What Is Islamo-Socialism? – OpEd
One of the more curious tendencies of the modern Western left—which claims to defend gender equality, pluralism, and secular democratic governance—is its knee-jerk defense of radical Islam. In fact, the further left the group, the more predictably it defends theocratic Muslim states that encourage violence against women, criminalize homosexuality, and outlaw free expression. Here on U.S. soil, increasing Muslim immigration, irrespective of the cultural attitudes held by given migrant groups, has become another boilerplate Democratic party cause. This contradictory ideological hybrid can best be described as Islamo-socialism: the merging of Islamist identity politics with socialist theories of power, grievance, and redistribution.
Islam has indeed become left-coded in Western politics. Most progressives know little about the religion or the geopolitical context surrounding most Muslim nations, but still treat Muslims as a protected identity group within a broader oppression narrative. Muslims get categorized alongside other perceived victims of Western power—regardless of the ideas that they themselves hold.
Aside from the critique of Western foreign policy, these leftists cherrypick Islamic thought to fit their own brand of totalitarianism. The religion becomes a convenient platform, and Muslims another demographic, through which to push grievance hierarchies, intolerance of dissent, and, of course, wealth redistribution. This framing is aggressively third-worldist, pitting the Global South against the decadent First World. Ultimately, it is a critique of the West itself: its individualism, markets, and freedoms.
This tendency is not rooted in classical Islamic tradition. The Quran and early Islamic jurisprudence contain robust support for commerce and private property. The Prophet Muhammad himself worked as a caravan merchant and married Khadijah, a prominent businesswoman who employed him to manage her trading ventures. Mecca and Medina were major commercial centers linking Arabian caravan routes to global markets. The Quran explicitly commands believers not to extract wealth from each other illegally, but to “trade by mutual consent” (4:29). Numerous hadith also praise honest commerce; and Islamic law, rather than eliminating markets, encourages them, while developing sophisticated financial instruments such as profit-sharing joint ventures to avoid usury.
Some Muslim-majority societies today practice free enterprise arguably more than Western ones do. The Gulf states—especially the United Arab Emirates—have low taxes, minimal regulation, open trade, and welcome foreign investment. Southeast Asia contains the world’s largest Muslim populations, with countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia having developed vibrant market economies with expanding halal industries, Islamic banking systems, and rising middle classes. Malaysia in particular has become a global hub for sharia-compliant finance, which replaces interest-based lending with asset-backed transactions and profit-sharing structures such as murabaha and sukuk. In Singapore, Muslims comprise roughly 16% of the population and operate comfortably as a minority within one of the world’s most market-oriented, pluralistic societies. These examples show that Islam and capitalism, in its various iterations, can overlap.
Islam also shares surface-level rhetorical similarities with socialism—much as Christianity and other faiths do when interpreted through a political lens. Both traditions speak of justice for the oppressed, critique greed, and envision a moral community united against exploitation. Verses on zakat (obligatory almsgiving) or warnings against hoarding wealth can be framed as calls for state-managed redistribution. For this reason, some twentieth-century Muslim intellectuals in Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere experimented with blending Quranic moral teaching with Marxist concepts of class struggle. Just as liberation theology recast Christ as a revolutionary against Roman oppression, some modern activists portray the Prophet Muhammad as an anti-colonial figure.
Modern Islamo-socialism takes this further, fusing two totalitarian impulses: religious dogmatism’s demand for total submission and socialism’s coercive machinery of the state.
In the U.S., figures like New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani have openly blended socialist economic ideology with activist rhetoric centered on Muslim identity. One day he is trying to raise taxes and freeze rents; the next, he is calling to boycott Israel and performing Islamic rituals in Gracie Mansion.
Another recent story out of New York City showed the illiberal outcomes that surface from combining secular and religious absolutism. Councilwoman Vickie Paladino has criticized Islam and its growing role in the city’s public spaces. For that she was charged with an ethics violation by a council committee, and is now suing on behalf of her 1st Amendment rights.
The massive charity fraud scandal in Minnesota offers another example. Federal prosecutors have charged dozens of defendants—mostly of Somali or Somali-American descent—in a scheme that siphoned hundreds of millions off of nonprofits such as Feeding Our Future. Much of the money was spent on luxury cars, real estate, and overseas transfers. Attempts to criticize the perpetrators, who represent a reliable Democratic voting bloc in Minnesota, were framed as bigotry, with Tim Walz calling them “vile, racist lies.”
A third example has been the Israel-Palestine conflict. After the October 7th, 2023 terrorist attack, and even before Israel launched its brutal counter-attack, American leftists who would presumably have little dog in the fight quickly took sides for Palestine, in some cases even attacking Jews at protests. It’s as if the racial and class optics of the situation were enough of a basis to pick sides.
The logical endpoint of this tendency is playing out in Europe. Following the massive and largely unchecked intake of refugees in the mid-2010s, parallel societies have emerged in parts of Britain, Sweden, and France, where authorities are increasingly urged to defer to sharia practices or overlook deeply troubling cultural patterns.
In Britain’s Rotherham scandal, authorities failed for years to intervene in organized child exploitation rings largely because officials feared accusations of racism or Islamophobia. In France, the term Islamo-gauchisme (“Islamo-leftism”) has entered the political lexicon to describe the alliance between radical leftists and Islamist networks that has fueled riots and no-go zones. Yet any pushback—whether from native citizens or moderate Muslims—is branded hate speech, sometimes punishable by fines or prison. This silencing tactic is straight from the Marxist playbook: control the language, criminalize dissent, and expand state power in the name of the oppressed.
What unites these examples is not actual religious devotion, or anyone’s personal relationship with God. This is power masquerading as religion, with political actors in both the Islamic and secular left communities overlooking their differences to build a coalition against capitalism and Western values. Putting a name to it—Islamo-socialism—is the first step toward resisting it and producing alternative interpretations of what Islam actually teaches.
- This article was published by the Independent Institute