A former Muslim recently wrote something on X that deserves to be taken seriously:

“I was never a practising, observant Muslim. Yet, even I wanted Islam to take over Europe and the West until I was a teenager.”

That is not a small admission. It is a glimpse into a religious-political imagination many Westerners have been trained not to notice, or at least not to describe plainly.

The issue is not ordinary Muslim citizens living ordinary lives. The issue is the version of Islam that understands itself not merely as private faith, but as a total system of law, society, politics, and conquest. That distinction matters because Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamism does not present itself as a hobby, an identity, or a private devotional life. It presents itself as a movement, with a theory of history, a theory of law, a theory of society, and a theory of liberation.

At its centre is the belief that human beings are not truly free until they submit to divine law. That may sound pious in abstraction, but it immediately raises the question liberal societies cannot avoid: what happens to people who do not want to live under that law?

Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones gives one answer. Qutb was not merely writing about personal religious improvement. He was writing a revolutionary text for Islamism, one that treated Islam as both religion and movement. In that framework, Sharia is not one moral tradition among others; it is the only legitimate law. Other systems of law are not merely different, mistaken, or incomplete. They are jahili: ignorant, illegitimate, and awaiting correction.

This is the part Western liberal societies keep trying to soften into something less threatening. The problem is not that Muslims pray, fast, worship, build families, open businesses, or form communities. The problem is a doctrine that treats civil law as false law, liberal democracy as ignorance, and non-Islamic societies as places that must eventually be transformed.

There are Muslims who reject this. There are reformist Muslims, secular Muslims, quietist Muslims, and ordinary Muslims who want nothing to do with Qutbist revolutionary politics. They are not the target of this critique. The target is the Islamist doctrine that treats their moderation as compromise, their citizenship as suspect, and their acceptance of civil law as evidence that they have submitted to something other than God.

From there, the conflict with liberal democracy becomes unavoidable. Qutb’s framework does not simply say that Muslims should be faithful within their own private lives. It says society itself must be reordered around submission to God’s law. It rejects the idea that human beings may legislate for themselves outside divine command; worse, it treats such legislation as a form of servitude, because human authority has supposedly usurped the authority of God.

Every civilization has conquest in its past. The issue is not that Islamic empires, like other empires, expanded through force. The issue is what later ideologies teach people to feel about that expansion. Was it ordinary human empire, subject to the same moral scrutiny as any other empire? Or was it sacred victory, proof of divine favour, and a model for the future?

That is the trick at the centre of the ideology. The Islamist does not necessarily think he is enslaving others. He may think he is freeing them from man-made law, rescuing them from ignorance, and liberating them from the false gods of democracy, secularism, nationalism, pluralism, or individual liberty. But domination does not become freedom because the dominator calls it liberation.

A liberal society can tolerate deep religious difference. It can protect mosques, churches, synagogues, temples, and atheists alike. It can defend the right of people to pray, preach, publish, criticize, convert, leave, and dissent. That is what religious freedom means, and it is one of liberal civilization’s great achievements.

But religious freedom is not a suicide pact. A society built on equal citizenship and civil law has no obligation to pretend that a movement seeking to replace civil law with religious law is merely asking for inclusion. It is asking for room to build a rival sovereignty; it wants the freedoms of liberal society while denying the legitimacy of the liberal order that makes those freedoms possible.

Former Muslims often understand this in a way polite Western elites do not. They know the internal language, the heroic stories, the childhood assumptions, the selective memory, and the pressure to treat Islamic expansion as something nobler than ordinary imperial ambition. When a former Muslim says he was taught that Islam’s greatest achievements were conquest and colonialism, we should not rush to explain the statement away. We should ask what kind of moral education produces that desire in a teenager who was not even especially observant.

Conquest does not always begin with armies. It begins with a story: one law is holy and all others are illegitimate; one community has submitted while the rest of the world lives in ignorance; ordinary civic loyalty is lesser than religious loyalty; the surrounding society is not a common home but a problem to be transformed.

Once that story takes hold, liberal tolerance can be turned against liberal civilization itself.

Western societies have become very good at speaking about “extremism” in the abstract, as though radicalization were a mysterious weather system that occasionally rolls through alienated communities. We condemn “hate” without asking what the hated object actually is. We speak endlessly about inclusion, but hesitate when inclusion is demanded by movements that do not intend to return the favour.

The hesitation is not harmless. The target of Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamism is not merely Western foreign policy, social prejudice, or insufficient accommodation. Its target is the liberal settlement itself: equal citizenship, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, secular civil law, and the right to live without submitting to a religious legal order.

A society cannot remain liberal if it treats every challenge to liberalism as just another form of diversity. There is a difference between welcoming Muslim citizens and making excuses for Islamic supremacism; between protecting private faith and accommodating political theology; between religious freedom and religious domination.

Those distinctions matter because liberal democracy depends on reciprocity. Citizens may believe different things, worship differently, argue fiercely, and disagree about ultimate truth; what they may not do is claim that their sacred law has a superior right to govern everyone else.

That is the line that must be defended, at all costs to preserve any society that does not wish to follow Sharia law.

When a movement teaches that non-believers live in ignorance until brought under divine law, it is not offering pluralism. When it treats civil law as illegitimate because only Sharia is legitimate, it is not asking for equal citizenship. When it remembers conquest as sacred achievement rather than domination, the West should stop pretending that the problem is misunderstanding.

The issue is Islamic supremacism: a religious-political project that seeks power over others while calling that power liberation.

No liberal society should be embarrassed to say so.

Conquest is not made holy by scripture. Colonialism is not redeemed by prayer. And religious domination is still domination, even when it arrives speaking the language of faith.

When religious law claims supremacy over civil law, justice is no longer blind; it is bound.

References and Source Material

This essay was prompted by a former Muslim’s post on X describing being taught to admire Islamic conquest and colonialism.

It also draws on discussion of Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones and Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamism in the New Discourses podcast episode provided in transcript form.