As the rise of Islam in the West continues to dominate headlines, there’s a crucial reality many are overlooking: Muslims in the West are more “radical” than Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa. Why? Because they simply get to practice Islam in its full capacity. They are being wholly Muslim, unlike their brothers and sisters under Islamic dictatorships, who face rulers who permit them to practice Islam as long as it does not threaten their political authority.
The evidence is striking. A 2015 report found that about 16,000 jihadists from the Middle East and North Africa went to fight with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. That region has about 414 million Muslims, 94 percent of its population. Western Europe, where Muslims numbered about 26 million in 2016, less than 5 percent of the population, produced more than 5,000. That is one jihadist for every 25,000 or so Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, and one for every 5,000 in Western Europe, more than four times the rate.
The gap widens in individual countries. Belgium, with about 860,000 Muslims in 2016, produced roughly 500 jihadists, one for every 1,700. France, with 5.7 million Muslims, produced about 1,700, one for every 3,400. Indonesia, with about 239 million Muslims in 2020, produced about 600, one for every 400,000. Belgium’s rate is roughly two hundred times Indonesia’s.
A study coordinated by Germany’s federal criminal police found that, in 2025, 23.8 percent of Muslims in Germany called an Islamic theocracy the best form of government, up from 18.7 percent in 2021, and 25.1 percent put the rules of the Quran above German law. In France, 24 percent of Muslims told Institut français d’opinion publique (IFOP) they sympathize with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founder called restoring the caliphate an obligation on every Muslim.
Muslims in the West are a small minority in rich, safe, free countries. Muslims in the Islamic world are the majority, and Islam runs their courts, their schools, and their calendars. The second group should be the more militant one. The first is, by a wide margin. So what is happening? Why does Islam in the West, at a fraction of the numbers, produce more jihad per head than the Muslim world does?
Islam on a Leash
For 13 centuries Islam divided the world into the House of Islam and the House of War. Jihad was a divine duty of Muslims, led by the ruler. Peoples who surrendered paid the jizya and lived as dhimmis, and those who refused were fought. Jihad was the foreign policy doctrine of the Islamic Caliphate since the days of Muhammad. The last caliph to officially use this doctrine was Sultan Mehmed V, who in November 1914 proclaimed jihad against Britain, France, and Russia and called on Muslims everywhere to rise.
On March 3, 1924, Turkey abolished the caliphate, and the governments that subsequently took control of Muslim lands kept the shell while abandoning the doctrines. They did not retain jihad, dhimma, or the full application of Sharia law. Yet these countries are called Islamic, while the thousands of Islamic groups that emerged after the caliphate’s fall to continue jihad until Allah’s rule is established over the entire Earth were given a label of Western invention: “Islamism.”
Under Muslim dictatorships, Islam is permitted where it serves the ruler and suppressed where it threatens him. The regime keeps the religious restrictions, the conservative customs, and the demands for personal obedience. It allows Islam to govern people’s clothing, relationships, and private conduct, but refuses to let an independent Islamic movement decide who has the right to rule. The ruler wants the population controlled by Islam without having his own authority challenged by it.
That’s why those Muslim rulers can wage war against Islamic terrorism even though they are Muslims: Because for these rulers, not for their people, trying to impose an Islamic political order is terrorism, and anyone among their people who says otherwise gets punished. Yet their people, just like the rulers themselves, know that establishing an Islamic political order is the heart of Islam, but they can’t say it openly out of fear. Those who try to accomplish it indirectly, like the Muslim Brotherhood, get banned, and those who try to establish it directly face war.
Take the leash off and see what Muslims in the Islamic world will do. In Egypt, the moment the dictator fell in 2011, 13.2 million Egyptians voted for the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate in a country where elections were controlled by the army, the same army that removed the Muslim Brotherhood’s president a year later.
When Assad’s authority collapsed across much of Syria, almost all those who could joined Islamic terrorist groups: tens of thousands of them, spread across a thousand units by 2014.
The fall of Saddam Hussein showed the world what happens when Muslims are no longer suppressed by a dictator and get to choose which version of Islam they believe in.
In Jordan, four members of parliament visited Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s family home after he was killed to mourn him and call him a martyr, while hundreds of mourners flocked to the tent. This was the man who had bombed three Amman hotels the year before and killed Jordanians. If it weren’t for fear, thousands would have gone to mourn al-Zarqawi.
Islamism is simply Islam practiced in freedom.
Islam Off the Leash
In the West, Islam has room to pursue the political ambitions that Muslim dictators keep under lock and key. A movement banned in its country of origin can establish an organization in London, recruit followers, raise money, and preach that Allah’s law must govern society. The ruler who would have jailed its leaders is gone. In his place stands a democracy that protects their right to organize, without examining what they are organizing to achieve.
Muslims in the West use everything democracy hands them to expand the true Islam that is suppressed in the Islamic countries, and then they make sure anyone in their way pays for it. Examine Sharia, or the Islamic justification for violence, and you will spend your time defending yourself against accusations of bigotry while nobody addresses what you actually said. Muslims ask for religious freedom and use it as a shield. They ask for a seat at the democratic table when the goal is to destroy democracy.
Add to that the effort to keep Muslim children insulated from the society around them. Twenty years ago, I remember Muslim families in the West returning to their home countries when their children reached adolescence because the parents feared what Western freedom would do to them. That’s why many state and non-state Islamic players started building mosques, religious schools, and community centers to provide an environment in which children remained surrounded by the authority their parents feared losing. These institutions became ideological fortresses, teaching young Muslims the true Islam their parents were prevented from practicing back home.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
Danny Burmawi is the founder and CEO of the Ideological Defense Institute (IDI), and he is the author of "Islam, Israel and the West."