These two characteristics, I would argue, provide as penetrating an understanding of the Islamist psyche as one could hope for, both at the individual and group levels.
They are taqiyya and the seamless movement between an idea and its opposite, a principle and its reverse, without any apparent sense that logic has been sacrificed or that a moral contradiction has occurred.
Although taqiyya belongs to the heritage of Shiite thought, where it was developed over centuries of persecution and pursuit, and although it broadly means that a person is permitted to declare outwardly something other than what he inwardly believes, adapting himself to the circumstances and requirements of his age while privately maintaining a different belief or conviction, the practice itself spread widely among Sunni Islamist movements of different tendencies.
Under the shadow of swords and amid bursts of gunfire, it became a revealing point of sectarian convergence, one that reflects the nature of the Middle Eastern condition and the concealment, discretion, and maneuvering it imposes upon those who operate within it. One may even say, without this being considered a major exaggeration, that taqiyya began as a Shiite jurisprudential and doctrinal inheritance and ended as a psychological characteristic among many.
When approaching the personality of Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, the former Al-Qaeda commander, these elements cannot be ignored when examining his behavior and statements, attempting to analyze his policies, testing their seriousness and credibility, and trying to anticipate their future course.
These two elements—taqiyya and moral contradiction—are not invoked here as inherent characteristics of his personality. Events have not revealed enough about him, nor has experience accumulated sufficiently to allow us to form settled impressions or assessments. Rather, they are recurring components that we have encountered for nearly a century within political Islamist movements and in the conduct of their members.
Yet the matter is somewhat different in the case of Al-Jolani, or Al-Sharaa. The man has already reached power, with international blessing, a degree of regional acceptance, and at the same time a measure of aversion and reservation.
It is therefore premature to test his old Al-Qaeda jihadist intentions, the worldview they contain, and the extent to which his current behavior remains shaped by them, whether the aim is ultimately to deny or confirm their continued presence.
In the end, he is testing a new reality with tools that are unfamiliar to him, moving from the ranks of armed opposition and terrorism to the realm of government and the modern state, with all that this entails in terms of engagement with the international community and submission to the requirements of the political game in its broadest sense.
Between a jihadist past that many find difficult to believe he has entirely abandoned, even at the level of personal conviction, and the accommodations and new appearances that have emerged—from the new look to the new language and ultimately to new policies—it is possible to assume that two necessities are struggling within him: the dominance of belief and the dictates of reality, unless he has succeeded, or contrived, to construct some formula capable of reconciling the two at the doctrinal, jurisprudential, and political levels.
The Jurisprudence of the Past and the Imperatives of the Present Moment
Last December, the Israeli Alma Research Center published an assessment arguing that Al-Jolani had not abandoned jihadist thought, but had merely moved beyond the identity of Al-Qaeda rather than its strategic vision, which, according to the analysis, includes establishing local governance, building institutions, exercising long-term patience, and practicing tactical pragmatism.
Alma further argued that Al-Jolani is practicing what it called “strategic patience,” presenting himself as a local leader rather than a global jihadist.
It is difficult to know on what basis Alma concluded that Al-Qaeda’s ideology envisages establishing local rule first and global jihad afterwards, particularly given Al-Qaeda’s well-known jurisprudential framework dividing the enemy into two categories, near and far, and holding that the far enemy—the United States—deserves priority in combat over the near enemy, namely the ruling Arab regimes.
Nor did Al-Qaeda establish a particular state as its headquarters or plan to create a governing system in any single country. Rather, it sought to exhaust and wear down the United States through militia-style warfare extending across the map of the world.
Despite the apparent plausibility of the scenario advanced by Alma, the doctrinal texts and ideological foundations to which Al-Sharaa, as a former Al-Qaeda figure, belongs would appear, in principle, to contradict such an assessment.
Moreover, material emerging from Israeli circles should not be treated as detached research or neutral analysis. In many instances, it forms part of a larger struggle that Tel Aviv wages against Al-Sharaa, his opponents, and his allies alike, a reality that has often led Israeli research and media institutions to produce analyses that are either biased, infused with intelligence estimates, or burdened with the task of conveying specific messages.
Yet the Swedish researcher Aaron Lund, a specialist in Syrian affairs whose work has appeared prominently in media outlets and research centers around the world, preceded Alma in reaching a similar conclusion. Indeed, he was among the first to argue that what is taking place amounts to nothing more than a pragmatic repackaging of an existing image, and that Ahmad Al-Sharaa is pursuing a degree of adaptation and reinvention that the old classical generation of Al-Qaeda figures would never have attempted.
This applies not only to relations with the United States and the sensitivities surrounding them, foremost among them the relationship with Israel, but also to Russia, whose presence in Syria remains deep and whose historical relationship with the Afghan mujahideen and Al-Qaeda has long been marked by conflict. Al-Sharaa did, in fact, visit Russia last January in an attempt to establish relations with President Vladimir Putin, a man against whom he and his predecessors, each from his own position, had long been at war.
The issue, however, does not lie solely in Al-Sharaa’s or Al-Jolani’s willingness or desire to maneuver.
The theory of former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski remains influential in American circles and continues to shape aspects of Washington’s approach toward the Islamic world. Understanding that theory is essential to understanding the relationship between Al-Sharaa’s Damascus and Washington, and it may also provide a useful entry point for interpreting the ambiguous condition of Syria’s current president as he stands between his jihadist affiliation and the demands imposed upon him by his role as a president whose appearance and conduct must necessarily be civilian.
Brzezinski was one of the architects of the strategy that employed the Afghan mujahideen to distract and exhaust the Soviet Union during the Afghan wars of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As he famously wrote in correspondence with former President Jimmy Carter regarding the Soviets, “We gave them their own Vietnam.”
Brzezinski’s worldview divided the planet into strategic zones, with Muslims inhabiting the zone most richly endowed with resources. Consequently, the effective management of world affairs, in his view, required an understanding of those Muslim populations occupying that part of the globe.
His ideas produced concepts such as cooperation with “moderate Islamic fundamentalism,” formulations described as “using Islam against Islam,” and accommodations that, for periods of time, absorbed and encouraged organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yet there are a number of signs that can be assembled into a single pattern and may help indicate the direction in which Al-Jolani is likely to move. The man has filled the ranks of his government and state apparatus with former jihadists and takfiri associates. He continues to pursue sectarian policies and practices that have generated considerable unrest and disturbance. He appears to have divided his challenges into two categories: one in which he operates according to his own jurisprudential conceptions of the state, its role, and its relationship with its citizens—or subjects—and another that concerns his relationship with the outside world and the constraints that must be observed.
Yet the crisis of scientific objectivity in attempting to diagnose Al-Jolani’s future lies in the fact that such an effort requires measuring variables that continually shift in relation to other variables that are themselves inherently unstable. Consequently, identifying a fixed point, or several fixed points, from which to begin becomes almost impossible in a case such as this.
For that reason, part of the exercise enters the realm of literary speculation. Put differently, we are attempting to measure the future through what the past has been and through patterns that have generally held in similar and comparable cases, while acknowledging that this particular experience contains new factors not present before.
Failed Experiences
The rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt collapsed tragically in 2013. Their experience in government in Sudan ended in a catastrophe whose consequences we continue to live with every day. Their experiment with Hamas in Gaza did not succeed, nor, for that matter, did the Afghan experience or Khomeinist Iran.
If some argue that the Islamist experience in Turkey has been successful, many within Islamist ranks themselves contend that Turkey has succeeded to the extent that it has been pragmatic, aware, and adaptable, rather than Islamist.
This issue was discussed at length by the Islamic thinker Dr. Mohamed Selim Al-Awa during his appearance on the YouTube podcast Eh El-Hal, in an episode that generated considerable controversy in November 2025.
In attempting to anticipate the future of Al-Jolani, or Al-Sharaa, by comparison with previous adherents of the same ideological tradition, we find a number of scattered indications that may be woven together into a single thread.
This is not because each of these cases lacks its own circumstances, but because all of them emerged from a mentality shaped by the same intellectual tributaries and launched from the same premises in pursuit of the same outcomes.
The Adaptable Discourse
Political Islamist movements have often found themselves compelled to alter the coloring of their discourse, illuminating certain areas while keeping others in darkness, adapting themselves to circumstances, avoiding some conflicts, postponing others, and yielding to the balance of power prevailing in each country and each context.
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the practices of the Muslim Brotherhood. The content published on the Brotherhood’s Arabic-language website differed from that published on its English-language website between 2005 and 2013. The English-language content, in particular, sought to avoid confrontation with Western powers on highly visible and contentious issues such as takfir, attitudes toward non-Muslims, questions of freedom and homosexuality, and the establishment of normal relations with Israel.
Within the Brotherhood’s international organization during the 1990s and the early years of the new century, policies often allowed local branches to adopt different positions on certain issues according to local circumstances and the political conditions of each country. This was evident in attitudes toward Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait and later toward the American occupation of Iraq, where positions varied from one country to another as though one were dealing with several organizations rather than a single movement.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, some branches of the organization in a number of Arab countries sided with Iraq despite the statement issued by the Brotherhood’s General Guide in Egypt at the time, Mohamed Hamed Abu Al-Nasr, condemning the Iraqi invasion.
Later, when Brotherhood offices in different countries protested the American military intervention against Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait, the Kuwaiti Brotherhood reacted with alarm. It adopted a position opposite to that of the movement’s other branches, welcoming the American intervention.
Although one would expect a religious movement such as the Brotherhood to derive its decisions from purely doctrinal and jurisprudential considerations, the reality proved broad enough to accommodate both a position and its opposite according to the interests of each party and the circumstances of each national setting—or, more simply, according to what the moment permitted.
Why Political Islam?
The paradox lies in the fact that the driving force behind the emergence of these organizations is the conviction that true Islam is not being implemented and that Muslims have fallen into decline and deviation from the proper path. Each movement sees itself as uniquely qualified to represent the absent Islam and to guide people—or, more accurately, to drive them—toward the correct destination.
What is striking is that the narrative advanced by modern political Islamist organizations closely resembles the narratives of the various sectarian and doctrinal movements that emerged during the early centuries of Islam, in the decades and centuries following the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphate.
For centuries there has existed an underlying feeling that the Islam actually practiced and present is not the Islam that ought to exist. Yet the influences that shaped Muslim self-perception after the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, together with the movements that emerged afterward—such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the writings of Sheikh Rashid Rida, and later Sayyid Qutb’s thesis concerning the jahiliyya of society—created the conditions that would eventually produce the intellectual, political, activist, and armed transformations embodied by those who embraced such ideas.
Thus emerged organizations such as the Military Technical College group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya in Egypt, followed later by Al-Qaeda and ISIS, along with numerous other movements that never achieved the same degree of visibility or media attention, whether in Egypt or elsewhere in the Arab world. Yet all of them fed upon one another intellectually, organizationally, and jurisprudentially.
Then came the Arab Spring revolutions, which brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt in 2012 before removing them from office the following year, in what was perhaps the most dramatic experience in the history of political Islamist movements in the region.
Eventually, Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani—who later adopted the name Ahmad Al-Sharaa—reached the presidency of Syria after entering Damascus on December 8, 2024.
We first became acquainted with Ahmad Al-Sharaa, before his de facto presidency in Syria, more than ten years ago. It was widely known that Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, the leader of Jabhat Al-Nusra and later Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham, was Al-Qaeda’s representative in Syria, pledged to Ayman Al-Zawahiri and occupying the organization’s place on a Syrian battlefield where everyone seemed to be fighting everyone else.
In June 2015, Al-Jolani appeared in a lengthy televised interview with Al Jazeera presenter Ahmed Mansour, who is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to explain his worldview, the foundations of his discourse, and the role his organization represented inside Syria.
He repeated the familiar themes of Al-Qaeda’s discourse, including the excommunication of Arab armies, calls for their dismantlement, and accusations that Arab governments and states had failed to establish Islam.
He also called for confronting the Americans and others. His remarks contained a harsh critique of the Muslim Brotherhood’s experience in Egypt. During the interview, he explained that the writings of Sayyid Qutb were taught within Jabhat Al-Nusra and described the Brotherhood in Egypt as a “deviant” group because it had accepted, and because its representative, Mohamed Morsi, had accepted upon reaching power, the Camp David Accords, participation in the United Nations system, parliament, elections, and the constitution. In his view, they had failed to govern according to Islamic law and had fought the “mujahideen” in Sinai. He called upon them to return to their origins and take up arms.
Al-Jolani also spoke about the need to dissolve Arab armies and establish a new army for each country. More significantly, he declared that the muhajireen—by which he meant foreign fighters within his organisation—must have a place in the new Syria and should not experience what had happened to foreign fighters in Bosnia after the Dayton Agreement. He noted that the muhajireen constituted 30 percent of his organization.
Yet the paradox is that the Al-Jolani who appeared in that interview re-emerged ten years later, having lost weight, become noticeably more polished, trimmed his once-unruly beard, changed his clothing, and discarded his head covering. He instead appeared in a military-style outfit with a distinctly activist, militia-like character, not unlike the public image cultivated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
He was no longer the man whose home had been mountains, caves, and hideouts. Instead, he appeared as a leader operating from a command center equipped with multiple telephone lines and screens, as though he were directing a modern army.
Later, it became known that he had received training from an American diplomat, with assistance from a British non-profit organisation, as part of an effort to rehabilitate him politically.
According to statements made by former U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford in May 2025, a British non-governmental organization specializing in conflict resolution invited him in 2023 to assist in transforming Al-Jolani from the world of terrorism into the world of politics.
Then came the meeting that brought together Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, or Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, and David Petraeus, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during a session held as part of Concordia University’s annual conference on security and democracy on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last September.
Al-Jolani remarked during that session, “At one time we were on a battlefield, and we moved to the field of dialogue,” before adding that he now sat with Petraeus “as friends.”
Thus, the Al-Jolani who wished to fight the United States ten years ago—or, more precisely, to resume the war he had already fought against it in Iraq—now sits with it as a friend.
The Arab armies whose dismantlement he once advocated are represented today by military and political leaders with whom he meets.
The Muslim Brotherhood, whom he criticized for compromising their Islamism, have been replaced by political figures far less Islamist than they are, with whom he now sits smiling before the cameras.
The Jews whom his Al-Qaeda discourse regarded as unbelievers and toward whom it directed its fiercest hostility are now represented by rabbis whom he meets and from whom he receives blessings, as happened during his meeting with one rabbi on the margins of his visit to the United States last September.
At this point, it is worth returning to the idea with which this article began: taqiyya, which envelops his personality and compels him to display something other than what he conceals, together with the capacity to coexist with the internal and moral contradiction between what he privately believes and what he publicly declares.
My assessment is that Al-Jolani will abandon many of his convictions along the way. Yet some of those convictions, I suspect, have been deliberately set aside and preserved until circumstances permit their re-emergence. The issue involves not merely his personal strategy but an entire trajectory and a broader vision embraced by him and his associates, in a paradox that has displaced the old jurisprudential orthodoxy long established within the organization in favor of what political possibility allows.
*The writer is an Egyptian journalist.
*This article was originally published in Al-Mashhad Al-Alami (Global Outlook), a periodical issued by the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS).
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