Islam vs the West: The four biggest fallacies about Islam explained
Isn't Islam inherently violent? What stopped the Islamic world having an Enlightenment? Why are some Muslims so into head-chopping? And isn't Hamas the same as Islamic State?
A recent conversation with a friend highlighted to me how little most westerners know about Islam, and how they struggle to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. This lack of knowledge, cultivated in the West to keep us fearful and supportive of Israel, creates the very conditions that originally provoked ideological extremism in the Middle East and ultimately led to the rise of a group like Islamic State.
Here I examine four common misconceptions about Muslims, Islam and Islamism – and about the West. Each is a small essay in itself.
Islam is an intrinsically violent religion, one that naturally leads its adherents to become Islamists.
There is nothing unique or strange about Islam. Islam is a religion, whose adherents are called Muslims. Islamists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Islamic identity as a way to legitmise efforts to advance that project. Muslims and Islamists are different things.
If that distinction is not clear, think of a parallel case. Judaism is a religion, whose adherents are called Jews. Zionists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Jewish identity as a way to legitimise efforts to advance that project. Jews and Zionists are different things.
Notably, with the help of western colonial powers over the past century, one prominent group of Zionists had great success in realising their political project. In 1948 they established a self-declared “Jewish” state of Israel by violently expelling Palestinians from their homeland. Today, most Zionists identify at some level with the state of Israel. That is because doing so is advantageous, given that Israel is tightly integrated into “the West” and there are material and emotional benefits to be gained from identifying with it.
The record of the Islamists has been far more mixed and variable. The Republic of Iran was founded by clerical Islamists in a 1979 revolution against the despotic rule of a western-back monarchy led by the Shah. Afghanisan is ruled by the Islamists of the Taliban, young radicals who emerged after prolonged super-power meddling by the Soviets and Americans left their country ravaged and in the grip of feudal warlords. Nato-member Turkey is led by an Islamist government.
Each has a different, and conflicting, Islamist programme. This fact alone should highlight that there is no single, monolithic “Islamist” ideology. (More on that later.)
Some groups of Islamists seek violent change, others want peaceful change, depending on how they view their political project. Not all Islamists are the head-chopping zealots of Islamic State.
The same can be said of Zionists. Some seek violent change, others want peaceful change, depending on how they view their political project. Not all Zionists are the genocidal, child-killing soldiers sent by the state of Israel into Gaza.
The same kind of distinction can be made between the religion of Hinduism and the political ideology of Hindutva. The current government of India – led by Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party – is fiercely ultra-nationalist and anti-Muslim. But there is nothing intrinsic to Hinduism that leads to Modi’s political project. Rather, Hindutvaism fits Modi’s political objectives.
And we can see similar political tendencies over much of Christianity’s history, from the Crusades 1,000 years ago through the forced Christian conversions of the West’s colonial era to a modern Christian nationalism that prevails in Trump’s MAGA movement in the United States, and dominates major political movements in Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Italy and elsewhere.
The main point is this: followers of political movements can – and often do – draw on the language of the religions they grew up with to rationalise their political programmes and invest them with a supposed divine legitimacy. Those programmes can be more or less violent, often depending on the circumstances such movements face.
The West’s obsession with associating Islam, and not Juadism, with violence – even as a self-declared “Jewish state” commits genocide – tells us precisely nothing about those two religions. But it does tell us something about the political interests of the West. More on that below.
But Islam, unlike Christianity, never went through an Enlightenment. That tells us there is something fundamentally wrong with Islam.
No, this argument entirely misunderstands the socio-economic basis of Europe’s Enlightenment and ignores parallel factors that snuffed out an earlier Islamic Enlightenment.
Europe’s Enlightenment emerged out of a specific confluence of socio-economic conditions prevailing at the tail-end of the 17th century, conditions that gradually allowed ideas of rationality, science, and social and political progress to be prioritised over faith and tradition.
The European Enlightenment was the result of a period of sustained wealth accumulation made possible by earlier technical developments, particularly relating to the printing press.
The change from hand-written texts to mass-produced books increased the dissemination of information and slowly eroded the status of the Church, which until then had been able to centralise knowledge in the hands of the clergy.
This new period of intense scientific inquiry – encouraged by greater access to the wisdom of previous generations of thinkers and scholars – also unleashed a political tide that could not be reversed. With the erosion of the Church’s authority came the diminishment of the authority of monarchs, who had been ruling under a supposed divine right. Over time, power became more decentralised and core democratic principles gradually gained currency.
The consequences would play out over succeeding centuries. The flourishing of ideas and research led to improvements in shipbuilding, navigation and warfare that enabled Europeans to travel to more distant lands. There they were able to plunder new resources, subdue resistant local populations, and take some as slaves.
This wealth was brought back to Europe, where it paid for a life of ever greater luxury for a small elite. Surpluses were spent on the patronage of the artists, scientists, engineers and thinkers we associate with the Enlightenment.
This process accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, which increased the suffering of peoples across the globe. As Europe’s technologies improved, its transport systems grew more efficient, and weapons more lethal, it was ever better positioned to extract wealth from its colonies and prevent those colonies’ own economic, social and political development.
It is often assumed there has been no Enlightenment in the Islamic world. This is not quite true. Centuries before the European Enlightenment, Islam produced a great flourishing of intellectual and scientific wisdom. For nearly 500 years, starting in the 8th century, the Islamic world led the way in developing the fields of mathematics, medicine, metallurgy and agricultural production.
So why did the “Islamic Enlightenment” not continue and deepen to the point where it could challenge the authority of Islam itself?
There were several reasons, and only one – perhaps the least significant – is related to the nature of the religion.
Islam has no central authority, equivalent to a Pope or Church of England. It has always been more decentralised and less hierarchical than Christianity. As a result, local religious leaders, developing their own doctrinal interpretations of Islam, have often been better able to respond to the demands of their followers. Similarly, the lack of centralised authority to blame or challenge has made it harder to create the momentum for a European-style reformation.
But as with the emergence of a European Enlightenment, the absence of a proper Enlightenment in the Muslim world is really rooted in socio-economic factors.
The printing presses that liberated knowledge in Europe created a major handicap for the Middle East.
Europe’s Roman scripts were easy to print, given that the letters of the alphabet were discrete and could be arranged in a simple order – one letter after another – to form whole words, sentences and paragraphs. Publishing books in English, French and German was relatively straightforward.
The same could not be said of Arabic.
Arabic has a complex script, where letters change shape depending on where they occur in a word, and its cursive script means each letter physically connects to the letter before and after it. The Arabic language was almost impossible to reproduce on these early printing presses. (Anyone who underestimates this difficulty should remember that it took Microsoft Word many years to develop a legible digital Arabic script, long after it had done so for Roman scripts.)
What was the significance of this? It meant that European scholars were able to travel to the great libraries of the Islamic world, copy and translate their most important texts, and bring them back to Europe for mass publication. Knowledge in Europe, drawing on the Muslim world’s advanced research, spread rapidly, creating the first shoots of the Enlightenment.
By contrast, the Middle East lacked the technical means – chiefly because of the complexity of Arabic script – to replicate these developments in Europe. As western science surged ahead, the Islamic world progressively fell behind, never able to catch up.
This would have an all-too-obvious consequence. As Europe’s technologies of transport and conquest improved, parts of the Middle East became a target for European colonisation and control, from which they struggled to free themselves. Western meddling dramatically increased in the early 20th century with the weakening and then collapse of the Ottoman empire, soon followed by the discovery of vast quantities of oil across the region.
The West governed through brutal systems of divide and rule, inflaming sectarian differences in Islam – such as those between the Sunni and Shia, the equivalents of Europe’s Protestants and Catholics.
More than 100 years ago, Britain and France imposed new borders that intentionally cut across sectarian and tribal lines to produce highly unstable nation-states, such as Iraq and Syria. Each would rapidly implode when western powers started directly meddling in their affairs again in the 21st century.
But until that point, the West benefited from the fact that these volatile states needed a local strongman: a Saddam Hussein or a Hafez al-Assad. These rulers, in turn, would look to a colonial power – typically Britain or France – for support and to stay in charge.
In short, Europe arrived first at its Enlightenment chiefly because of a simple technical advantage, one that had nothing to do with the superiority of its values, its religion or its people. Deflating as it may be to hear, Europe’s spectacular dominance may be explained by little more than its scripts.
But perhaps more importantly in this context, that dominance exposed not an especially “civilised” western culture but a naked, brutal greed that repeatedly laid waste to Muslim communities.
Once the West got ahead in the race – a race for resource control – everyone else was always going to be playing a difficult game of catch-up, in which the odds were stacked against them.
That’s all very well, but the fact is the Middle East is full of people – Muslims – who want to chop off the heads of “infidels”. You can’t tell me a religion that teaches people to hate like that is normal.
“They hate us for our freedoms” – George W Bush’s memorable slogan – conceals far more than it illuminates. The sentiment might be better expressed as: “They hate us for the freedoms we have made sure to deprive them of.”
The political projects variously ascribed to Islamism are of far more recent origin than most westerners appreciate.
The early Islamist movements, which emerged 100 years ago in the wake of the Ottoman empire’s fall, were chiefly grappling with ways to strengthen their own societies through charitable works. Their larger political projects remained marginal compared to the much greater appeal of a secular Arab nationalism, championed by an array of strongmen who rose to power, usually on the coat-tails of the British and French colonial powers.
It was actually the 1967 war, in which Israel swiftly defeated the major Arab armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, that provoked the emergence of what, by the 1970s, scholars were calling “political Islam”.
The 1967 war was a severe humiliation for the Arab world – to add to the running sore of the 1948 Nakba, in which the Arab states were unable, and unwilling, to help the Palestinians save their homeland from European colonisation and prevent its replacement with an avowedly “Jewish state”.
It was a painful reminder that the Arab world had been not seriously modernised under its western-backed autocrats. Rather, the region languished in an imposed backwardness that contrasted with the financial, organisational, military and diplomatic advantages the West had lavished on Israel – continuing advantages evident in the West’s lock-step support for Israel as it carries out its current genocide in Gaza.
Westerners might be surprised by the street scenes in secular Arab cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Photos and films from the time often show a hip, swinging environment – at least for urban elites – in which women could be seen in mini-skirts and wearing open-necked blouses. Parts of Damascus (below in 1970) and Tehran looked more like Paris or London.
But the westernisation of secular Arab elites, and their palpable failure to defend their countries from Israel in the 1967 war, set off demands for political reform, especially among some disillusioned and radicalised youth. They believed the West’s false promises, and a growing western-style decadence, had left Muslim societies complacent, fragmented, weak and subservient.
A political project was needed that would transform the region, making it more dignified and resilient, and ready to struggle for liberation from western control and against the West’s highly militarised client state of Israel.
It should hardly be surprising that these reform movements found inspiration in a politicised Islam that would clearly demarcate their programme from a colonial West, and cleanse their societies of its corrupting influence.
It was also natural that they would craft an empowering origin story: a narrative of a “golden era” of early Islam, when a more pious and unified Muslim community was rewarded by God with the rapid conquest of large swaths of the globe. The Islamists’ goal was to return to this largely mythical era, rebuilding the fractured Muslim world into a caliphate, a political empire rooted in the teachings of the Prophet himself.
Note, paradoxically, that political Islam and the more secular Zionist movement shared many ideological themes.
Zionism expressly sought to reinvent the European Jew, who, in Zionist thinking, was ascribed a weakness that made him all-too-readily a victim of persecution and ultimately the Nazi Holocaust. A Jewish state would supposedly restore the Jewish people to their ancestral lands and renew their power, echoing the mythical golden age of the Israelites. A Jewish state was intended to rebuild the Jewish people’s character as they toiled for themselves, working the land as muscular, tanned farmer-warriors. And the Jewish state would ensure the Jewish people’s security through a military prowess that would prevent others from interfering in its affairs.
The Islamists, unlike the Zionists, of course, would be offered no help from the western powers in realising their political dream.
Instead, their vision offered consolation at a time of failure and stagnation for the Arab world. The Islamists promised a dramatic change of fortunes through a clear programme of action, employing religious language and concepts with which Muslims were already familiar.
Islamism had an additional advantage: it was hard to falsify.
Failure by these movements to remove western influence from the Middle East, or defeat Israel, did not necessarily undermine their influence or popularity. Rather, it could be used to strengthen the argument for intensifying their programmes: through a stricter application of dogma, a more extreme approach to Islamic rectitude, and more violent operations.
This very logic led ultimately to al-Qaeda and the death cult of Islamic State.
What is happening in Gaza is awful, but Hamas are just like Islamic State. If we cannot allow Islamic State to take over the Middle East, we cannot expect Israel to let Hamas do so in Gaza.
I am based in the UK and therefore answering this point is difficult without risking contravening Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act. Section 12 makes it an offence liable to up to 14 years in prison to express an opinion that might lead readers to take a more favourable view of Hamas.
The fact that Britain has outlawed free speech when it comes to the political movement that governs Gaza – in addition to the proscription of Hamas’ military wing – is revealing about western fears of allowing a proper and open discussion of relations between Israel and Gaza. In effect, one can cheer on the mass-murdering of Gaza’s children by the Israeli military without consequence, but praising Hamas politicians for signing up to a ceasefire flirts with illegality.
The following observations should be understood in this highly restrictive context. It is impossible to speak truthfully about Gaza in Britain for legal reasons, while social and ideological pressures make it similarly difficult in other western states.
The idea that Hamas and Islamic State are the same, or different wings of the same Islamist ideology, is a favourite Israeli talking point. But it is patent nonsense.
As the foregoing should have made clear, Islamic State is the ideological and moral cul de sac Islamist thought was driven into by decades of failure – not just to create a modern caliphate but to make any significant impact on western interference in the Middle East. Through repeated failure, Islamism was certain to arrive sooner or later at nihilism.
The question now is where does Islamism head next, having reached this low point. Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda leader whose followers helped topple Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria and who became the country’s transitional president in early 2025, may serve as a signpost. Time – and western and Israeli interference in Syria – will doubtless tell.
There are, however, very obvious differences between Islamic State and Hamas that westerners misread only because we have been kept entirely ignorant of Hamas’ history and its ideological evolution – chiefly to stop us understanding what kind of state Israel is.
Islamic State seeks to dissolve nation-state borders imposed by the West on the Middle East so as to create a global, transnational theocratic empire, the caliphate, governed by a strict interpretation of Sharia law.
Unlike the maximalist positions of Islamic State, Hamas has always had a far more limited ambition. In fact, its goals conflict with Islamic State’s. Rather than dissolving nation-state borders, Hamas wants to create just such borders for the Palestinian people – by establishing a Palestinian state.
Hamas is chiefly a national liberation movement that wants to repair Palestinian society and liberate it from the structural violence inherent in Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinian people and illegal occupation of their lands.
Islamic State views Hamas as apostates for this reason. Remember that during the two-year genocide in Gaza, Israel has been cultivating and arming criminal gangs, chiefly those led by Yasser Abu Shabab, which have explicit links to Islamic State. Israel has recruited these associates of Islamic State in Gaza to help weaken the, by comparison, more ideologically moderate forces of Hamas. What does this suggest about Israel’s true intentions towards Gaza, and the Palestinian people more generally?
Hamas has a political wing that contested and won elections in Gaza in 2006 and has been governing Gaza for nearly two decades. During that time it has not imposed Sharia law, though its rule is socially conservative. Hamas has also protected the enclave’s churches – many of them now bombed by Israel – and has allowed Christian communities to worship and integrate with Muslim communities.
Islamic State, by contrast, rejects elections and democratic institutions, and is brutally intolerant not just of non-Muslims but of non-Sunni Muslim communities, such as the Shia, and non-believing Sunnis.
Another noteworthy difference is that Hamas has limited its military violence to Israeli targets, and has not waged operations outside the region. Islamic State, on the other hand, has called for violence against those opposed to its Islamist programme and has selected western targets for attack.
As alluded to in a previous section, Hamas’ nationalism and Israel’s Zionist nationalism echo each other.
Both view the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as exclusively theirs to rule. Both have an implicit one-state agenda. Despite Zionism starting as a secular movement, both draw on religious justifications for their territorial claims.
Ultimately, Hamas has concluded that mirroring Israel’s violence is the only way to free Palestinians from that violence. It must inflict such a high cost on Israel that it will choose to surrender.
The terms of the surrender demanded by Hamas of Israel have changed over the years: from all of historic Palestine to the lands occupied in 1967. Westerners have been encouraged to ignore this softening in Hamas’ ideological position – its reluctant, implicit acceptance of a two-state solution – and focus instead on its break-out in October 2023 from Israel’s brutal, illegal, 17-year siege of Gaza.
Perhaps what has been most striking after Hamas relented on its maximalist territorial demands was Israel’s response. It became even more viciously hardline in seeking Jewish territorial expansion, to the point where it now appears to be pursuing a Greater Israel project that includes occupying southern Lebanon and western Syria.
The religious Zionists in the Israeli government, including the self-declared Jewish fascists of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, now look firmly in charge. Maybe it is time to focus a little less on what the Islamists are up to and start worrying a lot more about what Israel’s extremist Zionist rulers have in store for the world.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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I appreciate your understanding of these complex religious histories and thank you for sharing this so that I may be better informed. It is my hope that peaceful coexistence may prevail.
I have been following this story for sixty years but JC's latest analysis has explained a lot to me. Thank you Jonathan for providing such an excellent public service.