The World of Islam: ‘good’ religion, perennialism, and public culture in the 1970s

ABSTRACT This article draws on conversations about liberal religion to explore how international events attempt to stage ‘good Islam’ for non-Muslim publics. It does this by focusing on an understudied event from post-empire Britain: the 1976 World of Islam Festival. Here, I focus on how Muslim and non-Muslim actors, ideas about universalism, perennialism and religion, and international politics organised the presentation of ‘good’ Islam in the 1970s. I attend to how liberal renderings of ‘good religion’ operate in a feedback loop with racist, xenophobic and specifically anti-Muslim sentiments in the years just before Muslim politics would take centre-stage in global imaginaries.