In a CDDRL research seminar held on May 21, 2026, Alice Evans, a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford King Center for Global Development, presented her research exploring the causes of the global Islamic revival. To understand this transformation, she conducted qualitative research across nearly every world region, living with families and communities in countries including Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, Uzbekistan, India, and across West Africa. 

Evans explores several competing theories for the global Islamic revival, beginning with past religious authoritarianism and Arab prestige bias. Past religious authoritarianism is the belief that historical Islamic empires consolidated political authority by empowering clerics and religious institutions, creating systems in which rulers derived legitimacy through religion. Similarly, Arab prestige bias argues that the religious prestige of places like Mecca and Medina drew Muslims across the world to follow religious practices associated with the Arab Islamic heartland.  However, Evans argues that these explanations alone cannot fully explain the global Islamic revival, as both Arab religious prestige and religious authoritarian traditions existed long before the revival began in the 1970s. 

The second major explanation discussed by scholars is historical contingencies, including geopolitical conflict and Saudi-funded Wahhabism. Geopolitical conflicts such as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the post-9/11 War on Terror intensified a sense of global Muslim solidarity and reinforced an “us versus them” worldview. Similarly, Saudi-funded Wahhabism explains the revival through Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth, which allowed the kingdom to fund mosques, madrasas, scholarships, and religious education programs across the Muslim world. However, Evans argues that these explanations still cannot fully account for the revival because geopolitical conflict does not explain why the shift manifested specifically through religiosity, veiling, and gender segregation, while reformist Islamic movements also emerged independently outside of Saudi influence in places such as Egypt, India, and West Africa. 

Consequently, Evans argues that modernization played the most important role in the global spread of the Islamic revival. As highlighted throughout the seminar, technological advances such as steamships, print media, radio, television, and the internet enabled Muslims around the world to gain greater access to religious knowledge, leading to deeper engagement with Islamic scholarship and religious networks. This process was further strengthened through expanded mass schooling and increased state spending on religious education. 

This ultimately leads to Evans’ central theory, the “Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop,” which argues that modernization amplifies whichever moral systems command prestige within a society. In Muslim-majority societies, greater access to religious education and communication technologies leads to greater trust in religious authorities and increased social importance of visible piety, including practices such as veiling and gender segregation. Evans emphasizes that these practices are reinforced through community social pressure, particularly in large religious communities where individuals are constantly evaluated based on visible signs of piety. Consequently, modernization strengthened transnational Islamic identity and reinforced religious norms across the Muslim community.