Who Shapes Identity in the Muslim World: Institutions or Ideas?
By Ayesha Tauqeer
Last month, the secretary-general of the Muslim World League met with the editorial leadership of Foreign Policy in Washington to discuss the Makkah Declaration. This document represents a pan-Islamic Framework promoting coexistence, moderation, and dialogue, and was endorsed in 2019 by more than 1200 Islamic Scholars and Religious Leaders. Later, this was supported by OIC member states, who recommended that its principles must be incorporated into religious, education and cultural institutions across the Islamic world.
By all accounts, it was an institutional event, a formal gathering with a global affairs journal, a transactional group, and an official paper. However, no one in the room questioned the larger question it presented. Who genuinely influences the way 1.9 billion Muslims perceive themselves and their faith.
Institutions have a compelling argument. The infrastructure of religious life has historically been governed by states, seminaries, and organizations such as the Muslim World League. This includes who trains imams, whose curricula are taught in schools, and which interpretations are preached in churches. According to research presented in May 2026 at Stanford’s Center on Democracy. Developments and the Rule of Law, historical Islamic empires established systems in which rulers derived legitimacy through religion, consolidating political authority through the empowerment of clerics and religious institutions. This pattern continues to this day.
The most obvious example in the modern era is still Saudi Arabia. One of the most significant institutional identity-shaping initiatives of the previous fifty years has been its financing of religious instruction and mosque construction throughout Indonesia, West Africa, and South Asia. Because Saudi Arabia is the center of Islam and the Arabic language, it has the power to establish religious norms that Muslims all around the globe have embraced. Global repercussions occur when Riyadh changes its religious focus, as it has under Vision 2030.
However, the field is not exclusive to institutions anymore. According to a leading interpretation of the Islamic revival, Muslim Identity has seen a significant metamorphosis from regionally based tradition via state-attempted secular modernisation to the renewal of a global Muslim identity. Interestingly, the same modernisation that nations employed to control religion provided common Muslims with access to judicial knowledge that was previously unheard of.
This is more evident in the digital realm than anywhere else. Every day, more than 83% of Muslims in the UAE utilise apps for prayer and an Islamic lifestyle. With over 150 million downloads, well-known applications like Muslim Pro and Athan Pro offer digital spiritual mentoring and AI-integrated Quranic study aids. Encoded digital venues are enabling theological contemplation and social discourse that is not feasible within mosques in areas where state censors keep an eye on public remarks. Here, the process of religious identification is bottom-up rather than top-down.
Social media influencers and online scholars now compete directly with traditional mosque and seminary structures for religious authority, creating new “virtual ummahs” that cross borders and local constraints. A young Muslim in Lahore, Lagos, or London can access a scholar in Cairo, a debate in Jakarta, and a fatwa from an AI platform.
In her Stanford study presentation, Alice Evans hypothesised what she terms a “Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop” in which mass education and communication technologies strengthened rather than diminished the societal impact of religious authority and norms. The internet increased the number of institutions competing for institutional power rather than eradicating it.
This is what makes the question challenging. In the Muslim world, identity is formed by the competition between institutions and ideas rather than by these things themselves. Declarations are made by states. Imams are trained by scholars. Fatwas are delivered via apps. Congregations are built by influencers. Each is asserting its right to define what it means to be a Muslim in the twenty-first century.
Some Muslim thinkers have opposed the Makkah Declaration because “it’s based on a Western template,” a critique that points to the deeper anxiety beneath every institutional framework. Whose Islam? Shaped by whom? In the service of what? These are not theological abstractions. They are live political contests, fought every day in classrooms, on screens, and in the silence between a believer and their conscience.
The institution can build the mosque. It cannot control what happens inside the mind that prays there.