Islam, Modernity, and the ‘Problem-Case’ of Religion

Abstract

This article examines how social science has recurrently positioned Islam as a problem-case for European narratives of modernity, simultaneously comparable as ‘a religion’ yet cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit’ secularisation, differentiation, and liberal public-reason expectations. Moving beyond the view that social science merely misdescribed Islam, this article argues that Islam has often been made to carry an explanatory burden internal to Europe’s self-narration, a limit-case through which stalled secularisation, anxious liberalism, and contested universals are rendered intelligible and governable. The article returns to canonical texts that helped establish such comparative imagination, including Hegel’s philosophy of history, Weber’s typologies of religious ‘bearers,’ and Gellner’s account of Islam as a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ of social order, to show how durable contrast effects were installed and later reactivated in contemporary debates on secularism, gender, security, and belonging. Drawing on Asad’s critique of the category ‘religion’, the article theorises ‘disruption’ as a recurring genre through which Islam is made exceptional, disruptive to secularisation theory, to accounts of modern differentiation, and to liberal self-understanding. It concludes by appealing to a reflexive sociology of religion that historicises its own categories, compares entanglements rather than civilisations, and treats Muslim intellectual traditions as theory-producing interlocutors rather than merely empirical ‘data’.

1. Introduction

It is now routine to describe Muslims as occupying a distinctive place in European public life, as objects of integration policy, security governance, media controversy, and recurring contestation over the boundaries of public reason (Husain 2021; Hirsi Ali 2021; Rougier 2020; Micheron 2020; Vidino 2020; Kepel 2021; Mansour 2022; Murray 2022; Mounk 2022; Abdel-Samad 2023; Gilligan and Stott 2025). Yet treating these dynamics as a contemporary issue, or as a discrete ‘policy problem,’ risks obscuring a deeper point. Namely, a concept of Islam enters European modernity much sooner than the arrival of Muslims as a new demographic fact, and through which Europe narrates itself as modern, liberal, secular, progressive, and capable of universalism, while simultaneously requiring exceptions, tests, and boundary figures in order to stabilise those self-descriptions. This formulation shifts attention away from Muslims as a population to the evaluative architecture in which Muslim presence becomes meaningful. Norton (2013, p. 5), for example, observes that ‘the figure of the Muslim’ functions as a ‘sentinel, marking a boundary, a physical and moral frontier’, dividing those presumed capable of liberal modernity from those imagined to stand against it. That frontier is more than territorial, therefore; it is moral and epistemic too, in shaping that which counts as reasonable religion, permissible public faith, acceptable community, and legitimate political critique.

This article argues that a central place to trace that axis is in how key canonical and contemporary thought has repeatedly positioned Islam as simultaneously comparable and exceptional, comparable insofar as it is analysed as ‘a religion,’ and exceptional insofar as it is frequently cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit,’ the religion that interrupts secularisation narratives, limits differentiation accounts, or exposes the violent exclusions underpinning liberal modernity. In this sense, Islam becomes a ‘problem case,’ a case that seems to require special explanation because it destabilises what the discipline expects religion to do under modernity (Bell et al. 2025; Drouhot 2021; Guveli and Platt 2023; Hamid 2016; Kalmijn and Kraaykamp 2018; Koopmans 2015; Manser-Egli 2026; Norris and Inglehart 2012). The argument, however, is not that social science simply ‘got Islam wrong,’ but that Islam has often been asked to bear an explanatory burden internal to European self-narration, to explain why modernity ‘fails,’ why secularisation ‘stalls’, and why liberalism ‘panics’. Once installed in this role, Islam functions less as an empirical field of plural traditions and more as a device, an interpretive limit-case stabilising Europe’s story about itself. A variety of important contributions have approached this topic through complementary and adjacent perspectives, including Asad’s (1993, 2003, [1986] 2009) critique of the category of religion per se, my own discussion of Muslim consciousness in Europe (Meer 2008, 2012), Fadil’s (2019) account of the ‘double epistemological impasse’ surrounding Islam in Europe, and Amir-Moazami’s (2022) analysis of liberal–secular power, amongst many others. Each, moreover, delineates its own genealogy of an ongoing field of governance and knowledge, including a conceptual staging in which Islam is not separable from geopolitics.

This article sits alongside such interventions but begins by revisiting some of the most influential philosophical pronouncements about Islam. Hegel’s line, ‘Islam has long vanished from the stage of history at large, and has retreated into Oriental ease and repose,’ was articulated against the existence and anticipated decline of the Ottoman Empire, a polity that for many European observers functioned as Islam’s geopolitical synonym (Hegel [1837] 1914, p. 374). In this respect, the ‘idea’ of Islam was often less a theological description than a geopolitical category, forged within a narrative of European ascent and Ottoman eclipse, and helps explain why Islam so readily becomes a test for ‘modernity.’ Indeed, long-running European framings of Islam and modernity have relied upon underlying narratives of geopolitical decline and European advance, frequently with Christianity as the prevailing reference point (Meer 2017, p. 2). This infrastructural geopolitics helps explain why Islam has ‘occupied the peculiar place of historical opposition to both European Christianity and modernity’ (Almond 2007, p. 70). It also clarifies why later ‘clash’ framings can appear as abrupt new claims while reproducing older structures of thought in repackaging a long-standing alignment, Christianity as the implicit norm of ‘religion,’ and Christian–secular modernity as the pathway by which modernity is recognised as modern. By ‘philosophical pronouncements’ I mean not a departure from social science but the philosophical and social–theoretical roots through which later social–scientific categories of religion, secularism, rationalisation and modernity became available. This also connects the argument to Said’s account of Orientalism while specifying a somewhat different emphasis, for the issue is more than representational power; it is also the secular–theological grammar through which Islam is made legible as Europe’s constitutive religious and political other (Said 1978; Asad 2003).

This must not be taken to imply that contemporary European publics are straightforwardly or uniformly Christian in any sociological sense, but rather that Christian histories remain sedimented in the conceptual grammar through which ‘religion’, ‘secularity’, and acceptable public faith are often recognised and judged. In late-twentieth-century idiom, the same gesture reappears in civilisational theses that treat ‘Western Christianity’ as ‘the single most important characteristic’ of Western civilisation (Huntington 1996, p. 70) and that insist ‘the West was West long before it was Modern’ (ibid., p. 69). These claims tacitly measure Islam’s relationship to modernity against a Christian–secular path treated as normative (Bawer 2006; Caldwell 2009; Fallaci 2001; Huntington 1993; Lewis 1990; Murray 2017; Phillips 2006; Sarrazin 2010; Steyn 2006; Ye’or 2005).

To show how this burden was assigned, I proceed genealogically by returning to texts that helped establish social science’s comparative imagination, Hegel’s philosophy of history, Weber’s comparative study of religion, and Gellner’s typological account of ‘Muslim society.’ The selection of Hegel, Weber, and Gellner should be understood strategically rather than representationally, and the article does not treat them as if they somehow stand for the entirety of social science, nor does it claim that they have exercised equal influence across all disciplines or historical moments. The point is different and more limited, but also more analytically precise. These thinkers are approached as especially revealing crystallisations of three durable operations through which Islam has been made conceptually useful to European thought. In Hegel, Islam enters as a world-historical force that is granted immense energy yet denied developmental futurity, such that it can be recognised only as an expansive but ultimately exhausted moment in universal history. In Weber, Islam becomes a comparative religious type, one that is folded into a wider sociology of religious ethics yet repeatedly marked as resistant to the trajectories of rationalisation that his broader account privileges. In Gellner, Islam is reconstructed as a comprehensive socio-moral order whose coherence appears to trouble the secular differentiation of spheres that much twentieth-century sociology took as normative. Read together, these figures offer a set of conceptual expectations within which Islam can be repeatedly apprehended as temporally belated, structurally over-integrated, politically excessive, or insufficiently differentiated. Put schematically, Hegel helps install Islam as a temporal disruption to developmental history, Weber as a comparative disruption to rationalisation and secularisation, and Gellner as a structural disruption to the differentiated social order that twentieth-century sociology frequently treated as the signature of modernity. It then extends that genealogy by incorporating an account of how modern framings of Islam and modernity were institutionalised in European scholarship from the nineteenth century onwards and later reactivated in contemporary discussions of secularism, postcolonialism, identity, gender, and innovation. The aim is to read these texts as part of an enduring conceptual inheritance that shapes what appears thinkable, often long after the original formulations are disavowed. The final sections therefore move from this canonical genealogy to the institutional and political translation of these contrasts in liberal–secular governance, before turning to colonialism, Orientalism, Muslim intellectual production, and the risk that critique itself can reproduce Islam as Europe’s privileged mirror. In doing so, this article also asks how social science might move beyond simply inverting the hierarchy, by treating Muslim intellectual traditions as theory-producing interlocutors rather than merely as empirical evidence of Europe’s contradictions.

2. Genealogy, Comparison, and Disruption

This article uses genealogy to identify how certain conceptual operations become durable and dominant repertoires of self-description rather than singular actors with one voice. ‘Europe’ is understood as internally contested, historically plural, and formed through entanglements with non-European worlds, even where hegemonic narratives have repeatedly presented it as coherent, self-authorising, and uniquely modern (Delanty 2018; Bhambra 2016). The same qualification applies to ‘social science’. The argument is nonetheless that a recurrent comparative grammar travels across them with different emphases and effects, and that this can be asserted without the mistake of collapsing differing intellectual traditions and policy discourses into one undifferentiated field. Indeed, the grammar is powerful precisely because it persists across disagreement, allowing Islam to return again and again as the figure through which Europe’s modern self-understanding is tested. In a Foucauldian sense, genealogy asks how categories are historically assembled, normalised, and made productive, paying attention to the contingencies through which they come to organise what can be seen, said, and governed (Foucault 1977, pp. 139–41). In this article, the object of inquiry is the recurrent production of Islam as a comparative object within European self-description. Following Asad, the point is to show how categories such as ‘religion’, ‘the secular’, and ‘tradition’ are not neutral descriptors but historically sedimented formations that shape what appears anomalous, excessive, or properly modern (Asad 1993, p. 27; [1986] 2009, pp. 14–15). Genealogy here means tracing how Islam came to occupy the position of a recurring limit-case within these formations, and how that positioning continues to inform later sociological, political, and policy vocabularies.

A genealogical approach to the study of religion does not simply trace ideas through time (Foucault 1977, p. 139); it treats theory as a practice that constitutes the objects of ‘religion,’ ‘Islam,’ ‘modernity,’ ‘Europe,’ ‘the secular’ (Asad 1993, p. 27), through comparative operations and narrative placements that are historically situated and politically consequential. Genealogy therefore asks a concept does, what it authorises, what it excludes, what it renders anomalous or normal, what it makes appear historically necessary (Foucault 1977, p. 141). The notion of ‘disruption’ is one recurring product of these operations and is apparent in at least three related senses. Firstly, Islam is cast as a disruption to secularisation theory, the case through which secularisation is either declared incomplete or reasserted as a norm to be achieved (Wiktor-Mach 2011, p. 395); secondly, as a disruption to differentiation accounts of modernity, the religion is said to refuse the separation of religion and politics, law and ethics, public and private; and lastly it is cast as a disruption to liberal self-understanding, a presence that seems to test the coherence of rights, equality, and the universality of public reason (Cesari 2013, p. 83; Rawls 1997, p. 783). Disruption is rarely a neutral description. It is a judgement embedded in a temporal and normative scheme. If ‘modernity’ is imagined as the progressive differentiation of spheres, then a religion that is framed as ‘comprehensive’ becomes disruptive by definition. If ‘religion’ is imagined as belief and inward conscience, then a tradition that is framed as law, practice, and public discipline becomes disruptive by definition. Islam’s disruptive status therefore often reveals more about the conceptual grammar of inquiry than about Muslims themselves.

This is why Talal Asad’s warning about ‘contrast effects’ is so important. Asad cautions against analyses where Islam is conceptualised primarily through contrasts that stabilise a story about Europe, about ‘the West,’ rather than through the historical plurality of Islamic discursive and institutional formations (Asad [1986] 2009, p. 4; Meer 2017, p. 6). When Islam functions mainly as a contrasting foil, it becomes a conceptual resource for Europe’s self-description, a way of producing Europe’s narrative of rationality, freedom, and secular order by positioning Islam as the case that lacks or refuses these features. Genealogy, then, works alongside empirical sociology as a condition for doing empirical work without silently reproducing the discipline’s inherited asymmetries. If the sociology of religion wants to avoid reinstalling Islam as a perpetual test of Europe’s norms, it must clarify the conceptual history through which Islam became that test.

3. Islam as a World-Historical Moment to Be Surpassed

Hegel’s philosophy of history supplies an early template for in The Philosophy of History, Hegel assigns Islam (‘Mohametanism’) a distinct place within the unfolding of Spirit. Islam appears as a dramatic and expansive episode, a surge of universality, monotheism, and political force. Yet it appears within a teleology that ultimately privileges Europe as the location where history achieves its proper form. Structurally, Islam is staged less as a continuous co-producer of European modernity than as a transitional phenomenon, an eruption that precipitates movement and conflict and then yields to the ‘proper’ unfolding of European history. In this frame, the content of ‘Islam’ becomes inseparable from a narrative of civilisational time: ‘At present, driven back into its Asiatic and African quarters, and tolerated only in one corner of Europe through the jealousy of Christian Powers, Islam has long vanished from the stage of history at large, and has retreated into Oriental ease and repose’ (Hegel [1837] 1914, p. 374 emphases added). Hegel’s confidence that Islam had ‘vanished’ from history’s stage was, in this reading, a wager on Ottoman decline and European ascendancy. It was also an instance of Europe’s self-positioning as ‘the telos of history,’ where civilisation ‘is finally realised’ (Turner 2013, p. 132).

The conceptual move is familiar. Europe is the site where ‘history’ continues and culminates. Islam is the object whose decline authorises Europe’s confidence in its own modernity. Goggin’s (2024) recent reading helps clarify that this staging of Islam is not an isolated ‘aside’ within an otherwise neutral universalism, but is embedded in a wider racialised cartography of Spirit that also underwrites colonial reason. Specifically, Goggin (2024) shows how Hegel repeatedly organises world history and religious development through a civilisational geography in which the ‘West’ becomes the site where Spirit comes to self-consciousness, the ‘Orient’ appears only in partial illumination, and Africa is figured as a zone of arrested immediacy, ‘shrouded in the color of the night,’ such that non-European life is positioned as incapable of generating historical novelty on its own terms (ibid., p. 185). What matters for the genealogy developed here is that Islam’s placement as a dramatic, transitional ‘moment’ is stabilised by this broader hierarchy; it is rendered legible as intensity without differentiation, unity without mediation, and hence as something that can appear world-historical while still being assigned a terminal point from which Europe’s ‘proper’ history can proceed. At the same time, the conceptual machinery doing this work is explicitly colonial. Hegel’s hierarchical model of cultural difference is shown to ‘underwrite his support for European colonization’ (Goggin 2024, p. 188), while the category of ‘fetishism,’ a pivotal comparative foil in Hegel’s typology, lumps African religions under a register of caprice and sensuous attachment that marks them as pre- or anti-universal (Goggin 2024, p. 192). Read in this way, Islam’s later availability as a sociological ‘problem-case’ can be read less as an empirical discovery than as the afterlife of a canonical contrast operation in which universality is continually secured through racialised and colonial placements. This racialised cartography also matters because Black Muslims are often doubly erased within these genealogies—first through anti-Black constructions of Africa as outside history, and second through framings of Islam that imagine Muslimness through non-Black or civilisational figures. The point is not to fold Islamophobia into anti-Blackness, but to note that the construction of Islam as disruption has developed alongside, and sometimes through, the anti-Black grammars that have long organised European accounts of religion, reason, and humanity.

The placement is a conceptual operation. Islam is made legible through a vocabulary of excess, intensity, abstraction, fanaticism, and conquest, such that Islam’s universality becomes something that must be disciplined and superseded by a later synthesis. The universal arrives, but in a form that is treated as unstable and dangerous. Europe becomes the site of a higher universality that contains and corrects that danger. Whatever the empirical referent—Ottoman decline, European ascendancy—the conceptual work is seen in how Islam is granted historical force and then removed from history’s stage. Europe becomes the site where history continues, where movement persists, where progress unfolds. Islam becomes stasis, a civilisation imagined as no longer productive, no longer generative, no longer capable of historical novelty. This requires attention to a more anthropological dimension of Hegel’s staging, a claim about subjectivity and complexity. Hegel’s Muslim is imagined as undifferentiated, lacking the plurality of relationships attributed to Europeans. For Hegel (1975, p. 206), ‘If the European is a convolution of diverse relationships, the Muslim is one whole and only this one’. This is a political anthropology that helps sustain a narrative of freedom. If freedom is tied to internal plurality, mediation, and reflexivity, then the European subject must appear complex. The Muslim subject must appear unified and therefore less capable of autonomy. Europe becomes the site of differentiated life. Islam becomes the site of totalising unity. The Hegelian template therefore contributes to the genre of disruption in at least two ways. First, it temporalises Islam. Islam is not simply different. It is placed as ‘earlier,’ ‘arrested,’ ‘exhausted,’ or left behind by history. Second, it makes Islam legible primarily as theologico-political force. Islam is rendered as a dramatic political religion rather than as a complex field of jurisprudence, philosophy, aesthetics, economy, ethical self-formation, and intellectual pluralism, much of it deeply entangled with Europe. Islam’s productivity is acknowledged only insofar as it serves as an engine for Europe’s eventual self-realisation.

4. Islam as a Comparative Foil in the Typology of Religious ‘Bearers’

If Hegel supplies a teleological staging of Islam, Weber supplies a comparative toolkit that translates teleology into social–scientific idiom. Weber’s study of religion is often treated as a break with philosophical history, a shift toward interpretive explanation, ideal types, and the relation between religious ethics and social organisation (Kalberg 1994), shaping the questions later sociology asks even when Weber’s conclusions are rejected. Yet Weber’s comparative method still operates within an asymmetrical narrative where modernity is explained through a privileged European trajectory, with Protestantism as the exemplary case for understanding rationalisation. In one compact but immensely consequential formulation, Weber lists the ‘primary bearers’ of different religious worldviews. Confucianism is carried by ‘world-organising bureaucrats,’ Hinduism by ‘world-ordering magicians,’ Buddhism by ‘world-fleeing mendicant monks,’ Judaism by the ‘pariah people,’ Christianity by ‘itinerant artisan journeymen.’ Islam, by contrast, is rendered as the religion of a ‘world-conquering warrior’ (Weber 1978, p. 512).1 These motifs predispose Islam to be read as expansionist, martial, and politically fused. Islam becomes legible as a religion whose carrier is not bureaucratic, monastic, or artisan, but warrior. They also position Islam as structurally inclined toward politico-religious fusion and less likely to generate the institutional differentiation associated with European modernity.

Alongside a descriptive claim about early Islamic history, it is a way of positioning Islam within a comparative narrative about rationalisation, law, and differentiation. Notice the convenience of the contrast. If Protestantism can be linked to disciplined inwardness and the routinisation of ethical conduct, Islam can be linked to conquest, charismatic authority, and a different relation between religion and politics. Once Islam is positioned as warrior creed, it becomes easier to treat Islam as resistant to secularisation and less productive of the dispositions that modern capitalism and bureaucratic legality supposedly require. The typology thus invokes disruption by making Islam a built-in limit-case, a religion expected to resist the secular settlement because its social carrier is presumed to have stamped the tradition with martial–political orientation. This is why later scholars can plausibly claim that Weberian theory provides a basic repertoire for the formation of the toolkit of categories still used for making sense of the relationship between Islam and modernity (Salvatore 2009, p. 11; Meer 2017, p. 3). The ‘toolkit’ contains inherited contrasts—warrior versus bureaucrat, law versus conscience, fusion versus differentiation—that stabilise Europe’s narrative of rationalisation.

What is especially striking is how thin the sociological and political–economic analysis can be in these Weberian framings. Turner’s corrective is telling and includes how early modern Muslim societies were ‘primarily urban, commercial and literate’ (Turner 2013, p. 31), and the Qur’an is ‘steeped in a commercial terminology’ (ibid.), thereby arguing from within the sociology of Islam that Weber’s selective emphasis on the ‘warrior’ trope cannot stand as an adequate account of Muslim social formation.

5. Islam as ‘Blueprint’ and the Sociology of Comprehensiveness

If Weber supplies a durable repertoire of contrasts, Ernest Gellner supplies one of the most influential modern syntheses of Islamic exceptionalism in social–theoretical form. Muslim Society offers a striking formulation that has become a kind of shorthand for Islam’s alleged comprehensiveness, ‘Islam is the blueprint of a social order.’ (Gellner 1981, p. 1). The sentence is both descriptive and programmatic. It characterises Islam as an available written scheme for organising society, in which divinely ordained rules define ‘the proper ordering of society,’ in principle available to ‘all literate men,’ and therefore not easily separable into a sacred specialist sphere and a secular remainder (Gellner 1981, p. 1). Gellner’s account then draws several linked conclusions. Since Islam’s law-centred comprehensiveness is in principle publicly accessible, there is, on his account, no structural justification for a distinct priestly estate that monopolises sacred knowledge. Hence, ‘officially, Islam has no clergy and no church organisation,’ and even though it relies on scholars, ‘church and community are co-extensive’ (Gellner 1981, p. 1). Christianity, he suggests, contains a recommendation to ‘give unto Caesar’ what is Caesar’s, an orientation encouraging accommodation to political orders not fully under religious control. Islam, by contrast, ‘had no need to give anything unto Caesar’ because of its early political success. This favoured the social pervasiveness of religious law (Gellner 1981, p. 2) and his later comparative elaboration becomes a template for deficit framings of Islam and modernity.

In a closely related perspective, the differentiation of religious and state power that facilitated European modernity is cast as difficult to replicate in Islamic polities, where doctrinal rigidity allegedly limits innovation and the state–religion distinction is said to be absent (Lewis 1988; cited in Filali-Ansary 1999). Gellner’s sweeping claims about the completeness and finality of divine message intensify this. Islam and secular thought cannot be co-constituting because ‘the idea that the divine message is complete and final’ implies ‘no new schemes are to be countenanced’ (Gellner 1981, p. 2). The power of Gellner’s formulation is that it intensifies a Weberian contrast. Whereas Weber typologises Islam’s carrier as warrior and suggests a political entanglement, Gellner turns entanglement into a structural property; Islam is, by its nature, a comprehensive social order, and becomes a generalised principle, a civilisational logic, rather than a historically variable field of contestation. That move is conceptually forceful and politically risky. It invites social science to treat Islam as a total system rather than as a contested discursive and institutional tradition with plural practices, arguments, and historical trajectories.

Gellner’s influence also comes from a dynamic dimension of his model, the oscillation between different religious forms, often summarised as a movement between scripturalist ‘high’ Islam and popular ‘low’ Islam, between puritan reform and saintly mediation. Whatever one thinks of the model’s fit across contexts, it became a template for how Islam is expected to behave, periodically renewed through reformist puritanism, structurally inclined toward law-centred comprehensiveness, and comparatively less likely to produce the differentiation associated with European secular modernity. Modernisation can be framed not as religion’s decline, but as the intensification of scriptural religion and its political salience, Islam ‘pursuing its modernity through religion’ rather than through secularisation (Zubaida 1995, p. 156; Meer 2017, p. 4). Islam becomes modernity’s counter-form, modern, but modern in the ‘wrong’ way, so troubles the secular settlement—modern, but not modern in the secularised form that the theory expects.

By ‘intensification of scriptural religion’ I mean not a simple return to an untouched premodern past, but a specifically modern reorganisation of religious authority in which scripture, legal reasoning, and claims to authenticity are re-centred under the conditions of reform, secularisation, and the nation-state. As Zubaida argues, twentieth-century calls for the application of the shari’a are themselves products of modern state formation and reformist politics rather than survivals external to modernity (Zubaida 2010, pp. 269–70). Asad’s critique is helpful here because it warns against recoding such developments as evidence of a timeless Islamic ‘social blueprint’; Islam is better understood as a discursive tradition in which claims about correct practice are argued over, transmitted, revised, and authorised in historically changing conditions (Asad [1986] 2009, pp. 13–15). Scriptural intensification, then, names a modern struggle over who may speak authoritatively in Islam, how normativity is standardised, and how public religion is rearticulated under new institutional conditions. This is also where the language of ‘constellations’ (van Es and Topolski 2026; Topolski 2018) and the ‘race-religion nexus’ (Jansen and Meer 2020) is helpful: rather than treating race, religion, law and culture as separate variables, it draws attention to the historically shifting configuration through which ‘the Muslim’ becomes racialised as a religious and civilisational figure.

6. From Islam as Problem to Muslim as Sentinel: The Axis of Liberal Secular Self-Description

In place of a series of mistaken judgments about Islam, still less a tidy canon that can be linearly extended into the present, the readings of Hegel, Weber, and Gellner suggest a durable mechanism through which a historically diverse and internally contested body of traditions, arguments, institutions, and practices is rendered intelligible primarily in terms of what it seems to allow Europe to affirm about itself. Islam is made to bear the burden of explaining why religion does not privatise, why politics does not differentiate, why law remains sacralised, why collective identity appears non-national, or why public religion persists. The deeper operation at stake is therefore a transfer of explanatory labour.

What remains to be specified is the mediating level between canonical diagnosis and contemporary governance. Hegel, Weber, or Gellner obviously do not produce present-day integration policy, but the normative contrasts they helped stabilise—religion versus secular reason, fusion versus differentiation, civilisational excess versus liberal restraint—furnish a repertoire through which Muslim presence becomes intelligible as unusually difficult for integration, security, and public accommodation. In translated form, older civilisational descriptions reappear as administrative distinctions between acceptable and problematic religion, integrated and non-integrated subjects, visible difference and excessive public religiosity. This supports recent scholarship on how inherited grammars are reworked institutionally in integration debates, state dialogue, and struggles over the boundaries of proper religion (Amir-Moazami 2022, pp. 607–8; Fadil 2019, pp. 117–19). For the contemporary treatment of Muslims in Europe as exceptionally difficult objects of integration, security, or public accommodation does not arise ex nihilo, but neither is it a simple continuation of nineteenth-century theory. It is better understood as a translation. Older conceptual placements of Islam as excessive, over-comprehensive, or insufficiently differentiated become available for new institutional uses within the liberal–secular governance of minority populations. Rather than a single doctrine, what persists is a repertoire of suspicion and intelligibility. That repertoire makes it possible for Muslims to appear not merely as citizens who happen to be religious, but as test cases for the viability of national cohesion, public reason, or democratic tolerance itself, governed through liberal–secular distinctions between acceptable and excessive religion, private and public faith, and proper and improper visibility.

The implication is that liberal universals depend on the capacity to repeatedly ask Muslims, explicitly or implicitly, to demonstrate compatibility with ‘our values,’ to privatise faith, to translate religiosity into the idiom of the secular, and to accept the boundaries of permissible public religion. Muslim presence is thus made into a test of the nation’s capacity to remain itself, and helps explain why controversies over Muslim practices, head coverings, dietary rules, mosque construction, and religious education, so often become inflated into civilisational dramas. That Islam becomes the site where liberalism performs its self-defence is nowhere better illustrated than in public ‘tests’ of gender equality. Of course, gender relations and the status of women sit at the forefront of debates about Islam and modernity, often through a broader idea of ‘progress’ and an assumed incompatibility between Islam and Western models of modernity and reason (Yeğenoğlu 1998, p. 96). The desire to unveil the ‘oriental woman’ becomes a civilisational desire, and veiling becomes an emblem of modernity’s boundaries. Social science is implicated here because it often treats veiling as either ‘religious tradition’ or ‘political symbol,’ without analysing how secular governance produces the veil as a sign of unreason and non-modernity. Veiling practices have multiple histories and meanings, including pre-Islamic origins and shifting associations with status, piety, ethnicity, and class (Meer et al. 2010). Veiling becomes a ‘contested signifier’ whose meaning is reworked across contexts (Dwyer 1999).

Yet in European political discourse it becomes ‘evidence’ that Islam has not differentiated religion from politics, not privatised belief, and not accepted secular norms. In this way, gender becomes a privileged site where the ‘Muslim question’ is posed, often as a question about compatibility with ‘our values.’ The categories of social science through which this is often studied, meanwhile—religion as belief, privatised conscience, voluntary association, modernity as differentiation, secularism as neutrality—inform what states and publics expect Islam to look like in order to be ‘acceptable.’ When Islam is described as ‘legalistic,’ ‘communal,’ ‘public,’ or ‘political,’ it becomes ‘improper religion,’ religion that exceeds the boundaries the secular settlement is prepared to tolerate. The social science of religion thus does not simply observe public controversies. It helps constitute the grammar through which those controversies become intelligible and governable.

The genealogical critique becomes especially concrete when we consider secularism less as a settled philosophical doctrine but as an institutional practice, a way of managing religion’s public presence. Secularism is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity (Asad 2003, p. 25). While contemporary debates about religion in public life have involved a wider political revitalisation of secular questions (Habermas 2006). In this conjuncture, Islam’s public status is frequently framed as re-opening settled peace compacts. Muslims are positioned as those who ‘bring religion back’ into the public sphere, even where European publics have never fully evacuated religion from public life, rather, secularism has sought not ‘to banish religion from the public domain’ but ‘to reshape the form it takes’ (Mahmood 2006, p. 326). This is a crucial correction to liberal common sense. It suggests that secularism is not merely a neutral background condition. It is an active governmental project that shapes legitimate religiosity, its permissible subjectivities, its acceptable epistemological claims, and its proper forms of association and public reason.

The asymmetry is especially visible in how state power frames religion’s legitimate forms across different contexts. In many Muslim-majority settings, let us recall, secularism was embedded through colonial and postcolonial state projects in ways that meant it never overcame its colonial origins and remained associated with the postcolonial state’s attempt to dominate society (Nasr 2003, p. 69). For some constituencies, ‘despotism, dictatorship and human rights abuses came to be associated with secularism’ (Hashemi 2014, p. 445). The point is that the meaning of secularism is not stable across contexts and cannot be treated as the unmarked norm against which Islamic politics is judged. Asad’s concept of a ‘secular imaginary’ is helpful here, a vernacular landscape populated by differentiating categories, ‘spiritual’ versus ‘scientific,’ ‘sacred’ versus ‘profane,’ ‘worship’ versus ‘democracy,’ that appear natural but are historically produced (Asad 2003, p. 13). When Islam is read through this imaginary, it is easily cast as what exceeds categorisation—too public, too legal, too ethical, too communal. One of the historical features of modernity has been the scope of European rule over Islamicate societies. In this knowledge, two issues are especially important. The first concerns institutional reconfiguration of states and civil societies. The second concerns the semiotic field—discourse, text, representation. Postcolonial scholarship has insisted that these cannot be separated, categories and geopolitics mutually constitute one another, and the conceptual production of ‘Islam’ is part of the practical organisation of rule.

Once tied, a postcolonial knot held new nationalist regimes to colonial nation-state models, before entering international organisations dominated by former colonial powers, and re-reproducing contradictions in which Islam was both invoked and controlled (Majid 1998, p. 328). This complicates any easy story where ‘Islam’ stands outside the state. It also complicates a story where ‘Islam’ is simply ‘traditional’ and ‘modernity’ is simply ‘Western.’ Colonial modernity, postcolonial state-building, and global political economy are not external to Islamicate histories. They are among the very conditions through which contemporary Islamic politics takes shape. The second strand is Orientalism. Said’s observation is well known, ‘for Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma’ (Said 1978, p. 59), meaning Europe narrates its own civilisation, and the ‘Orient’ becomes a conceptual landscape where Europe stages its fears, desires, and anxieties. As Asad cautions, ‘the world of Islam’ itself is often a concept ‘for organizing historical narratives,’ not the name of a self-contained collective agent (Asad [1986] 2009, p. 15). The implication is methodological for if social science treats ‘Islam’ as a coherent agent with an essence, it risks reproducing an ideological representation rather than analysing the historical and political work that representation performs.

7. The Risk of Critique and Inversion Without Escape

One of the most persistent limitations of canonical inquiry, as discussed above, is that Muslims appear as objects of analysis rather than producers of theory, in which Islam serves as ‘data’ for normative European ‘theory,’ the latter furnishing the conceptual categories in which Muslim traditions, communities, and experiences are framed and classified. Yet Muslim intellectual traditions, classical and modern, contain extensive debates about law, authority, reason, science, ethics, and the relation between revelation and governance. What then if we reverse the telescope and view the modern through long-standing intellectual developments within Islamic thought, and specifically the endogenous forms of thinking that frame modernity as something within the purview of Muslim scholarship too? Here we might observe a current running from the nineteenth century to the present day, with Khan’s (1862) Tabyin al-kalam: The Mohammedan Commentary of the Holy Bible, Iqbal’s ([1930] 1986) The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, and Rahman’s (1965) Islamic Methodology in History. Each respond not just to a widespread sense of political decline with the onset of colonial interventions in the Muslim world, but also to innovations in theology which revise the classical Islamic epistemologies that responded to both Greek speculative thought and science.

In this respect these authors affirm the later observation by Eisenstadt (2000) that it is better to think in terms of ‘multiple modernities’. To treat Islam merely as ‘a blueprint’ or as a ‘world-conquering warrior’ religion is to miss the fact that Muslims have long theorised the very questions social science poses, how authority is legitimised, how ethical selves are formed, how law relates to politics, how tradition and change are negotiated. The methodological invitation to reverse the telescope is precisely an invitation to take such traditions seriously as intellectual work that can illuminate modernity rather than merely receive it. Indeed, Hodgson’s (1974, pp. 57–59) corrective offers an alternative set of organising categories. Hodgson argues that it is too common to use ‘Islam’ too casually for both religion and the overall society and culture associated with it, and he introduces ‘Islamdom’ and ‘Islamicate’ to differentiate these domains. The value of this move for the social science of religion is in how it helps prevent a slide from ‘Islam’ as a faith tradition into ‘Islam’ as a total social explanation, precisely the slide that makes Islam appear as a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ by definition.2

This is relevant in at least three ways. First, it complicates the law-centred stereotype. Even where Islamic law is central, Muslims have never been unanimous about what law is for, how it is interpreted, who can interpret it, and how it relates to political authority. The legal tradition contains plural methodologies, institutional histories, and normative disputes. Gellner is right to note Islam’s legal–ethical reach, but reductive if that reach is turned into a fixed structural essence. Once essence replaces history, pluralism becomes noise. Second, it destabilises the secularisation test. Muslim reformist and modernist movements have addressed science, education, rationality, public reason, institutional change, and state authority in ways that cannot be reduced to ‘resistance’ to secularisation. The question is how modernity is negotiated in specific histories, often under colonial rule, postcolonial state formation, migration, racialisation, and changing global political economies. Third, it forces social science to reconsider what counts as theory, for if we continue to treat European intellectual traditions as ‘theory’ and Muslim traditions as ‘data,’ it reproduces the very hierarchy that makes Islam a perpetual test-case rather than a co-producer of conceptual insight. A post-teleological study of religion would instead treat Muslim intellectual production as theoretical interlocution relevant to the discipline’s core questions. The challenge is not to romanticise Islam as an alternative modernity, nor to treat Muslim intellectual life as a pure outside to Europe. It is to refuse the asymmetry in which Europe is the measure and Islam is the provocation.

The caution being expressed here is recognises that the last decades have seen powerful critiques of Orientalism, secularism, racialisation, and the governance of Muslim minorities. These critiques have been indispensable in exposing how ‘Islam’ and ‘the Muslim’ have been produced as objects of suspicion, security, and conditional belonging. Yet critique can reproduce the genre of disruption in inverted form. Islam remains exceptional, but now as the privileged site where the West’s hypocrisy is unveiled. The risk is not that critique is wrong, but that it can remain trapped in the binary it seeks to undo. If Islam is continually framed as the West’s constitutive outside, the story still centres the West as the main character. Muslims become important primarily because they reveal something about Europe—its exclusions, its violence, its contradictions. Islam becomes the mirror in which Europe sees its moral failures. The axis remains. Only the evaluative polarity changes. A reflexive social science of religion must therefore do more than invert civilisational hierarchies so that reflexive inquiry can be sketched through three linked commitments.

First, historicise ‘religion’ rather than seek to export it. Instead of assuming a stable definition of religion, belief, church, or conscience, social science should treat ‘religion’ as a historically produced category shaped by Christian-European trajectories. That history includes church–state conflicts, the Reformation, Enlightenment disputes over authority and reason, and the gradual construction of ‘the secular’ as a domain imagined to stand outside religion. When that template is exported as universal, Islam is almost guaranteed to appear deviant, too public, too legal, too communal, too political. A reflexive approach requires demonstrating, not assuming, how the category travels and what it obscures. Second, compare entanglements, not civilisations. The most productive comparisons are rarely ‘Islam versus the West.’ Such civilisational contrasts reproduce the very binaries that generate contrast effects. A more fruitful comparative strategy attends to shared histories and entanglements, empires, trade networks, law, migration, colonial governance, postcolonial nation-building, and the global circulation of political and theological ideas. When Islam is treated as external to Europe, it becomes easier to narrate Europe as self-made modernity and Islam as its test. When Islam is treated as internal to Europe’s history—intellectually, politically, demographically—the genre of disruption becomes itself an object of explanation. Why does Europe repeatedly need Islam as its outside? Third, treat Islam as internal to Europe’s self-description, not external to its history. Islam has long been part of Europe’s history, not simply at its borders but in its intellectual life, political imaginaries, and demographic realities. The repeated framing of Islam as interruption is therefore a social fact to explain. It tells us about Europe’s boundary-making, its anxieties about secular order, and the politics of belonging. Islam becomes the site where Europe asks whether its ideals apply fully, and if not, to whom. The fuller implication is not that the social science of religion should abandon comparison, categories, or the study of Islam. It is that the discipline should refuse the comfort of making Islam a perpetual test of Europe’s norms. A reflexive sociology of religion must historicise its own categories, compare entanglements rather than civilisations, and treat Muslim intellectual traditions as theory-producing interlocutors. Only then can it move beyond the genre of disruption, toward an account of religion and modernity that does not require Islam as its constitutive anomaly.