Islamism: who they are and how to stop them

1. Why this page #

Islamism is the most lethal extremist ideology of our time. About three-quarters of MI5's counter-terrorism caseload concerns Islamist extremism,¹ and four jihadist groups caused about 70% of the world's terrorism deaths in 2025.² Yet most people cannot say what an Islamist is, what Islamists believe, or how to recognise their ideas.

This page answers those questions, in the Islamists' own words and from the texts they quote. It keeps three things apart:

• Islam, a religion with a sacred text and a body of law;
• Islamism, the political movement to make that law the law of the state, by persuasion, pressure or force;
• Muslims, people, most of whom are not Islamists, and many of whom are Islamism's first victims and bravest opponents.

The research file covers Sharia law in depth, and The Quran on war quotes 71 passages in full. This page draws on both.

2. What is an Islamist? #

An Islamist believes that Allah's law, not the people, must govern society, and works to make Islamic law the law of the land. Islamists differ on method but share that goal.

2.1 Warning signs you can see and hear #

You cannot identify an Islamist by appearance. Beards, headscarves, the niqab and traditional dress are worn by millions of Muslims who oppose Islamism, and many convicted jihadists dressed like any other young man. The signs are in what people say, display and do. UK counter-terrorism guidance tells the public to look for behaviour, not faces.⁸

What they say - Democracy and "man-made law" are illegitimate; only Allah may legislate. - Sharia must become state law, and the caliphate must be restored. - Apostates, blasphemers or gay people deserve death. - Muslims who disagree are "kafir" (unbelievers) or apostates, the practice called takfir. - Muslims must keep apart from, and be hostile to, unbelievers (al-wala' wal-bara').

What they display - Support for banned groups, or their flags, logos and propaganda. Displaying a proscribed group's symbols in public can be a criminal offence under section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000.⁹ - Praise for terrorist attacks and "martyrs", or shared beheading videos and jihadist sermons.

What they do - Pressure or intimidate others to follow religious rules, for example telling women to cover up, shops to stop selling alcohol, or couples to stop holding hands. The 2013 "Muslim Patrol" in east London did exactly this, and its members were jailed.¹⁰ - Protest outside a school or threaten a teacher, writer or artist over "blasphemy". - Cut young people off from family and non-Muslim friends and steer them to a particular preacher or online group.

Changes in someone you know - Sudden isolation and secrecy online. - New hostility towards family or towards Western society. - Obsession with a particular preacher or with the end of the world. - Unexplained plans to travel to a conflict zone.

These signs match the UK government's 2024 definition of extremism: promoting an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance that aims to "negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others" or to "undermine, overturn or replace the UK's system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights."¹¹

How to report. In an emergency, or if violence is threatened, call 999. Report concerns confidentially to the police anti-terrorism hotline on 0800 789 321 or online at gov.uk/ACT.⁸ Concerns about a young person can be raised through Prevent, via the police or the local council.

3. The ideologues and preachers #

A few ideologues wrote the doctrine, and a few preachers spread it.

• The Muslim Brotherhood's slogan: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."³
• Abul A'la Maududi, in a 1939 lecture, Jihad in Islam: "Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam." He called for a "universal revolution."¹²
• Sayyid Qutb, in Milestones (1964), argued that jihad passed through stages from patience to all-out war against unbelief, and that only the final stage now applies.¹³
• Abdullah Azzam (d. 1989) called on all Muslims to join armed jihad and mentored Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda, declared war on the United States in 1996 by quoting 9:5, the "verse of the sword", and ordered the 9/11 attacks.¹⁴
• Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was proclaimed caliph when Islamic State's spokesman, al-Adnani, declared a "caliphate" on 29 June 2014 and demanded the allegiance of every Muslim; Baghdadi first appeared in public as caliph on 4 July.¹⁵

In Britain, a handful of preachers are linked to a large share of Islamist terrorism:

Why preachers have power. A preacher claims to tell young men what Allah demands of them, which gives him an authority no ordinary recruiter has. The sociologist Quintan Wiktorowicz found that al-Muhajiroun's founder held recruits through his "sacred authority" as a religious scholar.²⁰ Islamic State's own intake records show that 70% of its foreign recruits had only "basic" knowledge of Sharia, so they relied on what their preachers told them.²¹

4. The principles they cite #

Islamists build their doctrine from real verses and classical rulings. These are quoted below in Pickthall's translation.²²

Allah alone rules (hakimiyya). "Whoso judgeth not by that which Allah hath revealed: such are disbelievers" (5:44). "The decision rests with Allah only" (12:40). Islamists read these verses to mean that any law not derived from Sharia is illegitimate.

Fight until the religion is Allah's. "…slay the idolaters wherever ye find them" (9:5). "Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah… until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low" (9:29). "And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah" (8:39). "Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you" (2:216).

Loyalty and enmity. "Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends" (5:51).

The three choices. A hadith instructs commanders to offer enemies Islam; if they refuse, "demand from them the Jizya"; if they refuse that, "seek Allah's help and fight them" (Sahih Muslim 1731).²³ Classical law divided the world into the "house of Islam" and the "house of war" and made extending Muslim rule a collective duty.²⁴

The sword verse. Many classical scholars held that 9:5 cancelled earlier verses of peace, and Islamists rely on that doctrine.²⁵ The full set of verses, and who cites them, is on The Quran on war.

5. The goal: a world under Sharia #

Islamists do not seek a place within free societies. They seek to replace them. Hizb ut-Tahrir's stated aim is to restore the caliphate, a single state ruling all Muslims under Sharia.⁵ Islamic State declared that caliphate in 2014.¹⁵ Iran's constitution commits the state to continuing its revolution abroad.⁶

Two roads to one goal.

• The fast road, jihad. Al-Qaeda and Islamic State seek to seize territory and impose Sharia by force, and to terrorise the West into retreat.
• The slow road, influence. The Brotherhood tradition works through preaching, schools, charities, community bodies and elections. A French government report of May 2025 warned of Brotherhood "entryism" at local level and linked 139 places of worship to its French network.²⁶

Why young men answer. The ideology offers certainty, belonging and a promise of paradise to those killed fighting: they are "living" with their Lord (3:169), and Allah "hath bought from the believers their lives and their wealth because the Garden will be theirs" (9:111). Research also finds that identity, purpose, friendship and the pull of a group matter as much as doctrine.²⁷

5.1 How Islamists see Western liberalism #

Islamist leaders have said plainly that they read Western tolerance, restraint and openness as weakness to be exploited.

• Strength is what they respect. In a video recorded in November 2001, Osama bin Laden told supporters: "when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse."⁵⁶ His 1996 declaration of war cited the American withdrawals from Beirut after the 1983 bombing and from Somalia in 1993 as proof that the United States could be driven out by attacks.¹⁴
• Western freedom as decadence. Sayyid Qutb spent 1948–50 in the United States and wrote with contempt of its materialism and sexual freedom. He concluded that the West's liberty was moral corruption, not strength.⁵⁷
• The welfare state as tribute. In 2013 Anjem Choudary was secretly filmed telling followers: "the normal situation is for you to take money from the kuffar [non-believers]. So we take Jihad Seeker's Allowance." He called British taxpayers "slaves".⁵⁸
• Democracy as a tool. Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects democracy as a system in which people, not Allah, make law, but has used the freedoms democracy guarantees to organise openly.⁵⁹ The Muslim Brotherhood contests elections to reach power, as Morsi's presidency showed.³⁰

What this means. When free societies hesitate to name the ideology, fail to enforce their own laws or back down under threat, Islamists present it as proof that their side is the "strong horse". The Batley teacher who went into hiding, and the years it took to deport Abu Qatada, are examples they can point to. Firm, consistent enforcement of one law for everyone denies them that argument.

5.2 Muslims: the Islamists' first victims #

Islamists regard Muslims who reject their ideology as enemies too. The doctrine of takfir lets them declare such Muslims apostates, and so, in their view, lawful to kill. The US National Counterterrorism Center found that, where victims' religion could be identified, Muslims suffered between 82% and 97% of terrorism deaths in the five years to 2011.⁶⁰

• In December 2014 the Pakistani Taliban attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar and killed 149 people, 132 of them schoolchildren.⁶¹
• In November 2017 gunmen believed to be linked to Islamic State attacked the Sufi al-Rawda mosque in Sinai during Friday prayers and killed more than 300 worshippers, the deadliest attack in Egypt's history. No group claimed it.⁶²
• In March 2016 Asad Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow, was murdered by a man who said Shah had "disrespected" the Prophet. The killer was jailed for life.⁶³

This is why two things are true at once. Islamists do not come in peace, and no one should pretend otherwise. And Muslims who reject Islamism are among its main targets. They need protection and support, not suspicion. Discriminating against Muslims as a group is wrong, it is unlawful, and it hands Islamists the story they want: that the West is at war with all Muslims.

Mainstream Muslim scholars reject the Islamist goal. In September 2014, 126 of them rebutted Islamic State point by point in an open letter.²⁸ Islamism is a minority position among Muslims, but a determined and organised one.

6. Myths about Islamists #

"Non-violent Islamists have peaceful aims." Their methods may be peaceful. Their aim is not. Britain's 2015 review of the Muslim Brotherhood found that aspects of its ideology and tactics were "contrary to our values."²⁹ When the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi won Egypt's presidency in 2012, within five months he issued a decree placing his decisions beyond the reach of the courts.³⁰

"Iran's revolution was about freedom." Many Iranians who backed the 1979 revolution wanted an end to the Shah's dictatorship. They got a theocracy. Iran made the hijab compulsory by 1981 and in 1983 made breaches punishable by up to 74 lashes, executed thousands of political prisoners in 1988, and in 2022 killed hundreds of protesters after Mahsa Amini died in morality-police custody.³¹

"The Ottoman Empire was a tolerant, multicultural state." It let Christians and Jews run their own communities under the millet system, as second-class subjects who paid special taxes. It took Christian boys from the Balkans to convert and serve as soldiers and officials, the devshirme. In November 1914 the sultan, as caliph, declared jihad, and from 1915 the Ottoman government's campaign against the Armenians killed between 600,000 and 1.5 million people, by historians' estimates.³²

"Islamism is just a reaction to Western wars." The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, twenty years before the state of Israel and seventy years before 9/11. Islamists use Western policies as grievances, but the ideology came first.³³

"Islamists are all terrorists." Most are not. They work through mosques, charities, schools and politics, which makes them harder to see and often more effective.

7. Islam's golden age, and what went wrong #

Islamic civilisation once led the world in science and learning. From the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, Baghdad's House of Wisdom translated Greek philosophy and science into Arabic. Al-Khwarizmi's work gave the world the words "algebra" and "algorithm". Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine was taught in European universities into the seventeenth century, and Ibn al-Haytham laid the foundations of modern optics.³⁴ Christians, Jews and Persians did much of this work alongside Muslims, in a period of relative openness.

Signs of the later decline include the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258;⁶⁹ the Ottoman Empire's refusal to let Muslims print in Arabic script until 1727, nearly three centuries after Gutenberg (the first such book appeared in 1729, though Jewish and Christian presses had operated in the empire since the 1490s);³⁵ and the UN's finding in 2003 that the whole Arab world translated about 330 books a year, a fifth of the number Greece translated.³⁶ Historians point to several causes: invasions, lost trade routes, and a long alliance between religious scholars and rulers that narrowed the room for independent thought.³⁷

Who gains from Islamist rule. It concentrates money and power in the hands of those who claim to speak for Allah. In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards control a large share of the economy.³⁸ In 2014 Islamic State was earning about $1 million a day from oil.³⁹ Where clerics and commanders rule in Allah's name, questioning them becomes blasphemy, and that protects their wealth and power.

8. 1,400 years, and today #

Within about 120 years of Muhammad's death, Muslim rule stretched from Spain to the borders of China, established by conquest.⁴⁰ Conquered peoples converted over the following centuries, under the pressure of the jizya tax and legal inequality.⁴¹ Islam also spread peacefully through trade, as in Indonesia and much of Africa. The full timeline is in the Quran page.

Where Islamists hold power today:

• Iran and Saudi Arabia carried out about 93% of the world's recorded executions in 2025.⁴²
• The Taliban publicly flogged at least 1,110 people in 2025 and bar girls from secondary school.⁴³
• Islamic State enslaved Yazidi women and girls, and a UN commission found that it committed genocide.⁴⁴
• Twelve countries allow the death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy.⁴⁵

9. Case studies: Iran, Europe, Britain #

Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini led the 1979 revolution partly from exile in France, spending four months in a village outside Paris, protected by French law and free to address the world's press.⁴⁶ In power, he built the world's leading Islamist state: clerical rule, compulsory hijab, mass executions and militias abroad.

Europe. Islamic State gunmen and bombers killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015.⁴⁷ France's government now warns of Brotherhood entryism.²⁶ Sweden's police list 19 "particularly vulnerable" areas marked by "parallel societal structures" and violent religious extremism.⁴⁸

Britain. Islamists have used the freedoms of an open society to advance a system that would abolish them.

• Hizb ut-Tahrir campaigned openly for a caliphate for decades before it was banned in 2024.⁵ Abu Qatada fought deportation through the courts for about eight years.⁴⁹
• An election court voided Tower Hamlets' 2014 mayoral election for corrupt and illegal practices, including "undue spiritual influence" through a letter signed by 101 imams.⁵⁰
• An inquiry found a "co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained" effort to introduce "an intolerant and aggressive Islamist ethos" into some Birmingham schools.⁵¹
• Sharia councils go uncounted, and the government's own review found that "no one disputed" that they discriminate against women.⁵²
• A teacher who showed a cartoon of Muhammad in a 2021 lesson was still in hiding when the government's review reported in March 2024.⁵³
• In a 2024 poll, 32% of British Muslims said Sharia in the UK within 20 years would be desirable.⁵⁴

10. Stopping Islamist terrorism #

Britain's counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, has four parts: Prevent (stop people becoming terrorists), Pursue (stop attacks), Protect (strengthen defences) and Prepare (limit the damage when attacks happen).¹ Islamist terrorism remains, in the Home Office's words, the primary terrorist threat to the UK.¹ The evidence points to seven measures that work.

1. Disrupt plots. MI5 and counter-terrorism police disrupted 43 late-stage attack plots between 2017 and October 2024, of all kinds; about three-quarters of MI5's counter-terrorism caseload is Islamist.⁶⁴¹ That depends on intelligence, on communities reporting concerns, and on police resources.
2. Ban the organisations. Proscription makes membership, support and fundraising crimes. Britain has proscribed Islamic State, al-Qaeda, al-Muhajiroun (under its successor names) and Hizb ut-Tahrir.⁵
3. Prosecute the preachers. Convictions of Abu Hamza, Abdullah el-Faisal and Anjem Choudary removed the most influential recruiters from circulation.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁹
4. Take the propaganda offline. Islamic State's recruitment ran on social media, and online material features in most terrorism cases. Platforms must remove terrorist content and preachers' sermons that incite violence.
5. Fix Prevent's focus. The independent review of Prevent found it "is not doing enough to counter non-violent Islamist extremism" and had a "double standard" between Islamism and the extreme right.⁶⁵
6. Stop radicalisation in prison. A 2016 government review found Islamist extremism in prisons was a growing problem, including gangs pressuring inmates to convert. It led to separation centres for the most dangerous extremists.⁶⁶
7. Protect crowded places, and learn from failures. The Manchester Arena Inquiry found that MI5 missed a significant opportunity to stop the 2017 bomber, who killed 22 people.⁶⁷ Martyn's Law, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 3 April 2025, will require larger venues and events to prepare for attacks once an implementation period of at least 24 months ends.⁶⁸

11. Glossary #

12. How free societies stop Islamism #

1. Be aware. Learn the warning signs in section 2.1 and report incitement to violence. The signs are ideas and behaviour, not faces: do not treat ordinary Muslims as suspects.
2. Stop the preaching of hate. Prosecute incitement, as Britain did with Abu Hamza and Anjem Choudary. Proscribe groups that promote terrorism, as the UK did with Hizb ut-Tahrir. Close extremist charities and remove online propaganda.
3. One law for everyone. Register every marriage, apply equality law to every religious tribunal, and never let Sharia councils act as courts.
4. Defend free speech and apostates. Criticising a religion, and leaving one, must be safe. Support the teachers, writers and ex-Muslims who are threatened.
5. Vote on it. Ask candidates where they stand on Islamist groups, Sharia councils, free speech and immigration.
6. Control migration. Screen arrivals for extremist views and links, and set numbers the country can integrate. Denmark granted only 860 asylum applications in 2024.⁷⁰ The US Supreme Court upheld entry restrictions based on country of origin in 2018.⁵⁵ A ban on people by religion alone would breach most Western constitutions.
7. Protect and back Muslims who reject Islamism. They are among its main targets and its bravest opponents. Never discriminate against Muslims as a group: it is wrong, it is unlawful, and it helps the Islamists.
8. Stop Islamist terrorism. Support the measures in section 10.

The booklet Fighting Islamists 101 sets out this argument in 30 pages.

13. Sources #

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