Respect Muslims Now 1
At the end of colonial rule, many societies faced a fundamental dilemma: how to modernize and build sovereign national identity without losing the essence of their cultural heritage. Ernest Gellner, through a comparative sociological and philosophical lens, argues that Islamic societies possess a unique advantage in this regard—an internal cultural and ideological structure that not only survives but thrives under the pressures of modernity. Drawing on David Hume and Ibn Khaldoun, Gellner offers an institutional (as opposed to an ideological) approach to understanding Islam that highlights its capacity to serve as both a continuity with tradition and a blueprint for modern statehood. Gellner sees in Islam—particularly its "high" tradition—a distinctive sociological form capable of withstanding the forces of secularization that have fragmented identities in many post-colonial and Western societies. High Islam, with its scriptural, rational, and egalitarian orientation, aligns well with the bureaucratic, urban, and literate forms of life that modernity demands. It is not merely a faith but a total social order—capable of organizing law, ethics, governance, and community life.
Where post-colonial secular states often have to rely on externally imported models—Western liberal constitutions, bureaucratic neutrality, or nationalist or Marxist ideologies cobbled together from colonial remnants—Islamic states can instead root their political legitimacy in indigenous religious frameworks. This allows them to reinterpret the trauma of colonialism not as a total rupture but as a deviation from an ideal Islamic order, one which can now be restored. Hence, Islamic modernism and its fundamentalism is not inherently reactionary, in Gellner’s view, and can serve as vehicles for national renewal and state formation. In this respect, Islamic societies were better equipped for what Gellner calls “rattrapage”—the leap to modernity—because they do not have to sacrifice cultural authenticity in order to adopt modern technologies or institutions. Unlike many non-Islamic post-colonial societies, which often struggle to maintain unity or social cohesion in the face of modernization and pluralism, Islamic societies can draw on a single, scriptural, universal framework that binds the elite and the masses. This creates the possibility of a moral and political order that is both modern and authentically Islamic.
Moreover, Gellner emphasizes that the modernization of Islamic societies does not secularize them in the way it does in the West. Instead, modernization tends to erode "low" Islam—rural, mystical, hierarchical—and bolster "high" Islam, which is more abstract, rational, and suitable for urban, bureaucratic life. This creates a unique feedback loop: modernization empowers Islamism rather than eroding it, allowing religious ideology to evolve into a vehicle of state and social organization. Fundamentalism, in this light, is not a relic of the past but an attempt to harmonize modern citizenship with a scriptural moral order. By contrast, in a non-Islamic state like India, the post-colonial project is more fragile. India had to navigate not only the legacy of British legal-rational institutions but also manage an internal pluralism of religion, caste, and language that resists unification. Secularism, in this context, often meant suppressing or managing religious difference rather than integrating it into a coherent moral-political order. The result has been a persistent tension between tradition and progress, modernity and identity that is with Modi being resolved through a toxic nationalistic Schmittian authoritarianism —a tension Gellner believes Islamic societies, by virtue of their religious structure, can better resolve.
Ultimately, Gellner’s institutional reading of Islam provides a counter-narrative to secularization theory. It treats Islamic modernity not as a failed imitation of Western development but as a legitimate, internally driven path toward national coherence and modernization. Islam’s ideological resilience, rooted in a centuries-old scriptural and legal tradition, gives post-colonial Islamic states a powerful resource for negotiating the challenges of modern statehood in ways that are unavailable to many other societies emerging from colonial rule.
His theory is shaped by a synthesis of ideas drawn from David Hume and Ibn Khaldun. These two thinkers provide the conceptual foundation for Gellner’s explanation of the internal dynamics, resilience, and historical transformations of Islamic civilization. From Hume, Gellner adopts a model of religious oscillation, while from Khaldun, he borrows a sociological account of rural-urban relations and group solidarity. Gellner’s synthesis of Hume and Khaldun yields a model in which Muslim societies experience a recurring swing between mystical and scripturalist expressions of Islam. These shifts are not random but are structured by broader patterns of political centralization, social organization, and cultural change. As modernization advances—through urbanization, mass education, and literacy—the social conditions that once supported Low Islam weaken, and High Islam gains ascendancy.
Rather than leading to secularization, modernity, in Gellner’s view, intensifies the spread of puritanical, scripturalist Islam, transforming it from an elite tradition into a mass phenomenon. It enables newly formed post-colonial Muslim states to become modern without having to eschew its traditional roots or adopt imported ideological underpinnings. By integrating Hume’s theory of religious transformation with Khaldun’s analysis of social structure, Gellner offers a powerful explanation of the internal divisions and adaptive strength of Islamic societies. Hume provides the conceptual vocabulary for understanding religious change, while Khaldun offers the historical and sociological machinery through which such changes take place. In this way, Gellner’s theory not only illuminates the religious dynamics of Islam but also presents a broader account of how tradition, social form, and modernization interact in shaping the Islamic world’s historical trajectory.
At the heart of his argument is the idea that Islam is uniquely adaptable to modernity, but that this adaptability is mediated through deep-seated internal divisions within Muslim societies. These divisions are most clearly articulated through his distinction between what he calls “High Islam” and “Low Islam.” High Islam refers to the scriptural, urban, orthodox, and legalistic dimension of the religion. It is centred around the ulama, the scholarly elite who interpret Islamic law (Sharia) and uphold a rationalistic, textual, and egalitarian religious system. This form of Islam is closely associated with urban life and the centralized state. Its theological architecture emphasizes a direct, unmediated relationship between the believer and a transcendent, impersonal God, discouraging saint-worship, magic, or mystical practices. Because of its reliance on codified law, High Islam is—according to Gellner—highly compatible with the logic of modern bureaucratic governance. In contrast, Low Islam encompasses the more syncretic, mystical, and locally adapted practices found in tribal, rural, and peripheral regions. It is associated with Sufi orders, shrine worship, and charismatic religious figures who act as intermediaries between God and the community. In these settings, religion is interwoven with kinship, lineage, and tribal solidarity. Authority is often hereditary, and religious legitimacy is bound up with personal charisma and local traditions. Low Islam is less concerned with legal uniformity and more with spiritual efficacy and social cohesion.
For Gellner, the interaction between these two forms of Islam defines much of the historical and political development of Muslim societies. He draws from both David Hume and Ibn Khaldoun to explain this interaction. From Hume, he borrows the notion of oscillation between different religious tendencies—between enthusiasm (puritanical monotheism) and superstition (ritual and mediation)—to characterize a cyclical dynamic in Islam: a pendulum swinging between orthodox revivals and mystical, locally adapted religious expressions. From Ibn Khaldoun, he adopts the concept of asabiyyah, or group solidarity, and the cyclical nature of dynastic power that alternates between tribal conquest and urban decay. Gellner uses this to argue that tribal society, with its strong internal cohesion and kin-based organization, periodically challenges urban political authority, only to eventually be absorbed into it and transformed. This cyclical relationship manifests in what Gellner calls the pendulum swing of Islamic history. Periods of mystical, decentralized, tribal religious expression (Low Islam) are often followed by movements of scripturalist, puritanical reform (High Islam), often backed by centralizing state power.
Examples include the rise of Wahhabism in Arabia or the Ottoman state’s support for official Sunni orthodoxy. In the process of modernization—especially during the 19th and 20th centuries—states often favored High Islam for its coherence and capacity to foster national unity. They suppressed or co-opted Low Islam, viewing its mystical and tribal dimensions as obstacles to rational governance and centralized control. Urbanization and education became the conduits through which populations transitioned from local religiosity to orthodox Islam, aligning religion with the interests of the state. Gellner concludes that modernity stopped the oscillation between high and low. The urban High Islam has become the dominant form of Islam in post-colonial modernity.
For these reasons Islam is unusually resistant to the secularization patterns observed in the West. Whereas Christianity underwent a process of privatization and institutional differentiation and was founded on a religion/state separation —resulting in secular states and pluralistic societies—Islam, in its ideal form, contains within it a total social blueprint. Sharia does not merely offer personal moral guidance; it regulates public, legal, economic, and political life. In Gellner’s view, this makes Islam not just a religion but a full societal order. Consequently, modern Muslim states often modernize through Islam, not away from it. They reform and rationalize Islamic institutions but rarely displace them entirely. This capacity for structural adaptation without secular rupture distinguishes Islam from its Western religious counterparts.
For this reason Islam offers a powerful framework through which postcolonial Muslim societies have not only adapted to modernity but also addressed the deep wounds left by colonial trauma. Gellner challenges the assumptions of much postcolonial theory, which often emphasizes rupture, hybridity, and secular disenchantment as inevitable outcomes of modernization. He argues instead that Islam, particularly in its rational, legalistic, and egalitarian “High” tradition, provides an internal logic that allows Muslim societies to modernize without abandoning their cultural and religious identities. In doing so, Islam becomes a source of ideological resilience and psychological repair in the aftermath of colonial rule. At the heart of this theory is the conviction that Islam is structurally immune to the secularizing forces that transformed European societies during modernization. Unlike Christianity, which in the West as I noted a minute ago was increasingly privatized and marginalized by secular state structures, Islam retained a public and normative authority that remained intact throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods.
This meant that when Muslim societies emerged from colonial domination, they did not face the same existential crisis about national identity or moral order that plagued many Western post-Enlightenment states. Rather, they possessed a ready-made framework of law, literacy, and ritual discipline—“High Islam”—that could be deployed in the service of modern state-building and societal integration. This ideological resilience is crucial to understanding how Islam functions as a balm for colonial trauma. Colonialism systematically undermined local authority structures, desecrated indigenous epistemologies, and imposed foreign legal and educational systems. For many postcolonial societies, this rupture created a cultural vacuum that secular nationalism or Western-style liberal democracy struggled to fill. But in the Islamic world, the reassertion of “true” Islam—often in its fundamentalist or reformist modes—allowed for a narrative reparation. The trauma of colonial rule could be reframed not as a permanent break or a loss of authenticity, but as a temporary deviation from a more righteous path.
In this sense, Islamic fundamentalism, far from being a simple regression or backlash, becomes a constructive historical re-interpretation: colonialism is not the defining trauma but an error to be corrected by returning to divine order. Gellner emphasizes that this return is not merely symbolic or nostalgic; it is materially and institutionally effective. As rural populations move to cities, and as education systems expand under postcolonial regimes, “High Islam”—once the preserve of urban elites—becomes accessible to the masses. This mass appropriation of legalistic, scriptural Islam creates a culturally coherent and socially mobilizing identity that can operate in tandem with the demands of modern citizenship: bureaucratic organization, individual responsibility, national loyalty. Thus, rather than experiencing modernization as a process of alienation, many Islamic societies experience it as a process of religious intensification and moral renewal. Islam provides not only consolation for the past but also a map for the future.
As I’ve indicated above, this vision sharply contrasts with the relativism and value-pluralism of much postcolonial theory, which fails to grasp the structural strength of Islam’s internal tradition. Modern Islam is not merely a reactive or symbolic force; it is a scriptural civilization with its own rational architecture. Its legal and ethical systems are not vestiges of the past, but tools for modern governance and collective agency. By overlooking this, postcolonial theory underestimates the capacity of Islamic societies to reconstitute themselves after colonialism on their own terms. Importantly, Gellner sees Islamic reformism—not only in its fundamentalist but also in its broader revivalist expressions—as an adaptive response to the twin pressures of colonial injury and modern institutional life. It allows societies to reject the colonial imposition without rejecting modern forms of statehood, education, or economic organization. Indeed, fundamentalist Islam can run modern institutions: courts, schools, banks, even parliaments. It does not require a theological compromise to do so. Instead, it reinterprets Islamic norms to align with new technical and bureaucratic realities, thus allowing for a continuity of tradition within innovation.
In this way, Islam offers a resolution to what Gellner sees as the great modernity dilemma: the choice between abandoning one’s cultural inheritance for the sake of strength, or preserving that inheritance at the cost of weakness and irrelevance. Islamic societies, according to Gellner, are uniquely positioned to avoid this dichotomy. Their religious tradition provides them with an internal source of strength, allowing them to modernize without capitulating to secularism, and to assert identity without falling into atavism. This ability to translate historical trauma into cultural and political renewal is what makes Islam such a potent force in the postcolonial world.
It’s a striking counterpoint to the dominant narratives in postcolonial thought. It refuses the melancholic tone of loss and displacement, and instead affirms the possibility of ideological self-reconstruction within tradition. Islam, in this view, is not only a religion but a civilisational engine—capable of absorbing the shocks of colonialism and channelling them into a disciplined, coherent, and future-oriented identity. Where postcolonial theory often sees fracture and hybridity, Gellner sees coherence and continuity. And where many theorists see fundamentalism as reactionary, Gellner provocatively sees it as modern: a rational, organizational force that allows Muslim societies to both remember and transcend their colonial past.
Gellner famously clashed with Edward Said over all this. While Said’s work is foundational for understanding the discursive construction of Islam in Western thought, particularly through his concept of Orientalism, it offers limited insight into the internal dynamics, resilience, and institutional evolution of Islamic societies themselves. Gellner, by contrast, centres his analysis on how the doctrinal and legal core of Islam equips Muslim societies with a unique capacity for ideological continuity and modernization.
Edward Said’s primary concern, being a literary scholar, was the West’s misrepresentation and domination of the East through knowledge production. In Orientalism, he exposes how Western colonial powers imposed distorted, essentialized images of Islam that served imperial interests. His theory is fundamentally about Western discourse and its epistemologies regarding Islam, not about the inner logic or development of Islamic societies. As such, Said’s framework tends to emphasize rupture, silencing, and cultural subjugation, leaving little room for understanding how Islamic societies have autonomously reconstituted their own institutions, ideologies, and political frameworks in the aftermath of empire.
Gellner, by contrast, focuses on the internal adaptability of Islamic civilization. Islam’s “High Tradition”—its emphasis on textualism, legalism, and spiritual egalitarianism—survived colonial disruption and offered a coherent ideological foundation for re-building postcolonial polities. Where Said sees colonialism as primarily a destructive imposition that leaves the colonized in a position of reactive identity formation, Gellner sees postcolonial Islamic states as drawing upon an enduring normative system that enables proactive reorganization of social and political life. Islamic state formation is not simply a reaction to Western domination or an expression of wounded identity. It is a modernizing project made possible by the deep compatibility between Islam’s internal logic and the requirements of modern statehood—centralization, bureaucracy, education, and national identity. This explains why many Islamic movements have not collapsed under the weight of modernization but instead have flourished, offering both spiritual coherence and social order. Islamic reformism and even fundamentalism are not regressions but dynamic, adaptive forms of modern political life.
Furthermore, Gellner’s theory is better equipped to explain why Islamic states have resisted secularization—a trend that modernization theorists and even some postcolonial thinkers like Said often took for granted. Rather than seeing religion as an obstacle to progress, Gellner identifies how Islam’s rational and universalist elements provide a moral and institutional framework that facilitates modernization on its own terms, without mimicking Western secularism. Gellner’s sociological approach allows him to identify how Islamic states have absorbed the shock of colonial trauma by framing it as a deviation from an authentic Islamic past. This turns the colonial period into a narrative of deviation and correction, rather than loss and defeat.
In contrast, Said’s emphasis on the hegemony of Western knowledge limits his account to the realm of discourse and representation, offering fewer tools for understanding actual institutional developments within Islamic societies. So, while Edward Said’s Orientalism has achieved near-hegemonic status in postcolonial theory—rightly transforming our understanding of how imperial power operates through discourse, culture, and knowledge—it has also led to certain analytic limitations. Chief among these is the tendency to overemphasize representation and epistemology at the expense of material, institutional, and sociological dimensions of postcolonial life.
This is especially evident in analyses of Islamic state formations, where the resilience and evolution of religious institutions and legal frameworks are central to political identity and governance. In post colonial theory such epistemological concerns regarding representation and discourse are hegemonic and if necessary are not sufficient. So for sure Said’s strength lies in his exposure of how Western knowledge systems construct the East as a passive, inferior Other—an epistemic colonization that lingers beyond formal empire. However, when this insight becomes the exclusive lens through which postcolonial societies are understood, it risks flattening the agency of those societies into mere reactions to Western discourses. The internal logics, structural continuities, and ideological resources of postcolonial states—particularly those shaped by Islamic traditions—become obscured. In such a framework, Islamic revivalism, for instance, is often read reductively as a backlash to Western hegemony, rather than as a reassertion of internal political and religious rationalities.
Gellner, by contrast, foregrounds those internal rationalities. His theory centres on how Islamic societies possess a distinctive institutional architecture—rooted in scripturalist legalism, social egalitarianism, and a decentralized tradition of religious authority—that allows for ideological coherence and social reorganization even in the aftermath of colonial disruption. Unlike modernization theorists who predicted secularization as a necessary outcome of modernity, Gellner recognized that Islamic modernism and fundamentalism were themselves modernizing forces, drawing upon indigenous traditions to create new forms of political authority and national identity. This structural perspective allows for a more nuanced and grounded analysis of postcolonial Islamic states. Instead of viewing them as sites of “discourse,” they are seen as actors capable of mobilizing religious law, educational reform, and bureaucratic organization to build functioning modern states.
It also enables a clearer understanding of how Islamic movements sustain mass legitimacy—not through reactionary identity politics alone, but by embedding themselves in pre-existing social and legal structures that resonate deeply with populations. Moreover, Gellner’s approach avoids the conceptual pitfall of reducing all postcolonial developments to Western intervention or influence. Where Said’s framework can sometimes imply that colonized societies are always in the shadow of the West’s gaze, Gellner restores a sense of historical continuity and cultural autonomy. He shows that Islamic societies possess institutional repertoires that pre-date colonialism and that these repertoires remain central in navigating postcolonial modernity. Finally, adopting a more institutional lens helps to address real-world political and developmental questions. Postcolonial states are not only discursive spaces but also bureaucratic, legal, and ideological systems. Their stability, legitimacy, and governance capacities depend on how well institutions—religious, legal, educational—function in postcolonial contexts. Gellner offers a way to analyze how these institutions evolve, endure, and adapt, while much of the Saidian paradigm remains fixated on critique rather than explanation.
When viewed through these lens of all this the recent anti-Muslim remarks by the Tory leader—singling out Sharia law and the burka as “unacceptable”—reveal not only a superficial understanding of Islamic practice but also a deeper failure to grasp the structural, institutional, and sociological nature of Islam as a religion historically embedded within specific political and legal orders. As we’ve seen, Islam is not simply a private belief system (such as Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism) but a civilizational structure—a “blueprint for a polity”—which has historically integrated law, ethics, and social organisation.
From this standpoint, the Tory leader’s remarks betray a fundamental ignorance not just of Islamic theology but of the rational institutional logic that underpins many Islamic practices. It is a classic case of Eurocentric bigotry.
When “Sharia” is invoked in political discourse as a signifier of backwardness or foreignness, it is almost always detached from its actual institutional role in Islamic life. Gellner would remind us that Sharia—far from being a primitive imposition—is a sophisticated legal tradition rooted in consensus, precedent, and juristic reasoning. It emerged historically as a check on arbitrary power, often standing in tension with authoritarian rulers. To equate it with irrational or illiberal violence is to ignore its function as a normative framework within which Muslim communities have adjudicated disputes, regulated personal status law, and cultivated ethical life. That many Muslims in Britain today refer to Sharia principles for guidance in family matters or dispute resolution is not evidence of parallel legalism or extremism, but of a continuity of institutional memory and cultural rationality—one that can coexist with liberal legal systems through voluntary arbitration, much like Jewish or Christian equivalents.
The same logic applies to the issue of the burka. Where the Tory leader sees only the visual marker of oppression, Gellner’s analytic eye would note that Islamic norms of modesty are part of a broader moral system tied to the historical role of Islam as an “exoskeletal” religion—one which provided a public, law-centred structure of ethical life, in contrast to Christianity’s internalised, conscience-based approach. Veiling, in this view, cannot be understood in isolation from the broader logic of communal identity, piety, and public morality that gives it meaning. It is not reducible to a patriarchal imposition; rather, it is embedded in a system of signs, moral commitments, and practices that often reflect voluntary self-positioning within a tradition.
Consequently the liberal impulse to "free" women from veiling becomes, under Gellner's logic, an act of cultural arrogance that ignores the institutional rationality of Islamic life and the agency of the veiled subject. Of course veiling and the place of women in some Islamic societies may still be challenged but not because they are part of a regressive pre-modern social system.
Moreover, by failing to recognise the historical adaptability and institutional autonomy of Islamic traditions, the Tory leader’s remarks collapse Islam into a fixed stereotype, implicitly reviving the orientalist binaries Said critiqued—yet without Said’s subtlety or self-awareness. But where Said remains locked in a textual, representational analysis of power, Gellner’s more fruitful approach asks what social forms and institutional arrangements religious traditions enable. Islam, for Gellner, is not a static object to be "tolerated" or condemned—it is a dynamic tradition that has historically managed the tension between community autonomy and central authority. Muslim communities in the UK continue this legacy, integrating into liberal democratic society while maintaining their own normative vocabularies and institutions. The Tory leader’s comments ignore this dialectic and instead attempt to expunge Islamic difference from the public sphere by pathologising it.
Indeed the Tory leader’s comments reveal a crude secular fundamentalism and a profound ignorance about the complex realities of post-colonial modernity. Islam is not a static or alien threat but a living tradition with rich resources—legal, ethical, and social—that have long equipped Muslim societies to navigate the challenges of modernization, pluralism, and identity. Rather than a barrier to progress, Islam provides frameworks of law, discipline, and community cohesion that help address the very complexities of post-colonial life that the leader seems wilfully blind to.
By demanding that Muslims shed these core aspects of their heritage to be deemed “modern,” she exposes herself as profoundly uninformed and intolerant, trapped in an outdated colonial mindset that seeks to erase difference instead of engaging with it. Her refusal to acknowledge Islam’s capacity for adaptation and renewal is not just a failure of understanding; it is an act of cultural violence that threatens the social fabric she claims to protect. Badenoch should be ashamed of herself for weaponising ignorance and racism under the guise of liberal values, undermining the pluralistic foundations of the society she aspires to lead. True leadership requires recognizing the strengths and contributions of all communities, not denigrating them through fear and prejudice.