Against the background of the ongoing debate about the Political Islam groups, their strength, and their chances of evolution, the Cairo publisher Dar Dawn has recently published Al-Eimama wa-Al-Rossas (The Turban and the Bullets), an account of the Political Islam groups in South Asia.
The 200-page volume is the first book by author Tarek Dahroug, who spent many years studying Political Islam groups in several Arab and Muslim-majority countries before he decided to write a book on Pakistan and other countries in South Asia, carrying out research in situ along with various interviews.
His book is not just a topographic picture of the current state of the Political Islam groups in South Asia, which is arguably a stronghold for some of the most radical versions of them. Instead, it fully explains the context that allowed for the rise of these groups, their eventual radicalisation, and their subsequent generations.
The book also examines the possible relations, both at the material and intellectual levels, of the Political Islam groups in South Asia with other, even if not so radical, groups elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim-majority countries and in countries with sizeable Muslim communities both in Africa and in Europe and particularly those around the Mediterranean.
The diversity of the radical militant groups of Political Islam, their intellectual and ideological squabbles, and their fighting amongst each other are also explained in a way that traces their root ideology and the evolution of their core objectives, especially those of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS).
The main argument is that there is much more to understand about the Political Islam groups beyond their radical and at times militant choices. Moreover, the book argues that while all the groups have much in common, especially at the level of founding ideology, there is no way they can all be addressed in the same fashion.
Understanding Political Islam, according to Dahroug, starts with dissecting the context of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, and the Islamic Group in Pakistan, founded almost two decades later in 1947. However, this task also requires a thorough understanding of the many shades of Political Islam both in its Sunni and Shia versions.
Dahroug argues that it is essential to understand the complex and multiple-phased history of Islamic scholars during the colonial era in what was then a West and Arab/Muslim paradigm.
In his introduction, he recalls that the original idea for the book goes back to 1997 when he was working on his MA at a French university during a moment of academic hype about understanding Political Islam. “This was particularly the case at the beginning of the 1992 Algerian Civil War in the wake of the cancellation of the elections won by the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front),” he writes.
This was also a time when the militant jihadists who were fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation were leaving the country where they had fought for years to hit back at their own countries or at some other Arab or Muslim-majority countries or even at Europe.
“This came with operations on the ground, as we saw with Egypt’s Jamaa Islamiya (Islamic Group) and Islamic Jihad, who were acting in alliance with Ossama Bin Laden who was based at the time in Sudan,” Dahroug writes.
The 1990s, he adds, was a time that brought together many of these groups from across the Muslim-majority countries. The name of their alliance was “the International Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” dubbed Al-Qaeda (AQ) in the Western literature.
At the same time, the wider Muslim presence in several European countries ended its phase of “quiet” that had lasted from the 1960s to the early 1980s and became more “vocal,” bringing up questions for public debate on the role and rights of Muslims in the European countries.
Then came the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington that widened the scope of the international interest in the history, ideology, and objectives of Political Islam, with its many shades and varieties.
A new layer of the story came with manifestations of the possible roles of Political Islam, as manifested in some Arab states, in the 2011 Arab Spring, as was the case in Libya that led to the elimination of its long-term ruler Muammar Qaddafi. Ultimately, Dahroug writes, the world came to see the Islamic State group (IS) as a much harsher version of Al-Qaeda.
For a while, it seemed that IS had the upper hand over Al-Qaeda. However, this was a rushed and inaccurate assessment, Dahroug says, because despite the elimination of the top leaders of Al-Qaeda, especially Ossama Bin Laden and his successor Ayman Al-Zawahri, subsequent generations of the group are still active in many parts of the Muslim-majority countries, especially in East Africa.
SOUTH ASIA: Dahroug stresses that the rise of radical Political Islam might not have happened had it not been for the call for jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation of this large and diverse Muslim country towards the end of the Cold War and the cooperation between leading Western powers and some Muslim capitals.
It is also hard to separate the beginning of the Islamic Group of Pakistan during the independence of the country from the history of discrimination that the Muslims of the subcontinent suffered prior to their split from India in 1947.
The British occupation of the parts of India that later became Pakistan was also a factor in the rise of an Islamic sentiment of resistance, he adds. “The very early beginning of the Jamaa Islamiya [Islamic Group] dates back to 1941 [as part of the resistance to the British occupation] prior to the establishment of Pakistan in August 1947,” he says.
Decades later, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 prompted a new surge of militant jihadi groups that attracted followers in the Muslim communities of Europe, where a sense of anti-Islam-based discrimination was increasingly sensed.
Dahroug argues that it is impossible to separate the evolution of the Political Islam groups, especially those of a radical militant orientation, from the dynamics of international relations, be it in the colonial era or later. The parallel is clear between those who left the Arab and Muslim countries to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and those who went to Iraq to fight against the US-led Western invasion or later to Syria to fight against the Russian-supported Syrian regime that was supported by only a very narrow Muslim minority.
The book cites the socio-economic challenges in the Arab and Muslim-majority countries as a clear reason that allowed the Political Islam groups, including those with a radical militant agenda, to gain ground and followers.
But beyond its discussion of international relations, Dahroug’s book is also very invested in approaching the issue of intellectual influences, especially between the ideas of Sayyed Qutb, one of the leading theorists of the radical faction within the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Abu Al-Ala Al-Mawdudi, theorist of Pakistan’s Jamaa Islamiya.
Both men were born in the first decade of the 20th century under British occupation, with Qutb dying in 1966 and Al-Mawdudi in 1979. Despite the differences of their respective paths, Dahroug explains that they both ended up subscribing to a hardline understanding of Islam that they preached to their followers.
Fi Zelal Al-Qur’an by Qutb and Tafahom Al-Qur’an by Al-Mawdudi are integral to the promotion of radical Islam, he says.
However, Political Islam, he argues, need not always be a strictly anti-establishment pursuit. At times, especially in the second half of the 1970s, there were leaders of Arab and Muslim-majority countries who opted for a path of Islamisation, which included tacit or not-so-tacit alliances with Political Islam groups to serve their own political agendas.
“While in Pakistan Muhammed Zia Al-Haq was pursuing a path of Islamisation, there came the call for jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, a call that attracted many young men in Pakistan,” Dahroug writes. “This was the moment when the core of the jihadi trends was put together in the country,” he adds.
The support of the state of Pakistan for the call of jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan was far from being Islamic, however. It was predominantly a political tactic that aimed to give Pakistan political leverage with the Western powers and to promote the country as a key regional player.
As a result, here again Dahroug looks at the complex influence of international relations on the path that allowed for the surge of radical Political Islam. He explains that in addition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was Pakistan’s keenness to position itself as a key ally of the West and the lavish financial support that came for the oil-rich Arab Gulf regimes that promoted an over a 100 per cent of Islamic schooling in Pakistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with an eye on the rise of Shia Islam in Iran after the ouster of the Shah’s regime in 1979.
Saudi national Ossama Bin Laden, he writes, was the link that connected Arab Gulf interests with those of Pakistan and of the leading Western capitals that were keen to get the Soviets out of Pakistan.
It was this Saudi-American coordination that allowed for the recruitment of jihadis to go to Afghanistan, not just from Pakistan and other nearby Muslim countries in South Asia, but also from North Africa. “It is estimated that 35,000 foreign fighters arrived in Afghanistan in the years between 1982 and 1992, with these coming from Muslim states in the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Central and Southeast Asia to participate in the Afghani jihad,” Dahroug writes.
“Sources indicate that American and international financial support for the Afghani mujahedin surged from $30 million in 1980 to $250 million in 1985. Equal amounts were channelled to Islamic relief organisations working on the ground.”
This moment saw the birth of Al-Qaeda, with Ossama Bin Laden as its de facto chief. The core of its militants were passionate volunteers from South and Southeast Asia, and the objective was to recruit more both from the Arab world and from Europe. Britain, a target for militant resistance in the first half of the 20th century, became central to this recruitment and funding, according to Dahroug’s book.
JIHAD: With the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the subsequent end of Communism and the Cold War, the call for jihad was relaunched under different forms of resistance: the unfairness imposed on Palestinians by the Western-supported Israeli occupation and the unfairness imposed on members of Political Islam groups by regimes not willing to accommodate them.
Dahroug offers a detailed explanation of the cross-border network that Bin Laden worked to establish from Algeria to Indonesia and from Egypt to Albania with some failures and some successes. Fighters who were in Afghanistan, especially those called Al-Afghan Al-Arab (Afghani Arabs) were crucial to this network building, as his book shows. This, he writes, was happening as Afghanistan was being ruled by the Taliban, starting in 1996.
At the same time, Dahroug reviews the expansion of radical Political Islam groups in several countries in east, north, and Central Africa. The book explains that with generous funding from some quarters in the Gulf, their rise continued in Africa, Asia, and Europe until 2001. It was then, he writes, that the US decided to act against these groups and forced the exit of Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and ended the rule of Taliban for two decades before it allowed it to take back control on certain conditions.
However, the call for jihadism was never eliminated. The management of Afghanistan under the US-supported regime that took over from Taliban in 2001 and the regime in Iraq that took over after the fall of former president Saddam Hussein in 2003 provided sufficient incitement for it. Dahroug argues that the level of aggression used in Syria against the segment of population that took part in the 2011 Arab Spring also rekindled the call for jihad in some radical quarters.
With fighters flocking to Iraq and Syria from Asia, Africa, and Europe, Dahroug writes, the lexicon shifted from “jihadists in Afghanistan” to that of “foreign fighters.” IS then declared the establishment of its state in Iraq and Syria. “Of a total of 32,000 foreign fighters who ended up in Iraq and Syria [under IS rule], there were 5,000 Europeans,” he states.
There were also “volunteers” who came to join the fighting in Syria and Iraq from both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Somewhere in the middle of this, the book shows, a segment of these Afghani and Pakistani fighters decide to go back to their part of the world and to start a new hub for world jihadis in the Khorasan Province. This group was empowered by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
In the past few years, Dahroug writes, IS in the Khorasan Province has presented itself as a more radical version of Political Islam than the Taliban, and it is now a source of opposition to Taliban rule in Afghanistan. He adds that it was IS in Khorasan that masterminded other key attacks, including one that hit Moscow in 2024.
“The Turban and the Bullets” does not offer a forecast about the future of the radical Political Islam groups, including IS in Khorasan. Nor does it offer any prediction about the results of their local in-fighting. However, it does lead the reader to believe that there are still many international dynamics that could allow for another round of very brutal fighting.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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