The Victims of Political Islamism; On The 19th Day of Revolts
"Islamism is a political project: the belief that the state should be run according to one hardline interpretation of the Islamic religion"
This is a guest essay by a friend of Mazelit’s Corner, Mr. John Aziz, a British-Palestinian writer who educates the public through his writings about Islam, Iran, Israel and other topics in the Middle East.
Over the past 19 days of the Iranians rising up against the IRGC—as a British-Palestinian living in Europe—I’ve had quite a few tweets on X go viral about my support for Iran.
I’ll show you my favourite one:
Not suprisingly, a large chunk of the pushback I get from these tweets is that somehow it is anti-Muslim, anti-Islam, or Islamophobic for me to support protests against Islamic rule.
That somehow, I’m the “bad guy” for raising awareness of what’s going on.
Of course, I’ve dealt with a lot of this at various occasions when I’ve criticised Hamas, both before October 7th 2023, and afterwards. The first instinct for a lot of Islamists and their defenders is to write off their critics as Islamophobes, at least in English. In Arabic, of course, you’re more likely to face accusations of kufr (unbelief), betrayal, or apostasy.
Let’s be clear about the category error.
Muslims are a vast, diverse group of people. Islam is a faith, and one with many different versions and interpretations. Islamism is a political project: the belief that the state should be run according to one hardline interpretation of the Islamic religion, enforced through surveillance, policing, and often violence. Opposing that project is no more “anti-Muslim” than opposing Christian theocracy is “anti-Christian.”
The part that gets quietly skipped over is that Islamists very often persecute Muslims first. The first targets are usually the people who most clearly expose the lie that “we speak for all Muslims”: peaceful Muslims who just want to practice their faith privately; secular Muslims who insist citizenship comes before clerical authority; reformists; women who won’t submit to compulsory codes; religious minorities within Islam; artists, journalists, students, trade unionists—anyone who refuses to accept a brutal and militant form of religion ruling them.
It’s really a cruel irony.
Of course, I don’t mean to downplay the hostility that other groups experience. Islamists routinely menace and scapegoat “outsiders” too—Jews, Christians, atheists, other minorities like Druze and Yazidi, dissidents in the diaspora, anyone unlucky enough to be cast as a convenient enemy. But before a movement can credibly project power outward, it has to neutralise internal rivals and enforce obedience within its own constituency. That’s why the first wave of victims is so often made up of Muslims who refuse to be drafted into a political identity they didn’t choose.
In Iran, the Islamic Republic has spent decades criminalising internal dissent, including from within the religious class. Dissident cleric Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi, for example, advocated separating religion from the state and was arrested along with hundreds of supporters; he was then sentenced after proceedings in Iran’s Special Court for the Clergy. The charge-sheet language is telling: they called him an “an enemy of God,” accused him of “corrupting society,” and “undermining the Islamic order”.
When ordinary people challenge that order, the same pattern repeats. The 2022 protests after Mahsa Jina Amini’s death were triggered by enforcement of an Islamic dress code, leading to lethal crackdowns, mass arrests, torture, and intimidation.
Today, it’s much the same thing—young Iranians, including many Muslims are being killed in the streets by the regime.
Zoom out and you see the same logic across Islamist movements throughout the region and across the world: enforce orthodoxy, then export the conflict. In Afghanistan, Shia Muslims—especially Hazaras—faced severe threats and discrimination, and ISIS-linked fighters have repeatedly targeted them as “heretics.” In Iraq and Syria, ISIS killed plenty of non-Muslims, but it also made a project out of murdering Muslims who didn’t fit its sectarian template.
So don’t make the mistake of believing that somehow this is just a civilisational clash. The brutality of Islamism begins at home.
And if you want a useful historical parallel, you don’t have to look to some “Islam vs West” frame at all. You can look to Europe, and Christianity.
For well over a century after the Reformation, Europe tore itself apart in theocratic civil wars: Catholics and Protestants killing each other, rulers convinced they could only be legitimate if they enforced the “correct” version of Christianity.
The result, in the end, was millions dead, and exhaustion via massacres, famines, and displaced populations. Just as Islamic theocracy hurt a lot of Muslims, Christian theocracy hurt a lot of Christians.
Eventually, a hard lesson began to sink in: you can’t build a stable society on compulsory belief. People will pretend, comply, lie, leave, resist, or fight—but they won’t all believe what you demand they believe. When the state insists on religious uniformity, it produces hypocrisy and violence. And any peace only lasts until the next round of fighting, anyway.
Eventually Europe came around to the right idea: stop murdering each other over metaphysics.
Compromise after compromise began to carve out a new principle: the state should be in the business of order and equal citizenship, not salvation.
Sometimes the compromise was crude: rulers picking a public religion while grudgingly tolerating others. Sometimes it was explicit: peace settlements that recognised pluralism as a fact of life. And over time, this opened the door to the notion that religious freedom is a right, opening the door to modernity and secularism.
That’s the thread Islamists hate, because it’s fatal to their theocratic projects.
Which brings us back to Iran. The people are sick of the madness of theocracy. They are worn down. They are exhausted. The regime is so stupid and petty they literally banned walking dogs in public.
The protests in Iran reflect something in me. Yes, the Islamic Republic was a major funder of Hamas and Hezbollah, and I am a Palestinian opponent of Hamas and Hezbollah. There’s a natural symmetry to that.
But the Islamic Republic represents a kind of modernistic theocracy—courts, prisons, intelligence services, armed militias, drones, mass surveillance.
Alongside other modern authoritarian states including China and North Korea, it’s like something out of dystopian science fiction, like Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Iran previously had a society infused with liberalism, in the 1960s and 1970s:
The truth is that secularism, modernity and freedom can be crushed under sufficient will. There is no end of history. There doesn’t seem to be any final state of humanity.
Freedom has to be fought for, or at least maintained. You can’t allow theocrats or authoritarians to take your freedom away and put you in a cage, force you and your children to dress a certain way or think a certain way, and force you to recite lines out of the Bible, or the Qu’ran, or Mein Kampf, or Mao’s Little Red Book.
It’s a hard truth to swallow. Freedom requires constant vigilance. Today it’s Iranians who are victims of Islamism, but it’s also a warning to everyone else who thinks they’ve permanently “moved past” this.
The impulse behind theocracy and authoritarianism isn’t uniquely Iranian, or uniquely Muslim, or uniquely Middle Eastern. It’s a recurring human temptation: when society is anxious or fractured, when people feel humiliated or unsafe, there will often be someone offering dictatorship as a solution.
This can happen in Europe, in America, in Asia, even probably in outer space and on other planets when humans come to live there.
As a species, we need to stand for freedom in the places that become unfree. People who don’t want authoritarianism are so much stronger when we unite and work together.
This is a guest essay written by John Aziz, a British-Palestinian writer and analyst of Middle East politics and history. Find him on X @aziz0nomics. Follow his top-ranked Substack here, and reach him at his personal site.
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Dear Mazelit, please post more. enough said.
I don’t know how it can be done but if I were God I would be able to separate the Jihadists and political Islamists from those who want to live in peace with non-Islamic people. But it will take something I have yet to see, those who are willing to live in peace taking on the jihadist +. It would be morally correct but I am not sure it is possible.
The jihadist must be suppressed and eliminated.