Islam Was the First Ideology

A Rebuttal to The Enchantment of the Arab Mind by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s article “The Enchantment of the Arab Mind” is, in essence, a sophisticated rescue mission: an attempt to save Islam from its offspring. He diagnoses the Arab world’s decay not as the natural consequence of Islam’s doctrines, but as a tragic psychological reaction, an “enchantment” with Western ideologies. In his telling, Islamism is not an organic product of Islam, but a postmodern performance: Frankenstein monster was born out of German idealism, Romantic nihilism, Marxist utopianism, and Heideggerian despair. Islam, he suggests, was caught in the blast radius of Western metaphysical failure.

This narrative is seductive. It flatters Western readers by making their ideas, however distorted, the center of Arab history. It flatters Muslim readers by implying that the dysfunction of their societies is not inherent in Islam, but caused by ideological “infection.” And it provides the secular Arab dissident with a noble task: to de-enchant the Arab mind, to free it from delusions and return it to reason.

But the thesis is wrong, dangerously so.

Islamism is not a mutation of Islam. It is its reenactment. The Arab mind is not a victim of Heidegger, it is the product of Muhammad’s epistemological regime. The totalitarianism of Islamism was not inspired by Hegel or Marx or Nietzsche; it was pioneered by the Quran and Hadith, which fused law, revelation, politics, war, and identity into a single unassailable authority. Islam does not mimic ideology. Islam is the first ideology.

Islam as the First Totalitarian Ideology

To understand why Mansour’s framework collapses, we must begin with a simple question: what is an ideology? In its modern sense, an ideology is a totalizing system of ideas that claims to explain the world, define good and evil, dictate political authority, and guide collective identity. It is not merely a worldview, it is a blueprint for the subjugation of reality to a set of unquestionable axioms. By this definition, Islam was not only an ideology, it was the prototype of ideology.

Mansour tries to frame Islamism as a distortion of Islam’s “original” essence. But what was that essence? From the hijra in 622 AD to the Prophet’s death in 632, Muhammad transformed a monotheistic preaching movement into a theocratic state. In Medina, religion became law. Revelation became governance. Opposition became treason. Apostasy became a death sentence. The Quran addressed military strategy, taxation, inheritance, penal codes, and warfare. The Prophet acted as judge, warlord, treasurer, and legislator. This was the birth of a total system.

In this regard, Islam differs categorically from both Christianity and Judaism. Jesus never governed. Moses did, but Jewish law remained tribal and limited in scope. Islam, by contrast, universalized its claim: submission to Allah must encompass the individual, the tribe, and the state. There is no “Caesar” in Islam. There is only God, and his viceroy on Earth, the caliph.

This fusion of theology and politics is the hallmark of ideology. It anticipates Rousseau’s “general will,” Hegel’s rational state, Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat, and Heidegger’s ontological volk. Where modern ideologues used secular language, history, race, class, Islam used divine revelation. But the structure is the same: a monopoly on truth, enforced by law, sanctified by metaphysics.

Islamism is not an imitation of modernity. It is a return to Islam’s original ideological structure.

The Quranic Epistemology and the Death of the Arab Mind

Mansour laments the loss of rationality in the Arab world. He attributes this to colonial trauma, failed Westernization, and the adoption of postmodern theories. But the true epistemological break occurred far earlier, at the level of scripture.

The Quran does not invite rational inquiry. It demands submission. The very name “Islam” means “submission.” The believer is not encouraged to investigate truth through logic or empirical observation, but to obey divine commands without question. The Quranic view of knowledge is vertical, truth descends from above, not discovered from below.

Reason is tolerated only when it aligns with revelation. The classical Ash‘ari theology, which dominated Sunni orthodoxy, explicitly denied natural causality. Al-Ghazali rejected the idea that fire burns by nature; it burns only because God causes it to burn. Logic, mathematics, and philosophy were tolerated as long as they served theology, but anathematized when they contradicted it.

The Mu‘tazila, rationalist theologians in the early Abbasid period, were ultimately crushed. Their attempt to harmonize faith and reason was declared heretical. Even great minds like Averroes (Ibn Rushd) were marginalized and their works burned. The Islamic tradition closed the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) by the 10th century. What followed was a thousand-year civilizational freeze.

The Arab mind was not “bewitched” by foreign ideologies. It was paralyzed by a sacred text that equated doubt with sin and inquiry with rebellion. Western postmodernism did not kill Arab rationality, it simply entered a space where rationality had already been executed.

Islamism and Postmodernism: Brothers, Not Strangers

Mansour insists that Islamism is “postmodern in form” and theatrical in substance, a copy of Western ideological pathology.

Postmodernism is the rejection of objective truth, the disintegration of meaning, and the reduction of all discourse to power games. Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard deconstructed the Enlightenment project. In doing so, they unleashed a nihilism in which identity replaced reason, and narratives replaced facts.

This is precisely what Islam accomplished over a millennium earlier.

• Islam denies objective history: there is only what is sanctioned by the Quran and sira.

• Islam reduces morality to obedience: good is what Allah commands, evil is what He forbids.

• Islam replaces logic with loyalty: the believer is rewarded not for understanding, but for submission.

• Islam eradicates individuality: there is no self, only umma.

Islamism and postmodernism rhyme. Both are systems built on total relativism: Islam in the name of divine sovereignty, postmodernism in the name of power. Both are hostile to universal reason. Both construct totalizing narratives that brook no dissent. Islamists didn’t borrow this structure from the West, they inherited it from the Prophet.

The claim that Islamism is an “orientalized” mimicry of Western radicalism is not correct. Islamism did not adopt postmodernism. If anything, postmodernism adopted Islam’s ancient posture: truth is whatever the sovereign declares it to be.

Why the “De-Enchantment” Thesis Fails

Mansour ends his article with a call for “de-enchantment”, a romantic return to rationality, humility, and spiritual clarity.

First, this presumes that the Arab mind was once disenchanted, once free, rational, self-aware. There is no evidence of this. Even in the pre-Islamic jahiliyya period, Arab societies were tribal, fatalistic, and resistant to abstraction. Islam did not destroy a flourishing rational culture. It simply weaponized its absence.

Second, it assumes that the Islamic tradition can be gently rehabilitated. It cannot. The Quran is not compatible with Enlightenment values. It declares war on reason, pluralism, and freedom. The hadith sanction violence, misogyny, and autocracy. The fiqh codifies these into eternal law. There is no “soft” path to reform. There is only rupture.

Third, the enchantment metaphor obscures the nature of the problem. If the Arab mind is enchanted, it can be awakened. But if it is structurally programmed by scripture, then awakening is not enough, it must be deprogrammed.

Apostasy or Stagnation

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour offers a brilliant analysis of the symptoms but misdiagnoses the disease. His essay is not dishonest, it is insufficient. By blaming the Arab malaise on Western ideologies, he overlooks the far more foundational problem: Islam itself.

Islam was the first ideology. It combined metaphysics, politics, law, and identity into a single totalizing structure. Islamism is not its corruption but its revival. The Arab mind was not enchanted by the West, it was colonized by the Quran. The Arab world is not suffering from ideological mimicry, it is suffocating under the weight of its original software.

The way forward is not enchantment or de-enchantment. It is apostasy, intellectual, moral, and political. Not individual apostasy alone, but collective civilizational apostasy from Islam’s epistemology, anthropology, and theology. Anything less is recycling the problem in new packaging.

Mansour seeks to save the Arab mind. But the Arab mind cannot be saved without first being liberated, from Islam.

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