For centuries, European thinkers have positioned Islam as the religion that “doesn’t fit” modernity. A new study exposes this intellectual legacy and its lasting impact on how Muslims are governed today.
Introduction: Islam as “The Exception That Proves the Rule”
Why does Islam so often appear as a challenge to Western values? Why are Muslim practices—from veiling to mosque construction—so frequently debated as “tests” of national identity?
A study published in the journal Genealogy argues that the answer lies not in Islam itself, but in how European social science has historically constructed Islam as the religion that “doesn’t fit”. It demonstrates that Islam has been made to carry an “explanatory burden” for Europe’s self-narration as modern, secular, and liberal.
This is not about whether social science “misdescribed” Islam. Instead, the study reveals a deeper conceptual operation. Islam became a limit-case through which stalled secularisation, anxious liberalism, and contested universals are rendered intelligible and governable.
Three Thinkers Who Shaped the “Problem-Case”
Hegel and the “Vanishing” of Islam
The story begins with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the influential 19th-century philosopher. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel famously declared that “Islam has long vanished from the stage of history at large, and has retreated into Oriental ease and repose”. For Hegel, Islam was a dramatic and expansive episode, but ultimately a transitional phenomenon destined to be surpassed by Europe.
Islam, in this framing, lacks developmental futurity. It appears as intensity without differentiation, unity without mediation. Consequently, it must be disciplined and superseded by a later synthesis. This is not merely an aside, but part of a broader racialised cartography of Spirit that underwrites colonial reason.
Weber’s “Warrior Religion”
Max Weber, the founding figure of sociology, provided a comparative toolkit that translated this teleology into social-scientific idiom. Weber listed the “primary bearers” of different religious worldviews: Confucianism by bureaucrats, Hinduism by magicians, Buddhism by monks, Christianity by artisans.
Islam, however, became the religion of a “world-conquering warrior”. This trope predisposed Islam to be read as expansionist, martial, and politically fused. It positioned Islam as structurally inclined toward politico-religious fusion and less likely to generate the institutional differentiation associated with European modernity.
Weber’s comparative method thus operates within an asymmetrical narrative. Modernity is explained through a privileged European trajectory, with Protestantism as the exemplary case. Islam becomes a built-in limit-case, a religion expected to resist the secular settlement.
Gellner’s “Blueprint of a Social Order”
Ernest Gellner, a prominent 20th-century anthropologist, supplied one of the most influential modern syntheses. “Islam is the blueprint of a social order,” he declared in Muslim Society (1981). This characterisation depicts Islam as an available written scheme for organising society, in which divinely ordained rules define “the proper ordering of society.”
For Gellner, Islam’s law-centred comprehensiveness meant there was no structural justification for a distinct priestly estate. Unlike Christianity’s recommendation to “give unto Caesar,” Islam “had no need to give anything unto Caesar.” This favoured the social pervasiveness of religious law and made the differentiation of religious and state power difficult to replicate in Islamic polities.
Gellner’s formulation turned entanglement into a structural property. Islam became, by its nature, a comprehensive social order, a civilisational logic rather than a historically variable field of contestation.
Three Foundational Thinkers and Their Framings of Islam
The Genre of “Disruption” in European Thought
The Concept of “Disruption”: A Recurring Genre
Meer theorises “disruption” as a recurring genre through which Islam is made exceptional. This operates in three related ways:
- Disruption to Secularisation Theory: Islam becomes the case through which secularisation is either declared incomplete or reasserted as a norm to be achieved.
- Disruption to Differentiation Accounts: Islam is said to refuse the separation of religion and politics, law and ethics, public and private.
- Disruption to Liberal Self-Understanding: Islam appears to test the coherence of rights, equality, and the universality of public reason.
This 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, a religion framed as “comprehensive” becomes disruptive by definition.
How This Legacy Shapes Contemporary Governance
What remains to be specified is the link between canonical diagnosis and contemporary politics. Hegel, Weber, or Gellner obviously do not produce present-day integration policy. However, the normative contrasts they helped stabilise—religion versus secular reason, fusion versus differentiation—furnish a repertoire through which Muslim presence becomes intelligible as unusually difficult for integration, security, and public accommodation.
Older civilisational descriptions reappear as administrative distinctions between acceptable and problematic religion, integrated and non-integrated subjects. Muslim presence is thus made into a test of the nation’s capacity to remain itself. This helps explain why controversies over Muslim practices, head coverings, dietary rules, mosque construction, and religious education so often become inflated into civilisational dramas.
The implication is profound. 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.
The Gender Dimension
Gender relations and the status of women sit at the forefront of these debates. The desire to unveil the “oriental woman” becomes a civilisational desire. 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. In European political discourse, veiling becomes “evidence” that Islam has not differentiated religion from politics, not privatised belief, and not accepted secular norms. This pattern is visible across Europe, where fears over Muslim women’s dress re-emerge systematically following terrorist attacks.
Towards a Reflexive Sociology of Religion
Meer concludes by appealing to a reflexive sociology of religion with three linked commitments:
- Historicise “Religion”: Treat “religion” as a historically produced category shaped by Christian-European trajectories, not as a universal export.
- Compare Entanglements, Not Civilisations: Attend to shared histories—empires, trade networks, colonial governance—rather than reinforcing “Islam versus the West” binaries.
- Treat Islam as Internal to Europe: Recognise that Islam has long been part of Europe’s intellectual, political, and demographic history. The framing of Islam as interruption is itself a social fact to explain.
Perhaps most importantly, the study challenges social science to treat Muslim intellectual traditions as theory-producing interlocutors rather than merely empirical data. This means taking seriously thinkers like Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, and Fazlur Rahman, who have long theorised modernity from within Islamic frameworks.
Conclusion: Moving Beyond the “Problem-Case”
The study demonstrates that the construction of Islam as a “problem-case” for modernity is not an empirical discovery but an intellectual inheritance. It tells us about Europe’s boundary-making, its anxieties about secular order, and the politics of belonging.
A reflexive sociology of religion must refuse the comfort of making Islam a perpetual test of Europe’s norms. Instead, it should historicise its own categories, compare entanglements, and treat Muslim intellectual traditions as contributions to the discipline’s core questions. 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.
Reference: Meer, N. Islam, Modernity, and the ‘Problem-Case’ of Religion. Genealogy 2026, 10, 62. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020062
Other Articles:
