Political Islamism

Political Islamism holds that Islam is a complete system (din wa dawla, religion and state) governing public as well as private life, and that a legitimate political order should be grounded in Islamic law, or sharia, rather than in secular, liberal, or purely national principles.

It arose in the twentieth century as a response to colonial rule and to the secular nationalism that succeeded it. Its foundational movement, the Muslim Brotherhood (founded 1928), and thinkers like Maududi and Qutb argued that societies not ordered by divine sovereignty had lapsed into a new jahiliyya — the 'ignorance' of the pre-Islamic age — which Muslims were obliged to overturn and replace with an Islamic state.

Its trajectory has been strikingly varied. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 produced a Shia clerical state; Sunni movements have governed or contested power in Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, and Gaza; the Afghan Taliban imposed a severe version; and a jihadist fringe, from al-Qaeda to ISIS, split off toward global insurgency and terrorism.

The category is therefore broad and internally divided, spanning movements committed to elections and gradual reform, others to revolution, and a violent minority — factions that disagree fundamentally over democracy, pluralism, women's rights, and the permissibility of force. What groups them is a shared premise about the source of law, not a shared programme.

Its critics, secular and religious alike, argue that fusing religious and state authority threatens minorities, dissenters, and women, and that 'the sharia state' papers over deep disputes about what Islamic governance actually requires; its defenders answer that Western secularism is not the neutral default it claims to be but one contestable settlement among others.

Every axis on this instrument presupposes that religion and politics occupy separable spheres — which is the very premise Islamism most explicitly denies, so the map can only describe it in a vocabulary it rejects.