Part 4
By Abu Umair al‑Afghani
The final decades of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first marked a genuine awakening in the Muslim world. For much of the mid-1900s, Muslims had been weak, and Islamic thought had all but faded from the public consciousness. However, another headache emerged for the West: a different ideology known as Socialism came into being, which caused panic in the West.
After the Second World War, the dominoes began to fall. The Soviet Union consolidated and grew powerful. China went communist. Cuba fell under socialism’s shadow. Eastern Europe followed. Vietnam, Korea, Africa, one by one, they drifted into the socialist orbit. For Western powers, socialism had become the enemy. Islam could wait.
The confrontation began in earnest around 1947, what history would call the Cold War. Two massive blocs now faced each other: socialist collectivism on one side, Western capitalism on the other. But this wasn’t open warfare. The West fought from behind the curtain, through proxy conflicts, covert operations, and manufactured crises. The Vietnam War. The Korean Peninsula. The Cuban Missile Crisis. For nearly half a century, this shadow war defined the world.
Since Socialism, Capitalism, and Islamism were in conflict with one another, and Socialism also posed a threat to Islam and Muslims. The Muslims, despite being in a very weak state, rushed to confront Socialism.
Why is there a conflict between Islam and Socialism?
Islam and socialism were never going to coexist. The reason is: socialism is built on atheism. Its architects had no room for religion, and Karl Marx called it the opium of the people. But it wasn’t just theology. The entire economic logic of socialism clashed with Islamic teaching. Socialism demands collective ownership, everything pooled, everything shared, the state holding the keys to everything. Islam, by contrast, protects the individual’s right to earn, to own, to trade, lawfully and freely. Halal and haram draw clear lines. Socialism erases them.
Socialism is not compatible with Islamic faith, thought, or economics. This was the reason that conflict began between Muslims and socialists, a struggle in which the West also stood against the socialists. Ultimately, Muslims won this battle as a result of their faith and Islamic ideology. Jihad and the Islamic system once again took root in the minds of Muslim youth.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Western powers had figured something out: Islamic thought, when alive and energized, could be a powerful force against socialist expansion. So they quietly made peace with it, temporarily. They signaled to their secular allies in Muslim-majority countries: let Islamic ideas breathe, let them push back against the communists.
It worked. The jihad spirit and the vision of an Islamic order took hold again in the minds of young Muslims. Secularism had failed them, it couldn’t protect them, couldn’t free them, couldn’t defend them. And in the end, it was that Islamic conviction, rooted in faith and fired by the idea of jihad, that broke the back of a totalitarian system the entire Western world had struggled to contain.
At the end of the 20th century, socialism collapsed. The West exhaled.
But the relief didn’t last. Before the dust had settled, a new challenge was already taking shape, and this one hit closer to home. Across the Muslim world, a generation of young people was waking up again: to the idea of Islamic governance, to jihad, to sharia, to the caliphate. These weren’t fringe ideas anymore. They were spreading.
For the West, this was the nightmare scenario. It shook the foundations of their global order/empires, stripped them of sleep, and dragged up bitter memories of centuries past, of a time when Islam had been a civilization that could not be ignored, and could not be controlled.