1. Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/. Daesh is the name by which the group became known in the Middle East, an acronym of the Arabic al-dawlaʾl-islamiyya fi ʿl-ʿiraq waʾl-sham, “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.”

2. Juan Cole, “Today’s Top 7 Myths about Daesh/ISIL,” Informed Comment, February 17, 2015, http://www.juancole.com/2015/02/todays-about-daesh.html; Sohaira Siddiqui, “Beyond Authenticity: ISIS and the Islamic Legal Tradition,” Jadaliyya, February 24, 2015, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/31825/Beyond-Authenticity-ISIS-and-the-Islamic-Legal-Tradition.

3. Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” n. 2.

4. Ernest Gellner, “Islam and Marxism: Some Comparisons,” International Affairs 67, no. 1 (1991): 1–6.

5. The most succinct and influential formulation of this widespread argument remains Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (London: Random House, 2003). Lewis had long advanced such a view, which gained a massive public and policymaking audience after September 11, 2001.

6. In particular, the whole interdisciplinary field of modern Middle Eastern studies—across history, political science, sociology, and anthropology (and most notably in English, French, and German)—constituted itself, in an important respect and from the late 1970s onward, as a movement of emancipation from both the academic institutions and the intellectual tutelage of an older Orientalism, which focused on earlier periods and tended to read the modern history of Muslim-majority societies through the lens of normative ideas about the classical period. This development was already underway before the publication in 1978 of Edward W. Said’s polemical study Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); an important early statement remains Roger Owen’s excoriating review of the 1970 Cambridge History of Islam: E. R. J. Owen, “Studying Islamic History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 2 (1973): 287–98. For an institutional and intellectual history of this question, see Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

7. See, for example, Roberto Cipriani, “Sécularisation ou retour du sacré ?” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 52, no. 2 (1981): 141–50, an acerbic comment on the state of the field that already offered a critical history of the concept of secularization and its problems. Jean Baubérot, “Religion diffuse et sécularisation,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 56, no. 2 (1983): 195–98, comments on British sociologist Robert Towler’s idea of “diffused religion.” Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion [1985], trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), analyzed the “exit from religion” as central to modern political philosophy, but also as enabling the continuity of religious belief in democratic societies. Significant interventions in English include José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Rodney Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P.,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 249–73; Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof, eds., The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Christopher Deacy and Elisabeth Arweck, eds., Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Craig Calhoun, “Rethinking Secularism,” The Hedgehog Review 12, no. 3, 2010, http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2010_Fall_Calhoun.php. On Islam specifically, see Dale F. Eickelman and John W. Anderson, eds., New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Dale F. Eickelman and Armando Salvatore, eds., Public Islam and the Common Good (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Nadine Picaudou, L’islam entre religion et idéologie. Essai sur la modernité musulmane (Paris: Gallimard, 2010); Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Humeira Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? Jama‘at-e-Islami and Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa in Urban Pakistan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and work by Kemal Karpat, Cemil Aydin, Karen Barkey, and Nurullah Ardiç on law, the state, and religion in the late Ottoman Empire.

8. The secularization paradigm has nonetheless maintained a tenacious presence in some of the sociological and philosophical literature loath to divest itself of this dominant frame of reference, though sometimes modifying it considerably. See, for example, Karel Dobbelaere, “The Meaning and Scope of Secularization,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Peter B. Clarke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 599–615; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Such studies almost never address societies outside of (mainly northwestern) Europe, and within them consider mainly the Christian (or post-Christian, or Christian by cultural heritage) majority. The implication is usually that only a handful of societies had become “modern” in this sense by the end of the twentieth century, raising the question of the concept’s real utility, at least for any non-Eurocentric conception of history.

9. The inheritance of Euro-American intellectual history makes itself felt, of course, in the etymologies of our own analytical vocabulary: “secularity” in its original meanings denotes one side of a distinction between religious and “non-religious” spheres, anticipating the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas of secularization in social behavior as well as in freedom of thought, as emancipation from the religious through the expansion of a secular sphere imagined as having emerged from, and eventually eclipsing, the religious. That “the religious” in this account exists prior to and outside of secularity betrays the religious (or religiously nonconformist) origins of all such thinking. Redefining secularity as encompassing the religious is less to restate secularization theory than to suggest, on the contrary, that it began from the false premise of allowing primacy, and logical priority, to religion.

10. This is especially true of South Asia and the Middle East. There are some important exceptions, notably in West Africa, where the advance of Islamization circa 1880–1940 was driven by Sufi brotherhoods that sometimes (if only after periods of repression) formed effective working relationships with colonial administrations. See David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000); Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

11. Muhammad Asad, The Principles of State and Government in Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 97.

12. The hegemony of the reformist narrative within twentieth-century accounts of Islam means that this dimension of the movement’s intellectual and social history has not been fully explored. See, however, James McDougall, “État, société et culture chez les intellectuels de l’iṣlāḥ maghrébin (Algérie et Tunisie, c. 1890–1940), ou la réforme comme apprentissage de l’arriération,” in Réforme de l’État et réformismes au Maghreb, xix^e–xx^e siècles, ed. Odile Moreau (Paris: L’Harmattan/Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain, 2009), 281–306. Among the influences on Muslim thinkers in this vein were European and American writers including Gustave Le Bon, Arnold Toynbee, and James Henry Breasted.

13. In the 1990s, it became common to associate these changes with a “Muslim Reformation,” seeing the democratization of religious authority and the objectification of religiosity itself as evidence of a “rationalizing” of religion in distinctly modernist and Weberian terms. See Dale F. Eickelman, “Inside the Islamic Reformation,” Wilson Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1998): 80–89; Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori, eds., Muslim Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and the critique by Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 10–16. My point here is to emphasize that such factors have not brought unidirectional change in the ways presupposed by classical sociology, but rather much more fragmented and unpredictable forms of thought and practice that cannot simply be plotted on a modernist timeline of progress/regression.

14. Author’s interview with Slimane Chikh, Algiers, July 2008. From a family of Ibadi scholars, Chikh, later rector of the University of Algiers and several times a government minister, was a student in Tunis in the 1950s; his father, the poet and militant Mufdi Zakarya, had also studied there in the 1920s. On Ibadi Islam in the Mzab and its wider context over this period, see Augustin Jomier, Islam, réformisme et colonisation. Une histoire de l’ibadisme en Algérie (1882–1962) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2020). On transnational Ibadism and Arab nationalism, see Amal N. Ghazal, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s–1930s) (New York: Routledge, 2010).

15. Rainer Brunner, Islamic Ecumenism in the Twentieth Century: The Azhar and Shiism between Rapprochement and Restraint (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought: The Response of the Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims to the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1982), 41–51. Enayat refers in particular to the work of the shaykh Maḥmūd Shaltūt (1893–1963), who led al-Azhar from 1958 to 1963, and the dār al-taqrīb al-madhāhib, the “Organisation for the Conciliation of the Schools,” created in Cairo in 1947. On Shaltūt, see Kate Zebiri, Maḥmūd Shaltūt and Islamic Modernism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). The political conjuncture of Nasserism with Shii dissent against the Shah between the early 1960s, when the Iranian regime tilted toward Israel and embarked on the “White Revolution,” and the Islamic Revolution of 1978–1979, also facilitated this brief inter-sectarian fraternity.

16. Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought, 81–82.

17. The reforming modernism of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh, beginning in the 1880s, has often been conflated with the purist reformism of this salafi school. Henri Lauzière has shown that the earliest generation of reformers, often referred to as founders of a broader salafīyya movement, did not use this term to describe themselves, although later Muslim as well as non-Muslim writers often affixed it to them. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the term salafi was used broadly by reformers who saw themselves as combining the recovery of a true, original Islam with a pragmatic rather than a rigorist orientation to rational interpretation and social “progress” (like the Moroccan Muḥammad ʿAllāl al-Fāsī, d. 1974), as well as by others who tended toward rigorist orthopraxy and a rejection of progressive rationalism and interpretative latitude (like the Moroccan Muḥammad Taqī al-Dīn al-Hilālī, d. 1987). It is not clear, however, that Lauzière’s own categorical distinction between “modernist” and “purist” salafis, “two conceptions of salafism” that he sees as having emerged by the end of the 1950s, maps neatly onto distinct schools of thought in this period. Those whom Lauzière calls “modernist salafis” might be more simply termed “iṣlāḥists” or “reformists” (muṣliḥūn), to use the term they often applied to themselves, as opposed to his “purist salafis,” followers of the rigorist school of orthopraxy closer to Wahhabism in outlook. See Henri Lauzière, “The Construction of Salafiyya: Reconsidering Salafism from the Perspective of Conceptual History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 3 (2010): 369–89; Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Lauzière, “What We Mean versus What They Meant by ‘Salafi’: A Reply to Frank Griffel,” Die Welt der Islams 56 (2016): 89–96.

18. Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori, eds., Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); James L. Gelvin and Nile Green, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

19. The influence of Gustave Le Bon’s (racist and anti-Semitic) La civilisation des arabes (Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1884), which lauded an Arab-Islamic golden age before the Arab world’s “racial” decline, deserves attention here. For the importance of François Guizot, Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de l’Empire romain jusqu’à la Révolution française (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1828) on later nineteenth-century Muslim thinkers, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 114–15.

20. For an exploration of the multiple ways in which such communications could be received and used, see Arthur Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). On the “countertempos” produced by communication and transport technology in Egypt, see On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). For a more general argument about the contradictory effects of space and speed in narratives and experiences of modernity, see James McDougall, “Modernity in ‘Antique Lands’: Perspectives from the Western Mediterranean,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60, no. 1/2 (2017): 1–17.

21. Jomier, Islam, réformisme et colonisation; James McDougall, “La mosquée et le cimetière. Espaces du sacré et pouvoir symbolique à Constantine en 1936,” Insaniyat. Revue algérienne d’anthropologie et de sciences sociales 39/40 (2008): 79–96; Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For a contemporary case, see Magnus Marsden, Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

22. Ali Shariʾati, On the Sociology of Islam: Lectures, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1979), 82–87; Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariʿati (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 199 and 289–91.

23. Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Risālat al-tawhid (1925; 15th ed., Cairo: Dār al-Manār, 1952), 180.

24. Gamal ʿAbd al-Nāṣir’s antipathy to the Muslim Brotherhood and their vision of social remoralization after 1952 is well known, as is the clear distinction between religion and politics in his own thinking and political program: James Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 35–37. But however marginal and formulaic religious references were in Nasser’s thinking and speeches, for his audience, his rhetoric drew part of its power from the invocation of an Egyptian national community whose unity of strength and purpose was routinely set under God—as, for example, in the famous speech announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal: “We aim with strength, determination, and faith, trusting God and ourselves, relying on God and on our determination, on God and on our strength, to achieve the goals of this revolution” (speech given in Alexandria, July 26, 1956). In Algeria, anticolonial nationalism prior to 1954 combined a political culture influenced by the context of the French Republic with identification of the nation as a fundamentally Muslim community. The revolutionary FLN (National Liberation Front) in 1954–1962 and its one-party state from 1962 to 1989 sought to subordinate and instrumentalize, but also endorsed and officialized, a doctrine of national identity that identified Arabism with Islam. See Luc-Willy Deheuvels, Islam et pensée contemporaine en Algérie. La revue “al-Aṣâla,” 1971–1981 (Paris: Éd. du CNRS, 1991); Charlotte Courreye, L’Algérie des Oulémas: Une histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 1931-1991 (Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne, 2020).

25. On Arab nationalisms, see James McDougall, “The Emergence of Nationalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History, ed. Amal Ghazal and Jens Hanssen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199672530.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199672530.

26. Turkish nationalism under the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) and the early republic, despite the later laiklik of Kemalism, strongly identified “Turkish” national belonging with Islam. This was a trend shaped by the conjuncture of demographic with political pressure, from the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 that brought an influx of Muslim refugees into Anatolia, through the Armenian genocide, to later “population exchanges” with Greece in the 1920s. Kemalist secularism sought to deny public authority to religion, but implicitly endorsed an ethnoreligious definition of Turkish national community. The return to prominence of Turkish Islamist politics, from the Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) to the AKP (Justice and Development Party), is a much less radical departure from Turkey’s earlier twentieth-century history than might have been supposed by observers who took the Kemalist republic as a triumph of secularist “modernization.”

27. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi: Weststruckness [1962], trans. John Green and Ahmad Alizadeh (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1997).

28. For a Maghrebi example, see Mubārak al-Mīlī, Risālat al-shirk wa maẓāhirihi (Algiers, 1937).

29. Ali Abdel Razek, Islam and the Foundations of Political Power [1925], trans. Maryam Loufti (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

30. On reimaginings of the caliphate, see Reza Pankhurst, The Inevitable Caliphate? A History of the Struggle for Global Islamic Union, 1924 to the Present (London: Hurst, 2013); Madawi Al-Rasheed, Carool Kersten, and Marat Shterin, eds., Demystifying the Caliphate: Historical Memory and Contemporary Contexts (London: Hurst, 2013); Mona Hassan, Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

31. Asad, The Principles of State and Government.

32. Ibid., 100.

33. Sayyid Abu-’l-A‘lā al-Maudūdī, Islamic Law and Constitution, ed. Khurshid Ahmad (Karachi: Jamaat-e-Islami Publications, 1955); A‘la-Mawdudi, Let Us Be Muslims [Khuṭbāt], trans. Khurram Murad (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 1985).

34. Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

35. Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī, Malamiʾ al-mujtamaʾ al-islami alladhi nanshaduhu (Beirut: Muʾassasat ar-Risāla, 1996), quoted in Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “The ʿUlama of Contemporary Islam and Their Conceptions of the Common Good,” in Public Islam and the Common Good, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and Armando Salvatore (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 145.

36. Ibid.

37. Asad, The Principles of State and Government, 9.

38. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2.

39. The excerpt from the speech in which ʿAbd al-Nāṣir made the joke, in the course of relating his 1953 effort to reach agreement with the Brotherhood “correctly and reasonably,” was recently widely shared and discussed online, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4RK8bj2W0 (accessed March 2019, since removed). He was, of course, discrediting the movement that his police was then brutally repressing. But the filmed audience reaction, as well as the manner in which he recounts the anecdote, are revealing. For a good, short discussion by Egyptian blogger Issandr El Amrani, see “Nasser, the Muslim Brothers and the Veil,” https://arabist.net/blog/2012/10/30/nasser-the-muslim-brothers-and-the-veil.html (October 30, 2012).

40. William R. Roff, ed., Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning: Comparative Studies of Muslim Discourse (London: Croom Helm, 1987).

41. Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

42. I am taking some liberties here in employing Pierre Bourdieu’s terms very loosely; while his system of “fields” describes a static, self-reproducing system of social hierarchy and symbolic power, I use the same imagery to designate a more dynamic, emergent system, with the field metaphor serving to describe a “moment” rather than an equilibrium. Bourdieu’s own account of the specifically religious field better describes what I have characterized as the pre-twentieth-century “total discourse” of Islam than the more diversified system I suggest has emerged in the past century: Pierre Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champ religieux,” Revue française de sociologie 12, no. 3 (1971): 295–334.

43. For explorations of some of these variations, both political and non-political, see Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

44. For a slightly different exploration of the idea of “market Islam,” focused on the affinity between Saudi-promoted styles of conservatism and neoliberal consumerism, see Patrick Haenni, L’islam de marché. L’autre révolution conservatrice (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2005). For detailed case studies of what I am calling “market Islam” in different contexts, see Maris Boyd Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Charles Tripp, Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Daromir Rudnyckyj, Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Olivier Roy and Amel Boubekeur, eds., Whatever Happened to the Islamists? Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims, and the Lure of Consumerist Islam (London: Hurst, 2012); Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (Oxford: Berg, 2010).

45. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World.

46. Michael F. Laffan, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

47. John R. Bowen, “Secularism: Conceptual Genealogy or Political Dilemma?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 3 (2010): 680–94; Katznelson and Stedman Jones, Religion and the Political Imagination, 2.

48. Bowen, “Secularism,” 682.

49. Katznelson and Stedman Jones, Religion and the Political Imagination, 5.

50. Sami Zubaida, “Islam and Secularization,” Asian Journal of Social Science 33, no. 3 (2005): 438–48.