Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam offers a useful starting point for understanding the current crisis of political Islam. Devji’s central argument is that political Islam should be treated not simply as a timeless expression of religion in politics, but as one of the great ideological projects of the modern age. Like Communism, Baathism, Pan-Arabism, or anti-colonial nationalism, political Islam emerged from a particular historical moment. It promised to unite Muslims across borders, overcome the humiliation of colonial domination, defeat corrupt authoritarian regimes, and provide a moral alternative to both Western liberalism and secular nationalism. Its dream was not merely to make individual Muslims more pious, but to create a new political order grounded in Islam.
Yet Devji’s argument is also a diagnosis of exhaustion. The dream of a unified global Islamic political subject has fractured. Political Islam no longer possesses the same moral energy, organizational coherence, or universalist promise it once claimed. The Iranian Revolution did not spread across the Muslim world as Ayatollah Khomeini had hoped. The Muslim Brotherhood failed to consolidate power in Egypt. ISIS declared a caliphate but collapsed under the weight of its brutality and international military opposition. Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not produce Islamic justice or moral governance; rather, it turned Islamism into a vehicle of patronage, corruption, authoritarianism, and personal rule. These cases appear to confirm the argument that Islamism as a governing ideology has entered a period of decline.
But decline is not disappearance. The main weakness of arguments about the “end” of political Islam is that they often conflate the failure of one form of Islamism with the disappearance of the phenomenon itself. Political Islam should not be understood as a fixed ideology that either triumphs or dies. It is better understood as a flexible repertoire of symbols, grievances, practices, institutions, affects, and political languages that can mutate under changing historical conditions. Its power does not derive solely from formal Islamist parties or movements but also from its capacity to translate social suffering, humiliation, moral outrage, and political exclusion into a religiously charged language of resistance. For this reason, the failure of Islamism as a state-building project does not necessarily mean its disappearance. When Islamist parties fail to govern, when Islamic republics become corrupt and coercive, or when jihadist projects are militarily defeated, political Islam may simply relocate into new forms. It may reappear as anti-imperial resistance against Western domination, as religious nationalism, as radical militancy, as moral protest against corruption, or as revolutionary opposition to authoritarian regimes.
Indeed, the collapse of mainstream or institutional Islamism may even create the conditions for more radical forms. When electoral Islamists are crushed, when authoritarian regimes close peaceful channels of opposition, and when foreign intervention reinforces narratives of humiliation and injustice, political Islam can become more militant and anti-systemic. In this sense, the exhaustion of Islamism as a governing ideology does not necessarily lead to secularization or moderation. It may instead push Islamism from the arena of parties and institutions into the realm of insurgency, protest, resentment, and extremism.
As long as oppressive conditions, corruption, foreign domination, occupation, social inequality, and unresolved injustices persist, political Islam will remain a potent language of protest. It may lose credibility as a blueprint for good governance, but it can still retain emotional and mobilizing power as a discourse of resistance. The real story, therefore, is not the end of political Islam, but its mutation: from state-building ideology to fragmented forms of resistance, moral anger, nationalism, and radical opposition.
The old promise of political Islam was state-centered. Islamist movements claimed that if Muslims returned to Islam as a comprehensive program of governance, they would achieve justice, dignity, sovereignty, prosperity, and moral order. This promise appealed to societies marked by colonial memory, authoritarian repression, corruption, inequality, and the failure of secular nationalist regimes. Islamism presented itself as the solution to humiliation and disorder. It offered not only religious authenticity but also political redemption. Its slogan, in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, was simple and powerful: “Islam is the solution.”
Wherever Islamists came close to power, this promise proved difficult to sustain. Iran is the most important example. The Islamic Republic is the most durable revolutionary Islamist state of the modern period. It succeeded in creating a clerically guided regime, building a powerful security apparatus, surviving sanctions and war, and projecting influence through regional proxies. Yet it failed to deliver the justice, freedom, or prosperity promised by the revolution. Instead, it created a coercive state sustained by repression, ideological policing, economic stagnation, and militarization. Its revolutionary universalism gradually gave way to regime survival.
Inside Iran, political Islam has lost much of its moral legitimacy, especially among women, youth, and urban social groups who experience the regime less as liberation than as domination. The compulsory veil, morality policing, censorship, and violent suppression of protest have transformed the Islamic Republic from a revolutionary hope into a symbol of suffocation. Yet Iran also shows how political Islam adapts. As its Islamic legitimacy weakens domestically, the regime increasingly relies on nationalism, sovereignty, and resistance to Israel and the United States. The Islamic Republic survives not because it has fulfilled the universal promise of Islamism, but because it has fused Shi‘i revolutionary symbolism with Iranian nationalism and anti-imperial defiance.
This is one of the most significant transformations in political Islam: from Islamic governance to resistance politics. Today, the political power of Islamism often rests less on its promise to implement Islamic law than on its claim to oppose domination. In this sense, Gaza, American intervention, Israeli military power, and Western double standards remain central to the future of political Islam. These experiences provide Islamists with a powerful emotional vocabulary of humiliation, betrayal, and revenge. Even when Islamist regimes fail, the grievances that sustain Islamist mobilization endure. Political Islam survives by attaching itself to unresolved wounds.
Egypt illustrates another dimension of this transformation. The Muslim Brotherhood’s rise and fall after the Arab uprisings showed both the promise and vulnerability of electoral Islamism. The Brotherhood won elections after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, but it failed to reassure secular forces, state institutions, and regional powers. Its brief rule ended with a military coup, mass repression, imprisonment, exile, and the restoration of authoritarian rule under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. For critics of Islamism, the Egyptian case proved that Islamists were incapable of democratic governance. For many Islamists, however, the lesson was different: democracy was a trap. Elections could be tolerated only so long as Islamists lost. Once they won, the military and its allies would crush them.
This lesson is dangerous. When electoral Islamism is destroyed, it does not necessarily produce liberalism or secular moderation. It may radicalize a new generation. If moderate Islamists conclude that democratic participation leads only to prison, exile, or massacre, the space for compromise narrows. The collapse of institutional Islamism may therefore strengthen anti-systemic Islamism. It may empower those who argue that only force, secrecy, and revolutionary struggle can confront authoritarian regimes. Thus, the death of electoral Islamism may become the birth of more militant forms.
Turkey represents yet another mutation: the degeneration of Islamism into kleptocratic authoritarianism. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party initially presented itself as a conservative democratic movement. It promised to reconcile Islam, democracy, market reform, and Europeanization. For a time, Turkey seemed to offer a model of post-Islamist governance: religiously rooted but formally democratic, pro-market, and pragmatic. Yet over time, this project collapsed into personalized rule. Erdoğan hollowed out institutions, subordinated the judiciary, captured the media, criminalized opposition, and built a patronage system around construction, finance, religious networks, and loyal business elites.
In Turkey, Islamism did not fail because clerics took over the state, as in Iran. It failed because religious language became a tool of corruption and authoritarian loyalty. Erdoğan transformed Islamism into kleptocratic Islamism: a system in which piety legitimizes plunder, religious identity masks crony capitalism, and loyalty to the leader replaces moral accountability. The Islamic vocabulary of justice and virtue was emptied out and replaced with regime propaganda. Turkey therefore demonstrates that political Islam can survive institutionally while dying ethically. It remains visible in symbols, schools, mosques, media, and state discourse, but its moral promise has been consumed by power.
The Turkish case is crucial because it shows that Islamism’s decline is not always dramatic. It does not always collapse through war, revolution, or military defeat. Sometimes it rots from within. It becomes a language of entitlement for ruling elites. It turns into a mechanism for distributing contracts, silencing critics, and sanctifying personal power. This is why Erdoğan’s Turkey must be placed alongside Iran and Egypt in any serious account of political Islam’s transformation. Iran shows clerical authoritarianism; Egypt shows crushed electoral Islamism; Turkey shows kleptocratic Islamism.
Syria adds another variation. For years, jihadist and Islamist actors were central to the anti-Assad insurgency. Yet after years of devastating war, Islamist actors seeking power have often moderated their public language. The case of Ahmed al-Shara is revealing. A figure once associated with jihadist militancy has increasingly presented himself as a pragmatic national leader rather than as the builder of a strict Islamic state. This does not mean that Islamist commitments have disappeared. It means that the language of Islamism is being recalibrated to fit the requirements of statecraft, recognition, reconstruction, and international legitimacy. In Syria, as elsewhere, political Islam adapts by blending with nationalism and pragmatic governance.
Saudi Arabia also demonstrates the retreat of official Islamism, though from a different direction. For decades, the Saudi state used religious conservatism and Wahhabi legitimacy as central pillars of rule. Under Mohammed bin Salman, however, Saudi Arabia has shifted toward nationalism, modernization, entertainment, tourism, and economic diversification. Clerics have been weakened; religious police have been curtailed; women drive; concerts and global sporting events have become part of the kingdom’s new image. Yet this is not democratization. It is authoritarian modernization. Religion has been subordinated not to liberal freedom but to state nationalism and dynastic power. Saudi Arabia shows that the decline of Islamism may strengthen authoritarian nationalism rather than democracy.
These cases reveal a broader pattern: political Islam is not moving in one direction. It is fragmenting. In some places, it becomes nationalism. In others, it becomes resistance. Elsewhere, it becomes authoritarian corruption, electoral memory, insurgency, or moral protest. The question is not whether political Islam has ended, but which form of it is declining and which form is emerging.
This is why a Middle East-centered analysis is insufficient. The claim that political Islam is exhausted looks more plausible if one focuses primarily on Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. But the picture changes once Africa is included. Across the Sahel, Lake Chad Basin, and the Horn of Africa, jihadist movements remain powerful. Groups linked to Al Qaeda and ISIS operate in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, and beyond. In some of these areas, Islamist militancy is not declining; it is expanding, adapting, and embedding itself in local conflicts.
Africa challenges the idea that political Islam requires a strong state or a coherent ideology to survive. In many African contexts, Islamism thrives precisely where the state is weak, predatory, absent, or externally dependent. Jihadist groups often present themselves as providers of protection, order, dispute resolution, and revenge against corrupt officials, abusive militaries, or rival communities. Their appeal is not only theological. It is rooted in local grievances, ethnic conflict, poverty, smuggling economies, land disputes, climate stress, and anger at state violence. Islamism here is less a blueprint for a modern Islamic state than a language of insurgent authority.
This African dimension is crucial because it suggests that political Islam’s center of gravity may be shifting from capitals to peripheries. The older model of political Islam was urban, ideological, party-based, and state-centered. It sought to capture the state and govern society from above. The emerging model in parts of Africa is rural, insurgent, fragmented, and militarized. It grows in borderlands, deserts, villages, and zones of state collapse. It does not always need mass ideological consent. It can survive through protection rackets, local alliances, coercion, religious courts, and control over mobility and resources.
Neglecting Africa leads to a mistaken conclusion. Political Islam may be exhausted in some Middle Eastern states where Islamists have governed and failed. But it may be mutating elsewhere into insurgent jihadism, shadow governance, and armed moral economy. The decline of Islamism in Tehran, Ankara, or Cairo does not mean its decline in the Sahel or Somalia. Indeed, the global map of political Islam may be moving away from the classic centers of Arab and Persian politics toward frontier zones where state authority is contested.
This transformation also complicates the relationship between Islamism and secularization. The failure of Islamist governance does not automatically produce secular democratic politics. In Iran, it may produce nationalism and anti-regime protest. In Turkey, it may produce cynicism toward religious politics but not necessarily liberal renewal. In Egypt, it may produce fear, silence, or radicalization. In Africa, it may produce alternative jihadist orders in places where the state cannot provide security. The failure of Islamism does not resolve the problems that made Islamism attractive in the first place.
This is the tragic paradox. Political Islam has failed repeatedly as a governing ideology, but the conditions that generated it remain powerful. Authoritarianism persists. Corruption persists. Foreign intervention persists. Palestine remains unresolved. Social inequality deepens. Youth populations face unemployment, humiliation, and blocked futures. States continue to use violence without legitimacy. Under such conditions, religiously framed politics will not disappear. It will mutate.
The future of political Islam is therefore likely to be post-triumphalist. The grand confidence of earlier Islamist movements has faded. Few can credibly claim that an Islamic state will automatically produce justice and prosperity. The record is too compromised. Iran, Turkey, Sudan, Afghanistan, ISIS, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s failures have damaged the Islamist brand. But post-triumphalism is not the same as post-Islamism. Political Islam may lose its utopian certainty while retaining its power as protest, resentment, and resistance.
The most dangerous possibility is that the failure of moderate or institutional Islamism will strengthen radical alternatives. When Islamists are allowed to govern, they often disappoint. When they are crushed, they often become martyrs. When foreign powers attack Muslim societies, Islamists gain the language of resistance. When secular autocrats rule through corruption and torture, Islamists regain moral appeal. This cycle prevents the simple disappearance of political Islam. It repeatedly generates new forms out of defeat.
Thus, the transformation of political Islam should be understood through several shifts: from governance to resistance; from universalism to nationalism; from parties to networks; from clerical authority to militant entrepreneurship; from urban movements to peripheral insurgencies; from moral reform to revenge politics; and from state-building to anti-systemic fragmentation. These shifts do not mean that all forms of political Islam are equally powerful or equally legitimate. They mean that the phenomenon is adaptive.
The correct conclusion is not that political Islam has ended, but that its classical form has lost credibility. The age of confident Islamist state-building is over, or at least deeply weakened. But the age of Islamist mutation is not over. Political Islam survives in fragments: in Iran’s resistance nationalism, Turkey’s kleptocratic religious populism, Egypt’s repressed Brotherhood memory, Syria’s pragmatic post-jihadi pragmatism, Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian de-Islamization, and Africa’s expanding jihadist insurgencies.
Political Islam has failed to deliver justice, but it has not lost access to grievance. It has failed to build legitimate states, but it still speaks in zones where states fail. It has lost much of its universalist promise, but it remains powerful wherever humiliation, repression, occupation, and corruption create demand for a language of moral resistance. The future of political Islam will therefore not be a return to its earlier triumphalist dreams. It will be more fragmented, more nationalist, more insurgent, and possibly more radical. Its transformation, not its disappearance, is the defining development of the present.
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