Originally posted on 15 June 2025, after the Israeli bombing of Iran.

Now seems like a good time to post about the political movement known as Islamism, and the variant of it that currently remains in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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Islamism can be defined as a movement which aims to implement political structures and policies based on Islamic religious teachings. It tends to be seen as a form of religious conservatism – an attempt to turn the clock back to a more pious age. But it would be a mistake to think that Islamism is the same thing as conservative Islam. Most conservative Muslims are not Islamists; and Islamism is in many ways not a conservative project at all. It is a revolutionary product of the modern age. Ali Khamenei, the HTS guys, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and indeed the late Osama bin Laden are children of modernity just as much as tech workers marching at Pride.

The origins of Islamism lie in the Ottoman Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The world’s last great Muslim power was struggling with the challenges of transitioning into the modern era. It was in this environment that the essential elements of Islamist ideology were formulated, with their characteristic and contradictory features. A veneration for the early Muslim community and the Islamic civilisation of the past, combined with a deep indebtedness to contemporary Western thought; a desire to build an Islamic state, combined with opposition to actually-existing Muslim governments.

It was in Sunni countries that Islamism first emerged as a political force. In the Arab world, its main institutional form was the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood remains the world’s oldest Islamist organisation, and can claim credit for giving birth to Hamas. It was founded in 1928 by an Egyptian teacher, Hasan al-Banna. Banna was an open admirer of Mussolini and Hitler: men who had “guided their peoples to unity, order, regeneration, power, and glory”. He pioneered the selective anti-imperialism that has become characteristic of Islamists. British rule in Egypt, bad; Italian rule in Abyssinia, good.

Elsewhere, in south Asia, the journalist and writer Abul A’la Maududi founded Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941. He believed that “Islam, speaking from the view-point of political philosophy, is the very antithesis of secular Western democracy”. He believed in “a limited popular sovereignty under the suzerainty of God”, which he referred to as “theo-democracy”. Several branches of the Jamaat remain active in different countries today.

After World War II, an Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, emerged as the leading Islamist ideologue. Qutb was another somewhat sinister character. He condemned the entire modern world, including Muslim countries, for having fallen back into the state of jahiliyya (ignorance) which had afflicted mankind before the coming of the prophet Muhammad. He was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but he influenced everyone in Islamist circles, including the Shia, and he became fairly well-known in the West after 9/11.

In the postwar Middle East, it looked like the future belonged to the rising movements of Arab nationalism and socialism. But by the 1970s these ideologies had run out of steam. The Arab armies had been defeated by Israel in the Six Day War, the Arab nationalist hero President Nasser was dead, and the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood was spreading. The Islamists of the 70s and 80s were on the way up. They were seen by short-sighted Western governments as a bulwark against communism, and they could draw for funding on Saudi oil money. Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, flirted with them in Egypt, and in return they killed him. In Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in 1977 and implemented an ‘Islamization’ programme. By 1979, Islamists had entered into government in Sudan and seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, an act which acted as a catalyst for the increased Islamification of Saudi Arabia. Most momentously, the same year saw the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

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As we have noted, Islamism is often seen as a fundamentally reactionary enterprise. From this perspective, it is a movement aimed at imposing the values and strictures of seventh-century Arabia on societies that have long since entered the modern age. It is an attempt to enforce the behaviours of an early medieval culture in a world of 5G and AI.

This perspective is not wrong, exactly. But it is incomplete.

It may be argued that the project of turning the Islamic Shariah into a rigid set of rules of governance is an essentially modern endeavour, bound up with the rise of imperialism and the nation-state: a product of the clumsy intrusion of centralised models of power into traditional social ecosystems.

On this view, traditional Islamic norms were not, for the most part, legislated by state authorities: Islamic law was a grassroots phenomenon that was embedded in the lives of ordinary people. The Islamist vision of the Shariah as a coercive, top-down system is a product of the modern age. This version of what a Muslim society ought to look like is a legacy of imperial power, as initially deployed by the Ottomans and then by the European states. It is often forgotten that the first attempt to codify the Shariah under state authority took place in British India: a classic example of imperialists making things worse by mishandling local institutions that they didn’t understand. The most widely made critique of Islamic law is that it relegates women to an inferior status. But it could be argued that the position of Muslim women was relatively favourable under the more flexible rules of traditional Islamic society; and that it deteriorated as a result of the defective and heavy-handed implementation of modern initiatives such as the 1917 Ottoman Law of Family Rights (which remains embedded in several Middle-Eastern legal systems).

This kind of argument can, of course, be pressed too far. One might question how flexible and pluralistic the traditional Shariah really was. It was always patriarchal, and it does not stand out as particularly benign even when compared to the practices of other premodern societies. Yet there is truth to the idea that modern modes of governance have made traditional Islamic norms more rigid. And Islamist political movements have not reversed this development: they have embraced it.

A further point that is worth noting is that the pronounced anti-Western vein in Islamism is bound up with the West’s own engagement with modernity. This is often overlooked by Western radicals, for whom Islamists are the enemy of their enemy: social justice activists who have possibly taken things a bit too far but only because America provoked them into it. Yet Islamist prejudices against the West owe less to rational critiques of Western power than to the influence of Western reactionary currents that arose out of the advent of modernity (as has been traced by writers like Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit in Occidentalism). The likes of Qutb and Khomeini were engaged in the same enterprise as the Tsars and General Franco of fighting against the nightmare of secular liberal capitalist modernity and (((the people behind it))). One Struggle, indeed. The irony of anti-Western prejudices originating from prejudiced Westerners is matched only by the irony of Islamists responding to modernity by inventing a new modern ideology to resist it.

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And so to Iran.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is the foremost example of an Islamist state in the world today. Ironically, some Sunni Islamists think that it’s not Islamic enough. Its constitution is a compromise with ungodly liberal ideas, and its foreign policy is unduly influenced by Iranian nationalism. You just can’t please some people.

In fact, Shia Islamism is inextricably linked with the Sunni developments that we have been looking at. Khomeinism emerged from the stew of ideas that was cooked up by Banna, Maududi and Qutb. It is part of the same modernist resistance to modernity.

In one sense, it could be said that the Shia tradition is historically more disposed than Sunni Islam to be receptive to political radicalism. The Sunnis had no history of radical political activism or attempting to overthrow the local rulers. Shi’ism, by contrast, was a heretical minority sect which never developed the same deferential attitude towards official institutions. The Shia historically weren’t sure about what to make of established authorities. Ervand Abrahamian has written in his book Khomeinism:

Although the Shii clergy agreed that only the Hidden Imam had full legitimacy, they differed sharply among themselves regarding the existing states – even Shii ones. Some argued that since all rulers were in essence usurpers, true believers should shun the authorities like the plague….

Others, however, argued that one should grudgingly accept the state. They claimed that bad government was better than no government; that many imams had categorically opposed armed insurrections; and that Imam Ali… had warned of the dangers of social chaos….

Others wholeheartedly accepted the state – especially after 1501, when the Safavids established a Shii dynasty in Iran.

Modern Shia Islamism, leaving aside the influence of Qutb and other Sunnis, is inextricably linked with the imposing figure of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, the strongman who ruled Iran from the Islamic Revolution in 1979 until his death 10 years later.

Ayatollah Khomeini combined a classic religious fundamentalist mindset with a very modern sense of the totalitarian power of the state. He believed that the project of human beings governing themselves by consent was an insult to the absolute sovereignty of God. The solution was to reject the secular model of democracy practised in the West and to adopt instead a full-blown commitment to theocracy:

Those who do not govern according to the laws of Allah are infidels, oppressive and corrupt. Islam is a State; Islam is a government…. What the nation wants is an Islamic Republic, not just a Republic, not a democratic republic nor a democratic Islamic republic.

The actual system of government that has developed in Iran is partially democratic. There is an elected president and parliament, although they are vetted by the clerical establishment for Islamic orthodoxy and the country’s ‘supreme leader’ (rahbare moazzam) is always an ayatollah. The democratic elements in the constitution were essentially pragmatic concessions necessitated by the political situation in Iran at the time of the Revolution. In the Khomeinist mindset, ‘one person one vote’ has an altogether different resonance.

The Khomeinist version of Islamism envisages that the state will be ruled by Muslim clerics – a system known as velayat-e faqih (‘guardianship of the jurist’). In fact, this doctrine has very shallow roots in Shia tradition. For most Shia scholars across most of Islamic history, velayat-e faqih meant simply legal guardianship in the non-political sense. This was also the view of most of the other senior ayatollahs in Khomeini’s time, notably the highly respected Iraq-based Grand Ayatollah Abul-Qassim al-Khoei. Khomeini himself only gradually came round to his own theory. It is not taught in his early work Kashf al-Asrar, which was published in 1942. It first seems to have appeared in a series of lectures in early 1970, which were published under the title Velayat-e Faqih.

It will be clear that Khomeini’s political vision was absolutist. His theory of state power was less close to Muhammad than to Mussolini. He had an explicitly totalitarian conception of what Islamic governance meant:

Secular governments… are only concerned with the social order…. Islam and divine governments are not like that. These have commandments for everybody, everywhere, at any place, in any condition. If a person were to commit an immoral dirty deed right next to his house, Islamic governments have business with him…. [Islam] has rules for every person, even before birth, before his marriage, until his marriages, pregnancy, birth, until upbringing of the child, the education of the adult, until puberty, youth, until old age, until death, into the grave, and beyond the grave.

Rather astonishingly, Khomeini thought that the Islamic state could override even the God-given precepts of the Shariah itself. He wrote in a 1988 letter to Ali Khamenei, who was at that time the country’s president:

From your comments during the Friday prayers it would appear that you do not believe it is correct… that the state is the most important of God’s ordinances and has precedence over all other derived ordinances of God. Interpreting what I have said to mean that the state [only] has its powers within the framework of the ordinances of God contradicts my statements. If the powers of the state were [only] operational within the framework of the ordinances of God, the extent of God’s sovereignty and the absolute trusteeship given to the Prophet would be a meaningless phenomenon devoid of content.

So it is that Iran under the ayatollahs – the most self-consciously Islamising society of the modern era – has been shaped less by historical Muslim traditions than by influences deriving from statism, modernity and the West. It is a pre-eminent example of the principle that a movement based on the absolute sovereignty of God will almost inevitably turn into a vehicle for the absolute sovereignty of men; and in particular the men who invented it.