Political Islam’s Global March: the Taliban, Iran, Europe, and Africa

Across Asia, Europe and Africa, movements seeking to fuse politics with a strict reading of Islamic law are reshaping societies. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have imposed a draconian regime. Women and girls are virtually erased from public life: they are the “only country where girls and women were banned from secondary and university education”. Under Taliban rule even walking unaccompanied or holding a job is a grave offense. A new “virtue and vice” law now forces women to cover their faces and forbids them “from singing in public or letting their voices be heard”. As Amnesty International reports, Afghan women face what it calls the “crime against humanity of gender persecution,” denied freedom of movement, education beyond grade six, or work in almost any public sphere. In short, Afghanistan is a gender apartheid state.

The Taliban’s crackdown goes beyond sex and gender. Free speech and dissent are crushed. Human Rights Watch documents how the Taliban routinely detain journalists and shut down independent media. Activists are silenced; peaceful protesters are arrested on the pretext of morality violations. Afghan press programs are banned or tightly controlled – no questions unscreened, no interviews without Taliban approval. Even intellectuals are targeted. For example, political analysts and NGO workers have been swept up in wave of arrests simply for criticizing the regime. In March 2025 one well-known Afghan commentator was detained for questioning Taliban taxes on small businesses, then only quietly released a week later. Throughout 2023–25 the result is a choking of civil society.

Religious minorities in Afghanistan fare no better. The Taliban preach a single ultra-conservative Sunni vision and see anyone outside it as suspect. Human Rights Watch warns that “the entire population is being forced to live according to ultraconservative interpretations of one branch of a single religion”. Ahmadis and atheists are treated as apostates worthy of death, and even small communities of Hindus, Sikhs or Christians must hide or flee. Ethnic Hazaras – mostly Shia – are terrorized by ISIS-K attacks, and the Taliban offer only token protection. Many Shiites whisper that the regime tolerates anti-Shia terror so long as it won’t challenge the Taliban’s rule. In practice, any deviation from the Taliban’s narrow theology is dangerous. The United Nations found that Afghanistan’s women-led protests and even children’s car-horn honking were met with “unlawful killing” and torture. By early 2024, UN investigators concluded that Iran’s armed forces (aiding the Taliban indirectly) had committed “crimes against humanity” in crushing dissent – a warning sign for what Afghanistan itself is becoming.

Europe’s Encounter with Political Islam

Islamic political movements are also influencing Europe. In France, Germany and the UK, debates over religion and secularism have grown heated. Officials now speak openly of “political Islam” as a challenge to Western values. In Paris, a May 2025 government report shocked the public by accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of running a “long-term Islamist plan to infiltrate state institutions”. The leaked document warns that Brotherhood-linked groups – notably the “Musulmans de France” federation – have built networks of mosques, schools and charities that form “parallel Islamic ecosystems”, threatening the secular Republic. Interior ministers talk of a covert campaign in French neighborhoods to shift society toward Sharia law. In response, President Macron has accelerated a crackdown on foreign funding for mosques and tightened controls on Islamic schools and NGOs. Critics say some of this stings ordinary Muslims more than radicals, but the Paris report underlines a mainstream anxiety: France’s six million Muslims are seen as fertile ground for political Islam.

Germany faces a similar tension. Its well‐established Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland traces back to figures tied to the Brotherhood – the exiled cleric Said Ramadan (son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s founder) and his sons became major German-speaking preachers. Many German mosques are financed by groups from Turkey or the Gulf, which prompts Berlin to monitor foreign influence. In recent years Germany has banned some Islamic preaching in prisons and required tighter oversight of mosque construction to curb radical messaging. At the same time, German universities and governments fund programs to train homegrown imams aligned with democracy. The United Kingdom likewise wrestles with these issues. British leaders recently warned that the country’s liberal democracy is being “undermined by Islamist … extremists”. In March 2024 the UK pledged extra funding to protect Muslim communities after Gaza war backlash, even as ministers proposed new anti-extremism laws to block public support for radical organizations. A survey showed one in three Britons believes their ruling party has an Islamophobia problem – reflecting tensions between fighting militant ideology and respecting ordinary believers.

Civil society in Europe is not immune. Many national Muslim councils and charities now lobby politicians on education, family law and Sharia-based arbitration. For example, the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe and the European Council for Fatwa and Research promote an agenda of Islamic values within EU countries. Salafi preachers have gained followings in the suburbs of Paris, Berlin and London, pushing conservative dress and gender roles. These trends have spurred far-right parties and populists to exploit fears of an “Islamic threat,” deepening social divides. Governments have been forced to respond: France bans full-face veils and foreign mosque funds, while Germany and the UK emphasize integration and dialogue. But as a commentary in ISPI notes, “managing Political Islam in Europe has far-reaching implications for democracy and social cohesion”.

Iran: Clerical Repression and Revolutionary Ambitions

Iran under Supreme Leader Khamenei has been on a sharply repressive course at home while projecting its theocratic ideology abroad. Security forces have brutally crushed dissent since 2022. A UN fact-finding mission reported that Tehran’s suppression of protests (sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini) involved mass murder, torture, rape and gender persecution – indeed “the crime against humanity of persecution on the grounds of gender has been committed.”. Between 2022 and 2024, credible counts suggest hundreds of civilians (including many women and children) were killed by Iranian forces. Leading women’s rights activists sit in prison for staging peaceful rallies, while the morality police continue to arrest women for minor dress code “offenses” and brutalize men who speak for equality. In short, Iran has doubled down on its theocracy: national dissent is treated as heresy. The truth, judges of the UN panel said, has been “actively obfuscated” by the regime to avoid accountability.

Overseas, Iran’s rulers have embraced an expansionist vision framed by their 1979 revolution. Iran’s founders saw the Islamic Republic as an “ideological” project, not merely a nation-state, requiring them to “export” their revolution. This remains core policy today. As analysts note, “the Iranian government today and much of its policy, both internal and external, derive from the ideology of the Islamic Revolution.”. The constitution even mandates spreading Iran’s Shiite Islamic model abroad – a theme Khamenei emphasizes in roughly 80% of his public speeches. Thus Tehran backs allied militias across the Middle East: it pours money and arms into Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Syria’s regime, Iraq’s Shia militias and Yemen’s Houthis, all under the slogan of defending the “oppressed” Muslim world. In the current Gaza war, for example, Iranian-backed Hezbollah has launched missiles at Israel, while Houthi fighters in Yemen struck Red Sea vessels – actions widely seen as proxies for Tehran’s strategy. A Washington Institute analysis warns that these operations serve as a direct warning from Iran to Israel and the US, showing Tehran is “prepared to make maximum use of its proxies” to deter any challenge. In short, Iran’s regional aggression is inseparable from its theocratic ideology: regime leaders publicly cast their proxies’ wars as part of a religious mission against the West and its allies.

Boko Haram’s Insurgency in Nigeria

Thousands of miles away in Nigeria, a long-festering Islamic insurgency continues to plague the government. Boko Haram (the name literally means “Western education is forbidden”) has been at war in the northeast since 2009. Despite military offensives, the group (and its offshoot ISWAP) still carries out deadly attacks. In September 2024, suspected militants raided a farming village in Yobe State – burning homes and slaughtering dozens of civilians. The broader picture is grim: the United Nations reports that over 15 years of insurgency some tens of thousands have died and roughly 2 million people have been uprooted from their homes. In recent years Boko Haram fighters have even forged alliances with bandit gangs in the region, sparking a new wave of bloodshed.

Crucially, Boko Haram justifies its violence with an explicitly religious doctrine drawn from conservative Islamic teachings. Its early leaders taught that the secular Nigerian state is un-Islamic – echoing radical jurists of the past. “Boko Haram” spokesmen themselves say their name reflects a core belief: they insist that “Western education is forbidden by Islam,” applying old-school Salafi logic that mixes religion and daily life. The group’s ideology fuses religious exclusivism (denouncing democracy, constitutions and any practice seen as “anti-Islamic”) with a narrative of persecution. Boko Haram claims it is avenging decades of alleged abuse of Muslims in northern Nigeria, arguing that any Muslim who does not resist secularism is betraying the faith. These ideas are not fringe inventions but drawn from Islamic thought: Boko Haram leaders have even cited Qur’anic verses and medieval scholars to demand Sharia law and to excommunicate rival Islamic sects.

In practice, this means Boko Haram enforces a hard-line version of Sharia in areas it controls. It bans girls from school, flogs those who disobey its morality edicts, and at times targets other Muslims who refuse its rule. Its propaganda blames Nigeria’s corrupt democracy for poverty and says only Allah’s law can save society. As Brookings Institution researchers observe, the group demands that “Muslims choose between Islam and a set of allegedly anti-Islamic practices: democracy, constitutionalism, alliances with non-Muslims, and Western-style education.”. In this way, Boko Haram claims continuity with past jihadi movements: it sees itself upholding a religious duty (jihad) and forcing society to conform to its interpretation of Islam. The result has been brutal. UN monitors note Boko Haram employs suicide bombers and mass kidnappings – including abducting more than 1,600 children since 2014 – to spread terror.

Conclusion

From Kabul to Paris to Tehran to Maiduguri, a common thread emerges: movements inspired by Islamic ideology are pressing their agendas in governance and society. In Afghanistan, Taliban clerics openly rewrite the rules of daily life according to their faith, crushing dissent and diversity. In Europe, long-established Muslim communities and new immigrants alike are grappling with calls by groups to make Islam the basis of public order, provoking intense political debate. In Iran, a revolutionary theocracy brutalizes its own people and supports fellow jihadists abroad as a matter of state doctrine. In Nigeria, Boko Haram’s campaign – though on a smaller scale – likewise seeks to reshape society along strict Sharia lines.

Critics argue that these phenomena cannot be neatly separated from Islam itself, since the actors claim religious legitimacy for their causes. Certainly each case must be understood in local and historical context. But it is undeniable that today’s Political Islam – whether enforced by regimes or preached by insurgents – represents a militant strain with real political power. As recent events show, it poses a challenge to human rights, secular governance, and international stability alike. Western governments are only beginning to come to terms with the broad reach of this movement: banning some foreign funding here, passing integration laws there. For ordinary citizens and policymakers, the task will be to defend democratic values and equal rights while engaging constructively with Muslim communities. Whether in Kabul’s streets or Paris’s town halls, this global contest over the role of religion in public life is one of the defining issues of the 21st century.