How Hardliners Win in Chaos?

In periods of revolutionary upheaval, Islamist hardliners often begin by cooperating with moderate or libertarian-leaning groups. Once stability weakens and institutions erode, these alliances are systematically abandoned, allowing hardliners to consolidate power for themselves. Chaos provides the opening; moral certainty provides the weapon.

After orthodox and power-driven actors seize control of a movement, many moderate Muslims - often personally tolerant and uneasy with extremist actions - find themselves unable to resist. Their attachment to faith, combined with intense social pressure, discourages open opposition. Those who do resist face physical assault, exile, imprisonment, or social boycott, frequently justified through accusations of blasphemy or apostasy. As a result, individual tolerance within society does little to prevent the emergence of totalitarian control by hardliners.

A key ideological assumption underlying such movements is the belief that moral behavior can be legislated, enforced, and punished into existence. This leads to systems of morality policing, public shaming, harsh penalties, gender segregation, religious surveillance, and broad social enforcement. Power, once obtained, demands continual moral regulation to sustain itself.

Even when hardliners are granted their full list of demands, the process does not end. If religious authorities are allowed to define all societal failures and the state enacts every prescribed reform, new grievances soon emerge. Within a short time, fresh demands appear, accompanied by renewed internal pressure. Moral regulation becomes an expanding project rather than a completed one.

Individual moral failures are rarely treated as personal responsibility. Instead, blame is externalized—often toward the West or foreign cultural influence - reinforcing a perpetual sense of siege. This narrative sustains unity by defining corruption as external and virtue as internal.

Followers must also be convinced that enemies can be defeated. Through shifting rhetoric, opponents are portrayed as simultaneously overwhelming and contemptibly weak. This contradiction fuels mobilization while undermining objective assessment, a structural flaw common to authoritarian and fascist movements that ultimately leads to strategic failure.

Most insidious, however, are the so-called True Believers. They are not overtly aggressive and often act with sincere intentions. Quietly, they promote collectivist norms and moral conformity, gradually marginalizing individualistic behavior. Through denial of dissent and unquestioning belief, they help construct a society that excludes difference without appearing coercive. In times of chaos, such actors provide the social glue that allows hardliners not only to rise - but to endure.

The funny thing is replacing Islam with Communism, and all the logic will still appear to be true.

There was a great Marxist named Lenin, who did two or three million men in. That's a lot to have done in, but where he did one in, that great Marxist Stalin did ten in. - Robert Conquest.