The term “Islamism” has achieved near-universal adoption in Western policy, media, and academic discourse without achieving anything close to universal agreement on what it means. This paper traces the word’s history, from its eighteenth-century origin as a straightforward synonym for Islam, through its long disappearance from scholarly use, to its deliberate reinvention after the Iranian Revolution as a conceptual instrument serving specific geopolitical needs. “Islamism” was designed to do classificatory work, to separate Islam-as-religion from Islam-as-politics, insulating the former from scrutiny while localizing all difficult questions in the latter. The paper demolishes the historical, etymological, and definitional foundations of this separation and concludes that the category should be abandoned.

Ideological Defense Institute

THE HOUSE OF ISLAM

The House of Islam: The Case Against the Islam/Islamism Divide is the inaugural issue of The Ideological Defense Institute Journal, a new publication dedicated to examining the doctrines, movements, and ideological conflicts shaping the future of the West…

Read more

12 days ago · 10 likes · IDI

Read more

ABSTRACT

The terms political Islam, Islamic governance, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic Salafism, Hakimiyya, international Islamism, and Islam as religion and state are not competing concepts pointing to different phenomena. They are synonyms for a single reality: orthodox Islam as it has always understood itself and expressed itself when it has had the power to do so. This paper argues that the conceptual separation between Islam and political Islam is analytically indefensible, historically without foundation, and directly contradicted by the tradition’s own most authoritative contemporary voices. Drawing on a systematic comparison between sharia and modern constitutional law, and an examination of constitutional provisions across Muslim-majority states, the paper demonstrates that political Islam is not Islam’s aberrant politicization but its foundational and persistent institutional expression. The evidence has been publicly available for decades. The West has chosen not to read it.

THE SYNONYMS FOR A SINGLE REALITY

Read more

The West has consistently misread Islam’s expansion into liberal societies by treating Islam as a religion in the Western sense, private belief distinguishable from politics, law, and governance. This paper argues that categorization is false. Islam, as constituted in the Qur’an, the Sunnah, and the jurisprudential tradition, is a total civilizational system, a House, in which religion is one room among several, inseparable from sharia, governance, economic regulation, social control, and expansion through jihad. Examining each structural component in turn and tracing the architecture from the Rashidun period through its contemporary expression, the paper concludes that the distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ Islam is not a distinction between two different systems or two interpretations, but between faithful adherence and nominal adherence to the same one.

The Western Misreading and Its Consequences

There is a specific intellectual error at the foundation of Western engagement with Islam, one that is not accidental, not the product of ignorance, and not easily corrected by more information alone. It is the error of category: the assumption that Islam is a religion in the sense that Christianity is a domain of private conscience and personal practice, distinguishable from and in principle subordinate to secular political authority.

This assumption has a history. Western political thought arrived at the separation of religious from civil authority through a specific and traumatic historical process: the Wars of Religion, the Peace of Westphalia, the philosophies’ systematic critique of ecclesiastical power, and eventually the constitutional settlements that placed religious practice under the protection of the state while simultaneously removing it from the state’s own governing logic. The experience was so formative and so paradigm-shaping that it produced a general theory of what religion is, a theory in which the Thirty Years’ War functions as the empirical premise and the separation of church and state as the necessary conclusion.

When Western observers, policymakers, and scholars apply this framework to Islam, they are not making a neutral analytical move. They are projecting a historically specific category, the privatized, politically subordinate religion of post-Westphalian Europe, onto a tradition whose foundational texts, institutional history, jurisprudential development, and normative self-understanding all point in the opposite direction. The result is a systematic misreading whose consequences have been documented across a generation of failed integration policy, inadequate security frameworks, and diplomatic engagements built on the assumption of a “moderate Islam” awaiting liberation from its “extremist” distortion.

The architecture of Islam as actually constituted, as the Qur’an establishes it, as Muhammad instantiated it in Medina, as the classical schools of jurisprudence developed it across fourteen centuries, and as its most faithful contemporary adherents understand it, is not a chapel with political implications. It is a House: a total civilizational order in which the spiritual, legal, political, economic, social, and military dimensions are not merely related but structurally unified, designed from the foundation to operate as an integrated and indivisible system.

This paper examines that architecture room by room.

The Foundation

Ideological Defense Institute

THE HOUSE OF ISLAM

The House of Islam: The Case Against the Islam/Islamism Divide is the inaugural issue of The Ideological Defense Institute Journal, a new publication dedicated to examining the doctrines, movements, and ideological conflicts shaping the future of the West…

Read more

12 days ago · 8 likes · IDI

Read more

THE SACRED ORDER BENEATH IT ALL

From the earliest moments of consciousness, human beings have looked to the heavens, to the rhythms of the seasons, to birth and death, suffering and joy, and asked: What is behind this? Who am I within it? Theology begins here, not as dogma but as orientation, the instinct to seek coherence, to interpret the invisible, and to make moral sense of existence.

But this raw impulse must be shaped. It requires language. It requires stories. It requires authority. And so theology crystallizes through narrative. It is encoded in origin myths, epics, hymns, rituals, sacred laws, and divine names. A society’s theology emerges not simply from individual contemplation but from what it collectively chooses to remember, repeat, and revere. What it fears. What it blesses. What it believes the gods, or God, require. Over time, these narratives form belief. They are taught to children, inscribed in temples, enforced by kings. And eventually they cease to be remembered as responses to mystery; they are declared as reality itself. This is how theology becomes civilization’s bedrock. Its truths are no longer argued; they are assumed. No longer explored; they are enforced.

Because of this, every civilization carries a theological foundation, even when it is not named as such. These ultimate convictions form the moral architecture of a society, determine its direction, and set its boundaries. Behind every renaissance, every revolution, and every collapse lies a vision of the world, and of the ultimate order that gives it meaning, whether named as God or conceived in secular terms.

In the earliest civilizations, theology and power were inseparable. In Mesopotamia, kings ruled by divine sanction;¹ in Egypt, the pharaoh was regarded as the god incarnate. Law, economy, and daily life were all downstream from cosmology. Justice was not an abstract concept but the maintenance of cosmic balance as decreed by the gods.² The rise of empires was read as divine favor, their downfall as divine judgment. For these ancient peoples, religion and politics were not two spheres that could be separated, they were a single fabric.³

The Greco-Roman world carried this fusion forward in new ways. What we now call “philosophy” did not emerge in opposition to religion but as its child. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle did not begin their inquiries by rejecting the gods, but by asking what kind of cosmos the gods had made and what kind of human life would be worthy within it.⁴ Reason was not a rebellion against the sacred but a means of refining its understanding. Rome inherited and reshaped this synthesis: Greek philosophical categories were absorbed into Roman civic religion, sacralizing law, elevating citizenship, and presenting order itself as a divine mandate.⁵

Judaism was the first great rupture in ancient religious thought. It introduced a sovereign Creator, transcendent yet just, who established a moral order and declared that every human being, regardless of status or origin, was made in the image of God.⁶ This was an ontological revolution. Human dignity was no longer earned or granted by the state; it was inherent. Christianity built upon this foundation, universalized it, and carried it across cultures and continents, making explicit what Judaism had inaugurated: that human value is not tied to bloodline, tribe, or empire, but to creation itself.

This idea, that all people are equal before God, did not remain a doctrine. It erupted into history. Over centuries, it inspired the abolition of slavery, the sanctity of life, the defense of the poor, the elevation of women, and the moral architecture of human rights. It laid the foundation for modern democracies. But that transformation was not instant. For centuries, the Church itself became the new institution of power. Eventually the tension between power and principle erupted: the Reformation shattered the monopoly of sacred interpretation and unleashed the modern West. It was the religious revolution Luther led in Wittenberg that inspired a political one.⁷

The printing press was a philosophical earthquake. For the first time, ideas moved faster than armies. The Enlightenment did not discard religion; it unleashed its consequences. The conviction that man could reason morally apart from clerical control, that conscience could challenge kings, that nature itself was governed by law, all of this emerged from the fusion of Judeo-Christian theology and Greek philosophy. These ideas gave birth to the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and laid the groundwork for human rights, limited government, and constitutional democracy.⁸

But the same power that builds can also destroy. When theology goes unchallenged, or when false gods are enthroned, civilizations deform. Nazi Germany declared that ultimate reality was race; blood and soil, not human dignity, became the foundation of existence. This was a theological claim: it redefined what it meant to be human. Hitler did not need a god in heaven; he enthroned the Fatherland in its place. Marxist-Leninist communism sought to erase the divine altogether, but in doing so enthroned a new absolute: history itself. The Party was its high priest, interpreting the will of the future, purging heretics, promising utopia on the far side of obedience. Even postmodernism, which declares that there is no absolute truth, enthrones a god of its own: the individual becomes sovereign, lived experience becomes scripture, and those who question the anti-structure are not debated but excommunicated.

Whether we admit it or not, every system is theological at its root. Even the claim “there is no god” is a theological claim. The question is never whether theology shapes a civilization. The only question is which theology, declared or hidden, true or false, liberating or oppressive, is doing the shaping. Strip away the surface of any civilization and you will find a god. It may be the state. It may be the race. It may be the collective will, the historical dialectic, or the prophetic leader. But someone, somewhere, is speaking in absolutes. And absolutes always come with rituals, enforcers, doctrines, and consequences.

PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA

The Arabian Peninsula before Islam was no godless wasteland. It was a spiritual ecosystem, a living theater of theological imagination. The gods were tribal guardians, war patrons, fertility figures, and protectors of commerce, as real as the sand underfoot and as territorial as the clans that invoked them. In Arabia, theology was geography. Every valley had its sentinel. Every tribe its chosen god. The sacred was not universal but fractured, not transcendent but local.⁹

Read more

The House of Islam: The Case Against the Islam/Islamism Divide is the inaugural issue of The Ideological Defense Institute Journal, a new publication dedicated to examining the doctrines, movements, and ideological conflicts shaping the future of the West.

The volume examines:

• The political and theological architecture of Islam

• The historical invention and modern function of the term “Islamism”

• Muhammad’s Medinan state as the enduring model of Islamic governance

• Sharia, jihad, apostasy, and the limits of internal reform

• Islamic antisemitism

• Muslim parallel societies and no-go zones in Europe

• The role of Western Muslim apologetics in preventing reform

• Policy recommendations for defending open societies

The issue also includes extensive interviews with Robert Spencer and Andrew G. Bostom, and a a point-counterpoint exchange with Dr. Daniel Pipes, presenting sharply different perspectives.

Written by scholars, former Muslims, policy analysts, and individuals who have lived under Islam, The House of Islam offers a direct and uncompromising investigation of one of the most consequential ideological questions of our time.

Download Here:

Read more

Even Athens, the birthplace of democracy and supposedly of free expression, had its limits. The playwright Aristophanes, the father of political comedy, was hauled into court by Cleon, the most powerful politician in the city, for the crime of making Athens look bad in one of his plays. And the same democracy that invented satire forced Socrates, its greatest philosopher, to drink poison, for disrespecting the gods of the city. Further east, the Great King of Persia required every man who approached him to perform proskynesis, to throw himself face-down on the ground, the posture of worship. When Alexander the Great conquered Persia and adopted the practice for himself, his own court philosopher, Callisthenes, refused to bow. He did not survive the refusal.

In 1579, an English writer named John Stubbs published a pamphlet objecting to Queen Elizabeth’s plan to marry a French Catholic prince. For that, the state laid his right hand on a block and severed it with a cleaver. Fifty years later, a lawyer named William Prynne wrote a book attacking the theater as immoral, at the very moment the Queen of England happened to be enjoying performing in court plays. Reading his book as an insult to her, the state cropped off his ears. And in France, a young writer was thrown into the Bastille, the royal prison, for circulating verses that mocked the man ruling the country. His name was Voltaire, the future giant of the Enlightenment, and his career in free thought began in a cell for the crime of a joke. Europe had a legal name for this crime: lèse-majesté, literally, “injured majesty.” To mock the ruler was treated as sacrilege, as violence against something holy.

Power has never feared the sword as much as it fears the joke. An assassin can kill a king, but the king dies a king, a martyr, even. A satirist makes the king ordinary. He drags the throne down to eye level, where everyone can see that the man sitting on it sweats, lies, lusts, and fears like everyone else. Armies can be defeated and replaced. Awe, once punctured, never fully reinflates.

This is why every despotism in history has criminalized laughter. Ridicule is a solvent. It dissolves the invisible substance that authoritarian power is actually made of, not tanks, not treasuries, but sanctity.

The Civilization That Sanctified No One

Around the tenth century before Christ, the king of Israel took another man’s wife, impregnated her, and arranged for her husband to be killed at the front to cover it up. This was standard behavior for a Bronze Age monarch; the pharaohs and the kings of Babylon did worse before breakfast, and their court scribes recorded only their glory. But into David’s throne room walked a prophet named Nathan, a man with no army and no title, and he told the king a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb. When David burned with anger at the thief, Nathan pointed at him and said: “You are the man.”

Read more

After Egypt defeated Australia on penalty kicks in the Round of 32 on July 3, coach Hossam Hassan held the Palestinian flag in front of fans who chanted, “free, free Palestine.” “My heart and soul are with them,” Hassan said afterward regarding the Palestinians. “May Allah grant them victory. May Allah have mercy on their martyrs.”

Then after Egypt’s quarterfinal loss to Argentina on July 7, Hassan used his press conference to deliver a passionate soliloquy for more than 4 ½ minutes on the Palestinians’ plight.

“Today, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand of them were struck by a single missile and died, while we’re still here,” Hassan said. “It’s not hard to see that the children we see can’t even find food. They’re facing diseases and epidemics that can result from a lack of food, a lack of sleep, and a lack of basic necessities.

“All nations, including Europe and America, are looking the other way. So if I don’t feel compassion as a human being, then I have no reason to live – nor does any human being on the face of the earth who is unaware of what’s happening in Palestine.”

The hypocrisy on all fronts is breathtaking.

Hassan postures as a humanitarian but cares nothing for the Israeli victims of Hamas’ barbaric attacks on Oct. 7, 2023 – victims who faced far worse than his “kind and honorable” Palestinians. Egypt postures as a Palestinian ally yet considers Palestinians to be a domestic threat and economic burden, as most Arab nations do. FIFA postures as an apolitical body that disciplines political advocacy but grants the Palestinians and their supporters an exception.

More importantly, all three parties increase the hostility against Israel and its supporters.

Egypt built a fortified border wall to protect its citizens from Hassan’s “kind and honorable” Palestinian “martyrs.” Construction began in 2009 amidst opposition from Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. Despite the wall, which extended underground to block tunnels, jihadists murdered 33 Egyptian soldiers in 2014 in two separate attacks in the northern Sinai Peninsula. One attack just 13 miles from Rafah in Gaza killed 30 soldiers.

Subscribe now

Those attacks accelerated development of a more fortified wall and stronger countermeasures against tunnels, such as pumping water and toxic gas into them. From 2013 to 2015, Egyptian authorities forcibly evicted about 3,200 families, destroyed hundreds of acres of farmland and demolished 3,255 buildings.

“The Egyptian authorities provided residents with little or no warning of the evictions, no temporary housing, mostly inadequate compensation for their destroyed homes -- none at all for their farmland -- and no effective way to challenge their eviction, home demolition, or compensation,” Human Rights Watch stated in its report, ironically entitled, “Look For Another Homeland.”

“Egypt needs to explain why it didn’t use available technology to detect and destroy the tunnels and instead wiped entire neighborhoods off the map,” added Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch’s director for the Middle East and North Africa.

The steel-and-concrete wall now reaches 23 feet and extends the length of Egypt’s 7.5-mile border with Gaza. The barrier includes several lengths of barbed wire, electronic sensors and surveillance and a cleared buffer zone.

“They didn’t ask for anyone’s permission,” author Karen Hunt wrote. “The UN (United Nations) didn’t condemn Egypt for it. Western media didn’t accuse them of being an apartheid state.”

FIFA’s hypocrisy contradicts its own disciplinary code. Article 13 states that “using a sports event for demonstrations of a non-sporting nature” constitutes “offensive behavior” and violates “the principles of fair play.” Article Six outlines punishments ranging from fines to suspensions to banishment but leaves enforcement to the discretion of FIFA’s judicial bodies.

In the past, FIFA punished blatant politicking. In 2013, Croatian defender Josip Simunic received one for 10 games and missed the 2014 World Cup after instigating a chant and using a salute associated with the pro-Nazi Ustase regime during World War II. After that year’s tournament, Argentina’s soccer federation drew a fine because its players stood behind a banner proclaiming in Spanish that Britain’s Falkland Islands belonged to Argentina.

In 2016, the federations of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales received fines for having players wear black armbands featuring poppies for Armistice Day. But when it comes to Palestine or Arab/Muslim sensibilities, soccer’s international governing body exhibits far greater latitude.

During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, FIFA allowed the display of Palestinian flags while prohibiting team captains from wearing rainbow armbands to support LGBTQ activism, since Qatar criminalizes homosexuality. Morocco’s team displayed the Palestinian flag numerous times, especially after defeating Spain to reach the quarterfinals. The British group Lawyers for Israel demanded sanctions but FIFA did nothing.

“Rules only make sense if they are consistently applied,” Deutsche Welle’s Mark Meadows wrote at the time. “Whatever your view on the Middle East and the future of the Palestinian Territories, taking their flag onto a football pitch at the World Cup surely counts as a political statement.

“It is obviously difficult for FIFA to stop this. But FIFA and Qatar are not responding to the Palestinian issue because they know they have backed themselves into a corner. If rainbow armbands are a political statement then so is ‘free Palestine.’ But they don’t want to crack down on this because it will cause such a rumpus among Arabs.”

The Moroccan players’ behavior reflected the antagonistic atmosphere toward Israel in a country that supports Islamism.

“Israeli fans and reporters were met with a climate of hostility and anger that forced many of them to return to Israel,” wrote Hussein Aboubakar Mansour. “While not covered in the Western media, nearly all Israeli reporters and journalists were the subject of public humiliation, hostility, and threats. Those who have been following the story got a rare glimpse of the Israeli reality of living amidst a sea of absolute rejection and hostility”

For example, Arab fans would yell at Israeli reporters conducting interviews and tell them they did not belong in Qatar. “There is no Israel, only Palestine,” one shouted at Moav Vardy, foreign affairs reporter for the Israeli network KAN. To avoid harassment, Israeli reporters would tell Arab fans they came from other countries.

Meanwhile, local businesses refused to serve Israelis. One restaurant owner not only called security to evict an Israeli diner. The owner took the customer’s phone and deleted pictures of the restaurant’s food. Later, a driver ordered the same patron to get out of the cab in the middle of a street.

While Israelis are safer in the United States, Canada and Mexico, the hosts for this year’s World Cup, FIFA followed suit on its hypocrisy. Egypt’s federation has yet to be sanctioned for its coach’s overt advocacy. FIFA continues to allow the Palestinian flag while banning Iran’s lion-and-sun flag representing the Pahlavi dynasty before the 1979 Islamic revolution, as it did in Qatar.

That last issue matters because Iran played all three group matches in areas with large populations of Iranian expatriates. Los Angeles, where Iran played twice, has the largest such population in the United States.

The Israeli flag also was not welcome. During the game between Iran and New Zealand on June 15, security confiscated an Israeli flag one fan wore on his shoulders after warning the fan.

“Why don’t you remove that flag? When you guys remove that flag, I will remove mine,” the fan responded in reference to a Palestinian flag.

Subscribe now

“They told me that the head of FIFA and the staff was actually pointing at me and singled me out in a stadium of 100,000 people,” the fan, named Rony, told Fox News. “Just two seats behind me, there were people with Palestinian flags. When I asked about them, they (security) said the head of FIFA didn’t care about that. They only cared about my flag in particular.”

“They said they’re going to return it to me at the end of the game, which never even happened. I looked for it, tried finding it, but they never gave it back to me. I thought we lived in America in 2026, not Nazi Germany in the 1930s.”

Some Palestinian activists want to do to Israeli soccer what the Nazis did to
German Jews in the 1930s: Isolate them from society. On June 11, the World Cup’s first day, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement issued a statement demanding that fans “raise the Palestinian flag and isolate the Zionist entity from international sport.”

In soccer, that would mean expulsion from FIFA.

The group, also known as Masar Badil, affiliates with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist organization that organized numerous terrorist attacks on Western targets and airline hijacking. In the most famous, the PFLP commandeered four Western airliners within a day in 1980 and blew up three of them in Jordan after releasing all the passengers.

Masar Badil pressed “football fans, supporters, athletes, sports clubs and federations participating in World Cup activities” to “transform stadiums and sporting venues into platforms of solidarity with the Palestinian people” and “raise Palestinian flags, organize solidarity actions, launch chants and display banners opposing genocide, and demand the exclusion of the Zionist entity from all sporting, cultural and international forums.”

Before Canada’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina in Toronto on June 12, Doha News showed activists covering a FIFA sign with a circular red banner that said, “Kick Israel out of FIFA.” The video included responses from social media. Amar Singh Chouhan challenged FIFA directly.

“Toronto activists just unfurled a HUGE “KICK ISRAEL OUT OF FIFA” banner over the FIFA installation,” Chouhan posted, with a Palestinian flag ending the sentence.

“Russia banned. Israel still in. Hypocrisy?

“FIFA, your move?”

If FIFA makes such a move against Israel’s soccer federation, soccer’s international governing body will have sacrificed its credibility on the altar of appeasement.

Joseph D’Hippolito is a contributor to IDI

Iranian fans cheered.

But before Iran’s next match against Wales four days later, most of a starting lineup that looked intimidated either sang or mouthed their national anthem’s words meekly as fans jeered.

What happened? Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps approached the players between games and threatened their loved ones back home if they continued to protest.

Those incidents exemplify the pervasive control the IRGC holds not only over the national team but over all Iranian soccer. Since the United States and Canada view the IRGC as a terrorist group, both nations refused to grant visas to Iranian soccer officials and support personnel—including Mehdi Taj, president of the national federation, and Hedayat Membini, its secretary general.

Subscribe now

As part of the visa restrictions, the national team had to live and train in Tijuana, though all its first-round games took place in Seattle and Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles, California. After each game, the squad immediately returned to Tijuana.

“The group stage is finished tomorrow and we don’t have our logistics people here,” forward Mehdi Taremi, the team captain and a veteran of three World Cups, said after Iran’s final first-round game Friday. “We don’t have recovery or logistics people to help us. They don’t have a visa.”

“We have to fight everything here,” he added. “FIFA did nothing. It’s not fair. Who wants to help us? It’s a disaster World Cup, a disaster.”

But consider that Taremi spent most of his career supporting the regime. He not only was a personal friend of the late Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, one of the protégés of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In 2017, Taremi reposted Khamenei’s Twitter declaration that Israel would cease to exist within 25 years.

The relationship between the regime and sports began when Khamenei secured the IRGC’s loyalty by promising economic opportunities insulated from financial accountability. As a result, the IRGC expanded into industries ranging from banking to mining to agriculture to construction, and accounts for more than 50 percent of Iran’s gross domestic product.

“Over the past two decades, most sports clubs and related bodies have been taken over by political or security-military organizations, with former Revolutionary Guards holding the top positions,” Kambiz Foroohar, a journalist and consultant, wrote in 2021. “The financial benefits of running a sports club are simply too great for the Revolutionary Guards to ignore.”

Money becomes the reward for exercising political power.

“The Guards see sports as a form of social control to be exploited in pursuit of domestic policy objectives,” Foroohar wrote. “The country’s two most popular sports, wrestling and football, attract a young male demographic, often from poor socio-economic backgrounds, that needs to be managed and directed. Furthermore, sports have a symbolic value, as policies applied to the athletic domain project ideals for society at large.”

The IRGC exerts its power in domestic soccer through the Persian Gulf Pro League. Former IRGC commanders serve as club executives or board members, especially at two of the biggest clubs in Asia: Persepolis and Esteghlal, bitter rivals based in Tehran. The chief executive officer of one mid-level club, working under a double alias, not only was an IRGC commander and the head of security for state television. Amir Mansour Bozorgian-Asl (his real name) belonged to an assassination team that murdered in Vienna the leader of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, in 1989, as well as other Kurdish activists elsewhere.

The IRGC even owns one club: Shiraz’s Fajr Sepasi FC, which the unofficial Team Melli website called “the most hated club in Iran!”

Khamenei protected his IRGC allies in soccer by ordering a popular Iranian soccer commentator off state television in 2019 for being too tough on corruption and mismanagement. Adel Ferdosipour, whom Newsweek described in 2009 as one of Iran’s 20 most powerful people, had been covering soccer for two decades.

Corruption flourished under Taj, who was an IRGC intelligence officer at 19 and is serving his third term as president of the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. For example, players accused the federation in 2019 of stealing 1.5 million Swiss francs, or $1.3 million, they received for playing in the 2014 and 2018 World Cups. The IRGC even influences the choice of a national coach.

Since the men’s national soccer team represents the sporting world’s most direct connection with Iran, the regime takes great pains to use it to promote propaganda and to enforce political compliance. The team’s official video for this year’s World Cup began with shots of an Iranian flag flying near bomb damage accompanied by a statement of defiance:

“Even if the entire world becomes our enemy, this land belongs to Imam Mahdi, the imam of the time.”

Shia religious imagery and singing dominate the video, which includes an AI-generated image of head coach Amir Ghalenoei with his hands extended in prayer.

Later, players wearing the national white soccer uniform turn into soldiers wearing camouflage and helmets while brandishing automatic weapons.

Subscribe now

Authorities spare no expense to ensure compliance. For the 2022 World Cup, the regime spent $2.36 million to send about 350 agents and social media specialists to the tournament. Qatari authorities helped by banning the lion-and-sun flag, symbolic of the deposed Pahlavi dynasty, and other anti-regime messages.

One year later, when Qatar played host to the Asian Football Confederation’s 2023 Asian Cup, undercover IRGC and Basij agents arrived to “boost player morale and be in the presence of international photographers,” Membini said. About 100 of the more than 300 agents attended training sessions while many served as undercover fans. That effort cost the regime about $300,000.

For this year’s World Cup, FIFA capitulated to the demand to ban the lion-and-sun flag but allowed fans to show the Palestinian flag when Iran plays.

Compliance also involves punitive measures. Forward Sardar Azmoun, a World Cup veteran who scored 57 goals in 91 games for Iran and plays in the United Arab Emirates after two seasons with top European clubs, was expelled from the national team in March for appearing in photos with Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE’s prime minister and the ruler of Dubai. Iran considers the UAE a wartime enemy.

In 2023, the news agency Tasnim, which the IRGC operates, reported that prominent players were arrested for drinking alcohol, illegal in Iran, and socializing with unmarried women. In 1984, the regime executed Habib Khabiri, Iran’s captain, for supporting political opposition.

During the massive demonstrations in December, January and February, as the regime killed tens of thousands of protesters, Iranian soccer players stood with them. Ali Karimi, who played in the 2006 World Cup and for Germany’s Bayern Munich, joined other former players, a soccer coach, a referee and Iranian sportswriters in an open letter to FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.

Karimi and his fellow signatories demanded that FIFA condemn the regime’s attacks, whose victims included “members of the football community, sanction Iran’s federation for violating FIFA statues and suspend its national teams from all competitions, including this year’s World Cup.

“I have always considered myself one of the people,” said Karimi, who had his property confiscated by the regime and now lives in Los Angeles. “Now that our country is going through one of its most sensitive and sorrowful periods, the least I can do is be the voice of my people.”

Subscribe now

Two months later, five members of the national women’s team received asylum in Australia, site of the Women’s Asian Cup, after starters refused to sing the Iranian anthem.

The persecution of Mohammed Rachid Mazaheri, a reserve goalkeeper on Iran’s 2018 World Cup squad, best illustrates the close cooperation between the IRGC and the FFIRI. The federation suspended him in 2019 after he criticized the government for spending money on building soccer stadiums in Iraq. One year later, the IRGC interrogated Mazaheri for protesting the execution of three prisoners. In 2021, he received a second suspension from the FFIRI for supporting mass protests over the severe lack of water.

Then in February, as the regime continued to murder protesters, the IRGC arrested Mazaheri for posting an Instagram picture of Khamenei with the caption, “Satan” and the phrase “Khamenei! Know that your command over this holy land has ended.”

No news about Mazaheri’s fate has since emerged.

Joseph D’Hippolito is a contributor to IDI

Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon is quoted as his last address to mankind, the summing-up of everything he came to teach, and it is produced on cue whenever Islam is accused of a poor record on race or on women. Fourteen centuries ago, the story goes, this man stood before a crowd and declared that no Arab outranks a non-Arab, no white man a black man, and that women are partners deserving of kindness. Case closed. The West got there in 1948; Muhammad got there in 632.

Few Islamic texts are cited more frequently to whitewash Islam in the West. Yet a comparison of the most popular version of the Farewell Sermon with earlier Islamic historical sources reveals substantial differences.

Passages concerning women have been softened or omitted, universal humanitarian language has been introduced, and several statements commonly quoted today simply do not appear in some of the earliest surviving accounts. These differences raise an important historical question: which version of the Farewell Sermon most accurately reflects the earliest Islamic sources?

This article does not seek to reconstruct Muhammad’s exact words during his final pilgrimage. Like much of early Islamic history, the Farewell Sermon survives through multiple narrations that differ in wording and detail. Instead, it is a case study in how modern Islamic apologetics present historical sources selectively, promoting the later, composite versions abroad while burying the earlier accounts that a Western audience would find harder to stomach. The result is the West is fed the sanitized sermon and comes to believe that is what Islam teaches, while the Islamic world goes on transmitting the original to its own.

The modern English version most widely reproduced online, can be found on websites such as IslamicFinder and IslamReligion, can be traced to Sermons of the Prophet, translated by S. H. Faizi in 2001. Faizi himself acknowledged that the authenticity of these collected sermons remained disputed among Muslim scholars. Rather than presenting a single historically verified sermon, the collection appears to compile material from different narrations attributed to Muhammad. It reads:

“O People, it is true that you have certain rights with regard to your women, but they also have rights over you. Remember that you have taken them as your wives only under God’s trust and with His permission. If they abide by your right then to them belongs the right to be fed and clothed in kindness. Do treat your women well and be kind to them for they are your partners and committed helpers. And it is your right that they do not make friends with any one of whom you do not approve, as well as never to be unchaste.

“O People, listen to me in earnest, worship God, say your five daily prayers (Salah), fast during the month of Ramadan, and give your wealth in Zakat. Perform Hajj if you can afford to.

“All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action. Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood. Nothing shall be legitimate to a Muslim which belongs to a fellow Muslim unless it was given freely and willingly. Do not, therefore, do injustice to yourselves.

“Remember, one day you will appear before God and answer your deeds. So beware, do not stray from the path of righteousness after I am gone.

“O People, no prophet or apostle will come after me and no new faith will be born. Reason well, therefore, O People, and understand words which I convey to you. I leave behind me two things, the Qur’an and my Sunnah and if you follow these you will never go astray.

“All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again; and may the last ones understand my words better than those who listen to me directly. Be my witness, O God, that I have conveyed your message to your people.”

The oldest surviving lives of Muhammad, al-Tabari’s History and Ibn Ishaq’s Life, are the most authentic and most widely accepted accounts Islam has, the sources Muslim and non-Muslim historians alike still begin with. Both are foundational to Islam, and when these texts are set beside the popular version promoted in the West, a very different picture emerges.

Al-Tabari’s version reads:

“Now then, O people, you have a right over your wives and they have a right over you. You have [the right] that they should not cause anyone of whom you dislike to tread on your beds; and that they should not commit any open indecency. If they do, then Allah permits you to shut them in separate rooms and to beat them, but not severely. If they abstain from [evil], they have the right to their food and clothing in accordance with the custom. Treat women well, for they are [like] domestic animals with you and do not possess anything for themselves. You have taken them only as a trust from Allah, and you have made the enjoyment of their persons lawful by the word of Allah, so understand and listen to my words, O people. I have conveyed the Message, and have left you with something which, if you hold fast to it, you will never go astray; that is, the Book of Allah and the sunnah of his Prophet. Listen to my words, O people, for I have conveyed the Message and understand [it]. Know for certain that every Muslim is a brother of another Muslim, and that all Muslims are brethren. It is not lawful for a person [to take] from his brother except that which he has given him willingly, so do not wrong yourselves. O Allah, have I not conveyed the message?”

Ibn Ishaq’s The Life of Muhammad renders the same passage slightly differently, describing women as being “like prisoners with you.”

These passages concerning women found in al-Tabari and Ibn Ishaq are not isolated reports. Qur’an 4:34 also contains instructions that earlier Islamic jurists have understood as permitting a husband to strike a “disobedient” wife under specified circumstances. Similar wording also appears in canonical hadith collections recognized within Sunni Islam which compare women to dogs and donkeys in the context of nullifying prayer, and that women will make up the majority of the Hellfire.

Nuriyah Khan is a fellow at IDI

Sources

Al-Tabari. The History of al-Tabari, Volume IX: The Last Years of the Prophet. Translated by Ismail K. Poonawala. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 112.

The Qur’an. Surah An-Nisa (4:34).

Faizi, S. H. (trans.). Sermons of the Prophet. New Delhi: Adam Publishers & Distributors, 2001.

Ibn Ishaq. The Life of Muhammad. Translated by Alfred Guillaume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 651.

IslamicFinder. “The Farewell Sermon by Holy Prophet (SAW).” Available at: https://www.islamicfinder.org/knowledge/islam-and-sunnah/the-farewell-sermon-by-holy-prophet-saw/.

IslamReligion. “Prophet Muhammad’s Last Sermon.” Available at: https://www.islamreligion.com/articles/523/prophet-muhammad-last-sermon

Jami’ al-Tirmidhi. Book of Marriage. (Hadith numbering varies between editions and online databases.)

Sunan Ibn Majah. Book of Marriage, Hadith 1851.

Several Arab regimes do not want the Arab-Israeli conflict to end. They cannot afford to want it to end. The conflict is the central instrument by which they generate their domestic legitimacy, their strategic relevance to the West, and the rents that keep them solvent. Resolution would dissolve the instrument. So they manage the conflict instead, keeping it cold enough to prevent open war, hot enough to maintain its political utility, and arrayed in such a way that any approach to genuine resolution can be pulled back to the starting line at the necessary moment.

The mechanism is the Industry of Security. The pitch the regimes make to the West is the operative content of the industry:

“we are the only thing standing between you and the Jihadists. The populations we govern are hostile to your interests, hostile to Israel, hostile to liberal civilization, and only authoritarian rule by us prevents the hostility from translating into action. Pay us. Arm us. Tolerate our human rights record. Because the alternative is what would happen if the people we suppress were free to act on their own preferences. “

This pitch has been the foundation of Western policy toward several Arab states for fifty years. It has produced something close to a hundred billion dollars in cumulative aid. And it has produced a powerful structural incentive, inside the regimes themselves, to ensure that the populations remain exactly as hostile as the pitch requires.

Read more

When the men who wrote the First Amendment guaranteed the free exercise of religion, they had a specific picture of religion in their heads, and Islam was not in it. The world they knew was Christian and Jewish. Religion, to them, meant what a person believed about God, how he prayed, what he held to be right and wrong, a matter of conscience, lived out in private and in the pews, and walled off from the apparatus of the state. They were not legislating about a system that aspires to run the state itself, write its laws, and order the lives of believers and non-believers alike under a single divine code. They had no reason to. Nothing in their experience looked like that.

That gap between what the Founders meant by religion and what Islam actually is may be the quietest and most consequential confusion in the modern West.

The Western concept of religion is, at bottom, a Christian inheritance, and it carries Christian assumptions whether or not anyone still believes the theology. Chief among them is that faith is private. What a person holds about God is between him and his conscience; he is free to believe, to doubt, or to walk away, and no civil authority hands down a creed. The separation of church and state did not happen to this tradition by accident. It grew out of it. The thing being separated, an interior, voluntary faith, was already understood to be separable.

Subscribe now

Islam does not sit inside that definition. It is not a body of beliefs and rituals that happens to have political opinions attached. Prayer and fasting are one part of it; alongside them stand a theory of state law, rules of war, a judicial code, and detailed provisions for governing non-Muslim populations under Muslim rule. To peel the spiritual away from the political and keep only the first is not a reform. It is a mutilation of the thing itself.

Put the question the way the Founders would have had to face it. Had they been staring across the Atlantic at an Islamic caliphate rather than at the Christian empires of Europe, it is hard to imagine them extending the protections of the First Amendment to a system whose announced purpose was to replace constitutional self-government with rule by divine law, a system that treats the consent of the governed not as the source of legitimate authority but as a usurpation of God’s. The Amendment was written to keep the state out of the church. It was not written to license a church that intends to become the state.

The reassuring claim is that the political reading of Islam belongs to a fringe, a small, loud minority of radicals at odds with the quiet majority. The largest survey ever taken of Muslim opinion does not support that claim. In 2013 the Pew Research Center polled some thirty-eight thousand Muslims across thirty-nine countries. Asked whether sharia should be enshrined as the official law of the land, majorities said yes across most of the Muslim world, and in several countries the majorities were overwhelming:

Strip away the euphemisms and the incompatibility between Islam and Western constitutionalism comes down to three collisions, none of them about extremism and all of them about the system as it has been taught for more than a thousand years.

The first is the separation of powers. Islamic governance gathers authority in the caliph, whose mandate descends from God rather than rising from the governed, and classical theory builds in nothing like the deliberate division of legislative, executive, and judicial power that the American framers treated as the central safeguard against tyranny. Where the entire design assumes a single divinely sanctioned authority, there is nothing to separate.

The second is the vote. In Islam the ruler is not chosen by the population at large. He is selected by a body of qualified scholars, and the office is closed to women and to non-Muslims by definition. The republican premise, that legitimate power flows upward from the consent of all the people, has no counterpart in Islam, where legitimacy flows downward from God through His law and the men qualified to interpret it.

The third is freedom of religion. The First Amendment protects the right to hold any faith or none, and above all the right to change one’s mind. Islamic law prescribes death for the apostate. The right that the First Amendment guards most jealously is the one Islamic law most flatly forbids.

This leaves the West with a dilemma: move to restrict Islamic political activity, and a government risks open conflict with Muslim populations at home and Muslim states abroad, and lays itself open to the charge of trampling the very liberties it claims to be defending. Decline to move, and the steady growth of Muslim populations in Western cities, together with the patient political pressure to accommodate Islamic law piece by piece, wears down the constitutional order from the inside.

Subscribe now

The most direct way out does not run through Western policy at all. It runs through the Muslim world, which is the only place the underlying tension can actually be resolved. That would mean one of two things. Either Islam develops and formally institutionalizes a genuinely private, spiritual practice, one that explicitly renounces sharia as a project of state governance and means it, or it states honestly Islam remains what its own texts describe, an expansionist political and legal order at odds with the foundations of the modern constitutional state, and the world deals with that fact rather than pretending it away. What cannot continue indefinitely is the present arrangement, in which the political claims are real, advancing, and unacknowledged.

For decades the West managed the question by insisting it did not exist. That option has closed. Western cities are changing in plain view. Saying clearly what Islam is, and what the First Amendment was and was not built to protect, is not bigotry. It is the bare precondition for an honest conversation about everything that comes next, a conversation the West can no longer afford to keep postponing.

Brother Rachid is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

Both of these framings are available in the Western discourse on any given day, but stand at the angle of what the thing actually was and you will see the Nakba was a theological assault that failed. It was the attempt to extinguish a non-Muslim sovereignty newly declared on land that Islam regards as its own, an attempt prosecuted by five Arab armies that invaded the day after the state was born, lost the war they had started, and produced, in their losing, the refugees they have wept over ever since.

Read more

On April 15, 2023, a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan between two war criminals: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, commander of the Rapid Support Forces. Both men lead military forces that were once part of the Sudanese army; this is, in other words, a state of fracture and military conflict following an alliance, and following war crimes both sides had committed against the Sudanese people and against the civilian opposition. In 2003, al-Burhan and Hemedti took part, on the orders of Omar al-Bashir, in the savage massacres in Darfur that claimed more than 300,000 lives. In October 2021, the two men joined together in the coup against the civilian government that had been formed after the Sudanese uprising.

The war has plunged Sudan into total ruin. According to international reports, between 150,000 and 200,000 Sudanese have been killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, with more than 50,000 missing. Roughly 14 million Sudanese have been displaced inside and outside the country, and 34 million suffer from widespread hunger. Thousands of women have been raped: according to Doctors Without Borders, 3,396 women were sexually assaulted in Darfur alone between 2024 and 2025, and international reports estimate that hundreds of women across Sudan have taken their own lives as a result of this rape. Six million children have been forced out of school, along with 714 university students; 89 percent of farmers have lost the ability to work their land; and infrastructure has been destroyed on a vast scale across the whole of Sudan.

Mass graves. Mass rape. Ethnic cleansing. Forced displacement. Enforced disappearance. Torture. War crimes. Extrajudicial executions. The largest humanitarian crisis in the world. The most dangerous famine in the world. A surge of hate crimes. Even chemical weapons have been used in this filthy war, by the Sudanese army.

Subscribe now

And yet, for all the horror of what is happening, Sudan has drawn no real attention from the international community. There is no media coverage of what is taking place there; not a single demonstration has been held against the continuation of this war, even as thousands of demonstrations have filled the streets of the West on behalf of Gaza. This war has earned no global concern whatsoever, and we have heard not one voice from the women’s organizations against the mass rape of Sudanese women. All of this is because the Arabs and Muslims wanted to steer attention and money toward shining the spotlight on Gaza alone, for the sole reason that Israel is the other party in the equation.

Foreign intervention has prolonged the war, deepened the crisis, and fed the conflict, for there are states backing each side of the war for reasons of their own. Egypt, for instance, backs al-Burhan because it supports military rule and has stood behind every military coup in Sudan’s history. The opposite is true of the UAE, where, over the past fifteen years, Mohammed bin Zayed has pursued two principles without apology: a determined campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, and the conviction that the UAE is entitled, like any sovereign state, to put its own interests first. Both are at work in Sudan. With the Muslim Brotherhood holding the Sudanese army in its grip, Abu Dhabi had every reason to back the other side, and its economic ties to Hemedti gave it a further, perfectly ordinary national interest in the outcome.

As for Saudi Arabia, which was in a cold war with the military regimes back in the 1960s, it backs al-Burhan for one reason only: because the UAE backs the other side, as part of the current rivalry between the Saudis and the Emiratis.

There are many other parties entangled in the Sudanese crisis as well, South Sudan, Chad, Libya, the Central African Republic, Turkey, Russia, Ethiopia.

The most dangerous intervention America has observed is the Iranian one: arming the Sudanese army with drones, and training the Muslim Brotherhood elements fighting alongside that army. This is a dangerous scenario that Iran had been planning, to close the Bab al-Mandab strait and disrupt international trade through the Red Sea by means of its Houthi allies in Yemen and the Brotherhood in Sudan. For this reason the American administration designated the Brotherhood organization in Sudan a terrorist group in 2026 and warned al-Burhan against cooperating with Iran.

It is these international interventions that have blocked any solution to the crisis. On July 30, 2025, the Washington meeting on the Sudanese crisis collapsed over an Egyptian-Emirati dispute: the United States had circulated a draft plan for a settlement that everyone, including the UAE, accepted, and Egypt rejected, and so the meeting failed.

Sudan’s Crisis Is an Old One

But the crisis in Sudan is old, and it can be summed up in three words: England, Egypt, and Islamic sharia.

England, for the sake of its own interests, assembled an enormous Sudanese state out of mismatched ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, Arabs and Africans, Muslims and Christians and pagans, warring tribes, clashing races, forming the largest country in Africa until the secession of South Sudan, and currently the third largest.

Egypt, for its part, has backed military rule and supported the coups in Sudan, from Ibrahim Abboud’s coup in 1958 to al-Burhan and Hemedti’s coup against the civilian government in 2021.

And Islamic sharia bred a contest and a bidding war over Islamization between the military and the Islamists. Across the seventy years since Sudan’s independence, the military has ruled for fifty-nine years and civilians for only eleven, and even those civilian years were divided between two Islamist movements, the Mahdiyya and the Khatmiyya. Military rule, too, was blended with Islamic rule: General Jaafar Nimeiri imposed strict sharia law in September 1983, and Omar al-Bashir ruled for thirty years, a Brotherhood government under military cover, since al-Bashir was himself a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. And now al-Burhan’s army is controlled by the Brotherhood.

Subscribe now

Islamic sharia also fed a surplus of hatred, a surplus of violence, a surplus of tyranny, and a religious supremacism and persecution against non-Muslims, along with a supremacism over non-Arabs. The imposition of sharia ignited a war in southern Sudan that killed millions, until South Sudan gained its independence on July 9, 2011.

This is why the Sudanese scene has been marked by:

• Arab supremacism and persecution of Africans. (During the rape of girls in Darfur in 2003 and 2004, the soldiers would say to the African women: “You should be proud, slave, that the one raping you is an Arab, so that you will give birth to an Arab.”)

• Religious supremacism and persecution of non-Muslims.

• Military supremacism over civilians.

The Sudanese army is fighting an existential battle on behalf of the ruling military class, allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to be rid of a man of its own making, Hemedti, and no longer sees him as representing it.

Hemedti, too, is fighting an existential battle, for himself and his family. He runs the largest private army in Africa, controls a vast gold trade that has widened his alliances, and has been able to operate a mercenary trade serving African and Arab conflicts. He sees himself as the representative of a large region attempting to break away, the region of Darfur.

Because each side regards this war as existential and zero-sum, because the parties to the conflict are being fed by various states, because neither side can win it outright, and because of the hatred rooted deep in Sudan’s components, the solution, in my view, is a new partition of Sudan, to reduce this hatred, this strife, and these civil conflicts.

Magdi Khalil is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

IDI frequently responds to the misinformation spread by Carlson and his guests, but for the moment it is worth focusing on just this one claim. The assertion that John Nelson Darby originated Christian Zionism is historically false.

Dispensationalism and Christian Zionism are related, but they are not identical. Dispensationalism is a particular system of biblical interpretation. It offers answers to questions about prophecy, the relationship between Israel and the Church, and the sequence of events surrounding the end times. Christian Zionism is merely the belief that God intends to keep His promises to Israel. When God promised Abraham descendants, a nation, and a land, those promises were not transferred to someone else and stripped of their original meaning.

Darby certainly held that conviction, but he did not create it. To claim otherwise requires ignoring centuries of Christian history. Long before Darby was born, prominent Protestant thinkers were already arguing that the Jewish people had a future in God’s plan and that the promises concerning the land retained a literal dimension. The belief appeared in some of the most influential currents of Protestant thought.

Subscribe now

One of the clearest examples is the Geneva Bible of 1560, published nearly three centuries before Darby’s major writings. The Geneva Bible was the Bible of the English Reformation, the Bible carried by the Puritans, and the Bible that crossed the Atlantic with many of the settlers who helped shape early America. Its marginal notes frequently reflected an expectation that God’s dealings with Israel were not finished. The prophets were not simply speaking about the Church under another name. Israel remained a meaningful category within God’s redemptive plan.

The same pattern emerges among the Puritans. Increase Mather, one of the most influential figures in colonial New England and later president of Harvard College, published The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation in 1669. Mather argued that the Jewish people would one day experience national restoration and once again possess the land promised to Abraham. More importantly, he challenged the habit of turning every biblical promise made to Israel into a purely spiritual promise for the Church.

Mather was not a dispensationalist. He was not a nineteenth-century prophecy teacher. He was a Puritan Calvinist writing in seventeenth-century Massachusetts more than a century before Darby’s birth. Yet the central issue he was addressing is the same issue debated today: when Scripture speaks about Israel, should Christians assume that it really means the Church, or should they allow Israel to remain Israel?

Mather was hardly alone. Across the Protestant world, long before Darby’s birth, influential theologians were reaching similar conclusions. The German Pietist leader Philipp Jakob Spener encouraged prayer and expectation for the conversion and restoration of the Jewish people, a theme developed even more explicitly by his disciple August Hermann Francke and later Pietist writers. In England, the Puritan theologian Thomas Brightman argued in the early seventeenth century that the Jews would return to their land and experience national restoration before the end of history. His views influenced a generation of English Protestants, including figures such as Joseph Mede, whose prophetic writings anticipated a future conversion and restoration of Israel. In New England, Increase Mather’s son, Cotton Mather, continued the same expectation, writing that the Jewish people would one day be gathered and restored according to the promises of Scripture.

What all of those men shared was the belief that God had not finished with the Jewish people and that the promises made to Israel in Scripture could not simply be dissolved into the Church. Long before Darby systematized his prophetic framework, Protestants across England, Germany, and colonial America were already reading the Bible and concluding that Israel still had a future in the purposes of God.

When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, he was already confronting a temptation that would accompany Christianity throughout its history: the temptation of Gentile believers to conclude that Israel’s story was over. Romans 11 is Paul’s direct response. He warns Gentile Christians against arrogance toward the Jewish people. He reminds them that they have been grafted into a covenantal story that began long before them. Most importantly, he rejects the idea that God has cast away His people. Whatever debates Christians may have about the precise meaning of Paul’s statement that “all Israel shall be saved,” it is difficult to read the chapter honestly and conclude that Paul believed Israel had simply vanished from God’s purposes, or as Hall told Tucker Carlson, that the Jewish people had “just become like any other nation.”

Subscribe now

While forms of supersessionism eventually became dominant, particularly after Christianity became intertwined with imperial power, the idea that God retained future purposes for Israel never disappeared entirely. The rise of replacement theology was not the inevitable outcome of Christian reflection. It was a historical development shaped by particular theological and political circumstances.

Once Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, many theologians increasingly interpreted the Church as the complete and final replacement for Israel. Promises once associated with the Jewish people were reinterpreted as promises fulfilled exclusively in the Church. Over time this became the dominant framework throughout much of Christendom. Yet even at its height, alternative readings persisted beneath the surface.

The Reformation brought many of those older questions back into view. By returning to Scripture as the highest authority, Protestant thinkers reopened debates that had long been considered settled. As they worked through the prophets, the covenants, and Paul’s writings, many discovered that the biblical text did not fit comfortably within the assumptions they had inherited.

At its heart, Christian Zionism is a theological claim about the character of God. It asks whether God’s promises remain trustworthy even when centuries pass between the promise and its fulfillment. It asks whether the covenants made with Abraham can simply be reassigned to another people. It asks whether the God who bound Himself to Israel in Scripture intends to keep the commitments He made.

@DanBurmawy is the Chief Executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

Nine countries currently possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. All the world’s nuclear weapons states are non-Muslim except for Pakistan, which acquired the so-called Islamic Bomb in 1998. Although Pakistan is an Islamic republic, it’s nuclear weapons are to deter a military attack by its arch-rival, India, a nuclear weapons state since 1974.

Why, then, is there such particular concern about the nuclear weapons program in Iran? Ultimately, the issue boils down to ideology, theology, and the apocalyptic worldview held by the jihadist leaders of Iran, and the eschatological imperatives that incentivize them to use such weapons against Israel and the rest of the Judeo-Christian world.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a theocratic state based on the Shiite branch of Islam. Shia Muslims comprise roughly 15% of the global Muslim population, with the other 85% being Sunni Muslim. The main difference between the two branches of Islam lies in a historical dispute over the rightful successor to Muhammad, the founder of Islam, after his death in AD 632. Shias believe Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, was the true successor; Sunnis believe Abu Bakr, a close companion of Muhammad, was the rightful heir. In essence, the centuries-long quarrel between Shiites and Sunnis boils down to whether Muhammad’s legitimate successor must be a blood relative.

Twelver Shiism

Read more

I learned the word jihad before I understood what it meant. Growing up in Beirut, I watched militias and armed men move into civilian neighborhoods, and I saw neighbors kill neighbors over religion and sect. Years of it nearly destroyed the country. And all of it was carried out in the name of jihad, jihad for Allah, Allah is with the jihadis, slogans that flooded the radio, the newspapers, the conversations on my own street. Decades later, the word still runs across the news, in the Muslim world and the Western press alike, and it has not lost its meaning.

September 11, 2001, broke something in the American mind, the comfortable assumption that all is well because all religions are basically the same, and that no faith teaches the killing of the innocent. I was in Indianapolis that morning, meeting with the missions committee of an evangelical church, when we watched the second plane hit the tower and the buildings come down. A word millions of Americans had never spoken entered their vocabulary overnight.

In the days after, imams went on television to explain that Islam is a religion of peace and that the men who did this were not Muslims. It was a campaign built to reassure Americans and to move their attention somewhere safer. Others called the attacks a tragic accident, an aberration, something jihad is not.

Subscribe now

The years since have answered them. Jihad did not recede; it spread. Jihadi movements and terror attacks multiplied, not only in the lands they call kufar, the territory of the unbelievers, but across the Muslim world itself. The Islamic State slaughtered Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds, and then slaughtered fellow Muslims, Sunni and Shia, for being the wrong kind. In the West, an American woman converted to Islam, named herself Jihad Jane, and announced she had joined the global jihad. An Englishman converted and surfaced in execution videos as Jihadi John. The convert tells you what the convert was converted to.

If Islam is a religion of peace, why does the new convert so often arrive at the knife? The notion of a peaceful Islam is not a description of the thing. It is a tool, used to disarm the societies the thing intends to subdue. Thomas Jefferson met the same reality at the founding of this country. Rather than keep paying tribute to the Barbary states that preyed on American ships in the name of holy war, he sent the Navy, and the Marines, whose hymn still carries the line “to the shores of Tripoli” from that fight. He concluded that force, not negotiation, was the only language those raiders understood.

The Qur’an sets out jihad in Surah 9, verses 5, 29, and 111, and Surah 47 turns to the waging of war and the killing of enemies. I have read the Qur’an in Arabic more than forty-five times, so I can say plainly what the apologists obscure when they insist it can only be understood in Arabic: the meaning is clear. The Qur’an, like the Hadith, sorts humanity into Muslim and kafir, and it places Jewish and Christian believers among the kuffar, the blasphemers. The fashionable claim that the three faiths are simply “Abrahamic” cousins does not survive a reading of the book itself.

What Muhammad set in motion was a permanent fault line, between his religion and every other, and within his religion as well. The Sunni-Shia war is itself a jihad, a contest over who truly follows Allah and his messenger, and it does not end. Under Khomeini, the Iran-Iraq war consumed something close to a million lives on both sides in eight years, Muslim killing Muslim. Today American forces stand in the region largely as a buffer between a radical Shia regime and the Sunni Arab states it targets with rockets and drones. Jihad can be turned on anyone judged insufficiently faithful.

Once, speaking on jihad and the Middle East, a man in the audience told me jihad will end when the whole world becomes Muslim. I answered him with the history above. The Muslim world has not found peace within itself, and it will not, not until the ideology changes, until the way Muslims are taught to see other peoples and other nations changes. Islam has given neither inner peace nor social peace, and I do not foresee it.

I do not write this from a distance. My friend and classmate Waleed was killed by Palestinian jihadis. I had cousins die in the Golan Heights. For years I carried the hatred those losses earned, hatred for Palestinians, hatred for Jews. There are many peace-loving Muslims in spite of Islam, not because of it, and I am not speaking against them; I am speaking against an ideology that permits the killing of the kafir and the seizure of his land, and calls it obedience to God.

Subscribe now

What changed me was not politics and not time. It was the Gospel. I asked God to forgive the hatred in me, and I trusted that Christ had paid the penalty I owed and risen to give me power over sin. I became a different man, able to feel compassion for all people, ready to ask God’s blessing on every nation. That is why I have given my life to Christ, and why I founded Crescent Project. In the years since, I have spoken with hundreds of Muslims, many of them once drawn to jihad, and I have found the same thing in them again and again: a thirst. A thirst for a God who is near and who saves. You cannot satisfy that thirst with seawater, and Islam is seawater.

This is where the Church has work to do. Speaking the truth about Islam is not Islamophobia, it is love. Christ told us the truth would set people free, and I have watched it do so. Many Muslims are leaving Islam now, turning away from an ideology that divides the world into believer and unbeliever. Some have come to Christ; some have not yet. But the door is open, and the people on the other side of it are thirsty.

Fouad Masri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

On the first morning of the war, in late February, the strikes found the Supreme Leader. Ali Khamenei had spent his final years in a bunker so deep the elevator took five minutes to reach him. It was not deep enough. Much of the military high command died with him. In the months that followed, the proxy crescent he had strung across the region, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and the client already lost in Damascus, came apart. The currency collapsed. By every ordinary measure, a state takes blows like these and falls.

This one didn’t.

The memorandum brokered through Pakistan and signed in Versailles is not the record of Iran’s defeat. It is the record of its survival, and for a regime built to outlast every man inside it, survival is the only victory that counts.

To see why a war meant to humble Tehran has ended up enriching it, you have to find the assumption underneath American policy, the belief that prosperity dissolves conviction. Feed a people into global markets, reconstruction contracts, oil revenue, and the comforts of modern life, and in time they’ll trade their grievances for growth.

Subscribe now

This belief belongs to the entire post–Cold War West. Republicans and Democrats alike have bet that commerce would tame ideology, a conviction with a long pedigree. It runs from Montesquieu, who held that trade softens men and quiets nations, through Francis Fukuyama, who declared liberal capitalism the end of history, down to the creed of Davos.

In January, a revolt over a collapsing currency spread to more than two hundred cities across Iran. The regime answered with rifles. The killing peaked on the eighth and ninth of the month, and then the state cut the country’s internet and worked in the dark. Around fifty thousand people were arrested in the weeks that followed. Detainees were tortured, and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented rape among the methods.

President Trump, that winter, named the regime as murderers and vowed the men responsible would be tried and executed.

Those are the men now sitting across the table. The administration that called them killers in January is, by June, lifting their sanctions, thawing their accounts, reopening their ports, and helping raise a reconstruction fund of at least three hundred billion dollars.

Article Five of The Islamic Republic’s constitution lodges authority not in the will of the people but in the guardianship of the jurist—Velayat-e Faqih—held in trust during the absence of the Hidden Imam. The preamble hands the Revolutionary Guard with the mission of guarding a revolution and carrying it beyond the border. Other armies defend a country. The IRGC was built to defend an idea.

When the strikes killed the Supreme Leader, it was the Guard that closed ranks and chose the next one; the office passed from father to son. The Guard and its Basij were the hands that did the killing in the streets in January. And through its engineering empire and its web of front companies, the Guard is also one of the largest economic actors in the country, with its hands on construction, energy, and trade.

So, when the memorandum says “Iran,” the reconstruction billions and the unfrozen accounts don’t settle on some abstraction called the nation. Given the Guard’s reach, any recovery will flow back to the one institution that survived the war, named the new leader, and ran the massacre, the institution whose written purpose is to export the revolution.

What Iran gives, it gives an “affirmation” that it won’t build a bomb, a promise, or a lie, that was made over and over again. The enriched uranium stays in the country, and the things that make Iran a revolution rather than a state, the ballistic missiles, the proxy armies, Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis, aren’t in the text at all.

This is not an Iranian peculiarity. The 2020 Doha agreement made the Taliban a partner. The movement waited out the most powerful coalition on earth and walked back through the gate. What it has built since is in the United Nations’ own reporting: al-Qaeda has reopened training camps and madrasas, moves freely across much of the country, and its leadership now openly calls the faithful to come train in Afghanistan and go out to strike Western targets. A country the West spent twenty years and a trillion dollars to deny to terror is, once again, terror’s preferred address.

Syria runs the same play. Ahmed al-Sharaa, until recently Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, a man whose career ran through al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, is now received in the oval office as a partner. Over the last year and a half, his jihadists massacred the Alawites, Druze, and Christians of Syria.

Subscribe now

Qatar has spent a generation buying the satellite channels, the endowed chairs, the institutes and lobbyists that carry political Islam into the center of Western life, and funding Hamas along the way. Turkey supplies the harder currency of politics and arms, casting itself as protector of the Islamic project and now standing behind the new order in Damascus. The US enters both in its ledgers as allies and never asks what the money is for.

A president who built his name on the art of the deal does not seem to grasp that some men cannot be bought into the circle he is selling. The wager beneath all of it is that prosperity dissolves conviction, that a jihadist made rich will become a partner. It is a delusion. A rich jihadist in Syria does not abandon the caliphate; he funds it. A rich jihadist in Iran does not abandon the imamate; he rebuilds the Guard that carries it. The rich jihadists of Qatar have had a generation to prove the point, and they spent their fortune not on joining the modern world but on exporting the very project the West keeps trying to purchase its way out of. Wealth does not soften that kind of conviction. It arms it. And a deal that hands these men money, ports, and time has not bought peace. It has made a down payment on the next war.

Ali Siadatan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

More From IDI

One such community is the Assyrians, also known as Syriacs.

Ancient Mesopotamia was home to a number of different groups of peoples and civilizations. However, historical evidence demonstrates that Assyrians are indigenous to the land with a long and glorious history in the region. With a calendar dating back to 6,776 years, Assyrians contributed greatly to a region which is often referred to as Cradle of Civilization. From agricultural innovation, trade and commerce, record keeping, literature, governance, and military organization, Assyrians played a monumental role in the development of the world civilization.

The Assyrian Empire was a dominant ancient Mesopotamian civilization that expanded from its heartland in present-day Iraq to unite most of the Middle East. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was the largest and most powerful Assyrian state. It lasted from 911 BC to 609 BC. For 300 years, Assyrian kings ruled the largest empire the world had yet known.

For more than two millennia, Assyrians have been a people without a state. This began with the fall of the empire and sack of Nineveh in 612 BCE.

Assyrians are also one of the first nations to embrace the Christian faith. According to the Assyrian Church of the East, within a generation following the death of Jesus, Apostle Thomas, Saint Bartholomew and Saint Addai converted the Assyrian people to Christianity.

To this day, Assyrians continue speaking a version of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. “Aramaic was a broader family of languages,” said Dr Nicholas Al-Jeloo, a prominent expert of Assyrian and Middle East history. “Jesus spoke Galilean Aramaic and Assyrians speak Assyrian Aramaic.”

The Aramaic language has immense historical and religious significance. It became the official language of the Assyrian Empire (722 BC), as well as the subsequent Babylonian and Achaemenid Empires (539–331 BC). These administrations adopted it as the language of governance and official communication.

Dr. Efrem Yildiz, a full Professor at the Department of Philology of the University of Salamanca in Spain, told IDI Center:

“Aramaic is a linguistic branch within the Semitic family that developed into a variety of linguistic forms spoken by various peoples in different regions. Although the Assyrian language belongs to the Aramaic branch and retains its grammatical structure in this language and is largely rooted in the Aramaic linguistic tradition, its ethnolinguistic identity is fundamentally Assyrian.”

The contiguous territory that forms the traditional Assyrian homeland includes parts of southern and south-eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria. For at least four thousand years, this land has been known as Assyria.

Subscribe now

Yet today, it is majority-Muslim. Assyrians experience threats to their existence within their indigenous homeland because their population has decreased as a result of centuries-long persecution at the hands of Islam.

This began with the Islamic conquests of the Middle East.

Following the seventh century Arabic and later Ottoman invasions of the Middle East, the Assyrians (as well as other non-Muslims) were reduced to persecuted communities. For centuries, Islamic supremacists have placed a target on indigenous peoples due to their religious beliefs and ethnic identities. Muslim rulers turned them into dhimmis, second-class subjects of Islamic empires who were obliged to pay a poll tax called jizya to be able to remain Christians or Jewish.

Hannibal Travis, a Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law, noted in his article “Native Christians Massacred: The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians during World War I:”

“With the Arab conquests of Mesopotamia and neighboring Persia and Syria, as well as Armenia, Egypt, and the Levant, the Eastern Christian peoples fell to a subordinate status. Arab officials decreed the destruction of many churches, the cessation of Christian religious services, the deportation of Christians from the land, the expropriation of their property, and the executions of those who resisted.”

“For more than a thousand years before Mesopotamia and Persia fell under Turkish domination, Turks had begun infiltrating Mesopotamia from Central Asia, as nomads and imported slaves. The Seljuk Turks seized power from the Baghdad caliphs in the eleventh century, only to be overthrown by the murderous Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan, Hulagu Khan, and Timur the Lame. These forces massacred thousands of people and destroyed many ancient cities, claiming countless Assyrian churches and [lives of the] faithful and driving the Assyrian community into the nearly inhospitable Hakkari mountains.”

During the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turks re-conquered Mesopotamia. They retained control until World War I. This era was defined by violent territorial conflicts with Safavid Persia and distinct periods of semi-autonomous governance by Georgian Mamluks.

Historians record that the first massacre of Assyrians in modern times occurred in the 1840s in northern Mesopotamia. Professor Travis writes:

“The Ottoman Turks allowed the Assyrians to be massacred by the Kurdish chieftain Badr Khan Bey, who summoned the surrounding Muslim population to a ‘Holy War,’ killing 10,000 Assyrians, enslaving many women and children, and ravaging villages. Turkish soldiers and their Kurdish allies murdered the Christians of half a dozen Mesopotamian Christian villages; the surviving women and children were kidnapped and enslaved. Slavery was a common fate of Ottoman Christians in the nineteenth century.”

The Christian persecution in the Ottoman Empire culminated in the Assyrian, Armenian and Greek Genocides of 1914-23. Professor Joseph Yacoub writes in his book “Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, A History,”

“The advent of the First World War gave the Young Turks and the Ottoman government the opportunity to exterminate the Assyrians in a series of massacres and atrocities inflicted on a people whose culture dates back millennia and whose language, Aramaic, was spoken by Jesus. Systematic killings, looting, rape, kidnapping and deportations destroyed countless communities and created a vast refugee diaspora. As many as 300,000 Assyro-Chaldean-Syriac people were murdered and a larger number forced into exile.”

“The ‘Year of the Sword’ (Seyfo) in 1915 was preceded over millennia by other attacks on the Assyrians and has been mirrored by recent events, not least the abuses committed by Islamic State.”

Professor Travis adds:

“The evidence is overwhelming that Turks and their Kurdish allies massacred tens, and more likely hundreds, of thousands of Assyrians in order to exterminate the Christian population; raped and enslaved hundreds, and more likely thousands, of Assyrian women in a systematic fashion; and deported the Assyrians en masse from their ancestral lands under conditions that led to famine and widespread death.”

Even following the genocide, the persecution against Assyrians did not end in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It was followed by the 1923-24 massacres in Hakkari, Turkey, the 1933 Simele massacre in Iraq, the Islamic Revolution of Iran that severely restricted freedoms for Assyrians and other Christians, the emergence and growth of al-Qaeda since 2004, and the 2014 genocide committed by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.

The Simele massacre and the earlier Armenian and Assyrian Genocides in Ottoman Turkey were direct inspirations for lawyer Raphael Lemkin when he coined the term “genocide” and advocated for its recognition in international law.

The Current State of Assyrians Within and Beyond the Middle East

According to a May 2026 report by the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), the Assyrian communities in Iraq and Syria continue to face violence, displacement, and political marginalization which threaten their survival in their ancestral homeland. The organization called for the protection of Assyrian rights, land, cultural heritage, and meaningful political inclusion.

Subscribe now

Global Assyrian populations are currently estimated to range between 3 million and 5 million worldwide. In the diaspora, the Assyrian community continues to learn its native language— particularly through their churches. Yet, some public schools have also been founded. Australia’s Assyrian schools, St. Hurmizd Assyrian Primary School and St Narsai Assyrian Christian College, for instance, are located in Western Sydney and successfully help Assyrian students thrive.

According to a 2017 report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

“In the 15 years since St. Hurmizd was founded, the Assyrian primary school in Western Sydney has grown from a cohort of 85 students, to more than 700.”

“As the only school in the Western world offering Assyrian faith and language classes, it’s perhaps no wonder St. Hurmizd’s has expanded at such a fast pace.”

Turkey

In Turkey, Assyrians are denied rights to receive an education in their mother tongue. They are denied cultural autonomy and the establishment of their own communal schools. This has been the case ever since they were excluded from the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the final treaty which concluded World War I and settled many issues, including the rights of religious minorities in the country. Assyrians are still not officially recognized as a distinct ethnic minority in Turkey.

Yet, Assyrians are one of Turkey’s indigenous peoples. Tur Abdin, an ancient region in southeastern Turkey, means “Mountain of the Servants of God” in the Aramaic language. It is the historic, spiritual heartland of the Assyrian people in Turkey. According to a report in the Assyria Post:

“Tur Abdin, one of the regions of Assyria most severely affected by genocide, persecution, and emigration, still boasts fifteen villages inhabited exclusively by Assyrians. Many of the other Assyrian villages in the region have a strong Assyrian presence but have been settled partly by Kurdish settlers. A number of villages, however, have been completely taken over by Kurdish settlers to the region.”

The last Assyrian/Syriac school in the city of Mardin in Tur Abdin closed in 1928, leaving the community without formal education in its mother tongue for decades.

That changed in 2014 following a legal battle. Some activists of the Assyrian community applied to Turkey’s Ministry of National Education in 2012 for permission and support to open a Syriac kindergarten in Istanbul. When their application was rejected, they began a legal struggle and were finally able to open the Mor Efrem kindergarten without any economic support from the government.

\Unfortunately, there is still not an Assyrian/Syriac elementary school in Turkey where the graduates of Mor Efrem could enroll. The officials of the Virgin Mary Ancient Syriac Church Foundation in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul stated in 2017 that it was impossible for them to open an elementary school without governmental support.

Nine years later, the Mor Efrem Kindergarten remains the only school in Turkey where the community’s native language is formally taught.

Speaking to Mezopotamya Agency on February 20, Evgil Türker, President of the Syriac Associations Federation (SÜDEF) based in Midyat, said that “There is no other school.” Ahead of International Mother Language Day on February 21, Türker described the language’s decline as both rapid and deeply concerning.

“Syriac [Aramaic] once spread across Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and almost all of Turkey,” he said. “It influenced many other languages and made important contributions to Arabic. But today it faces a serious danger.”

As governments in the Middle East have severely restricted or even ended the institutional use of the language of Assyrians/Syriacs, Arabic has eventually become dominant across much of the region.

“In Syria, Lebanon, Iraq—even in some parts of Turkey—our language was replaced by Arabic,” Türker said. “Today, I would say that 80 percent of Syriacs from Syria speak Arabic as their mother tongue.”

Emigration has further accelerated the decline. Beginning in the 1980s, large numbers of Syriacs/Assyrians were forced to leave southeast Turkey as a result of the war between the Turkish army and the Kurdish PKK. Many emigrated to Europe. As communities shrank in Tur Abdin, so did the everyday use of the language.

“In the Botan region, Syriac/Assyrian was once the strongest spoken language,” Türker said. “In Midyat, even Kurdish families who had lived there for 150 or 200 years spoke Syriac. It was the dominant language in the market, in the streets, and in schools.”

Today, he said, that reality has reversed. “Our children speak Turkish among themselves. When I started school in 1972, I did not know a single word of Turkish.”

Under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Greeks, Armenians and Jews in Turkey were recognized as minorities with certain educational rights. Assyrian/Syriac community leaders state that these protections should be extended to their community, as well.

“If we are citizens, if we have this right, and if Lausanne is considered one of the most important agreements, then the state must uphold it. It must finance our schools,” Türker said. “If the Ministry of National Education has a budget, there should be a budget for these [Assyrian/Syriac] schools, as well.”

Türker called on church foundations, civil society organizations and Assyrian/Syriac institutions abroad to work together:

“It should be one of our primary tasks. Otherwise, there is a serious danger even in the places where our people use Syriac extensively… We need to build a school in Midyat. We need to create such a school and ensure that our children are educated in their own mother tongue. Otherwise, we will disappear.”

He also called on local governments to revive earlier initiatives promoting multilingualism. In 2014 and 2015, some municipalities in southeastern Turkey adopted a “multilingual municipality” model reflecting the region’s linguistic diversity, including Syriac/Assyrian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic. Those efforts stalled in subsequent years amid political changes and the appointment of state trustees in place of elected mayors.

One hopeful development was the 2025 initiative led by Adem Coşkun, an expert on the history of the Assyrian/Syriac people and president of the Tur Abdin Institute. Coskun launched the first Syriac language class in the history of the Turkish Republic in March of 2025 in the town of Midyat. He taught Syriac to 29 students over the three-month course. In an interview with the newspaper Agos, Coskun said: “The Syriac people must preserve their mother tongue.”

Syria

Since the 1920s in Syria, constitutions have exclusively recognized Arabic as the official language. While widely preserved in liturgical and cultural spheres, Syriac, Aramaic or Assyrian is not legally recognized as a national language or integrated into official state education or administrative documents. Hence, this language remains institutionally unrecognized in Syria.

Assyrian/Syriac groups in Syria are actively campaigning for their native language to be constitutionally recognized as an indigenous national language. Their key demands include its integration into the public education system, use in official state institutions, and guaranteed representation in the country’s constitution.

Subscribe now

The conquest of the Syrian capital of Damascus by al-Qaeda affiliated forces of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in December 2024 has severely escalated Christian persecution in the country. The past year has seen a sharp increase in the murder of Christians, and attacks on churches—including the bombing of a church in Damascus in June 2025.

Christian communities are increasingly targeted by violence, discrimination and marginalization. Churches are subjected to insults, bombings and intimidation, including leaflets demanding conversion or jizya. In public schools, Christian children face pressure to attend Islamic lessons—especially if no Christian teacher is present. Syria’s curriculum has been Islamized by the new regime, who has reframed history through an Islamic lens and removed female figures.

In an interview with the IDI Center, Professor Travis emphasized the dangers posed by the new regime in Syria against the country’s Christian minorities:

“Recent developments, including the rise of an extremist regime in Syria and its dispersion throughout the country of most persons who had been detained on suspicion of conspiring with ISIS to destroy minority religions, languages, and cultural heritage, represent an extraordinary threat to Assyrians’ Article 1 and Article 27 rights under the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). The decision of the United States, some European countries, and other countries to proclaim a false dawn of freedom, democracy, human rights, and stability prevailing in the country will only serve to drive nails into the coffins of the Assyrian communities that formerly resided in Aleppo, Qamishli, and Hasakah province along the Khabur river prior to the ISIS-related invasions of foreigners from Turkey, Iraq, Libya, and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.”

Iran

In Iran, the Assyrian community is repressed. The organization Open Doors reports that although Assyrian and Armenian Christians are recognized by the Iranian state, they are treated as second-class citizens who are subject to systematic human rights abuses with restrictions on language use and contact with Persian-speaking Christian converts. They also face legalized discrimination in marriage rights, inheritance laws, and restrictions on employment opportunities. Open Doors adds:

“The state’s control of over 80% of the economy enables systematic discrimination, with Armenian and Assyrian Christians facing business obstacles while other Christians rarely receive business permits. The mandatory hijab requirement applies to all women regardless of faith. All high government positions are reserved for Shia Muslims, with Christians banned from public office except for three token parliamentary seats allocated to Armenian and Assyrian representatives. In addition, Armenian and Assyrian Christians’ children face mandatory Islamic classes.”

In Iran, the right to obtain official public education in the Assyrian language is heavily restricted; the Iranian constitution mandates Persian as the sole language of instruction in the public system.

Dr. Eden Naby, an independent scholar who specializes in religious and ethnic minorities of the Middle East, noted in her 2006 article,

“The dwindling of the Middle East’s non-Muslim population is nowhere more clearly observable than among Assyrians, the last substantive Aramaic speaking population of the world. With the establishment of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the Assyrian population dropped within a decade from 100,000 to 20,000.”

Directive #62123 of Aban 20, 1360 (October 13, 1981) from the Tehran provincial office of education, “sent alarm throughout the Assyrian community,” wrote Dr. Naby:

“The strict enforcement of such directives from the Ministry of Education and Training—and especially from the Ministry of Culture and Religious Guidance—led to eventual disintegration of Assyrian schools. Assyrian schools were forced to accept Muslim principals to conform to the law forbidding non-Muslims to serve as head administrators of any organization. Clearly this decision affected other minorities as well, including the Jews, Zoroastrians, and Armenians. Moreover, Assyrian schoolgirls were obligated to wear the hijab (veil) in accordance with Muslim Shari’a law. The schools were also forced to introduce Koranic instruction into the curriculum, as they accepted Muslim students.”

Iraq

In Iraq, the ancient homeland of Assyrians and where their ancient cities of Assur and Nineveh once stood, Assyrians maintain some public schools. These schools are located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).

Although 22 Assyrian schools reportedly remain operational across the region, eight have closed in recent years due to sustained population decline in Assyrian villages. These schools produce strong academic outcomes despite the challenges they face such as chronic underfunding and insufficient infrastructure, the Assyria Post reported in April 2026:

“As Assyrian schools continue to operate under mounting financial, institutional, and demographic pressures, their survival remains inseparable from the survival of the Assyrian language itself. Without meaningful government support and long-term investment, one of the most significant achievements in modern Assyrian education risks gradual erosion, along with the cultural identity it was created to protect.”

Sam Darmo is a prominent Assyrian-American activist and the head of the “Assyrians for Justice,” a US-based organization that advocates for the rights, cultural heritage, and protection of the Assyrian people. He credits the Assyrian Church of the East for the preservation of the Assyrian language.

In an interview with IDI Center, Dermo said that the Assyrian schools in the Kurdistan region of Iraq need remodeling and better infrastructure. His organization has relayed those requests to the Kurdish administration during their visit to the region. He said:

“Unemployment is a major problem throughout Iraq, which is forcing the youths to leave the country in large numbers. Another major problem is the confiscation of Assyrian lands and properties by some Kurdish individuals. We are working on a daily basis to resolve those issues, help our Assyrian people maintain their property rights and help them live on their lands in freedom and safety.”

As the persecution of Assyrians in Iraq remains ongoing, they need wider political representation, security, civil rights, and cultural autonomy. Many members of the Assyrian community request an autonomous region or protected districts for Assyrians in Iraq, their ancient homeland, as the community faces growing pressures from multiple actors in Iraq—such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. The European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ) calls this threat:

“Iran’s project of establishing a Shiite crescent, in which Christians are merely obstacles to be moved aside.”

The ECLJ issued a report on May 26 entitled “Iraqi Christians: An Ancient People Driven into Exile:”

“Christians are not only leaving in pursuit of a better future,” the report said. “They are being pushed out by various political and military actors who view this minority as an obstacle to their strategic goals. This is particularly true of the Shiite militias of the Popular Mobilization Forces (Hachd al-Chaabi), which number between 140,000 and 238,000 fighters. Supported by Iran, they form a powerful, largely uncontrolled faction within the Iraqi army, with growing political and military influence. In the Nineveh Plains, these militias are gradually taking over territory, checkpoints, and establishing Shiite settlements in traditionally Christian areas. The Hammurabi Organization denounces this and proposes countermeasures: ‘We are witnessing a real demographic shift—they are distributing land to Shiites in Christian areas. We demand the creation of protected districts where land would be reserved for Christians!’”

Meanwhile, a large group of Assyrian Christians is currently seeking refuge in countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The Iraqi Christian Relief Council (which is now called the “Here I Am Charitable Foundation”) has helped those refugees for years. In an interview with IDI Center, Juliana Taimoorazy, a leading Assyrian-American advocate and founding president of the Here I Am Charitable Foundation, said:

“In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Assyrian parents, much like their ancestors who were forced to escape their homes, decided to leave to save their children from imminent danger. Between 2003 and 2026, over 90 percent of the Christian population left Iraq, with most seeking refuge in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan where they endured dehumanizing living conditions. Prohibited from working, burdened by exorbitant cost of living, lack of adequate medical care, and limited access to safe educational opportunities for their children are all conditions that deprived them of their dignity and created an environment that posed real dangers to their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. These children who endured such hardship have come to be known as the ‘lost generation.’ The memory of their suffering and resilience has become one of the defining narratives in the modern history of the Assyrians of Iraq, shaping our identity in exile.”

Legal Framework for the Protection of Assyrians and Their Language

In an interview with IDI Center, Professor Travis, a legal scholar who focuses on global human rights, said that the question of what could be done to support the Assyrian language “can be helpfully thought of in four ways: Lemkin’s anti-genocide perspective, minorities treaties and national-minorities law, universal human rights law, and national indigenous language policy innovation.” He explains:

“First, Raphael Lemkin considered genocide to be a mosaic of activities to limit population numbers and resistance by interfering with biological and cultural processes of group reproduction. In the Assyrian case, as with other small indigenous groups, mass killings combined with drastic reductions in the number and strength of cultural and religious institutions like schools, churches, and nationalist movements led to forcible and adaptive assimilation and language loss, which may be irreversible. “

“In the Genocide Convention and post-World War II political practice, legal judgments against perpetrators along with measures on behalf of victim group survival are a main bulwark against the elimination of ethnical, national, and religious groups. The Assyrians qualify as three of these group types by virtue of their language and historical ties to kin, language, and specific lands (ethnical); traditions of self-rule particularly as quasi-independent tribes under loose empires and later millet systems; and religious differences from other Christians such as the Catholics, Russian Orthodox, or Protestants who sought to displace their hereditary and ancient rites.

“Second, the minorities treaties of the interwar period and the subsequent UN and EU instruments on minorities and indigenous peoples establish a variety of helpful norms, which result in recommendations from groups like Helsinki Watch, Human Rights Watch, UN special rapporteurs, the European Court of Human Rights, etc. Here is a report by the Helsinki Watch, whose officials were experts in the 1990s on European minorities treaties and human-rights situations.

“The Greek and Assyrian situations in Turkey are similar in that both communities were reduced to a smaller numerical remnant than the Armenians or Kurds were in the 1909-1939 period.

“Third, universal human-rights law, while focused in the main on governments not prohibiting the use of minority languages in private or communal life as opposed to in public institutional settings, has a nexus with the anti-genocide prophetic teachings of Lemkin in the following respect:

‘[The UN] Human Rights Committee has pointed out that Article 1 of the ICCPR [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights], on the right to self-determination for ‘peoples’, may have significance on the interpretation of the individual rights in the Covenant, including Article 27. Indigenous peoples in particular have a way of life that is closely related to land, and there may therefore be a need to restrict states’ right to intervene in such lands. HRC [Human Rights Committee] General Comment No. 23, paragraph 3.2: ‘The enjoyment of the rights to which Article 27 relates does not prejudice the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a State party. At the same time, one or other aspect of the rights of individuals protected under that article—for example, to enjoy a particular culture—may consist in a way of life which is closely associated with territory and use of its resources. This may particularly be true of members of indigenous communities constituting a minority.’

Subscribe now

‘The content of indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination was a challenging question during the negotiations on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is assumed that the term, as used in ICCPR Article 1, refers to both external and internal right of self-determination, but that the threshold for requiring external right of self-determination (status as a state) is extremely high. Article 1 on ‘self-determination’ for ‘all peoples’ in both ICCPR and ICESCR [International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights] must be seen against the background of the decolonization that had taken place after World War II, and which was still an inflamed political theme in the 50s and 60s. In any case, Article 1 on self-determination must be read in the light of the provisions of the UN Charter on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. The wording of UNDRIP [United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] Articles 3, 4 and 5 reflects that indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination encompasses a right to internal self-determination within a state.

‘In several cases, the Human Rights Committee has pointed out that Article 1 of the ICCPR may be relevant to the interpretation of Article 27…

‘In two individual complaint cases on Sami rights in Finland from 2018, the Human Rights Committee emphasized the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination. HRC, Tiina Sanila-Aikio v Finland (Communication No. 2668/2015), Klemetti Näkkäläjärvi et al. v Finland.... In the decisions, the Committee expressed its view on the significance of ICCPR Article 27 in light of the right to self-determination. The Committee observed that Article 27, interpreted in the light of the Indigenous Declaration and ICCPR Article 1 on self-determination, gives indigenous peoples a fundamental right to ‘freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.’”

As for methods to support the language of Assyrians, Professor Travis says:

“There are various models for indigenous language promotion or revival. One might include in this trend the establishment of academies of sciences in various new states inhabited by peoples that had been subject to genocide in the preceding decades of the twentieth century. Or, for a different example, the establishment in Canada of a network of indigenous language instructional institutions in relation to the residential schools compensation system and Indigenous Services Canada.”

“The preservation of the Aramaic language is important for several reasons,” Dr. David Fischler, a pastor and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Here I Am Charitable Foundation, told IDI Center:

“One is that it’s the language of Jesus, and the Assyrians are still speaking it, giving them some unique insights into His words in the gospels. (The gospels were written in Greek, but there’s an Aramaic version, the Peshitta, that isn’t translated from the Greek that contains nuances that are uniquely Semitic.) A second is that as one of the oldest languages still being spoken (dating from circa 1100 B.C.), it has a connection to humanity’s origins in the Middle East unsurpassed by any other. Finally, every language encompasses a culture, which is why it’s always a tragedy to see a language die out. The Assyrian culture is one of the world’s oldest, and their Aramaic language is intimately tied to that culture.”

Other scholars also emphasize the significance of keeping Assyrian as a living language. Dr. Anahit Khosroeva, visiting professor at Harvard University, told IDI Center:

“The question is not only how the Assyrian language can survive, but how it can remain a living, intergenerational language rather than becoming primarily a liturgical, symbolic, or heritage language. Culturally, Assyrian must remain a language spoken in homes and families, not only in churches, cultural events, or heritage programs. We also need more literature, music, films, media, and youth activities in Assyrian so that the language remains relevant to everyday life. Intellectually, Assyrian must be developed as a language of modern knowledge. Scholars, educators, and institutions should create terminology for contemporary fields such as technology, science, economics, and politics. We need more books, research, digital resources, and educational materials in Assyrian so that the language can function in both academic and public life. Linguistically, we should work toward greater standardization in writing and education while respecting the richness of our dialects. At the same time, endangered dialects should be documented and preserved. The development of language-learning programs, digital tools, and artificial intelligence resources will also be essential for ensuring Assyrian’s place in the modern world.

“The future of Assyrian language depends on cooperation between communities in the Middle East and the Diaspora. The homeland provides historical continuity and cultural roots, while the Diaspora offers educational, technological, and institutional opportunities. If we strengthen language transmission, invest in cultural and intellectual production, and embrace modern technology, the Assyrian language can remain a living language for future generations rather than becoming merely a language of memory and heritage.”

Before Islamic military conquests, massacres, and persecution started in the seventh century, most of the Middle East and North Africa (including lands which are now called Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt, amongst others) were predominantly Christian. They were part of the Eastern Roman/ Byzantine Empire. There were large Jewish and other non-Muslim communities throughout. People spoke Greek, Assyrian/Aramaic/Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew, Coptic (an ancient Egyptian language), and other indigenous languages. The linguistic diversity existed long before Arabic or Turkish largely erased and then replaced many of these languages—a process that occurred simultaneously with Islamization.

After centuries of persecution, Assyrians should finally have an autonomous region in the Middle East to secure their survival in a Muslim-dominated region that is hostile to Christianity and to non-Arab and non-Turkish communities. The Assyrian language should enjoy official administrative and guaranteed educational status in its indigenous homelands in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. It should also be taught as an elective foreign language course at more universities in the West.

Some activities that could be carried out include the opening of Assyrian language schools, academic institutions, and research centers in the Middle East and the Assyrian diaspora. The governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria should be obliged to officially recognize the Assyrians, their language and their national and human rights, including their right to obtain education in their native language. Concrete actions should be taken to help this unique nation thrive and live in dignity in a way that their identity, language, rights, and freedoms will be recognized, respected, and protected.

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.