In New York City, just one week before it voted for its first Muslim mayor in history, British columnist Melanie Phillips declared that “the West is facing a death cult in the forces of Islam.” The remark, reiterated repeatedly by British, European, American and Israeli voices, was made at a conference titled “Rage Against the Hate,” ironically patterned after the anti-racist 1990s band Rage Against the Machine, known for its politically active anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist members who openly protested state violence.
By contrast, the conference represented the opposite axis of contemporary power: a platform aligned with state-security narratives, geopolitical propaganda, and a worldview that pathologises the very populations Rage Against the Machine defended.
The statement drew approving nods—it didn’t require evidence despite being historically unfounded. Such a sentence does not stand alone; it condenses a worldview built since the Second World War through war, repression, and the recasting of Islam as a civilisational threat.
The remark is not interesting in itself; what matters is the architecture that made it legible, even comforting to an audience that sees no problem in labelling a global religion as inherently homicidal. The same audience and commentator also accept other ahistorical claims such as “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” or that people of European origins have a historical claim to the Holy Land.
The appropriation of the progressive band’s name for a conference preaching opposing politics is revealing.
The architecture that made the remark palatable, is composed of an antagonistic political, ideological, military, and institutional structure concealed behind a façade of a distorted notion of liberalism and speech “against hate.” And it has produced an environment in which “Islam is a death cult” feels like a diagnosis rather than a reversal of reality.
The Saudi laboratory
The transformation of Saudi Arabia over the last decade is often framed as a story of modernisation or liberalisation. School textbooks have been revised, certain passages and historical episodes removed or softened, and religious institutions brought under tighter central control. These changes did not respond to popular demands for reform so much as foreign ones, intended to pave the way for eventual normalisation with Israel.
American and Israeli commentators have celebrated these changes as “historic reforms.”
Yet, these reforms are inseparable from a broader project: the political disarmament of Islam in the very territory from which it originated.
The Saudi state has aggressively restructured religious life. Independent scholars have been side-lined, sermons regulated, and religious doctrine channelled through state-sanctioned narratives.
Parallel to this ideological consolidation is the spectacle of liberalisation: concerts in al-ʿUlā, carefully curated art festivals devoid of politics, entertainment districts, concerts by American pop stars, and a push to introduce alcohol beyond diplomatic circuits—all to rapidly align Saudi identity with a global pattern established elsewhere, the religious distinction of the country marginalised.
History has been marked unsafe, but consumption encouraged; religious depth is threatening, but superficial openness is marketable. The result is a population that feels culturally Muslim while being severed from Islam’s ethical and political vocabulary—a pattern seen earlier in post-Ottoman Turkey. Saudi reforms do not abolish Islam but drain it of political force, turning it into ritual and costume.
Erasing Islam by other means
If Saudi represents rapid reform, Egypt represents sustained suppression. The 2013 military coup that removed the country’s first democratically elected president had unleashed a campaign that treated Islamic political identity as treason.
The Rabaa massacre was not simply an event; it was a manifesto. It announced that the state was willing to kill its own citizens on an industrial scale to eliminate Islamic political agency.
What followed was systematic. Tens of thousands imprisoned. Islamic organisations dissolved. Activists disappeared. Academics silenced. Imams monitored. Sermons standardised. The Waqf (religious endowment system) lingers in paralysis. Religious discourse reduced to state-authored scripts delivered weekly in mosques stripped of autonomy. Leadership of Islamic parties with large constituencies was imprisoned or executed.
What began as a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, metastasized into a campaign against any form of Islamic expression not curated by the regime.
But Egypt’s war on Islamic identity extended beyond bodies and institutions. It became spatial, architectural, physical. Not only were the contemporary spaces of banned parties and organisations confiscated or destroyed, but historic sites that testify to Egypt’s long Islamic history were dismantled and demolished, including minarets and mausolea.
This is erasure: the destruction of environments that hold Islamic memory, the bulldozer becomes an instrument of ideological engineering, not just in Cairo but in the West Bank, China, India and beyond.
At the same time a monumental mosque was built in the desert in the new capital with total disregard to Egypt’s rich and historically significant heritage of Islamic architecture. The void created by eliminating Islamic visibility in education, charity, and political activity was filled by pyramid-side electronic music concerts during the unfolding genocide.
These measures build on decades when political Islam was scrutinised under Mubarak, when even growing a beard could land someone in the offices of state security. This has been imposed with the support and demands of the US and Israel.
The suppression did not emerge suddenly after 9/11. In the mid-1990s, Egyptian thinker Mustafa Mahmoud—one of the country’s most popular public intellectuals—fell afoul of geopolitical sensitivities after publishing books critical of Israel. The Anti-Defamation League sent a formal complaint to the Egyptian regime demanding Mahmoud be silenced; by 1999, the state complied, and he spent the last decade of his life isolated.
In the 1960s, he was also silenced by Nasser, who targeted or executed thinkers framed as Islamist. The suppression has outlasted regimes and transformed from one president to the next, nearly always with foreign direction, publicly or privately communicated.
Mahmoud was not an Islamist. He was not militant. He was not a threat. He was simply a Muslim intellectual whose critique crossed an invisible line. His fate demonstrates that long before the war on terror, mechanisms already existed to suppress Islamic thought when it conflicted with Western or Israeli interests, or when it merely invigorated public discourse or intellectual life in Egypt.
The geopolitics of smear
While Saudi and Egypt focus on internal containment, the UAE—which enthusiastically embraced normalisation with Israel through billions of dollars in contracts and shared military training—has developed a specialty in exporting suspicion.
Over the last decade, the UAE has financed transnational campaigns to label Muslim NGOs, scholars, charities, and civic organisations in Europe and beyond as “extremist” or “Islamist,” often using defamatory dossiers compiled by private intelligence firms.
These documents—frequently unverified, sometimes fabricated—have circulated in European ministries, security briefings, media outlets, and think-tanks. In many cases, they shaped government policy and public narrative.
Muslim civil-society groups found themselves isolated, delegitimised, or raided based on reports funded by a Gulf monarchy with a clear ideological agenda. An example of these smears is the case of UAE operative Amjad Taha who pushed fabricated “extremism” claims about Islamic Relief on UK media—claims so false the broadcasters had to publicly retract them and pay damages.
The UAE’s project seems straightforward: weaken Islamic political expression everywhere, especially in the West, where Muslim civic institutions remain relatively independent. By blurring the distinction between Islam, Islamism, extremism, and terrorism, the UAE helps construct a European and North American environment in which the mere presence of Muslims is treated as a threat.
The moral bankruptcy of the UAE that produces such smears is encapsulated in the “Dubai Porta Potty” revelations. This is the soil in which the “death cult” accusation grows. It is not born from ignorance; it is cultivated by states that depend on Islam’s sterilisation.
Institutionalising suspicion
In the US, the machinery of Islamophobia became structural after 9/11, embedded not as an exception but as policy. Surveillance programs, the Patriot Act, and “counter-radicalisation” schemes normalised the idea that Muslim identity itself constituted a risk category. This framework produced a two-decade pattern in which mosques, student groups, charities, individuals, and community organisations were subjected to disproportionate monitoring.
The FBI’s use of paid informants and manufactured plots—targeting vulnerable individuals to produce “terrorism” cases—became standard practice, creating a pipeline of fear and spectacle rather than security.
The Trump administration’s 2017 “Muslim ban” made explicit what had already existed: that travel, family reunification, and refugee status could be denied on the basis of religion and national origin alone. Its legal codification, later upheld by the Supreme Court, signalled to the wider public that Muslims were an inherently suspect population.
The effects were immediate: documented spikes in anti-Muslim hate crimes—often undercounted or ignored by law enforcement—airport profiling, employment discrimination, and the stigmatisation of Muslim civic participation. Civil-rights groups such as CAIR themselves became targets of state-level attacks, legislative harassment, and defunding campaigns—illustrating that even organisations advocating for constitutional rights could be recast as threats.
Crucially, these policies were not confined to one political camp. Islamophobia in the US is bipartisan. Democratic and Republican administrations alike engaged in anti-Islamic repression, and participated in the transnational effort—led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—to equate Islamic political expression with extremism.
Manufactured militancy, engineered wars
Any conversation about “Islamic extremism” that treats it as an organic feature of Islam ignores the extent to which Western and regional intelligence services have shaped the militant landscape for half a century.
The anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s—funded by the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan—created an unprecedented transnational network of fighters, logistics, and ideology. This was a Cold War project, not a theological eruption. The infrastructure built for that war later became the ecosystem from which post-9/11 militant groups emerged.
Israel’s policies in Gaza during the 1980s follow the same logic: in an effort to weaken the PLO, it tolerated and indirectly strengthened Islamic charities that later formed the nucleus of Hamas.
In Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s transformation from al-Qaeda commander to a Western-courted “local actor” reveals how flexible these labels become when geopolitics demands it. And throughout the region, the majority of those killed by so-called “Islamist” groups have been Muslims—further undermining the notion that these movements reflect a civilisational impulse rather than a political field shaped by foreign states, ultimately for imperialist ends.
This manufactured landscape was then used to legitimise the largest continuous sequence of wars in modern Middle Eastern history. The US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the Syrian proxy war, the blockade of Yemen, and the ongoing devastation of Gaza constitute the dominant architecture of organised mass killing in the 21ST century.
Taken together, these wars and interventions have killed well over four million people since 2001, the vast majority of them Muslim civilians. These were geopolitical campaigns carried out by nation-states—American, British, Israeli, Russian, Turkish, Emirati, Saudi, Iranian—under a civilisational narrative that cast Islam itself as the source of global disorder.
Seen against this backdrop, describing Islam as a “death cult” is not merely wrong—it is an inversion. The overwhelming force reshaping the region has been state violence, not scripture. Islam is blamed for the consequences of wars waged overwhelmingly against Muslims.
From Islamists to ordinary Muslims
The conflict between Islam and the powers that smear it is ultimately economic and structural. Islam’s moral and legal order rejects what modern capitalism depends on—usury, predatory debt, wealth concentration, speculation, and the reduction of society to a market. Its ethics constrain power and hierarchy, posing a threat to elites who rely on inequality and compliant populations.
A religion that forbids debt servitude, demands fair distribution, ties wealth to responsibility, and resists excess cannot be absorbed into global capitalism. It must therefore be recast as harmless ritual or dangerous extremism.
Across Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Europe, and the US, the pattern is consistent: Political Islam criminalised, practicing Muslims scrutinised, civic organisations smeared, and finally Islam itself is recast by self-described liberals as a “death cult.”
This is securitisation’s elasticity: once a category is marked dangerous, its boundaries steadily expand, and the political and financial incentives for doing so grow. Eventually, the label engulfs the religion itself.
This is why a room of educated professionals in New York can hear Islam described as a “death cult” and nod along. Two decades of policy, propaganda, and geopolitical design have trained them to see not a civilisation, but a pathology.
What the conference claims to “rage against” is precisely what it reproduces: a system that projects its own violence onto the people it targets, then regurgitates that projection back to the public as liberalism or courage, whichever label sells that day.
Mohamed Elshahed is a writer, curator, and critic of architecture, his work extends to design and material culture. He is the author of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, 2020) and of Rebellious Things: A History of Modern Egypt in Objects (forthcoming). Mohamed was a 2023 Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington DC. In 2023-2024 he was a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris.
Follow Mohamed on Instagram: @rebellious_things_book
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