Islam as an imperial project

How I think about it

I have a simple heuristic for understanding different religions:

• Judaism is focused on commandments (there are way more than ten). Jews are supposed to remember their obligations to G-d.

• Christianity is focused on salvation. If you come to Jesus, he will save you. Wouldn’t you prefer heaven to hell?

• Islam is focused on conquest. Get those unbelievers to submit to you.

Please do not take that is a conclusive generalization. It is more like a joke with a grain of truth.

One can read Islam in history as an imperial project. I had a long discussion with Claude about this. The full conversation is here. In my last question, I asked about the early Islamic use of agents to proselytize in areas before taking them by force, and whether we could see echoes of that today from Iran.

Claude replied (I omit quotation marks):

You’re essentially asking whether Iran could replicate the Fatimid da’i model — the network of ideological missionaries who prepared the ground for expansion before armies arrived — in a modern context. The answer is: they’re already doing it, have been for decades, and with some real successes and some significant limits.

What Iran is actually doing

The Islamic Republic has pursued exactly this strategy since 1979, with considerable sophistication. It operates through several overlapping networks:

The IRGC Quds Force is the most visible instrument — the external operations arm of the Revolutionary Guards, responsible for cultivating, funding, training, and arming sympathetic movements abroad. Its reach is genuinely impressive. Hezbollah in Lebanon is the crown jewel — built from scratch after 1982 into what is arguably the most capable non-state military force in the world, with deep social roots in Lebanese Shia communities through schools, hospitals, and welfare provision. Hamas in Gaza and Palestinian Islamic Jihad receive Iranian support despite being Sunni, because shared anti-Israel ideology overrides the sectarian gap. The Houthis in Yemen. Shia militias across Iraq. These are not ad hoc alignments — they are the product of decades of patient ideological and material investment.

Cultural and religious institutions operate more quietly. Iran funds Shia seminaries, cultural centres, and mosques across the world — in West Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and notably in Western countries with significant immigrant Muslim populations. The Imam Ali Foundation and similar organisations operate in European capitals. These aren’t simply religious charities; they are soft-power instruments that cultivate loyalty to the velayat-e faqih framework.

The Shia diaspora network is particularly relevant to your question. In Britain, Germany, Sweden, Canada, and the United States there are substantial communities of Lebanese, Iraqi, Iranian, Afghan, and Pakistani Shia Muslims. Iran cultivates relationships with community organisations, mosques, and clerical figures within these communities, sometimes successfully.

Where the Fatimid parallel is genuinely apt

The structural logic is the same as the Fatimid da’i network. You identify a population with a pre-existing religious or ethnic identity that can be activated — in the Fatimid case, discontented Ismaili sympathisers inside Abbasid territory; in Iran’s case, Shia Muslim communities abroad who may feel marginalised, discriminated against, or alienated from their host societies. You send in ideological agents — in the modern case, trained clerics, community organisers, and occasionally intelligence operatives — who build loyalty to your framework over years or decades before any political payoff is sought.

The 2006 Lebanon war showed how effective this could be in a conducive environment. Hezbollah had spent twenty years building genuine social roots in Lebanese Shia communities, and the result was a movement that could fight the Israeli military to a standstill and maintain popular support while doing so. That was the Fatimid model working at its best — ideological investment converting into durable political and military power.

Where the modern context creates fundamental limits

But there are four structural differences between the Fatimid world and the modern one that significantly constrain Iran’s ability to replicate the model in Western immigrant communities.

The first is sectarian reach. The Fatimid da’is were working within a broad Islamic community where Sunni-Shia distinctions were real but the theological distance was traversable. Iran’s primary ideological appeal is specifically Shia — and the majority of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe and North America are Sunni, often from countries (Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria) where Iran is viewed with suspicion or outright hostility. Iran’s influence operations work best where there is a pre-existing Shia community; in predominantly Sunni immigrant populations, Iranian ideology is often actively unwelcome. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar are simultaneously running their own competing influence operations in exactly these communities, and they have the sectarian advantage.

The second is the counter-example problem. The Fatimid missionaries could offer a compelling utopian vision of what Ismaili rule would look like, because no one in Abbasid Iraq had lived under it. Iranian clerical rule has now been observed in practice for 45 years, and the evidence it offers — economic stagnation, political repression, the 2022 uprising — is not an attractive advertisement. Among Iranian diaspora communities specifically, the Islamic Republic is deeply unpopular. The people most culturally and linguistically equipped to carry Iran’s message to immigrant communities are often precisely the people who left Iran because they opposed the regime. This is a profound structural handicap the Fatimids never faced.

The third is state surveillance and legal frameworks in Western democracies, which are now substantially oriented toward detecting exactly this kind of influence operation. The exposure of Iranian assassination plots on European soil — including operations in France, Denmark, Germany, and Albania — has made Western intelligence services acutely aware of Iranian network-building. Several Iranian-linked cultural organisations have been investigated or shut down. The operating environment for da’i-style patient infiltration is considerably more hostile than 10th-century Baghdad.

The fourth and perhaps deepest limit is what Iran is actually selling. The Fatimid missionaries offered liberation from Abbasid taxation and oppression, and a more legitimate religious authority. What does Iran’s ideological framework offer to a second-generation Pakistani Muslim in Birmingham or a Moroccan immigrant in Paris? The velayat-e faqih — clerical theocracy — is not an obviously attractive model for people who are simultaneously navigating secular democratic societies and their own complex hybrid identities. Iran can offer a sense of civilisational pride and anti-Western solidarity, and for some individuals that is genuinely compelling. But it is a narrower appeal than the Fatimid missionaries could make.

What Iran can realistically achieve

The honest assessment is that Iran’s influence network is most effective in three specific conditions: where there are substantial Shia populations with genuine grievances (Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, eastern Saudi Arabia, Yemen); where state structures are weak enough to be penetrated (post-2003 Iraq being the most dramatic example); and where Iranian-backed organisations can offer material benefits — security, welfare, employment — that the host state fails to provide.

In Western immigrant communities, these conditions are only partially met. Iran can cultivate individual sympathisers, maintain some community organisations, and conduct intelligence operations. But the dream of building a mass base of ideologically loyal agents in Western Muslim immigrant populations runs into the sectarian mismatch, the counter-example of Iranian governance, and the active countermeasures of both Western states and rival Sunni powers.

The more interesting strategic question is whether Iran’s model has already partly succeeded in shaping how some Western Muslim communities think about geopolitics — specifically around Israel-Palestine, anti-imperialism, and civilisational conflict with the West. Here the answer is murkier, because Iranian and broader Islamist narratives overlap considerably, and separating Iranian influence from the broader current of Islamist political thought in Western communities is genuinely difficult.

What the historical pattern suggests, though, is that the da’i model works best as a preparation for something — the Fatimid missionaries were preparing the ground for a conquering army and a state. Iran’s influence networks in the West are not preparing the ground for anything so concrete. Without a plausible endgame, patient ideological investment tends to dissipate rather than crystallise into durable power. The Fatimids knew what they were building toward. It is less clear that Iran does.

Me Again

I asked, “I wonder if Muslim immigrants to Western countries could be very psychologically susceptible to such efforts. An immigrant may have a very fragile sense of identity within a foreign country and have a need for something that gives a strong sense of purpose and ability to leapfrog the status of the natives.”

Claude replied,

The psychological dynamic you’re describing is well-documented. It tends to cluster not in first-generation immigrants but in the second generation — and this is one of the most robust findings in the radicalisation literature. The pattern is almost paradoxical: the people most vulnerable to extreme ideological recruitment are often not the most marginalised or the poorest, but those who are partially integrated — educated enough to have expectations, assimilated enough to feel the gap between those expectations and reality, but not fully accepted by the host society.

The French sociologist Olivier Roy, who has studied European jihadist radicalisation extensively, calls this the “search for a pure identity” — a rebellion against the ambiguity of being caught between two cultures, neither fully French nor fully Algerian, neither fully British nor fully Pakistani. The appeal of a totalising ideology is precisely that it resolves this ambiguity completely. You stop being a hyphenated person navigating two worlds and become something singular, absolute, and — crucially — superior to both the parents you’ve partially rejected and the host society that hasn’t fully accepted you.

The “leapfrogging status” point you raise is particularly sharp. Research on foreign fighters who joined ISIS found a striking pattern: many were not deeply religious before radicalisation. Several had criminal records, histories of drug use, or what one researcher called “pre-radical” periods of ordinary Western dysfunction. What the ideology offered was an instant status transformation — from nobody, from a second-generation immigrant working in a call centre or recently released from prison, to a soldier of God in a cosmic struggle. The vertical leap in self-perceived status and significance was intoxicating in a way that gradual social mobility simply cannot match.

Why Iran’s specific pitch faces limits here

But this is where the Iranian angle becomes complicated, for reasons that go beyond what we discussed earlier.

The identity vacuum in second-generation Muslim immigrants in the West is real. Iran’s ability to fill it specifically is limited, for a structural reason: the identity on offer has to feel authentically theirs. The radicalisation research consistently shows that successful ideological recruitment works by giving people a story about themselves — their community, their grievances, their destiny. The ideology has to feel like a homecoming, not an adoption.

For a second-generation Moroccan in Brussels or a Pakistani in Bradford, Shia Iranian theocracy does not feel like a homecoming. It feels foreign in the same way their parents’ village feels foreign — somewhere else’s tradition, not theirs. The identities that have successfully recruited in these communities have been Sunni Salafi and jihadist frameworks — precisely because they offer a pan-Islamic identity that transcends ethnic and national origins and speaks directly to the experience of being Muslim in a non-Muslim society. Al-Qaeda and ISIS were masterful at this. Iran, structurally, is not.

Where Iran can and does exploit this psychology is more indirect. Anti-Western, anti-imperialist, pro-Palestinian narratives that Iran amplifies resonate broadly across Muslim communities regardless of sect — because these narratives tap into real grievances about Western foreign policy that don’t require accepting Shia theology. Iran can be a contributor to the broader ideological ecosystem that makes some immigrants receptive to radical ideas, without being the direct recruiter.

The “cognitive opening” problem

There is a concept in radicalisation research called the cognitive opening — the moment when a person becomes psychologically receptive to a radical worldview. It is usually triggered by a personal crisis: discrimination, a failed relationship, a prison sentence, a bereavement, a humiliation. The grievance doesn’t have to be political — personal humiliation is often the actual trigger, with political ideology providing the framework that gives that humiliation cosmic meaning.

What this suggests is that the vulnerability you’ve identified is real but episodic rather than structural. Most second-generation immigrants navigate the identity tension you describe without becoming radicalised — the majority find ways to hold hyphenated identities, to be British-Pakistani or French-Algerian without needing a totalising resolution. The vulnerability crystallises in specific individuals at specific moments of personal crisis, and the ideological recruiter’s skill lies in being present at that moment with a compelling story.

Iran’s influence networks are not particularly good at this kind of opportunistic individual recruitment in Western contexts. The organisations that have been good at it — Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, Salafi networks in France and Belgium, online jihadist communities — operate through entirely different ideological channels.

The deeper long-term concern

Where your question points to something genuinely worrying is not in Iran’s direct recruitment potential but in a broader dynamic that several European security analysts have written about seriously.

Western Muslim immigrant communities — particularly in France, Belgium, Sweden, and Britain — contain populations where a significant minority feel what researchers call dual loyalty tension: a sense that their primary moral and political obligations run not to the state in which they live but to the global Muslim community (the umma). This is not radicalisation in the violent sense, but it creates a population that is at minimum less likely to actively resist Iranian or Islamist influence operations, and at maximum a pool from which more active sympathisers can be drawn.

The compounding factor is social media and algorithmic amplification. The Fatimid missionaries had to physically travel to Baghdad and cultivate relationships over years. Iran’s contemporary equivalents can reach a psychologically vulnerable 19-year-old in Malmö or Marseille instantly, with content precisely calibrated to his specific grievances, in his own language, through platforms that algorithmically reward the most emotionally engaging — usually the most extreme — content. The infrastructure costs of the da’i model have collapsed to near zero. The speed has increased by orders of magnitude.

This does not make Iranian influence in Western Muslim communities inevitable or even likely to succeed at scale. But it does mean that the psychological vulnerability you’ve identified — the identity fragility, the status hunger, the susceptibility to a narrative that makes you suddenly significant — is being targeted with tools of a sophistication and reach that the Fatimid caliphs could not have imagined.

The historical pattern we identified across the seven empires was that ideological coherence and the promise of belonging were among the most powerful tools of expansion. That has not changed. What has changed is the delivery mechanism — and the delivery mechanism is now faster, cheaper, more targeted, and considerably harder to police than a network of travelling missionaries in medieval Khorasan.

And a few days ago…

I saw an essay by Ben Cobley, “The plot for a British Caliphate.” He sees this coming from the Muslim Brotherhood (not Iran).

It is worth taking a moment to discuss Qaradawi, the foremost Brotherhood ideologue of recent times, who died in 2022. Qaradawi acquired a certain notoriety in the West for stating that Islam will conquer Europe via “da’wa [the Arabic term for proselytizing] and ideology” and for advocating a “jihad of necessity” against Israel, including civilians and the “innocent child” as legitimate targets.

…Qaradawi says, “Islam came to be followed, and not to follow; to be dominant, and not subordinate.”

…[Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna] put it “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

…We might also note the Brotherhood’s pragmatic alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran