Revivalism and Decoloniality: The Paradox of Modernization without Westernization in the Political Theology of Israr Ahmad

Abstract

This article explores the contribution of modern Muslim revivalism to Muslims’ political decolonization, and the paradoxical role the West plays in that process. On the one hand, revivalism rejects the founding principles of liberal political theory, and on the other hand, it readily adopts the salient structures and mechanisms of the modern polity with a view to Islamize them, all the while insisting on the Muslims’ need to de-Westernize. Toward revealing the hitherto neglected dimensions of revivalism, my analysis adopts an unconventional route by subjecting revivalism to a semiotic analysis in conversation with the archetypal theories of Mircea Eliade and Carl G. Jung. The analysis unveils the universal psychological structures of revival, and their specific Muslim symbolization. I conclude (a) that depth psychology makes modern Muslim revival inevitable, which will only grow stronger and gain wider appeal while the Muslims continue to suffer decline; (b) that among the different forms of Muslim revival, revivalism ventures the farthest in decolonizing Muslim political imagination; (c) that the revivalist imagination makes their espoused caliphate imperative for the purpose of ritual participation in Islam’s sacred origins; and (d) that a critical reconstruction and evolution of revivalism holds out the promise of a greater contribution to Muslim decolonization. For my analysis, I largely turn to the Pakistani political theologian Israr Ahmad (d. 2010), whose ideas have been disseminated widely across the Muslim world, yet who has not received the requisite academic scrutiny. Moreover, intra-revivalist critique of revivalism has been a neglected aspect in the study of revival, and its careful scrutiny should become a topic of investigation in its own right. In that regard, Ahmad offers a most important critique of earlier revival efforts and their entanglement with certain aspects of coloniality.

1. Introduction

The experience of modernity for a vast number of Muslims unfolded in the context of their colonization by European nations. In this context, the Western, the colonial, the modern, and the Christian became intertwined and synonymous in the imagination of many colonial subjects. In colonial India, the Perso–Urdu–Hindi terminology of farangī (European), pardesī (foreigner), angraiz (the English), maghribī (Western), gorai (Whites), and ʻīsāyī (Christian) invoked synonymous meanings, in reference to the British colonizers. A primary reason for these associations is that before experiencing it as a system of politics and economics, the colonial subjects experienced colonialism as a person, the figure of the farangī, maghribī, angraiz, vilayatī, and ʻīsāyī colonizer. Long before the South Asian people came to understand the structural side of colonialism, its grand ambitions, and the inner workings of the colonial imagination, they harbored resentment against the farangī presence. The presence of the farangī was variously experienced in the form of an administrative apparatus, military control, foreign officials speaking a strange tongue, extraction of the colony’s resources for the development of the metropole, and the disruptions of age-old local economies, sociocultural norms, religiosities, and political orders. These experiences fueled anti-colonial sentiments, which translated into the demand to remove the farangī authority from the homeland. Ending direct colonialism was a necessary step toward decolonization, and for many the sufficient condition for eradicating coloniality. However, for the revivalists, decolonization was much greater in scope and extended beyond the termination of direct colonialism.

In the case of South Asian Muslims, different anticolonial sentiments were articulated by disparate Muslim imaginations, all of which contributed to the modern Muslim revival. While all imaginations of revival contributed to the decolonization of the Muslim peoples in some way, their various imaginations were limited by their respective understanding about the nature and extent of colonization. The differences in imagination translated into the differences in the nature of their relationship to colonialism and the West at large. My current focus is on the particular stream of South Asian revival that inaugurated the first modern Muslim political theologies in the region, which came to be labeled revivalism. While the different forms of revival have an uneasy relationship with the West on some level, the revivalists tend to be far more assertive in their stance against the West, and the West returns the gesture in kind—the vast literature criticizing “Islamism” and warning of its dangers exemplifies the conflict. Tellingly, despite the mutual suspicion and animosity, there is a stark difference between these two imaginations. Whereas the West does not look to appropriate Islam for its progress, revivalism, for the most part, looks to modernize Islam in specific ways without which it cannot imagine Muslim advancement, and that very attempt entangles it in the paradox of modernization without Westernization.

Towards analyzing the Islam–West entanglement in revivalism, my argument first outlines the semiotics of (de)coloniality. I then situate the phenomenon of revival in the framework of religious semiotics in conversation with the archetypal theories of Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung. Finally, I examine the revivalist hermeneutics and historiographies articulated by Sayyid A. A. Maududi and Israr Ahmad, the paradoxical relationship they have with the West, and the extent to which their revivalism contributes to Muslim decoloniality.

2. The Conditions of Coloniality and Decoloniality

Decoloniality identifies modernity as the epistemic ground of coloniality, the conditions that create and sustain structures, relations, and dynamics of colonial power. In the colonial context, therefore, Foucault’s general equation knowledge/power has been translated by decolonial thinkers as modernity/coloniality (Mignolo and Walsh 2018). As regards colonialism, what allowed modernity, the episteme, to produce coloniality, the corresponding effect, was in part the modern understanding of nature and humans as resources apt for exploitation for economic advancement and political domination. Apart from the dynamics of direct colonialism, coloniality also sought to colonize indigenous knowledge by propagating the modern episteme among them. The epistemic colonization is deeply linked with the problem of representation or signification—the domain of semiotics—first systematically articulated by Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism. Coloniality of representation results in the colonial subjects imagining themselves and the colonizer through the modern/colonial lens. In Anibal Quijano’s explanation,

In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression ….The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivised expression, intellectual or visual. It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers’ own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural. These beliefs and images served not only to impede the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic.

(Quijano 2007)

Quijano’s account underscores the more rational and conscious modes of deploying colonial knowledge. Walter D. Mignolo, on the other hand, draws attention a to deeper level of knowledge production by using Foucault’s idea of episteme. An episteme points to the unconscious historical, social, and political structures of knowledge and its regulation deployed for the management of power, of what can and cannot be said. My analysis below will nuance this assumption by pointing to psychological structures of experience deeper, and for that reason, more potent than epistemic structures, ones that operate at the universal level of depth psychology.

Decoloniality claims that despite the end of direct colonialism, indirect coloniality, in the post-colonial period, continues to plague the previously colonized people in significant ways that continue to impose upon, disrupt, exploit, and suppress the lives of the non-Western peoples around the world and in the West (e.g., minorities) in ways that perpetuate the conditions and experiences of coloniality. In the post-colonial Muslim context, a decisive and potent structural force that perpetuates coloniality is the nation-state. There are two aspects of the nation-state that the revivalist discourse takes particularly seriously, namely, nationalism as the epistemic ground of state ideology, and the general structures and mechanisms of modern statecraft. Decoloniality commits itself to “epistemic disobedience” by “delinking” from the logic of modernity/coloniality so as to undo the conditions of coloniality in order to finally set the colonized free from those conditions (Mignolo 2009). It proposes to scrutinize the full extent of coloniality upon its victims, past and present.

Decolonial liberation today doesn’t consist of expelling the settlers from the territory (because they are almost all gone), but liberating ourselves from the mindset that allowed the settlers to settle in foreign territory and to implant their frame of mind (knowledge and ways of knowing) and leave it there after they returned to their own country. Decolonial liberation today means liberating ourselves from the ideals of modernity and modernization, which were gently forced upon us in all areas of experience.

(Mignolo 2020)

The process of decolonization cannot commence until the colonized realize their colonial condition. This, in turn, requires the colonized imagination to possess something against which it can contrast coloniality, a contrastive vantage point that stands, whole or in part, outside the modern imagination so as to transcend the colonial viewpoint and subject it to critique from the outside as it were. The perspective that can both move into and out of a given purview can afford its panoramic scrutiny. Such a panoramic view becomes possible by displacing or replacing the dominant symbols or representations of coloniality in the imagination of the colonized with their emic symbols or representations, thereby empowering them to represent themselves in their own image.

In view of the (w)holistic structures and dynamics of representation, I prefer to speak of the coloniality and decoloniality in terms of imagination, instead of knowledge, rationality, and episteme. Imagination is that human faculty in which all human experiences of memory, values, emotions, motivations, purposes, ideas, reasoning, and actions are evaluated, integrated, and judged as to their meanings or significations. It names a higher faculty that processes the inputs from all other faculties of the body (senses), mind, heart, spirit, and soul. This view of imagination accommodates the religious insistence on wholeness, on addressing the whole human, the immaterial and the material, the spiritual and the rational, the conscious and the unconscious, the emotional-axiological and the pragmatic, the individual and the social, and so on. This view of imagination opens up a view of human experience that does not privilege the rational, logical, empirical, biological, and material aspects of experience, but gives equal weight to non-rational experiences, which can become the primary determinants of behavior in religious contexts. Such a (w)holistic view of human nature is necessary to make sense of religious revivals.

The vehicles or the activators of experience in imagination are symbols (e.g., ideas, principles, images, etc.), which represent within the world without, carry meanings, structure imagination, and whose interactions determine the processes or the activity of signification. The coalescing of individual imaginations in communities gives rise to collective imaginations that we call cultures or traditions, whether religious or secular. An intimate mutuality exists between the individual and collective imaginations, for the two reflect, represent, or symbolize each other. It is imperative for the stability of both that a high level of harmony between them is maintained. However, when the individuals find the collective imagination in disharmony with their own imagination, an internal tension ensues, compelling the individuals to resolve the tension in some way. If widespread, the tension within can transform into a community-wide crisis. The moments of collective crisis are likely to motivate religious communities to return to their origins.

3. Religions, Depth Psychology, and Muslim Revivalism

Religious revivals across the globe in the latter half of the twentieth century left many in the West baffled. A major reason for the bafflement was the sanguine projections made earlier in the twentieth century about religion’s inevitable disappearance from the world as a result of modernization. Such predictions point to the failure to grasp the deeper functioning of religion in human psychology and patterns of religious engagement in and with history. In this section, I analyze religious revival as a manifestation of universal psychology, which makes the revival of religions inevitable, not their disappearance. In particular, I wish to show that the modern Muslim revival is in line with the general patterns of religious revivals both in its insistence on returning to Islam’s origins and in its attempt to engage with modernity.

Keeping in mind that the history of religions is, at the same time, the history of humanity, the history of religions clues us into the historically recurring patterns of human nature and imagination. Among the recurring patterns in religions is the return to origins. Winston King’s term for such a return is “traditionalism.” In religions, King writes, “[p]resent modes of religious activity always seem to look backward for origins, precedents, and standards” (King 2005). King further remarks that in religions,

the beginnings—the original creative action, the life and words of an individual founder, even the authorless antiquity of a tradition’s scriptures, as in the case of Hinduism—are taken as models of pristine purity and power, fully authoritative for all members of the group or adherents of the faith. Second, no matter how great the actual changes in a particular historical religious tradition—and sometimes this means the entire cultural tradition, more or less—the basic thrust of traditionalism is to maintain itself. Typically, religious reformers speak about a reforming of the religion in terms of its more holy past.

(King 2005)

King’s observation indicates that the recurring patterns of the return-to-origins in human history has left deep and indelible influences on the religious imagination. A historical explanation of the recurring patterns of return-to-origins was offered by Mircea Eliade (d. 1986), the influential historian and phenomenologist of religion of the twentieth century. In his Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade spoke of archetypes as those symbols that recur in abundance across religious traditions. Among these symbols are those that speak of temporal regeneration, a return to the original time—a time out of time—when the primordial chaos was ordered or created into the cosmos. Given the long persistence in religions of temporal regeneration, Eliade terms the recurrence “eternal return”, a collective experience that regenerates the community, which involves, in some traditions, the resurrection of the dead ancestors and resetting the annual cycle (Eliade 2005, p. 62). It is highly noteworthy that Eliade identifies ritual as the standard mechanism of temporal regeneration.

The glimpses of the eternal return that Eliade recounts underscore the staying power of the archetypes and the past, and of their preservation and ritualistic embodiment in tradition. Moreover, that ritual is the standard mechanism of eternal return and holds important implications. Rituals create a context of communal participation in the origins, which can carry different meanings depending on the community: for example, resetting the cosmic clock, renewal of life, commemoration of ancestors, to commune with gods on earth, and so on. At the center of the regenerative ritual are symbols, through which the contemporaries imagine and experience the origins. Ritual is embodied symbolism, an externalization of a people’s collective imagination. Ritual puts symbols into play in vivid, evocative, and in some cases, provocative modes, leaving indelible impressions on a people’s collective imagination. It was, inter alia, the power of ritualistic effervescence that led Durkheim to equate the religious with the social dimension of experience. The evocative nature of ritual serves another crucial socio-psychological purpose. The recurring nature of ritual is a mode of (re)collection, a revivification of the memory of the past, and thereby, of sustaining communal identity. Stated in negative terms, ritual guards against the collective amnesia of communal identity. Without such a mechanism of re-collection, the community’s collective memory is likely to lose strength, and eventually lose its identity.

Eliade’s account of the archetypes leaves open the question of why they recur so ubiquitously across religious traditions, or whether there might be a common source whence they emerge. The recurrence of common symbols among the archaic peoples across vast distances in time and place rules out the possibility of cultural exchange as an explanation for the ubiquity of these symbols (alternatively, “archaic remnants”, or “primordial images”) (Jung 1964, p. 67). Carl G. Jung’s depth psychology offers a cogent answer to the question of the origins of the archetypes (Jung 1964, Part I). Jungian archetypes are those symbols that abide in humanity’s collective unconscious and are inherited by every individual. Among these archetypes are those of the Hero, the Prophet, the Center, the Sacred, and the Devil. They take on concrete content when evoked in an individual consciousness mediated by a particular culture in a specific historical context. A more philosophical way of explaining the operation of the archetypes is that, given their source in the unconscious, they are structural and transcendental—akin to Platonic Forms—for they do not appear as such as objects of conscious experience, but inherently structure experience. For that reason, the archetypes are unlikely to submit to strict rational examination and are likely to overflow the bounds of reason and strict logic (ibid., pp. 91, 96).

The unconscious and the historical relationship between the Eliadean and Jungian archetypes suggests a cyclical process. If the unconscious points to the source of the archetypes, Eliade’s account explains the mechanism that populated the unconscious in the first place. In the first instance, recurring experiences of temporal regeneration first imprint their effects on consciousness during ritual. In the second instance, more abstract impressions settle in the unconscious. The unconscious source of the archetypes also means that their manifestation is autonomous and inexorable at the onset of a pertinent context or experience (say, a poetic experience, or a prophetic dream) (Jung 1964, p. 83). The context of manifestation plays a decisive role. For objectivization, archetypes depend on content in an individual consciousness. Individuals, however, do not generate their own content. Their source is their community’s collective imagination. The objectivization or symbolization of archetypes is, therefore, tradition-dependent. As a tradition evolves over time, the historical content of archetypal symbolization evolves with it. Traditional symbolization in revival, however, fails if a people have lost touch with their tradition, or if traditional memory grows too weak. Weak traditional memory implies the substitution by extra-traditional content, or innovation of new content. It is for this reason why in committed modern secular societies, having lost in their erstwhile religious traditions, the Hero, the Ruler, and the Sacred archetypes are symbolized not through traditional, religious content, but through secular ones (e.g., founding fathers, political leaders, soldiers, founding documents, and the like).

While in most religions the eternal return operates at an unconscious level, Peters observes that the explicit reflection on revival is more closely related to the revealed religions, the Christian Reformation and the history of reform efforts in Islam (including revivalism) being cases in point (Peters 2011, p. 70). Eliade also admits to the different reception of time in the Abrahamic religions taken together. “The situation is altogether different in the case of the monotheistic revelation. This takes place in time, in historical duration: Moses receives the Law at a certain place and at a certain date. Of course, here too archetypes are involved…but they will not be repeated until the times are accomplished, that is, in a new illud tempus” [sacred time] (Eliade 2005, p. 105). Furthermore, Jewish messianism amounts to “eschatological granting of value to the future, to ‘that day,’ but also of the ‘salvation’ of historical becoming” (ibid., p. 107).

In the case of Islam, it manifests the monotheist pattern with its own explicit theory of revival. Given that Jung did not limit the number of archetypes, and that the archetypes are imposed upon traditional content, the Islamic idea of revival lends itself to an archetypal reading. As such, the Revival archetype is associated with the archetypes of the Prophet (Muhammad), the Sage, the Sacred, the Ruler (God), the Law (sharīʻah), and the Rule (polity). Given that Muslims have preserved the memories of past regenerations, when the return to origins successfully revived or preserved the community in moments of crises, and given that Muslims overall have not lost touch with their tradition, modern revivals demonstrate manifestations of traditional content. The Revival archetype is likely to be invoked in moments of crises and in the face of some opposition that manifests the spirit of anti-Islam, which must be overcome. For modern South Asian Islam, the birth of revivalism was occasioned by British colonialism providing the crisis and modernity signifying the anti-Islam spirit threatening Islam.

In the modern context, the political form in which the Revival archetype manifests itself is the nation-state. Insofar as the origins of a nation-state rests on particular ideological or epistemic grounds, its espoused form of nationalism, it is externalized in the form of the nation-state. In turn, the polity serves to protect and promote its national imagination among the citizenry. In this way, the citizens’ imagination and the collective imagination in the form of the nation-state symbolize each other harmoniously. In addition, like religion, the nation-state also resorts to ritual as the mechanism of a secular form of return-to-origins. National anthems, pledges of allegiance, constitutions, laws, national curriculum, monuments, memorials, state buildings, military cemeteries, public education, and national holidays ritualize nationalism to signify the nation, vivify the collective memory, and guard against collective amnesia.1 This ritualization manifests the archetypes of the Hero (e.g., the great leaders, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and the gold medalists at the Olympics), the Ruler (the heads of state apparatus), the Rule (the system), the Law (the constitution and the laws), the Sage (the intellectuals), and the Sacred (monuments, national cemeteries, founding documents, cherished values and principles). The semiotic structuring and dynamics of the nation-state help explain why the revivalists are so insistent and focused on Islamizing the state.

3.1. Centennial Revival in Islam

In Islam, the idea of the eternal return is expressed through terms such as reform (iṣlāḥ), renewal (tajdīd), and revival (iḥyā’). Revival as a cyclical, generational process has been made most popular through a narration (ḥadīth) by Prophet Muhammad that prophecies recurring centennial renewal (tajdīd) in Muslim history. The narration states that God will raise for the Muslim community (ummah) a renewer (mujaddid) of religion (dīn) at the head of every century (Al-Durar Al-Sanniyyah n.d.). Following this tradition, Muslims in the past have drawn up lists of centennial renewers. Landau-Tasseron shows that the earliest compilations of renewers were undertaken by the Shafiʻī school of Islamic jurisprudence and listed mostly Shafiʻī figures (Landau-Tasseron 1989). Similarly, the Ḥanafī-Māturīdī scholarship in South Asia has constructed its own line of renewers that mainly consists of the Naqshbandī-Mujaddidī Sufi heritage (Hartung 2013, chp. 3). Given these sectarian motivations, to date no universal Muslim consensus exists as to who should appear on the list. Following the argument established by Landau-Tasseron, Jan-Peter Hartung speculates that the earliest motivations behind the narration of the centennial renewal might have been eschatological, associated with the figure of al-Mahdī (‘the Guided One’), the messianic reformer who emerges during end times. Moreover, Hartung speculates that “the widespread existence of lists of mujaddidūn [renewers] throughout long periods of Muslim history and the Muslim world within a particular current of Islamic thought could well be explained as a means to establish legitimacy of rule and thought, the same as a pedigree (shajara) of teachers and pupils, or a spiritual lineage (silsila) in Sufism” (Hartung 2013, chp. 3). Certainly, one function of returning to origins is to legitimize one’s revival effort by drawing on the authority of the earlier generations and identifying with them.

Before the modern period, however, the idea of revival itself had not been scrutinized as a subject of hermeneutic reflection. That tradition was inaugurated by Maududi, who reworked the Islamic idea of revival into a hermeneutic and a historiography, objectivizing the idea of Islamic revival for rational analysis. In the revivalist hermeneutics of both Maududi and Israr Ahmad, the West plays an important, instrumental role for the cause of Islam’s modern revival.

3.2. Maududi’s Revivalist Hermeneutic and Historiography

Sayyid Abu’l Aʻlā Maududi (1903–1979) has been called “without doubt the most influential of contemporary revivalist thinkers” (Nasr 1996, p. 3), and credited, along with the Egyptian Hasan al-Banna, with introducing “a new movement of thought that endeavored to define Islam primarily as a political system, in keeping with the major ideologies of the twentieth century (Roy 2004, p. viii). An important treatise in this regard was Maududi’s Tajdīd o Iḥyā-yi Dīn (trans. A Short History of the Revivalist Movement in Islam). Before Maududi, the discourse on revival in colonial India revolved around the revival of the traditional sciences (manqūlāt), and moral reforms patterned upon the emulation of the first three Muslim generations (Hartung 2013, chp. 2). Maududi’s innovative reading historicized the process of revival. “What Mawdūdī did here resembles quite strikingly the shift from a historia sacra, or history of salvation, to a historia profana, or political history, that occurred in eighteenth century Western historical thought” (Hartung 2013, chp. 3). That Maududi introduced a new lens of political history in Muslim historiography is acknowledged, but he did not, at the same time, do away with salvation history. Rather, he combined the two readings into one. Maududi’s achievement is that he temporalized history through a Qur’anic reading of history as a perennial struggle between revealed monotheism and different imaginations corrupted with the anti-monotheistic spirit. For Maududi, the culmination of history can only move toward a predetermined eschatological point in end times in which Islam reaches global ascendance.

Maududi observes—as mentioned by Landau-Tasseron and Hartung—that the meaning of mujaddid (renewer) has been understood in hagiographical terms that elevate the piety and knowledge of past mujaddids. Only a few minds, claims Maududi, have ever contemplated the larger questions pertaining to the problem of revival (tajdīd-i dīn), the kind of work that can be justified as tajdīd, and the various dimensions of such an undertaking (Maududi 2004, p. 9). In a novel reading, Maududi interprets revival as a “principled and historical struggle” (uṣūlī aur tārīkhī kashmakash) between Islam and jāhiliyyat (ibid., p. 13). The Urdu term jāhiliyyat is a cognate of the Arabic jāhiliyyah, which means ‘ignorance,’ ‘foolishness,’ ‘impetuosity,’ and uncivilized behavior. The Qur’an extends the pre-Islamic semantics of jāhiliyyah to connote an “epochal term.” It speaks of “the former jāhiliyyah” (al-jāhiliyyah al-‘ūlā) (Qur’an 33:33), invoking the term in reference to the pre-Islamic Arabian society in order to condemn its paganism, tribal loyalties, and its reprehensible immorality (Hartung 2013, chp. 3). In this sense, jāhiliyyah serves as a shorthand for all imaginations and orientations that embody an anti-Islamic spirit that threatens to corrupt or entirely replace Islam as a way of life. In Maududi’s words, “there is no middle ground between Islam and jāhiliyyat” (Maududi 2005, p. 51). Only one of the two, Islam or jāhiliyyat, may be tolerated, but the two cannot coexist together without jāhiliyyat corrupting Islam’s purity. Jāhiliyyat, therefore, serves as the measure against which the purity of a person’s or a community’s Islam is to be judged. The purity of one’s Islam was compromised to the extent that one’s understanding or practice was contaminated with jāhiliyyat.

Maududi reinterprets jāhiliyyat as a typological term (Hartung 2013, chp. 3) by noting that there have been only four types of metaphysical views (mā baʻd al-t̤abīʻī naz̤ariye) or blueprints of life (dastūr-i zindagī) in history, namely, the materialistic (māddah parastānah), the idolatrous or polytheistic (mushrikānah), the monastic (rāhibānah), and the Islamic, by which Maududi means any form of revealed Monotheism (Maududi 2004, pp. 14–27)—the fundamental principles of monotheism revealed to innumerable Prophets from Adam to Muhammad. Maududi imagines his typology as referring to essential cultural (tahzīb, tahzībī) types, with Islam being the only type that stood on the right understanding of the cosmic reality, humanity, ethics, politics, and so on, because it was based on the submission to the absolute authority of God. Connecting Islam’s perennial struggle against jāhiliyyat to revival, Maududi identifies the mission of every Prophet to purge all elements of jāhiliyyat from their societies and “to implement (nāfiz karain) that whole system of life (pūre niz̤ām-i zindagī) which they received from God by establishing a godly governance (ḥukūmat-i ilāhiyyah)” (Maududi 2004, p. 28). This makes every Prophet a kind of a mujaddid out to revive monotheism in a specific historical context. On the flip side, the mission of the Prophets also defines the mission of the mujaddids in the context of the post-Prophetic Muslim history following the death of Prophet Muhammad (Maududi 2004, p. 33). In other words, the general task of the mujaddid is the same as that of the Prophets, which elevates the work of revival and lends it historical continuity and spiritual sanctity. The implications being that in modern times, the revivalists are out to do on a smaller scale and to a lesser extent what the Prophets and mujaddids have done throughout history. Maududi’s reading suggests that Monotheism, Jāhiliyyat, and Mujaddid should also be read as recurring archetypal patterns in Muslim history. The monotheisms of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, each represents a specific historical manifestation of Monotheism. Similarly, just as the God and the Devil archetypes oppose each other, the Jāhiliyyat archetype remains in perpetual opposition to the Monotheism, spearheaded either by the Prophet or the Mujaddid archetypes.

Having identified the terms of revival, Maududi projects the process of revival onto the modern context. He equates the Western civilization, exemplified by the British in this case, with modern (jadīdah) jāhiliyyat, primarily for its materialism (Maududi 2004, p. 95). He acknowledges the vast and multidimensional revolution that had been wrought in the West due to the rise of numerous new sciences and the practical effects of their application in the world (Maududi 2004, pp. 91–94)—the implication being that the West had at least mastered the material side of the historical process. Consequently, the world of Islam now faced a great many new, unprecedented challenges thrown its way by the West. Toward a successful Islamic revival, Maududi recommends that the new sciences be critically evaluated as to their harms and benefits for Muslims (Maududi 2004, pp. 95–96). From this vantage point, Maududi is in line with the overall tenor of Muslim revivalism that approaches Islam’s relationship with the West as both antagonistic and instrumental. Antagonistically, the West represents a form of perennial jāhiliyyat from whose influence Islam must be purified. Instrumentally, revivalism is willing to adopt modern science and technology for the Muslims’ material advancement. The recognition of the Western scientific achievements as a basic fact of modern history and the Muslim need to benefit from them had been commonplace in South Asia in the post-1857 period. The cause of scientific and technological advancement of Muslims was first championed most consistently and forcefully by the South Asian Muslim reformer of the nineteenth-century, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Saikia and Rahman 2019). Whereas with Khan the adoption of modern sciences was mostly a practical necessity, with Iqbal, the philosophical and methodological paradigms of modern science were subjected to a more systematic and critical evaluation. In the end, Iqbal found the modern Western civilization to have sprung from the same intellectual impulses awakened by the Qur’an, which had galvanized the rise of the early Islamic civilization (Iqbal 2012).2 Whether it is practically possible to adopt the scientific worldviews and technological products of a foreign culture without imbibing the culture itself remains an open question, one that Muslims have failed to address in all earnest.

Before Maududi, the vision of revival subscribed to the ‘great-man’ vision of history. A single individual stands tall above history and bends the historical forces to his will. Maududi’s interpretation instead transforms the individualist burden of revival to the Muslim collective in general and places the primary leadership of the collective in the hands of a disciplined social justice movement as its “vanguard” (Nasr 2015). What is more, even the Islamic movement is not the ultimate arbiter of history because Maududi locates revival as a historical process that transcends all individuals and collectivities, and to which all human agents are subject. The process is ongoing, and individual Muslims are at liberty to participate in it if they so wish. As for the great mujaddids, while their contribution is exceptional, they too must follow the logic of the process, without having any control over the principles that govern it. Maududi’s reinterpretation of revival as a process to which human agents are partly subject and that works upon them autonomously from the outside as it were speaks to its transcendental, autonomous, archetypal nature.

The most important contribution that Maududi’s historiography has made toward the decolonization of Muslim imagination is his recovery of Islamic symbols of tajdīd, iḥyā’, and jāhiliyyat, and weaving them together in a hermeneutic and a historiography. Maududi, thus, empowers Muslims to counter grand historiographies—such as that of Hegel and Marx, for example—with an Islamic alternative, thereby, enabling them to explain their own condition in the terms of an Islamic historiography—as Ibn Khaldun and Shah Waliyullah had done in their times. Psychologically, a hermeneutical articulation of revival makes the otherwise transcendental process much more objective, and the response to it much more rational and self-critical. Maududi’s hermeneutical lens, therefore, offers a powerful and effective tool for the colonized to gain a viewpoint whence to transcend the object of their critique and subject it to critical scrutiny from the outside as it were. In light of Maududi’s hermeneutic, the equation modernity/coloniality becomes jāhiliyyat/coloniality and its corresponding antithesis becomes revivalism/decoloniality. We can now turn to a question I hinted at above: under what conditions do the hidden, transcendental workings of an episteme become vulnerable to exposure? Restated in reference to Maududi, the question becomes as to what motivated Maududi to look upon revival critically? The answer is the double consciousness (á la W. E. B. Du Bois) that he suffered upon recognizing his own colonization and the superiority of the West at least in material terms, and the conviction of Islam’s absolute spiritual, moral, and theological superiority.3 This double consciousness enables the revivalists to imagine the world and themselves from two conflicting viewpoints, the modern and the Islamic. The ability to move in and out of each imagination empowers the revivalists to uncover the structures and functioning of both imaginations because (a) both cast their reflection within them simultaneously; and (b) both impose themselves upon the same conditions externally and symbolic structures and processes in imagination subjectively. In other words, the collective imagination operates upon individuals by imprinting its representations within their subjectivities. The external workings of a collective imagination may remain obscure, but its subjective working makes it much more accessible to one’s self-critical gaze. Especially because subjective experience is acutely felt viscerally in a way that external, structural conditions are not so felt. Double consciousness, therefore, affords the revivalists the advantage of assuming both the modern and the Islamic viewpoints, and the opportunity to scrutinize one perspective from the vantage of the other. The revivalist can observe the modern from an Islamic lens, and vice versa. The tension produced by the disharmony between Islam’s purported theoretical superiority, which has failed to materialize in the modern age, and the West’s actual superiority in many fields incites in the revivalists the struggle to reconcile the contradictions. This attempt at reconciliation is one reason that allows revivalism to venture farther than their Muslim rivals in decolonizing the Muslim imagination. Israr Ahmad’s hermeneutic and historiography represent creative attempts at Islam–West reconciliation, which, at the same time, advances a scathing critique of revivalism’s entanglement in coloniality.

4. Israr Ahmad, Revival, and Decolonization in Colonial India

Israr Ahmad (1932–2010) was born in the district of Hisar (currently, in the Indian state of Haryana), in the province of Punjab, during the waning years of British colonialism in India. As a young boy, Israr Ahmad imbibed the influences of three kinds of imagination competing for Muslim loyalties: the modernism of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and his Aligarh movement, the traditionalism of Deoband, and revivalism of Iqbal, Abu’l Kalām Azad (until 1920s). The first school of Muslim revival in colonial India was the modernist Aligarh movement, inspired by Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Emerging in the aftermath of the failed anti-colonial Uprising of 1857, and the colonial government’s vengeance exacted from the Muslims for their participation in it, Khan’s grand objective was to pave the way for an economically and politically secure Muslim future in India under the aegis of British colonialism. Khan’s strategy signaled the Muslim acceptance of the loss of their erstwhile power and influence in India, and the dire Muslim need to support colonialism as a bulwark for jumpstarting Muslim modernization in order to catch up to the rising tide of the Hindu majority. The Aligarh movement espoused modernization to varying degrees. It was enthusiastic about modern education, scientific advancement, mercantile economy, and reinterpreting Islam in light of the modern science and the modern critique of religion with a view to formulate a new Islamic theology (Lelyveld 2019). However, Khan’s imagination of Muslim advancement placed limits on the scope of Muslim decolonialization. Politically, Khan supported British colonialism in India because he saw it as a political bulwark against the fast progressing Hindu majority. He saw the British as more open-minded and amenable to persuasion toward offering Muslims fairer opportunities for modern education and economic advancement. For this very reason, Khan was openly hostile to the institutionalization of democracy on a nationwide scale in India because he saw majoritarian politics as a disadvantage to the Muslim minority. Khan’s influence translated into the Aligarh movement remaining pro-colonial until the early twentieth century, when its support for colonialism waned as it championed the cause of Muslim nationalism and its call for an independent Muslim nation-state.

Ahmad inherited from the Aligarh movement the unsettling awareness by Muslims of the global rise and power of the West, the growing Hindu power at home, and the Muslim nostalgia for and eagerness to revive their lost power and prestige in the region. Ahmad would come to concur with Aligarh’s insistence on the need for modern education, the necessity of updating Islamic theology in light of modern knowledge, and the pitfalls that lay ahead for Muslims in the projected majority-Hindu democratic nation-state. However, Ahmad’s hermeneutical commitment to the essential Sunni theology set him at odds with Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s theological interpretations.

The second kind of imagination that contributed to Ahmad’s revivalist imagination was the traditionalist movement of Deoband—eponymously named after the seminary-hospice established in the northeastern town of Deoband in 1867. The leaders of the Deoband movement hailed from a Mughal-era scholarly class, who lost to colonialism their erstwhile influence, prestige, livelihoods, and access to and patronage by the elite sectors of Mughal India. Moreover, they were now threatened with the loss of the traditional Muslim culture in India owing to cultural Westernization. They adopted “a strategy of turning within, eschewing for the time all concern with the organization of the state and relations with other communities. Their sole concern was to preserve the religious heritage—the classic role of the ʻulama from the post-ʻAbbasid centuries on—and to disseminate instruction in authentic religious practice and belief. They sought to be, and to create in others, personalities that embodied Islam” (Metcalf 1982, p. 11). Deoband was antagonistic to all things Western, and its proponents eschewed as much modernization as they could afford. Their relationship to the Muslim heritage was one of uncritical reverence and romanticism, as a result, the notion of novel reinterpretation of the Muslim tradition was largely unthinkable. The romanticism imposed upon the movement an anti-intellectualism that refused to engage with modern knowledge. The Deoband movement was staunchly anticolonial, but their decolonial horizon was limited by their support for secular Indian nationalism, which kept them, among other things, from waging a religious critique of two crucial fundamental pillars of coloniality, namely, the ideology of secular nationalism and the nation-state order. Ahmad identified with the basic religiosity, spirituality, theology, and morality of the Deobandi imagination, but opted for a different path on the matters of modernization in relation to science, technology, and politics.

Above all, Ahmad was impressed by the revivalism of the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (Ahmad 1990, pp. 6–7) and the political theology of Abu’l Aʻlā Maudūdī, both of whom contributed to the founding of modern Muslim political theology and advocated for modernization without Westernization. Ahmad reveals that his initial motivation for Islam’s revival was inspired by Iqbal’s poetry, but it was Maududi who gave him a more elaborate view of political theology and the vision of activism necessary for the revivalist task (Ahmad 1996, p. 10). Maududi’s revivalism was situated between the two poles of Muslim modernism and traditionalism. Its hermeneutics called for a critical engagement with both the Muslim tradition and the West, and was open to appropriating modern ideas and achievements, but with the caveat that the Muslim religion and culture would not be violated or undermined in the process. In the words of Khurshid Ahmad, one of Maududi’s trusted and ardent expositors, “The approach of the Islamic movement is to…modernize without compromising on Islamic principles and values… It says ‘yes’ to modernization but ‘no’ to blind Westernization” (Nasr 1996, p. 52). It should be noted here that by Westernization, Muslims tend to mean liberal culture, especially individualism, sexual openness, feminism, consumption of alcohol, and consumerism. For this reason, the revivalist imagination has been labeled by some as “neo-orthodoxy” and “neo-Fundamentalism” (Rahman 1980), and “modernist” by others (Nasr 1996, pp. 50–51).

In the idea of Pakistan, Ahmad saw the possible fulfillment of the revivalist dream of instituting an Islamic polity. Hence, even as Maududi opposed the Pakistan Movement because it was spearheaded by secular actors, Ahmad supported the cause. He evocatively speaks of traversing “the rivers of fire and blood” as he recalls the travails of the journey with his family from India to Pakistan in 1947. The different streams of imagination and symbols that birthed Pakistan looms large over Ahmad’s imagination and influenced the overall tenor of his imagination and activism in Pakistan. After moving to Pakistan, Ahmad’s initial affinity with Maududi turned into a close collaboration as Ahmad went on to join Maududi’s Jamāʻat-i Islāmī. In the late 1950s, the association came to a bitter end as Ahmad began to criticize the failings of the Jamāʻat’s involvement in electoral politics as a fruitless endeavor for remaking Pakistan in the revivalist image. The differences among revivalists translate into their different kinds of negotiation with the West, Ahmad’s negotiation being among the most nuanced in the revivalist genre.

5. The Intersection of Islam and the West in Israr Ahmad’s Hermeneutic and Historiography

One reason for Ahmad’s creativity lies in his willingness to critically engage and incorporate more insights from the modern sciences. His own professional training as a physician afforded him an appreciation of the modern sciences and their practical efficacy. Whereas Ahmad too, like Maududi, situates revival in a historical process, however, going much farther, he situates the historical process itself within the larger processes of cosmological and anthropological evolution. It is in this evolutionary development that the role of both Islam and the modern West converge in history. The evolutionary lens also transforms Ahmad’s hermeneutics into a historiography, which, like Maududi’s, also combines historia sacra and historia profana.

Like Iqbal before him, Israr Ahmad too was both impressed by the modern discourse on evolution and yet remained critical of its anti-theistic premises and conclusions. To begin with, Ahmad acknowledges the fact of cosmological evolution at work since the Big Bang. However, unlike the modern scientific view, Ahmed considered the Big Bang to be a divinely willed act that brought the cosmos into being. However, once initiated by God, the post-Big Bang cosmic processes mostly proceeded along natural paths, following its own internal dynamics, punctuated only occasionally by a miraculous intervention (e.g., special revelation, parting of the Red Sea, Jesus’s fatherless conception, etc.). As the evolutionary process traversed the stages of material, chemical, and biological evolution, the latter stage culminated in the emergence of homo sapiens (Ahmad 1999a, pp. 20–21). The first specimen of the homo sapiens was the Biblical Adam, who was made fully human when God breathed into him “of His own spirit” (Qur’an 15:29, and 38:72) (Ahmad 1999a, p. 35).

Taking cues from the Qur’an, Ahmad points out an essential principle of Qur’anic epistemology. God awarded Adam the two gifts of “revealed knowledge”4 and “acquired knowledge”5 (special revelation and general revelation in Christian terms, respectively). With Adam begins the evolution of both kinds of knowledge. The communication to humans of revealed knowledge rests on the divine will in the form of special revelation, communicated to humanity through the agency of the Prophets. Acquired knowledge, on the other hand, depends entirely on human effort, whose cumulative effect results in the evolution of human consciousness, discursive knowledge, and the socio-structural organization of human life. In its infancy, socio-structural evolution began with the small nomadic communities of hunter gatherers, followed by agricultural and tribal societies, later succeeded by city-states, monarchies, empires, and finally, nation-states. In this march forward, material evolution (māddī taraqqī) and its concomitant means and resources (vasā’il o zarā’iʻ) also continued to grow more complex and sophisticated (Ahmad 1993, p. 9).

Ahmad’s hermeneutical insight brings together the two kinds of evolution, the revealed and the acquired. In keeping with the general revivalist understanding, Ahmad distinguishes between the two Qur’anic concepts of dīn as the spiritual, doctrinal, moral, and ethical teachings revealed by God, and sharīʻah as the revealed praxis prescribed by the Prophets under divine inspiration. According to Ahmad, while all the Prophets adhered to the same dīn, the specific sharīʻahs ordained upon different Prophets have varied depending on the stage of anthropological evolution of their respective communities. That is to say, throughout the long history of Prophethood, the divinely-ordained sharīʻahs have kept pace with anthropological evolution propelled forward by an evolving acquired knowledge and the resulting social evolution accompanying it (Ahmad 1999a, pp. 49–54).

In Ahmad’s hermeneutic, the challenge of Prophethood—or the archetype of Monotheism—from Adam until Abraham, as recounted by the Qur’anic narratives, remained confined to personal sins, having to do with idolatry in different forms and moral deprivations of various kinds. In this reading, Abraham represents the perfection of individual monotheistic commitment and morality. In contrast, the challenges faced by many post-Abrahamic Prophets were of a social nature. For example, Lot dealt with the sin of homosexuality, Shuʻayb6 with financial corruption rampant among the Midianites (Qur’an 7:85–92, 11:84–94), and Moses with the political sin of the Pharaoh’s claim to divinity (Qur’an 79:24) (Ahmad 1993, pp. 12–13). After Moses, all the Hebrew Prophets were bound to the sharīʻah revealed to him. Their task was to reform “the Children of Israel” (banī isrā’īl) and call them to renew their commitment to their covenant with God and the Mosaic sharīʻah. Ahmad proceeds to observe, as did Maududi before him, that the function of the Hebrew Prophets after Moses until Jesus was akin to that of reformers and renewers (muṣlih, tajdīdī kārnāmah) (Ahmad 1993, p. 13). The Mosaic sharīʿah was finally superseded by the sharīʻah of Prophet Muhammad. While the Qur’an offers no details of the sharīʿah of the previous Prophets, Muslim history bears witness to the fact of the enforcement of the sharīʿah in the public sphere, even if partially carried out. The public enforcement creates a context of ritual participation for the fulfillment of divine will. As with Maududi, the archetypal implication of Ahmad’s ruminations on the developmental nature of Prophethood is that the whole process of Prophethood has been underway since Adam and can itself be seen as a process of Revival. In the march of evolution, the Prophethood of Muhammad occupies a unique and decisive position that carries implications for the end of history and the role of the West in it.

5.1. The End of History and the Last Prophet

Ahmed states that the two parallel evolutionary processes, the anthropological and the Prophetic, reached a climax with Prophet Muhammad. For Ahmad, Prophet Muhammad represents not only “the seal of the Prophets” (Qur’an 33:40), but also the evolutionary consummation of Prophethood (Ahmad 1993, p. 3). While the Qur’an and the Prophet gave no explicit rationale for this divine decision, Ahmad finds in the Qur’an a subtle hint: “this day I (God) have consummated (akmaltu) your way of life (dīnakum) for you, and have completed (atmamtu) my favor upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your way of life (dīn)” (Qur’an 5:3). Moreover, Ahmad observes that in the long history of special revelation, the Qur’an was the only universal revelation because it addresses all humankind—as in “Say (O Muhammad!) O Humankind! I am a Messenger to you all…” (Qur’an 7:158). Ahmad argues that consummation implies a process, development, culmination, climax, summit, and maturity. He observes that after Jesus, there was a hiatus of divine intervention in the form of special revelation and Prophethood for roughly 600 years until the advent of Prophet Muhammad. He considers the period of 1200 years (roughly, 600 BCE to 600 CE)—the tail end of which surpasses the Axial Age (800 BCE to 200 BCE)—leading up to the advent of Prophet Muhammad as one in which the human intellectual and socio-organizational evolution reached a significant crescendo. Having traversed the age of the city-states, humanity had reached the maximum extent of socio-structural organization in the form of great empires. The complexity of managing such large territories gave rise to three intractable social problems, namely, how to achieve a proper balance between the rights and responsibilities between men and women, individuals and society, and labor and capital. In addition, during those 1200 years, the basic philosophical problems of human existence had been raised, and some of the most significant answers to them formulated. Consequently, the Qur’an revealed to humanity the grounding principles of a just, social order (niz̤ām-i ʻadl-i ijtimāʻī) whose application insures against “social perversion,” “political repression,” and “economic exploitation” (Ahmad 1993, pp. 13–14; 2001b, pp. 32–35), thereby establishing a proper balance in relation to the three mentioned problems. Even barring one’s knowledge of the Qur’anic message, humanity’s collective intellectual achievements were such that now it was possible for all thinking persons to meditate upon their existential condition and recognize the essential truth of monotheism (Ahmad 1999a, pp. 50–51), obviating the need for further divine guidance in the form of especial revelation and the person of the Prophet.

As counterintuitive and self-serving as Ahmad’s historiography sounds, it serves a crucial socio-psychological function for revivalists’ self-image as God’s chosen people and Islam’s religious superiority over the rest. Secondly, for the revivalist imagination, the finality of Prophethood is also a central hermeneutic and historiographic principle. It is the answer to the question: ‘What is it that is to be revived?’ If the answer to this question points to something in the past, it begs the further question: ‘Is not a return to the past a regression and backwardness?’ The revivalist answer is that the return to the last Revelation and Prophet is a return to something consummate, and as such, something which, despite its origins in the past, is always applicable to the present, and which, at the same time, is futuristic because it is that in which history is to culminate in the form of a global caliphate. This eschatology imparts revivalism with a powerful teleological reading of history, which serves both socio-psychological and ideological purposes, for it places before revivalism—and all other Muslims attuned to this teleology—a very clear and triumphant trajectory of history in which Islam comes out on top. This projected outcome makes it psychologically easier for revivalists to both acknowledge the achievements of the West and appropriate them as an efficient means to arrive at a predetermined end.

For Ahmad, after the finality of Prophethood, one final stage of social evolution remains. Once the Muslims successfully revive Islam in some or all Muslim states, the Qur’anic blueprint of spiritual and collective life revealed to Prophet Muhammad ought to be made global, preached to, and adopted by all humanity. The institutional order that such a stage will assume will be that of a global caliphate (discussed below) (ibid., 55–59). Two interrelated factors stand in the way of Ahmad’s global caliphate, the Muslim decline, and the Western ascendance.

5.2. The Rise of the West

Ahmad conveys an acute awareness—as many modern Muslims are wont to do—of the predicament of modern Muslims due to their location within the age of Western modernity: “The present age is undoubtedly the age of dominance of Western thought and sciences,” declares the opening lines of Ahmed’s tract Islamic Renaissance: The Real Task Ahead (Ahmad 2004, p. 5). In agreement with Maududi, Ahmad identifies the essence of the Western civilization as materialism (thos haqā’iq o wāqiʻāt). While admitting the complexity of the Western intellectual history, Ahmad nonetheless observes that in the modern age “a single viewpoint that gradually gained ascendance, which is rightly considered its essential foundation” is its privileging of the universe over God, matter (māddah) over spirit (rūḥ), and innerworldly finite existence (ḥayāt-i dunyāwī) over otherworldly eternal life (ḥayāt baʻd al-mamāt) (ibid.). The result was an unprecedented commitment to the study of nature that led to the discoveries of hitherto hidden secrets to immense power. Accordingly, when Europeans concentrated all their intellectual energies on the investigation of the material world, they fell upon the keys to harnessing the immense powers of nature. Scientific development gave rise to superior technology and increased the West’s military prowess. As a result, the Western world took the world of Islam by storm, colonizing it. The process worked its way along two tracks: “military-political (ʻaskarī o siyāsī) and rational-intellectual (zihnī o fikrī)” (ibid.). Accordingly, Ahmad observes, the Muslim response to Western domination was also two-pronged, political and intellectual. Revivalism was the intellectual response that sought to meet the Western challenge by articulating “Islam as a [superior] system of life” (islāmī niz̤ām-i ḥayāt) (ibid.). The political response took the form of mass movements seeking to implement the Islamic system (ibid.). Ahmad dedicated himself to responding to the challenges of modernity/coloniality on both fronts. A significant aspect of Ahmad’s intellectual contribution is his critique of two kinds of revival efforts.

5.3. The Extent of Revivalism’s Decolonization

Ahmad criticizes the revivalist movements—especially the South Asian Jamāʻat-i Islāmī and the Arab Al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn—for their failure to achieve their espoused political goals despite their long struggle. The root of the deficiency lies in that, for the most part, revivalists too were unconsciously enchanted by the essential materialism of the West. For the revivalist imagination too, on the whole, tends to privilege the material over the spiritual, and the thisworldly struggles of economic and political life over the otherworldly life of the spirit (Ahmad 2004). As a result, the revivalists consider the spiritual essence of Islam as a mere instrument or means to be pressed in the service of a political vision. Worship and prayer, for example, come to be seen as exercises for the preparation of the movement’s cadres, rather than being an end in themselves. Similarly, instead of equating Islam essentially as one’s intimate fellowship with God, it is instead mistakenly reduced to a “politico-social system” (Ahmad 2004, pp. 14–15). To the contrary, in Ahmad’s estimation, “imān (faith) is Islam’s foundation, and the dream of Islam’s revival can never materialize without a popular renewal of faith among Muslims (tajdīd-i īmān) (Ahmad 2004, p. 17). In Ahmad’s definition, the essence of īmān is to assent to three primary realities, namely, God, Prophethood (nubuvvat o risālat), and life after death (ākhirat o maʻād) (Ahmad 2004, pp. 38, 68–73). The upshot of Ahmad’s criticism is that the overemphasis on the structural order of Islam at the expense of its spiritual essence is emblematic of the colonization of the revivalist imagination.

In contrast to the Jamāʻat and the Ikhwān, Ahmad praises the Tablīghi Jamāʻat—which has origins in the South Asian Deobandi movement, but is today a global missionary movement—for its rightful emphasis on īmān and emulation of Prophet Muhammad’s personal character. However, Ahmad is critical of this movement for overemphasizing individual spirituality at the expense of remaining oblivious to the collective, structural manifestations of Islam. Moreover, Ahmad expresses dismay over Tablīghī Jamāʻat’s anti-intellectualism. Its attitude conveys an implicit contempt for both Islam’s intellectual heritage and modern learning. In Ahmad’s assessment, modernity’s dominance rests on philosophical depth and scientific advancement, which, owing to its materialistic imagination, leads to the negative effect of a widespread crises of faith. The intellectual nature of the crisis demands an intellectual response. The Tablīghī response certainly proves effective against materialism, but its anti-intellectualism proves ineffective in the face of the intellectual challenges posed by the West. Consequently, the Tablīghī imagination fails in decolonizing the structural aspects of Muslim societies. If the revivalism of the Jamāʻat and the Ikhwān fell victims to Western materialism, the Tablīghī approach fails to engage the West altogether.

In contrast to both the revivalists and the Tablīghīs, Ahmad’s intellectual revival calls for “faith with an intellectual dimension” aimed at integrating the spiritual and the intellectual (Ahmad 2001c). Ahmad calls for an intellectual project composed of Muslim intellectuals dedicated to the integration of Islamic sciences with the modern humanities and social sciences, especially logic, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and religious studies (rūḥāniyyāt, literally, spiritual sciences). The goal of the intellectual project is both constructive and critical. Critically, Ahmad recommends a sophisticated, academic refutation of the materialistic and atheistic dimensions of modernity with a view to arrest the loss of faith among Muslims. Constructively, Ahmad envisions a revival of Islamic philosophical theology toward a systematic reconstruction of Islamic beliefs so as to render rationally coherent Islam’s fundamental beliefs, values, principles, and higher purposes (Ahmad 2004). Crediting Muhammad Iqbal with the insight that it was the Qur’an that inaugurated the essence of inductive attitude to life, Ahmad emphasizes that it was Islam which first began to build a civilization on the basis of an empirical and scientific attitude to life that propelled the Muslim civilization forward. After making important contributions to the development of the Western civilization, the Muslim world suffered decline. As the premodern Muslim civilization waned, the inductive attitude and achievements of the Muslim civilization were transmitted to and appropriated by Europe, whence it spread to other European cultures. The point being that the revivalists imagine that the animating spirit of the Western civilization is essentially Islamic. A widespread phenomenon among modern Muslims, such a “transvaluation of values” (Greenfeld 1992, pp. 16–17) allows the revivalists to appropriate those modern values or achievements that they admire in the West and claim them as their own heritage. Transvaluation of values is a strategy in the revivalist quest for modernization without Westernization, for it legitimizes their instrumental appropriation of modern sciences, technologies, and institutions for the purpose of Islam’s revival.

Be that as it may, Ahmad’s engagement with Islam’s spiritual tradition, revivalism, and the West affords him a higher viewpoint whence to compare and contrast them, and critique the shortfalls of each in light of the other. Ahmad’s critique signifies an attempt at collective anamnesis, to undo the effects of Muslims’ loss of touch with or misunderstanding as regards to different aspects of their heritage. The intellectual revival is only one-half of Ahmad’s revivalist project. The other half sets its sights on political revival. If Ahmad’s intellectual revival takes the form of theological reconstruction, his political revival assumes, in keeping with the revivalist imagination, the form of a modern caliphate.

6. Israr Ahmad’s Political Theology

6.1. The Spiritual Significance of Politics

Having critiqued the inadequacy of the two disparate imaginations of Muslim revival, the onus is on Ahmad to articulate an alternative that rightly integrates the spiritual and the political in the modern context. Ahmad’s revival lays the groundwork for the modern Muslims’ ritual participation in Islam’s origins.

In a series of three sermons delivered in 1972 before the Friday congregations in Karachi—later collected as Mut̤ālabāt-i Dīn (The Demands of Islam as a Dīn)—Ahmad elaborated on the path from Islamic spirituality to politics. Together, the three sermons addressed the three general obligations incumbent upon Muslims toward fulfilling their duty to God. Ahmad begins with the Qur’anic commandment “O humankind, do ʻibādah of your Lord” (Qur’an 2:21)—a more common verse cited on the topic is ‘I have not created humankind and Jinn except that they do my ʻibādah’ (Qur’an 51:56). The Arabic ʻibādah and the Urdu cognate ʻibādat is normally translated as worship, but Ahmad highlights the non-technical, literal meanings of the term to draw out its essential signification. He translates ʻibādat with the Perso–Urdu bandagī, meaning servitude. Ahmad, thus, declares the essential message of the Qur’an to be servitude to God (Ahmad 2002, pp. 12–19). Such servitude consists of two related attitudes. First, servitude to God is entirely spiritual-emotional, it demands an intense love for and utmost humility before God. In this sense, ʻibādat conveys one’s personal relationship with God. However, Ahmad stresses that the same worshipful attitude should assert itself in all walks of life. Consequently, according to Ahmad, Islam demands that ʻibādat should be total. God must be obeyed in all walks of life, individual and collective (Ahmad 2002, pp. 18–24).

Ahmad articulates the second obligation to Islam in reference to Qur’an 2:143: “And so We [God] have made you [Muslims] a middle ummah so that you may bear witness over humanity and that the Messenger may bear witness over you.” Ummah signifies the global Muslim community, which makes the bearing of witness a collective obligation. Ahmad points out that the bearing of witness can take two forms, namely, praxis and doctrine. Doctrinally, Muslims are obligated to preach the Qur’an’s message to the whole of humankind. However, the true witness is that which is borne out practically. It is one thing to sing the praises of Islam’s greatness, which may not convince many of Islam’s veracity, for the claim might sound fantastic to some, and impractical to others (Ahmad 2002, pp. 52–53). The second obligation will not be fulfilled until “the system of life (niz̤ām-i ḥayāt) based on the obedience to God is witnessed by all humanity” in a practical form, hence, as a practicable option (Ahmad 2002, p. 53). In other words, the praxis of shahādah demands a public witnessing, a public proclamation and show of ʻibādah to ensure that not only the private sphere, but the public sphere also has the form of Islam, partly by a display of ritual ʻibādah.

From the second obligation follows the third, the obligation to “establish the Islamic dīn” (iqāmat-i dīn). Dīn is normally translated as religion or faith.7 But, as with shahādah, Ahmad probes into the lexical meanings of dīn, which, derived from dayn, denotes recompense or exchange (badlah)—it also denotes debt, obligation, and liability. Ahmad notes that dīn also connotes reward and punishment (jazā aur sazā), which implies a system of law and regulations (qānūn aur ẓābit̤ah). Law, in its turn, necessitates an authority that must be obeyed (mut̤āʻ). The whole chain of semantics taken together comes to signify dīn as a complete system of life (mukammal niz̤ām-i zindagī aur ẓābit̤ah-yi ḥayāt) ordered in compliance with the law and a way of life regulated by a sovereign (mut̤āʻ, ḥākim-i mut̤laq) (Ahmad 2002, pp. 76–78). This understanding of dīn treads close to the revivalist understanding that Ahmad criticized for being overly political. The seeming contradiction is resolved when Ahmad’s nuance is taken into account. For Ahmad, dīn is first an individual’s spiritual-moral relationships with God, and its practical effect is the molding of one’s character in accordance with God’s will. Only in the second instance, the spiritual relationship is to be embodied in a structural order, which becomes grounds for bearing witness to Islam’s veracity in practice. In this way, the spiritual and the structural reflect and symbolize each other, and the individual imagination enjoys a relative harmony with the externalization of the collective imagination. The externalization also allows for the community to ritually participate in its origins by reliving the experiences of the order created by the first community. For Ahmad, the modern form that the spiritual embodiment of servitude should take is that of a popular caliphate.

6.2. Toward a Popular Caliphate and Decolonizing Pakistani Democracy

In another series of lectures delivered in the city of Karachi in December 1983, later published as Tawḥīd-i ʻAmalī (The Praxis of Monotheism), Ahmad took up the topic of Islam’s essential doctrine of tawḥīd. Literally, tawḥīd is derived from the trilateral root w-ḥ-d from which comes wāḥid, meaning one. The verb waḥḥada means to assert God’s unity or oneness as in waḥḥada allāh, he asserted or declared God to be one.8 Theologically, tawḥīd becomes a shorthand for asserting the totality of the Islamic understanding of monotheism and its implications for the God–human relationship. It may be said that the essence of the Monotheism archetype is tawḥīd.

Reframing Ibn Taymiyyah’s division of tawḥīd as doctrine (tawḥīd fī al-maʻrifah) and tawḥīd as purpose (tawḥīd fī al-t̤alab), Ahmad bifurcates tawḥīd into doctrine (ʻilmī) and praxis (ʻamalī). Doctrinally, tawḥīd positively connotes accepting God’s unity, negatively it connotes the avoidance of equating another entity with God and taking care not to conflate the divine essence or attributes with those of finite entities (Ahmad 2003a, p. 26). The praxis of tawḥīd demands that the believers embody servitude to God to the fullest and with utmost sincerity. Ahmad further bifurcates tawhīdic praxis into individual (infirādī) and collective (ijtimāʻī). The ideal of individual tawḥīd is to Islamize one’s subjective being and practical conduct to the fullest extent possible through staunch obedience to God in all matters. Ahmad considers it a necessary function of human nature that the truth and the good one possesses be shared with others. Hence, individual tawḥīd ought to leave its transitive effects on others in one’s company, and as a result, take on a collective character.

Collective tawḥīd, in the first instance, entails preaching (daʻvat o tablīgh) the doctrine of tawḥīd. In the next stage, this activity entails that obedience to God manifest at all levels of the collective order, including politics (Ahmad 2003a, pp. 29–34). The climax of collective tawḥīdic praxis is the supremacy of the Islamic dīn (iqamat-i dīn) over the whole of life such that all aspects of social, economic, and political orders are made subservient to the will of God, patterned upon the Prophetic model, and the injunctions of the Islamic law (sharīʻah). That Islam should not be equated with religion in the secular sense as a private affair, but should be looked upon as a complex system, is a shared principle across the whole revivalist tradition. Ahmad justifies this reading by again turning to the revivalist interpretation of dīn, which he here connotes as constitution (dastūr). Ahmad explains that both dīn and a constitution determine the matter of sovereignty, identify the highest authority in a given system, and the institution(s) responsible for legislation. The parallel function of a constitution in a statist order is performed, in Islam, by dīn, which determines God to be the Absolute Sovereign, and legislation to be restricted within the bounds of the divinely-revealed law (sharīʻah) (Ahmad 2003a, pp. 66–67).

In 1991, Ahmad launched the Pakistan Caliphate Movement (Taḥrīk-i Khilāfat Pakistān) aimed at Islamizing the Pakistani nation-state toward a true modern caliphate. In what can be called the fundamental principle of revivalist political theology, Ahmad opposes khilāfat to ḥākimiyyat (sovereignty). While the Qur’an does not mention ḥākimiyyah as such, it does mention ḥukm, as in ḥukm is God’s alone, Who decrees that you shall do ʻibādah of none but Him: this, indeed, is the upright dīn (dīn qayyim) (variously stated in Qur’an 3:79, 40:12, 12:40, and 12:67)—note that this verse brings together hukm, ʻibādah, and dīn as near synonyms. Ḥukm’s denotations include command, order, injunction, judicial judgment, dominion, rule, ordinance, and decree.9 In his turn, Ahmad translates the term ḥukm with two words, government (ḥukūmat) and sovereignty (ḥākimiyyat). He likens any human claim of sovereignty to claiming divinity. In his conclusion, if sovereignty is reserved for God alone, then khilāfat is reserved for humans.

Explaining the semantics of khilāfat, Ahmad notes that before God sent Adam (and Eve) to the earth, God declared Adam his khalīfah (vicegerent) (Qur’an 2:30), bestowing khilāfat upon him, and by extension, upon all humanity. Every human is potentially God’s khalīfah in one’s individual capacity, charged with discharging their humanly responsibility according to the divine will. Accordingly, situating khilāfat within his theory of anthropological and Prophetic evolution, Ahmad views khilāfat from Adam until Muhammad to be an individual affair, that is, the individual Prophets discharged the duties related to the office of the khalīfah. However, after Prophet Muhammad, the responsibility of discharging the institutional responsibilities of the khilāfat have collectively fallen to the Muslim ummah. The transition to khilāfat as a collective responsibility is in line with social evolution that has now universally reached the stage where the political principle of popular sovereignty or democracy enjoys global support. The challenge before the revivalists is how to square a divinely-willed khilāfat with a people-willed democracy, which Ahmad calls dīn-i jamhūr (popular sovereignty) (Ahmad 1996, pp. 73–80).

Turning to the question of Islam and Pakistani politics in a Friday sermon in 2001, Ahmad contrasts the essence of an Islamic political order with two general forms of human sovereignty (ḥākimiyyat), namely, monarchy (mulūkiyyat) and democracy (ʻavāmī ḥākimiyyat, ḥākimiyyat-i insānī). In contrast to secular democracy, Ahmad terms the Islamic political order a “limited democracy” (maḥdūd jamhūriyyat), and politically, declares (limited) democracy to be the “essence of Islam” (ʻayn-i jamhūriyyat) (Ahmad 2001a, pp. 11–14). Ahmad acknowledges that ‘democracy’ is not an Islamic term, and the use of ‘democracy’ for both the secular and the Islamic systems conflates their very different meanings. Yet, given that ‘democracy’ is today a familiar term, it makes it easier to explain the nature of Islamic politics. The relevant Qur’anic term for the Islamic order is that of shūrā (consultation). Ahmad clarifies that the Qur’an makes it imperative that the affairs of the Muslims be governed by their mutual consultation (wa amruhum shūrā baynahum, Qur’an 42:38). In the same vein, ʻUmar bin al-Khat̤t̤āb—the august companion of Prophet Muhammad, and the second Caliph to assume Muslim leadership—warned against usurping the collective right of the Muslim community to appoint its leaders through consultation, for, in his words, it is a “(collective) affair of the Muslims” (amr al-muslimīn) (Ahmad 2001a, pp. 14–15). Ahmad claims, the principle of limited democracy was in fact first introduced by Prophet Muhammad in the city-state of Medina in the seventh century (Ahmad 2001a, p. 14).

Ahmad maintains that the Islamic order also upholds the principle of equality of all Muslims before the law, along with their right to participate in the political process. Yet, the Islamic order restricts citizenship to Muslims alone, for according to Ahmad, the Islamic political order is an ideological (naz̤ariyyātī) one, whose first principle is divine sovereignty. The condition of participation in such an order rests on the acceptance of the Islamic ideology—by pledging allegiance to the order by way of wholehearted acceptance of all that it entails (Ahmad 2001a, pp. 16–17), in doctrine and in praxis. In other words, an Islamic imagination is required by individuals seeking full participation or full citizenship rights in Islam’s collective imagination. For this reason, Ahmad modifies Maududi’s terminology of “popular vicegerency” (khilāfat-i ʻāmmah)—which implies the full participation of all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims—to “vicegerency of the Muslims” (khilāfat-i muslimīn, or, going by ʻUmar’s term, amr al-muslimīn)—which implies the full participation by Muslims only (Ahmad 2001a, p. 19).

Stressing the significance of the composite ‘Islamic democracy,’ Ahmad attributes the founding of Pakistan in 1947 to the convergence of both the Islamic and democratic principles. “Pakistan’s father is Islam, whereas its mother is democracy” is a common refrain in Ahmad’s discourse on Pakistan (Ahmad 2001a, p. 23). Stated differently, Ahmad’s political ideal neither calls for a theocracy, nor a secular democracy, but for Maududi’s theo-democracy, in which the democratic praxis is secondary and instrumental to the cause of the tawhīdic doctrine. Explaining his political theology further, Ahmad recalls a conversation with an official of the American consulate in Lahore, James F. Cole. In answering Cole’s inquiry about the kind of a constitutional structure that Ahmad envisioned in his caliphate, Ahmad answered that it would be something akin to the American system with the following three amendments admitted into the American constitution: (1) that sovereignty belongs to God alone; (2) that legislation must not violate Qur’anic and Prophetic injunctions; and (3) that the benefits of full citizenship will accrue only to Muslims, while non-Muslims will enjoy that status of a “protected minority”—they will be barred from holding certain high-level positions, and from the legislative process, but all of their other citizenship rights (freedom of speech, assembly, religion, etc.) will be guaranteed and safeguarded by the government (Ahmad 1999b, pp. 15–16).

Convincing the Muslim naysayers who may object to the incorporation of democracy as Western and hence foreign to Islam, Ahmad states that just as most Muslims do not hesitate to adopt modern technology because they see no religiocultural threat in it, so Muslims should keep an open mind and a realistic outlook toward adopting or adapting to the beneficial developments that have taken place in the West in the realm of economics and politics (Ahmad 2003b, pp. 36–37). Accordingly, Ahmad observes, the process of political evolution in statecraft initiated by the French Revolution reached its “climax” in the basic institutional order established by the American state. In the American order, government is furcated into three branches, each of which acts independently and in complement to the other two branches in keeping checks and balances upon one another. However, Ahmad emphasizes that he does not mean to import the Western social (samājī), economic, and political system wholesale, but appropriate only the architecture of its statecraft. As far as the particular western implementations of the secular democratic order goes, Ahmad remains highly critical of the exploitative nature of the western system of governance (Ahmad 1999b, pp. 19–20). The point of Ahmad’s critique of Western politics is that it suffers from two ills. One, that it rebels against God’s sovereignty, and two, that it fails to live up to its own promise of true liberation of all humanity. Rephrased in decolonial terms, the promises of modernity have been frustrated and squandered by coloniality, which continues to plague Pakistani politics in different ways.

Ahmad points out the vestiges of colonialism that the Pakistani political order continues to retain, and which have in fact now become status quo, thinking beyond which remains unthinkable for the Pakistani imagination at large. He stresses that the founding of Pakistan was in fact motivated by the ideal of Islamic nationalism to implement Islamic social justice. To the contrary, the colonial vestiges continue to frustrate the Islamic nationalist ideal. Ahmad enumerates seven vestiges of the British colonial heritage (angraiz kī virāsat) that need to be rooted out from the Pakistani political order in order to completely decolonize it and pave the way for an Islamic order:

(1)

Secular nationalism;

(2)

The parliamentary system—Ahmad prefers a congressional system (Ahmad 2003b, p. 28);

(3)

Provincial demarcations instituted by the British—which serve to instigate provincialism at the expense of national unity;

(4)

An usurious banking system;

(5)

Different forms of gambling (built into the national economy, e.g., lottery);

(6)

Feudalism (“absentee landlordism”);

(7)

A culture based on gender desegregation responsible for loose morals and the weakening of the family system (Ahmad 2003b, pp. 8–10).

As it is out of my current scope to elaborate on this whole list, I will only address the question of feudalism to give a sense of the extent of Ahmad’s decolonial imagination. Ahmad recalls the land reforms that ʻUmar bin al-Khat̤t̤āb had instituted. ʻUmar decreed that any land conquered by Muslims by force is to be considered the common property (fay) of the Muslims, hence, to be placed under the jurisdiction of state treasury and tax levied upon them. Given that the most land that fell under Pakistani jurisdiction was once conquered by Muslims, it is to be included in state property (fay). However, during the colonial era, the British distributed large estates that now belong to Pakistan to their local agents as reward for services to the colonial government, services that were often against the interests of the local population. These lands became the basis of feudalism in Pakistan, a means of the worst kinds of exploitation of the peasants (Ahmad 2003b, pp. 79–80). It is imperative for the Islamization of the Pakistani system that Islamic land reforms be enforced and feudalism be eradicated.

7. Conclusions

The joint reading of depth psychology and history of religions demonstrates that temporal regeneration is inherent in human nature, and autonomously manifests in moments of crises. The Revival archetype depends on symbolization and ritual to create a context for the participation of the present in the past, and for the individual in the collective. When the revivalists return to Islam’s origins, they discover the lack of a principled dichotomy between the private and the public spheres, and the ritualizaton of the public order through the public enforcement of the sharīʿah. While archetypal ritualization is always contextual, the unprecedented nature and scope of modernity/coloniality has presented an enormous challenge for modern Muslim revival. Most importantly, the post-colonial context of the nation-state order and its secular ritualization of the public sphere presents a potent form of coloniality, saturated with the spirit of jāhiliyyat. The revivalist not only fear, but in some cases, have in fact suffered the immense power at the state’s disposal and its potential to overwhelm even the private sphere. In their estimation, as long as the secular state persists, a painful disharmony is obtained between the individual Muslim imagination and their collective imagination, between bearing personal witness to truth and its public expression, between doctrinal tawḥīid and its praxis, and between personal ʻibādah and collective ʻibādah. The quest to dissolve the disharmony leads to the revivalist struggle for the decolonization of the state through its Islamization. In the revivalist imagination, political revival in the form of the khilāfat is the only solution that guarantees the restoration of the lost harmony and opening of a greater space for the public ritual participation in Islam’s origins. This political imperative, however, carries grave dangers for misconstruing the proper relationship between Islamic spirituality and politics, and may in fact keep Muslims in entangled in coloniality.

Ahmad’s critique of revivalism is an important contribution in the development of revivalism itself. He disabuses the different forms of revival from the imbalance in their religious priorities. The revivalist obsession with politics and state power at the expense of one’s spiritual relationship with God risks devolving into a demonic misuse of religion. The politics of Muslim militantism of such groups as Al-Qaidah, Boko Haram, and ISIS have amply demonstrated the dangers of a religiosity driven by political obsessions. Muslim militantism perpetuates the Muslims’ coloniality in that to the extent that colonialism entailed oppression, suppression, exploitation, and violence against innocent subjects, Muslim militantism too perpetrates violence upon those it targets, both Muslims and non-Muslims. As for the more democratically inclined revivalists, like the Ikhwān and the Jamāʻat-i Islāmī, their espousal of select democratic structures and rituals (mechanisms such as political parties and elections) too raises the obvious question of coloniality. For if coloniality of imagination entails imagining one’s engagement with the world through modern symbols and rituals, then any political borrowing from the West is akin to perpetuating coloniality among Muslims. The idea of adopting selected aspects of the very jāhiliyyat one fears and opposes due to its materialism, inert spirituality, corrosive morality, and decadent culture is paradoxical indeed. On the flip side, the personalist movement of the Tablīghī Jamāʻat presents a different conundrum. Despite its global outreach and every-increasing numbers, the Jamāʻat seems to leave little impact on the corrupt, oppressive, and corrosive structural forces in Muslim societies. A strictly personalist revival leaves the political arena open to the forces perpetuating coloniality among the Muslims. Insofar as the public sphere in a Muslim society remains secular, it remains colonized. In addition, taken together, the militant and the personalist revivals fail to address the greater philosophical challenges facing the Muslim world.

In view of Maududi’s historiography coupled with Ahmad’s cosmology, which makes an earnest effort at reconciling the theory of evolution with Muslim theology, Ahmad’s instructive criticism of revivalist excesses or shortfalls, his astute identification of the extent of colonial vestiges in the Pakistani system, and the attempt to reconcile political theology and democracy suggests that the revivalists in general have ventured the farthest toward decolonizing Muslim imagination. Nonetheless, despite Ahmad’s criticism of revivalism and his attempt to rectify its shortfalls, Ahmad’s own attempt keeps him ensnared in the paradox of modernization without Westernization. To situate histories of Islam and the West in an evolutionary historiography leads Ahmad to acknowledge the Western civilization as the pinnacle of cosmological evolution to date, a process in which Islam has been left far behind in many aspects. The acknowledgment of the West’s superiority makes it imperative to appropriate Western achievements for Islam’s advancement. Dependence on the West is coloniality by another name. The same dependence applies to revivalist thinking on theo-democracy. Confining their espoused khilāfat within the existing democratic paradigms keeps the revivalists from thinking beyond the nation-state, to other modes of politics. In light of the corruption of the nation-state by moneyed interests, its failures to deliver on its promises of equality, fraternity, and prosperity for all; the manipulation of the state by corporate power, the repeated violations of the global nation-state order by the very powers that birthed it, and the forecasts of the impending ecological destruction due to climate change, the nation-state order is under severe distress. Modernization without Westernization implies that the revivalists continue to imagine Muslim politics within the limits of conventional democratic politics. Without subjecting the vulnerabilities and limitations of conventional democratic politics to further criticism, revivalism serves to perpetuate the conditions of coloniality among the Muslims.