Interview with Faisal Devji: Islam as an actor, an agent, a protagonist in history is dying.

Hey hey…

This week I come to you in podcast form as I promised earlier.

I interviewed Faisal Devji, a top historian and a public intellectual. He is the Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. He is the author of some of the most original books written on Muslim political thought in the past two decades, among them The Impossible Indian, on Gandhi, and Muslim Zion, his study of Pakistan as a political idea.

We did not coordinate beforehand on this colour palette, matching trousers and matching tops, and it is certainly not an Oxford uniform, just a funny coincidence.

He is also, I should say, a friend, and one of those rare people I get to call a friend while also looking up to him. As an intellectual, as an academic, as a teacher, Faisal has a depth and an integrity that I have come to treat as a kind of benchmark. And he is also genuinely a kind person, which in our line of work does not always travel together with brilliance.

His new bo…