This essay is about the way in which Muslim thinkers in 19th and 20th century South Asia started thinking about Islam as a universal religion. It argues that these men abandoned previous notions of Muslim universality to focus on the way in which Islam could be said to represent the human race as a new kind of enumerable entity. In the process, the multiple worlds and angelic or demonic beings who had populated them were dismissed from view in a secularization of the Islamic tradition. Beginning as a denial of the hierarchies of race and civilization that had become familiar themes in colonial sociology, this emphasis on Islam's purely human universality was theorized in terms of its fidelity to nature and natural law. By the 20th century, however, nature was replaced by history as the true sign of Islam's universality, with the Prophet coming to be seen as the first truly human recipient of divine revelation, one who laid no claim to the supernatural. It was precisely the secular nature of Muslim history, then, that guaranteed its universality. The essay then goes on to explore the intellectual implications and contradictions of such a position.
