What is Political Islam?

Abbas Goya

Political Islam (PI)—also referred to as Islamism—as understood by Marxian socialists, denotes an ultra-right, nationalist, independent, and extremely violent political movement. It is fundamentally anti-communist, anti-worker, and deeply misogynist. At first glance, PI may appear compatible with capitalism, particularly in its most brutal form, where workers are stripped of rights and cheap labor is the primary source of profit. However, this compatibility is superficial.

Political Islam is grounded in the raw, misogynist, backward, and violent doctrines and social customs of Islam. As such, it fails to sustain the essential structural requirements of a functioning capitalist system. Like all religions in their unrefined form, Islam belongs historically to the feudal mode of production. It cannot adequately serve as the superstructure of capitalism across political, social, economic, and cultural domains.

During the Cold War, political Islam occupied a marginal position in the Middle East, while the Left—particularly the pro-Soviet Left—constituted the primary opposition to authoritarian regimes in the region. The West, led by the United States, actively nurtured, financed, trained, promoted, and politically elevated Islamist forces as a counterweight to communist and socialist movements. In Iran (1979) and later in Afghanistan, Western powers facilitated the conditions under which political Islam could seize state power.

It is important to stress that political Islam was—and is—not a puppet of the West. Rather, it functioned as a strategic political ally in the shared objective of defeating communism and suppressing any socialist alternative. Nevertheless, without Western intervention and support, political Islam would likely have remained a marginal force.

Political Islam is nationalist to its core. It occupies the far-right wing of nationalist movements in the Middle East and aims to reorganize the regional bourgeoisie under its ideological leadership. In this respect, PI’s nationalism closely resembles that of Eurocentric fascism. Like fascist movements in Europe, Islamist nationalism does not necessarily confine itself to a single nation-state but often claims an entire region as its imagined political and cultural domain.

Rooted in the Middle East and extending into North Africa, political Islam seeks integration into global capitalism while demanding a larger share of economic power and geopolitical influence. Its anti-U.S. rhetoric emerges most clearly once it attains power, as it inevitably clashes with American hegemony. This pattern was evident in Iran, where Khomeini—once tacitly tolerated by the West—turned decisively against the United States, and later in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden, trained and armed by the CIA, founded the most extensive Islamist terrorist network ever created by a non-state actor.

In Iran, Khomeini established the largest state-run Islamist terrorist apparatus in modern history. In Afghanistan, bin Laden constructed the most formidable transnational Islamist terrorist organization. In both cases, yesterday’s Western-approved allies turned out to be today’s foes—not because political Islam changed its nature, but because it had finally accumulated enough power to assert its own imperial ambitions.

The year 2016 marked the centenary of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, under which Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine were carved out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The later creation of Saudi Arabia (1932), Kuwait (1922), Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (1971) was closely tied to the discovery of oil in Arabic-speaking regions beginning in the early twentieth century (oil was first discovered in Iran in 1908). Some of these states are younger than I am; many are younger than my father, and Sykes–Picot itself is younger than my not-so-long-ago deceased grandfather.

When the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant erased sections of the Iraqi–Syrian border, it triumphantly announced the act on social media with the hashtag #SykesPicotOver. More recently, Masoud Barzani—the Kurdish strongman—echoed this rhetoric by calling for the dismantling of Sykes–Picot and the redrawing of the Middle Eastern map. The onset of the Cold War, the creation of Israel in 1948, and the unresolved Kurdish question complete the political landscape of the Middle East prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The political expression of these historical processes in the Middle East took the form of nationalism (in various capitalist configurations) and socialism (in multiple and often competing variants). Reality, however, was never a simple binary. These tendencies frequently overlapped, producing movements such as Pan-Arabism, Arab Socialism (notably Nasserism), Baathism (often aligned with the Soviet bloc), secular client states, as well as Zionism and anti-Zionism. Political Islam, at this stage, remained largely marginal.

What unified most movements carrying the “Arab” label was nationalism. Middle Eastern nationalism itself encompassed a wide spectrum of political currents. Since the Second World War, two dominant tendencies competed for leadership:

a) the Left, largely reformists, aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War

b) secular, pro-Western nationalism.

Islamist movements, however, managed to move from the margins to the political center—largely due to sustained Western backing. The Left began to decline in the 1970s, particularly after the oil crisis triggered by the Saudi-led embargo against the West during the Yom Kippur War. This marked a decisive turning point. Islamists received extensive financial and ideological support from Saudi Arabia, with full U.S. approval. Zbigniew Brzezinski formalized this strategy in what became known as the “Green Belt” doctrine—a network of Islamic allies mobilized against communism.

At first glance, “pro-Western nationalism” may seem contradictory. In practice, it encompassed both nominally independent opposition movements and outright client regimes—such as those in Egypt, Tunisia, and, on the periphery of the Middle East, Turkey—during the Cold War. What defined this tendency was a commitment to

a) secularism

b) the forms of modernization required by capitalism.

There also exist states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain that scarcely fit conventional definitions of a nation-state. Nevertheless, these regimes—along with today’s Islamic rulers in Turkey—firmly belong to the Western camp, despite using Islam as a constitutional and cultural framework. Crucially, these states do not belong to Political Islam as a movement; they are not Islamist oppositions seeking power but established regimes embedded within global capitalism and Western geopolitical structures.

It is impossible to discuss political Islam without turning to the thinker who formulated its analysis most clearly: Mansoor Hekmat. He defines political Islam as follows:

“Political Islam is a contemporary reactionary movement. Apart from its outward form, it has no real connection to the Islamic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In terms of its social content and socio-political and economic objectives, it is entirely rooted in contemporary society. It is not a repetition of an old phenomenon.”

According to Hekmat, political Islam emerged out of a failed—or more precisely, aborted—project of Western-led modernization in Muslim-inhabited Middle Eastern countries during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This failure coincided with the decline of secular nationalist movements, which had previously served as the main vehicles for economic, administrative, and cultural modernization in the region.

As the ideological and governmental crisis deepened, a political vacuum emerged. In this vacuum—and amid confusion within the local bourgeoisie—Islamist movements rose as a right-wing alternative for reorganizing bourgeois rule against the Left and the working class, which had grown alongside capitalism. Even so, Hekmat emphasizes that without the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, political Islam would likely have remained marginal. It was in Iran that Islamism first consolidated itself as a state power, transforming political Islam into a major regional force.

Political Islam, therefore, is not simply religious ideology. It is a political project that uses Islam as the primary instrument for a right-wing restructuring of class power and the construction of an explicitly anti-Left state. As such, it does not merely oppose socialism domestically; it also competes with other capitalist power blocs for influence within the global capitalist order.

With the rise of political Islam, pressure to impose religious norms on society inevitably intensifies. However, this pressure is fundamentally political rather than cultural or theological. The resulting so-called “Islamic renaissance” is enforced through coercion, violence, and terror—manifesting differently in places such as Algeria and Iran, but driven by the same political logic.

Hekmat is especially clear on the misuse of cultural labeling. Islam has existed in Iran for over fourteen centuries and has undoubtedly left historical traces. Yet it is only one factor among many that shape Iranian society—alongside monarchy, repression, ethnicity, language, economic relations, political history, geography, urbanization, and countless other material and social conditions.

To single out Islam from among these factors and use it to label an entire society—encompassing atheists, secularists, and non-believers—is not an innocent analytical choice. It serves a specific political agenda. Iran, Hekmat insists, is not an Islamic society; it is a society ruled by an Islamic state. Islam has been imposed through force, repression, and murder—both under the monarchy and under the Islamic Republic. After decades of coercion, the attempt to transform society itself into “Islamic” has failed. To describe Iranian society as Islamic is therefore part of a reactionary effort to make it so.

Within a more limited context, Hekmat acknowledges the role of the Arab–Israeli conflict and the Palestinian question in shaping political Islam. The presence of an ethnic-religious-imperialist “enemy” undermined Arab nationalism and secularism, allowing Islamism to present itself as an alternative claim to power. But the more significant question is counterfactual: what direction would the Middle East have taken in the twentieth century had Israel not been created in this specific geopolitical context?

To what extent could capitalism, industrialization, technology, and Western capital—with all their administrative, cultural, and ideological consequences—have developed in the region? Could Islam, like other religions under twentieth-century capitalism, have been secularized, moderated, and absorbed into the political superstructure, much as Catholicism was in Ireland?

Hekmat argues* that modernization and secularization had already begun in the early twentieth century and had achieved tangible results by the 1960s. However, Western powers viewed the full integration of the Middle East into the capitalist world order as unfeasible—largely due to the Palestinian question, Cold War polarizations, and their strategic alliance with Israel. As a result, the region was treated not like Latin America or Southeast Asia, but as a perpetual danger zone: unstable, hostile, and irredeemable.

Political Islam emerged precisely within this black hole. Had the Israeli–Palestinian conflict not existed, countries such as Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia might have followed trajectories similar to Brazil, Mexico, or Peru. Political Islam might still have existed—but only as a marginal, sectarian force, not as a dominant political power.

As Hekmat concludes, the historical rise of militant political Islam was not inevitable. It was the product of the defeat of bourgeois nationalism, secularism, and modernism in the Middle East—forces that, under different conditions, might have absorbed and neutralized Islam rather than being overwhelmed by it.

Terrorism is not incidental to political Islam; it is existential to it. The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) became the primary incubator of modern Islamic terrorism from the early 1980s onward. It functioned as the cornerstone and model for Islamist terror, inspiring and shaping groups such as Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and later ISIS. The IRI did not merely participate in terrorism—it systematized it.

Long before the 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut—planned and ordered by senior Iranian officials and carried out by Hezbollah—the Islamic Republic had already institutionalized terror inside Iran. The 1980s marked the first full-scale experiment in Islamist state terrorism. The massacre of political opponents on June 20, 1981 signaled not only the definitive defeat of the 1979 revolution but also the unleashing of an unprecedented reign of terror by the clerical regime.

Hijab was enforced through open violence, literally pinned onto women’s heads in the streets. Public executions became routine, while prisons carried out mass executions—often numbering in the hundreds—on a daily basis. Workers’ councils and independent labor organizations were crushed. Political activists outside the structure of the Islamic Republic—including many who had fought against the Shah—were rounded up, tortured, and condemned to death in sham trials lasting only minutes.

Afghan workers were subjected to systematic repression: confined to precarious labor, forbidden to travel without state permission, and forced to carry special identification at all times. Stoning of women and executions of homosexuals were not aberrations but normalized practices of the regime.

Beyond its borders, the Islamic Republic established a specialized terror apparatus—one that today paradoxically cooperates with the United States in Iraq—which assassinated prominent dissidents across Europe and the Middle East. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, issued shortly after Iran’s defeat in the Iran–Iraq War, marked a new stage in the globalization of Islamist terror and emboldened political Islam worldwide.

The Islamic Republic went on to found, finance, train, and arm numerous Islamist organizations, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon. By the late 1980s, the Iranian model of state-sponsored Islamist terrorism had been widely adopted by a broad spectrum of Islamist movements, becoming the template for the forms of terror that continue to shape global politics today.

The 1990s witnessed the so-called “dirty war” in Algeria, where Islamist forces turned to armed confrontation after a military coup annulled their electoral victory in 1991. By the mid-1990s, Islamist armed groups were systematically massacring entire villages, beheading civilians indiscriminately. These atrocities continued for more than a decade and resulted in an estimated 50,000 to 200,000 deaths.

Al-Qaeda emerged from the internecine wars among Islamist factions in Afghanistan, tracing its roots to the U.S.-backed Afghan mujahideen of the 1980s. Throughout the 1990s, al-Qaeda carried out only three major attacks, the most significant being the simultaneous suicide bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. These attacks were a direct extension of Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and reflected the same operational model.

With the Taliban’s victory over rival Islamist factions in 1996, al-Qaeda gained state protection. From that point on, it effectively enjoyed backing from two states: Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a gesture of loyalty to the Taliban, al-Qaeda assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud—the leading Islamist opponent of the Taliban—on September 9, 2001.

During the same period, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) expanded its regional and international terrorist network. It deepened its alliance with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Assad regime in Syria, while also backing Islamist groups inNigeria, Somalia, Turkey, and numerous other countries, including within the West. The IRI continued its systematic campaign of assassinating dissidents abroad. Notable cases include:

• Shapour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister under the Shah, beheaded in his home in Paris in 1991;
• Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a prominent entertainer and outspoken critic of the regime, murdered in his home in Germany in August 1992;
• The assassination of four Kurdish opposition leaders at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin in September 1992.

A German court later ruled that the Mykonos assassinations were ordered by the highest levels of the Iranian state, naming Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then-President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Inside Iran, repression continued unabated. The regime carried out mass imprisonments and executions, culminating in the serial murders of intellectuals and political dissidents in 1998. Internationally, the Islamic Republic is widely regarded as the primary suspect behind the March 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 people and wounded more than 240.

The September 11, 2001 attacks marked the beginning of a new phase in Islamist terrorism. This era formally opened with the U.S. “war on terror” and extended through the Bush presidency, effectively lasting until the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011.

In September–October 2001, Mansoor Hekmat produced one of the most incisive analyses of the September 11 Islamist attacks, examining in detail their background, immediate context, and likely consequences. His intervention, written at the very outset of what would become the so-called “war on terror,” stands out for its clarity and foresight. Before assessing the outcome of this conflict up to the present day, it is worth revisiting a key passage from Hekmat’s “The World After September 11”:

“The September 11 incident was not an isolated act of psychotic individuals cut off from society; nor is the USA’s impending military action. The world prior to September 11 was not in equilibrium, but was moving along a deteriorating path. There are profound economic, social, and political problems underlying these events. These problems have pushed the world in this direction, and they must be addressed. September 11 is how political Islam is responding to these contradictions—just as bringing the Taliban to power, destroying Baghdad, starving the people of Iraq, suppressing the Palestinians, bombing Belgrade, and now launching a ‘long war on terrorism’ are how the leaders of capitalism in the USA and Europe have responded. Today’s events are moments in an ongoing and dynamic situation.”

Hekmat goes on to stress that, for both camps, this confrontation is fundamentally a power struggle, not a genuine fight against terrorism:

“Terrorism is one reality of this conflict, but the conflict itself—and the imminent war—are not about terrorism. Everyone knows that U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, even the capture of bin Laden, will not halt Islamist terrorism or bring greater security to Europe or America. On the contrary, it will intensify the danger.”

While the Palestinian question represents the most visible point of direct confrontation between the United States and political Islam, Hekmat insists that the war is not truly about resolving it. Nor is it about eliminating terrorism. A policy of “massive, sustained, and comprehensive” military action, he argues, can only exacerbate both Islamist terror and regional instability—potentially triggering civil war in Pakistan, deepening crises in supposedly stable Middle Eastern states, and generating global repercussions. These outcomes are not unforeseen mistakes; they are understood and accepted risks.

For the United States, Hekmat argues, the real objective is the consolidation and expansion of global hegemony in a unipolar world. The crimes of September 11 merely provided the context and opportunity for advancing that strategic goal—not for resolving the Palestinian question or ending terrorism.

At the same time, political Islam is engaged in its own power struggle:

“The suffering of the Palestinian people and the historical injustices committed by the West are not the source of Islamist terrorism. The Islamic movement is attempting to reverse its declining fortunes and expand its position within the bourgeois power structure of the Middle East.”

Islamist movements exploit legitimate popular anger toward American and Israeli policies by transforming blind hostility to the West into political capital. Far from seeking peace, they depend on the perpetuation of conflict. Hekmat argues that genuine peace in the Middle East—an independent Palestinian state and an end to systematic discrimination—would spell the political collapse of political Islam. Terrorism therefore functions as a strategic tool to deepen ethnic, national, and religious divisions and to keep the region in a permanent state of crisis from which Islamism draws strength. For this reason, Islamists welcome confrontation with the United States despite its devastating consequences.

Hekmat concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for an independent, popular, and internationalist movement opposed to both poles of this deadly confrontation—Islamist terrorism on one side and imperialist militarism on the other. To build such a movement, the political truths underlying September 11 and the U.S. response must be clearly explained to the public. War propaganda and ideological justifications from both camps must be exposed.

The events set in motion after September 11, Hekmat warned, would reshape global politics and ideology for decades—and profoundly affect Iran and the broader Middle East. Addressing these developments, he argued, requires not moral panic or alignment with either camp, but a principled communist political framework capable of confronting both imperialism and political Islam.

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* From “The Rise and Fall of Political Islam”