Against a backdrop of rising anti-Muslim rhetoric pushed by far-right activists and mainstreamed by influential British political figures, a new academic book has emerged as a critical, evidence-based corrective to widespread ignorance and bigotry surrounding modern Islamic thought. Last weekend, far-right agitator Tommy Robinson drew crowds to a central London rally peddling the false claim that white Britons face existential harm, echoing longstanding conspiracy theories that falsely frame Islam as incompatible with Western society and cast any pushback against these lies as an attack on free speech. This toxic narrative is not limited to the far-right fringe: figures across the mainstream political spectrum, from Nigel Farage of Reform UK to senior Conservative Kemi Badenoch, along with large sections of the British media, regularly amplify anti-Muslim falsehoods built on ignorance, sustained by conspiracy, and unmoored from factual analysis.
Against this misleading public discourse, Oxford scholar Fitzroy Morrissey’s *The Renewal of Islam: Thinkers and Believers of the Modern Era* offers an accessible, deeply researched historical overview of modern Islamic reformation movements that directly counters these distorted popular narratives. Rooted in the Arabic concept of tajdid, which refers to centuries of efforts to renew Islamic faith and practice, the book traces a continuous intellectual lineage of Islamic reform stretching back to the late 16th century.
Morrissey begins with the Ottoman Damascus-based scholar Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, who challenged 16th-century religious puritanism to defend controversial practices including coffee drinking, smoking, music appreciation, and saint grave visitation. Crucially, al-Nabulusi argued that all Muslims, not just elite initiated Sufi leaders, had equal access to religious practice and knowledge, rejecting the idea that religious elites should hide core teachings from the general public. This position made him an early proponent of two defining themes of modern Islamic reform: egalitarianism that breaks down rigid religious hierarchies, and a call to return to original scriptural sources instead of blindly accepting inherited scholarly opinions. A key argument running through the book is that modern Islamic reformers drew far more heavily from classical Islamic tradition than most Western scholarship has previously acknowledged, particularly the metaphysical thought of medieval Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi and his doctrine of the “unity of existence,” which holds that all existence is a reflection of God’s singular true being.
Morrissey brings long-overdue nuance to thinkers that historians have often incorrectly lumped together as generic fundamentalists. For example, 18th-century Indian scholar Shah Wali Allah, frequently stereotyped as a rigid puritan, was actually an admirer of Ibn Arabi who sought to harmonize scripturalism and mysticism. By contrast, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the movement that would become the ideological foundation of Saudi Arabia’s ruling House of Saud, rejected Ibn Arabi’s thought, opposed popular Muslim practices like saint veneration, and labeled competing Muslim thinkers heretics. Today, the House of Saud remains a key Western ally even as it continues to export its strict interpretation of Islam globally.
The book also unpacks the complex history of the Deobandi movement, which emerged in 19th-century northern India after the collapse of Mughal rule. With nearly half of all British mosques following Deobandi tradition, the movement is regularly framed as a uniformly fundamentalist threat in Western media. Morrissey corrects this oversimplification: Deobandis are traditional adherents of the Hanafi school of Islamic law, a position that puts them at odds with Abd al-Wahhab’s rejection of established legal schools. While the movement does adhere to conservative positions on religious innovation, it also embraces a restrained form of Sufism, and the fact that the Taliban emerged from Deobandi tradition does not represent the views of the global Deobandi community.
The book’s most consequential contribution is its detailed, nuanced analysis of how modern Islamism emerged from earlier Islamic modernist thought, tracing transnational intellectual connections between disparate Sunni and Shia thinkers across different regions. Early foundational figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a Persian rationalist philosopher labeled a subversive by the British Empire, traveled across the Muslim world and Europe to advocate for Muslim unity against European colonialism. His student Muhammad Abduh, an Egyptian Islamic modernist exiled for opposing British rule, argued for gender equality, a position that foreshadows contemporary feminist Islamic scholarship that shows many patriarchal teachings associated with Islam were added by later scholars, not found in the Quran itself. This lineage of thought shaped the Aligarh Muslim University in India, which educated a generation of Muslim leaders involved in the early 20th-century Khilafat Movement and the All-India Muslim League that led to Pakistan’s independence, including the revered poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who was even praised as a genius by British novelist E.M. Forster. Morrissey notes that Iqbal’s argument that God alone holds sovereignty, in opposition to modern secular nationalism, became the core ideological concept of Islamism, defined as the movement to renew Islam through political action.
This detailed historical analysis directly undermines the clumsy definition of “Islamist extremism” put forward by the British government’s 2024 social cohesion strategy, which frames Islamism as a monolithic, inherently violent threat that seeks to impose a global Islamist state. The book shows that the reality is far more diverse. For example, Abu l-’Ala’ Mawdudi, who claimed Iqbal’s intellectual legacy and founded Pakistan’s Jamaat-i Islami, shaped the thought of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 by Sufi scholar Hasan al-Banna as a movement focused on peaceful social reform through education and outreach. It was only after the Brotherhood was violently suppressed by Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s that a minority faction led by imprisoned scholar Sayyid Qutb developed a radical, armed vision of Islamism that would later inspire global jihadist movements. Most Brotherhood members followed the lead of figures like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who argued that Islam was compatible with democracy and emphasized the flexibility of divine law to adapt to modern contexts. Similarly, Tunisian Brotherhood-affiliated leader Rached Ghannouchi embraced democratic politics after the Arab Spring, moved away from traditional Islamism to embrace “Muslim democracy,” and is now a political prisoner under Tunisia’s authoritarian current regime.
Morrissey also brings valuable perspective to Shia Islamism, showing that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, shared core ideological commitments with Sunni Islamists, including a belief in God’s sovereignty, and even drew on Sunni scholarly thought like Ibn Arabi’s mystical framework to shape his doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, or the rule of the jurist as the guardian of the public good. Khomeini, who argued women deserved equal political and economic rights including the right to vote, work, and own property, nevertheless mandated compulsory headscarves and framed opposition to this rule as Western-backed corruption. Khomeini’s ideology has been widely influential among Sunni Islamists, but it has also faced sharp criticism from leading Shia scholars, including prominent Iraqi scholar Ayatollah Ali Sistani and dissident Iranian scholar Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who argued that Islam requires separation of powers and rejects concentration of authority in a single fallible leader.
While the book is a straightforward work of intellectual history that leaves some readers wanting more direct engagement with contemporary anti-Muslim discourse, it stands as an essential counterpoint to the pernicious falsehoods that dominate Western public conversation about Islam. At a time when far-right and great replacement theory narratives are gaining traction and becoming increasingly dangerous across Britain and the West, Morrissey’s work fills a critical gap in public understanding, offering a nuanced, historically grounded alternative to ignorance and bigotry.