Part I of the series ended with a paradox. By the middle of the twentieth century, Political Islam was not a leading force. Neither was the Pro-West camp. Nationalism and socialism were winning.
Then the Cold War arrived. Socialists naturally found ideological and material support from the Soviet Union.
Pro-West governments found protection in Washington and London.
Nationalists were different. Their desire for sovereignty kept them largely independent, while their nationalisation drive frequently brought them into confrontation with Western interests.
Political Islam occupied a more unusual position. Islamists were not necessarily pro-West.
But their opposition to communism brought them head-to-head with the Soviets and made them useful for the US in the Cold War.
Iran provided an early warning. In 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh became prime minister and nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. His politics were nationalist.
Two years later, British and American intelligence helped engineer the coup that removed Mossadegh, uprooted Iran's nascent democracy, and strengthened the Shah's pro-West rule.
Egypt followed a different path.
After Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel confronted him in 1956, but he emerged politically strengthened. His Arab nationalism had enormous popular legitimacy.
But 1967 changed the equation.
Israel inflicted a crushing defeat on Egypt. For Nasser, the defeat was more ideological than military. The strongest fortress of Arab nationalism had been breached.
Pakistan provided another example.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto combined Pakistani nationalism with a socialist economic programme. His government nationalised major industries while pursuing a more independent foreign policy.
But in 1977, General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in a military coup. Two years later, Bhutto was executed following a trial that Pakistan's supreme court would decades later rule had failed to meet fair-trial and due-process requirements.
Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan followed different paths, but in each case, the nationalist force that had dominated the political landscape was forcefully removed or severely weakened.
Nationalism failed to re-emerge as a force from these three events.
Socialism presented a more difficult challenge.
Unlike the nationalists, the socialists had the USSR behind them, providing weapons, money, and political support. Confronting socialism directly, as was done against nationalist forces, risked confronting the Soviets themselves.
Afghanistan would, therefore, become a laboratory for testing indirect confrontation between the US and USSR.
In 1978, the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan seized power. A year later, the Soviet Union intervened to prop up the struggling communist government.
There was no powerful pro-West movement in Afghanistan that the West could support. But there was another force determined to fight the Soviet-backed communist government: Islamists.
They hated the 'atheist' communists.
The US, helped by the pro-West regimes in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, channelled money and weapons to the Afghan Mujahideen. For Washington, the Mujahideen did not have to be pro-West, only anti-Soviet.
They emerged as the enemy of America's enemy. They had become a proverbial friend of the West.
The model worked. The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Three years later, the communist government crumbled.
Iraq and Syria provided a different story. They remained Ba'athist, but amid the events happening around them resorted to pragmatism.
Iraq moved first. As an Iranian victory in the Iran-Iraq War appeared increasingly threatening, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the US moved closer. Washington increasingly treated Baghdad as a counterweight to revolutionary Iran.
However, the arrangement did not last.
After Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Iraq went from useful counterweight to enemy. The US invasion in 2003 destroyed the Ba'athist regime.
Syria managed to cling on for more than half a century through its alliances with Iran and Russia. But in December 2024, that order collapsed too.
The movement that replaced it emerged from an Islamist insurgency. Ahmed al-Sharaa is neither nationalist nor socialist but has sought accommodation with the West.
By now, all major socialist and Ba'athist strongholds had been defeated one by one.
For the West, the ideal outcome was a pro-West government. However, after World War II, the firmest pro-West regimes were concentrated in Türkiye and the Gulf monarchies.
Later, Iran and Pakistan were forcefully changed towards pro-West alignment by dismantling their democracies. Nationalist forces were annihilated by the 1970s, leaving socialism as the only credible competing force.
Over the next two decades, Islamist movements would become increasingly important for the US in the struggle against Soviet influence.
Saudi Arabia had already demonstrated that pro-West and Islamist forces could coexist. The kingdom remained firmly aligned with the West while its political order drew legitimacy from a deeply conservative religious establishment. During the Afghan war, Saudi money, Pakistani networks, and American weapons worked in the same direction.
Iran presented a different version of this relationship.
The Shah represented the preferred outcome: a powerful pro-West government on the Soviet Union's southern frontier.
But by 1978, it was collapsing.
The revolution brought several forces onto the streets. But two organised forces stood out: the socialists, including the Tudeh Party, and the Islamists around Ayatollah Khomeini.
For Washington, Khomeini was hardly an attractive option. But he possessed one important advantage over the Tudeh Party: he was anti-communist.
As the Shah's survival became increasingly doubtful, American officials explored contacts with Khomeini's movement.
The preferred pro-West option was disappearing. Between an Islamist Iran and a communist Iran, Islamists became the second-best option.
There is also evidence that US intelligence later provided information that helped Khomeini's regime identify and crush members of the Tudeh Party.
Afghanistan and Iran had demonstrated that Islamists could emerge as the second-best preference for the West. However, these same Islamist forces would eventually turn against not only the West but also forces within the Muslim world.
Across the Cold War's crucial battlegrounds, Islamists had gained strength through Western-backed anti-communist campaigns against Soviet influence.
Politics in the Muslim world had changed entirely. Of the four forces – nationalists, socialists, pro-West and Islamists – only two survived. Three of the four forces were secular.
Only one was religious – and it had been increasingly helped by the West.
The genie was out of the bottle.
Islamists had been useful not because they were pro-West, but because they were anti-Soviet. Once the Soviet threat disappeared after 1991, so did much of their strategic utility to the West.
But their ideology did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Iran provided an early warning. The Islamists with whom Washington had explored accommodation against the Soviet-backed Tudeh Party soon became one of America's fiercest adversaries.
Likewise, the weapons, money, and networks built in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet war did not simply disappear. Afghanistan descended into civil war, and the Taliban later emerged from the same broader ecosystem that the US-backed anti-Soviet campaign had helped strengthen.
Saudi Arabia presented the final paradox. One of America's closest allies had helped finance the Afghan jihad while supporting the international spread of its conservative religious establishment.
Years later, 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers turned out to be Saudi nationals.
Wherever the West accommodated, supported, or worked alongside Islamist forces, whether in Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia, the relationship eventually produced consequences not only for the Western world but for Muslims themselves.
Looking backwards, the pattern becomes clearer.
The Cold War reshaped the ideological map of the Muslim world through different means: coups against nationalists, support for insurgencies against communists, and military action where required. The vacuum left by nationalists and socialists was increasingly filled by Islamist forces.
The consequences of this strategy would eventually reach far beyond the Cold War battlefields, most dramatically on 9/11, 7/7, and 7 October. But the greatest cost would be borne by the Muslim world itself, where Islamist extremist movements would go on to kill Muslims by the hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
That Muslims themselves have been among the principal victims of Islamist extremism is enough to challenge the idea of a straight-line connection between Islam and extremism.
Political Islam is a political ideology that had little organised presence before the 1920s and limited grassroots support until the Cold War, when it was strengthened by the short-term strategy of the US and its allies. Today, the West is paying the cost of having aided this ideology, but that cost is still far smaller than the one the Muslim world has paid.
The question is not whether Islam is compatible with Western values.
The question is why an ideology which is not even compatible with Muslims was aided by West?
About the Author: Waqas M Awan is a Luxembourg-based corporate professional and the author of Power of Sage: An Anti-thesis to Machiavellian Prince. He writes on economics, geopolitics, and power systems at his Substack publication Perspectives (waqasperspective). He has held senior finance roles at Amazon, Kraft Heinz, and KPMG.
