What is needed now is not a return to the past nor a rejection of modernity, but a recovery of the spirit that once animated both, through critical thought that strengthens faith and ethical responsibility that values living one’s beliefs more deeply than proclaiming them loudlyWhen I returned to Kerala after nearly twenty years late last year, it felt like stepping into a dialogue with my younger self. I had travelled recently to Malaysia, and over the years to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — each offering its own expressions of Muslim identity and thought. But Kerala is different. It is where Islam did not arrive with conquest, but with ships, stories, and scholars (similar to Malaysia in this regard). It blended into the land without displacing the people, their languages, or their rhythms of life. It was confident, rooted, and graceful.
I expected to find continuity in that balance. Instead, what I encountered was a more complex reality — one that reflects a wider crisis unfolding across the Muslim world. It is not a crisis of doctrine, nor even of faith. It is a crisis of meaning.
This became most vivid during a Friday prayer in a village mosque. The khateeb delivered his pre-sermon remarks while reading from notes on his mobile phone. Then, before ascending the minbar, he carefully put the phone away and began condemning the use of technology in the mosque — including the loudspeaker amplifying his voice. He denounced such tools as unwelcome innovations, even though without them, his message would not have reached the congregation.
Because my Malayalam is imperfect, I checked afterwards with my cousins to ensure I had understood correctly. They laughed gently and said, “Yes, that’s our state.” It was not mockery, but resignation.
In the mosque, the elders nodded out of habit, while many of the younger attendees (the few that I saw) seemed mentally elsewhere.
A ritual had occurred — but the encounter with meaning had not.
This disconnect is not a local quirk; it is a microcosm of a broader Muslim condition. Across Kuala Lumpur’s gleaming skylines, Abu Dhabi’s marble mosques, Istanbul’s lecture halls, and Toronto’s Islamic centres, I see the same struggle. We are torn between rigid traditionalism, unreflective modernism, and a performative religiosity in which emotion and identity overshadow depth, reflection, and ethical living.
Rigid conservatism mistakes tradition for immobility and confuses certainty with depth. In Kerala, as in many Muslim societies, questioning is often treated as a threat rather than a path to understanding. Yet historically, questioning was a sign of reverence — because truth was seen as something to be discovered, not merely inherited.
On the other side lies shallow modernism — the impulse to imitate Western progress by adopting its technologies, institutions, and lifestyles, without engaging the ethical and philosophical foundations that make progress meaningful. The result is a modernity of surfaces, not substance.
And between these poles emerges a third posture: a public performance of religiosity, where symbols are defended more fiercely than values are practised. It is easier to raise our voices than to deepen our vision.
The Muslim world did not always live in this fractured state. The intellectual tradition of Islam once insisted on coherence: heart and mind working together. Ibn Rushd argued that reason and revelation are not enemies, but two expressions of the same search for truth. Ibn Taymiyyah and Shah Waliullah called for reform grounded in within the tradition, not in imitation of external models or in fear-fueled rigidity.
Muhammad Iqbal warned that Muslims had allowed “dead habit” to replace living thought, and called for a reconstruction of our intellectual foundations. Fazlur Rahman reminded us that the Qur’an was not meant to freeze societies, but to cultivate ethical communities capable of justice.
And then there is Ghazali — who, after mastering law, theology, and philosophy, realised that knowledge without humility breeds arrogance, while devotion without thought breeds emptiness. His insight remains painfully relevant: action without understanding is performance, and understanding without action is vanity.
These thinkers, though separated by time and geography, speak to the same principle: Islam withers when reduced to form without meaning.
Kerala once embodied that principle beautifully. The Mappila literary tradition, the Arabi-Malayalam scholarship, coastal intellectual networks tied to Yemen, Cairo, and Mecca — these were expressions of a community that believed faith could converse with the world, not retreat from it.
What I saw on this return visit was that this heritage remains present — yet it is strained. Rapid cultural change, the algorithmic impact of social media, and the global circulation of ideological anxieties have unsettled the confidence that once defined Kerala’s Muslim identity.
Young people yearn for meaning and relevance, but the places that once nourished the spirit now often offer only performance. I have seen many drift from faith—not because they reject God, but because they are denied the space to wrestle, question, and reinterpret the tradition in light of the world they inhabit.
What is needed now is not a return to the past, nor a rejection of modernity, but a recovery of the spirit that once animated both. This begins with the willingness to think critically without fearing that questioning will weaken faith; indeed, genuine belief has always welcomed reflection.
It requires a renewed commitment to ethical responsibility, where our identity is measured not by how loudly we proclaim faith, but by how deeply we live its values. And it calls for a cultural confidence rooted in the understanding that Muslims are not merely responders to global change, but contributors to it — capable of shaping knowledge, shaping society, and shaping the moral imagination of the age.
Renewal will not come from louder sermons, stronger boundaries, or heightened defensiveness. It will come through quieter shifts — from anxiety to curiosity, from certainty to reflection, from performance to sincerity.
If my return to Kerala taught me anything, it is that the flame of meaning is not extinguished. It is flickering. It needs tending. But it is alive.
And if we nurture it — with patience, thought, courage, and humility — Islam will cease to be something we merely affirm, and again become something we embody.
When that happens, the spirit we believe we have lost will reveal itself to have been with us all along.
Faisal Kutty is a lawyer, law professor, and regular contributor to The Toronto Star and Newsweek. He is an affiliate faculty member at Rutgers University Centre for Security, Race, and Rights. He is also Associate Professor of Law Emeritus at Valparaiso University. You can follow him on X @faisalkutty