About a year after the Iranian revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of the new Islamic government, detailed his plan to govern according to Islam. The bearded, turbaned cleric said the state would support farmers and laborers and distribute land in line with “religious regulations.” Universities and journalists would propagate the divine cause. The courts would serve as “perfect examples of the implementation of God’s religion.”
The result, he declared, would strengthen Iran against foreign powers and create a model for the liberation of Muslims everywhere. “We must strive to export our revolution to the world,” he said. “Despite all the painful hardships we endure, we confront the world from an ideological standpoint.”
In the years since, Iran has done just that. For nearly five decades — even through the strain of its current war with the United States and Israel — Iran’s government has run a major Middle Eastern state under the guidance of clerics while building a formidable military force. That puts the country at the vanguard of modern experiments with political Islam, or the application of the world’s fastest growing religion to statecraft, an ideal that has remained both alluring and elusive across the Muslim world.
Many Muslim-majority states cite the Quran as a source of legislation. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan officially claim Islamic bona fides. Islamist parties use politics to advance religiously inspired policies in Iraq, Lebanon, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Turkey. And recent decades brought new efforts to apply Islam to politics in the Middle East. Governments, political parties and militant groups across the region have sought political power by vowing that greater Islamic adherence would usher in a new era of just governance.
Now, however, political Islam in the region has withered. The map of the Middle East is dotted with examples of idealistic Islamist visions that failed to manifest into real-world successes. Their proponents may have marshaled popular support, for a time. They may have held the levers of power. They may have governed, or tried, in line with their views of Islamic law. But today, in most cases, they did not last.
“As organized political forces, be they governing forces, political parties or organized movements, Islamist groups are definitely on the back foot,” said Monica Marks, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi.
Osama bin Laden’s attempt to ignite a civilizational war against the United States did not work out. The Islamist parties that rushed into politics during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 failed to maintain power over any state. The U.S. military and its allies smashed the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Leaders in Saudi Arabia and Syria — and even Iran — now rely more on nationalism and less on Islam to rally their people. Few of the world’s two billion Muslims, including many in Afghanistan, want the fundamentalism that the Taliban offers.
Each of these failures had its own context and history, but the causes overlap. Western military might demolished the most extreme Islamist projects. Others never amassed the popular or international support needed to prevail over authoritarian forces that rose up in their own countries, often backed by powerful neighboring states.
Still in power, Iran’s revolutionary government is the most prominent exception, although its ideals face new dangers. American and Israeli bombs have killed its leaders and battered its military. Many Iranians made their distain for the clerical government clear through recurrent protests. The country’s international isolation is deep, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s dream of the revolution sweeping the Muslim world never materialized.
Iran’s current travails have intensified discussion among experts about whether political Islam has crested and what that means for the Middle East and the broader Muslim world.
A rise and fall
Experiments combining Islam and politics have been around since the religion arose in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century. By the 16th century, emirates, sultanates and other polities that drew on Islam had ruled or were still thriving in areas between modern-day Spain and the Indian subcontinent as well as parts of Africa.
The nation states that arose in the 20th Century redrew what remained of that map. The victors in World War I dismembered the Ottoman Empire; its heart became modern Turkey, a secular republic that abolished the caliphate in 1924. Since then, republics and monarchies, some with Islam-inspired laws, have prevailed.
Still, many believers have clung to the idea that politics needs more religion, not less. They see Islam as not just a personal faith but also a comprehensive societal program. Repression and corruption in Muslim countries, often by regimes supported by the West, fueled the belief that only pure Islamic governance could deliver justice and prosperity.
These ideas were central to the Iranian revolution and rose again during the Arab Spring uprisings that toppled strongmen across the Middle East.
In Egypt, the fall of the regime in 2011 led to free elections. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, campaigned on the slogan “Islam is the solution.” It won control of the Parliament, then the presidency.
Those victories were short-lived. Protests erupted against the new authorities, whom critics accused of breaking promises to rule inclusively and using their government posts to expand their power. The military remained intact, and in 2013, it ousted the president, Mohamed Morsi. A year later, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi became president through an election widely regarded as undemocratic. He remains in power, at the helm of a new autocracy.
A similar story played out in neighboring Tunisia, where Islamists rode elections to power but failed to win the trust of secular voters. Protesters and other political parties opposed them, and an election in 2019 elevated a populist president, Kais Saied, who has since granted himself almost limitless powers.
The fall of regimes in Libya and Yemen, after popular movements there, led to civil wars. Islamists took part in both but never gained complete control of either country. Syria, too, collapsed into a brutal civil war. The Islamists finally won in 2024 and promised a moderate path, not a strict Islamic regime.
For now, many scholars doubt that political Islam will rise again soon. In a new book, “Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam,” Faisal Devji, a historian at Oxford, compares political Islam to Communism, Baathism and other ideologies that sprang up during a specific historical moment and later lost their relevance. Terrorism tarnished the Islamist brand, too, Professor Devji told me. Most Muslims abhorred the cinematic violence of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. “With the emergence of Al Qaeda and ISIS, you had a massive rethinking of what a Muslim public life and politics should look like,” he said.
Of course, measuring what people want across an area as vast as the Middle East is difficult. A further tangle is how to define political Islam, which can encompass everything from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, an Islamist at the head of a constitutionally secular state, to radical jihadists who attack anyone who disagrees with them, including other Muslims.
To avoid such complications, Arab Barometer, a public opinion tracker, focuses on specifics, said Michael Robbins, the group’s director. Its surveys ask whether it is better for religious people to hold state positions, whether clerics should have sway over government decisions and whether religion should be private and separated from socio-economic life. It compares those indicators in six Arab countries — Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Iraq, Lebanon and Tunisia.
Overall, its results suggested that only a minority was enthusiastic about political Islam. From 2012 to 2025, support for religious people in government ticked above 50 percent in just two of the countries, Jordan and Morocco. Support for clerical influence over state policy rose in five countries, but was above 40 percent only in Iraq, at 58 percent. (In the United States, by comparison, 43 percent of people say the government should promote Christian values, according to the Pew Research Center.) Solid majorities in four of the countries agreed that religious practice should be a private matter.
But public opinion holds limited sway in the Middle East. Polling in many countries is scant, and power is held mostly by autocrats who don’t have to worry about angry voters chucking them out in the next election.
Such is the case in Iran, where voters choose from among preapproved candidates but never vote on the regime itself. The last time they did, after the revolution in 1979, was in a referendum on whether Iran should become an Islamic Republic. The vote was highly irregular and the official results put the “yes” vote at more than 98 percent. Still, it did appear that many Iranians were willing to at least give the new regime a chance.
During the intervening decades, however, much of Ayatollah Khomeini’s idealistic vision became a mirage. His revolutionary pitch to Muslims worldwide had limited appeal, and his proposed war against Israel and American influence failed to spread far beyond the proxies that Iran financially supported in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza.
Inside Iran, repression and strict morality codes soured many Iranians, especially the youth, on the revolution. Some Iranians have pushed back by challenging prohibitions on women’s dress. Others have revolted in mass protests — and endured bloody crackdowns. Sanctions and economic torpor have not helped sell the revolution either.
“The Islamic Republic didn’t turn into a great thing for its people or for anybody else,” said Afshon Ostovar, author of two books about modern Iran. “It had some successes in its own way, but at the end of the day it was a miserable experience because it could only be held together with violence and hate.”
A rebranding?
It’s too early to speak of political Islam in the past tense, though. Even now, Iran’s leaders, who maintain control of their country (and largely over the Strait of Hormuz), carry on the dream.
Others do, too. Amr Darrag, a minister under Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s ousted Islamist president, told me that the Muslim Brotherhood never really had a chance. It lacked preparation to govern, outside powers didn’t want an Islamist government to take root in the Arab world’s most populous state and the West stood by while Egypt returned to a dictatorship. “The game was not fair,” Mr. Darrag said. “It was very obvious from the beginning that it would be won by the most powerful forces.”
Despite the lack of durable Islamist victories, many Muslims still like the idea of infusing politics with Islam, keeping open the possibility of a revival, Mr. Darrag said. “There will be another cycle when the Islamists thrive,” he said.
The persistence of despots across the region as well could spawn new religiously driven movements against them. “Every time that people have declared that we’re in a post-Islamist universe, they’ve been wrong,” Professor Marks said. “Because authoritarian repression keeps that hope alive for too many people.”
Still, there are signs across the Muslim world that both leaders and their people have stepped away from Islamism’s tarnished brand.
Many recent popular movements among Muslims have not rallied around Islam itself, Professor Devji of Oxford noted. He pointed to political and women’s rights protests in Iran; the demonstrations that brought down the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh in 2024; and pro-Palestine protests in the West over the Gaza war. This does not necessarily represent rising secularism or a turning away from Islamic faith, Professor Devji said, but a decoupling of that faith from politics.
Some Arab leaders have quietly dialed down the Islamism, too.
In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler, has weakened the clerics while promoting a new Saudi nationalism, a major shift for a kingdom that long championed Islamic causes. Until 2016, the so-called religious police patrolled public spaces to enforce ultraconservative social codes. Until 2018, women couldn’t drive. Now, Islamic branding plays little role in the kingdom’s efforts to attract tourists, throw music and comedy festivals and host the World Expo 2030.
More than a decade ago in Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, then the commander of a jihadist group fighting in the civil war, vowed to turn the country into an Islamic state. “We seek that God’s law will rule the country,” he said. His forces finally won in 2024 — and now he’s the president.
His administration has passed some socially conservative regulations, but his priority seems to be pitching himself as a normal Middle Eastern leader with whom others can do business, not imposing Islamic orthodoxy. He wears suits, appears in public with his wife and met President Trump last November in the White House, where the two men shared a joke about polygamy. In April, he was filmed in the stands at a basketball game, watching a female dance troupe gyrate to Missy Elliott’s “Work It.” He did not bob his head to the beat. Nor did he storm out.
Even in Iran, the great holdout, the government has increasingly deployed national symbols as opposed to religious ones to unite its people. In arguing their country’s case, its leaders lean more on international law, global treaties and the concept of national sovereignty than on religion — suggesting a recognition that Islamist arguments have limited purchase.
The clerical regime has failed to bring its people the freedom and justice it promised, said Mohsen Kadivar, a clerical critic of the government now at Duke University. But it has succeeded in sticking to another cause embraced by many Islamists: standing against Israel and American influence in the Middle East.
That may be the clearest conception of modern political Islam, Professor Kadivar argued — the opposition to the control or domination of Muslim lands by foreign powers. “The hard-liners in Iran became much stronger than before,” Dr. Kadivar said. “This is the gift of President Trump to Iranians.”
In that way, the Iran war may do more to fortify Iranian resistance — and what remains of political Islam — than to shake it.
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