In the early years of his mission, Muhammad spoke of the Jews with reverence, positioning himself as an Arab successor to the biblical prophets and, therefore, a convener of all nations under the ancient Abrahamic covenant. He directed his followers to pray toward Jerusalem. He hoped that the Jewish tribes of Medina would recognize him as a prophet in their own tradition.

They did not.

What followed was a systematic campaign to neutralize Jewish influence, de-legitimize Jewish testimony, and eliminate the Jewish presence from the Arabian Peninsula, ultimately involving the exile, enslavement, and mass-murder of Arabian Jews. The Jews’ ability to demonstrate, chapter and verse, that Muhammad’s “revelations” were riddled with errors and anachronisms posed an existential threat to his prophetic authority.

What the Jews Knew

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Women’s rights are utterly trampled in the Islamic tradition, in Islamic jurisprudence, and across the record of Islamic history. Yet in Muslim countries, anyone who says this openly is accused of “contempt of Islam” (blasphemy). A woman in Aswan, Egypt, Shahira Mohamed Suleiman, was sentenced to six months in prison on a charge of contempt of Islam, because she said: “I refuse to have anyone tell me that my voice is ‘awra [shameful nakedness].”¹

In the documented Islamic tradition and jurisprudence, a woman inherits half a male’s share from her father,² and an eighth from her husband if she has borne him children;³ counts as one-quarter in marriage;⁴ counts as half a witness before the courts;⁵ and her blood-money in the case of killing is half a man’s.⁶ She was created from a crooked rib;⁷ her body is a temptation and her voice is ‘awra;⁸ she must cover her body and hair so as not to seduce men; her clothing must not be sheer, must not be tight, and must not draw the eye, which is why black is preferred for her;⁹ and if she leaves the house wearing perfume she is a fornicator.¹⁰

She is impure: her mere touch nullifies ablution, like a donkey or a black dog.¹¹ She is deficient in intellect and in religion.¹² Women swear oaths and are the liars; they refuse sex while desiring it; consult them and then do the opposite, that is, never act on her counsel.¹³ Her husband may have intercourse with her even on the back of a camel-saddle,¹⁴ and if she refuses sex and the man’s sexual desire at any time, in any place, the angels curse her until morning.¹⁵ She owes her husband blind obedience: if a man has a lawful excuse to break the Ramadan fast, his wife must break it with him even if she has no excuse, because it might occur to her husband to kiss or to take her during the day.¹⁶

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Muslims insist that Islam is the purest, most uncompromising form of monotheism, the very standard by which they condemn Christians for worshipping the Trinity and Jews for allegedly elevating Uzayr (Ezra) to divine sonship, a charge that has no footing in Jewish texts or history. Muhammad, it seems, needed to invent that particular slander to make the accusation stick.

But the claim that Islam alone delivers untainted monotheism weakens first when we notice how completely Muhammad has, in practice, eclipsed Allah in the hearts and daily devotions of Muslims. It shatters again when we examine where Islamic rituals actually came from.

Yesterday the Islamic pilgrimage season ended, hundreds of thousands of men and women pressing in suffocating waves around the Kaaba, bodies climbing over bodies, hands clawing toward a single black stone set in silver, lips and foreheads desperate to touch it. What is the origin of that chaos?

Identity Theft

Allah was never the invisible, transcendent, jealous, one-and-only Creator who thundered from Sinai and sent prophets to Israel. That was never his face in pre-Islamic Arabia. He was already on the scene, centuries before Muhammad, as a fixture in the Meccan pantheon: a high god, sure, but a pagan high god, enthroned above a family of lesser deities, daughters, consorts, and intercessors who handled the day-to-day divine dirty work. Islam didn’t discover Allah. It hijacked him. It stripped the polytheistic fingerprints, slapped on borrowed Abrahamic rhetoric, and marketed him to the world as the same God who spoke to Moses, drowned Pharaoh, and fathered Jesus through the Holy Spirit. This was one of the most audacious theological identity thefts in human history.

In Jahili Mecca, Allah was never solitary. The Quran, trying to score points, accidentally confesses time after time that the Quraysh and their neighbors already confessed Allah as creator of the heavens and earth, sender of rain, reviver of the dead, controller of destiny (29:61; 31:25; 39:38). But they “associated” partners with him, daughters, helpers, intercessors, exactly the way every ancient Near Eastern polytheist had done for three thousand years: El in Canaan had Asherah and a divine council; Baal-Shamem in Syria had his consort and attendants; Zeus Hypsistos in the Hellenistic world had a whole heavenly bureaucracy. The Meccans were textbook henotheists: one boss god at the top, a loyal supporting cast underneath, and Allah was their undisputed kingpin.

Muhammad didn’t unearth some buried, forgotten monotheistic Allah who had been hiding under pagan rubble, waiting for the true revelation. He seized the existing pagan high god, the one the Quraysh already called creator, lord of the Kaaba, master of fate, and forcibly grafted Biblical clothing onto him. He kept the name Allah. He kept the Kaaba. He kept the Black Stone. He kept the sevenfold ṭawaf. He kept the sacred months. He kept the talbiya chant’s hypnotic rhythm. Then he wrapped the entire stolen package in Abrahamic camouflage: “This is the pure religion of Abraham the ḥanif.” Except Abraham never stepped foot in Mecca. Abraham never laid a single stone of the Kaaba. Abraham never kissed a meteorite fragment. Abraham never acknowledged a high god named Allah who came with three daughters named al-Lāt, al-Uzza, and Manat.

The Biblical God smashed golden calves, cursed high places, and declared, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god” (Isaiah 45:5).

Mecca’s Monopoly on Pagan Pilgrimage

The Kaaba wasn’t unique in pre-Islamic Arabia. It was one Kaaba among many, dozens of cube-shaped shrines scattered across the peninsula, each serving as a local or regional cult center. Khalil Abd al-Karim, in his The Historical Roots of Islamic Sharia, counts at least twenty-one documented Kaabas before Islam. Other sources (al-Yaqubi, al-Maqrizi, Ibn al-Kalbi) name prominent ones: the Kaaba of Najran (dedicated to a palm-tree deity), the Kaaba of Dhu l-Khalṣa in Yemen (for the southern tribes), the Kaaba of al-Uzza in Nakhlah, the Kaaba of Manat near Medina, and several others tied to tribal gods like Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Yauq, and Nasr (mentioned in Quran 71:23 as Noah’s idols, but still active in late Jahiliyya). Each had its own custodians (sadana), its own sacred precinct (ḥaram), its own pilgrimage season, its own sacrifices, and its own circumambulation rites. They were miniature versions of what Mecca became: sacred cubes housing stones, idols, or baetyls, drawing pilgrims who shaved heads, offered animals, and performed tawaf.

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What made Mecca’s Kaaba special, and ultimately unbeatable, was not divine revelation. It was location and economics. Mecca sat at the crossroads of the most lucrative caravan routes in late antiquity: incense from South Arabia (Yemen, Hadramawt) heading north to Gaza and Damascus; spices, silk, and slaves moving south from the Levant and Mesopotamia; African gold and ivory funneled through the Red Sea ports. The Quraysh tribe turned the Kaaba into the peninsula’s premier franchise. They declared four sacred months (Rajab, Dhu l-Qada, Dhu l-Ḥijja, Muharram) during which all intertribal warfare was forbidden, creating the only safe corridor for commerce across a fractured landscape. Pilgrims came not just to worship but to trade. The annual fairs at Ukaz, Majanna, and Dhu l-Majas near Mecca were among the largest markets in Arabia. The Kaaba was the brand: a single, prestigious address where every tribe could deposit its god’s representative (an idol or stone), perform the same rites, and do business under truce. By the sixth century, it had become the monopoly hub. Other Kaabas were regional; Mecca’s was continental.

When Muhammad conquered Mecca in 630 CE, he didn’t destroy the Kaaba. He destroyed every other Kaaba he could reach. Ali ibn Abi Talib was sent to demolish Manat at al-Mushallal. Al-Mughira ibn Shuba razed al-Lat’s temple in al-Ṭaif (and, according to al-Kalbi, the site later became the left minaret of the mosque there). Khalid ibn al-Walid led the destruction of Dhu l-Khalsa (the “Yemeni Kaaba”) and al-Uzza’s shrine in Nakhlah. One by one, the rival cubes were smashed, their custodians killed or converted, their sacred stones broken or buried, their pilgrimages outlawed. Muhammad wanted only one Kaaba standing, only one pilgrimage worth making, only one sacred center worth the caravan trade. Muhammad kept the Kaaba of his own tribe, the Quraysh, and sacralized it as the sole legitimate house of God. All the others were declared idols and erased.

The claim that this Kaaba was built by Abraham and Ishmael has no historical or scriptural support outside Islamic tradition. Neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament places Abraham or Ishmael anywhere near western Arabia. Genesis traces Abraham’s movements from Ur to Haran to Canaan to Egypt and back, never south of the Negev. Ishmael is expelled into the wilderness of Paran (near Sinai), fathers twelve princes, and disappears from the narrative. No Jewish, Christian, or pre-Islamic Arab source links either figure to Mecca, the Kaaba, or the Black Stone. The Quran’s assertion (2:125–127) that Abraham and Ishmael “raised the foundations of the House” is a seventh-century retrofit, an attempt to graft Biblical patriarchs onto an existing pagan shrine to give it legitimacy.

Paganism Preserved Step by Step

Islam markets the hajj as the purified pilgrimage of Abraham, monotheism in seven-day motion. But the entire sequence is lifted almost verbatim from pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism. Muhammad inherited these acts from his own tribe and the wider Ḥijazi cultic world, centralized them at Mecca, eliminated every competing shrine, and then insisted they had always been the property of the one true God. The physical movements, the sacred sites, the timing, the blood, the stones, all of it is pagan continuity dressed in monotheistic costume.

Here is the full hajj ritual cycle as practiced today, exposed side-by-side with its documented pre-Islamic roots.

Ihram (ritual consecration) Pilgrims stop at miqat boundary points, perform ghusl or wudu, put on two seamless white cloths (men), forbid perfume, hunting, sex, cutting hair or nails, and begin reciting the talbiya chant (“Labbayka Allahumma labbayk…”): These exact purity rules, sacred months, general truce (no bloodshed), no sexual relations, no hair/nail cutting, special garments, were already enforced by the Ḥums (Quraysh and allied tribes) for anyone approaching the Kaaba or other major shrines. The miqat stations (Dhu l-Ḥulayfa, Yalamlam, etc.) were pre-Islamic pilgrimage gateways. The talbiya chant itself is older than Islam: Ibn Hisham and al-Kalbi preserve pagan versions (“At Your service, O Allah… You have no partner except the partner You have…”), which the Quran criticizes for allowing “association” yet retains in edited form.

Tawaf al-qudum (arrival circumambulation of the Kaaba) Seven counterclockwise circuits around the Kaaba, ideally touching, rubbing, or kissing the Black Stone at the eastern corner: Sevenfold tawaf was the standard act of devotion at the Kaaba and at rival shrines. Pagans circled nude or in special garments; women sometimes wore only a single cloth over the genitals. The Black Stone was one among hundreds of baetyls/ansab, sacred standing stones, often meteorites, believed to embody divine presence or serve as the “hand” of a god. Pilgrims kissed and stroked them exactly as Muslims do now. Umar’s confession, “I know you are only a stone… if I hadn’t seen the Prophet kiss you, I wouldn’t kiss you”, is an unintentional admission that the rite had no inherent monotheistic logic.

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Say between al-Safa and al-Marwa Seven trips (walking or jogging) between the two hills inside the Masjid al-Ḥaram, men jogging in the green-lit middle section: The two hills already hosted idols, Isaf on Ṣafa and Naila on Marwa (two lovers petrified by Allah for fornicating inside the Kaaba precinct, per Ibn al-Kalbi). Pagans ran or walked between them, touching or invoking the statues as part of the Kaaba pilgrimage. The Quran retains the exact path but removes the statues (2:158: “There is no sin for you in going between al-Safa and al-Marwa”), turning it into a Hagar story.

Wuquf (standing vigil) at Arafat Standing on the plain of Arafat from noon to sunset on the 9th of Dhu l-Ḥijja, praying and supplicating, the “peak” of hajj: Arafat was already the central assembly point for pre-Islamic pilgrims. Tribes gathered there during the sacred months, stood in vigil, listened to orators, traded goods, and performed collective rites at the high place. The name derives from “recognition” or “gathering”, pagans “recognized” their deities and renewed tribal alliances there. Ibn Hisham and al-Azraqi confirm it was integral to the Jahili hajj cycle.

Overnight at Muzdalifa Moving to Muzdalifa after sunset, praying maghrib and isha combined, collecting 49–70 pebbles for the next days: Muzdalifa was a pre-Islamic night halt where pilgrims gathered stones for the rami rite and spent the night in the open. Pebble collection was already part of apotropaic (evil-averting) customs across Arabia.

Rami al-jamarat (stoning the three pillars/walls) Throwing seven pebbles at each of three structures (Jamrat al-Aqaba on Eid day, then all three on the following days): Stone-throwing at cairns, pillars, or sacred boundaries was a widespread Arabian rite to drive away jinn, evil spirits, or rival deities. While the exact three-pillar sequence may be Islamic innovation, the act of pelting stones at ritual sites is pre-Islamic Bedouin apotropaic practice.

Nahr / ḥady (animal sacrifice) Slaughtering a sheep, goat, cow, or camel in Mina on the 10th (Eid al-Adha), with meat distributed to the poor: Animal sacrifice was the core of every Arabian cult, offered to Allah, al-Lat, al-Uzza, Hubal, and countless tribal gods at the Kaaba and other shrines. Mina was already a slaughter site during pilgrimage season. The Quran keeps the rite but insists it is directed to Allah alone (22:28–37; 108:2).

Ḥalq or taqṣir (head shaving or hair trimming) Shaving the head completely or cutting a lock of hair to exit ihram: Head-shaving or depilation was standard at the conclusion of pre-Islamic pilgrimage, especially at Manat’s shrine near Medina, where pilgrims shaved to complete their rites. The Quran retains it (2:196).

Other Pagan Footprints

The hajj is the loudest echo of pre-Islamic paganism in Islam, but it is far from the only one. Once you start looking, the traces appear everywhere, small, stubborn survivals that Muhammad either could not erase or chose not to. They were too useful, too familiar, too profitable, or too deeply wired into Arabian identity.

The Crescent Moon & the Lunar Calendar

Every mosque in the world is crowned with a crescent moon. Muslims begin and end Ramadan by sighting the new moon. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar, months of 29 or 30 days, no intercalation to match the solar year. Pre-Islamic Arabia was saturated with moon-god veneration. South Arabian kingdoms worshipped the moon. The crescent was already a widespread symbol of divine power in Nabataean, South Arabian, and Mesopotamian iconography. Muhammad kept the lunar calendar, the moon-sighting rule (Bukhari 1909), and the crescent as a visual marker. Today Muslims still greet each other with “Eid Mubarak” under the same crescent their pagan ancestors saluted.

Friday as the Day of Assembly

Muslims gather for the obligatory congregational prayer on Friday (Yawm al-Jumua). Pre-Islamic Arabs, and many Near Eastern cultures, dedicated Friday to the planet Venus (al-Zuhara / Uzza) or, in some traditions, to the moon. Al-Maqrizi records that the seven-day week in ancient Arabia assigned each day to a planet: Saturday to Saturn, Sunday to the Sun, Monday to the Moon, and Friday to Venus. The Muslim Friday prayer replaced pagan planetary devotions with Allah’s name, but the day itself was already sacred.

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The Kiswa (Black Covering of the Kaaba)

Every year the Kaaba is draped in a new black silk kiswa embroidered with gold Quranic verses. This is not an Islamic innovation. Pre-Islamic Arabs clothed their idols and sacred stones in cloth, especially black or red fabrics, to honor them.

The Zamzam Well & Sacred Springs

Muslims drink from the Zamzam well inside the Haram and carry its water home as a blessing. Pre-Islamic Arabs revered sacred springs and wells as gifts from their deities. Zamzam was already a pilgrimage focal point in Jahiliyya; pilgrims drank from it for health and blessing.

The Direction of Prayer (Qibla) & the Kaaba’s Centrality

Early Muslims prayed toward Jerusalem for about 16–18 months. Then Muhammad abruptly switched the qibla to the Kaaba (2:144). Why the sudden pivot? Jerusalem was the Biblical holy city; Mecca was the pagan one. The change was political and cultural: it yanked the new movement away from Jewish/Christian gravitational pull, after Jews and Christians rejected Muhammad, and anchored it firmly in Quraysh territory. The Kaaba became the sole direction of prayer for 1.9 billion people, not because Abraham built it, but because Muhammad’s tribe owned it.

The Old Gods Never Fully Left

Islam did not arrive on a blank slate. It arrived in a land thick with shrines, stones, seasons, chants, and blood rituals that had shaped Arabian identity for centuries. Muhammad destroyed the idols, banned the goddesses, outlawed rival Kaabas, and killed or converted their guardians. But he kept the Kaaba, the Black Stone, the tawaf, the say, the standing at Arafat, the stoning, the sacrifice, the shaving, the lunar calendar, the Friday assembly, the covering of the shrine, the sacred well, the crescent symbol, everything that could be repurposed without losing the economic engine or tribal loyalty.

The result is a religion that claims to be the final, uncorrupted monotheism while walking, step by step, through the exact choreography of the pagan pilgrimage it replaced. The hajj s the last pagan procession on earth, only now the worshippers chant one name instead of many. The old gods lost their statues, but they kept the shrine, the stone, the circuit, the blood. And every time a Muslim kisses the Black Stone or circles the Kaaba under the crescent moon, the Jahiliyya whispers: “We never really left.”

Danny Burmawi is the cheif executive of the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Since the 1970s, the term al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Awakening, emerged and spread across the Middle East. More than a hundred books have been published in Arabic under the title The Islamic Awakening, along with thousands of studies, articles, and television programs devoted to it. The renowned Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi alone has written sixteen books on the Awakening, including:

• The Islamic Awakening Between Adolescence and Maturity

• The Islamic Awakening Between Denial and Extremism

• The Islamic Awakening and the Concerns of the Nation

• The Islamic Awakening Between Legitimate Disagreement and Blameworthy Division

• Toward a Mature Awakening That Renews Religion and Advances the World

• The Islamic Solution as Obligation and Necessity

• The Jurisprudence of Priorities for the Islamic Movement

• Toward an Intellectual Unity for Those Working for Islam (five volumes)

The Awakening, as the Sheikhs of Islam define it, is the renewal of the worldly life of Muslims through the renewal of their religion. This renewal is to be achieved by returning to the roots of Islam in the first three Islamic centuries, by fully emulating what is contained in those centuries, and by following the example of the Prophet of Islam and his companions, those whom they call the Righteous Predecessors (al-Salaf al-Salih). According to the French researcher Stéphane Lacroix in his book The Time of the Awakening, the contemporary Islamic Awakening is a fusion of Wahhabi jurisprudence and Muslim Brotherhood ideology. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabis are the two wings of this Awakening. They have interacted and cooperated, and together they have produced an extraordinarily dangerous activist version that combined the activism and comprehensiveness of the Brotherhood with the Salafism of Wahhabism. From this fusion has emerged most, if not all, of the violent Sunni Islamic movements, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, Boko Haram, and others.

The Awakening has many synonyms: the Islamic Vigilance, the Islamic Revival, the Islamic Renewal, the Islamic Resurrection, the Islamic Renaissance, the Islamic Salafism. Its proponents, however, prefer the term Awakening. They hold that this renewal occurs at the head of every Islamic century (every hundred Hijri years). According to Islamic history:

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The Renewer of the First Century was Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (101 AH).

The Renewer of the Second Century was Imam al-Shafi’i (204 AH).

The Renewer of the Fifth Century was Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (505 AH).

The Renewer of the Seventh Century was Taqi al-Din ibn Daqiq al-’Id (702 AH).

The Renewer of the Fourteenth Century, according to Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Muhammad al-Ghazali, is Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Islamic Awakening was launched from three principal centers: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. Its founding fathers may be identified as the Saudi Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949), and the Pakistani Abul A’la al-Mawdudi (1903–1979).

On the Shia side, the founding fathers are Khomeini (1902–1989) and Ali Shariati (1933–1977), extending down to their disciples such as Khamenei and Hassan Nasrallah.

The matter then developed from the founding fathers of the Awakening into the stars, symbols, and sheikhs of the Awakening, including, by way of example and not exhaustively:

In Saudi Arabia: Bin Baz; Bin al-Uthaymeen; Abd al-Rahman al-Dosari; Salman al-Awda; Safar al-Hawali; Awad al-Qarni; Hamoud al-Shu’aibi; Abdullah ibn Jibreen; Abdullah ibn Humayd; Saad al-Faqih; Muhammad al-Mas’ari; Juhayman al-Otaibi; Saeed al-Ghamdi; Hamoud al-Tuwaijri and his son Abdullah; Abd al-Wahhab al-Tariri; Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak; al-Taifih; Saud al-Faysan; Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin; Muhammad Aman al-Jami; Mansour al-Nuqaidan; Musa al-Qarni; Mohsen al-Awaji; Muhammad al-Arifi — and of course Bin Laden.

In Egypt: Sayyid Qutb; Muhammad al-Ghazali; Muhammad Mutawalli al-Sha’rawi; Sheikh Kishk; Omar Abdel-Rahman; Ayman al-Zawahiri; Omar al-Tilmisani; Said Ramadan and his son Tariq; Zaynab al-Ghazali; Abd al-Halim Mahmoud; Sayyid Imam; Sayyid Sabiq; Muhammad Qutb; Fahmi Huwaidi; Muhammad Amara; Muhammad Selim al-Awa; Jad al-Haq Ali Jad al-Haq; Muhammad Hassan; Abu Ishaq al-Huwayni; Muhammad Hussein Yaqub; Mustafa al-Adawi; Hazem Shouman; Yasser Burhami.

Pakistan and Afghanistan: Sayyid Ahmad Khan; Abul A’la al-Mawdudi; Muhammad Ilyas; Burhanuddin Rabbani; Abdul Rasul Sayyaf; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; Mullah Omar.

North Africa: Allal al-Fassi; Rachid al-Ghannouchi; Abbasi Madani; Ali Belhadj; Abd al-Qader al-Idrisi.

Kuwait: Ismail al-Shatti; Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid; Ahmad al-Qattan; Abdullah al-Nafisi.

Jordan: Kamel al-Sharif; Muhammad Nasir al-Albani; Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi; Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani; Abu Qatada.

Sudan: Hassan al-Turabi; Zayn al-Abidin al-Rikabi; Jaafar Idris.

Lebanon and Iraq: Muhammad al-Sawwaf; Fathi Yakan.

Among the Palestinians: Abdullah Azzam; Ahmed Yassin; Ramadan Abdullah Shallah; Azzam Tamimi — and all the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

A large number of books have appeared that provide the ideological theorization of the Islamic Awakening, of jihad, and of Islamic violence. Among these Islamists, these books are treated with the standing of sacred texts:

• In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones by Sayyid Qutb

• Memoirs of the Call and the Caller and the Epistles of Hassan al-Banna

• Kitab al-Tawhid by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab

• Jihad in Islam, Islamic Government, and The Religion of Truth by Abul A’la al-Mawdudi

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• The Jurisprudence of the Sunna (Fiqh al-Sunna) by Sayyid Sabiq

• Loyalty and Disavowal (al-Wala’ wal-Bara’) and Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner by Ayman al-Zawahiri

• The Signs of the Merciful in the Jihad of the Afghans by Abdullah Azzam

• Islamic Law and Say to the Tyrant: No by Omar Abdel-Rahman

• The Neglected Duty (al-Farida al-Gha’iba) by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj

• The Religion of Abraham (Millat Ibrahim) by Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi

• The Master in the Preparation of the Equipment (al-’Umda fi I’dad al-’Udda) by Sayyid Imam

• Jihad and Ijtihad by Abu Qatada

• The Call to Global Islamic Resistance by Abu Mus’ab al-Suri

• The Management of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji

• The complete works of Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Muhammad al-Ghazali

• The recorded cassettes of Sheikh Kishk

• al-Sha’rawi’s Tafsir of the Qur’an

• The weekly program Sharia and Life (al-Sharia wal-Hayat) hosted by Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the Al Jazeera channel

The Islamic Awakening has passed through many phases. What concerns me here are two in particular: the phase of international terrorism, which reached its peak on September 11, 2001; and the phase of international Islamism, which is the appearance of vast Islamic networks covering most of the world’s states, especially the Western states, and which seek to apply the values, the culture, and the Sharia of Islam in the Western states specifically. There are hundreds of Islamic organizations and thousands of large mosques across Europe, North America, and Australia, financed by petroleum surpluses and supervised by the Wahhabi and Brotherhood cells in the West. The ultimate goal is the Islamization of the West and the toppling of Western civilization.

To contain and recruit Muslims, the Awakening has adopted short and attractive slogans, such as Islam is the Solution and Islam is in Danger. It has taken the woman’s hijab and the man’s beard as symbols that distinguish its adherents from others.

The Islamic Awakening has identified its enemies, whom it considers the enemies of Islam and of Muslims:

• The West, especially America and Europe.

• Israel and the Jews in general.

• Non-Muslims in the Islamic states, especially Christians.

• The Muslim rulers who do not apply the Islamic Sharia.

• Secularism, modernity, and the manifestations of modern civilization.

But why did the Islamic Awakening appear at this particular time?

The principal reason is the surplus of petrodollars, which the Wahhabi-Brotherhood alliance deployed to advance its agenda. They found in the fall of the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate in 1924 a cause that would justify reviving the Caliphate once again.

What also helped accelerate the ambition of the Sunni Awakening was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, with Khomeini’s seizure of power and the establishment of a Shia theocratic state governed by the clerics.

Another cause is the Awakening’s own conception that the backwardness and degradation of Muslims is the consequence of their abandonment of the application of Islam, of jihad, and of conquest, and that their abandonment of Islam is what led to Western colonization of their lands. They themselves should have been the ones who conquered the West. Their principal aim in the present is therefore a reverse conquest, the destruction of the West from within, using every instrument that Western civilization makes available to them, including democracy and the freedoms, in order to undermine those very values.

To summarize: the Islamic Awakening is the largest dangerous and destructive global phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century, and it remains so up to the present moment. Beyond having ruined the Middle East, it has terrorized the world with contemporary international terrorism. The greatest losers from the appearance of this Islamic Awakening, however, remain the Christians of the Middle East and of the Western states. They have been subjected to racial discrimination, persecution, forced displacement, the kidnapping of their daughters, and the burning and bombing of their churches, to the point that Christianity has nearly been extinguished entirely from states such as Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and the regions of the Palestinian Authority, and their numbers and their civilizational role have severely declined throughout the whole of the Middle East.

As for Europe, it has come under permanent Islamic danger. There are entire cities that Muslims have taken over and that have become semi-closed, dangerous, and frightening, even to the original people of the country, and that are difficult to enter.

And in America, they are attempting to drag the country toward the same fate as Europe.

Magdi Khalil is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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Part of this confusion stems from genuine ignorance of Islam’s textual, legislative, and historical architecture. But the end result is always the same: a muddled public consciousness, incapable of perceiving the direct relationship between a founding text and the behavior it produces when that text is taken seriously as a total and indivisible commitment.

If a Muslim commits fully to what the Quran commands, what the hadith transmits, and what the Sira establishes as normative, that commitment does not remain confined to private belief or personal worship. It transforms, by its own internal logic, into a comprehensive vision of life: of the relationship with the other, of the shape of society, of the nature of authority, of the logic of governance. From that point, speaking of Islamism as something separate from Islam becomes a form of terminological evasion that conceals rather than clarifies the original question.

A Muslim who takes the founding texts with complete seriousness, who regards them as binding in thought, behavior, and social organization, is, by his intellectual structure, an Islamist in the fullest sense of the word, regardless of whether he belongs to a political organization, carries a party banner, or operates within an organized movement. Islamism, properly understood, is not organizational affiliation. It is the logical consequence of literal commitment to the text when that text is understood as a comprehensive project for life, governance, and society.

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The claim that Islam is one thing and Islamism another is therefore not interpretation. It is mitigation, an attempt to produce a cosmetic image of the religion detached from its original reference material. And this in turn suppresses public understanding, distorts intellectual debate, and grants wide operating space to forces that benefit from the ambiguity to expand their presence and influence across societies that have been deliberately kept confused about what they are dealing with.

The problem is not merely terminological. It is political, cultural, and security-related in its consequences, because building public policy on the assumption that a genuine rupture exists between Islam and Islamism consistently produces an incomplete reading of reality, and a delayed recognition of the nature of the motivations driving individuals and groups when they anchor themselves in religious reference points that consider themselves bound by the text rather than by modern reinterpretation.

Any serious discussion of Islamism cannot therefore begin with organizations alone. It must begin with the founding texts themselves, and with the specific way those texts produce a worldview, assign a position to the Muslim within it, and assign a position to the non-Muslim as well.

The Parent and the Obedient Child

If the Islamic religion is an overbearing, authoritarian, dictatorial head of household, one who controls the breath of his sons and daughters and issues an unending stream of commands and instructions, then Islamism is the dutiful, devoted daughter who executes everything the father says and wants with maximum fidelity.

Islam, not as a separate category labeled Islamism but as an expression of the text’s own political logic, is built, at its textual core, on the concepts of takfir (declaring non-Muslims infidels), jihad, Islamization, the supremacy of Sharia, and an ultimate teleological vision: the subjugation of the human domain under a single system concluding in the idea of the Islamic Caliphate.

Jihad occupies a central position in the doctrinal and legislative architecture of Islam, not as a jurisprudential footnote or an incidental concept, but as a value that recurs throughout the Quran, the hadith, and the Sira, bound to reward, divine selection, elevated spiritual rank, and the differentiation between believers according to their degree of commitment. Across the centuries, jihad has remained one of the most consistently present concepts in the shaping of traditional Islamic consciousness, whether understood as a religious obligation, a path to salvation, or the means of protecting and expanding the faith. This explains its dense presence in both the founding texts and in the historical experience of Islamic civilization.

Surah At-Tawbah, 9:29, perhaps the most politically consequential verse in the Quran:

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture — until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.”

The command is not metaphorical. It is not contextual in the way that modern apologists insist. It is a standing legislative directive governing the relationship between the Islamic political community and non-Muslim populations, a directive that has shaped Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic statecraft for fourteen centuries.

Surah Al-Anfal, 8:15 establishes the battlefield imperative without qualification:

“O you who have believed, when you meet those who disbelieve advancing for battle, do not turn to them your backs in retreat.”

Surah Al-Anfal, 8:60 extends this to a permanent posture of civilizational readiness:

“And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy.”

Surah An-Nisa, 4:74 and Surah Al-Fath, 48:29 complete the picture. The latter is worth quoting in full for the directness of its political theology:

“Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah; and those with him are forceful against the disbelievers, merciful among themselves.”

Forceful against the disbelievers. Merciful among themselves. This is not a description of a spiritual community. It is the founding charter of a political civilization with a specific and explicit attitude toward outsiders.

The hadith literature is equally unambiguous. Three examples, all from the most authoritative collections:

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The Prophet is recorded in Ahmad, with a version in Bukhari, as saying:

“I was sent with the sword just before the Hour so that Allah alone would be worshipped with no partner. My provision was placed under the shadow of my spear, and humiliation and submission are placed on those who oppose my command. Whoever imitates a people is one of them.”

From Sahih Bukhari, hadith number 25, and confirmed in Sahih Muslim:

“I have been commanded to fight the people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, establish prayer, and pay zakat. If they do that, they protect their blood and wealth from me except by the right of Islam, and their reckoning is with Allah.”

From Sahih Bukhari, hadith number 2818, confirmed in Sahih Muslim:

“Know that Paradise is under the shadows of swords.”

The Cognitive Crime

The separation of Islam from Islamism does not merely appear analytically imprecise. It appears as what it is: a complete cognitive crime, one that carries the unmistakable odor of an agenda directed against the capacity of Western civilization to understand and defend itself.

The Islamist is not a distortion of Islam. She is its faithful daughter, attentive to the father day and night, devoted to the realization of his vision. The distinction that Western liberals, political scientists, and policymakers have invested decades in maintaining is not a distinction that survives contact with the primary sources. It is a distinction maintained precisely because the primary sources make it untenable, and because acknowledging that it is untenable requires conclusions that the current intellectual establishment is not prepared to draw.

The genuine humanization of Islam as a civilizational project, if such a thing is possible, will not come from finding softer interpretations of existing texts. It will come only from the collective acknowledgment that the Quran contains material that is dangerous to human civilization in every place it operates, and that any honest path forward must reckon with that material directly, which means not reinterpreting it but confronting the question of what to do with it. That is a conversation that has not yet begun in earnest. The evidence presented here is an argument that it cannot be postponed much longer.

Mohamed Saad Khiralla is a fellow at the Idelogical Defense Institute.

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“I see heads that seem real with blood on them, but when I reached out to touch them, they are not there.”—Reverend Mother Mariam, Abbess of Nea Moni

Nea Moni is an 11th-century Greek Orthodox monastery complex, now utilized as a convent and history museum, located on the beautiful Greek island of Chios.

Nea Moni’s ossuary displays the skulls and bones of some of the victims of an 1822 massacre with the words, “I await the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting. Amen.”

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As a visitor to Chios between March 18 and 20, I made the journey up the mountain above the city to see the convent, the site of the horrific massacre at the hands of Ottoman Turks during the Greek War of Liberation in 1822.

In the words of Colette Burton, who, in 2023, published her master’s degree thesis for Brigham Young University entitled “Remembering Martyrdom: Delacroix’s Massacre of Chios as a Site of Collective Memory”:

“Three thousand refugees hid in the abbey of Nea Moni, but when Turkish soldiers penetrated the outer wall, all were killed. Another three thousand refugees hid at [the monastery of] Agios Minas. According to records, every one of these refugees died when, on Easter Sunday, April 14th, Turkish troops burned the sanctuary to the ground with the refugees trapped inside.”

I photographed the skulls and bones of some of the victims of the massacre which are now kept in a glass cabinet in a small chapel within the monastery complex. The experience was heart-wrenching and chilling.

Greece celebrated its Independence Day on March 25, a date long associated with the start of the 1821 Greek War of Independence against Ottoman rule. However, the revolution actually began weeks earlier (in mid-February), unfolding then across multiple regions through a series of uprisings.

On February 22, 1821, Alexander Ypsilantis (leader of the secret revolutionary organization Philiki Eteria) launched the first military actions in the Danubian Principalities. Although these initial efforts were unsuccessful, they should be situated around the wider context of multiple other revolts which were beginning in Greece about the same time.

March 25 is symbolically significant. It coincides with the Greek Orthodox celebration of the Annunciation and is also the day that independence was officially proclaimed in 1822. The date was formalized as a national holiday in 1838 through a royal decree and has been subsequently observed as the official Independence Day for Greece.

The road to Greek independence was marked by the selfless sacrifice and courage of many Greek women and men. The 1822 Chios massacre, in the midst of a period when atrocities by the Ottoman Turks against Greek civilians were numerous and vicious, was one of the bloodiest.

Approximately three-quarters of the Chios’ population (which totaled 120,000) were killed, enslaved, or died of disease after thousands of Turkish troops landed on the eastern Aegean island to end a rebellion.

How did the Ottoman occupation of mainland Greece and Anatolia/Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) even begin?

The Greek presence in Asia Minor dates back to the 11th century BC. The cities in Anatolia were built and enriched by Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and other indigenous peoples.

Before the Ottoman invasions, the Balkans, Greece, Anatolia, Egypt, Syria, the Holy Land, and North Africa, amongst other areas, were part of the Greek-speaking Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire.

In the 11th century, Turkic Muslim tribes from Central Asia invaded Anatolia, which was then part of the Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire. They would later, in the 13th century, form an Ottoman state in western Anatolia.

In the 7th century, Arab Muslims began attacking and capturing then-Greek-ruled, majority-Christian Levantine lands. Ottoman Turks invaded and captured Constantinople (Istanbul) in the 15th century, bringing an end to the Byzantine Empire.

For more than 600 years, from its Anatolia founding in 1299 through its end in 1922, the Ottoman Empire occupied nations across three continents. These nations included most of the Balkans, (such as Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and Romania), Hungary, Cyprus, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Israel (then part of southern Syria), Lebanon, some of Arabia and a considerable amount of North Africa.

During this period, many crimes were systematically committed against non-Muslims, including:

• The ghulam system: the enslavement, conversion, and training of non-Muslims to become warriors and statesmen;

• The devshirme system: the forced recruitment of Christian boys who were abducted from their families in Christian countries, converted to Islam and enslaved for service to the sultan in his palace and to join his janissaries (“new corps”);

• Forced conversions to Islam resulting from social, religious and economic pressure and persecution;

• The sexual slavery of women and children, deportations and massacres.

Ottomans also abducted Europeans primarily through the Mediterranean slave raids by both Barbary corsairs and land-based raids by the Crimean Khanate. Most victims were captured from coastal towns across Europe.

Key locations for the Ottoman abductions of European women and children included the Mediterranean Sea and coastline (Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and islands like Malta), Northern Atlantic (raids reached as far as Iceland in 1627), Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and Moldova), and the Balkans (Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and others.) Some of the captives were sold in the markets of Constantinople, but many were taken to other Ottoman markets such as North Africa. The Christian boys abducted from those nations were the primary source for the Ottoman devshirme system.

The period of Ottoman occupation in mainland Greece lasted from the mid-15th century until the successful 1821 Greek War of Independence. The First Hellenic Republic was proclaimed in 1822. The Greeks who remained under Ottoman control in Anatolia (today’s Turkey) continued to suffer as second class subjects of the empire. The indigenous Christian residents of Anatolia were largely annihilated as a result of centuries-long Islamic oppression that culminated in the 1913-23 genocide in Ottoman Turkey.

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After nearly four centuries of Ottoman occupation, Greeks initiated a war of liberation in 1821. Ottoman Turks responded with unmitigated brutality, massacring or enslaving thousands of innocent people.

In 1822, a year into Greece’s war of independence, the Ottoman sultan sent his commander-in-chief of the navy (the Kapudan Pasha), Kara Ali, to Chios with 15,000 men. The massacre began in late March, accelerating the following month, following the arrival of a massive Turkish fleet. The Ottoman troops slaughtered or sold into slavery tens of thousands of islanders.

In 2022, Richard Calvocoressi, the descendant of a prominent Kampos family from Chios, wrote in the New Statesman an article entitled “My family and the forgotten massacre of Chios.”

He noted that the bloodbath was “essentially a holy war.” His three-times-great-grandfather Ioannis Kalvokoresis “had his fingers chopped off one by one for refusing to hand over gold to his captors and for resisting conversion to Islam.” Ioannis’s “90-year-old mother, her arms outstretched in the form of a cross, was walled up alive for refusing to renounce her faith.”

Brutality raged across the island. Ottoman troops were reported to have brought severed heads and ears of Greeks to their commander, seeking monetary rewards or recognition for their actions.

Sexual violence was rampant during the massacre. Burton writes that “in remembering the innocence of the young Chiot girls in his pre-massacre visit, the French Count Mario de Marcellus mourned over their fate: ‘Poor young girls, of the most beautiful island in the sea, what has become of you?’” The count’s language is reminiscent of the lamentations in the third chapter of Isaiah describing the fall of the ‘beautiful daughter of Zion.’ One can easily equate the biblical descriptions with the fate of Chios:

“‘And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty. Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground.’

“With men fallen by the sword and the stink of death in the air, the formerly prosperous island was in the process of being razed to the ground. Burning had replaced beauty. The rape imagery found in the rent girdles and lamenting gates described in Isaiah further speaks to the sexual violence experienced by Chiot women. More concretely, these verses seem to describe Delacroix’s painting with desolate women sitting on the ground, clothes rent. Around them, men have fallen by the sword, and their beautiful island burns in the distance. Like the captive daughter of Jerusalem, these women would later find themselves sold ‘like animals’ in the markets of Istanbul, Smyrna, and Asia Minor.”

Alexander M. Vlastos wrote about the 1882 Chios massacre in his book, “A History of the Island of Chios A.D. 70-1822”:

“The Turks, two days after the arrival of the fleet, when they had finished burning the churches and houses, and had killed, or made prisoners all the inhabitants of the town, still thirsting for Christian blood, turned their steps to the mountains. Again everywhere blood, everywhere murder, everywhere droves of women and children being dragged into captivity. They kill or burn 3000 Christians, who had shut themselves up in the monasteries of Néa Monè and Agios Minas; they dishonour the nuns of Chalandra and Kalimasià and carry them off. Howling curses, they heap up Christian bodies at each step. Having exterminated the inhabitants of St. George and Anavato, they proceed to the highest parts, in search of further victims.”

In June of 1822, an attempt was made by Greek naval powers to stop Kara Ali’s fleet from leaving Chios and strengthening the Ottoman navy elsewhere. Led by Constantine Canaris of Psara, thirty-two men crept into the harbor and boarded the Turkish ship. In the morning of June 19, the flag-ship exploded, killing over 2,000 men, as well as Kara Ali himself, in the blaze.

“By the end,” writes Burton, “out of roughly 120,000 Chiots, 25,000 were dead from violence or plague, 45,000 had been sold into slavery, and roughly 20,000 were left alive on the island. The rest, a number of about 30,000, had become refugees on the continent in what would later be known as the Chiot diaspora.”

According to Chiot historian Philip P. Argenti, nine-tenths of the island’s 120,000 were massacred or sold into slavery, leaving, according to more liberal estimates, 10,000 survivors.

The massacre shocked Europe. Volunteer organizations collected money to support the Greek Revolution by providing arms and weapons while many Westerners arrived in Greece to fight the Ottomans.

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Many famous artists dedicated their works to this heinous event. The French painter Eugene Delacroix immortalized the massacre in his 1824 Massacre at Chios, which hangs in the Louvre. Today, a replica of Delacroix’s painting resides on the island inside the entrance of the Chios Byzantine Museum, located in a converted mosque built on the ruins of a Christian church.

Furthermore, Victor Hugo’s poem about the massacre, the Child/L’enfant, highlights the brutality that the victims suffered at the hands of the Ottomans.

Since its founding in 1923, Turkey has continued its attempts at wiping out Greeks from the region—from the genocide of 1913-23 in Anatolia to the pogrom against Greeks in Constantinople in 1955—not to mention the forced deportations of Greeks from the city in1964 and the 1974 military invasion of Cyprus. The atrocities go on and on.

Chios is just 9 nautical miles (around 16 km) from Turkey, which makes the island an attractive and easy-to-reach tourist spot for Turkish citizens. However, the Greek government should turn this gorgeous island into an international tourism center, publicize its unique beauty on a global scale, and not allow it to rely on Turkish tourism solely for its survival.

Should the Greek government expend even a small amount of effort to make known on a broader scale the island’s beauty, including the exclusive location of the Mastic tree, the products of which are known and prized for their excellent healing properties, its local merchants might be released from dependence on the Turkish market into their own nook on the world stage.

Greeks were occupied in mainland Greece by Ottoman Turks for 400 years. They became second class subjects of an Islamic empire, paying the “jizya” tax to the same Muslim overlords who frequently abducted their children to forcibly convert them to Islam and turn them into soldiers (janissary troops), or forcibly marry them and make them their “brides,” sex slaves, or domestic slaves. This only ended when the Greeks fought back to end the Ottoman occupation starting in 1821.

The history of Greeks—both in mainland Greece and Anatolia as well as the Levant—should be objectively taught at schools in the West as a case of an indigenous people who suffered for centuries at the hands of a brutal, occupying force, gaining their freedom only after winning a fierce war of independence which they themselves fought.

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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To understand why it persists, it helps to have a name for what it is doing. Call it mythotherapy: the practice of using an idealized, sanitized past as a balm for present wounds. The wound, in this case, is real enough—the humiliation of colonial subjugation, the failure of post-Ottoman secular governments to deliver dignity or prosperity, the enduring trauma of watching a civilization that once led the world reduced to a collection of dependent states whose borders were drawn in London and Paris. Mythotherapy does not deny this pain. It metabolizes it into a political program, offering a lost golden age as both diagnosis and cure. If only we return, the reasoning runs, we will be whole again.

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An Islamic Golden Age that Never Existed

The problem is that the golden age being invoked never quite existed—and understanding how it has been constructed tells us as much about the present as it does about the past.

The primary historical reference point for modern Islamic movements is the era of the al-Khulafa’ar-Rashidun—the four “Rightly Guided” Caliphs who led the Muslim community following Muhammad’s death in 632 CE. In the mythology, this period appears as something close to paradise on earth: leaders who lived like commoners, courts open to the grievances of the poor, law applied with absolute equality, and a community moving as one, guided by faith rather than power. The historical record offers a considerably different picture.

The death of Muhammad barely registered before the nascent community was in crisis. Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, spent much of his brief tenure fighting the Ridda Wars—campaigns against Arab tribes that had decided, reasonably enough, that their political and financial obligations to Medina died with Muhammad. These were not theological disputes conducted through polite disagreement; they were bloody military suppressions. The “unity” of the early Ummah was, from its first moments, something that had to be enforced.

The political fragility of the era is most starkly illustrated by the fates of the four Caliphs themselves. Of the four men celebrated as paragons of just governance, only Abu Bakr died of natural causes. Umar was assassinated by a Persian captive. Uthman was besieged in his own home and killed by Muslim soldiers from the Egyptian and Iraqi provinces—a mutiny from within the community he was supposed to lead. Ali’s reign was consumed entirely by civil war: first the Battle of the Camel, in which his forces fought those loyal to Muhammad’s widow Aisha, then the protracted conflict at Siffin against Muawiya, governor of Syria, which produced the Kharijite schism—a radical splinter movement that would eventually murder Ali himself.

This is not a footnote to the era; it is the era. The foundational period of Islamic governance was one in which the very question of who had the right to lead was answered, repeatedly, by force. This is not a revisionist reading imposed from outside the tradition. Ibn Khaldun, writing in fourteenth-century Tunisia, built an entire philosophy of history around the observation that political solidarity—what he called asabiyyah, group feeling—was inherently cyclical and perishable, always subject to the corruptions of power and the entropy of success. His Muqaddimah is, among other things, a sustained argument that no political order, including Islamic ones, escapes the logic of rise and decay. He drew no golden age. He was a Muslim scholar, writing from within the tradition, and the history he saw was the same history we see now—a record of struggle, fracture, and impermanence.

To speak of it as a time of “frictionless unity” is not to recall history but to enact a collective amnesia about it.

The Myth of Muslim Unity

The second layer of the pitch draws on the Abbasid Caliphate and the later “Gunpowder Empires”—Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal—for its claims to civilizational prestige. The claim shifts from piety to power. The Islamic world, the narrative holds, was once the undisputed global superpower: leading in science, philosophy, medicine, and trade. Modern weakness is the direct consequence of fragmentation. Restore the unity; restore the glory. But political unity and civilizational achievement were never as tightly coupled as this implies. The golden age of Islamic science and philosophy flourished during a period of profound political fragmentation. The Abbasids claimed the Caliphate from Baghdad from 750 CE onward, but their authority began fracturing almost immediately—an Umayyad survivor fled to Al-Andalus and established a rival State, while by the tenth century the Shia Fatimid Caliphate had risen in Egypt, explicitly rejecting Abbasid legitimacy.

At the height of Islamic intellectual achievement, there was no unified Muslim political entity. There were competing ones.

The idea of a unified “Muslim bloc” in medieval geopolitics is, in fact, a historical fiction. Throughout the medieval period, Muslim states formed alliances with non-Muslim powers against their Muslim rivals as readily as any other polity. The Abbasids exchanged diplomatic overtures with Charlemagne against the Umayyads of Spain. During the Crusades, local emirs made arrangements with the Crusader kingdoms when doing so protected their interests against neighboring Muslim rivals. And the three great Muslim powers of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries—Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal—were not pillars of a unified civilization but rivals engaged in sustained, often brutal conflict. The Ottoman-Safavid wars lasted over two centuries, driven by the Sunni-Shia divide and the contest for Mesopotamia.

Shared Religious Practice

What did unify the Islamic world during these centuries was real and significant: shared religious practice, the Arabic language of scholarship, the Hajj, a rich network of trade and intellectual exchange. But these were cultural and spiritual unifiers, not political ones. The history of Islamic civilization is, in large part, a history of remarkable achievement without a unified central government—a fact that modern political movements prefer not to advertise.

To understand why this mythology has such power today, it is necessary to be honest about what is driving it. Modern calls for a restored Ummah are less about history than about trauma—specifically, the political and psychological trauma of twentieth-century colonialism and its aftermath. The carving of the Middle East into mandate territories by Britain and France after the First World War left borders that did not reflect the ethnic, tribal, or religious contours of the populations within them. They were drawn to serve European imperial interests, and they left generations of Muslims in the psychically destabilizing position of living in states that felt, quite literally, foreign.

Invented Tradition

The Ummah myth offers a direct answer to this wound. The nation-state, in this framing, is not a legitimate political unit but a colonial imposition designed to keep Muslims divided and weak. The current world order is not merely flawed but illegitimate—a deviation from the divinely ordained. This move does several things at once: it delegitimizes existing governments without requiring specific critique of their failures, and it shifts responsibility for corruption, stagnation, and dysfunction away from internal governance and onto the original sin of colonial disruption.

This is not the exclusive property of fringe movements. Yusuf al-Qaradawi—president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars and for decades the most watched Islamic scholar in the Arab world—told a Muslim Brotherhood rally in El-Arish in May 2013 that Islam rejects the very existence of multiple nations: “there are Islamic peoples but not Islamic nations, because Muslims are one Ummah.” Western colonialism, he continued, had artificially fragmented a people who were one under the Caliphate. The diagnosis and the cure, in two sentences. That this was met with applause rather than controversy is precisely the point: the mythological framework it draws on is not extremist. It is the common air of mainstream Islamic political discourse. Political scientists have a useful term for this kind of maneuver: invented tradition. The concept, developed by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, describes how modern movements take historical symbols, reinterpret them through a contemporary lens, and present the result as ancient and unchanging. The “tradition” being invented here is a modern political construction—assembled from selective historical memory, genuine spiritual bonds, and present-day grievance—then dressed in the authority of antiquity.

A Dangerous Conflation

None of this is to dismiss the genuine spiritual reality of the Ummah. For nearly two billion people, Islam provides a profound sense of shared identity expressed through prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, and a felt sense of brotherhood that crosses national lines. This is a living, meaningful reality. What the political version of the pitch does, however, is collapse this spiritual community into a demand for a centralized political state—insisting that the felt experience of solidarity is incomplete, even fraudulent, unless it is expressed through a unified government. Sudanese-American legal scholar Abdullahi An-Na’im has argued from within the Islamic tradition that this conflation is not only politically dangerous but theologically incoherent—that genuine religious compliance requires freedom of conscience, which state coercion by definition destroys. His work is contested, but it exists, and it represents a serious tradition of internal Islamic critique that the political-unity narrative actively suppresses. The political version of the pitch thus conflates two very different things: feeling like one people, and living under one ruler.

The consequences of this conflation are not merely theoretical. When political movements promise to restore a conflict-free, perfectly just order, they create what might be called a utopian gap—the distance between the imagined perfection of the past and the irreducible messiness of actual governance. Because the perfect unity being promised never existed in the first place, any real attempt to implement it must deal with dissent and pluralism by suppressing them. The history being invoked as a model is, as we have seen, a history characterized by exactly the internal divisions the restored order is meant to transcend. There is also a subtler cost: the erasure of Islam’s extraordinary geographic and cultural diversity. The mythotherapy pitch treats “authentic” Islam as something expressible only through a specific, idealized Middle Eastern model, airbrushing away the rich, locally rooted traditions of West Africa, Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and Central Asia. The Javanese Muslim, the Moroccan Sufi, the Senegalese scholar—their traditions become, in this framework, deviations from an original purity that never existed.

The Antidote to Mythotherapy

Ultimately, the call for a unified Ummah is not a history lesson. It is a political product, and what it is selling is not a return to the past but something that has never existed: a future disguised as an origin. The appeal is compelling precisely because it draws on real things—genuine spiritual bonds, real civilizational achievements, the legitimate grievance of colonial humiliation, the authentic failure of many post-colonial states. But the myth itself—the perfectly unified, justly governed, divinely ordained Caliphate that Muslims need only restore to reclaim their dignity—is a construction, and a thoroughly modern one.

Islamic history, like all human history, is a record of struggle: for power, for legitimacy, for survival. Its achievements in science, philosophy, law, and art were produced not by a monolithic unity but by a civilization comfortable with internal debate, regional variation, and competitive pluralism. That messy, human record is more inspiring—and more usable—than the sanitized myth. The antidote to mythotherapy is not cynicism about the past but honesty about it—and honesty requires acknowledging what the tradition actually contains. Islamic civilization produced Ibn Khaldun’s unsentimental sociology of power, al-Biruni’s empirical curiosity, the fierce jurisprudential disagreements of the legal schools, the mystical heterodoxy of the Sufis. It produced, in other words, exactly the pluralism, internal dissent, and intellectual restlessness that the unified-Ummah myth is designed to foreclose. To invoke the tradition as a mandate for enforced conformity is to betray what the tradition actually was.

Conclusion

The question for Muslim-majority societies is not how to return to an origin that was never as clean as the myth requires. It is how to draw on fourteen centuries of genuinely contested thought and practice to build institutions adequate to the actual problems of the twenty-first century: political legitimacy, economic development, the rights of minorities and women, the governance of religiously plural societies. These are hard problems. They have no answers in the seventh century because the seventh century did not have them. They require exactly the kind of honest, rigorous engagement with the present that mythotherapy is specifically designed to prevent.

The myth endures because it is doing real emotional work. But a civilization capable of producing the achievements that Islamic history genuinely contains does not need a fabricated past. It needs to look at the actual past—take what is usable, discard what is not, and build forward. That is, in the end, what every living tradition has always had to do, otherwise it remains trapped between the twenty-first century and a seventh century that never quite existed.

Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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Now, despite all these differences, they might still agree on a principle like equal liberty, the idea that every person should have the same basic freedoms under the law.

• Christians might support equal liberty because they see every human being as possessing inherent dignity, worthy of protection.

• Secular humanists might support it because it secures individual autonomy, allowing each person to live according to their own conscience.

• Utilitarians might support it because it creates stability and peace, which maximizes the well-being of society as a whole.

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Different reasons. Same principle. And this shared political principle allows them to function under the same government without killing each other.

Rawls’s “Overlapping Consensus”

This is exactly what the American political philosopher John Rawls called overlapping consensus. In a modern democracy, you’ve got people with all kinds of comprehensive doctrines, which is just philosophy-speak for the big-picture worldview that shapes your moral and political opinions. That can be a religion, a secular philosophy, or any deep moral framework. Rawls says that for a stable, just society, you don’t need everyone to share the same comprehensive doctrine. What you need is for different groups to agree on the same political principles, for their own reasons. The principles themselves are freestanding. That means they’re not taken from the Bible, the Qur’an, the writings of Karl Marx, or Nietzsche. They’re not justified by one religion or ideology. They stand on their own, grounded in political values that people from many worldviews can accept.

Even though I have argued before that these so-called “freestanding” liberal democratic principles were in fact historically shaped and nurtured by the Judeo-Christian worldview, for the sake of this article, let’s assume they truly are freestanding. Let’s take Rawls at his word and treat them as if they exist independently of any religious or philosophical tradition, available for all to adopt regardless of their cultural or theological roots.

This is what makes a liberal democracy possible. We all sign onto the same rules of the game, equality before the law, protection of basic rights, freedom of conscience, but we sign on for different reasons.

Rawls adds an important qualifier: this overlapping consensus only works among reasonable comprehensive doctrines. What does “reasonable” mean? It means you accept that other people will hold different worldviews, and you agree not to impose your own as the law of the land unless everyone can accept it on neutral terms. You’re willing to live in a system where you can’t force people to live by your religion or ideology.

That’s the deal. If you’re in, you can join the consensus. If you’re out, if your worldview demands that you rule over everyone else, then you’re not a “reasonable” doctrine in Rawls’s sense.

Can Islam join this overlapping consensus?

A Christian can say: “I believe in the dignity of the human person, and in politics, I will argue for laws that protect everyone’s rights equally, including non-Catholics.”

A secular humanist can say: “I believe there is no God, but I will defend your right to worship one if you want.”

A utilitarian can say: “I’ll accept your freedom of conscience because it creates stability and well-being.”

But Islam says something very different:

• The law of Allah (Sharia) is supreme over all man-made laws.

• Sovereignty belongs to Allah alone, not to the people.

• The Qur’an and Sunnah are binding for all time and cannot be changed by human agreement.

• Political equality between Muslims and non-Muslims is rejected, Muslims have a higher legal and social status.

• Freedom of speech and religion is conditional, you cannot insult Muhammad, reject Islam, or promote beliefs that contradict it without punishment.

A liberal democracy says:

• Laws are made by the people through debate, voting, and consent.

• All citizens are politically equal.

• No religion gets to impose its rules on everyone else without their consent.

Islam says:

• Laws are made by Allah and revealed through Muhammad, no debate allowed.

• Muslims are superior to non-Muslims in legal status.

• Sharia is binding not just on Muslims, but on everyone in Muslim-ruled territory.

You can see the problem.

Why “Good Muslim” and “Good Citizen” Pull in Opposite Directions

In a liberal democracy, a good citizen is someone who:

• Accepts equal rights for all citizens, regardless of religion or belief.

• Respects secular law as the highest political authority.

• Defends freedoms like speech and religion for everyone, even opponents.

• Participates in the system without trying to overthrow it.

A good Muslim is someone who:

• Believes Sharia is supreme over all man-made laws.

• Rejects political equality between Muslims and non-Muslims.

• Supports Qur’anic commands that restrict speech, religion, and personal autonomy.

• Works toward a society governed by Islamic law.

Those duties point in opposite directions.

Four Core Contradictions

1. Sovereignty

   • Democracy: Sovereignty belongs to the people.

   • Islam: Sovereignty belongs to Allah.

2. Equality

   • Democracy: All citizens have equal rights.

   • Islam: Muslims have higher status; women have fewer rights; apostates lose rights entirely.

3. Freedom of Speech and Religion

   • Democracy: You can criticize any religion or leave your faith without punishment.

   • Islam: Criticizing Muhammad or leaving Islam is punishable — in classical law, by death.

4. Loyalty

   • Democracy: Loyalty to the constitution and nation.

   • Islam: Loyalty to the ummah and Sharia, above any national constitution.

Some Muslims in the West try to present themselves as both, loyal citizens and faithful Muslims. They say they “balance” the two identities. But this so-called balance only works if you quietly ignore parts of Islam or quietly reject parts of liberal democracy.

• Follow Islam fully, and you’ll inevitably reject democratic principles.

• Follow democratic principles fully, and you’ll inevitably ignore parts of Islam, making you a bad Muslim.

The two identities are not just different; they are fundamentally incompatible. One will always override the other.

• In liberal democracy, justice means fairness under neutral law.

• In Islam, justice means implementing what Allah has commanded, which includes laws that violate democratic principles.

The words sound the same. The meanings are worlds apart.

The Difference Between Tolerating and Inviting

A liberal democracy can tolerate a lot of worldviews, even some that don’t fully share its values, as long as those groups don’t try to change the rules for everyone else. That’s why Rawls talks about reasonable doctrines. If a group says, “We’ll follow our own beliefs privately, but we accept the public rules,” they can be part of the overlapping consensus. But if a group says, “Our beliefs must rule over everyone, and we will change the public rules when we can,” they are not part of the consensus. They are in a modus vivendi at best, a temporary truce, waiting for the balance of power to shift.

A modus vivendi, latin for “way of living,” is basically a truce. Two groups that can’t stand each other might agree not to fight, but not because they believe in the same principles. It’s because it’s convenient. Maybe they’re equally powerful and can’t win. Maybe they need each other economically. The problem is that A modus vivendi is fragile. As soon as the balance of power shifts, the truce falls apart. There’s no moral commitment holding it together, just self-interest. That’s what Islam is in the West: not a partner in overlapping consensus, but a participant in a fragile truce.

You cannot have a stable liberal democracy if one of the major groups within it is committed to replacing the political framework itself. John Rawls talked about how unreasonable doctrines cannot be part of the consensus because they destroy it from within. Islam is an unreasonable doctrine in the Rawlsian sense. It doesn’t agree to the deal. It can make a temporary truce (modus vivendi) when it’s weak. But when it’s strong enough, it acts on its own political vision, one that replaces the liberal democratic framework entirely.

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On October 7, a message from a friend in Cairo woke me up, alerting me to what happened in Israel. It didn’t take me long to realize that we were facing events that bore many similarities to September 11. Thus, I would like to reflect on the most significant parallels between September 11 and October 7:

I. Both Attacks Were the Product of a Religious Islamic Ideology Hostile to Jews and Christians

In preparation for September 11, Al-Qaeda had established the World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Christians/Crusaders. The perpetrators of the terrorist attack on October 7 belong to a broad alliance sharing an ideology clearly hostile to Jews and Christians.

Hamas’ charter calls for the liberation of Palestine from the River to the Sea, i.e., the total removal of Jews from the region. It even instructs Muslims that the annihilation of Jews is a divine promise.

As for Iran, its slogan since 1979 has been Death to America and Death to Israel. Iranian officials have signaled dozens of times the desire to eradicate Israel. In fact, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has called for the elimination of the “Zionist entity,” in his eulogy for Hassan Nasrallah.

As for the Houthis, their slogan is Death to America, Death to Israel, and Curse on the Jews.

This doctrine doesn’t make a distinction between Judaism and Jews, nor between Christianity and Christians. It essentially wages a religious war on Judaism and Christianity, and consequently on Jews and Christians, with Islamist jihad serving as a mobilization device.

II. Both Were Horrific Terrorist Acts.

September 11 is the largest terrorist attack against civilians in US history.

October 7 is the largest terrorist attack against civilians in the history of Israel, and the most horrific against Jews since the Holocaust.

Former CIA Director and retired US General David H. Petraeus pointed out that, in comparison, the October 7 attack on Israel killed a far greater proportion of its much smaller population, which would be the equivalent of the US having experienced over 40,000 losses, and 7,000 abductions all at once.

Both operations were particularly ruthless because they targeted, deliberately killed, and even boasted about killing, innocent civilians. To make matters worse, they were born out of a religious legitimacy that justified killing those civilians.

III. Both Conveyed a Vehement Assault on Civilization and Progress

Americans have famously wondered, “Why do they hate us?” Contempt and resentment of progress and prosperity is one of the reasons for this animosity against the US and Israel. The jihadist ideology is fueling the fires of hatred, and when that is combined with a failure to compete with the US and Israel, the result is a raging and obsessive desire to destroy them both.

IV. Both Led to a Difficult and Complex War

After September 11, a global war on terrorism broke out and lasted for two decades, the longest since the Cold War. It was a complex, widespread, and costly war.

After October 7, the Gaza war broke out, then the war on Hezbollah—a multifaceted war against Iran’s actors in the Middle East, which has turned into a wider, regional war.

The global war on terrorism required an international coalition. Likewise, the war against Iran and its proxies requires a broad Western coalition, not just in support of Israel, but because Iran and its terrorist proxies pose a threat to the Western world.

V. Both Aimed to Destroy the Nation

September 11 aimed to ruin America’s image as a superpower that triumphed in the Cold War, strike the nation’s economic, military and political symbols, destroy its status, as well as stop the momentum of globalization led by the US.

The goal of October 7 was to annihilate the State of Israel, or at least to take the first step towards destroying Israel. I have watched hundreds of Arab political analysts predict the end of Israel after October 7. Short of that, the attack aimed to stop the momentum of normalization, and the Abraham Accords between the Gulf States and Israel, especially with Saudi Arabia.

VI. Both Were Met with Similar Reactions in the Arab Street

I followed the reactions of the Arab street to the two attacks, and they can be summarized in three words: jubilation; justification; skepticism and conspiracy theories. However, I can confirm that the feelings of joyful vindication in the Arab street in the first few days after October 7 were much greater than what was witnessed following September 11.

As for justification, September 11 was justified as a strike against American arrogance and hegemony, while the slaughter of civilians on October 7 was viewed as a necessary form of resistance to Israeli occupation, to liberate historical Palestine from the River to the Sea.

Conspiracy theories were much more prevalent in regard to September 11. A great number of Arabs believe, till now, that the Deep State in America carried out the attack. October 7 had its own share of conspiracy theories as well, for instance:

• It was a collaboration between Israel and Hamas.

• Israel had full knowledge of the attack and let it unfold to put an end to the Palestinian cause.

• Netanyahu greenlighted the operation, to save himself politically.

• Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, is a Mossad agent, and they trained him to carry out the attack, aiming to destroy Gaza and Palestine.

• Israel had full knowledge of the attack and let it unfold in order to seize the Gaza port and the natural gas off the coast of Gaza.

These conspiracy theories remain popular, even though Al-Qaeda and Hamas, respectively, proudly claimed responsibility for the attacks.

VII. Both Tested the Nation’s Inner Strength

September 11 and October 7 are hauntingly etched in the history of the United States, and the history of Israel, respectively. The attacks challenged and tested the spirit of each nation, but ultimately brought out the best in them, revealing their strength, resilience and unity, and their determination to:

• Achieve victory and put an end to this terrorist threat.

• Stop this from ever happening again.

• Achieve a superior level of security and safety.

• Remain defiant and focused on rebuilding. Therefore, the United States built the Freedom Tower in place of the World Trade Center, with more advanced technology; as well as a memorial to the victims of September 11. I am confident that, in time, Israel will build a memorial to the victims of October 7, and to the soldiers who were killed during this existential war.

VIII. A Day that Changed the World and a Day that Changed the Middle East

September 11 is recognized as a day that changed the world, and October 7 will be recognized as a day that changed the Middle East. Chronologists look at September 11 as landmark in the history of the world, and I think the same will apply to October 7 in regard to the Middle East.

IX. Overwhelming and Excessive Force Being the Only Viable Response

After September 11, there was no way to deal with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Islamist terrorism, except by using overwhelming, excessive and devastating force.

After October 7, there was no way to deal with Hamas and Hezbollah, except by using overwhelming, excessive and devastating force.

These bloodthirsty radical organizations, which pride themselves on killing innocent civilians, believe that war is a zero-sum game, leaving us no option but to use excessive military force to defeat them.

X. Defining Victory over Terrorist Organizations in Both Cases

This type of war should not be evaluated based on the traditional criteria of victory and defeat, but from the perspective of threat reduction and goal achievement. In my opinion, the United States has successfully achieved this during the global war on terrorism, and as a result it is now in a more secure position.

Israel would also benefit from defining victory along the same vein, with a focus on:

• Administering painful blows to the military structure of these terrorist organizations.

• Killing most of the senior leaders.

• Security and intelligence vigilance.

• Thwarting future threats.

As we know, Islamist jihadist ideology is akin to a hydra (Greek mythical serpent with multiple heads), so whenever you cut off one head, another emerges. Therefore, the purpose of the war is to cut off the active heads of this form of terrorism, rather than eliminate the ideology.

The overall effects of what happened on September 11 and October 7 will not be totally revealed for quite some time. The dangerous hostility in the Arab and Islamic worlds towards the United States and Israel will sadly continue, even if radical Islamist organizations are weakened, this profound animosity will likely outlive them.

Yes, they do hate us. Spurred on by a misguided and bloodthirsty radical doctrine, they will continue to despise the West, hate Jews and Christians, obsess over the US and Israel, and harbor delusional fantasies about destroying the Western world and eradicating Israel.

This, unfortunately, is the painful truth.

Magdi Khalil is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

Magdi Khalil is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI