Sayyid Qutb was one of contemporary Islam’s most important theorists, and one of the most consequential shapers of Muslim Brotherhood ideology. His view of America is the Muslim Brotherhood’s view of America. His view is also the view of every modern Islamic movement. And it remains, to this day, the view of most Muslims, not their view of America alone, but of the entire West, with America at its head.

If we want to understand how the collective mind of the Middle East was programmed against America, we have to study what the films did, what the media did, what education did. Qutb’s thought is the model on which the media and the education systems of the Arab world were built over the last century.

Qutb had a project. It was built on hatred of the West: a Brotherhood project, an Islamic project, a project for a state, a project for the whole Middle East, a project to raise generations on hatred of the West and hatred of America. This is the Muslim Brotherhood’s project, it is Qatar’s project, it is Al Jazeera’s project, it is the project whose consequences we are living with today.

Who Was Sayyid Qutb?

Qutb was born in Egypt in 1906. He graduated from Dar al-Ulum University in Saudi Arabia in 1933, and then worked as an Arabic teacher, later as an inspector, and then in Egypt’s Ministry of Education. In 1948, Qutb was sent on an educational mission to the United States, funded by the Ministry of Education. He returned in 1950 and left the ministry in 1952.

Some people hold to a conspiracy theory that it was America that made him a radical; that the trip is what turned him. This is false, and the historical record refutes it. According to the historian Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal, it was he and Ismail al-Qabbani who proposed to place Qutb on the mission, even though he was unqualified, because he had been causing problems at the Ministry of Education. Qutb was forty-two, in poor health, with bad eyesight and other ailments. Neither his age nor his health would ordinarily qualify a man for such a mission.

The ministry of Education was moving in the direction of adopting Western curricula in education, and Qutb was among those who opposed this. He was not alone; there was a group of opponents. They sent him to the United States in the hope that his outlook would broaden and change, that he would see America for himself, do some comparison of educational curricula, observe how they were run there, and return reassured that Egypt should adopt what America had.

What actually happened is that he already hated America before he went there. He did not become a radical after his visit. He went as a man who already hated America, hated the West, hated Western curricula, wanted to overhaul the Ministry of Education. He had even started a journal, al-Fikr al-Jadid (The New Thought), before he left for the United States, with Muslim Brotherhood funding: al-Hajj Muhammad Helmy al-Minyawi, a Brotherhood member, was its financier. Qutb’s ideas already aligned with those of the Brotherhood, though he had not yet joined the organization formally, that came only later, in 1952.

Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1952, two years after his visit to America. He was arrested in 1954 accused of conspiring to overthrow the Egyptian government. He served ten years and was released in 1964. He was re-arrested in 1965 for leading a Muslim Brotherhood effort overthrow of what he saw as non-Islamic governments. He was tried and executed in 1966, sixty years ago this August 29.

In 1952, in al-Risala magazine he wrote:

“We will not be able to overcome this colonialism, unless we destroy it in our own feelings, and destroy with it the machinery that crushes our faith in ourselves: the machinery represented by the Ministry of Education and the institutes of pedagogy, and the treacherous, deformed pens.”

In his view, no pen that praises Western civilization or says it is superior to Egypt can be permitted. The curricula must go; the Ministry of Education must be destroyed.

“We must crush this machinery that once sang the praises of France, or England, or America, any one of them; we must grind them down.”

Did Qutb succeed? Look at the level to which education in Egypt has now sunk. Look at the extent of the hatred of the West and of Christianity. The Muslim Brotherhood project succeeded in destroying education in Egypt and across the Arab world. What Qutb himself could not do, they are doing now, and have done after him.

“Our First Enemy: The White Man”

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When you walk into the grand Casino du Liban in Jounieh, you are immediately transported back to a lost era. The walls of the entrance hall and main galleries are lined with large black-and-white photographs from the 1960s and early 1970s. There is President Camille Chamoun greeting foreign dignitaries; Charles Helou smiling beside international statesmen; Fairuz performing at the height of her fame; Hollywood stars and European royalty mingling with Lebanese elites at lavish parties; images of a confident, glamorous Beirut filled with elegance, possibility, and modernity. As you stand there, it is almost impossible not to pause and ask: What happened to Lebanon?

In the early 1960s, Israel’s Ministry of Tourism dispatched a high-level delegation to New York. Their mission was to sit down with one of America’s most prestigious advertising agencies and figure out how to transform Tel Aviv into another Beirut on the Mediterranean.

At that moment, Beirut stood as the undisputed crown jewel of the Middle East, a city routinely called “the Paris of the Orient.” In the 1960s, it was the financial capital of the Arab world. Gulf oil money flowed through its sophisticated banks, making Lebanon the region’s premier financial hub. It was the medical capital, home to the finest hospitals and specialist clinics, attracting patients from across the Middle East and beyond. It was the educational capital, anchored by the American University of Beirut, an institution so renowned that it was often described as the Harvard of the Middle East. Its campus, perched on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean, produced generations of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and intellectuals who would go on to shape the region.

Beirut’s streets hummed with cosmopolitan energy. Elegant French architecture lined the Corniche. Nightclubs, theaters, and cafés stayed open late. Fashion houses, art galleries, and publishing firms flourished. Tourists from Europe and the Gulf mingled with local elites. Lebanon’s economy boomed. Its currency, the Lebanese pound, was one of the strongest in the developing world. Its press was the freest in the Arab region. Its universities attracted the brightest minds. For a brief, glittering window, Beirut represented what the Middle East could have been: prosperous, open, and modern.

Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, along with substantial Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, and Protestant communities, had built and sustained the country’s most vital institutions. They had established the banking system, and nurtured the leading educational centers. They had built the hospitals that earned Lebanon its reputation, and cultivated a legal and political culture that allowed for greater freedom, pluralism, and economic dynamism than anywhere else in the Arab Middle East.

The Decline

While Lebanese Christians poured their energy into building, large segments of the Muslim population remained preoccupied with religiously motivated causes that had little to do with Lebanon. For many Muslims, Lebanon was never an end in itself. It was viewed as part of a larger Islamic ummah. The ultimate loyalty was not to the Lebanese republic but to the broader struggle against perceived enemies of Islam, chief among them the emerging Jewish state.

When the Arab-Israeli War broke out following Israel’s declaration of independence, Lebanon was under strong pressure from the Arab League to join the military coalition against the new Jewish state. Christian leaders, particularly the Maronites, were deeply reluctant. Many saw no strategic reason for Lebanon, a small, fragile, multi-confessional country, to risk its stability in a distant ideological conflict. Yet the Muslim political class, backed by pan-Arab sentiment and pressure from Cairo and Damascus, insisted that Lebanon must participate.

In the end, Lebanon sent only a token force, a single infantry battalion that saw limited action, but the decision to join the Arab coalition, however symbolic, marked the first time the young republic subordinated its own interests to a broader Islamic cause. Christian politicians, wary of being labeled traitors to the Arab nation, acquiesced. It was the beginning of a pattern that would repeat for decades: Christians compromising their own vision of Lebanon in the name of national unity, while Muslim leaders treated that unity as a tool to advance larger ideological objectives.

The pattern accelerated dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism presented itself as a secular, modernizing ideology. In reality, it served as a powerful vehicle for reasserting Islamic identity and political goals under a more palatable banner. Nasser’s radio broadcasts, his calls for Arab unity, and his fiery anti-Western and anti-Israel rhetoric resonated deeply with Lebanon’s Muslim population. For many Muslims, Nasser’s movement was not merely political; it tapped into long-standing religious sentiments about restoring Muslim power and dignity against historical enemies.

Christian leaders initially tried to accommodate this wave. They hoped Arab nationalism could be domesticated within Lebanon’s confessional system. Instead, it systematically undermined Christian political dominance. In the 1958 crisis, Muslim demands for greater power and closer alignment with Nasser’s United Arab Republic nearly tore the country apart. President Camille Chamoun, a Maronite, was forced to call in American Marines to restore order.

By the late 1960s, the arrival of armed Palestinian militias, the fedayeen of the PLO and other factions, and under intense pressure from Nasser’s Egypt and radical Arab states, the Lebanese government signed the Cairo Agreement. This infamous pact effectively granted the PLO extraterritorial rights inside Lebanon. Palestinian camps became sovereign enclaves beyond Lebanese army control. The south of the country was transformed into “Fatahland”, a de facto launching pad for cross-border attacks on Israel.

Lebanese Christians watched as their country was turned into a base for a foreign guerrilla war. The Palestinian cause was never really about Palestinian statehood in the eyes of Muslims; it was part of the larger Islamic struggle against the “Zionist entity.” Once again, Muslim leaders in Lebanon pressured the Christian political class to accept this arrangement in the name of Arab solidarity. Christians, still clinging to the dream of coexistence, compromised. The result was catastrophic. The PLO’s presence radicalized Lebanese Muslims, destabilized the south, and provoked Israeli retaliation. What began as “tolerance” for a supposedly secular nationalist cause became the vehicle for embedding a religiously driven war inside Lebanon itself.

After Israel’s 1982 invasion forced the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut and southern Lebanon, the underlying dynamic did not disappear. It simply mutated. In the power vacuum left by the departing Palestinians, a new force emerged: Hezbollah inherited the mantle of “resistance.” Unlike the PLO’s secular façade, Hezbollah presented its war against Israel not as jihad but as legitimate “national resistance”, a cause that even some secular Lebanese could be pressured to support.

Once again, parts of the Lebanese political class, including some Christians, were drawn into accommodating or at least not confronting this new actor. Hezbollah gradually entrenched itself in Lebanon’s institutions, built a parallel state in the south and the Shiite suburbs, and used the country’s resources, territory, and political system to pursue its religiously motivated objectives.

The pattern that destroyed Lebanon was always the same: Christians, driven by a genuine desire to build and coexist, repeatedly compromised with groups whose ultimate commitments were theological and expansionist. Muslims, whether under the banner of Arab nationalism or Palestinian liberation or “resistance,” consistently subordinated Lebanon’s national interest to a larger civilizational and religious struggle, with Israel as the central symbol of that struggle. Each concession was sold as pragmatism or unity. Each time, it further eroded the Christian-built foundations of the state.

The New Lebanon

The Christian-built West is being systematically transformed into the new Lebanon. What is happening today is a coherent process in which Islamic political causes, rebranded as secular and humanitarian struggles, have been granted entry into the very institutions Christians once created. The result is a coalition of convenience in which disparate groups, each with its own agenda, have converged on a common project: using the West as a launching pad against Israel while simultaneously hollowing out the West itself.

What was once openly declared as jihad now travels under more palatable banners: “Palestinian rights,” “anti-colonial resistance,” “global justice,” “intersectional liberation,” and “human rights.” These slogans allow Islamic supremacist goals to infiltrate Western universities, media, NGOs, political parties, and even churches without triggering the instinctive alarm that would have been raised in earlier generations. The cause remains the same, the theological and civilizational rejection of Jewish sovereignty and, by extension, of the Christian West that supports it, but the packaging has been updated for Western consumption.

This rebranding has proven extraordinarily effective at recruiting non-Muslim allies who would never openly embrace Islamic theology. The coalition is broad and seemingly contradictory, yet it holds together because each partner gains something vital from the weakening of the existing order.

Younger Westerners, particularly those educated in the last three decades, have been steeped in a narrative of civilizational guilt. They have been taught that their own societies are irredeemably racist, colonial, and oppressive. For them, aligning with the “oppressed”, currently embodied in the Palestinian cause, offers moral absolution and a sense of purpose. They do not see themselves as participants in a religious war; they see themselves as fighting for justice. Their hatred is not of Jews per se, but of the civilization that produced them. Israel becomes the perfect symbol of everything they have been conditioned to despise: Western success, military strength, and unapologetic particularism.

Traditional antisemites, both on the far right and among certain segments of the old left, have discovered in anti-Zionism a socially acceptable vehicle for their ancient hatred. What was once confined to fringe conspiracy theories or outright neo-Nazism can now be expressed in the respectable language of human rights reports, academic conferences, and street protests. Anti-Zionism has become the acceptable modern form of antisemitism, one that allows respectable people to traffic in the same tropes their grandparents would have recognized.

Communists and hard-left ideologues see in the Palestinian cause a continuation of their historic project. For them, Israel is the last outpost of Western capitalism and imperialism in the Middle East. Bringing it down is a necessary step toward dismantling the broader liberal order. They do not care about Islamic theology; they care about power. The alliance with Muslims is purely tactical, useful idiots on both sides, each believing they will ultimately prevail.

Globalists and one-world-order advocates view strong nation-states with distinct civilizational identities as obstacles. National sovereignty, cultural particularism, and the Judeo-Christian moral framework that undergirds the West stand in the way of their vision of borderless governance and homogenized humanity. By eroding the West’s confidence in its own foundations, they accelerate the transfer of power to supranational institutions and global norms. The Palestinian cause, with its universalist framing, serves as a useful battering ram against the particular.

And then there are the Muslims themselves, those operating from an explicitly Islamic framework. For them, the cause is theological. From the river to the sea is not a slogan about borders; it is a statement of eschatological intent. They are not seeking a two-state solution. They are advancing the same civilizational project that motivated the PLO, Nasserism, and now Hezbollah and Hamas: the eventual submission of the West to Islamic dominance, with Israel as the immediate and symbolic obstacle.

What makes this coalition so dangerous is that it is not coordinated from a single command center. It does not need to be. Each group brings its own institutional power, cultural capital, and demographic weight. The left controls the universities and much of the media. The globalists dominate international organizations and large foundations. Muslims provide the foot soldiers, the demographic momentum, and the uncompromising ideological core. Together, they have achieved what no single faction could have managed alone: the capture of Western moral language, the weaponization of Western institutions against the Jewish state, and the gradual erosion of the West’s will to defend itself.

The process mirrors Lebanon with eerie precision. In Lebanon, Christians believed they could contain and domesticate the forces arrayed against them. They compromised again and again in the name of unity. Each concession further empowered the very groups that ultimately destroyed the state they had built. Today, the West is making the identical mistake, only the stakes are global. The same tolerance that allowed Palestinian militias to turn southern Lebanon into “Fatahland” now allows ideological enclaves to function as bases for a larger civilizational assault.

The destruction is not coming through tanks and artillery this time. It is coming through lawfare, demographic transformation, institutional capture, and the steady hollowing out of cultural self-confidence. The West is being turned into a platform, a new launching pad, from which the war against Israel, and ultimately against the Christian civilizational order that made the modern West possible, can be waged more effectively than ever before.

And like Lebanon before it, the West is financing its own demise. Its universities train the activists who march against it. Its media amplifies the narratives that delegitimize it. Its legal systems are being used to shield those who seek its replacement. Its political class, terrified of being called intolerant, continues to extend the very tolerance that is being weaponized against it.

The Christian-built West is repeating Lebanon’s error on a civilizational scale. The question is how far it will be allowed to go before the realization comes, too late, as it did in Beirut.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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Why is the greatest civilization in history so insanely intent on committing collective seppuku? Why has the West regressed from a super-civilized society into the great herd of Gadarene swine stampeding wildly and drowning itself in the sea as in Mark’s Gospel?

Since James Burnham penned his landmark Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism in 1964, historians, sociologists, and philosophers have spilled barrels of ink attempting to answer the enigma of Western self-immolation. As it happens, the “suicide of the West” is now a genre in its own right.

Gad Saad, an evolutionary psychologist who has become a social media sensation because he can speak in a style accessible to the commoner, straddle East and West with the dexterity of a cheetah, but most importantly, because his two-word diagnosis of the West’s hara-kiri has gone viral. For Saad, the psychotropic intoxicant fueling the West’s lunacy is “suicidal empathy.”

Shortly after Saad’s book hit the stands in mid-May, “suicidal empathy” rapidly became a byword to explain Western irrationality. Remarkably, each time I pen a piece on some new lunacy pushed by Western governments, academia, the medical establishment, or even Pope Leo XIV and send it to friends, they almost always chime back with two words: “suicidal empathy.”

Saad’s Jewish family was forced to flee Lebanon and emigrate to Canada to escape the Islamic Jew-hatred plaguing the land of his birth. With Canada now leading the West in pathological empathy, there couldn’t be a better illustration of “out of the frying pan into the fire.” Saad is writing from inside the furnace: it’s what gives his book its evocative voice and diagnostic depth.

The British historian Arnold Toynbee had already postulated that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Saad’s key contribution is to field the question of civilizational kamikaze from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. He builds on his 2020 book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, which explored how human cognition can misfire when it becomes “zombified by ideological rapture.”

Saad defines suicidal empathy as the “orgiastic misfiring” of empathy, one of our most noble virtues. Our evolutionary mechanism has hardwired us to be empathetic whether in romantic mate choice, making friends, or in the caring professions like nursing.

While psychopaths lack empathy, there are also psychiatric disorders involving a display of indiscriminate hyperempathy. Our empathy system could also be “hijacked in suboptimal ways” without necessarily being concomitant with a mental disorder, Saad warns, as in the case of “compassion fatigue.”

Similarly, suicide can be viewed through an evolutionary lens “as the activation of evolutionary-based forms of altruism.” It could be understood as noble and virtuous—Saad cites examples of a radical commitment to one’s belief system (death cults), ultimate devotion (Romeo and Juliet), a means of expiation (seppuku), or an alternative to something far worse (Jews at Masada).

“Suicidal empathy” is the bastard child of Mr. Virtuous Martyrdom and Mrs. Orgiastic Compassion. The suicidally empathetic person engages in this form of ritual disembowelment as the supreme path to attaining and parading one’s virtue. Like Narcissus, they take hubristic pride in their superior virtue. The disorder then spreads like a contagion through society. “Suicidal empathy is a deadly contagion of one of our most noble virtues,” Saad warns. “If not properly contained, it will destroy the West.”

Saad cites the classic illustration of suicidal empathy from Aesop’s fables: an orgiastically compassionate farmer sees a viper freezing to death and tucks it into his coat to keep it warm. The snake bites the farmer as soon as it recovers. One of the many human tales of orgiastic empathy in the book is that of Karsten Nordal Hauken, a Norwegian man raped by a Somali immigrant. When a Norwegian judge decided to deport the rapist back to Somalia, Hauken was traumatized, worrying that his rapist might lead a difficult life in his homeland.

A central argument of Saad’s book hinges on a paradigm shift in Western epistemology (the theory of knowledge). For centuries, Western civilization was predicated on the rigour of the scientific method—the epistemology for seeking truth. It is what contributed to Western greatness and superiority. Jettisoning an epistemology of truth in favour of an epistemology of care leads to a grotesquely perverse epistemological empathy: “I empathize, therefore I am.”

Saad explains how the West was built on deontological principles. Misguided empathy, however, uses consequentialist rather than deontological ethics. Progressive academia, for example, censors “forbidden knowledge” by banning sensitive research topics lest they lead to “negative consequences” for “marginalized” communities. If research on a topic finds Blacks superior on a given task, it is celebrated. If the results find whites superior, it must be binned. One must, of course, be empathetic to serial plagiarism if practised by Black academics like Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Saad’s book was released just before the scandal of Cambridge University’s Jason Arday.

Paradoxically, “marginalized” communities like Muslim migrants may be intent on destroying the host community that welcomes them. But the host refuses to distinguish between embracing the in-group while remaining cautious of the out-group. We do not mete out our “empathy equally to all,” Saad writes. “Suicidal empathy eradicates this evolutionary-based calculus.” In this twisted scheme, there are, nevertheless, out-groups like the Jews who, despite their status as an “out-group,” must never be the recipients of empathy.

Saad applies the construct of “suicidal empathy” to the entire gamut of Western brain sickness, showing how it demonstrates a preferential option for the diversity, inclusion, and equity cult over meritocracy, illegal aliens over citizens, criminals over victims, squatters over homeowners, transwomen over biological women, drag queens over children’s innocence, Hamas over Zionists, socialism over capitalism, wanton foreign aid over judicious reciprocity, and Islam over all other religions.

Saad draws on a range of diverse scholarship, from economist Thomas Sowell’s book on how self-congratulation becomes a destructive basis for policymaking to ethicist Peter Singer’s idea of expanding our moral circle to animals. The book is packed with hair-raising illustrations of the catastrophic cancer of suicidally empathetic policies that are rapidly devouring the West.

Readers who reject evolutionary biology or psychology can still benefit from Saad’s conclusions, while remaining hermeneutically suspicious of his methodological tool. In a later edition, Saad might perhaps delve deeper into the question of why the West has a unique penchant for suicidal empathy. Can evolutionary biology explain this phenomenon?

Why is it that the 57 member states in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation or the 22 Arab countries are unwilling to display the same level of empathy and rehome Gazan refugees? Why do Singapore, Japan, or India not exhibit extravagant empathy as do Germany or Sweden?

Would a metaphysical explanation of how the West is rooted in biblical ethics of compassion and love for the Other, even the enemy, offer a better way to understand the West’s madness by positing that in a post-Christian context it has turned the biblical imperative to love the other into a heresy?

G.K. Chesterton defined heresy as “a truth taught out of proportion.” In his book Orthodoxy, he elaborated: “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” In a West that has rejected its biblical foundations, it is almost as if a hubris-filled collective is enthroning itself as divine by replicating what the God of the Bible has done for humanity by dying for us “while we were his enemies,” as the Jewish rabbi Paul would write to the Romans.

The Messiah suffered and died to save us in the “out-group” by atoning for our sins—a concept Jesus derived from the Servant Songs of the prophet Isaiah. Godless Westerners reject the Gospel, yet with a self-affirming messianism and savior complex, they believe they are saving the ‘marginalized’ other by ‘dying to be kind’ and becoming self-canonized martyrs.

Policymakers, pastors, and Pope Leo XIV would benefit from reading this book. It might stem the nauseating tide of saccharine suicidal empathy oozing from politicians and pulpits of many churches and from platitudinous papal disquisitions that read as if Greta Thunberg had ghostwritten them. A health warning: do not take the book with you on a beach holiday. It contains too many horror stories of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomes is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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The West, Aleksandr Dugin says, has mistaken its own historical experience for a universal model. Individual rights, liberal democracy, freedom of conscience, these are not truths applicable to all of humanity. They are the products of one particular civilization that has arrogantly imposed itself on the rest of the world. His multipolarity is presented as the cure: let Russia be Russia, let Iran be Iran, let China be China. The West has no right to demand that you become like it.

It sounds, on the surface, like a defense of diversity. It is not. It is a philosophical project to abolish the only principles that have ever given ordinary people, inside Russia, inside Iran, inside China, the standing to resist the power of those who rule them. What Dugin calls the cage of Western universalism is, for the dissident in a Moscow prison, the only key that exists.

Western civilization produced a specific set of ideas about the relationship between the individual and power. Every human being possesses an inherent dignity that no ruler, state or collective can erase, not earned through service to the state, not granted by government in exchange for loyalty, but existing before the state and placing limits on what it may do. Law stands above rulers. The king is not the source of law. He is subject to it. Conscience precedes political authority. What a person believes, how he worships, what he says, these are not gifts from the government, revocable at its pleasure. They belong to the person before any government exists. Rights are not granted by states. They are recognized by states. If rights come from the state, the state can take them back. If they exist before the state, its only function is to protect them.

These ideas were encoded in the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence. Dugin’s argument depends on a claim that these principles are Western, historically contingent products of one civilization’s experience, with no more universal validity than any other civilization’s arrangements. The claim is false.

There is a reason more than 175 nations adhere to civil and political rights treaties manufactured in the West. The non-Muslim in an Islamic country and the Shudra in India are protected, theoretically, at least, by those laws, not by their religious or caste standing. Because if they were left to the traditions of any other civilization, they would have no protection at all: their own traditions are precisely the thing the treaties protect them from.

Western civilization globalized its Judeo-Christian principles. The intrinsic value of the human being, the premise adopted by all those signing nations, comes from Genesis: if man bears the image of God, then his worth comes from God, not from his religious affiliation or social rank. No caliph grants it; no caste assigns it; it arrives at birth, from above every throne.

The limitation of power comes from the same source. If God stands above every ruler, then the ruler answers to a law he did not make. In Deuteronomy the king is commanded to write out the law with his own hand and read it all the days of his life, “that his heart be not lifted up above his brothers,” the king as the law’s copyist, not its author. The ruler is not the source of law. He is its subject.

And freedom of conscience comes from there too: if conscience is the place where the individual stands alone before God, then no political authority can legitimately occupy that space.

These ideas did not originate in London or Philadelphia, they originated in Jerusalem. The West translated them, through centuries of legal development, through the Reformation’s insistence that Scripture stands above rulers, through the Enlightenment’s rendering of theological claims into political language. John Locke wrote that the reason no one may harm another is that human beings are “the workmanship of one omnipotent Maker.” The verse on the Liberty Bell, “proclaim liberty throughout the land”, is from Leviticus. The Declaration of Independence grounds rights not in the wisdom of the founding generation but in a Creator.

Dugin is therefore not attacking Western preferences. He is attacking the political consequences of a theological claim about the nature of the human person, a claim that preceded the West and will outlast it.

Dugin presents multipolarity as liberation. Each civilization, freed from Western universalism, organizes as it likes. Russia can be Eurasian, Iran can be Islamic, China can be Confucian, or Marxist-Leninist, or whatever civilizational identity the Party finds convenient that decade.

What does that mean for the human beings actually living under each civilization? In Russia, journalists are imprisoned for reporting on the war in Ukraine under laws that criminalize the word “war” itself. Alexei Navalny died in February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony above the polar circle, because his fate was decided by the principles of a non-Western civilization.

In Iran, women who remove their headscarves face arrest, torture and death. Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police in September 2022, and the young women who took to the streets afterward, who cut their hair and burned their hijabs, did not appeal to Shia jurisprudence. They appealed to the right to determine what happens to their own bodies, to freedom of conscience, to the proposition that no government owns the person. These are Western impositions.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban erased women from schools, universities, parks, and finally from windows, a 2024 edict ordered that new buildings deny women even a view of the street. The girls studying in secret basements are not appealing to Islam. They are appealing to an idea that the West globalized.

There is a reason the peoples of the world aspire to the Western model: it is universal. It is the destination, for justice, liberty, equality before the law, rather than one culture among many. If the totalitarian governments of the world achieve Dugin’s dream, each “civilization” decides what is good and what is evil, which means the men holding power decide. They will decide whose life outweighs whose: the believer’s over the infidel’s, the Party member’s over the peasant’s, the ruler’s clan over everyone else.

Multipolarity delivers every human being to whoever rules the ground he stands on. This is not the liberation of civilizations. It is the liberation of governments from their people.

Dugin calls Western universalism a cage, but in reality for the people inside the civilizations he celebrates, the cage is the multipolarity he is building. No one smuggles himself toward Tehran, no one crosses an ocean on a raft bound for Pyongyang. The migration of the modern world runs overwhelmingly in one direction, toward the societies built on the very ideas Dugin describes as parochial.

Ali Siadatan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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The term “red-green” or “Islamo-leftism” refers to the forms of cooperation between the radical Western left and the organizations of the Islamic movement in the West, organizations which in turn control the mosques and the Islamic mainstream in Western countries. In practice, then, it is an alliance between the Western left and fundamentalist Islam, which presents itself as the representative of Islam without any objection from the Muslim majority.

The term seems to have appeared in numerous writings at the beginning of the twenty-first century, first in France, perhaps, then in Britain, but it has recently stirred controversy in America after the victory of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, followed by the victory of Abdul El-Sayed as the Democratic Party’s nominee for the United States Senate from Michigan.

But the mutual admiration and leftist support for the Islamic movement is older than that. Some date it to the beginning of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, when the Western left, especially the French left, hailed the Islamic revolution as a triumph over imperialism and modernity. Leading figures of the French left such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault praised Khomeini’s revolution; Foucault described it as “a new political spirituality, an alternative to Western modernity.” Khomeini, for his part, used leftist terminology about justice and historical grievances in his Islamic sermons.¹

In 1994 the British writer Chris Harman published a study titled “The Prophet and the Proletariat: Islamic Fundamentalism, Class and Revolution,”² later published as a book in 1999, in which he laid the foundations for cooperation between the Islamic movement and the left in the West against a common enemy, imperialism and the state, without either side adopting the other’s ideology: “Where the Islamists are in opposition, our rule should be ‘with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never.’”

In 2002 the French sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff coined the term Islamo-gauchisme in his book The New Judeophobia to describe a current within the far left that opposes Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and enters into alliances with Islamic currents. The term was used widely in 2003 by supporters of the law banning religious symbols in French schools; the right-wing leader Marine Le Pen then employed it in 2012 to describe what she considered a suspect alliance between the Islamic movement and the French left; and it acquired broader official governmental use between 2020 and 2021 amid the controversy over “Islamic separatism.”

In an interview with the British Times, former Prime Minister Tony Blair said that “antisemitism is not new, but it has undergone a recent and malignant development after the Gaza war within progressive left circles, because of the alliance with the Islamic movement,” and he called for this evil alliance to be brought to an end.³

The Islamic movement in the West understands that its relationship with the left is a utilitarian one, tied to achieving shared objectives against a shared enemy. It is an alliance against everything Western, Christian, Jewish, white, or capitalist. It is an alliance of demolition, not construction: the two sides have no shared conception of the society they want to build together, but they agree on the enemy that must be united against, defeated, and broken.

One might put it this way. Just as Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under Carter, saw in Islam and the Islamic movements a force of violence, hatred, resentment, and rebellion, an organized and funded force, and used them against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan to defeat it there and hasten its collapse, so the Western left likewise saw in Islam and its movements a force of violence, resentment, hatred, and funded organization that could bring down the West from within. And the Islamic movement, in turn, found in the Western left a lever that would carry it into Western societies from the inside more quickly, and a partner in demolishing the West and replacing it with Islam.

Indeed, the scholar Daniel Pipes argues in his essay “The Western Mind of Radical Islam”⁴ that the Islamic movement is characterized by a duality: outward hostility to the West combined with deep influence by Western concepts in practice, and the adoption of revolutionary organizational methods resembling those of modern totalitarian movements such as the left and fascism, rather than the mechanisms of historical Islamic rule. This is true, though the practice of fascism and religious totalitarianism is itself a feature of Islamic rule throughout history. The Islamic movement’s imitation of the left and of the fascists certainly exists, but its imitation of Western Jewish organizations in organization, fundraising, and lobbying has become strikingly evident among Islamic organizations in the West. Even the term “Islamophobia” itself was coined in imitation of “antisemitism,” despite the vast difference between the two. And let us not forget that Islam itself stole a great deal of Jewish teaching and narrative without ever acknowledging it.

In France they did not stop at describing an alliance between the left and Islam. They found that many in the Islamic movement had adopted a shared Islamic-leftist agenda, and that many leftists had adopted Islamic discourse, meaning not merely a red-green alliance but a green-red interpenetration. This is why the French sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff in 2002 called them “the Islamic left in the West.” The Islamic left in the West is a merging of leftist Muslims and Islamized leftists, as if they had become a single new evil bloc challenging the West.

President Emmanuel Macron described the Islamic left as one that “minimizes Islamic violence and focuses on Islamophobia.” The former French interior minister Gérald Darmanin said that “the Islamic left is complicit in terrorist acts in France.” The former minister of higher education Frédérique Vidal said that “the Islamic left is gnawing at the whole of French society.” And the former education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer described the Islamic left as leading to catastrophes.

Shared Features

• Both the left and the Islamic movement are totalitarian, exclusionary, supremacist ideologies.

• Both believe in violence to achieve their goals, and both have practiced it.

• Both possess the capacity for organization, mobilization, and mass assembly.

• Both work to demonize their opponents.

• Both fail at governing and at the agenda of progress, and succeed far better in the role of opposition and in cultivating popular resentment under the pretext of resisting injustice and calling for justice.

• Both live inside a victim mentality, complaining of grievances and the absence of justice.

This is why so many radical leftist Muslims converted to the Islamic movement when it rose. The most prominent in Egypt was perhaps Sayyid Qutb, the theorist of Islamic terrorism in his famous book Milestones, who before that was a radical leftist and wrote two books of Islamic leftism, The Battle Between Islam and Capitalism and Social Justice in Islam, before turning fully to Islamic discourse. Ali Shariati in Iran likewise moved from leftist to Islamic theorist. In Egypt, too, Muhammad Imara and Mustafa Mahmoud were both Marxists who became Islamic thinkers; and Abdel Wahab El-Messiri moved from the left to Islam, specialized in anti-Zionism, and wrote a complete eight-volume encyclopedia on Zionism. The list of leftists who converted to the Islamic movement inside the Islamic countries themselves goes on.

Shared Goals and Interests

First: the shared anti-state agenda. Reducing the power of the police and the army, to the point of demanding the abolition of the police; defending illegal immigration; cutting prison funding; opposing imperialism and what they call Western settler-colonialism; working to demolish the capitalist system; demonizing the wealthy, “eat the rich”, which leads in the end to a policy of impoverishing everyone; noise and mass assembly; attempting to destroy the founding principles of the United States; demonizing the Founding Fathers; and ultimately working to demolish Western civilization from within.

Second: achieving the Islamic movement’s goals through this alliance, such as: criminalizing “Islamophobia” and treating any criticism of Islam as a crime; supporting Palestine; delegitimizing Israel; justifying violence as a response to grievances; working to turn Islam into a race; conflating Islam and Muslims and treating them as one thing; helping secure recognition of Muslims’ cultural and legal particularity, including sharia courts, sharia police, Islamic education, and sharia towns, despite their contradiction with Western constitutions and civilizational values; normalizing acceptance of the intifada and the slogan “Palestine from the river to the sea,” despite its representing an existential threat to Israel; participating in demonstrations for Islam and for Palestine; boycotting and isolating Israel internationally; spreading Judeophobia and conspiracy theories about Jews; and opposing Zionism.

It is important to understand that this alliance has a specific plan regarding Israel on which it works step by step: changing the political discourse about Israel in America and the West, then changing actual behavior toward Israel, including cutting aid, halting arms supplies, and economic boycott, then raising the level of hatred toward Israel and toward Jews, culminating in transforming Israel into an enemy rather than a strategic ally.

This cooperation appeared clearly during the Gaza war. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard’s Kennedy School, 12,400 pro-Gaza protests were recorded across the United States from October 2023 to June 2024, and the same institute documented 3,700 protest-days at more than 500 American academic institutions.⁵

In Europe, Middle East Monitor reported more than 42,000 pro-Gaza demonstrations across the continent during the war.⁶

The Islamic movement’s closeness in the West to the left and to the woke movement protects it from criticism as inciters of terrorism. Indeed, it lends legitimacy to Islamic jihad inside Western countries, to the point of normalization, the acceptance of jihad as something ordinary.

The French newspaper Le Figaro published an extended report on the unholy alliance between wokeism and the Islamic movement, noting that working with the progressive left and the woke is the Islamic movement’s most promising tactic, while it retains its old plan of using every tool available to Islamize the West.⁷

How Does the Islamic Movement Justify This Alliance?

How does a Muslim support homosexual rights, when in his sharia it is a crime punishable by death and by being thrown from mountaintops and high buildings? How does he ally with communists, atheists, and the irreligious, who are infidels in his creed? How does he approve of gender transition for children and minors, despite Islam’s criminalization of it?

Islamic jurisprudence, the Islamic heritage, and the teachings of Islam are full of solutions that proceed from lying and evasion.

There is the jurisprudence of priorities, which proceeds from the tactic of postponing disputes in order to achieve the more important goals. In application, they see ideological and religious disagreements as to be deferred until tamkin,empowerment, is achieved, followed by domination and complete Islamization.

There is pragmatism, which they believe the Prophet of Islam practiced when he was weak: he made peace with his enemies and then pounced on them. He wrote tolerant portions of the Quran while in Mecca, then abrogated them, annulled their validity, once he possessed military power in Medina, where he wrote the Quranic verses that call for hatred, excommunication, violence, and jihad.

There is taqiyya, lawful deception: concealing what you believe and displaying its opposite in order to deceive others. Taqiyya is a Quranic injunction.

There is lawful lying in support of Islam, according to the hadiths of Muhammad.

There is the juristic maxim that necessity permits the forbidden, far more dangerous than Machiavelli’s dictum that the end justifies the means.

And there is the saying of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and the founder of the Shia school, that the Quran “bears many faces”, meaning that one may choose from it according to the situation. The late Egyptian academic Hassan Hanafi explained this by saying that the Quran is like a supermarket in which you find everything: you find milk and you find rat poison. When you are weak, offer people the milk; when you are strong, offer them the poison, that is, hatred, violence, killing, and jihad.

The Islamic movement in the West knows all this well and uses every one of these tricks. But in the end they hate the West and Western civilization; they hate Judaism and Christianity; and they believe in Muhammad’s promise to them of the conquest of Rome, that is, the fall of Western civilization and its replacement by Islam.

The Rise and Election of Zohran Mamdani

Perhaps the most prominent example of this alliance’s sabotage of the West is the rise of Zohran Mamdani, a dangerous turning point in the history of New York. A communist governing the capital of world capitalism; a Muslim who relied financially and organizationally in his campaign on Islamic organizations, governing the city that Islamic terrorism struck roughly a quarter century ago. Mamdani combines the agenda of the radical left with the Islamic view of the West. He is the first mayor in New York’s history to announce his religion after his victory, that he is a Muslim, declaring, “I am proud of my faith, and I will serve by what Islam taught me!!!” On the day of his victory he went to celebrate with his followers at a mosque in Astoria, New York, telling them: “I am from you and for you.” This is why many considered the day of his victory a black day in the city’s history. The Big Apple has fallen into the hands of a green-red alliance.

The Islamic activist Linda Sarsour said at a CAIR conference on September 20, 2025, that Islamic money and Islamic Super PACs played a pivotal role in funding Mamdani and his political rise. The press recently reported her appointment as an adviser to Mamdani, and Al Jazeera interviewed her days ago, presenting her as his adviser. It should be noted that Sarsour has demanded that Mamdani dismantle the NYPD unit responsible for monitoring terrorist threats.

CAIR was named in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing investigations as an unindicted co-conspirator. The CAIR organizations, registered as 501(c)(3)s, established CAIR Action as a 501(c)(4) in order to have the right to electoral funding through affiliated Super PACs such as the Unity and Justice Fund, founder of a Political Action Committee. This fund supported Mamdani with $120,000, and by their own account, more than 80% of its funding came from Muslims. There is another CAIR-linked fund, Unity Lab PAC, which also funded Mamdani’s campaign.

The Rise of Abdul El-Sayed

The victory of Abdul El-Sayed (Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed) as the Democratic nominee for the Senate from Michigan was another shock, greater than Mamdani’s in New York, because El-Sayed comes from the very heart of the Islamic movement in America. He and his wife, while students at the University of Michigan, were prominent leading members of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), an organization founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in America as one of several major Islamic organizations, and they met each other through their involvement in it. El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, is one of the founders of ISNA, another of the large organizations founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, and was also president of the Michigan chapter of CAIR.

It is not only El-Sayed, his father-in-law, and his wife who are classified as activists in Islamic organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, but his sister and mother as well. His biological mother, Faten Fathi al-Koumi, worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), an organization accused of financial cooperation with Osama bin Laden, Hamas, and the Taliban, and designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2004.

His sister, Eman Abdelhadi, posted on X: “I hope the whole world rises up against the American empire.” She described Independence Day as a celebration of stolen land and Thanksgiving as a celebration of genocide and propaganda for American settler-colonialism, and she endorsed the October 7 attack on Israel. His close friend, who runs media promotion for his campaign, the Islamic extremist Hasan Piker, said that America deserved what happened to it on September 11.

I can say that the anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israel statements that have come out of El-Sayed and the members of his family are only a small fraction of what they believe. What they conceal is far more dangerous.

Strangely, El-Sayed criticizes political money in elections yet relies on Islamic political money: his father-in-law donated more than $200,000 to his campaign, and members of the Islamic organization CAIR donated $115,000.

Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and other Muslim candidates rely in their campaigns on Islamic funding, Muslim volunteers, and decisive Muslim votes. They want to implement a leftist-Islamic agenda, and they accuse anyone who criticizes this of “Islamophobia”, El-Sayed even called President Trump’s criticism of him Islamophobia. More dangerously, he called criticism of sharia the product of white-supremacist racism, and his mendacity reached the point of comparing brutal Islamic sharia to Catholic canon law.

Arabic-language platforms have been filled with defenses of Mamdani and El-Sayed, one Arabic podcast in America even asked, “What’s wrong with El-Sayed if he really is a Brotherhood member?”, despite the Muslim Brotherhood’s designation as a terrorist group by the White House. And a Muslim American university professor of Egyptian origin argued that “we do not want to apply our Islam in America to Americans, but to ourselves, we Muslims”, meaning he wants an Islamic ghetto applying sharia and Islamic values that contradict the American Constitution and laws and the values of Western societies, and that stand against the very concept of citizenship in the modern state!!!

El-Sayed’s position on Israel does not differ from Mamdani’s: he describes Israel as an evil state that has committed genocide and practices apartheid; he rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; he wants to cut American aid to it and end all American military support; he wants Netanyahu tried as a war criminal; and he was a prominent member of the anti-Israel “Uncommitted” movement.

In short, anyone who analyzes the whole of his discourse concludes clearly that he is an antisemite and a hater of Jews, a fundamental feature of the Islamic movement’s discourse, beliefs, and behavior.

Add to this, of course, his radical leftist agenda: a return to the chaos of illegal immigration through abolishing ICE; nationalizing the ownership of artificial-intelligence companies; government rent control; free universal health insurance extended even to illegal immigrants; canceling medical debt; paying reparations for what he calls historical injustices; imposing a new 7% wealth tax; and, of course, portraying Muslims as victims of Islamophobia.

It is worth mentioning that El-Sayed said he stayed silent on condemning Khamenei’s killing of thousands of peaceful Iranians so as not to lose the Muslims of Michigan!!

But the question remains: does Abdul El-Sayed belong to the Muslim Brotherhood?

From my study of the history of the Brotherhood and of Islamic movements throughout Islamic history, and from my experience over decades of televised debates with senior leaders of the Brotherhood and the various Islamic groups, including Mohamed Morsi, whom I debated on Al Jazeera in November 2001 about the September attacks on America, and who later became president of Egypt, I can say with confidence that Abdul El-Sayed is a fundamentalist who belongs to the Brotherhood’s school of thought, carries its agenda and its goals of Islamization, and practices its methods of deception and misdirection. Beyond that, El-Sayed was an organizational member of a body the Muslim Brotherhood helped found, the Muslim Students Association (MSA); he cooperated with CAIR and spoke at its conferences; he received $115,000 for his campaign from 41 individuals, most of whom held or hold positions at CAIR; and, of course, his father-in-law’s relationship with CAIR and ISNA is documented, organizations founded by the Muslim Brotherhood or by elements supportive of Hamas.

Anyone who has studied the history of Islamic movements knows well that most Islamic organizations around the world, if not all of them, were founded by Muslim Brothers, Saudi Wahhabis, or Muslim fundamentalists; put more plainly, all of these organizations were founded by the organized Islamic movement. Most Islamic organizations in America and the West, and most mosques as well, particularly in the period 1960–2000, were founded through cooperation between the Brotherhood’s organization and Saudi Wahhabi money.¹⁰

As the proverb goes: if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Everything that has come from Abdul El-Sayed and his family confirms that they belong to the extremist organizations of the Islamic movement and have close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood through the organizations the Brotherhood helped found in America.

It Began with Obama

We can date the rise of the red-green alliance in America to the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, which combined leftism with support for Islamic presence and Islamic ascent. Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, wrote an article and a book on the Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama administration,¹¹ naming many of the Islamic figures promoted during Obama’s tenure, such as Mohamed Magid, who had been president of ISNA and to whom Obama gave an important post in the Department of Homeland Security, along with others: Dalia Mogahed, Rashad Hussain, Huma Abedin, Farah Pandith, Kareem Shora, Mohamed Elibiary, Louay Safi, Kifah Mustapha, Azizah al-Hibri, Salam al-Marayati, Mazen Asbahi, Nawar Shora, Arif Alikhan, Eboo Patel...

Abdul El-Sayed plans to follow in Obama’s footsteps: from senator from Michigan to president of the United States.¹² The rise of Mamdani and Abdul, a quarter century after September 11, is far more dangerous to America than September 11 itself.¹³

Convergence of Goals with Certain Wings of the Right

A new term has recently emerged: “red-green-brown.” It means that certain Islamic organizations’ goals have converged with those of certain wings of the American right (convergence, not alliance). Tucker Carlson, for example, leads a fraudulent discourse in defense of Islam, Muslims, and the Islamic movements; he repeats the falsified Islamic historical narrative about Palestine and is hostile to Israel. The substance of Carlson’s discourse is an attempt to create a Christian right-wing current in the United States hostile to Israel in service of the Islamic narrative, and to produce a rupture between Christianity and Judaism in service of Islamic goals. This is why one of the Islamic movement’s leaders in New Jersey, Osama Abuirshaid, executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, admitted at a public event on January 16, 2026, that they had succeeded in splitting the MAGA movement from within; I believe he was referring to what Tucker Carlson and his current are doing. There are persistent reports about Carlson’s relationship with Qatar, matters that require security investigation more than they constitute research material.

It should be noted that the red-green alliance in America selects specific cities in which to extend its influence through candidacies for political office: Diverse cities with a mixed immigrant population, cities with a low proportion of whites and of Christian conservatives, cities with a high proportion of Muslims, cities controlled by the Democratic Party, cities with economic and social problems, cities that have become repellent to the middle class and to business people, cities with a notable presence of the radical left.

The Hijacking of the Democratic Party

For decades, the radical left or radical liberal current has controlled the schools, the universities, most of the American media, Hollywood, and then Silicon Valley, to the point that social media platforms, during the Biden years, practiced strict censorship of the American right and Christian conservatives’ access to their platforms, while opening the field to the woke agenda and the red-green alliance.

The problem is the acceleration of the so-called progressive current within the Democratic Party, which seeks to hijack the party entirely. This current calls itself the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but in reality it differs from the social democrats or social democracy that existed in Europe and America. This current within the Democratic Party is in fact democratic communism: they want to use the mechanisms of elections and democracy to spread a communist agenda, and let us not forget that Hitler saw himself as a socialist.

What has helped this current rise in America, as Fareed Zakaria says, is the Democratic Party’s accelerating shift leftward over the past three decades: Obama was further left than Clinton, and Biden implemented a bigger leftist agenda than Obama. Zakaria observes that those who support the leftist agenda within the Democratic Party are not the poor and the workers but university graduates, which is exactly what happened with El-Sayed in Michigan. More dangerous, as Zakaria says, is the Democratic Party’s adoption of the woke agenda and its predicament regarding crime, immigration, and the border.¹⁴

The Islamic movement in America sees in the rise of this radical left within the Democratic Party its own opportunity for political ascent, which is why it has allied with it. The Islamic activist Linda Sarsour was a principal volunteer in Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and the victories of Mamdani and El-Sayed are the fruit of this alliance.

Essential Observations on the Green-Red Alliance

This alliance holds that achieving justice requires bringing down the system, then bringing down the entire colonial West. From its perspective, the collapse of Israel is the prelude to the collapse of Israel’s makers and backers in America and the West, which is why the current is so intensely hostile to Israel.

This alliance takes no interest in criticizing tyranny, the degraded status of women, the absence of human rights, or the persecution of homosexuals in Islamic countries; it focuses exclusively on the West.

The persecution of Christians in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia receives no attention whatsoever from this alliance. Although the left is fierce in its criticism of Christianity in the West, it never comes near criticizing Islam, even though Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world today, and Islam is the foremost persecutor of Christians worldwide.

The Islamic side has imposed on this alliance the conflation of Islam and Muslims. However hard Western thought and Western courts try to separate the two, the Muslim party insists on conflating them; the Islamic organizations insist that any criticism of Islam is an assault on Muslims, and insist that they represent Islam and Muslims together, despite being unelected.

The left tries to adapt any philosophical position to find a justification for allying with the Islamic movement, from the Iranian revolution to Islamophobia to anti-Zionism. The left has also used intersectionality theory to place all forms of grievance in a single category, and used this intersectionality to classify Muslims not merely as a religion but as a racial and ethnic minority.

Red-green discourse is pale and evasive toward Iran, while it is hostile to the moderate Islamic states allied with America.

This alliance works, in cooperation with Islamic states that sponsor terrorism, to control the institutions of the United Nations and harness them to condemn Israel exclusively.

The Islamic movement also learned from September 11 that undermining America and the West will not succeed through violence so much as through infiltrating institutions and sabotaging them from within, via a policy of alliances, immigration, and procreation.

The radical Western left treats the Islamic movement as a persecuted minority and overlooks its violent ideology, hostile to every value of the West’s liberal democracies.

Islamic funding of many American universities has entrenched the alliance between the left and the Islamic movement on campus, with Islamic control of Middle East departments and the imposition of their academic vision upon them.

The green-red alliance also blends hostility to America and the West with hatred of Judaism and Christianity and with the theory of anti-white-man animus. It is, in short, a poisonous hatred of everything Western, Christian, Jewish, white, or capitalist.

The Western left has also helped the Islamic movement to organize, to reach the masses, and to change its hardline political language into an evasive, deceptive one, accelerating its entry into the political mainstream of the West.

Some have warned of the danger that this current has hijacked the causes of Black Americans and folded them into its agenda under its theory of intersectionality.

The red-green current converges with Iran in portraying America as the leader of imperialism and therefore, for both, “the Great Satan,” as Khomeini called it.

Most Muslims who emigrated from Islamic countries to the West carried the creed of antisemitism with them, and through their alliance with the Western left they raised the level of antisemitism on the left and thence throughout the West, but this time under the heading of the Palestinian cause. The word “Palestine” has become the key to antisemitism in the West today, and a source for inflaming that hatred.

The crime of the Western left is what it leaves unsaid about Islam and Muslims regarding violence, Islamization, sharia, the condition of women, apostasy laws, and Islamic terrorism, to the point that a German leftist activist said, after a vehicle-ramming attack on citizens in Germany, “I wish the perpetrator had been white and not a Muslim!!”

The left also overlooks the cities that have become semi-closed to all but Muslims. In Europe there are the so-called no-go zones; in France, 751 areas have been counted as “sensitive urban zones,” the product of an alliance between the Islamic movement, the left, and criminal gangs. In America, Dearborn, Michigan is more an extension of southern Lebanon than an American city, and when you walk through Paterson, New Jersey you feel you are in Ramallah rather than America.

The Future of the Alliance and the Future of the West

There are different theories about the future of this alliance.

The pessimistic view holds that this alliance will lead to the sabotage of the West from within, followed by its fall. Hans-Georg Maaßen, former president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), said in a television interview on November 24, 2023: “In the end the Europeans will surrender to Islam, because Europeans are not prepared to confront the Islamization that is gradually destroying their culture.”

In his last interview, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said: “Europe made a grave mistake in that it created within itself peoples who reject its standards, its values, and the foundations of its constitutions, through mass immigration.” Kissinger deplored that in Berlin, eighty years after the Holocaust, people chant “death to the Jews” in the streets without being held accountable.

The optimistic view holds that the West will wake up; that the right will govern and bring under control all these negative phenomena hostile to the Western spirit and its values; that they will work to limit Islamic immigration and weaken this leftist-Islamic alliance.

The dangerous view holds that the alliance of the left, the Islamic movement, and the anarchists will seize power in America and most European countries, especially through the ballot box, as happened with Hitler; that the reaction will be a hardline right seeking to save the West; and that this will lead to political conflicts, then mutual violence, then civil wars, and perhaps divisions and collapses.

I hope a reformist awakening occurs in America within the Democratic Party before this dangerous scenario unfolds.

Notes and References

1. The Iranian left’s enthusiasm for the alliance with the Islamic movement in 1979, which led to the fall of the Shah, ended with Khomeini’s persecution of the leftists: he killed many of them and imprisoned most. Likewise the Egyptian left’s alliance with the Islamic movement in the so-called Arab Spring — but after Mubarak’s fall, the Brotherhood monopolized power and excluded the left. In the end, the Islamic movement regards these alliances as temporary and self-interested, solely for achieving its larger goals.

2. https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1994/xx/islam.htm

3. https://www.aljazeera.net/politics/2026/3/29/ (Tony Blair: “We must end the sinful alliance”)

4. https://firstthings.com/the-western-mind-of-radical-islam/

5. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/protests-united-states-palestine-and-israel-2023-2024

6. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250818-report-42000-pro-palestine-protests-events-held-in-europe-since-gaza-war/

7. https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/la-france-insoumise-et-les-islamistes-l-histoire-secrete-d-une-alliance-politique-20241122

8. I believe CAIR should have been shut down after the Holy Land Foundation case in 2008, and I have no doubt that CAIR is a terrorist organization. I was not surprised by the announcement of CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, of his elation at what happened on October 7 — that is only natural. I personally debated him on the Saudi channel Al Arabiya in 2007, during the imprisonment of Sami Al-Arian, accused of terrorism in America and later deported; in that encounter Nihad Awad defended Sami Al-Arian vigorously. Anyone who listens to Sami Al-Arian since he left America does not doubt for a moment that he advocates terrorism; he called October 7 a great deed.

9. The Islamic movement everywhere shares Hasan Piker’s view that America deserved what happened to it on September 11 — indeed, they wish for America’s ruin. I debated an American Islamic figure named Mohammad al-Asi in the first Arabic-language debate on the subject, two hours long, titled “Does America Deserve What Happened to It?” on Al Jazeera on September 18, 2001. For two hours Mohammad al-Asi insisted that America deserved what befell it, despite being an American living in it. After the debate, I believe the Islamic organizations advised him to keep silent, for I have heard nothing of him since.

10. On May 18, 1962, the Saudi King Faisal founded the Muslim World League, gathering on its board Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna; Abul A’la Maududi, founder of Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan; and Amin al-Husseini, principal founder of the Islamic movement in Palestine and friend of Hassan al-Banna. Al-Banna and al-Husseini had agreed that there was no solution to the Palestinian question except through Islam, and Hamas was later the natural outgrowth of their cooperation. The Muslim World League was the beginning of the Islamic movement’s global founding, uniting Saudi Wahhabism with Egyptian Brotherhood thought, Deobandism from the Indian subcontinent, and the Palestinian Islamic movement. Most organizations in America and the West between 1962 and 2000 were the product of this alliance: the Brotherhood took on the organizational and activist work, and Saudi Wahhabism took on the funding. The most important American organizations founded by the Brotherhood after this alliance are MSA, ICNA, ISNA, and later CAIR. On Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting global terrorism, see Dore Gold’s 2003 study Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism.

11. https://www.amazon.com/Muslim-Brotherhood-Obama-Administration-ebook/dp/B009HIP79K

12. CAIR announced decades ago that its goal is a Muslim in the White House as president of America. CAIR does not merely aim for an American president to come from a minority of no more than 1.5% of the population; it plans for a member of the Islamic movement to reach that office — and support for Abdul El-Sayed may well serve that dream.

13. New York City did not face the savagery of Islamic terrorism only on September 11; the Islamic strikes on the city continued. Immediately after September 11, Muslims attempted to build a mosque near the site of the fallen towers, dubbed the Ground Zero Mosque — an Islamic message saying: we brought down the symbols of New York’s and America’s economic power and raised a mosque in their place. Were it not for the efforts of the activist Pamela Geller, that mosque would have been built. Then, after the Islamic movement failed to bomb Times Square, its plan became to gather for prayer in that famous square, as part of a plan to Islamize the great squares of the West by praying in them, so that in their belief they become Islamic land and Islamic waqf. Then the Islamic efforts were crowned by Mamdani’s victory as mayor of the city. And most recently, an American convert to Islam named Jessica Bowie attempted to bomb the New York State Capitol and was arrested on August 20, 2026.

14. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1571754584354482

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On Christmas Day 2017, more than 5,800 former Muslims who converted to Catholicism published an open letter to Pope Francis. They challenged him to reconsider his words in Evangelii Gaudium, an exhortation concerning evangelism in which Francis wrote, “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

“If Islam is a good religion in itself, as you seem to teach, why did we become Catholic?” they asked. “Do not your words question the soundness of the choice we made at the risk of our lives? Islam prescribes death for apostates (Quran 4.89, 8.7-11), do you know? In accordance with (Jesus’) teaching (Lk 14:26), we preferred Him, the Christ, to our own life. Are we not in a good position to talk to you about Islam?”

Their letter featured a stinging indictment.

“Many of us have tried to contact you on many occasions and for several years and we have never received the slightest acknowledgement of our letters or requests for meetings.”

Undaunted, Francis in 2019 signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together with Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, the head of the most prestigious university in the Sunni Muslim world, Al-Azhar. The document provides a framework for Catholicism and Islam to work toward common goals that build peace, freedom, justice, and prosperity.

Francis’ attitude reflects the Vatican’s policy of indulging Islam to the point of appeasement and enabling it at the expense of the Catholic Church’s moral credibility.

William Kilpatrick, a professor emeritus at Boston College who has written numerous books and articles about the relationship between Christianity and Islam, makes a more devastating accusation.

“The Church’s attitude toward Islam goes beyond appeasement and enablement,” Kilpatrick said, adding:

“At this point, and I speak as a Catholic, it’s more accurate to speak about complicity.

“By speaking only good about Islam, and by remaining silent about the bad, the Church has covered-up much of the truth about Islam. In doing so it has put Catholics and other Christians in a much more vulnerable position vis-à-vis Islam—more vulnerable because (the church is) misinformed.”

The church’s attitude reflects the views of Louis Massignon, a French-Catholic scholar from the 20th century who believed the God of Abraham was the God of Muhammad. Massignon also described Islam as “the faith of Abraham revived with Muhammad,” he wrote, and the Qur’an as reflecting a level of divine inspiration.

Because Muslims are Abraham’s descendants, Massignon concluded, “they have the right to equality among the monotheisms descended from Abraham to participate in the double promise made to Abraham, that of the Messiah and that of the Holy Land,” he wrote.

Massignon’s work appeared while secularism’s influence increased in Europe, creating “an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity, and with our liberal, capitalist, individualistic arrangements,” French-Catholic scholar Alain Besancon wrote in 2004. As a result, “an entire literature favorable to Islam has grown up in Europe, much of it the work of Catholic priests under the sway of Massignon’s ideas.”

“Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe, these writers cannot but admire Muslim devoutness,” Besancon wrote. “Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do.”

The Catholic Church embraced Massignon’s ideas at the Second Vatican Council, which took place between 1962-65 to address the church’s role in the modern world. One document, Nostra Aetate, which focused mainly on Judaism, addressed Islam:

“The Church also regards with esteem the Muslims. They adore the one God . . . they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet.”

Another document from the council, Lumen Gentium, declared that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God.”

That passage made the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Pope John Paul II, who published that catechism, plotted the course for appeasement by making an unprecedented commitment to engage in dialogue with Islam.

“For Karol Wojtyla (John Paul’s given name), religious dialogue is necessary in order to foster the common good of humanity,” Renzo Guolo, an expert in Islam at the University of Trieste, wrote in 2003. “This dialogue is sustained by the awareness that there are common values across cultures, because these values are rooted in human nature. These include the defense of the family, opposition to abortion, and peace.”

In the late pope’s mind, no obstacle would be too powerful to overcome.

“He seems to believe,” Guolo added, “that only the prophetic gesture, the utopian perspective, the mystical leap powered by an intense spirituality, can achieve this objective.”

John Paul used such dialogue to try to forge a de facto alliance with Islam against Western secularism after the demise of European Communism.

“The Church is aware that it can offer a sort of new civil religion to the United States of Europe,” wrote Enzo Pace, sociology professor at the University of Padua. He added:

“Islam thus becomes the most important moral interlocutor because the Church sees it as a well-structured religion which is on the increase in contemporary Europe.

“To ensure this integration, the Catholic Church believes it is necessary to accept the idea of recognizing Islam as a universal religion, while, at the same time, inviting Islam to accept at least the basic moral and juridical principles of European Christian culture.”

Bishops implemented that directive by selling underutilized churches and schools to Muslim groups, with churches becoming mosques. In 2006, the Capuchin Franciscan friars agreed to help the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy build a mosque in Genoa.

The union, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, advocates “an extremist version of the Qur’an, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalized, as well as women and other Muslims who don’t submit to their rule,” reportedMilan’s Corriere della Sera. The group’s president, Mohamed Nour Dachan, refused to sign a document pledging Muslims to accept Italy’s constitution, denounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Nevertheless, a Vatican cardinal suggested Muslim students receive Islamic religious instruction in Italian schools during the hour reserved for Catholic instruction.

“If there are 100 Muslim children in a school, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taught their religion,” Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said in 2006. “If we said ‘no’ until we saw equivalent treatment for the Christian minorities in Muslim countries, I would say that we were placing ourselves on their level.”

In 2008, the bishops of England and Wales asked Catholic schools to reserve prayer rooms for Muslim students and to adapt lavatories for ritual washing before prayer. “The demands go way beyond legal requirements on catering for religious minorities,” reported the Daily Mail.

But the worst appeasement occurred in Belgium.

Bishops turned their churches into homes for Muslim migrants to force the government to grant amnesty. In 2006, more than 30 Belgian churches served that purpose. About 300 migrants occupied Antwerp’s Magdalena Chapel. Other churches held as many as 700.

At Brussels’ Our Lady of Succor Church, migrants lived in small tents donated by Catholic relief agencies, conducted Muslim services, erected computer tables near the pulpit and even set fires on the floor. The Rev. Herwig Arts described the scene at Antwerp’s Jesuit chapel for Gazet van Antwerpen in 1998.

“(Migrants) removed the tabernacle, (and) installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass,” Arts said. “It has upset me very much. For me, the place has been desecrated. I feel I cannot enter it anymore.”

Belgium’s bishops were not amused.

“Everybody is entitled to a good place in our society,” said Monsignor Luc van Looy, the bishop of Ghent, including what he called “illegal fugitives.”

Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the archbishop of Brussels and Belgium’s leading prelate, added that “solidarity cannot be limited to one’s own nation.”

Bishops thus silenced Arts and other priests who held similar opinions.

While Catholic bishops disregarded the needs of their own congregants, John Paul ignored the plight of Christians in the Muslim world. Bishops remembered how John Paul, “who ordinarily speaks about all topics,” Guolo wrote, “had spread a veil of silence over the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.”

In 2002, an Arab convert named Nura told Corriere della Sera: “We feel abandoned. After our conversion, we have no one to support us. We ask the Church and Italy: Protect us, defend us.”

Pope Francis accelerated the momentum by reinforcing the link between migration and Islam. In 2015, Francis askedparishes in Europe to take in at least one family escaping civil disorder in Syria. In 2016, the pope visited the Greek island of Lesbos, home to thousands of Syrian refugees, and brought 12 Muslim refugees from three families with him on the return trip to Rome.

During his visit to Lesbos, Francis lectured about the moral imperative to help migrants “who have faces, names and individual stories,” he said. As European governments imposed immigration restrictions, the pope criticized their “fanaticism of indifference” while visiting Marseilles in 2023.

Yet when confronted with Muslim violence, the Vatican and Western bishops display their own “fanaticism of indifference.”

Middle East Forum reported in 2019 that French authorities recorded 1,063 attacks on churches in 2018. In Germany, “crosses are broken, altars are smashed, Bibles are set on fire, baptismal fonts are overturned and the church doors are smeared with Islamic expressions such as ‘Allahu Akbar.’”

In the midst of hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants overwhelming Europe and engaging in criminal behavior, Catholic bishops either issue sentimental boilerplate or remain silent.

“Have you heard one English bishop express sympathy for the English people’s concerns about criminal aliens invading our country? I haven’t,” the Rev. Nick Donnelly, a British Catholic deacon, wrote last year during massive nationwide protests. “Have you heard one English bishop express outrage over the hundreds of thousands of English girls raped by men from foreign cultures? I haven’t.”

As IDI examined, Pope Leo propels Francis’ agenda. In an impromptu press conference while returning from Lebanon in December, he insisted upon dialogue as the solution to long-standing problems between Christians and Muslims.

“I think one of the great lessons that Lebanon can teach to the world is precisely showing a land where Islam and Christianity are both present and are respected and that there is a possibility to live together to be friends,” the pope said. “We should perhaps be a little less fearful and look for ways of promoting authentic dialogue and respect.”

Only breathtaking naïveté can explain such a response after visiting a nation ravaged by more than five decades of religious civil war.

“The Church has, in effect, become an enabler of Islam,” Kilpatrick said, “by lending legitimacy to Islam through dialogue, joint statements from the Pope and Islamic leaders, Islam-friendly school curriculums and so forth—but mostly by keeping silent about the worldwide persecution of Christians by Muslims.”

In the current clash of civilizations, Rome’s relationship to Mecca resembles Vichy’s to Berlin during World War II.

Joseph D'Hippolito is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institue

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Christian colonialism is an oxymoron—a contradiction in terms. Jesus said: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight.” Islamic imperialism is a pleonasm: it’s like saying “frozen ice.” Muhammad’s farewell speech: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah,’” became the doctrinal underpinning of Islamic expansionism. The Qur’an declares that Allah has made Muslims “his agents, inheritors of the earth” and “promised to… make them rulers in the earth” (24:55, 6:165).

Christian rulers who established empires in Jesus’ name were flagrantly flouting their founder’s teachings. Muslim colonizers who founded empires in Muhammad’s name were following their master’s model and mandate. The Western, ostensibly Christian, colonial project began around 1500. Islamic empire-building began when Muhammad established Medina as the first Muslim state in 622 CE. By the end of the 20th century, Western/Christian empires were as extinct as dinosaurs. In the 21st century, the world confronts the specter of a global Islamic caliphate.

The historical data is undeniable. Yet, for academic activists, the millenarian existence of Islamic imperialism is discombobulating. They would eagerly echo the famous line spoken by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” These academic insurgents plot to subvert the Judeo-Christian West using Critical Theory and its bastard child, postcolonialism, but the reality of Islamic imperialism effectively dismantles their theoretical framework. In the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, Islamic imperialism is the little boy who, watching the fatuous parade of Postcolonial Studies, cries out: “The emperor is naked!”

Postcolonialism: The Trojan Horse of Muslim Academics

Now, in a feat of mega gaslighting, Muslim academics are flipping the imperialist paradigm and using postcolonialism as a Trojan Horse to infiltrate academia. Their goal is two-fold: subvert the West and supplant it with Islam. On August 15, The Spectator reported that Farah Ahmed, an assistant research professor at the Cambridge Faculty of Education, is using Postcolonial Theory to promote Qur’anic creationism through the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC) project at Darwin College, Cambridge. The irony is staggering on multiple levels.

First, the college is named after Charles Darwin, the father of evolution and a Cambridge alumnus. Second, a Christian academic promoting biblical creationism at Cambridge would be tarred, feathered, and drowned in the Cam. Third, none of the apostles of postcolonialism would dream of applying the discipline to Islamic imperialism. Fourth, Ahmed is a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir—a movement aiming to revive Islamic imperialism by establishing a caliphate, i.e., a global Islamic empire, as I wrote in my essay The Closing of the Cambridge Mind.

Ahmed’s chapter on “The Western Education System and the British National Curriculum,” in the book Education and Identity: The Dilemma of Muslims in the West, first published as a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet, trashes Western education as inimical to Islam. She insists that Western education is unsuitable for Muslim students, “as the ‘adeeqah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this.” She excoriates English as “one of the most damaging subjects” because Muslim students who are taught to identify myths and legends in their English courses might conclude that the story of Muhammad riding on a winged horse is as phony as Odysseus escaping from the Cyclops by clinging to the belly of a giant ram.

Ahmed, in case you hadn’t heard, is also a colleague of sociologist Jason Arday, who killed himself after the exposure of his legendary plagiarism and pathological lying went viral.

Islamic Creationism in the British Classroom

For Ahmed and her fellow ideologues, Western education is a tool of imperialism festooned in the fancy dress of “objectivity.” Her colleague, Usama Javed Mirza, also a Muslim academic in the Cambridge Faculty of Education, presents an alternative paradigm he labels: “Islamic Scientific Critical Consciousness.”

British education brainwashes students with “a Western oppressive monoculture of secularised ‘modern’ science,” contends Mirza in his paper “Islamic Scientific Critical Consciousness as a theoretical framework for Muslim science educators.” Muslim students should be taught to identify “colonial ideology being taught as ‘objective’ knowledge.”

Mirza says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.” The paper is published on the IELC website and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mirza doesn’t pretend to be objective. He honestly identifies himself as a “decolonial scholar-activist” who wants to promote Qur’anic creationism in the classroom. The great enemy of the Muslim student exposed to Western science is “fitna” (trial, temptation, sedition against God), which occurs 28 times in his paper.

“Fitna,” Mirza warns, “may occur, for example, when a Muslim student in the science classroom begins to believe that humans emerged on Earth without any role played by the Creator.” In contrast, “in the Islamic science tradition, research was viewed as an act of worship, and the scientific discourse was embedded in an Islamic world view and ethical framework.”

Mirza reminds his readers that “there is no compulsion in religion” (Qur’an 2:256). But isn’t that a half-truth? Islamic jurisprudence does frown on forced conversion. What Mirza won’t tell his readers is that the alternative to conversion for the kufr is dhimmitude. Robert Spencer explains in The Critical Qur’an: “They enforce subservience upon those who refuse to convert, such that many of them subsequently convert to Islam to escape the humiliating and discriminatory regulations of dhimmitude—but when they convert, they do so freely.”

And Mirza’s paper is a not-so-subtle manifesto for Islamic dawa (proselytization) aimed at converting the secular kufr. In another paper titled “Regime Change: The Need for Scientific

Critical Consciousness” published in the International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, Mirza calls for “regime change” to “help overcome the hegemonic ideas” like “scientism, patriarchy, racism and colonialism.”

European colonial powers have committed “epistemicide” by killing “the Islamic Science Tradition in Muslim-majority lands ranging from North Africa to the Asia-Pacific,” he writes. This includes presenting “beliefs in empiricism, positivism, reductionism and determinism as indisputable rational ideas about the nature of the world.” Mirza attempts to subvert this colonial paradigm by offering a “revamped” curriculum of the Cambridge Assessment International Education O Level physics in his paper.

I am not faulting Mirza or Ahmed. They are faithful Muslims carrying out Muhammad’s missiological mandate with Machiavellian finesse. Here are the big questions: why is Darwin’s university feeding the Trojan Horse that is railroading Islam into British education? And why are the experts in postcolonialism silent when it comes to Islamic imperialism?

Cambridge Capitulates: From Newtonian Physics to Postcolonial Poppycock

Mirza holds a position at the university where Newton developed the reflecting telescope, Thomson discovered the electron, Chadwick discovered the neutron, Cockcroft and Walton split the atom, and Crick and Watson discovered the double-helical structure of DNA. Yet he dares to warn Muslims that this “secular Eurocentric ‘monoculture’ of modern science” poses a threat to their religion and identity. And his woke academic colleagues genuflect before him, Ahmed and Jason Arday, as if the three just invented fully autonomous nanobotic medicine to cure genetic diseases at the cellular level.

Why this cringing obsequiousness? “The answer is always: whoever is fighting the West,” writes Dan Burmawi. “The left and Islam make strange bedfellows, but they share a common enemy, and in the logic of the left, that is enough,” he explains in his incisive essay “The Philosophy Behind the Left-Islam Alliance.” Since Islam “is fighting Western power, it serves the interests of the oppressed, which is the only moral category that matters.” The same is true of Postcolonial Theory, which makes it possible to rewrite history because “history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten,” as Edward Said wrote in his book Orientalism.

The goal of Postcolonial Theory is to deconstruct the West. In their book Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay succinctly sum up what Ahmed, Mirza & Co. are in effect saying: “The West has constructed the idea that rationality and science are good to perpetuate its own power and marginalize nonrational, nonscientific forms of knowledge production from elsewhere. Therefore, we must now devalue white, Western ways of knowing for belonging to white Westerners and promote Eastern ones (to equalize the power imbalance).”

This is also why woke/Muslim academics love wallowing like pigs in the muck of Postcolonial Theory, even though it has been largely discredited together with its siblings like Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and Disability and Fat Studies. Remember when James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, two respected scholars, wrote a hoax academic article titled “The conceptual penis as a social construct?” to debunk the Mickey Mouse discipline of Grievance Studies? The article was published in the Cogent Social Sciences journal after peer review. It outrageously claimed that “the conceptual penis…is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.” When the authors revealed that they were pulling a fast one on academia (remember Jason Arday?), the article was retracted and woke academics had egg on their faces.

Islamic Imperialism: The Elephant in the Room

The biggest problem with Postcolonial Theory is that it is congenitally blind to the camel in the faculty lounge—Islamic imperialism. A few biblical scholars have engaged in a postcolonial critique of empires like Assyria and Babylon in the context of ancient Israel, but that only reinforces the case for including Islam in the club of the great colonial powers.

When I taught Islam at a British university, I would project a map of the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and Persia. I would then explain that these territories were predominantly Christian, Jewish, Sabean, Zoroastrian, or polytheistic. The seven churches in the book of Revelation are in Turkey. Before Muhammad, Mecca had a small but influential Christian population. Syrian merchants were preaching the Gospel in Mecca. Even members of Muhammad’s Quraysh tribe had converted to Christianity. I then showed my students a second map of the same regions. It took Islamic imperialists just a few decades to conquer these lands and convert their inhabitants or subjugate them as dhimmis paying a burdensome tax. “All the regions conquered by jihad were governed by Islamic legislation,” writes Bat Ye’or in her book Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide.

Within twelve years of Muhammad’s death, Muslims subjugated Iran and snatched Egypt and Syria from Byzantine rule. By the eighth century, they had conquered Central Asia and much of the Indian subcontinent up to the Chinese border and besieged Constantinople. If not stopped at the Battle of Poitiers (732), they would have entered France and swept over Europe.

Within a century of Muhammad’s death, Islam had created the world’s largest empire (caliphate), “spreading from Arabia at a whirlwind speed to Transoxiana and Sindh (India) in the East, conquering all of Egypt and North Africa and had reached the heart of France in Europe,” M.A. Khan writes in Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion‚ Imperialism‚ and Slavery.

Non-woke historians are not shy of recording the facts of Islamic imperialism in books published by university presses. “From the first Arab-Islamic empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of never quiescent imperialist dreams,” observes Efraim Karsh in his book Islamic Imperialism (Yale University Press). The historian Johannes Kramers famously remarked that in medieval Islam there were never real states but only empires, more or less extensive, Karsh notes.

Islam is the quintessentially imperialistic ideology. It remains the only world religion that upholds imperialism as doctrinal indicative and missiological imperative. “Religion is integral to the conquests and the evolution of an Islamic Empire,” asserts Robert G. Hoyland in In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire(Oxford University Press).

Muslim colonialism wasn’t benign: lust for booty drove the rapacious invaders; slavery (riqq) of colonized peoples was systemic, endemic, and significantly informed by sharia; and indigenous cultures and civilizations across three continents were expunged and Arabized. Local knowledge bases were plagiarized or erased: Umar, the second caliph, ordered the Great Library of Alexandria to be burned in 642 when Muslims conquered Egypt.

The Illusion of Islamic Science

If Islamic science is greater than Western science, why do students from Muslim countries flock to Western universities to complete doctorates in science and engineering and not return home? Can the reader name a single life-changing invention (lightbulb, steam locomotive, motorcar, television, airplane, refrigerator) that was invented as the fruit of Islamic science?

Why is it that only three Muslims (four if you count one Ahmadiyya—a “heretical” sect) have been awarded the Nobel Prize in the 125-year history of the award? Why is it that, as of 2024, only about 280 of 29,553 scientific journalsoriginate from Arab Muslim countries, accounting for less than 1 percent of the total? In the same year, there were 3,536,265 scientific papers published globally, but only 20,780 from Arab Muslim countries, making the Islamic world’s contribution just 0.59 percent of scientific documents published globally.

If Islamic academics like Ahmed, Mirza & Co. are so confident that Islamic science is great and Western science is the product of an oppressive monoculture, perhaps they might consider following the medical advice of their Prophet? In a hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari, Muhammad ordered his followers in Medina who fell ill to drink camel urine as a medicine. One can only speculate when The Lancet will recognize the glories of Islamic medicine and publish a peer-reviewed article on the “Therapeutic Benefits of Drinking Camel Urine as a Postcolonial Prophylactic Against HIV.”

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomes is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Charles Finney was one of the most important revivalists in nineteenth-century America. Born in 1792 and trained as a lawyer rather than a theologian, he became one of the defining figures of the Second Great Awakening and exercised enormous influence over the revival culture that spread across the United States in the decades before the Civil War. His preaching was practical and deliberately aimed at producing an immediate response. He believed revivals could be brought about through the proper use of means.

That conviction marked a significant break with the theological culture represented a century earlier by Jonathan Edwards.

Edwards had also lived through revival. He was one of the principal theologians of the First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s, and no one could accuse him of wanting a cold or lifeless Christianity. But he treated religious experience as something that had to be examined, disciplined, and interpreted through Scripture and theology. His Religious Affections was written precisely because emotional intensity could not be accepted as proof that God was at work. People could cry, tremble, shout, experience overwhelming feelings, and still be wrong about what was happening to them.

For Edwards, the experience had to answer to the truth. Finney gradually reversed that order. In Lectures on Revivals of Religion, published in 1835, he complained of “vast ignorance in the Churches on the subject of revivals.” By ignorance he meant that Christians did not understand how revival could be produced. He believed that when the correct methods were employed, revival followed in a predictable manner.

William McLoughlin summarized the difference between the two men like this: “One saw God as the center of the universe, the other saw man. One believed that revivals were prayed down and the other that they were worked up.”

The older Protestant minister was expected to be a theologian. He studied Greek and Hebrew because Christianity rested upon texts written in Greek and Hebrew. He studied church history. He studied systematic theology because a doctrine taken from one passage had to make sense alongside everything else Scripture taught.

The educational institutions surrounding the First Great Awakening reflected that expectation. The Log College associated with William Tennent and the founding of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, grew from a culture in which revival and scholarship were not enemies. Ministers were expected to know languages, theology, philosophy, the Reformers, and the older Christian tradition.

Finney’s world increasingly valued a different qualification: results.

His language about the Holy Spirit shows how far the shift went. He wrote that Christians could be guilty for not having the Spirit because “God has placed His Spirit at your disposal.” Revival therefore depended heavily upon whether Christians employed the proper means. If revival failed to occur, the explanation could be found in the minister, congregation, or method.

As a result, the minister who produces visible conversions begins to look more useful than the minister who can parse Greek verbs. The sermon becomes increasingly concerned with eliciting a response. Music, atmosphere, direct appeals, prolonged meetings, and psychological pressure acquire new importance because the human will becomes the object upon which the minister is working.

Finney’s famous “anxious bench,” where people under conviction were publicly separated and pressured toward decision, belonged to this world. So did the protracted revival meeting. The success of ministry became visible and countable. The minister was beginning to change from theologian into technician.

That shift created a religious culture in which formal theological formation was increasingly easier to bypass, and in which immediate experience and measurable results could carry authority that had once belonged to scholarship.

The Burned-Over Church

The region stretching across western and central New York became known as the Burned-Over District because revivalism swept across it so frequently during the first half of the nineteenth century that people joked there was no spiritual fuel left to burn. The region produced enormous religious energy. It also produced an extraordinary number of new religious movements.

William Miller, Joseph Smith, the early Adventist movement, and later Charles Taze Russell all emerged from or were deeply connected to the religious environment created in this period. Their doctrines differed enormously, but their founders were constructing massive theological systems without the kind of linguistic and historical formation that older Protestant churches had once considered essential.

William Miller was a farmer and Baptist lay preacher. By reading the King James Bible and calculating prophetic numbers in Daniel, he concluded that Christ would return around 1843 or 1844. Thousands eventually accepted the prediction. October 22, 1844, passed without the return of Christ and became remembered among his followers as the Great Disappointment.

Ellen G. White later helped transform the Millerite failure into a new theological system. When the expected event did not occur visibly on earth, 1844 was reinterpreted as a heavenly event associated with what became the Adventist doctrine of the Investigative Judgment.

Joseph Smith, with little formal education and no training in biblical languages, announced new revelation and produced new scripture in the language of the King James Bible. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged from the same broader nineteenth-century American religious environment in which established theological authority had weakened and charismatic claims to revelation could flourish.

Charles Taze Russell, whose movement developed into the Jehovah’s Witnesses, likewise constructed a sweeping theological system without any serious theological training. His rejection of Christ’s full deity revived arguments Christians had fought over during the Arian controversy more than fifteen centuries earlier.

The point is not that a degree guarantees orthodoxy. Church history contains highly educated heretics. The problem is what disappears when serious theological formation ceases to function as a restraint.

By the twentieth century, American Protestantism had become extraordinarily successful at producing religious movements on a mass scale. Revival campaigns filled stadiums. Radio and television turned preachers into national figures. Megachurches emerged. Christian publishing became an industry. The United States produced some of the largest Protestant ministries in history.

Finney’s emphasis upon decision developed into a revival culture built around bringing individuals to an identifiable moment of commitment. Billy Sunday carried the mass revival into the early twentieth century. Billy Graham later perfected the crusade model on a scale Finney could never have imagined.

Clinging to measurable results eventually entered the ordinary church. The Church Growth Movement encouraged pastors to think deliberately about what attracted people, what retained them, and what produced numerical growth. The seeker-sensitive movement pushed this further by designing services around people who were uncomfortable with traditional churches.

Once that happens, the pastor’s professional formation changes. He needs leadership skills, communication skills, organizational skills, fundraising ability, marketing instincts, and the personality necessary to lead a large staff. Greek and Hebrew become useful but optional. Church history becomes specialized knowledge. Systematic theology can be delegated to seminaries while the successful pastor concentrates on growing the ministry.

Christian preaching increasingly moved toward therapy. Questions about sin, judgment, covenant, redemption, holiness, and the nature of God were displaced by questions about personal fulfillment, relationships, success, mental well-being, leadership, and finding purpose. The prosperity gospel represents the most shameless version of this development. God becomes the mechanism through which the believer obtains health and wealth. God exists largely to improve my life. Scripture becomes a source of practical lessons. The sermon becomes encouragement. The pastor becomes motivational speaker, therapist, and chief executive simultaneously.

Salam Almasry is a fellow at the Ideologiocal Defense Institue

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An Afghan from the province Nuristan – formerly Kafiristan (“land of infidels”) told me his story: in early 1896, his region was the last to be conquered and folded into the Emirate of Afghanistan. His great-grandfather had gathered his eight sons – who at that time still worshiped the ancient gods and goddesses of the region – to discuss the choice their invaders had set before them: accept Islam or die.

Beginning with the eldest, son after son announced his choice: death. Their father begged his two youngest sons to accept Islam in order to carry on the family lineage. The man sitting across the table from me was the grandson of the youngest who had agreed to his father’s request and, not long after, had watched helplessly as six of his brothers were murdered for refusing to submit to Islam.

I was horrified. I was also confused. The man before me presented as a Muslim. He worked for a Muslim organization. His headscarf-adorned wife fussed over prayer times and whether processed foods contained gelatin or other forbidden ingredients.

I leaned forward and quietly asked, “So, are you still a Muslim?”

He told me that he was.

“Why?” I pressed boldly. “You live in America now. You are free. You can be whatever you want. Do you really believe in Islam, even after six of your grand-uncles were murdered for rejecting it? Muhammad killed people for rejecting Islam – the Qur’an tells Muslims to do that. Is that the prophet you want to follow, and the god you want to worship?”

He just shrugged. He barely knew me; what could he possibly say? Islam punishes apostasy by death. Even here in the Land of the Free, leaving Islam comes at great cost. In his case, it would start with his paycheck and his wife. And then – who knew what the total cost would be?

Even so, it astounds me that Islam maintains its hold over descendants of those who submitted to it under duress. His case is not unique. The Islamic doctrinal sources make clear that the vast majority submitted unwillingly. Even the Qur’an acknowledges Islam’s spread by force:

“He it is Who has sent His Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth to make it victorious over all religions even though the mushrikun (polytheists) hate it.”¹

How many submitted by faith, and how many for other reasons? If not by faith, how long before it collapses from within?

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Motivations among the Quraysh of Mecca

According to The Life of Muhammad, Alfred Guillaume’s English translation of Sirat Rasul Allah generally attributed to Ibn Ishaq, even Muhammad himself needed convincing. After the incident in the cave, Muhammad thought he had been possessed. He tried to commit suicide.²

It was his wife Khadijah and her cousin Waraqa who convinced him he was a prophet³ – their efforts likely saved his life.

Clearly some were true believers. Muhammad bestowed on his best friend Abu Bakr the moniker “al-Siddiq” – The Loyal – and indeed Abu Bakr remained loyal even after Muhammad’s death.⁴ Ali, who lived with Muhammad as a son at the time, was ten years old when he submitted to Islam.⁵ Bilal was abused for his faith in Muhammad, and he won his freedom from slavery because of his loyalty.⁶

Family ties played their part as well. Umar submitted to Islam in remorse for punching his sister.⁷ Muhammad’s uncle Hamza joined in anger at seeing his nephew mocked.⁸ Two other uncles, Abu Talib and Abbas, were supportive of Muhammad, but there is no solid indication that either accepted his claim of prophethood. After 13 years of preaching in Mecca, Muhammad’s followers numbered about 125, including women and children.

Most Meccans submitted years later, when Muhammad surrounded the city with ten thousand warriors from among his conquered peoples across Arabia. Abu Sufyan, Mecca’s chief, came out to negotiate.

[Muhammad] said, “Woe to you, Abu Sufyan, isn’t it time that you recognize that I am God’s apostle?”

[Abu Sufyan] answered, “As to that I still have some doubt.”

[Abdullah ibn Abbas] said to him, “Submit and testify that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the apostle of God before you lose your head,” so he did so.⁹

After witnessing Muhammad’s vast army, Abu Sufyan returned to Mecca and told his people, “This is Muhammad with ten thousand, wearing iron, so submit!”¹⁰ Most did, lining up before Muhammad to make their pledges.¹¹

Motivations among the men of Medina

The men of Medina invited Muhammad to their city to end their generations-long civil war, saying, “No tribe is so divided by hatred and rancour as [ours]. Perhaps God will unite them through you. So let us go to them and invite them to this religion of yours, and if God unites them in it, then no man will be mightier than you.”¹²

Muhammad united both armies, turning their warriors outward to conquer Arabia and beyond.

At the battle of the trench, one of his men complained, “Muhammad used to promise us that we would eat the treasures of Chosroes (the Persian Emperor) and Caesar and today not one of us can feel safe in going to the privy!”¹³

Is this a man motivated by faith, or by the promise of war booty? Muhammad complained a great deal about the “hypocrites”; the Qur’an contains 37 instances of the word “hypocrite” in its various forms.¹⁴

Slaves submit and win their freedom

In Muhammad’s siege of Ta’if, his herald called out, “Any slave who comes down from the fortress and comes out to us, is free!”¹⁵

Sahih Muslim tells us:

“There came a slave and pledged allegiance to Allah’s Apostle (peace be upon him) on migration; he (the Prophet) did not know that he was a slave. Then there came his master and demanded him back, whereupon Allah’s Apostle (peace be upon him) said: Sell him to me. And he bought him for two black slaves, and he did not afterwards take allegiance from anyone until he had asked him whether he was a slave (or a free man).”¹⁶

Slaves could expect to be set free if Muhammad accepted their pledge to Islam.

Submission of Arabs from other tribes

The Islamic historian al-Waqidi lists more than 70 raids and military expeditions led or dispatched by Muhammad during the ten years between his migration to Medina and his death in 632 A.D.¹⁷

Muhammad offered the defeated polytheists only two options: submit to Islam or die.¹⁸ Jews and Christians were offered a third choice: to pay tribute (jizya) of an amount intended to keep them small and powerless.¹⁹ The first jizya was imposed on the Jews of Khaybar: half the harvest every year. In the desolate sands of Arabia, losing half the harvest must have left little on which to survive.

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Motivated by Fear

After Muhammad’s conquest of Khaybar – consisting of seven towering fortresses on tops of mountains, and ten thousand armored warriors²⁰ – few dared fight him. Town after town and tribe after tribe submitted to his army and to Islam without a fight.²¹ In contrast to the 125 followers he garnered during his 13 years of preaching in Mecca, Muhammad amassed tens of thousands over the next ten years, after having acquired Medina’s battle-seasoned warriors who rode out to attack, on average, more than seven times each year.

Islam’s Apostate Wars

Any doubt that the overwhelming majority of Arabs submitted unwillingly can be dismissed by the accounts of the Apostate Wars. Ibn Ishaq writes that Aisha used to say, “When the apostle died the Arabs apostatized and Christianity and Judaism raised their heads and disaffection appeared.”²²

Abu Bakr, as the newly-appointed Caliph, spent nearly a year leading the army of Islam throughout Arabia to re-conquer them and bring them back into submission.²³ That is not faith – it is nothing but brute force.

What about Islam’s Narrators and Chroniclers?

Signs of disbelief can be found even among the narrators and chroniclers Islam’s history – in the very sources Muslims look to for their religious doctrines.

Ibn Ishaq recounts that, when rebuilding the Ka’ba, stones with inscriptions were found. Across the ancient world, it is common to find stones repurposed from one structure to another, but one allegedly read, “grapes cannot be gathered from thorns.”²⁴ Christians will recognize these words as Jesus’ warning about false prophets: “Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles?”²⁵ Not only would this suggest that a stone used in the construction of the Ka’ba – allegedly built by Abraham and Ishmael – had been repurposed from an old church, but imagine: Jesus’ famous warning about false prophets carved in stone on the Ka’ba in Mecca!

Muhammad Suffers the Qur’anic Punishment for False Prophets

The punishment for fabricating verses in the name of Allah is spelled out in the Qur’an as follows: “And if Muhammad had made up about Us some false sayings, We would have siezed him by the right hand, then We would have cut from him the aorta.”²⁶

According to Sahih al-Bukhari – the most trusted source for Sunni Muslims, second only to the Qur’an itself – Muhammad on his deathbed said, “O ‘Aisha! I still feel the pain caused by the food I ate at Khaybar, and at this time, I feel as if my aorta is being cut from that poison.”²⁷

Most people complain of stomachaches. Headaches. Body aches. Dizziness. Fatigue. When was the last time you heard someone complain, “I feel as if my aorta is being cut”? What is the likelihood that this was just a coincidence, that Muhammad just happened to suffer from the exact ailment the Qur’an promises for making up false sayings and attributing them to Allah?

Muhammad at Khaybar: A story replete with oddities

According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad and his army defeated each of Khaybar’s seven fortresses, surrounded by date palm plantations, one by one. Then he accepted a roasted goat (or lamb) as a gift from a Khaybarite woman and invited some of his companions to join him for dinner.²⁸ It was this poisoned meat which caused Muhammad to suffer for the next several years until his death, ultimately making him feel that his aorta was being severed.

How realistic is this story? Is it possible that the man who rose from orphaned shepherd boy to conqueror of Arabia could have been so gullible? Did it not occur to him that she might not have his best interests in mind? Were the corpses of her father, her uncles, and her husband still lying on the ground when she delivered this “gift” to her conqueror?

But there is more. Sahih al-Bukhari reports, “Narrated Sa`d: I heard Allah’s Messenger saying, “Whoever takes seven ‘ajwa dates in the morning will not be affected by magic or poison on that day.”²⁹

Both Medina and Khaybar were famous for their ajwa dates – both were surrounded by large date palm plantations. With ajwa dates all around him, did he he miss his breakfast that morning?

At table, Muhammad took meat from the goat’s foreleg, put a morsel in his mouth, and announced, “Stop! Surely this foreleg informs me that it is poisoned.”³⁰ His companion Bishr had already eaten some of the meat, and subsequently died from it. If the meat informed Muhammad that it was poisoned, why did it not tell him two minutes sooner?

Bishr tells us that he had tasted the poison. “By God, I found that from the bite I ate, and what prevented me from spitting it out was that I hated to spoil your pleasure at your food, for when you swallowed what was in your hand I would not favor myself over you.”³¹ Bishr did not need the meat to talk. But if the meat did not talk, why did Muhammad claim that it had? What other claims of supernatural communications might Muhammad have fabricated?

Muhammad also claimed that women were deficient in intelligence.³² Yet, in this odd story, Muhammad himself is easily outsmarted by a woman – outsmarted unto his own death.

Muhammad called her and asked, “Did you poison the shoulder?”

She said, “Who told you?”

He replied, “The shoulder.”

She said, “Yes.”

He asked, “What persuaded you to do that?”

She said, “You killed my father, my uncle, and my husband. You took from my people what you took. I said to myself, if he is a prophet, he will be informed. The sheep will inform him of what I did. If he is a king, we will be relieved of him.”³³

So, when Muhammad ate the meat, did he fail her test? Given all the oddities in this story, is it even possible that its narrators and chroniclers believed Muhammad was a prophet?

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Auf ibn al-Harith: Islam’s First Suicide Killer

At the battle of Badr, Auf ibn Harith asked Muhammad, “O apostle of God, what makes the Lord laugh with joy at his servant?”

[Muhammad] answered, “When he plunges into the midst of the enemy without mail.”

Auf drew off the mail coat that was on him and threw it away: then he seized his sword and fought the enemy until he was slain.³⁴

Why did Muhammad encourage this man to cast aside his protective chain mail coat, thus throwing his life away? Just to see if he could make him do it? To a modern-day military tribunal, this would be a war crime. To a Christian, this deed carries the odor of the deadly sin of pride.

Again, could the narrator of this tale possibly be a faithful, believing Muslim?

Mixed-Up and Heretical Bible Stories

Even the Qur’an itself is full of mixed-up and heretical Bible stories. For example, the Qur’an confuses Moses’ marriage story with Jacob’s. In the Bible, Jacob works for seven years to earn the hand of his bride Leah, then another seven years to win the hand of her sister Rachel.³⁵ Moses is freely given the hand of Zapporah, the eldest of Jethro’s seven daughters.³⁶ Yet the Qur’an says that it was Moses who worked for eight to ten years for the hand of one of two sisters.³⁷ The Prophet Hosea corroborates the story of Jacob’s work tending sheep to win a wife.³⁸

In the Book of Judges we find the story of Gideon testing his soldiers at the river and sending away the vast majority of them, based on whether they lifted the water in the hand to drink or got down on their hands and knees and lapped.³⁹ The Qur’an tells this story as well, but attributes it to Saul.⁴⁰

The Qur’an’s Angel Gabriel addresses Maryam – the Arabic name for Mary, the mother of Jesus – as “sister of Aaron” – apparently confusing Maryam with Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron who lived some 1400 years earlier.⁴¹ The Qur’an also calls Maryam the wife or woman of Imran.⁴² Islam rejects the notion of Jesus’ mother ever having a husband. Mary’s father was Joachim – Miriam’s father was Amram.

The Qur’an recounts a story of the boy Jesus breathing life into a clay bird, which then flies away.⁴³

This is from the heretical “Infancy Gospel of Thomas.”⁴⁴ It was much too late to have been written by Thomas, and it portrays the boy Jesus as a rascal – by his word, killing two boys who annoyed him. The Church declared this work heretical for good reason. Yet, its story found its way into the Qur’an.

The Islamic Dilemma

The Qur’an claims Jesus as a prophet who performed miracles; however, it does not contain a single one of Jesus’ teachings. Rather, it denies the crucifixion⁴⁵ – in spite of extensive historical evidence for it. Moreover, the Qur’an itself repeatedly affirms the authority, authenticity, and preservation of the Bible. This creates an inescapable dilemma for Muslims: if the Bible is correct, then the Qur’an is false, because the Qur’an contradicts the Bible. If the Bible is false, then the Qur’an is false, because it repeatedly confirms it. For details see: The Quran, the Bible, and the Islamic Dilemma (David Wood)

These are only a few examples of errors, mix-ups, and contradictions in the Islamic sources. The stockpile of evidence suggests that the “unlettered prophet” was sabotaged by his own chroniclers.

One did. Abdullah ibn Sa’d ibn Abi Sarh al-Amiri, Muhammad’s scribe, left Islam and started saying, “I used to direct Muhammad wherever I willed. He would dictate to me ‘Most High, All-Wise’, and I would write down ‘All-Wise’ only. Then he would say, ‘Yes it is all the same.’ On a certain occasion he said, ‘Write such and such’, but I wrote ‘Write’ only, and he said, ‘Write whatever you like.’” So when this scribe exposed Muhammad, he wrote in the Qur’an, “And who does greater evil than he who forges against God a lie, or says, ‘To me it has been revealed’, when naught has been revealed to him.”⁴⁶

When Muhammad later conquered Mecca, he ordered his men to kill him and some others, “even if they are found beneath the curtains of the Ka’ba.”⁴⁷

How Long will Muslims Cling to what Oppressed their Ancestors?

The Islamic sources cry out, again and again, that the overwhelming majority of Arabs submitted to Islam under duress. Even the narrators and chroniclers themselves indicate their inward rejection of the belief system they claim with their pens to represent. Beyond Arabia, Islam’s military conquests.

Elaine Jones is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Notes

1. Qur’an 61:9 and 9:33, Mohsin Khan translation

2. The Life of Muhammad, a Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, Guilliaume, A. page 106

3. Ibid, page 107

4. The History of al-Tabbari, Vol. X, The Conquest of Arabia, translated by Donner, Fred M. Page 14

5. Guilliaume, page 114

6. Ibid, page 144

7. Ibid, page 156

8. Ibid, page 132

9. Ibid, page 547. This story appears also in The Life of Muhammad: Al-Waqidi’s Kitab al-Maghazi, Edited by Rizwi Faizer, page 403

10. Al-Waqidi/Faizer, page 405

11. Guilliaume, page 553

12. Ibid, page 198

13. Ibid, page 454

14. The Quranic Arabic Corpus - Quran Dictionary (search for root “n-f-q” excluding “spend” and other meanings)

15. Al-Waqidi/Faizer, page 456

16. Sahih Muslim Book 10 Hadith 3901

17. Al-Waqidi/Faizer

18. Qur’an 9:5, also Sahih al-Bukhari hadith 25

19. Qur’an 9:29

20. Al-Waqidi/Faizer page 312-13

21. Guilliaume, A.

22. Guilliaume, A. page 689

23. The History of al-Tabbari, Vol. X, The Conquest of Arabia, translated by Donner, Fred M.

24. Guilliaume, A. page 86

25. Matthew 7:16

26. Qur’an 69: 44-46: Sahih International translation

27. Sahih al-Bukhari 5:59:713

28. Al-Waqidi/Faizer

29. Bukhari 5779, 5445, 5768, and 5769

30. Al-Waqidi/Faizer page 333

31. Al-Waqidi/Faizer page 334

32. Bukhari 304

33. Al-Waqidi/Faizer page 334

34. Guillaume, A. page 300

35. Genesis 29: 15-29

36. Exodus 2: 15-21

37. Qur’an 28: 23-29

38. Hosea 12:12

39. Judges 7: 1-8

40. Qur’an 2:249

41. Qur’an 19:28

42. Qur’an 3:35

43. Qur’an 3:49

44. Infancy Gospel of Thomas — Gospels.net

45. Qur’an 4:157

46. Al-Sira by al-Iraqi

47. Guillaume, A. page 550

Islamic law, sharia, produces a specific catalog of binding prohibitions and obligations. The criminal hudud penalties prescribe stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, and crucifixion or death for certain categories of brigandage and apostasy. The jizya tax is levied on non-Muslim populations living under Islamic political authority, who occupy the subordinated status of dhimmis. Conventional interest-based lending is prohibited under the doctrine of riba. Women are placed under the male guardianship of fathers, husbands, or other male relatives for major life decisions, and their testimony in evidentiary procedure is treated as half the value of a man’s. The political authority of non-Muslims over Muslims is prohibited, and the territorial expansion of Islamic authority is treated as a binding collective obligation under the doctrine of jihad.

These laws are not the inventions of modern extremists. They are the outputs of the canonical Islamic scripture.

Islamic law has been impractical for modern statecraft since the first attempts to build Muslim-majority states inside the international order that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It cannot be applied inside the contemporary international order. A state that imposes the hudud cannot maintain extradition treaties with non-Muslim states. A state that collects the jizya cannot host the diplomatic presence of non-Muslim governments. A state that prohibits riba cannot participate in the international banking system. A state that enforces the male guardianship of adult women cannot generate the labor-force participation, the educational attainment, or the consumer economy that modern productivity requires. A state that executes apostates cannot maintain freedom-of-religion treaty obligations or attract international professional populations. The laws are incompatible with modern statehood as such.

Every Muslim-majority polity that has attempted to participate in the modern international order has had to deactivate substantial portions of sharia to do so. Egypt does not stone adulterers; the modern Egyptian civil code was derived predominantly from the French Civil Code, with selective sharia references rather than the other way around.¹ Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinances of 1979 formally brought hudud penalties into the criminal code, but the evidentiary requirements, four adult male Muslim eyewitnesses to the act of penetration for zina prosecutions, rendered the ordinances largely inert in practice. The Women’s Protection Act of 2006 further constrained their operation.²

Indonesia, with the world’s largest Muslim population, operates a secular criminal code derived from the Dutch colonial system, with Islamic criminal law existing only in the Special Region of Aceh. Morocco reformed its Mudawwana family code in 2004 to remove the male guardianship requirement for adult women, heavily restrict polygamy, and equalize inheritance rights in significant respects. Tunisia, under Habib Bourguiba’s Code of Personal Status of 1956, abolished polygamy outright. The deactivation of Islamic law is therefore the rule across the Islamic world, not the exception.

THE DEACTIVATION OF SHARIA IN THE UAE

The United Arab Emirates has accomplished a deactivation more complete than any other Muslim-majority state.

Cohabitation and zina: Islamic law prohibits zina, defined as sexual relations outside marriage, with binding criminal consequences extending to cohabitation between unmarried adults of opposite sex. The UAE deactivated this prohibition through Federal Decree-Law No. 15 of 2020, signed by President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan on November 7, 2020.³ The reform was consolidated in the new federal penal code under Federal Law No. 31 of 2021, effective January 2, 2022. Consensual cohabitation and consensual extramarital sex between adults are no longer criminal offenses.

Alcohol: The Qur’anic prohibition on alcohol is among the more textually direct provisions of Islamic law (Qur’an 5:90-91). The same Federal Decree-Law No. 15 of 2020 amended Article 313 of the federal penal code to decriminalize the consumption, possession, and trade of alcoholic beverages by persons over twenty-one in licensed venues.⁴ Dubai operates a particularly permissive regime calibrated to support the international tourism economy.

Dhimma and non-Muslim religious practice: Islam permits the practice of certain non-Muslim faiths only within the dhimma framework: payment of jizya, prohibition on the construction of new houses of worship, prohibition on public display of non-Muslim religious symbols, and a generalized social subordination of dhimmi populations.⁵ The UAE has done none of what this framework requires. No jizya is collected. New churches, Hindu temples, gurdwaras, and Jewish synagogues have been built in the twenty-first century with state authorization. The Abrahamic Family House on Saadiyat Island, inaugurated on February 16, 2023 and opened to the public on March 1, 2023, contains the Imam Al-Tayeb Mosque, the St. Francis Church, and the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue in a single architectural complex.⁶

Women: Islamic law produces several binding constraints on women’s social and economic role: male guardianship, prohibition on free mixing between unrelated men and women, modesty requirements with specific provisions on covering, half-share inheritance, and limitations on women’s testimony. The UAE has deactivated most of these. Emirati women hold senior positions in the federal cabinet, the diplomatic corps, the judiciary, and corporate leadership. The guardianship system has been progressively dismantled. Women travel internationally without male escort. Free mixing is the normal condition of professional and social life. Dress is essentially voluntary. The inheritance rules retain their Islamic form in personal-status law for Muslims but operate inside a federal system that has permitted non-Muslim residents to opt out through Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2022 on Civil Personal Status for Non-Muslims.

Finance and riba: Islam prohibits riba (usury) and prescribes specific contract forms incompatible with the conventional global financial system. The UAE applies English common law rather than Islamic jurisprudence to its international financial sector. The Dubai International Financial Centre, established in 2004, and the Abu Dhabi Global Market, established in 2013, operate under English common law with independent court systems whose judges are predominantly drawn from common-law jurisdictions worldwide.⁷ Conventional interest-based lending operates freely. Sharia-compliant Islamic finance exists as a parallel product line, not as the system’s operative framework. The legal certainty that attracts international capital comes from the imported common-law system.

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Friday sermons and religious speech: A polity applying Islamic law would face the question of how to manage the Friday sermon, historically the primary medium of political-Islamic mobilization. The UAE has centralized the regulation of Friday sermon content under the General Authority for Islamic Affairs and Endowments. Sermons are written by the state and read aloud in mosques with deviation producing professional consequences for the imam. The content excludes political-Islamic themes and avoids the doctrinal positions on jihad, on Jews, on non-Muslims, and on the proper political role of Islam that mainstream Islamic preaching elsewhere continues to articulate.

Religious education: Across most of the Arab Islamic world, religious education transmits specific positions on jihad, on the religious status of Jews and Christians, on al-wala’ wal-bara’ (loyalty to Muslims and disavowal of non-Muslims), and on the political role of Islam in the state. Al-Azhar University in Cairo continues to teach and publish in this tradition. Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Al-Azhar issued a statement that “salutes with utmost pride the resistance efforts of the proud Palestinian people,” and on October 18, 2023, released a fatwa declaring that “Zionist civilians on occupied land do not [at all] qualify the description of ‘civilians.’”⁸ The UAE has systematically revised its national religious-education curriculum across the past fifteen years, removing this material and foregrounding abrogated tolerant Qur’anic verses.⁹

Apostasy: Even though Emirati law formally criminalizes apostasy by death, no Emirati Muslim has been criminally prosecuted for apostasy in living memory. Emiratis who quietly stop practicing are not pursued. The state does not investigate the personal religious convictions of its citizens. Private apostasy is, in fact, available in the UAE in a way it is not in other Islamic countries where social policing, family enforcement, or state action produce consequences that the UAE’s regime does not produce.

Israel and the Islamic political consensus: The majority of Muslims treats the rejection of the State of Israel as a binding political and religious commitment, anchored doctrinally in Qur’an 5:51 and in the jurisprudence on Dar al-Islam, which treats any territory once incorporated into Islamic political authority as permanently Islamic. The Khartoum Resolution of September 1, 1967, codified the Arab and Islamic position into the three no’s: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. The formula held as the binding consensus across Arab states and Islamic movements for fifty-three years. The UAE deactivated this commitment on September 15, 2020, by signing the Abraham Accords and establishing full diplomatic, economic, and security relations with Israel.¹⁰

The war on the Muslim Brotherhood: The deactivation is paired with active opposition to the international organizational infrastructure of political Islam. The UAE designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization in November 2014, under Federal Law No. 7 of 2014. The cabinet’s terrorist-entity list of November 15, 2014 contained 83 organizations, including the Brotherhood’s Emirati affiliate Al-Islah, Brotherhood-aligned organizations across Europe (the Association of Italian Muslims, the Finnish Islamic Association, Geneva-based Alkarama), Islamic Relief Worldwide in Birmingham, and the two largest Brotherhood-descended Muslim civil-society organizations in the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS).¹¹ On January 8, 2025, the UAE expanded the list further, adding eleven individuals and eight UK-based companies linked to the Brotherhood.¹² A state applying Islamic law in even attenuated form would not be the most aggressive opponent in the Muslim-majority world of the largest organized movement to apply Islamic law globally. The UAE has decoupled itself from Islamic governance and identified the international movement to apply Islamic governance as a strategic enemy.

THE TYRANNY OF PUBLIC OPINION IN ISLAMIC STATES

If the deactivation of Islamic law is the requirement of modern statecraft, why has it not consolidated across the wider Islamic world? Why are the patterns of failure, Iran 1979, Sudan 1985, Algeria 1991, Egypt 2012, so consistent? The answer is the constraint Tocqueville identified in Democracy in America as the tyranny of public opinion, applied here to societies whose public opinion has been shaped by fourteen centuries of religious political theology.¹³

In a society where the Friday sermon, the religious educational system, the social authority of the religious scholars, and the inherited moral imagination of the population continue to treat Islamic laws as binding, the state’s formal deactivation of those provisions is in permanent tension with the beliefs of its citizens. The state may write the law one way. The population believes the law should be written the other way. The gap is the political space in which Islamic movements grow, in which secular regimes lose legitimacy, and in which the deactivation is reversed whenever conditions permit.

Egypt under Anwar Sadat liberalized economically and signed the peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981, by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.¹⁴ Tunisia under Bourguiba and his successor Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ran the most aggressively secular Arab regime for fifty years. The regime was overthrown in 2011, after which the Islamic Ennahda party won the first free elections, demonstrating that the deactivation had been a state-imposed operation the population had not internalized. The Shah of Iran ran the most ambitious Islamic-world modernization program of the twentieth century: land reform, women’s suffrage, mass education, and aggressive economic liberalization. The Shah was overthrown in February 1979 by a revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini and supported by an alliance of the religious scholarship, the bazaar merchants, and the masses whose Islamic political theology the modernization program had failed to reach. Algeria’s secular socialist regime faced the Islamic FIS in the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991. The FIS won decisively, prompting a January 1992 military coup and a civil war that killed approximately 150,000 people across the following decade.

In each case the state’s formal apparatus had been substantially modernized and Islamic law had been substantially deactivated in operative content. In each case the population, shaped by religious institutions the state did not fully control, retained the political capacity to demand the reinstatement of Islamic political authority whenever the state’s legitimacy weakened.

The problem is therefore not the absence of administrative will to deactivate. Egypt, Tunisia, Iran under the Shah, and Algeria all had the administrative will. The problem is the public opinion the deactivation cannot survive. Where the population is open to political mobilization through religious channels the state does not control, through independent mosques, through religious scholarly authority outside the state’s discipline, through religiously formed civil-society organizations, through electoral processes that allow Islamic parties to compete, the deactivation cannot be made permanent. The Islamic intellectual and political constituencies are organized at a scale and with a depth of legitimacy that ruling regimes cannot indefinitely override.

IS THE UAE DIFFERENT? AND WILL IT LAST?

The UAE has escaped the public-opinion constraint through a specific combination of conditions that no other Islamic polity shares.

The federation was established on December 2, 1971, from seven Trucial sheikhdoms that had existed under British protection since the nineteenth century. The founding was the product of negotiated agreement among ruling families, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum of Dubai as architects, rather than imposition by force or mass political mobilization. The federation has governed since 1971 through consensus among ruling families and a small Emirati citizenry, embedded in a non-citizen resident population of expatriates from more than 200 nationalities.

This is the demographic and political configuration that has made the UAE’s deactivation possible. The Emirati citizen population is roughly one million in a total population of approximately ten million. The state determines the content of the Friday sermon, the religious educational curriculum, the legal framework, and the public posture on the major political-theological questions. There is no independent religious scholarly establishment outside state discipline. There are no Islamic political parties because there are no political parties. There is no electoral process at which an Islamic program could be tested against the regime’s program. The independent civil-society infrastructure through which Islamic mobilization could occur does not exist in the UAE.

The deactivation in the UAE is therefore in alignment with a public opinion that the state has built. The Emirati citizen who grows up inside the Emirati educational system, watches Emirati state media, attends mosques where the state writes the sermon, and lives in a federation whose ruling families have governed by consensus since 1971 has been formed inside the legitimating frame of the deactivation rather than against it. The state has not had to overcome a hostile religious popular sentiment because the state has prevented that sentiment from forming in political shape.

The UAE is different not because it has solved the doctrinal problem of Islamic reform but because it has conditions, small population, federal monarchy, total state control of the religious public sphere, absence of independent Islamic political mobilization, that other Islamic countries do not possess. The Emirati model cannot be replicated in larger or more politically open Islamic polities because the conditions that make the model work are precisely the conditions those polities lack.

Whether the UAE’s project will last depends on whether these conditions hold. Three risks deserve attention.

The first is generational. The deactivation has been built over the past two decades under the leadership of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed and his successor Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed. The current architecture rests on the cohesion of the ruling families, the continued exclusion of independent Islamic political organization, and the maintenance of a small citizen population relative to the non-citizen resident population. A succession crisis, a fracture among the ruling families, or a demographic shift that gave native Emiratis a different relationship to the state’s chosen course could destabilize the configuration.

The second is regional. The UAE is embedded in a region where Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and elements of the Muslim Brotherhood continue to project political-Islamic influence. The Emirati domestic deactivation is sustained partly by the active war on the Brotherhood and the broader infrastructure of political Islam. A regional shift, an Iranian success in projecting power into the Gulf, a Muslim Brotherhood return to political viability in Egypt or Tunisia, a Qatari-Turkish strategic realignment, could place pressure on the Emirati model from the outside.

The third is demographic. The non-citizen resident population sustains the UAE’s economy but cannot be assimilated into Emirati citizenship under the existing constitutional framework. The state’s ability to maintain the deactivation depends on continued political control by the small citizen population. If the non-citizen population grew in political weight, or if economic conditions forced the state to extend political participation to expatriates, the public-opinion constraint that the UAE has escaped could begin to operate.

NOTES

1. Enid Hill, “Al-Sanhuri and Islamic Law: The Place and Significance of Islamic Law in the Life and Work of ‘Abd al-Razzaq Ahmad al-Sanhuri, Egyptian Jurist and Scholar, 1895-1971,” Arab Law Quarterly 3, nos. 2-3 (1988): 182-218, 287-310.

2. Government of Pakistan, The Offence of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance, 1979; and Protection of Women (Criminal Laws Amendment) Act, 2006. Statutes archived at the National Assembly of Pakistan, https://na.gov.pk/.

3. United Arab Emirates, Federal Decree-Law No. 15 of 2020 Amending Certain Provisions of Federal Law No. 3 of 1987 Concerning the Penal Code. Text archived at the UAE Ministry of Justice, https://www.moj.gov.ae/. For analytical summary, see Trowers & Hamlins LLP, “United Arab Emirates Legal Reforms,” November 10, 2020, https://www.trowers.com/.

4. Anish Pailoor, “UAE: Reforms in Personal Status and Criminal Law,” Solicitors Journal, April 11, 2023.

5. Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

6. Maria-Cristina Florian, “The Abrahamic Family House, Adjaye Associates’ Interfaith Complex in Abu Dhabi, Opens to the Public,” ArchDaily, March 1, 2023, https://www.archdaily.com/997156/the-abrahamic-family-house-adjaye-associates-interfaith-complex-in-abu-dhabi-opens-to-the-public.

7. Dubai International Financial Centre, https://www.difc.ae/; Abu Dhabi Global Market, https://www.adgm.com/.

8. Institute for National Security Studies, “Al-Azhar at a Crossroads,” January 2024, https://www.inss.org.il/.

9. Mariam Alhashmi, Naved Bakali, and Rama Baroud, “Tolerance in UAE Islamic Education Textbooks,” Religions 11, no. 8 (2020): 377, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11080377; Zeynep Ozgen and Soha I. El Shishtawy Hassan, “Meaning of a Textbook: Religious Education, National Islam, and the Politics of Reform in the United Arab Emirates,” Nations and Nationalism 27, no. 4 (2021): 1181-1197, https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12734.

10. US Department of State, “The Abraham Accords Declaration,” September 15, 2020, https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords/.

11. “List of Groups Designated Terrorist Organisations by the UAE,” The National (UAE), November 16, 2014; “UAE Designates 83 Groups as Terrorist Organisations,” MEED, November 17, 2014.

12. Human Rights Watch, “UAE: Dissidents, Relatives Designated ‘Terrorists,’” April 22, 2025, https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/04/22/uae-dissidents-relatives-designated-terrorists.

13. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (1835), chap. 15.

14. On the assassination of Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, see the historical record consolidated in the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, “Egypt and the Camp David Accords,” https://history.state.gov/.

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Khaled Hassan & Danny Burmawi

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Hollywood has been a deliberate target of Islamic advocacy for decades. The Muslim Public Affairs Council operates an entire Hollywood Bureau. MPAC says the bureau works directly with executives, writers, producers, studios, and streaming companies to change portrayals of Muslims and Islam. By shaping culture, MPAC says, it can shape public perception and ultimately public policy. Its Hollywood Bureau has consulted with Disney, Paramount, Amazon, Hulu, CBS, NBC, Fox, FX, National Geographic, Starz, the BBC, and others.

Tom Clancy’s 1991 novel The Sum of All Fears involved Muslim terrorists, but when Paramount adapted the book, they were gone. The film’s villains became European neo-Nazis. Director Phil Alden Robinson and screenwriter Dan Pyne argued that Muslim terrorists had become a cliché and that neo-fascists fit the film they wanted to make. That part of the history should not be erased.

Well, what about the other part, not only of history, but of the present and the future as well?

CAIR conducted a lobbying campaign over the portrayal of Muslim villains before the film was released. CAIR’s ownlater materials acknowledge its involvement with The Sum of All Fears, among numerous Hollywood productions.

Fear of accusations of Islamophobia, combined with sustained pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations, helped create a culture in Hollywood in which filmmakers became increasingly nervous about depicting Islamic terrorism, even as groups such as Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Al-shabab, Boko Haram, and Iran-backed militias remain active around the world. At the same time, Hollywood has remained perfectly comfortable casting Nazis, Christian fundamentalists, intelligence agencies, corporations, the military, and American conservatives as villains.

In the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, federal investigators introduced internal documents from the Muslim Brotherhood’s American network. One of them was the now-famous 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America. Its author described the Muslim Brotherhood work in America as a long-term “civilization-jihadist” project aimed at changing the country from within. The document was not an American intelligence assessment. It was an internal Muslim Brotherhood document entered into evidence in federal court.

In 2008, a federal jury convicted the foundation and five of its leaders of providing material support to Hamas. The Justice Department said the evidence showed that Hamas’s parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, had built a network of organizations in the United States that raised money and spread support for Hamas. The defendants were ultimately convicted of channeling millions of dollars through Hamas-controlled organizations.

While CAIR itself was never prosecuted in the Holy Land Foundation case, the underlying historical connections cannot be waved away. Documents and testimony introduced in the case placed CAIR founders Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad inside the Palestine Committee milieu from which the Hamas-support network operated in the United States. Recent congressional testimony drawing directly from the trial exhibits again identified both men on internal Palestine Committee records.

MPAC describes itself as a bridge between the Muslim community and the entertainment industry. It cultivates relationships with executives, develops writers, advises productions, organizes fellowships, works with industry institutions, and trains Muslim storytellers to enter the business. In 2018 it partnered with Disney/ABC Television on a Muslim screenwriters lab. It has worked with entertainment-industry figures and institutions including the Writers Guild Foundation and The Black List.

Hollywood does not ordinarily invite the National Rifle Association to determine whether a film about gun violence is fair to gun owners. It does not ask oil companies to approve environmental thrillers. It does not hand evangelical political organizations informal authority over scripts about Christian nationalism.

Yet organizations devoted explicitly to changing what America is have successfully presented themselves as neutral experts on what should appear on screen. MPAC says plainly that its work in entertainment shapes perception and, through perception, policy.

A country becomes vulnerable when it loses the ability to name an ideology that is openly trying to shape it. Hollywood helps teach people which threats are considered legitimate and which are considered taboo. If Americans are frequently exposed to the narratives of the Muslim Brotherhood, then the Muslim Brotherhood will gain room to operate through institutions, advocacy groups, media, and electoral politics without any scrutiny.

Using Hollywood to Attack the UAE

Paramount+’s espionage series is an American adaptation of the French Le Bureau des Légendes, created for the U.S. version by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. George Clooney and Grant Heslov are among its executive producers. Its second season premiered in June 2026, in which Michael Fassbender is a CIA officer who has spent years undercover in the region. His lover, Samia, is Sudanese. In Season 2 she is imprisoned and eventually falls into the hands of an Emirati intelligence officer, Saeed Al-Bukhatir, who interrogates her, threatens members of her family, takes her to Abu Dhabi, and attempts to force her into advocating a particular political arrangement for Sudan.

That is the fiction. The reality in Sudan is more complicated.

Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship was an Islamic state built through an alliance between the military and Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamic movement. After Bashir fell, those networksbecame the army. Reuters reported in 2023 that Islamic movements retained significant influence within military structures; by 2025, senior Islamic figures were openly describing the war as a vehicle for the return of the Islamic state and thousands of Islamic-linked fighters were fighting alongside the army. By 2026 the matter had become serious enough that the United States designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhoodas a terrorist organization.

The SAF has not fought this war alone. Iran supplied drones that helped the army regain momentum. Turkey’s Baykarsent at least $120 million in military equipment, including TB2 drones and warheads. Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed the SAF. The important point is not that all four countries were backing the Muslim Brotherhood for the same reason, they were not. It is that Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all ended up supporting, in different ways, the side of the war which the Muslim Brotherhood controls.

Neither side in Sudan’s war should be exonerated. However, when a Western audience watching The Agencyencounters a sinister Emirati intelligence apparatus coercing a Sudanese woman while the Muslim Brotherhood’s long history of influence over Sudan’s state, army, and civil war goes unmentioned, the result is an audience left misinformed about the reality of the conflict.

It should not be difficult to look at the UAE’s record and understand why its role in Sudan would be portrayed this way. A country that has spent years confronting the Muslim Brotherhood and opposing Brotherhood-aligned movements across the world was always likely to become a villain in a Hollywood culture already shaped by radical-left influence and sustained pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks. Abu Dhabi has made itself the main enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood. For more than a decade, the Emirati government has dismantled Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks at home and opposed them abroad. In 2014, it formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood and numerous associated organizations as terrorist entities, including CAIR.

The UAE’s threat to the Muslim Brotherhood increased since it normalized relations with Israel. The Abraham Accords established full diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE in 2020 and opened cooperation in trade, tourism, technology, security, investment, and other areas. The Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative depends on grievance: grievance against Israel, grievance against Western power, grievance against secular Arab governments, grievance against the existing international order. The UAE has crushed that narrative.

There is no public evidence that Brotherhood-linked groups directly dictated The Agency’s treatment of the UAE. But given the documented effort by MB advocacy organizations to influence Hollywood, it is hardly unreasonable to ask whether that wider network helped shape the climate in which such portrayals are produced. If the Muslim Brotherhood-linked movements have already succeeded in gaining access to Hollywood’s narrative machinery, then we are yet to see what that influence will produce over the next decade.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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Justice, oppression, mercy, equality, liberation, concern for the poor and the stranger, peace, and human dignity may sound secular today, but they are biblical ideas. The left hijacked these principles and weaponized them, pushing them far beyond their original purpose.

In the Bible, these ideas belong to a moral order in which each principle is limited by others. Justice is joined to mercy, mercy assumes judgment, compassion does not cancel responsibility, equality does not erase every distinction. Care for the stranger does not abolish the nation, peace does not forbid self-defense.

Once these principles are removed from that moral order, they no longer serve their original purpose. They begin to serve the opposite.

The Bible has no patience for injustice, but biblical justice is not a political alliance with the weak against the strong. Exodus explicitly warns judges not to favor a poor man merely because he is poor. The biblical justice is based on conduct, not social position. Poverty does not make a person righteous, and wealth does not make a person guilty. A weak man can be wicked. A powerful man can be innocent.

The judge is supposed to ask what happened, who did wrong, and what justice requires. The left asks: who has power?

Once people are divided into oppressors and oppressed, the moral judgment follows the category. The oppressed are granted explanations that would never be offered to the people classified as powerful. Their violence is placed inside a history of colonialism, poverty, humiliation, racism, exclusion, or trauma. Their motives are studied, and their anger is contextualized. The victim may receive none of that attention if he belongs to the wrong group.

That is not biblical justice. It is precisely the kind of partiality the Bible warns against.

Mercy also changes when it is detached from the moral framework that gave it meaning. Biblical mercy assumes guilt. You forgive someone because there is something to forgive, you show mercy because punishment would otherwise be deserved. There is no contradiction between mercy and judgment because mercy only makes sense where judgment is real. Once guilt becomes uncomfortable, mercy becomes confused with the refusal to judge.

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The criminal becomes a victim of circumstances, his upbringing must be considered, his poverty must be considered, his trauma, social environment, mental state, and disadvantages must all be considered. Then punishment itself starts to look immoral, the offender becomes the person society must understand.

The biblical basis for human equality gives every human life dignity before race, class, wealth, status, or political power enters the picture. A king and a beggar stand before the same Creator. No race possesses a higher grade of humanity.

But equality before God never meant sameness. Parent and child are not interchangeable, judge and defendant are not interchangeable, citizen and stranger are not interchangeable, innocent and guilty are not interchangeable. Equal worth does not mean equal role, equal ability, equal responsibility, or equal outcome.

If equality is the highest principle, what must be made equal? Income? Representation? Academic achievement? Wealth? Social status? Political power?

Equality means applying the same rules to everyone. For example, two job applicants should be judged by the same standards regardless of race or sex. But if you decide that equal treatment should also produce equal results, then when one group gets fewer jobs, admissions, promotions, or contracts, you may conclude that the system must be unfair. From there, you can justify treating groups differently to force the outcomes to become more equal.

So the paradox is: in the name of achieving equality, you can end up abandoning equal treatment. That is how institutions can discriminate by race in the name of ending discrimination by race.

The Bible repeatedly commands Israel to treat the stranger justly. But those commands appear inside a Torah that also assumes a distinct people, a land, borders, rulers, laws, inheritance, and obligations that Israelites owe specifically to one another.

The stranger must not be abused, that does not mean Israel must stop being Israel. The radical left keeps the first half and discards the second. Concern for the stranger becomes suspicion of the distinction between stranger and citizen, border enforcement becomes evidence of cruelty, a government’s preference for the welfare of its own citizens can be presented as morally backward.

The biblical principle was designed to restrain a nation from treating outsiders unjustly. It was not designed to make national existence itself morally suspect.

Peace is another biblical good that becomes dangerous when treated as absolute. The Hebrew prophets look forward to a world in which swords are beaten into plowshares. Christianity blesses peacemakers. Neither tradition glorifies war for its own sake, but neither teaches that peace must be preserved at any price.

A peace purchased by surrendering the innocent to an aggressor is not justice, a ceasefire that rewards the party willing to commit enough violence can become an incentive for more violence.

When peace becomes the highest good, the aggressor gains an advantage over the society that fears conflict. The aggressor attacks, the victim responds, then the pressure for restraint falls more heavily on the victim because the victim has the strength to exercise restraint, the stronger side becomes responsible for ending the conflict, while the weaker aggressor benefits from the fact that he has fewer options.

A principle meant to restrain unnecessary violence can then be used to restrain legitimate defense.

The Bible did not hand Western civilization a collection of isolated moral slogans. It gave it a moral order: Justice had to coexist with mercy, mercy had to coexist with judgment, compassion had to coexist with responsibility, equality had to coexist with real differences between people, care for the stranger had to coexist with duties toward one’s own household and people, peace had to coexist with the obligation to defend the innocent.

None of these principles was ultimate. God was, that is what held them together. Once God is removed, the principles remain, but nothing above them determines their proper place.

@DanBurmawy is the Chief Executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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I remember a winter evening in Alexandria-Egypt, not yet thirty years old, on my way to meet a relative who was also one of my closest friends. We had arranged to drink beer and eat dinner together at Cap d’Or, one of the oldest and most storied bars in the city, known locally, for reasons that are their own story, as Sheikh Ali.

I arrived early at the timber shop he ran with his brother. A mosque stood directly across the street. I got there just as the call to Dawn prayer sounded, rain falling hard.

“I figured you weren’t coming,” he said. “Come on, let’s knock out Dawn real quick.”

He knew perfectly well that I did not pray. He also knew I would otherwise be sitting alone in the shop, so he pushed the joke further: “Come on, Abu Lahab, nothing’s going to happen to you. Don’t be scared.” The nickname was aimed at the Quranic figure condemned by name in the Quran itself, and it was entirely in character for him.

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How does a political movement that claims to champion women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, and secularism end up defending an ideology that rejects all of them? The answer is philosophy. The left and Islam make strange bedfellows, but they share a common enemy, and in the logic of the left, that is enough.

To understand the alliance, you have to understand the fundamental disagreement about what drives human behavior.

The Western liberal tradition, and capitalism as its economic expression, rests on the premise that ideas shape the world. This is what philosophers call idealism. A society’s values, beliefs, and convictions determine what kind of civilization it builds. Freedom produces prosperity. Dignity produces justice. A culture that glorifies conquest produces tyranny. A culture that prizes individual responsibility produces order.

From this perspective, Islamic violence is exactly what it appears to be: the product of a specific set of ideas. Ideas about divine obligation, about the duty to subjugate unbelievers, about the virtue of martyrdom.

Marxism begins from the opposite premise. For Marx and every tradition that flows from him, socialism, critical theory, postcolonial studies, intersectionality, ideas are not the cause of reality but its reflection. Material conditions come first: who owns what, who exploits whom, who holds power over whom. Everything else, morality, religion, law, culture, is built on top of this economic foundation, and serves to justify it. The ruling class produces the ruling ideas, in Marx’s famous formulation. Ideas are instruments of power, not independent forces.

As a result, if material conditions produce ideas rather than the reverse, then people do not kill because of what they believe. They kill because of their circumstances. Theology is not a cause; it is a symptom, a rationalization of underlying grievance. When someone commits violence in the name of a religious doctrine, the materialist does not ask “what does this doctrine say?” He asks “what economic or political condition made this person feel desperate enough to act?”

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The Logic of the Alliance

The leftists looks at the Muslim world and sees a region that whose people occupy the bottom of the global economic hierarchy. He then looks at jihadist movements, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic State, and applies his analytical framework. These movements arise from oppressed populations. They direct their violence against Western power and its regional allies. Therefore, whatever their stated ideology, their functional role is resistance. They are the proletariat with weapons. They are the global South striking back at the imperial North.

The ideological content of Islam is therefore irrelevant to this analysis. The left does not ignore the fact that Islam subordinates women, criminalizes homosexuality, executes apostates, and rejects democratic governance because it approves of these things. It ignores them because its framework does not process ideological content as a causal factor. To the materialist, the question “what does Islam believe about women?” is the wrong question. The right question is “whose interests does this movement serve?” And since the movement is fighting Western power, it serves the interests of the oppressed, which is the only moral category that matters.

This is why Western feminists who march for abortion rights will march alongside Muslims who would criminalize abortion entirely. This is why LGBT activists who would be executed in Gaza will express solidarity with Hamas. This is why secular academics who have spent careers arguing for the separation of church and state will defend the most theocratic regime on earth.

The Enemy of My Enemy

If human behavior is entirely the product of material conditions, if people kill because of economic despair, colonial humiliation, or structural oppression rather than because of what they believe, then no individual or culture is genuinely responsible for what they do. The suicide bomber is a mechanism produced by poverty and geopolitics, not a moral agent who made choices. The society that produces him is a mechanism produced by history, not a community with a culture that might be better or worse than another.

This is the worldview that cannot say some ideas are better than others. It cannot say that a civilization that protects individual dignity is superior to one that celebrates its destruction. It cannot say that freedom of conscience is genuinely more valuable than submission to divine authority. It can only say: whose side are you on?

And the answer is always: whoever is fighting the West.

The supreme irony is that this position, presented as anti-imperialism, is blind to the one imperialism that most deserves the name. Islam is an imperial ideology, one that spent its first century conquering from Spain to the borders of China, that developed a comprehensive legal framework for the subordination of conquered peoples, that has never produced a doctrine of genuine religious equality or political pluralism from within its own foundational texts. The left sees imperialism in a McDonald’s opening in a third world country. It does not see it in the fourteen-century history of conquest, dhimmitude, and forced conversion that built the Muslim world.

The movements the left defends are not the oppressed striking back. They are the representatives of a totalizing system that would, given sufficient power, impose on the left’s own constituents, women, gay people, atheists, political dissidents, a form of subjugation that makes Western capitalism look like a liberation movement.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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Like Humpty Dumpty on the wall, Cambridge University has just had a great, epic fall. And all its woke academics spouting gender studies sociobabble and all its Islamophilic critical theorists wailing before Allah like the prophets of Baal can’t seem to put Cambridge back together again.

It’s been a triple whammy for my alma mater—and all in the course of a week. First, the anti-hubris legend of Jason Arday: a sociology professor who, like a DEI Icarus, has his fake feathers burned to a crisp and comes crashing down into a pool of plagiarized Critical Race Theory slop.

Second, the Kafkaesque tale of Farah Ahmed: an educationist who turns out to be a former punter for Hizb ut-Tahrir—a movement aiming to establish a global caliphate and ban bacon butties. Ahmed is also cross that British schools dole out condoms but frown on child marriage.

Third, the cautionary parable of vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice: a COVID-19 tyrant from Princeton who has pioneered the discipline of “collective delusion,” but allowed Cambridge to be spellbound by Arday’s DEI Black magic. She also ignored a whistleblower who reported misogynistic bullying at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy.

Cambridge hadn’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of Islamo-wokeism when I was finishing my doctorate at the university in 2004. Many of my batchmates were Americans who had fled to British universities to escape the smog of woke groupthink in American Ivy League schools.

But there were signs of Islamo-wokeist creep into faculties like sociology and education. Islam was taught by a white convert without a doctorate, like Mormon Sunday School, with no heavy-duty critical tools applied as we did in biblical studies. And when Edward Said came to deliver a series of guest lectures, he was welcomed like a Palestinian Nelson Mandela.

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By 2005, the university’s student newspaper was trumpeting: “Cambridge is woke—that’s no bad thing.” Sure, it isn’t a bad thing if Islamofascists who now dominate Western academia wish to eliminate critical thinking—the foundation of Western education since Descartes, actually starting earlier with the Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle.

But critical thinking and ideological/dogmatic conformity cannot co-exist. Critical thinking is prophetic: it uses intentional questioning and evidence-based argumentation to evoke a vision and version of reality that offers an alternative to the ideologies that seek to domesticate and draw us back into the slavery of Pharaoh, with the lure of state-subsidized cucumbers and melons the Hebrew slaves ate in Egypt (Numbers 11:5).

Hence, the ideology of wokeism and the dogma of Islam, which both vie for hegemony, must collude, at least temporarily, to neutralize their chief rival—critical thinking. The crisis involving Arday and Ahmed—Cambridge’s poster boy and poster girl in its department of education—illustrates penetratingly how wokeism and Islam have colluded to kill critical thinking.

The Closing of the American Mind: A Warning Unheeded

We might have saved British academia if we had heeded prophetic warnings from America. In 1987, the philosopher Allan Bloom published his groundbreaking book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Bloom showed how postmodern relativism had destroyed American higher education.

“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative,” Bloom wrote. “The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance.”

“The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all,” he summed up.

Bloom recounts an experiment he would conduct, asking his Harvard students if the British rulers of India were right to abolish the Hindu practice of sati—where a wife is forced to immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre when he dies. The students, mentally muzzled by relativism, could not/would not answer. I ran the experiment with my university students in England years later. The results were the same.

From Relativism to Wokeism: A Logical Conclusion

All Jason Arday had to do was drive relativism off the cliff’s edge where his academic forebears had parked it for decades. With objective standards defunct, intersectional identity—defined by race, gender, sexuality, or class—becomes the primary lens for defining reality.

Maria Krylova’s essay “From Relativism to Wokeism: A Path of Confusion, Fallacy and Self-Destruction” traces the descent from the “tolerant relativism” of the 60s and 70s to current fanatical wokeism. And Karlo Broussard shows how wokeism is actually relativism in new clothes in his book The New Relativism: Unmasking the Philosophy of Today’s Woke Moralists.

So why did academics like Professor Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, gush over Arday, calling him “the best in the world” in terms of his research? Because to “judge” the intellectual output of a Black DEI appointee would be to blaspheme against the Gospel of Critical Race Theory, which is predicated on the conviction that the Original Sin of Western education is its Eurocentricity.

According to CRT’s ex cathedra dogma, other paths, including Arday’s sociobabble, Haitian voodoo, and Islamic Salafism, are, epistemologically speaking, equally valid.

When Mr. Woke Met Ms. Islam

That’s where Mr. Woke meets his doppelgänger, Ms. Islam aka Farah Ahmed—the two have a torrid affair in Cremin’s faculty lounge. In 2025, Cremin named Ahmed an assistant research professor in the Faculty of Education. Never mind her past links with Hizb ut-Tahrir—a terrorist movement aspiring to establish a global Islamic Caliphate.

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Ahmed’s philosophy of education is unblushingly anti-Western and unapologetically Islamic. I obtained a copy of her chapter, “The Western Education System and the British National Curriculum,” in the book Education and Identity: The Dilemma of Muslims in the West. It was first published as a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet.

“Those of us who have been through the Western education system, and have subsequently started practicing Islam, can recognise the effect on our personalities. It takes many years before even the most obvious Kufr concepts and values can be completely removed and our behavior substantially improved,” Ahmed warns in her screed, masquerading as scholarly discourse.

Ahmed attacks English as “one of the most damaging subjects.” Why? Because children are taught to identify genres of myths, legends, and fables and might end up identifying the story of Mohammad riding a winged horse as “also a made-up legend.” Ahmed trashes religious studies because it puts Islam “on the same level” as Christianity and other religions and promotes the idea of “inter-faith” and “religious tolerance.”

“Issues such as the definition of women’s awrah [body parts that must be covered] and the concept of men being allowed to marry up to four wives are put on a forum for discussion. Hence, the words of man are being placed above the words of Allah (swt) and His Messenger Mohammad (saw),” Ahmed cautions.

The Western education system “will not be suitable to the needs of Muslim students as the ‘adeeqah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this,” she emphasizes.

“The Islamic State produced mathematicians who surpassed each other in their brilliance, yet this fact is completely ignored,” she laments. “The impression is given that science is purely a Western discipline and that this is part of what makes Western civilisation superior.”

The Closing of the Muslim Mind: Oxymoronic “Islamic Education”

Really, Farah? Isn’t “Muslim education” as oxymoronic as “Jewish bacon?” Actually, Jews can buy “Facon” (fake bacon), which is beef cured to taste like bacon! Similarly, I’ve published several reports reviewing textbooks in Qatar, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories, where I show how “Facon Muslim education” in these countries celebrates jihad, demonizes Jews, condemns Christianity and Judaism as corrupt religions, and promotes Islamic supremacism.

Surely if Muslim education is so great and Western education is so dysfunctional, Ahmed should be teaching at Al-Azhar University, no? But she won’t because Muslim education, or at least its Sunni version, began its intellectual euthanasia in the second year of the reign of Caliph Ja’afar Mutawakkil (847-861), Robert Reilly argues in his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

It was the Ash‘arite sect and its leading theologian, Imam al-Ghazali (d.1111), who switched off the life support apparatus, leaving much of Islam clinically brain-dead, Reilly explains. Because reason leads to questioning, it is inimical to Islam, which demands unquestioning submission to Allah, al-Ghazali observed in his treatise The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Rather than the confusion and contradiction generated by the rationalism of Plato and Aristotle, one should rely solely on the clarity of Qur’anic revelation.

In his foreword to Reilly’s book, philosopher Roger Scruton writes: “Policy makers beware: unless you are ready to admit that you are facing an essentially theological problem in the Middle East, do not go about prescribing solutions, for you may actually make matters worse—particularly by creating the false impression that economic, sociological, or political programs can fix what is, in fact, a delusion of faith.”

Dogmatic Delusions Vs. Critical Inquiry

Wokeism and Islam are both delusions of faith. Both demand servile submission to an ex cathedra authority. Western education, in contrast, has its roots not in a religion of uncritical compliance but in the Judeo-Christian tradition of robust questioning and critical inquiry beginning with Abraham and culminating in the Reformation.

It is no accident that the Passover narrative used in the Haggadah on Pesach is triggered by Jewish children asking questions. “Judaism is the rarest of phenomena: a faith based on asking questions, sometimes deep and difficult ones that seem to shake the very foundations of faith itself,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks preached in a sermon on Parashat Bo (Exodus 10:1-13:16).

“Judaism is not a religion of blind obedience,” Sacks concludes. As a university chaplain in London, I remember debating with Muslim students. I would open my critical editions of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament and show them the textual apparatus. “I’m happy to rigorously question even my most sacred texts,” I’d say. “Now let’s do that with the Qur’an.” The response was always the same: “We cannot dare to question Allah. It’s blasphemy.”

Cambridge University’s old Cavendish Laboratory features a famous inscription on its door from Psalm 111:2: “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” Isaac Barrow, the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and Isaac Newton’s mentor, would say that God had written two books—the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. And both were to be studied with equal rigor. No wonder the atom was first split at the Cavendish Laboratory and not at Al-Azhar University.

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomez is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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On June 25, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Qatar’s Ministry of Interior, framing it as a step forward in combatting transnational crime, terrorism, and its financing. The five-year agreement commits both governments to facilitate arrangements between the Qatar National Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to advance police-to-police cooperation. It follows Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January 2026 visit to Doha, which produced a broader partnership on trade, investment, and defense.

The announcement was polished, the language reassuring. The logic, though, ran completely backwards.

Qatar is not a counter-terrorism partner. It is the most important state patron of the Muslim Brotherhood and a longtime host to Hamas’ political leadership. The wealthy Gulf state is also home to the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a transnational clerical body founded in 2004 by the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely regarded as the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential spiritual authority. The IUMS, which has long-standing ties to the Qatari government, issued statements after the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel that praised the Hamas assault and called for violent jihad in support of it.

The record of Qatari commitments is long and unpersuasive. A 2009 State Department cable, published by WikiLeaks in 2010, assessed Qatar’s counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States as the “worst in the region” and faulted Qatar for having “adopted a largely passive approach” to fundraising activities of terrorist groups. By 2014, then-US Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen stated publicly that Qatar had “for many years openly financed Hamas, a group that continues to undermine regional stability.” That same year, bipartisan members of Congress formally requested that the US Treasury impose sanctions on Doha and produce a full report on its financing ties to Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

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When the Arab Quartet—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates—issued thirteen demands in 2017 that included severing ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and other designated groups as the price of ending their blockade, Qatar dismissed them as neither reasonable nor actionable. The blockade was eventually lifted in January 2021 with none of the thirteen demands met.

In July 2017, Qatar and the Trump administration signed a memorandum of understanding committing Doha to combat terrorism and cut off financial support to terrorist organizations. It was neither the first such pledge nor the last: Qatar had signed the Riyadh Agreement and its supplementary accord in 2013 and 2014, and would overhaul its anti-money-laundering legislation in 2019. However, the Counter Extremism Project, an advocacy group that tracks terrorism financing, argues that despite this legislation and Doha’s participation in US-led initiatives, Qatari money has continued to reach internationally designated groups.

Events over the past year have made the divergence between Qatar’s public and private conduct harder to overlook. During the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025, Qatar publicly lamented the United States’ “attacks on the sisterly Islamic Republic of Iran”—even as Iranian missiles were being fired at the Al-Udeid Air Base on Qatari soil, housing roughly 10,000 American troops. Qatar also repeatedly told Washington it would not allow American forces to launch strikes from Al-Udeid—warnings that, while ultimately not acted upon, underscore where Doha’s loyalties lie when they are genuinely tested. More recently, Qatar reportedly proposed a secret arrangement with Iran in the weeks before the March strikes: Doha would suspend production at Ras Laffan—a shutdown that would spike global energy prices and pressure Washington and Jerusalem toward an early ceasefire—if Tehran kept the complex off its target list. One official claimed Qatar’s message to the Iranians was that “you will achieve your objectives without striking us.” However, Qatar categorically denied any such arrangement.

Then there is Al Jazeera. Qatar’s state-funded broadcaster is not merely a news channel with editorial blind spots. It is a deliberate instrument of Islamist soft power, spreading Brotherhood-compatible narratives across the Arabic-speaking world with considerable sophistication. In his book The Lost Spring: U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid, foreign policy analyst Walid Phares argued that Al Jazeera became the “primary ideological and communication network” of the Brotherhood during the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Its English-language arm performs the same function for Western audiences more subtly, packaging Islamist-adjacent narratives as progressive anti-imperialism.

There are signs that Qatari influence already extends into Canadian classrooms. Juno News reported that the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board brought a long-time trainer with the Qatar Foundation’s Education Development Institute into a new equity coaching role for Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students, a placement that surfaced in an internal board presentation in November 2024, at a time when antisemitic incidents were rising in Ottawa schools. A second case points to institutional ties rather than personnel: Edmonton Public Schools has maintained a longstanding partnership with Qatar Foundation International—the same organization that has contracted with school districts across the United States—while renewing an Arabic language and culture course that has run since 2011. Critics and watchdog reports have long argued that billions in Qatari funding for North American schools and universities serve as a soft-power tool to shape curricula, promote specific political or religious narratives, and influence how students view the Middle East.

The pattern is consistent. Qatar’s private conduct has repeatedly diverged from its public commitments, which is precisely the problem with signing a public safety MOU with Doha. It is a gift of legitimacy to a government that has spent decades working both sides of the ledger. As Amine Ayoub of the Middle East Forum, an American think tank, argues, no state can serve as America’s most critical regional staging ground and a refuge for Hamas at once.

Minister Anandasangaree’s office has not said what due diligence preceded the signing, or how Ottawa intends to verify that Qatar honors what it has committed to here, considering how little its earlier commitments have produced.

National security cooperation runs on trust that the other side is what it claims to be. Ottawa extended that trust to Qatar without saying what it verified, and the United States will now share the consequences.

Joe Adam George is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Until recently, Aleksandr Dugin was a name most Americans had little reason to know. The Russian political philosopher has spent decades arguing against the liberal West and for a new world order built around competing civilizations rather than shared political values. His actual influence inside the Kremlin gets exaggerated more often than not, but that hardly matters, Dugin’s importance stems from the fact that he has given a coherent philosophical language to anti-Western regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran.

Dugin’s rhetoric is appealing to Western conservatives because he talks about the collapse of the family. He talks about a national sovereignty he thinks the West has thrown away, a spiritual emptiness sitting underneath its consumer comfort, and a liberal culture too embarrassed by its own Christian inheritance to defend it. But in reality Dugin does not want the West to recover the religious and moral foundations it has abandoned. He wants the whole era of Western universalism to end.

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Both Christians and Jews revere what English speakers commonly call the Old Testament. In this sacred text, God declares, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Exodus 21:24).

This principle formed the security doctrine that shaped the world before World War II. It was a world most of us today would scarcely recognize—one in which the death penalty was the norm, even in democratic nations such as the United Kingdom, where it was typically reserved for murder and, at times, treason or rape. It was a world of leaders unashamed to project strength, a world in which friend and foe could still be clearly distinguished.

Today’s world is its opposite. We inhabit a society that has grown unfamiliar with the very concepts of justice and morality as they were understood for centuries. Foreigners who rape our daughters are often permitted, by court order and under the banner of human-rights law, to remain in the communities they have preyed upon. Murderers are offered a lifetime of taxpayer-funded comfort in prison. For years the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and much of the mainstream media insisted that a woman could have a penis—until a court finally compelled them to acknowledge the most elementary facts of human biology.

We live in a world shaped by a false doctrine: “An eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind.”

This maxim has molded the modern West’s understanding—or rather its misunderstanding—of justice and security. It has been promoted by some of the most influential voices of the modern era. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” King, influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, helped popularize the idea. The precise phrasing later appeared in the 1982 biographical film Gandhi, spoken by Ben Kingsley in the title role—though screenwriter John Briley later confirmed that he invented the line and that Gandhi himself never uttered it.

I regard this doctrine as a false prophet, one that promises salvation and a utopia that has never existed and never will. It has misled not only Christians but also many among the people of the Torah, who, in the generations after the Holocaust, helped spread the concept. In Fiddler on the Roof, a villager cites “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” Tevye the milkman replies, “Very good. That way the whole world will be blind and toothless.”

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Through this lens most contemporary events are now interpreted. It is the prism through which the majority of Western commentators and thought leaders view the world.

A Muslim murders Jews in broad daylight while shouting “Allahu Akbar”? It must be a response to Jewish occupation and oppression of Palestinians. An Afghan Muslim murders Americans, Britons, or other Europeans in broad daylight? It must be a reaction to Western imperialism and colonialism. Six thousand terrorists invade Israel, murdering, raping, and kidnapping hundreds of Israelis in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? Give them a state, and peace will follow.

Everything is rationalized. Everything is framed as an endless cycle of cause and effect. We are told we must never respond in kind, lest we intensify the vicious circle. We must never execute those who murder us and our people, because “that way the whole world will be blind and toothless.” When Westerners become the targets of violence, we are instructed that the cycle must end with us. And so we find ourselves permanently on the receiving end—lest we be accused of mere meaningless vengeance.

What is most striking is that the doctrine “an eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind” has produced the opposite result. Those who are left blind and toothless are overwhelmingly Westerners, compelled to watch the rape of their daughters, the murder of their people, and the gradual invasion of their countries while remaining silent. Despite living in an era of unprecedented hostility and aggression since the Second World War, large parts of the West remain wholly committed to this creed, like cultists committed to self-harm.

As reported by Sky News, a June 2026 YouGov survey of more than 2,300 British adults found that only 6 percent said they would volunteer to fight in the face of an “imminent” invasion. Fourteen percent said they would serve if conscripted; 17 percent said they would refuse to defend the country under any circumstances. Official findings from the Ministry of Defence corroborate the broader problem. The Strategic Defence Review 2025 described a “workforce crisis” in the Armed Forces, attributing it to “poor recruitment and retention, shoddy accommodation, falling morale, and cultural challenges.”

Comparable polls across other major Western European countries and the United States reveal a systemic pattern. A Gallup International survey from late 2023 asked, “If there were a war that involved your country, would you be willing to fight for your country?” In Italy, only 14 percent said yes (78 percent no). In Germany the figures were 23 percent yes and 57 percent no. In Spain they were 29 percent yes and 53 percent no. In the United States—still the last major beacon of relative hope—41 percent said yes and 34 percent said no.

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A 2025 NATO-wide survey conducted by Riga Stradiņš University and the Center for Geopolitical Studies Riga (September–October 2025, more than 31,000 respondents) found Italy and Slovakia among the lowest at roughly 25 percent willingness. Germany and the Netherlands ranked near the bottom as well. The United States stood at around 37 percent. Turkey—where Islam explicitly teaches the principle of qisas, or retaliation in kind—led at 88 percent.

“An eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind” has produced a Western world that sees virtually no justification for the use of force—not even in defense of its own home against invasion. The postwar order has created an abomination. It has eroded traditional values and inverted right and wrong. With its mainstream media, International Criminal Court, left-wing orthodoxy, radical individualism, and self-serving politicians, this order now constitutes an existential threat to Western civilization.

The West must return to its traditional Judeo-Christian foundations. We must embrace President Trump’s doctrine of “a head for an eye,” as he stated this week in response to Iranian terrorism and aggression. Our lives depend on it.

Khaled Hassan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

“The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous,” Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, wrote in a 1941 essay titled “Churchill’s Lie Factory.”

On July 13, 2026, the Church of England endorsed two big lies that would turn Goebbels green with envy. Despite robust opposition from top Jewish leaders, including Chief Rabbi Efraim Mervis, its General Synod approved a libelous Palestinian Christian manifesto.

Published in November 2025 by the Palestinian Christian advocacy group Kairos Palestine, the Kairos II manifesto is titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide.

The first lie of the Anglican-endorsed manifesto is to label Israel’s war on Hamas a “genocide.” “The genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people,” the manifesto asserts. It uses the terms “genocide” and “genocidal” 30 times.

The second lie is by omission. Kairos II mentions Hamas only once in the 14-page document, and that too in a paragraph justifying the October 7 massacre as “born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948, and more than sixteen years of an immoral, suffocating blockade on Gaza.”

As if this weren’t enough, in a hand-washing gesture that would make Pontius Pilate blush, the Church of England’s parliament passed an amendment to “hear” rather than “receive” the defamatory document. A few clerics opposing the manifesto warned that Jew-hating jihadis would hardly pause to parse such verbal gymnastics. Synod’s antisemites ignored their pleas.

On that dark day, the Church of England wantonly voted to bear false witness against Israel and, dementedly, against Hamas. Why? Who benefits from Synod’s big lies? What if it is Hamas, and not Israel, who committed genocide? What if Synod engaged in Kairos II’s big lie of “genocide inversion” to cover the involvement of a section of militant Palestinian Christians who deny Israel’s right to exist, engage in anti-Israel terrorism, desire Israel’s destruction, and perhaps even took part in the October 7 massacre? What if such Christians are not merely dhimmis but collaborators with Hamas?

Synod’s vote absolves the Church of England’s hierarchy from addressing the hippopotamus in the vestry, what historian of antisemitism Robert Wistrich identifies as “eliminationist” or “genocidal antisemitism,” as a key theological element of Hamas and Islam. Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally can now cover her face with the calligraphic edition of Kairos II and pretend Hamas didn’t perpetrate the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah. She can also continue to claim that the Israel-Arab conflict is about land, not Islamic imperialism.

How Hamas Inverted Its Own Genocide Against Israel

In a peer-reviewed article, International Law scholar Avraham Shalev argues that Hamas’ October 7 attack, combined with its statements of intent to exterminate Jews, meets the legal threshold for genocide under the Genocide Convention. He establishes both Hamas’s actus reus (physical acts of genocide) and its mens rea (genocidal intent).

“Recently captured documents demonstrate that on October 7th, Hamas believed that Israel’s destruction was a goal they could achieve,” Shalev writes. Hamas’ motivation was its intent to destroy Jews “as a distinct ethnic, racial, and national group.” Its “original charter makes it clear that the war against Israel and the Jews is an existential battle.” For example, just days after the massacre, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said: “We must remove that country [Israel]… The Al-Aqsa Flood [October 7] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.”

Shalev emphasizes genocide inversion as “a distinctive feature of the Hamas genocide of October 7.” Hamas’ genocide of Jews is “uniquely characterized by the immediate deployment of reverse accusations against its victims.” The weaponization of genocide inversion “deflects attention from Hamas’ own genocidal actions,” hijacks the moral freight of genocide accusations to delegitimize Israel’s war on Hamas, and “inverts Jewish historical trauma by comparing Israeli actions with the Nazi genocide,” he argues.

The big lie of genocide inversion isn’t original. Hitler deployed it in the 1920s, portraying the Jews as genocidal killers, writes Wistrich in his book A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. The Führer justified the preemptive genocide of the Jews, alleging that they were the “world enemy” who were seeking Germany’s annihilation.

Muslims claim that “Israel and world Jewry are determined to extinguish Islam, so they, too, must wipe them out,” Wistrich explains. It is as if Nazism was “symbolically handing over the relay baton of genocidal antisemitism to the Arabs just as its own star began to wane.”

“The Hamas Charter and its proclamations about implementing Allah’s promise and annihilating the Jews are as genocidal in their implications,” Wistrich notes, stressing that virtually all Islamic movements share “this language of mass murder.”

Islam’s Co-option of Antisemitic Palestinian Christians

A unique feature of Kairos II is that it is composed by Christians, not Muslims. And yet, much of its language mirrors the bombast of Islamic Israel-hatred. It calls the Balfour Declaration a “historic injustice.” It vilifies Christian Zionism as a “theology of racism, colonialism, and ethnic supremacy” that “calls on a tribal, racist god of war and ethnic cleansing.” It blames Christian support for Israel for “apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of indigenous people.” It trashes the Abraham Accords. It disingenuously warns “against giving our national struggle a religious character or turning it into a religious issue that pits religions against one another.”

Echoing the jargon of antisemitic elimination, it notes that “any genuine beginning must involve dismantling settler colonialism and the apartheid system built on Jewish supremacy as codified in Israel’s racist Nation-State Law.” If the Jewish state is so evil (genocide is, after all, the “crime of crimes”), a “Final Solution” is the only solution.

And that justifies violence against the Jews. Anglican biblical scholar Ian Paul, one of the very few synod members who spoke strongly against approving Kairos II, wrote: “Historically, Palestinian Christians as a group have been deeply involved in violent terrorism as their rejection of the State of Israel, and have been deeply involved in the PLO, whose founding charter rejected the right of Israel to exist, and claimed the whole region as an Arab homeland.” Outsiders find it “hard to understand how ‘Palestinian Christians’ could be involved with anti-Israeli and antisemitic terror,” Paul writes, explaining: “In this context, the term ‘Christian’ really functions as a tribal and ethnic identifier, more than in the sense of someone who has made a personal commitment to Jesus.”

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Just before the Synod vote, Archbishop Mullally went on a “pilgrimage” to Israel. She didn’t visit the martyrs’ memorial at the Nova Festival. Instead, she met Palestinian Christian activists linked to anti-Israel terrorist outfits and praised them for their “faithful resistance.”

In my news story for the Middle East Forum Observer, I reported on Mullally’s meeting with Layan Nasir at her home in Birzeit. The Archbishop described Nasir’s time in Israeli custody over the last five years as a “terrible ordeal.” She assured Nasir’s family of her prayers for the “unjustly imprisoned.”

Mullally omitted an inconvenient fact. Israeli authorities arrested Nasir for her leadership in the Democratic Progressive Student Pole at Birzeit University, the student wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), proscribed as a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union, Japan, Canada, and Israel.

The PFLP participated in and celebrated the October 7 genocide. It reportedly held hostage Shiri Bibas and her two infant sons. NGO Monitor confirms that the PFLP is Hamas’ abiding ally in Gaza. The European Council on Foreign Relations warned that the PFLP opposes a two-state solution, calls for Israel’s destruction and wants to create Palestine using “armed struggle.” It is responsible for numerous attacks on Israelis, including airline hijackings, suicide bombings, a synagogue attack, and the assassination of Israel’s Agriculture Minister Rehavam Ze’evi.

Mullally also met Natalie Abu Diyeh, a Lutheran soccer player, arrested on suspicion of “promoting terrorist activities,” and Zeina Barbar, the daughter of Majd Barbar. The archbishop’s website labeled her a “child detainee.” Barbar, a PFLP member, served 20 years in prison. Charges against him include attempted murder and membership in a terrorist group. Barbar and his accomplices transported a car bomb to Jerusalem and manufactured grenades. Police detained Zeina, another PLFP member, on suspicion of terrorism and released her in February 2025 as part of a prisoner exchange.

The PFLP was founded by George Habash. TIME magazine christened Habash “Terrorism’s Christian Godfather.” “If you assumed that Palestinian or Arab extremism somehow sprang entirely from Islam, from the puritanical Wahhabi intolerance and so forth, take a close look at Habash’s first name. He was a Greek Orthodox Christian who sang in his church choir as a boy back in the Palestinian town of Lydda,” TIME wrote. On his death anniversary, Yusef Daher, a Christian “peacemaker,” posted a statement asking George Habash to “pray for us.”

On her “pilgrimage,” Mullally is photographed praying in Layan Nasir’s living room with the portrait of Layan’s great-uncle Kamal Nasser behind her. Nasser played a key role in the Black September kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Another photograph shows Mullally meeting Greek Orthodox Archbishop Benedictus. On the wall is a portrait of Yasser Arafat. “Our archbishop has managed to be photographed in front of, not one, but two notorious terrorist leaders within the space of a couple of days—quite an achievement!” Ian Paul quipped on his blog.

General Synod Takes a Leaf Out of Hitler’s Autobiography

In Mein Kampf, Hitler explains how the masses “more easily fall victim to the big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous representation in others.” Hitler does not characterize his own poisonous propaganda as lies; he instead adopts the persona of a truth-teller and asserts that the Jews are the ones behind the great lie, effectively engaging in moral inversion.

The day before General Synod met in York, preached a sermon on the prophet Isaiah at York Minster. In a twist of supreme irony, she cited God’s word to the Jews in the Babylonian exile, assuring them that they would soon return to the Promised Land: “For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12).

Remarkably, the archbishop failed to recognize that God has fulfilled his promise when Israel was reborn in 1948. Mullally trumpeted her sermon on X. Jewish columnist Nicole Lampert responded: “Isaiah was a Jewish prophet in Judea. Yet your Synod has approved a document denying Jewish indigenous presence in that land. You encouraged them to approve it.”

I couldn’t help chiming in. I tweeted: “Isaiah says: ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’ (5: 20). Mullally and her Synod have proved the prophet right by voting for the libelous Kairos II document.”

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomes is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

What happens when a Muslim attempts conversion to Christianity in Egypt? The case of Said Mansour Rezk Abdelrazek, an Egyptian national and Christian convert, provides a chilling example. He has been arbitrarily detained in Cairo since 15 July 2025 simply for exercising his fundamental right to freedom of belief.

Abdelrazek’s continued imprisonment reflects a persistent and alarming pattern of Christian persecution in Egypt, particularly against individuals who convert from Islam.

Abdelrazek converted to Christianity in 2016. Since that time, he has endured severe and sustained persecution by Egyptian authorities. This includes repeated arbitrary arrests, torture and ill-treatment, forced divorce, forced separation from his young son, continuous surveillance, denial of access to legal representation, medical negligence, repeated attempts to coerce him into renouncing his faith, and ongoing punishment for leaving and criticizing Islam.

The next hearing is scheduled for 6 September. Abdelrazek is facing a potential life imprisonment or death sentence for his conversion to Christianity.

Notably, Abdelrazek is tried in the First Criminal Terrorism Circuit Court in Badr. By referring Abdelrazek to a terrorism court on charges such as “joining a terrorist organization,” Egyptian authorities have reframed a matter of personal belief and conscience into a national security threat.

In 2018, Abdelrazek attempted to leave Egypt and seek asylum in Russia. Egyptian authorities blocked this and summoned him to the National Security Office, where he recounted being insulted and humiliated. He eventually reached Russia through a tourist visa, applied for asylum, and formally converted into the Russian Orthodox Church. While there, his outspoken critics of Islam induced backlash.

He was then imprisoned for 11 months in Russia. Despite holding documentation from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) confirming that he qualified for international protection, he was deported back to Egypt in 2024. This was in violation of the non-refoulement principle. The Russian government revoked his refugee status after receiving threats from Muslim groups. They feared that Abdelrazek’s online criticism of Islam might trigger mass social unrest.

Upon his forced return to Egypt, Abdelrazek was detained and then released following warnings from national security officers. Additionally, he was forced to undergo a painful procedure to remove a Christian tattoo he had received in Russia. Abdelrazek later confided to close friends that during his detention, he had been suspended with his hands tied to a wall in a “crucified position” for several hours each day over the course of a week.

Following his release from prison, Abdelrazek lived under constant surveillance and psychological pressure. On 15 July 2025, he was again arrested in Cairo after seeking legal avenues to update his official identity documents to reflect his Christian faith.

Abdelrazek then appeared before the State Security Prosecution Office, where he was told that he would be charged with “joining a terrorist organization, disturbing public order, spreading false information and receiving illegal funding.” His detention has since been repeatedly renewed without due process. To this day, Abdelrazek remains imprisoned.

Abdelrazek is engaged to an Australian citizen and resident, Sofia, who is seeking his safe release and reunification. The Australian Department of Home Affairs acknowledged receipt of his XB (subclass 202) visa application on 8 May 2024, yet no substantive action has followed.

To help free Abdelrazek from prison, the organization Coptic Solidarity (CS) is petitioning the Australian government. CS’s Freedom4Said petition can be signed here. The appeal is an urgent request asking for the Australian government to petition Egypt for his release and his protection.

Another appeal to Tony Burke, Minister for Home Affairs of Australia, was signed by several international human rights organizations and individuals. It stated:

“The conflation of religious conversion with terrorism represents an extreme and dangerous criminalization of freedom of belief. His [Abdelrazek’s] lawyers have been denied access to his case files, and he has reportedly been deprived of basic necessities, including medication and clothing.”

“This case bears particular relevance to Australia,” the appeal added. “Australia therefore has a clear humanitarian interest and a meaningful opportunity to intervene.”

Lindsay Rodriguez, the Senior Director of Advocacy and External Relations of Coptic Solidarity, told IDI that Abdelrazek’s latest hearing was held on 15 June (Case No. 5664 of 2025):

“The defense team was present, along with representatives of several human rights organizations monitoring the case.

“The prosecution witnesses were to testify and be cross-examined by the defense, pursuant to the court’s previous order summoning them. The session was also expected to include the examination of the forensic expert regarding the technical reports submitted in the case.

“But the hearing did not include the testimony of the witnesses or the examination of the forensic expert. The court, instead, adjourned the proceedings to 6 September 2026 for the hearing of the prosecution witnesses and the forensic expert, and for their examination by the defense.”

The Public Prosecution has brought multiple charges against Abdelrazek. This includes “establishing and leading a group in violation of the law, joining a group allegedly founded unlawfully, financing such a group, promoting ideas and beliefs deemed harmful to national unity and social peace, and showing contempt for Islam and challenging its fundamental principles.”

So far, Abdelrazek has had about 5 or 6 detention renewal hearings. He has had 2 trial hearings. This includes a 21 April that was postponed to 15 June which would cross-examine the witnesses. Because they did not appear at this hearing, it was postponed to 6 September 2026.

“The revolving door of extending detention and pushing back hearings has become the standard procedure by the administration of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi for these types of cases. In this way, they perpetually extend the period of detention,” Rodriguez said.

“The prosecutors are demanding maximum sentencing. In terrorism circuit courts imprisonment for life and the death penalty are both possible sentencings. The preceding judge Mohamed Saeed El-Sherbiney, has an international reputation for giving mass death sentences.”

Abdelrazek is also denied access to regular visits from his lawyer and exposed to abuse and medical negligence:

“The last time his attorney Said Fayaz was able to communicate with Said [Abdelrazek] was on 21 April 2026 at the hearing. Attorney Fayez was able to visit Said only a single time on 15 January 2026, and in the courtroom on 21 April. They did not see each other on 15 June. No other request has been approved.

“Said reported to his attorney on the 21 April hearing that he had severe back and urinary track pain. We have news through the family member of another detainee that Said is in urgent need of medical care and they are worried for him. His fiancé explained that he has an undiagnosed health issue which they believe to be a heart condition that causes him to lose consciousness. To date, Said has not been able to get treatment.

“His fiancée believes that Said is being mistreated. In addition to being refused visits and access to his attorney and medical care, authorities have even refused to allow the delivery of clothes and blankets during the winter as well as food and medicine.”

According to Rodriguez, Abdelrazek’s imprisonment is a message by the Egyptian state to other citizens who are considering to leave Islam.

“Abdelrazek is not the only one targeted by his government for becoming Christian. We know anecdotally that there are numerous converts who have been imprisoned in Egypt. But we don’t have a way to get an accurate count.

“Marco Girgis was the first convert to try to change his ID to reflect his new Christian faith. He was imprisoned and tortured until he recanted. Said lost everything for his conversion. Both cases send a clear message to anyone else who would like to officially reflect a change of faith away from Islam.

“The case also exposes Egypt’s hypocrisy in that the Constitution affirms that ‘freedom of belief is absolute,’ yet in practice, conversion from Islam is routinely penalized, and in this case elevated to a terrorism offense—revealing a stark, and systematic, gap between declared commitments and actual practice.”

Rodriguez warned of the manipulative actions of the Egyptian lobby in Washington:

“The US government has been slow to notice or even react to the Egyptian lobbying machine in Washington, DC. Until last year when Coptic Solidarity published a report documenting their activities as recorded on the Department of Justice website under FARA filings, the State Department was still meeting with a registered Foreign Agent who is also the head of all Protestant Churches of Egypt, Rev. Andreas Zaki. After being caught bribing former Senator Menendez, Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, we still see no clear repercussions or efforts to stop the Egyptian government’s illegal efforts.
“Just recently, a lobbying firm hired by Egypt helped place an oped by then Egyptian Ambassador to the US, Motaz Zahran, titled ‘Egypt’s religious freedom tradition an asset to America, the world: El-Sissi walks the walk on tolerance for all faiths.’

“The claims made by the Ambassador are in direct contradiction to the actual actions of the Egyptian government with regard to religious freedom, as Coptic Solidarity documented in our last report, Erosion of Citizenship in Egypt: State-Managed Religious Governance and Institutional Islamization under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. But the Egyptian government is still laundering their reputation with little pushback.”

Rodriguez called on the governments of Australia and the US to help secure Abdelrazek’s release and protection:
“The US government and individual US legislators should be speaking about Said’s case frequently and publicly. It is only urging the Egyptian government to uphold the rights of its own citizens in the way in which it claims they already do.

“To date, Australian authorities have shown no real interest in intervening and have passed the responsibility to others within their own government. The best outcome would be for the Australian government to approve Said’s asylum request.”

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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