this project would be its “frank sense of history” — that is, the tradition inherent in the Islamic discourse of reconciling a religious tradition which was formed-in-time with the fact that this same religious tradition asserts values which transcend historical contingencies. This is not limited to Islam, naturally, though (by focusing on Islamic civilisation in his work) Hodgson expressed a hope that contemporary Islamic discourse would build from the tensions within its own tradition, “go a great deal further,” and “provide a basis for creativity” by which those of us still struggling with the challenges of technicalistic society might “overcome [our] cultural dislocations.”

The nature of universalised technicalistic society also means that this venture of Islamic society has ramifications for all of humanity (and the conclusions of other traditions, upon Islamic civilisation). For Hodgson, in our current condition, “the ultimate spiritual commitments of any sector of mankind must be taken account of by every other sector in evaluating its own ultimate commitments.” The success of one group, then, is the success of all — and vice versa.

Reservations and Opportunities

One might question whether Hodgson’s recommendations are satisfying for Islamic civilisation per se, and whether his framework is an actual critique of technicalistic society, or only an adaptation within it. Hodgson believed that the world religions provide a means by which those of us living in technicalistic society might start to address its unsettling and disruptive effects, including the increasing material pressures on world-society. This is a reasonable point to take from the perspective of the world as a single civilisational unit, but one might ask whether this is particularly Islamic. For someone who is committed to the success of Islamic society and who wants to meet the challenge of Islam in their personal orientation, it may not be particularly convincing to direct these goals to a universalistic perspective.

This is a frequent challenge for those who see commonalities across religious traditions as a human endeavor, or wish to perceive behind them a common spiritual or esoteric thrust: does this approach flatten religious practice into a meta-narrative, in which the particular religious traditions — each with their own, sometimes conflicting, claims about human purpose, salvation, the divine — are welcomed only to the extent they embrace this same universalising meta-narrative? Are visions of Islam, or any other religious tradition which views itself in more exclusive terms excluded from participating in this project of tackling the shortcomings of technicalistic society? This is not to criticise those approaches which are more perennialist in nature, but only to note the tension inherent in this path.

On that note, one might ask if Hodgson’s prescription matches his diagnosis of the disruptions that technicalistic society has wrought on human tradition and sources of meaning. Islam may well be a source of wisdom for those who are confronting, for example, atomisation and the accompanying loss of meaning, but does drawing from these sources on a personal level confront the prime cause — the very prioritisation of technicalism as the prime goal of human functioning? Or does this ethical-moralistic approach only provide palliative relief to the individual in the face of a technicalistic ideology which, by definition, cannot but continue to innovate, dislocate, and disrupt? If the solution to dealing with the ongoing system is still taking for it granted, it may not provide a sufficient alternative for those who are unconvinced with technicalistic society in the first place.

Then again, consider the points being raised in Hodgson’s concern about how to respond to technicalism. There is the issue of how to retain a connection to our religious and cultural traditions in a period when it seems like the old order has ceased to command the respect it once could. The cosmopolitan nature of our interconnected world-society — only made more rapid in the Internet age — calls for finding a balance between what we owe our local, tangible connections and what we owe the broader human community. The individual believer (and not only in an Islamic context) may see a dominant world paradigm which does not quite seem to fit with their own deeply-held beliefs, while realising that they must still find a way to work within it.

Hodgson would likely be the first to note that when looking at the long course of Islamic intellectual heritage, these are hardly new questions — though they may, just as in previous moments of upheaval, require new answers.

Author: Zach Winters is a writer and historian based in Chicago, Illinois. His doctoral work at the University of Chicago focused on messianism and the esoteric sciences in the Timurid era. He also writes about religion, culture, and history at his Substack page.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

Further Reading

Hodgson and World History:

• Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (3 vols)

• John Nef, The Conquest of the Material World

• Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

• Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History

• William McNeill, The Rise of the West

“Technicalistic” Society:

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

• Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

• Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

The rise of European imperialism is remembered as a humiliation for Islamic civilisation. The great Muslim empires were unable to confront Western military might in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lacking the centralisation, resources and technology with which to compete with European industrial strength. In India, the armies of the crumbling Mughal Empire were no match for the well-oiled fighting machine of Britain’s East India Company. The Ottomans made a belated attempt to modernise but ultimately failed, with the First World War dealing the fatal blow at the dawn of the last century.

Muslim traditionalists, however, strongly dispute the idea that the Islamic world floundered and fell behind, arguing instead that the modern West was an aberration and that, inspired by the Enlightenment, European empires developed outrageous and inherently immoral technologies and forms of governance. Muslim attempts to play catch-up with the West were doomed to fail because Islam, they claim, is incompatible with modernity.

This narrative has proven powerful and seductive since it neatly absolves Islamic civilisation of having to reckon with failure. It is also an increasingly popular position among young Western Muslim intellectuals. But this narrative has allowed a blinkered view of the past three centuries to develop.

In truth, some Muslim rulers bucked the trend and participated in modernisation, nearly disrupting the ascent of the European empires. While they may be remembered as heroes, their significance is often little-understood. These were ‘modernisers’, but not the ones we typically think of when that term is mentioned. They were statesmen who adopted modernity in the form of new science, military strategies, and bureaucratic technologies, which they comfortably integrated into their own worldviews.

One of the most significant such figures was Tipu Sultan, ruler of the South Indian kingdom of Mysore. In the late eighteenth century, this extraordinary figure nearly altered the trajectory of the British Empire by bringing the British East India Company to its knees.

Tipu Sultan is not exactly a forgotten figure. In Pakistan, he is lionised as a great Muslim hero, although he is rarely studied outside of academic circles. In India, meanwhile, he looms large in the Hindu nationalist imagination. While old-school secular politicians and intellectuals traditionally hailed Tipu as the first great hero of anti-colonial Indian nationalism, today Hindu nationalists revile him as the archetypal Muslim villain.

Often known by contemporaries as “Citizen Tippoo”, he allied with the French and made friends with Napoleon. Infamous for his gruesome wartime atrocities, he was known as the “Tiger of Mysore” - partly due to his prowess in warfare, and partly because his elite fighters dressed in tiger-striped uniforms. Tipu built his kingdom’s power and state capacity to an extraordinary level, forming a modern Western-style army that deployed military technology more advanced than anything the British had.

Ultimately, it was Tipu’s failure in diplomacy, rather than a lack of military or technological prowess, that brought him down. As he became increasingly isolated, the British could bring greater resources and armies to bear and eventually defeated him. Yet Tipu Sultan’s incredible rule stands as an essential example of a response to colonialism that defies the usual prejudices about Muslims in the modern era - one that sought to internalise advances in statebuilding, military technology, and the economy on its own terms.

Modernising Mysore

Haidar Ali, Tipu’s father, laid the groundwork for his son’s success. He ruled Mysore as a nominal province of the Mughal Empire from the 1760s, having emerged from its military ranks to depose and replace the ineffectual ruler, Wodiya Raja. Haidar set about diligently expanding Mysore’s army and invading neighbouring polities. He and Tipu, then only a teenager, hired French officers to train Mysore’s army and established a navy commanded by a European seaman.

In 1767, Haidar launched an assault on the East India Company east of Bangalore. The British, used to easy victories, were stunned to be confronted by an army of around 50,000 men – 23,000 of whom were cavalry – armed with cutting-edge rifles and cannon. They were particularly shaken to realise that the enemy’s artillery was more advanced than their own, with a far longer range.

Strategically, too, the Company was no match for Mysore. Seventeen-year-old Tipu was crucial to the war strategy, leading an implausible raid behind Company lines into Madras, where he set about looting and destroying its Georgian villas. In the end, the British were forced to sue for peace.

This was just the beginning. Time and again, Tipu’s armies fought and defeated British-led forces. In 1782, he led an army that decisively crushed a British column outside Tanjore. The next year, he ambushed a Company army by the Coleroon river. A massacre followed.

When Haidar Ali died shortly afterwards in 1783, Tipu was 33 years old and a statesman in waiting (he was also “uncommonly well-made, except in the neck, which was short”). His father, on his deathbed, had ordered him to devote his efforts to confronting the Company: “The English are today all-powerful in India,” he declared. “It is necessary to weaken them by war.”

The defining feature of Tipu Sultan’s rule was his ruthlessly selective adoption of his enemy’s strengths and tactics. While many Muslim modernists of the era are remembered for their infatuation with European high culture, such as Ottoman obsession with European music, suit jackets, and baroque architecture, Tipu took a different path. Indeed, in many respects, he was a quintessential Indian ruler. He wore a kurta, a silk brocade coat and a range of often absurdly elaborate turbans. A highly cultivated intellectual, his library boasted over 2,000 volumes in several languages. He loved music and dance, and composed poetry in Persian and the Dravidian language of Cannada.

Tipu’s religious sensibilities were also typical of Indo-Islamic elites: a devout Muslim, he was deeply interested in Hinduism, and made his troops bathe in holy rivers “by the advice of his [Brahmin] augurs”.

At the same time, Tipu embarked on a modernisation campaign that was unprecedented for any Indian ruler. He expanded Mysore’s state capacity, imported French industrial technology, introduced a sophisticated irrigation system and built dams. He developed water power-driven machinery. He even had silkworm eggs brought to Mysore from southern China and established a sericulture industry. British observers begrudgingly described the sultanate as “well cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants”, and with “cities newly founded and commerce extended”.

Tipu established trade centres across India’s western coast and beyond. His state-owned trading company built factories in the Persian Gulf, with the most important of these located in Muscat. Mysore exported timber, sandalwood, ivory, and cloth to the Gulf, and imported pistachios, copper, and chinaware. In Muscat, European merchants had to pay a 5% duty, while most Indians paid 8%, and Arabs paid just over 6%. In contrast, Mysore’s merchants paid only 4%.

The Stuff of British Nightmares

Most significantly, Mysore’s military might turned the tide against the East India Company. As historian Christopher Bayly writes, Tipu’s strategy was to fight “European mercantilist power with its own weapons: state monopoly and an aggressive ideology of expansion.”

By 1786, Tipu’s inventory contained 300,000 firelocks, 22,000 pieces of cannon, 11,000 horses, and some 700 elephants. Most extraordinarily, Mysore developed the world’s first iron-cased war rockets, which were launched from bamboo or metal frames at enemy soldiers up to 2,000 metres away. Tipu’s rockets, which killed thousands of the Company’s troops, would later lead to Britain’s Royal Woolwich Arsenal establishing a research programme to study Mysorean rocket cases, ultimately using their research to develop the rockets they would deploy with great success against the French in the Napoleonic Wars.

For two decades, Tipu Sultan haunted the British consciousness. He was the Company’s most loathed and feared menace. Tipu’s penchant for the theatrical contributed to this, including his elite sepoys who showed up to battle in tiger-striped uniforms. Colonial propaganda pushed by the Company’s Governor General Lord Wellesley portrayed Tipu as a savage brute, monstrous towards Hindus and Britons alike, and driven by Islamic fanaticism.

While this was largely fictional, the real Tipu did show terrible cruelty in war, and to a highly unusual degree by the standards of his own time. He earned something of a reputation. In particular, a great battle at Pollilur in 1780 caused shockwaves in Britain and seemed for a time to represent the beginning of the Company’s fall. An entire army was slaughtered, and Mysore captured one in five of all British soldiers in India, 7,000 British men, as well as an unknown number of women. They were taken to Tipu’s formidable island fortress of Srirangapatna, whose defences were designed by French engineers. British regimental drummer boys were forced to dance for Tipu’s court, and many soldiers were forcibly circumcised and converted to Islam.

While Tipu never dressed like an Englishman, more than a few Britons emerged from his captivity clad in kurtas and addicted to hookahs. After a decade in captivity, the prisoner James Scurry found he could no longer use a knife and fork or sit in a chair. His English was “broken and confused, having lost all its vernacular idiom”, and he despised English clothes. For the British public, this was the stuff of nightmares.

Among Tipu’s terrible policies in war was that he destroyed temples and churches in conquered territories. Portuguese missionaries recorded one particularly gruesome episode in which “he tied naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces”. But this was not driven by any religious fanaticism. In fact, Tipu enthusiastically patronised temples within his own domains. On one occasion, when the Marathas (a Hindu power) raided and damaged the magnificent temple of Sringeri in Mysore, Tipu sent money and grain to the temple and warned that “people who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds… Those who commit evil deeds smiling, will reap the consequences weeping.”

He was also tremendously popular with his subjects, who were predominantly Hindu. After Tipu’s death, the British found that his “confidential Hindoo servants” reported he had been a “lenient and indulgent master”.

The ‘Citizen Prince’

To expand his range of allies against the British, Tipu Sultan sought Ottoman support and recognition, but none was forthcoming. He had much more success with the French, whose East India Company competed with the British for dominance in the subcontinent. This was classic Tipu Sultan: a cynical and strategic alliance with a European power for his own ends. The French Revolution in 1789 did nothing to damage the relationship – in fact, Tipu established warm relations with Napoleon Bonaparte. The British, for whom this was an unbearable alliance, took to denouncing “Citizen Tippoo”, combining their loathing of the ruler with a healthy dose of Francophobia.

A Company diplomat, Major William Kirkpatrick, claimed that in May 1797, Mysore’s French troops established a Revolutionary Jacobin Club in Srirangapatna, which hoisted the tricolour flag. Kirkpatrick described to his British compatriots how a Jacobin maypole labelled ‘the Liberty Tree’ was planted, while French soldiers pledged their allegiance to the Republican constitution and swore “hatred of all Kings, except Tipoo Sultan, the Victorious”. Then at Srirangapatna’s parade ground, the “Citizen Prince” was said to have declared France to be Mysore’s “sister Republic”, and ordered an enormous salute from 2,300 cannon, 500 rockets and unnumbered musketry.

In reality, Tipu was no genuine Republican and cared nothing for Rousseau or Robespierre. The club was unlikely to have actually been given the “Jacobin” label, and its papers, which record that Tipu adopted the paradoxical title of “Citizen Prince”, may well have been fabricated by the British. Tipu engaged with European ideas, as much as European technology, only on his own terms.

Decline and Fall

The victory of the Company in India came with Tipu’s downfall in 1799. Having fought four major wars against the British, Mysore’s ruler had significantly slowed their ascent and forced them to fight tooth and nail for dominance. Largely because of Tipu, the British had lost their technological superiority. Nor did they have any administrative edge. Mysore had successfully closed the gap.

Ultimately, then, it was neither technological inferiority nor British brutality that secured Mysore’s defeat, but rather a staggering failure of diplomacy. This was Tipu’s great flaw. His father, Haidar Ali, had allied with three major powers – the Maratha Confederacy, Hyderabad and the French Company – making it impossible for the British to mobilise the powers that surrounded Mysore against the kingdom.

Tipu, by contrast, broke his alliances with the Maratha Peshwa and the Nizam of Hyderabad, and by 1786, he was waging war against both. Mysore’s aggressive expansionism terrified both rulers to the extent that they agreed to form a Triple Alliance with the British to bring Tipu down. In 1789, Tipu launched yet another war, this time against southern Travancore, whose Raja had entered a pact with the Company. By this point, Tipu had even proclaimed independence from the skeletal remains of the Mughal Empire, denouncing Emperor Shah Alam as “a mere cypher”. There would be no help from any Mughal army.

Still, Mysore demonstrated its superiority on the battlefield. A weary Major James Rendell noted in December 1790 that the “rapidity of Tippoo’s marches was such that no army appointed like ours could ever bring it to action in the open country.” But this only did so much against the Triple Alliance, which defeated Tipu in 1792 in the Third Anglo-Mysore War by besieging Srirangapatna and forced him to sign away half his kingdom in a humiliating treaty. “Know you not the custom of the English?” Tipu wrote imploringly to the Nizam. “Wherever they fix their talons they contrive little by little to work themselves into the whole management of affairs.” It was too late; the Nizam remained allied to the Company.

By this point, the Maratha Confederacy was in decline, and elite Indian financiers saw the Company, which controlled the revenues of Bengal and profited from the China trade, as the most reliable investment. This proved decisive. As the historian William Dalrymple writes in his monumental study of the Company’s ascent, The Anarchy: “In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through the collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals.”

Remarkably, however, Tipu fought on, famously proclaiming that “I would rather live a day as a tiger than a lifetime as a sheep”. His last hope was Napoleon, and in December 1797, he sent an embassy to Paris asking for the Emperor’s help. But Napoleon’s army was descending on Egypt. In April 1798, he assured Tipu from Cairo that he would come to Mysore’s aid after conquering Egypt, declaring that he was “full of the desire of releasing and relieving you from the iron yoke of England… May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!”

But soon afterwards, in April 1799, Mysore was finally crushed when Wellesley’s army besieged Srirangapatna. In that final confrontation, Tipu “gave us gun for gun”, a British observer recalled. “Soon the scenes became tremendously grand, shells and rockets of uncommon weight were incessantly poured upon us.” Meanwhile, “the blaze of our batteries which frequently caught fire… was the signal for the Tiger Sepoys to advance, and pour in galling volleys of musketry.”

10,000 Mysorean troops fell in the final battle. The Tiger of Mysore himself ascended onto the battlements to fight. He charged at the sepoys and was shot in the left shoulder. His attendants begged him to surrender. “Are you mad?” he responded. “Be silent.”

Tipu Sultan wielded his sword, his final weapon, against a group of Company redcoats and killed a grenadier. Then another shot him through the temple, and he fell among his men.

With Tipu’s death, so ended the dream of the last sovereign Indian state. Tipu’s energetic reforms enabled Mysore to supersede the best of European military technology and military organisation in short order. His strenuous modernisation programme for Mysore’s army and economy was so successful that it had compelled even the British to play catch-up militarily, nearly preventing their takeover of India and potentially changing the course of world history. It also inverts the traditional narrative of an unstoppably widening technological chasm between the West and the rest.

Yet it was not enough.

There is great significance in the history of Mysore's extraordinary diplomatic failure. It was the inability of Indian rulers to unite (with most failing even to identify the threat posed by the East India Company until it was too late) that secured the triumph of the British in the subcontinent. However, Tipu’s reign also puts lie to the myth that the Islamic world suffered a permanent decline for three centuries, let alone for a millennium, as many claim. Serious decline in the Islamic world began only in the nineteenth century, when reformers ceased to engage seriously with Europe in the material realm and retreated to the world of culture and ideas, as with the Tanzimat movement in the Ottoman Empire.

Before this retreat, some Muslim statesmen remained dynamically engaged with the challenges that confronted them, the most significant examples being Tipu and Muhammad Ali Pasha (the nearly contemporaneous Ottoman governor of Egypt). Far from rejecting modernity or capitulating to Western ideas of what it should be, Tipu fashioned his own modernity. He had no philosophical anxieties about modern warfare or governance being immoral and un-Islamic, and his response to the rising power of Europe was to selectively adopt and adapt what he wanted from it.

The tale of the Tiger of Mysore serves as both a corrective measure to traditional narratives of decline and a warning on how even the most skilled statesmen can be undone by hubris.

Author: Imran Mulla is a journalist at Middle East Eye in London, before which he studied history at the University of Cambridge. His book ‘The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince’ is set to be published this December by Hurst & Co. You can follow him on X at @Imran_posts.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

Further Reading

• Bayly, Christopher. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1987.

• Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Bloomsbury, 2020.

• Manjunatha T. 'Military Modernization Efforts Under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan'. International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research, Volume 6, Issue 5, September-October 2024.

• Mohibbul, Hasan. History of Tipu Sultan. The World Press Private Ltd, Calcutta, 1971.

• Qadir, Khwaja Abdul. Waqai-I Manazil-I Rum: Tipu Sultan's Mission to Constantinople. Aakar Books, 2005.

• Sampath, Vikram. Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore's Interregnum (1760–1799). Penguin Random House, 2024.

• Sivasundaram, Sujit. Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire. Harper Collins, 2021.

Unity in Language, Thought, and Action

“May God grant that Terciman be the servant of truth and the mirror of the age.
Let it proclaim truth and honesty, be a labour of enlightenment and justice.
May we finally come to know our sacred homeland; let the pages of Terciman reveal it to us.”
- From a letter to the editor of Terciman

So read a prayer printed in the first issue of Terciman, a Muslim weekly newspaper published by Crimean Tatar educator Ismail Gasprinsky on the morning of April 10, 1883. Modest in appearance and form, the paper featured just four pages: two in Crimean Tatar and two in Russian. Its motto was “Dilde, fikirde, işte birlik”—“Unity in language, thought, and action.”

The timing of Terciman was no coincidence. Russian authorities were tightening their control over newly acquired territories in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Just one hundred years earlier, the Russian Empire had annexed the Crimean Peninsula, leading to the mass exodus of its Muslim population to Ottoman lands. By the end of the 19th century, there were nearly 14 million Muslims in Imperial Russia, representing 11% of its total population across territories stretching from the Black Sea to the Tien Shan Mountains, and from the Volga to Persia's frontier. With old Crimean Tatar elites dislocated, traditions of knowledge weakened, and institutional orthodoxy shaken, the region entered a period of intellectual stagnation.

From his home in Bakhchysarai, the former capital of the Crimean Khanate, Terciman’s publisher Gasprinsky observed firsthand the rapid reconfiguration of the social, educational, and epistemic terrain around him. The civilisational structure of his forefathers was crumbling. Beyond the Peninsula’s shores, the light of a new era was gleaming on the horizon.

But Gasprinsky recognised in the unfolding events not only a threat, but also a historic opportunity. Between the two extreme ends of rejection and submission to the new order, he charted a middle path, one of revival and reimagining. Drawing on his travels in the Ottoman Empire, where local elites were actively renegotiating their place in the new age, he envisioned a similar awakening taking place among the Turkic Muslim peoples.

Istanbul at the time served as a melting pot of intellectual activity, drawing émigrés and exiles from across the Muslim world. It was there that Gasprinsky understood that Muslim modernisation was not just possible but plausible. He saw the printing press, modern pedagogy, and new forms of art and public discourse as civilisational tools capable of ushering in a new era of intellectual production, enabling the Muslims of Russia to reassert their place in the world on their own terms.

Gasprinsky took on the challenge. The first Crimean Tatar publication of its kind, Terciman quickly rose to be the most influential voice for Muslims across the Russian Empire and beyond. Its editorial team engaged with Russian-language publications of all genres and ideological leanings, while drawing on a network of correspondents from Kazan, Ufa, Makhachkala, Samarkand, Bukhara, and other key Muslim cities. Gasprinsky’s command of Crimean Tatar, Russian, French, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian gave him access to a wide range of intellectual currents. Over the following decades, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic periodicals regularly cited and reprinted Terciman’s articles. The newspaper had even found its way into the pages of European and Russian Orientalist journals, where its insights were mined by scholars of the Muslim world.

But Gasprinsky’s efforts did not end at literary activity.

In January 1884, he founded the first experimental school in Bakhchysarai. Known as the Usul-i-Jadid, or New Method schools, they developed new phonetic methods for teaching Arabic to replace traditional syllabic rote memorisation, and incorporated ‘secular’ subjects like history, geography, and mathematics taught in vernacular Turkic tongues within European-style classrooms. The emphasis on education was instrumental to Gasprinsky’s aim of promoting functional literacy and forming a comprehensive knowledge ecosystem. The proponents of this new reform movement, referred to as Jadids, sought to integrate the intellectual, scientific, and educational advancements of the modern age with Islamic teachings.

Jadids emerged at a time when ideas could traverse continents at unprecedented speed and scope, bypassing authorities and elite networks. Broadly described as ‘the short 19th century’, this period—stretching roughly from the 1830s to the 1910s—represents a forgotten chapter in history in which Muslim elites developed a culture of letters and constructed social institutions befitting the industrial age. By the 1880s, the reformist discourse animating the salons and chaikhanas of Istanbul and Cairo was flourishing in Bakhchysarai and would soon spread to the farthest regions of the Russian mainland.

The Turco-Islamic Belt

At the advent of Russian colonisation in the 1850s, sedentary areas of Central Asia—encompassing much of present-day Uzbekistan, parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan—consisted of myriad polities ruled by khans, emirs, and clerics, each of whose authority generally relied on personal agreements and tribal allegiances rather than formal institutions.

Shortly after the fall of the Timurids in the 16th century, global trade routes shifted from overland to maritime pathways, leading to a prolonged socioeconomic decline in the region. Cut off from global intellectual currents, Samarkand and Bukhara, the crown jewels of medieval Islamic civilisation, had fallen into decay. Over the following centuries, madrasas devolved from institutions of higher learning into rigid systems that reproduced a clerical class trained only in Islamic jurisprudence and unconcerned with other domains of knowledge. Instruction relied almost solely on oral transmission, leaving many graduates unable to read or write.

Institutional weakness had made the region both an easy target for imperial powers and ill-equipped to handle regional problems. Russian colonial rule introduced sweeping socioeconomic changes across what became known as Russian Turkestan. Before long, settler communities, equipped with their own schools, churches, newspapers, and markets, and designed following European urban planning, began proliferating across the region. Though nominally independent, protectorate states such as the emirates of Bukhara and Khiva were also coming under Russian influence. It was within this context of widespread sociocultural decline among the native population and mounting instability that the Turkestani Jadid movement began to take form.

One of the main Jadid architects of reform was Mahmudkhodja Behbudiy. Born into the old Samarkand elite, he received traditional madrasa education and worked as a clerk before advancing to the position of qazi. Like Gasprinsky, he travelled through Istanbul, Cairo, and Mecca, where he made personal acquaintances with leading reformers. Upon his return, Behbudiy embraced Gasprinsky’s pedagogical approach, initiating a comprehensive modernisation program in schools and launching his own publishing enterprise. Revenue from publishing allowed him to pursue and fund his projects without relying on traditional patronage or state funding.

In the capital, Tashkent, Munawwar Qari opened a New Method school, which became the largest and most organised in all of Russian Turkestan. He wrote numerous textbooks, ran a bookselling and publishing business, and ran a discussion circle which included “practically everybody involved in reform in Central Asia”. After 1914, Qari shifted focus to theatre, as was fitting for a committed Jadid—many reformers regarded drama as amongst the most effective mediums for conveying modernist ideas.

In Kazan, Volga Tatar intellectual Gabdulla Bubi developed a framework built around four core concepts: millät (people), hörriät (freedom), mäğrifät (education), and täräqqiyat (progress). Like many visionaries of his time, Bubi harboured designs that extended beyond the short-term horizon, encompassing places like Kulja (modern Xinjiang), which he planned to turn into a civilisational centre for scientific and intellectual discourse in Greater Turkestan. In the Caucasus, Russian administrators remarked on the emergence of an educated cohort of Muslims who aspired “to represent the local intelligentsia and exert direct influence on the very governance of the region.” By the century's close, even Siberian Tatar communities in the remote Tobolsk district had established Jadid schools that admitted both male and female students.

The influence of Gasprinsky's reforms began to spread like waves, inspiring an extensive network of Jadid-led initiatives throughout the ‘Turco-Islamic belt’ of the Russian Empire, stretching from the Crimean Peninsula through the Volga-Ural region, then south to Azerbaijan and eastward into Turkestan and Western Siberia. Russian Muslims now had regular access to books and periodicals from across the country, as well as from Turkiye, Iran, and other distant regions. To facilitate communication via the press, Jadids advocated for a Chagatai-based literary standard intended to supplant Persian as the region’s primary language.

Within a remarkably short period, Jadids managed to lay the foundations for a new plausibility structure: a social-cultural framework that determines what knowledge, beliefs, and expressions can be conceived of as legitimate and reasonable within a community. Leveraging educational reform, print media, theatre, and discussion circles as novel civilisational tools, the Jadids sought to redefine the limits of the plausible—and, in doing so, transformed how Russian Muslim elites understood and engaged with the world. Seeing educated mothers as essential for cultivating a capable next generation, Jadids launched a series of reforms aimed at elevating the status of Muslim women and granting them access to education and voting rights. Publications like Âlem-i nisvan, edited by Gasprinsky's daughter Shafika Hanim, and Volga Tatar-led Suyumbike, gave women a separate platform in the discourse. The Jadids contended that the Quran did not exempt women from the duty to seek knowledge, and that included disciplines both religious and worldly.

Reactions to Jadid societal and educational reforms were divided. Muslim conservative factions, known as Qadimists, or proponents of the old method, responded to the Jadids with escalating opposition. In particular, the Qadimists criticized the Jadids’ rejection of ulema commentaries in favor of direct interpretation and advocacy for ijtihad (independent reasoning); their infusion of Western ideas into Islamic tradition and calls for admitting Muslim women into madrasas and public roles; and their dismissal of Sufism as a ritualised folk practice incompatible with Islamic orthodoxy. What began as two competing visions for the optimal societal structure eventually evolved into a political struggle that outlasted the Russian Empire itself.

The Jadids and the Qadimists

In today’s public consciousness in Russia and elsewhere, Jadids are often cast as the socially progressive faction championing quintessentially liberal values, while their opponents are depicted as backward obscurantists resistant to progress. However, reality was much more nuanced, and the boundaries between the Jadids and the Qadimists were considerably more porous. Many Jadids, coming from elite backgrounds, remained entrenched in the traditional madrasa milieu; some others combined reformist activism and madrasa teaching. The Qadimists, far from being an uneducated, déclassé mass, held considerable social influence rooted in the established traditions of knowledge, chains of religious authority and, among Sufi adherents, an unbroken spiritual lineage. In many respects, the Qadimists formed a residual category, comprising people with diverse views, united by a shared unease over the Jadids’ attacks on clerical authority.

Jadids’ commitment to anti-ulema and anti-Sufi polemics went so far as to declare both groups as purveyors of ‘unorthodox’ and popular versions of Islam that had departed from the authentic tradition. This situated the Jadids within a broader pattern of Islamic reform movements emerging across the 19th century, particularly evident in the overlaps between Salafi and Jadid thought and methodology, all despite their different historical contexts and ultimate goals. Viewed from such an angle, both Salafism and Jadidism reveal an intrinsically modernist character, even when their conclusions appear to advocate for a return to pre-modern forms of religious practice. The very impulse to return to ‘pristine’ traditional sources and purge the religion of later accretions is itself a mark of a modern mentality, as it requires a type of historical consciousness that could only emerge in the modern period.

Jadid-Qadimist interactions and their engagement with the Russian state varied across regions. In Russian Turkestan, the Qadimists successfully worked out compromises with the administration and soon became dependent on them for social status. Many ulema accepted awards from the state, learned the language, and sometimes sent their sons to Russian schools. By the advent of the 1917 Russian Revolution, both the Jadids and the Qadimists were shaped by the realities of colonial rule and made abundant use of the opportunities the Russian regime provided to pursue their objectives. Each side sought to outmanoeuvre the other by cultivating ties with imperial officials and manipulating imperial laws and institutions to their advantage.

Jadid criticism had also extended to colonial rule, although it had to be coded and circumscribed. Initially supportive of the reforms, the officials grew wary as the Jadids gained influence, fearing that they might challenge the status quo. Colonial authorities had complex relationships with both groups: on one hand, they saw the promotion of ‘secular’ activities as an antidote to “Islamic fanaticism”; on the other hand, these activities had to be carefully vetted and monitored by authorities. The censorship of Jadid publications was systematic and far-reaching, ranging from direct censorship of the reformist press to closure of newspapers at the slightest provocation and denial of permissions for new publications, schools, and bookstores. Despite these restrictions, the Jadids succeeded in forming the first Muslim political organisation and party, Ittifaq al-Muslimin, in 1905.

Both the Jadids and the Qadimists frequently appealed to the Tsarist state for assistance in their disputes. Muslims quickly learned to frame and address their communal tensions in language that resonated with Russian officials; laypeople, in particular, found that they could challenge the authority of clerics by triggering state intervention. This overreliance on the Russian state as an arbiter led to increased state intrusion into the everyday life of Muslims, which has persisted well into the Soviet and post-Soviet period.

The Quest for Reform

In 2020, the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, delivered a speech honouring the Jadids as “outstanding educators who could have carried out the country’s Third Renaissance in the twentieth century”. In post-Soviet Central Asia, the legacy of the Jadids, once consigned to oblivion, is now being restored to prominence in national discourse.

The Jadid movement across the Russian Empire represents a fascinating yet understudied chapter in the intellectual history of Muslims at large. For us, their story raises important questions: what lessons can we extract from their successes and failures? How does one balance religion with modern education? And how can Muslim communities engage with secular state power without compromising on their faith?

In the years preceding the momentous 1917 Russian Revolution, Jadid criticism was directed primarily toward their conservative adversaries. The nascent public sphere they had worked so hard to create was still fragile, while the Qadimists, though weakened, continued to wield considerable influence across the Muslim social sphere. State-wide censorship rendered any meaningful criticism of the Russian state impossible. In the chaos that followed the Revolution, the Jadids saw in the ostensibly anti-imperial Soviet order an ally in their struggle for sovereignty. It was in those years that the Jadid movement transformed into an active political force, now positioned against both Qadimist traditionalism and Russian colonial designs with reinvigorated radicalism.

But the energy did not translate into electoral success. Time and again, the ulema emerged triumphant at the ballot box. Their victory, however, was soon rendered meaningless by the collapse of constitutional governance itself, which relegated all power to Russian settler communities. The turbulent period spanning 1917-1920 brought about a total reconfiguration of socio-political structures across the former empire. Once again, the Jadids found themselves caught between the dissolution of the old order and the birth pangs of a new one, but this time, they emerged victorious. When the exclusionary policies of the Tashkent Soviet finally yielded to pressure from Moscow, an extraordinary confluence of circumstances allowed Jadids to briefly take over the new institutions of power.

A standard narrative portraying all Jadids as sudden converts to communism obscures a more complex reality. The Jadids integrated themselves into the Soviet apparatus, convinced they could collaborate with revolutionary authority to deliver the blow to the opposition, in hopes that the new order might prove amenable to their aspirations. But their grandiose visions remained unrealised, colliding with the unforgiving constraints of political reality.

The Soviet hierarchy, for the most part, remained dominated by non-indigenous cadres. These leaders needed native recruits to disseminate the Soviet ideology, but harboured suspicions about their true loyalties. In the 1930s, party discipline demanded the expulsion of the Jadids and local communists, replacing them with a new generation of ideologically aligned and largely non-religious Central Asian party members. Stalin’s consolidation of power and the following purges obliterated Islamic institutions through a systematic campaign of executions, deportations, and resettlements, mosque and madrasa closures, and the abolition of courts. Most Jadids and Qadimists were tortured or executed, or perished in labour camps.

Gasprinsky passed away in 1914, never to witness the aftermath of the Russian revolution or to learn of the fates that befell his intellectual heirs. A century after his death, all across the Turco-Islamic belt of the former Russian Empire, the works of the assiduous Muslim reformers are being brought into the spotlight, if only to support nationalist agendas.

Today, we are still seeking to formulate answers to questions that have occupied the minds of Muslims since the dawn of the industrial age. Throughout the short 19th century, Muslims responded to the needs of the time, but for various reasons were defeated. The lessons from these reforms have faded from historical memory, leaving Muslims today trapped in an endless loop, recycling the concepts and ideas debated generations ago, unable to escape this forgotten legacy.

How do we navigate both mainstream secular culture and traditional Islamic authority structures that may not fully address our particular circumstances? How do we chart a middle path, one of revival and reimagining? And how do we build a new plausibility structure befitting the 21st century? The final lines of the inaugural prayer in Terciman remain as relevant today as they were a century and a half ago:

“This age is strange, foreign; we must understand it.
Let it (the newspaper) follow the right path.
And may the young Terciman (Interpreter) thrive.”

Author: Yana Zuray(eva) is a Buryat-Mongolian visual artist and 3D designer from Ulan-Ude, Russia. She writes at Waterfalls of Qaf and can be found on X as @yiihya. She lives between Toronto and London.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

Further Reading

• The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, Khalid Adeeb

• Clichés, Biases, and False Dichotomies in the Intellectual History of Central Asia, Devin DeWeese

• Jadidism as a Paradigm for Studying Islam in the Russian Empire, Alfrid Bustanov

• For Prophet and Tsar, Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, Robert Crews

• The Enlightener of the East, Ismail Gasprinsky, Yuri Bekirovich Osmanov

The Alif Jumu’ah: You Can Just Do Things

Alif, an accelerator at the frontier of a new subculture in Silicon Valley, is inextricably linked to the Jumu’ah prayer. After announcing its pilot cohort, Batch 0, in the summer of 2024, Alif began hosting a Jumu’ah in Fort Mason Park. The Alif Jumu’ah quickly took off, becoming an unexpected mainstay for San Francisco’s Muslims, natives, nomads and transplants alike — with some driving 45 minutes to attend. “There was no mosque near us to go pray together at,” Alif’s founder, Omar Waseem, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. So, with a partiful link and some tarps weighed down by backpacks, “we started one.”

The photos of the Jumu’ah, shared on social media by Alif with a mix of quippy in-group references (“touched grass, JM”) and earnest captions (“a testament to our community’s commitment to faith and mutual support”), are compositionally striking. Rows of worshippers dot neon blue tarps centred on a seemingly endless expanse of green, framed by palm trees and the San Francisco skyline, and surrounded by the bright blue sky.

The perspective and scale of the photos, between an iPhone and a drone, are both intimate and immense. The photos exude a sense of cinematic cool that reflects the ethos animating Alif’s spirit: you can just do things. You can just start a company. You can just start an accelerator. You can just lay down some tarp and pray, every Friday, with your coworkers, friends and family in the middle of Fort Mason Park.

The Alif Story

With roots in Furqan Rydhan’s Founders Inc. — Waseem worked at Founders Inc., and Rydhan was one of Alif’s first backers — Alif was born out of a dual urgency.

First, there is the urgency of our historical moment. Introducing Alif on X last spring, Waseem wrote, “With what we’ve seen from AI in the last two years”, there is a “window of opportunity that’s never existed at this magnitude in history”. He elaborates on this urgency on his YouTube channel — a well-produced, tightly edited channel that remixes the Mr. Beast school of YouTube with the tone and content of a thoughtful podcast, consolidating the bootstrapped ups and downs of young founders. Referring to AI, he says, “There is a generational opportunity that has never existed before, and that will probably never exist again in the same exact capacity to build things that create real impact.” Alif intends to take advantage of that.

Underlying Alif’s responsibility to the historical moment is an even deeper urgency: To create the kind of space Waseem wished existed when he first began his career. This goal, to build the community, infrastructure and cultural presence he had once searched for, but couldn’t find, is in active conversation with Silicon Valley 1.0 and 2.0. Alif is, in that sense, a space of the generational consolidation and transfer of knowledge and capital. “We’re building a space now where people who have done the thing can help bring up the people that are doing the thing for the first time”, Waseem says in a vlog, “And that has never existed in the Muslim community in the startup space”.

Over the past year, Alif has emerged as a gravitational centre for Muslim builders. One of Alif’s most notable milestones was its one-day Summit, held on February 1 at the City View Metreon in downtown San Francisco. Its slate of speakers, a mix of Muslim internet royalty and Silicon Valley heavyweights, was buzzy. The biggest draw was Replit-founder Amjad Masad, the Paul Graham darling whose influence touches both Gen Z builders and the alt-curious edges of tech Twitter.

The Summit drew over 600 attendees, most of whom flew into San Francisco for the event. It generated, conservatively, well over a quarter of a million dollars for a city much in need of the revenue. Tickets, averaging at $290, sold double and triple their value in the days and hours leading up to the event. Screenshots of Waseem’s personalised email confirmation to ticket buyers were shared on Twitter and Instagram. An unofficial WhatsApp group chat for Summit attendees was circulated on Twitter and ballooned to hundreds of members before the event. The Summit was, in short, a hype-fueled viral event that attracted not just the self-stylised “Muslim builder,” but also attracted any curious, ambitious and driven Muslim seeking a community of other curious, ambitious and driven Muslims.

The Summit also marked a new chapter in Alif’s journey, one that launched it into the public Muslim imagination. Its moment in the spotlight offered an inside look into a venture that is well on its way to a blueprint for the next generation of Muslim founders.

The Fourth Option

The Summit trailer, released two months before the event, begins with Waseem, sitting in the middle of a dimly lit workspace — something between an artist’s studio, a content creator’s set and a maker’s lab. Into a microphone, he recites, with bored lilt, the familiar diaspora refrain: “Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer.” Then, with a tilt forward, a glint, and perfectly measured beat, he asks, “But what if there was a fourth option?”

Despite talking robots and driverless cars, “we,” Waseem says, are still “stuck” at boring desk jobs. Yet, “now more than ever,” the trailer continues, “there is a new generation of Muslim builders that is being created in real time in front of us.” As he says this, a collage of Muslim founders pops up behind him. In addition to Rydhan, the collage features Haroon Mokhtarzada, an entrepreneur who sold Truebill, now RocketMoney, for $1.4 billion; Mamoon Hamid, a venture capitalist who co-founded Social Capital with Chamath Palipapitiya; and Jawed Karim, the mysterious co-founder of YouTube whose video “me at the zoo,” the first ever YouTube video, changed the world and who, since then, co-founded YVentures with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois.

As the Muslim founders’ collage fades, the trailer’s tone shifts. “History has shown us”, Waseem says, “that you can’t build big things alone”. With this line, the “builders” Waseem had just spoken about are not just aspirations collected in a collage, they’re us — they are the viewer, they are you. “So, for the first time ever”, Waseem pauses, “we are hosting a summit.”

By repositioning the viewer into an active participant in the success of the past generation of Muslim founders, the trailer collapses the distance between aspiration and identification. The trailer says, it’s not just that these Muslim builders exist, it’s that you too might be one of them. You just need to show up at the Summit.

I start with the Summit trailer because it captures, in under a minute, the core of what made the Alif Summit so compelling, and ultimately, so successful. The trailer is a skilful heir to the Don Draper school of advertising. It sells both a product and a vision, and in addition to giving people what they want, it teaches them what to want. The trailer’s power lies in its legitimisation and mainstreaming of a new vocabulary, specifically, the idea of the “builder.”

Delivering its message with a sleek authority, the word “builder” — a fluid, historically loaded term in and out of Silicon Valley — is presented without definition, and without irony. It is presented as if it has always belonged in the same canon as doctor, lawyer, and engineer. The trailer scripts a cultural shift, one that positions “builder” as self-evident, both an identity and an aspiration.

I was an outsider at the Summit: a lawyer observing the rituals and vocabulary of a community I am not part of. As an outsider, I recognise I might miss the cultural layers that insiders navigate unconsciously — Clifford Geertz’s “thick description,” and Pierre Bourdieu's habitus. Yet, a disposition of nearness and remoteness offers a distinct opportunity to examine assumptions the ecosystem takes for granted, while recognising the sincere ambitions and tensions at play.

At the Summit

The energy at the City View Metreon on that rainy San Francisco morning was electric, charged with the kind of breathless, youthful anticipation of move-in day at college. Upon the painlessly seamless check-in, each attendee was given a choice of three colored stickers for their badge to indicate their role: Founder, investor, or student.

I couldn’t resist a cheeky quip, “What if I am none of those things?”, confusing the smiling volunteer who hesitated with a puzzled smile before cheerfully suggesting I pick whatever felt closest. I picked “student.” Still, flippancy aside, the stickers were a smart visual system that eliminated the worst parts of networking (the opening questions), while enhancing its best parts (finding your people). Once checked in, I placed the sticker on the back of my badge.

Inside, the attention to detail reflected a commitment to excellence rarely seen among Muslims who, out of necessity, often accept middling production quality in exchange for community. The space was thoughtfully choreographed with fireside chats, an exhibition space, and a coffee cart. The polish and production value conveyed a seriousness, setting the tone that this Summit was different.

Despite the polish, I went in with scepticism. Aside from Rydhan, Masad and Mokhtarzada, the speaker lineup felt familiar, just another conference where modest achievements are repackaged as groundbreaking innovation, where representation is confused with power, and virility with influence.

But as each speaker took the stage, my cynicism softened.

Rhydan, who has built across multiple Silicon Valley cycles, delivered the day’s most foundational message: You can just do things. Conversational rather than polished, there was an almost weathered, perennial wisdom to his delivery, less guru, more guide — a secure older brother who wants to give away the playbook. Rhydan gave an audience conditioned to seek permission, the permission to blow up their frameworks, and just start.

Masad, whose company Replit is valued at $1.2 billion, resonated with an audience hungry to see itself reflected in tech’s upper echelons. Although the interview format felt constraining, forcing Masad to provide brief answers to predictable questions that barely scratched the surface of what he had to offer, his presence alone seemed to expand the room’s sense of possibility.

Rayouf Alhumedhi, who designed the hijab emoji that now appears on billions of phones, delivered what was unexpectedly one of the more compelling presentations. The hijab-emoji had always struck me as a well-intentioned but ultimately hollow gesture that flattened identity into iconography, even accelerating the displacement of the self into the hyperreal where representation is considered a necessary substitute for reality. Yet, Alhumedhi’s path from a teenager designing the hijab emoji in Berlin to a sophisticated career as a designer and curator in the venture capital world complicated my own reductive reading by revealing someone who was working at the intersections, and therefore, with discomfort and friction.

Amir Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder and CEO of Muslim, one of the “largest Muslim media networks” in the world, was almost hesitant on stage, as if uncertain he belonged among the speakers. Al-Khatahtbeh’s media company, @Muslim, is an Instagram account with over 6 million followers that describes itself as the ‘#1 Source for All Muslim News & Content”, and is a feed of aggregated photography, news, and religious content that averages well over 100,000 likes per post. In his talk, Al-Khatahtbeh compared @Muslim to Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam newspaper that had reached 2 million readers in the 1960s. He compared Angela Davis giving Muhammad Speaks an exclusive interview after she was released from jail in the early 1970s, to @Muslim’s crucial work in keeping Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza online. Although the comparison was admittedly strained — @Muslim is largely an aggregator of news, while Muhammad Speaks was a generator of original movement journalism and political thought — the underlying point about Muslim-controlled media infrastructure was compelling. In today’s digital media landscape, it is easy to see why a built-in virality machine like @Muslim is valuable.

Tasneem Atik Sabri, Vela co-founder, was a curious but welcome addition. As a company, Vela has so fundamentally transformed the hijab industry that its hijabs are memed — everyone knows about the difficulty of securing the watercolour Velas. It was hard not to squirm a little at the corporate polish of “We don’t just sell scarves. We sell confidence, identity and pride,” especially as images of stylish, Instagram-ready, Vela-clad women flashed across the screen to a majority male audience. Still, behind the marketing is a complex e-commerce empire that employs over 25 people and has developed a custom supply chain. As the gold standard of hijabs – the Nike of hijabs, as Sabri put it – Vela had built something undeniably impressive: A fashion brand that is also a functional piece of Muslim-owned infrastructure. For an audience learning to think in terms of capital, ownership, and long-term civilisational presence, a company that is actively shaping the hijab market is inspiring.

Mokhtarzada gave the day’s last talk, and although it was reportedly and by his own admission nearly identical to the talk he gave at Muslim Tech Week, his talk offered something the audience was hungry for: A practical roadmap for building a billion-dollar company without compromising Islamic values. His story, from nearly fifty investors' rejections to closing one of his biggest deals via DocuSign while in Medina, offered a kind of gritty happily ever after that is universally appealing. Although the Summit was expressly a tech conference, Mokhtarzada was a unique distillation of the Summit’s premise that Muslim excellence and tech ambition are seamlessly integrated, that spiritual grounding does not preclude material ambition.

As the day wore on, I was left with the wistful glow of a proud older sibling, and a protective wonder at the self-possession that, while not always relatable to me, clearly resonated with an audience hungry for a vocabulary of agency.

The vocabulary of agency essentially came down to one word: “builder.” Each speaker offered a distinct answer to the same question: What does it mean to be a “builder”? The collective answer was that a builder is someone curious and obsessive. Although a simple definition, it is expansive, it authorises action. If you are sincerely curious about a problem and obsessive about solving it, you’re a builder.

A Vocabulary of Possibility

Strolling after Maghreb prayer — of which there were several rounds to accommodate both the crowds and the travellers — I stopped by a black wall near the venue entrance covered with hundreds of sticky notes and printed cards. It was a wall of ideas, wishes and dreams of the Summit’s attendees. The result was a sprawling insight into a community learning what it means to dream at scale.

The ideas ranged from the practical to the fantastical. AI Quran tutors with tajweed correction sat beside rocket-powered skis. Muslim social networks next to an Iron Man suit and a real-life Jarvis. Mental health AI assistants next to platforms for elder care. Bitcoin and “halal economy,” next to retirement homes for elderly Muslims, water desalination plants next to a dental office that looks and feels like a spa and AI fashion for men. Someone wrote “A rocket ship?” complete with a question mark, an admission of uncertainty, but going for it anyway.

As I walked along the wall, tensions that revealed an ambitious community struggling to develop a coherent vocabulary of possibility that marries collective dreams with practical building became apparent.

First, there was the scale mismatch. Individual entries like “Muslim social network,” and “AI Quran tutor” (one of dozens of AI-enabled technology ideas) sat alongside civilisational ideals, like “an app that eliminates food and housing insecurity,” or “global sustainable energy infrastructure,” and even “a time machine to go visit ancient cities.” Many of these ideas require national resources, decades of development and for some, scientific breakthroughs. The tension lay in the mismatch between the scale of the dreams and the tools available to realise them. Building an AI app is one thing. Building a sovereign cultural, financial and scientific infrastructure is another. How does one go from prototyping to scaffolding?

Palestine also featured on the wall — as it had throughout the entire event. With attendees wearing kuffiyehs, cheering loudly anytime a speaker brought up Palestine, and showing off Palestine stickers on laptops, it was clear Palestine had become the community’s reference point, if not its anchor. Palestine revealed the scale mismatch most starkly. A note about a “tech hub in Gaza,” next to simple, and at times, basic, platform ideas exposed the gap between solidarity and capability. Building the infrastructure we need to help, and better yet, prevent a Gaza from ever happening again, requires the kind of sovereign systems thinking that seemed muted, if not missing.

Then there was the representation question. Many of the ideas on the wall seemed to be what Waseem expressly and explicitly wanted Alif to move beyond: “Muslim marketplace app”, “Entirely Muslim-friendly investment platform”, “A marketplace for halal economy investments”, “Islamic Ed-Tech”, “Muslim social network”. In his Ansari podcast interview, Waseem stated Alif’s goal: “It isn’t that we need to be the best Muslim podcast, or the best Muslim cafe, or the best Muslim founder. We just want to be Muslim, and then be the best to ever do it, in our category.” Yet, the wall still showed traces of “halalification” — the impulse to imitate what exists by adding a lazy “Muslim” or “Islamic” prefix to it.

Despite its tensions, the wall was instructive, revealing an ambitious community for whom the future is full of possibility. Revealing, in short, a community that is learning how to think like, and be, builders. In its own clumsy way, it underscored one of the functions of a place like Alif and the Summit, which was attempting to scale a new vocabulary and become a funnel for ambition.

A Blueprint

A dawning realisation in our generation is that what passes for ‘Muslim cultural expectations’ isn’t working; the divide between the mosque and the workplace, or anything else in life, is neither satisfying nor logical. The fourth option – to be a “builder” instead of a lawyer, doctor, or engineer – is as much a declaration of rebellion against quotidian cultural mores within the Muslim community as it is a counterculture within Silicon Valley.

Rather than passively consume the world, the younger generation of Muslims now wants to act on it with agency, shaping it in their image. To be a builder is not just a set of skills but a disposition towards the world. It is a disposition that Kasurian is attempting to create the vocabulary to describe.

In a time of AI slop, hallucinated truths, deep fakes and increasingly urgent ethical questions, Alif, as a company informed by Islam, seems to possess the core intuition that there is a missing gap for a new vocabulary and form of legitimacy necessary towards the cultivation of a new generation of Muslim “founders” in tech, who understand the importance of ihsan as a means to success. For Muslims, the question of “but should we?” is already and always embedded in “can we?” In the current moment, there is a virtue in building while publicly wrestling with the ethical stakes as part of the design process itself. At the same time, as Waseem put it in his Ansari interview, Muslims are too often too afraid of money — and he’s right. With Alif, ethical seriousness does not preclude power and sovereignty.

For all its sincerity and both its civilisational and practical world-building, the Summit was an exceptionally executed marketing spectacle. In that way, it was truly of its “content is king” era. Content is king is risky, because representation can’t be more important than the reality it represents. But, as Mad Men argued, even the most cynical packaging — advertising — is built atop the most sincere of human desires: the search for meaning.

Although at times it appeared to still be operating within the margins of the 2010s tech culture (founder worship, frictionless scaling, the cult of the new), ultimately, the Summit revealed a community hungry to scale and funnel its imagination, skills, and money towards new frameworks. It also showed that the means to build with both audacity and accountability are possible.

Alif, as Waseem has noted, is building people who build systems. That’s what makes “you can just do things” more than a slogan, but a call to action at the scale of civilisation.

Author: Mariam Mahmoud is a lawyer in California. She can be found on Twitter/X at @mariammahmoudns.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.