University of Oxford
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Professor Faisal Devji

Faisal Devji

Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History

Balliol College

faisal.devji@history.ox.ac.uk I completed my PhD in Intellectual History at the University of Chicago in 1994. I was then elected Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which I went on to run the graduate program at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, which included schools in Tajikistan and Iran.  Returning to regular academic life in 2003, I taught for two years at Yale as a visiting lecturer and another four at The New School for Social Research in New York as Associate Professor, arriving in Oxford as Reader in Modern South Asian History in 2009.  

Research Interests

I am interested in the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia as well as in the emergence of Islam as a global category. In my research I have focussed on the cultural and philosophical meanings of violence as much as the emergence of non-violence as a political project. I am also very interested in the different ways in which the idea of humanity achieves political realty, particularly as the simultaneous subject and object of globalisation. My recent work deals with efforts to think beyond the nation-state and the inheritance of anarchism in the post-colonial world.

Publications

Cover of Waning Crescent
Featured Publication

Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam

(Yale University Press, 2025)

A compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor
 
Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam’s birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim sovereignty in the age of European empire, provided a way of thinking about agency in a global context: an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics had the potential to represent the human race itself as a newly empirical reality.

DPhil Students

I would like to hear from potential DPhil students regarding: Intellectual history, political thought, South Asia, Hinduism, Islam.

Naif Alrogi

DPhil Student

Jack Jacobs

DPhil Student

Ziad Kiblawi

DPhil Student

Sohabe Mojaddidy

DPhil Student

Abraham Murad

DPhil Student

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