In the latest episode of UNAPOLOGETIC we sat down with Faisal Devji in Oxford. Devji is a widely acclaimed scholar of both South Asian history and the history of intellectual thought.

In his latest book, Devji presents a novel idea: that "Islam", as many of us commonly use the word today, meaning a single thing with a will and a direction of its own, rather than the faith Muslims practise, is barely 150 years old.

Sometime in the mid nineteenth century, people increasingly started using the word Islam not to describe the faith that Muslims follow, but as the name of something that acts. Islam wants, Islam demands, Islam is in decline, Islam will rise. Devji's argument is that this shift happened not because Muslims became more or less devout, but because Muslim political power collapsed under European empire. Once "Islam", or more spe ...