Sudan Should Make Us Pause
Sudan is burning, and the victims are overwhelmingly Muslim.
Villages torched. Civilians executed in the streets. Entire communities erased by Islamist militias and paramilitaries. The horror unfolding there should stop every observer cold, especially those eager to reduce the Muslim world to a single label.
If Islam itself were the root cause of the violence, why are Muslims so often the ones being slaughtered by other Muslims?
Sudan exposes the weakness in both dominant Western narratives. The Left barely looks because there are no Jews, no capitalism, and no America to blame. The Right looks, but too often rushes to blame “Islam” as a whole.
Islamism is a political ideology operating within Muslim societies, often against the Muslims who live in them. The authoritarian impulse behind it is one that human societies have produced in many forms.
Islam Versus Islamism
Nearly a quarter of humanity lives within the broad cultural world of Islam. Yet “Muslim” does not describe a single civilization any more than “Christian” does. The Islam of Senegal differs profoundly from the Islam of Indonesia, which differs from the Islam of Iran, which differs again from the Islam of Bosnia. Each reflects centuries of local history, culture, and institutions layered together with a shared religious tradition.
Islamism is the political project of organizing society around religious authority and Islamic law. Like many movements built around political purity and centralized authority, it has repeatedly produced repression, censorship, violence, and persecution, often directed first and foremost at fellow Muslims.
Treating Islamism as Islam itself makes about as much sense as treating Franco’s Spain or Cromwell’s England as Christianity itself.
Defining a Religion by Its Authoritarians
A common argument goes something like this: the more Muslim a country is, the more authoritarian it becomes.
But the conclusion is often smuggled into the premise. If “more Muslim” quietly comes to mean “more Islamist”—more committed to theocratic government and religious law as state law—then authoritarianism has already been built into the category.
We could play exactly the same game with Christianity. We could declare that the “truest” Christians were those who most aggressively used Christian narratives to justify authoritarian rule. Nazi Germany promoted a racialized “Positive Christianity.” Franco fused Catholicism with dictatorship and Spanish nationalism. Salazar grounded his corporatist state in God, family, hierarchy, and order. Tiso governed Slovakia as a Catholic priest-president.
On that standard, the most authoritarian Christian regimes would conveniently become the most authentically Christian ones. No serious person would accept that reasoning.
Their authoritarianism did not make them more Christian. They drew upon Christian symbols, institutions, scripture, and moral language to legitimize power. The same reasoning should apply to Islamism. It is one political movement within the Muslim world and cannot serve as the yardstick for who counts as a “real” Muslim.
The Human Pattern
The deeper pattern is collectivism: the recurring belief that the individual must submit to some higher collective—nation, race, class, church, revolution, or ummah. Different societies have wrapped that belief in different language, but the political impulse is familiar.
Christian societies were hardly immune. As recently as 1975, half of Europe still lived under communist rule. Spain and Portugal remained dictatorships. Greece had only just emerged from military rule. Across Latin America, authoritarian governments routinely justified themselves through Christian language and institutions.
Christianity did not inoculate the Western world against political religion. Western societies simply passed through much of that history earlier. The difference is largely one of timing rather than theology.
COVID Should Have Humbled Us
If anyone still doubts that authoritarian impulses are universal, COVID should have settled the matter.
Across much of the West, societies rapidly embraced purity rituals, moralized dress codes, speech taboos, public shaming, medical coercion, and sweeping restrictions on civil liberties. These policies were treated as moral obligations as much as emergency measures. Dissent became contamination. Skepticism became vice.
Whatever one thinks about the particulars of pandemic policy, the episode showed how quickly authoritarian habits can return in societies that believe they have outgrown them. Fear, crisis, and moral certainty were enough to bring them back at scale.
Having just lived through that, it is difficult to argue with a straight face that authoritarianism belongs uniquely to distant cultures or particular religions.
The Language Quietly Misleads Us
Even our vocabulary nudges us toward a false picture.
We speak of “the Muslim world,” but almost never of “the Christian world.” We explain authoritarian movements in Muslim societies through religious labels like “Islamism,” yet authoritarian movements in historically Christian societies become nationalism, fascism, military dictatorship, or simply politics.
Christianity quietly fades into the background while Islam remains in the foreground. The result is that Islam is treated as an explanation for political outcomes, while Christianity is treated as little more than scenery.
Ancient Texts Don’t Run Civilizations
There is another mistake underneath all this: the assumption that finding the “correct” interpretation of an ancient religious text somehow explains an entire civilization.
Scientists, working from modern data, shared methods, and formal logic, still disagree constantly about interpretation. It should surprise no one that communities separated by centuries, continents, languages, and cultures draw radically different meanings from texts written for worlds that no longer exist.
Ancient scriptures acquire meaning through their interpreters. The diversity of Muslim societies reflects that fact. There is no single, inevitable political order waiting inside the text to be extracted.
What History Actually Shows
For all the discussion of caliphates and Islamic fascism, genuinely Islamist totalitarian governments have been remarkably few. Iran’s Islamic Republic and the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate are the clearest modern examples. Pakistan occupies a more ambiguous middle ground, with Islamic constitutional features alongside long periods of military and civilian rule rather than full clerical government.
Most authoritarian governments across the Muslim world have instead been military dictatorships, secular nationalist regimes, monarchies, socialist governments, revolutionary strongmen, or patronage states. Their organizing ideologies were often nationalist, military, socialist, dynastic, or some combination of these.
Authoritarianism has been the dominant problem. Religion has sometimes supplied convenient symbolism, just as it has in Christian societies, but it has hardly been the only available language of power.
Replacing one authoritarian system with another does little for the people forced to live under it, whatever vocabulary the new rulers prefer.
The Wrong Question
We keep asking why Islam produces authoritarianism.
History points toward a broader question: why do human societies repeatedly produce authoritarian movements, and why do those movements so readily borrow whatever moral language is most persuasive to the people they hope to rule?
Sometimes that language is religious. Sometimes it is nationalist. Sometimes it is socialist. Sometimes it is scientific. Sometimes it is humanitarian.
The people being murdered in Sudan are being killed by authoritarians who speak the language of Islam. History is full of rulers who have used Christianity, socialism, nationalism, science, or humanitarianism in much the same way.
Islamism belongs to a familiar human pattern. No civilization has been free of it, and none has any reason to assume it always will be.