'Political Islam' is a Western umbrella term for a family of movements that share one core claim: Islam is not just a private faith but a complete blueprint for how the state, the economy and society should be organised. Beyond that, the family disagrees on almost everything. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, argues for gradual Islamisation through elections, unions and welfare networks. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 installed a very different model: a Shia clerical state under the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, rule by the supreme jurist. Saudi Arabia exports a conservative Wahhabi vision through mosques and universities worldwide while remaining a monarchy allied to Washington. Turkey's AKP has offered a democratic, capitalist, Sunni-conservative model — 'Islamic democracy' — that inspired Arab Spring liberals before it hardened into Erdoğan's personal rule. And at the violent edge sit al-Qaeda and ISIS, arguing that the entire existing state system in the Muslim world is illegitimate and must be destroyed to make room for a caliphate.
1979 is the hinge date. Three events in a single year transformed political Islam from a marginal current into a defining force in world politics. In February, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran — the first modern revolution to install clerical rule rather than a secular ideology of left or right. In November, Sunni militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca; the Saudi monarchy survived only by making a deal with its own conservative clerics that dramatically expanded their power over Saudi society and unleashed decades of Wahhabi funding abroad. In December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the CIA jointly funded the mujahideen — creating the networks, weapons and training camps that would produce, over the next two decades, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the whole architecture of transnational jihad. Every major Middle East story since — Iran-Iraq, the Gulf Wars, 9/11, the Arab Spring, Syria, ISIS — descends in some way from 1979.
The Sunni-Shia split originated in a seventh-century argument about succession, but its modern geopolitical form is essentially a Saudi-Iranian rivalry that has been running, hot and cold, since 1979. Saudi Arabia claims leadership of the Sunni Arab world and funds mosques, clerics and media from Morocco to Indonesia. Iran claims leadership of the Shia world and backs Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. Nearly every civil war in the region for a generation — Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon — is at some level a proxy contest between Riyadh and Tehran. The 2023 Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement briefly suggested this era might be ending; the Gaza war and Israel-Iran exchanges of 2024 suggested it is not. The map of the modern Middle East cannot be read without understanding which regimes and which militias belong to which side of this line.
The Arab Spring of 2011 was, briefly, the moment when democratic political Islam looked like the future of the region. The Muslim Brotherhood won free elections in Egypt and Tunisia. Ennahda governed in Tunis. Erdoğan's Turkey was the reference model. Twelve years later almost none of that survives. Egypt's Brotherhood government was overthrown in the 2013 military coup and its leaders imprisoned or executed. Tunisia's democracy has been dismantled by President Saied. Erdoğan has become an authoritarian personalist. Only in Morocco and, in a very different form, Indonesia, does electoral Islamism function inside a working political system. The result is a Middle East where the ideological space is now occupied by three surviving models — Iran's clerical state, Saudi Arabia's modernising autocratic monarchy, and Turkey's illiberal Sunni populism — and where the democratic Islamist option has largely been killed off. The consequences for the region's next twenty years are still being written.