Rising Muslim politicians do not always manage to distance themselves convincingly from violent excesses and organizations associated with their countries of origin or with fellow Muslims. Mamdani is a prime example. In 2017, he praised the so-called “Holy Land Five” in a rap song, five officials of a Muslim charity who were convicted in the US of providing material support to the terrorist organization Hamas.

As mayor of New York, Mamdani now condemns the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Whether this is taqiyya, an Islamic concept that permits believers to conceal their religious convictions under certain circumstances, or a genuine change of heart remains an open question. He nevertheless continues to voice his criticism of Israel, while also playing to supporters who make little distinction between Israel and Jews more generally.

There has been a petition, signed by nearly 100,000 people, opposing his attendance at the Ground Zero commemorations for the 2,977 victims. Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of New York at the time of the attacks, said: “Having lost friends there and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he’s coming.”

Bin Laden’s Global Jihad

Islamism has changed fundamentally since 9/11. The jihadist movement has become more decentralized and its methods more varied. At the same time, Islamists have sought to build political and social influence without violence.

Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader behind the 9/11 attacks, had ambitions far beyond New York and Washington. He aimed to globalize jihad and make the US, the “head of the snake”, its principal enemy. As early as the 1990s, al-Qaeda established links stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Bin Laden saw himself as the leader of an international jihadist confederation and in 1998 declared Americans around the world legitimate targets. The foundations were laid for what would become a "true global terrorist network".

A quarter of a century later, the old command center in Afghanistan no longer exists. US special forces killed bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, and al-Qaeda lost much of its former leadership. But the model of holy war lived on through al-Qaeda affiliates. The Islamic State, the al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) alliance in the Sahel, al-Shabaab in Somalia and other jihadist groups now operate from West Africa to Afghanistan.

A Global Jihadist Threat

The threat posed by al-Qaeda and IS is “multipolar and increasingly complex”, particularly in West Africa, the Sahel and South Asia. Yet the story is not one of relentless expansion. In 2025, deaths from terrorism worldwide fell by 28% to 5,582, the lowest figure since 2007. Almost 70% of those deaths occurred in five countries. Six of the 10 countries most affected lie in sub-Saharan Africa.

The center of jihadism has shifted. The Sahel, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan have supplanted many of the Middle East’s former jihadist hotspots. The threat has also become more diffuse and harder to track.

In 2001, al-Qaeda still needed flight schools, international travel, money transfers, terrorist camps and years of preparation to carry out an attack. Twenty-five years later, it can take little more than a smartphone, a radicalized individual and a car used as a weapon. London, Berlin, Munich, Nice and Paris have all suffered such attacks, often carried out by lone perpetrators drawing inspiration from wider ideological networks.

In 2025, the European Union recorded 45 completed, failed or foiled terrorist attacks. Twenty-four were jihadist. Of 486 terrorism-related arrests, 347 were linked to jihadism. Jihadist attacks killed five people and injured 81, while a right-wing terrorist attack caused one further death. Jihadism therefore remains the EU’s primary terrorist threat.

Islamism Without Bombs

Alongside this violent strand of Islamic expansionism in the West, European security authorities also monitor what they call “legalist Islamism”. The term refers to groups that do not resort directly to terrorist violence but seek over time to reshape the state and society according to Islamist principles.

One example is the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 and active in numerous Western countries. Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), estimated that around 1,450 people belonged to its milieu in 2024. Overall, German authorities counted 28,280 people as part of the Islamist extremist and terrorist spectrum, of whom around 9,540 were considered violence-oriented.

The German Muslim Community (DMG) is regarded as the central organization of the Muslim Brotherhood milieu in Germany. According to the BfV, it presents itself as moderate while pursuing a “strategy of exerting influence in the political and social sphere”. Its goal is to gain broader influence in society in line with Islamist ideas.

Political Islam often operates away from public view through mosques, congregations, associations, education, welfare work, youth programs and political contacts. The boundaries between moderate and extremist positions can be fluid.

In 2025, a French government report described the Muslim Brotherhood’s political strategy as “islamisation par le bas” or Islamization from below. Through da’wa, or Islamic missionary activity, as well as networks, associations and schools, the aim is to Islamize the population gradually and lay the groundwork for an Islamic social order in the longer term. At national level, however, the movement’s influence remained limited.

A British government review likewise described the Muslim Brotherhood as “primarily a political project”. Its writings envisaged the gradual transformation of Muslim societies and their political unification under Islamic law. The review found that individual members and affiliated organizations had an ambivalent relationship with the use of violence, but distinguished the Brotherhood from al-Qaeda.

Where Hamas Blurs the Lines

Hamas, the terrorist organization that has long dominated the Gaza Strip, shows how social work, politics and terrorism can overlap. The US has designated Hamas a foreign terrorist organization since 1997. The US State Department describes it as having emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas has not only recruited fighters but also operated welfare institutions, schools and clinics, run youth programs, engaged in politics and organized fundraising for the Palestinian struggle.

One of the most significant US terror-financing trials illustrates the point. Until 2001, the Holy Land Foundation was the largest Muslim charity in the US. In 2008, the foundation and five of its leaders were convicted of providing material support to Hamas. They are the same five men whom Mamdani later praised in his song. The case shows how the boundaries between charity, political office at home and terrorist organizations abroad can blur into an opaque web.

According to the Justice Department, around $12.4m flowed through the Holy Land Foundation to organizations linked to Hamas. Prosecutors also presented evidence of a fundraising network that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood milieu to raise money for Hamas.

A Muslim Mayor, Not an Islamist

England is now one of Europe’s clearest examples of politicians from Muslim backgrounds advancing through local politics and into the leadership of major cities.

London has had a Muslim mayor since 2016. Labour politician Sadiq Khan’s electoral success shows how firmly Muslim politicians have established themselves in senior office in Western cities. So far, he has provided no evidence of sympathy for political Islam. Khan condemned Hamas as a terrorist organization after 7 October and regularly commemorates the 52 people killed in the Islamist attacks on London on 7 July 2005.

The trend extends beyond England. Humza Yousaf became Scotland’s first minister in 2023 and described himself as the first Muslim leader of a Western democracy. In 2024, 25 Muslim MPs were elected to the House of Commons. Ahmed Aboutaleb, who was born in Morocco, served as mayor of Rotterdam from 2009 to 2024, becoming the first Muslim mayor in the Netherlands.

Where political platforms specifically target Muslim voters, the trend becomes more pronounced. In Brussels, Team Fouad Ahidar won three seats in the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region at its first election in 2024. Ahidar campaigned for headscarves to be allowed in the public sector and for ritual slaughter without stunning. He also sought a place in the regional government. He denies that he leads a Muslim party. Opponents accuse him of giving religion a greater role in politics.

Houellebecq’s Submission

Conditions in Western cities are still far removed from the scenario imagined in Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission. In the book, Mohammed Ben Abbes, leader of a fictional Muslim Brotherhood party, reaches the second round of the French presidential election. Socialists and center-right parties back him against Marine Le Pen, the real-life politician cast in the novel as the standard-bearer of the right.

Ben Abbes enters the Élysée Palace and gradually reshapes France according to Islamic principles. He does so not through force but through mounting cultural pressure: polygamy returns, established women’s rights are eroded and men are favored. The new order also turns out to be unexpectedly attractive to many Western men.

Houellebecq’s novel is fiction, but it touches on a real question. Muslim voters make up significant shares of the electorate in major Western cities, Muslim politicians reach the highest offices, and parties seek to translate religious interests into parliamentary power. Whether that amounts to ordinary democratic representation or political Islam depends on the ends being pursued.

At a fundamental level, Western and Islamic conceptions of the state diverge over the source of political legitimacy. Immanuel Kant placed autonomous reason above religious tradition and insisted on freedom of public dissent even in matters of faith. For Western democracies, that has long been a norm beyond dispute.

Quran, Sunna and the Secular State

Classical Islam, by contrast, recognizes the Quran and Sunna as a revealed normative order from which rules governing society and law have developed, without religion and state being divided into two independent spheres. Unlike Europe, the Islamic world did not undergo a comparable process of secularization, one that in the Christian West ultimately subordinated divine law to the sovereign legislation of the secular state.

Austria is currently debating constitutional changes as Chancellor Christian Stocker seeks to ban political Islam. That leaves him, like other critics of Islam, facing a difficult question: where does spiritual Islam end and political, or even extremist, Islam begin?

Muslim reform thinkers have also sought to establish such a distinction on theological grounds. In doing so, they are seeking to reform an inherited relationship between religion, law and politics rather than simply continuing a process of secularization that Western political thought regards as self-evident. From this perspective, Islam in every conceivable form remains a pre-modern worldview.

Al-Qaeda, IS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Hamas and a Muslim social-democratic mayor are not variants of the same organization, but they nevertheless represent different manifestations and possibilities of the same Islam. Jihadists and legalist Islamists differ over violence and methods – but not over their goal of an Islamic society.

The basic problem remains. The secular order is not regarded as the end point. Expanding the ummah, the worldwide Muslim community, means ultimately bringing religion and state back together and subordinating secular law to Islamic norms or sharia.

German domestic intelligence authorities describe this conflict, in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, as incompatible with popular sovereignty and the free democratic basic order, the central principles of Germany’s constitutional system.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, jihadist terrorism has become more global and organizationally diverse. At the same time, security authorities have documented Islamist movements seeking to expand their social and political influence without violence. Both branches of Islamism pursue the same goal: to make Islam the dominant force in the West.