I did not come to Islam through theology. I came to it through fear, threat and hatred directed at me and the world I live in. I think the first time I became aware of something called Islam was in 1989, when Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’ for writing his novel, The Satanic Verses. Images of furious men immolating books spread around the world and seared themselves into my childhood mind, fixing fear and confusion to something I did not yet know how to name. My father, a bookseller, insisted on continuing to sell the book, but decided, soberly, that it would have to be kept behind the checkout desk, available only if a customer asked for it by name.

My exposure to Islam grew as I did – through bombings justified in God’s name, through chants that promised erasure of my coreligionists, through the casual way anti-Semitism travelled across borders and languages wearing religious dress. Like many non-Muslim westerners of my generation, my first encounters with Islam were not in a library or a classroom but in the shadow cast by violence: the planes of September 11th, the suicide bombings of the early 2000s, the long years of jihadist attacks in Europe, and now October 7th and what followed. That history does not grant me or anyone else moral authority, but it does impose on us a responsibility. When an ideology repeatedly intrudes into people’s life uninvited, through bloodshed and intimidation, indifference ceases to be a neutral position.

Jews carry an inherited memory of what happens when a minority faith is blamed, caricatured, or collectively indicted, and liberal societies are built, rightly, on restraint, on the instinct to protect belief from suspicion. Criticising another minority’s religion feels perilously close to betraying those instincts. But October 7th and its aftermath intensified an inquiry that had already been running quietly for years. I have reported from the scenes of Islamic terror attacks around the world, from London Bridge to the Manchester Arena, the Bataclan and Le Petit Cambodge to the Brussels Metro, from Tel Aviv, Kibbutz Be’eri and others in between. As the cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ echoed in the air, mass murder was followed by celebration. Children and journalists were murdered for satire or music. Rape was followed by denial. Jewish deaths were followed by caveats. Slogans promising elimination were waved away as metaphor. Attacks on non-Muslims in western cities were treated as regrettable spillover rather than ideological consequence. Again and again came the reassurance: this isn’t Islam.

The claim itself is familiar and authoritative. Islamism, we are told, has nothing to do with Islam. Extremists are impostors. Their violence represents a distortion of a peaceful faith. Western leaders across liberal democracies have insisted on this distinction for more than two decades. In 2001, speaking at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., George W. Bush declared: ‘The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.’ In 2014, Barack Obama declared that ‘Isil is not Islamic’. Theresa May spoke of ‘a perversion of Islam’ after the London Bridge attack. Emmanuel Macron described Islamist separatism as ‘a political ideology’ distinct from the religion itself. Anthony Albanese’s language after the Bondi Beach attack likewise emphasised unity and condemned extremist violence, framing the incident in terms of violent ideology, rather than detailed theological distinction.

This reassurance signals decency. It protects innocent believers from collective blame. It allows plural societies to breathe. But as an explanation, it is weak. Comforting language becomes fragile when it cannot bear explanatory weight. Islamism has emerged repeatedly across continents, cultures and generations. It has done so in majority-Muslim states and minority diasporas, in conditions of poverty and relative prosperity, under dictatorships and within democracies. It survives military defeat and rhetorical condemnation. An account that treats this recurrence as accidental strains credibility. An explanation that requires redefining millions of self-identified Muslims out of their own religion sidesteps the phenomenon.

Even many Muslims who oppose extremism reject that move. Several reformist voices I have spoken to insist that denying Islamists their Muslim identity is theologically incoherent and politically counterproductive. Others argue that once theology declares itself irrelevant to violence, the entire burden of containment falls on secular law and security services. The idea that Islamism is not Islam fails because it resolves anxiety rather than answering questions.

Those questions shaped several interviews I conducted over the past year for my podcast series. I deliberately sought out Muslims, ex-Muslims, scholars, reformers, former insiders, and survivors who disagree profoundly with one another, for in-depth, long-form discussions. These were not ‘gotcha’ conversations or exercises in moral exhibitionism. They were stress tests. I pressed where answers hardened into slogans. I asked the same question in different forms, sometimes to discomfort, sometimes to silence. Is Islamism an abuse of Islam, an authentic expression of it, or something uncomfortably in between?

What emerged were four broad frameworks to approach this question, each internally coherent, but each incomplete.

One answer treats Islamism as Islam applied without disguise once political power is available. Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who later worked covertly with Israeli intelligence to prevent attacks, was the most........

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