Kasurian in Season: A Letter from the Editors #2
Concluding Kasurian’s Summer 2025 issue.
The summer season nears its end, and with that, Kasurian’s Summer 2025 issue has now concluded.
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.