How Islamists acquire arms and why they fail to govern
What links the weapons recently discovered in Jordan in 2024 with those that were used to assassinate Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha in 1948, kill President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and enable the Islamist-led coup in Sudan in 1989? This article traces how Islamist movements have historically used arms not to liberate nations, but to try to overpower them — from Egypt to Sudan to Jordan.
Islamist movements arose in response to Hassan Al Banna’s 1928 call to action, seeking to capitalize on the formal abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate — not merely its political decline, but its legal dismantling by the modern Turkish republic. These movements imbued the idea of a state ruled by the organization with religious sanctity, compelling critics to pause or retreat before challenging it. Drawing on populist causes, they justified the accumulation of arms for use not only against colonial powers and foreign occupiers but also, increasingly, in national struggles and internal conflicts. Over time, they developed overarching ideological frameworks — often self-contradictory — that mobilized religion, regional geography, ethnic tensions, and external alliances to answer three strategic questions: How do we acquire weapons? How do we recruit men? And whom should we point those weapons at?
The end of the Ottoman Caliphate left a vacuum that Islamist movements rushed to fill — not by retreating into spiritualism, but by preparing for power. In Egypt’s monarchical era, Hassan Al Banna’s followers began to stockpile weapons under the banner of national liberation. But by the mid-20th century, that arsenal was turned inward. Following a series of Christmas bombings, Egypt’s interior minister publicly declared that the Brotherhood’s arms had been aimed not at colonial powers, but at fellow Egyptians — political rivals, civil servants, and skeptics of the Islamist project.
When the Free Officers overthrew the monarchy in 1952, the Brotherhood claimed credit for enabling the revolution. They argued that their networks and weapons had made it possible — and demanded a share of power. President Gamal Abdel Nasser tolerated their ambitions until it became clear they were negotiating with foreign actors, using the state’s name, and offering strategic concessions in exchange for being handed the reins of government.
A similar pattern unfolded in Sudan decades later. In 1989, the Islamic Movement’s internal leadership formally authorized a military coup — with a civilian Islamist vanguard acting through uniformed officers. Years later, movement insiders would boast of having participated “with their own hands and tongues”. Their confessions revealed something more disturbing: The movement had spent Sudan’s democratic interregnum quietly embedding loyalists inside the state, building parallel institutions, and stockpiling arms not to defend the republic, but to destroy it from within — even as they sat in its parliament.
Recent investigations suggest that Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood had explored plans to coordinate with factions behind the October 7 attacks — not to wage war themselves, but to establish a supporting front from within Jordan, allegedly under foreign guidance. The plan, as some insiders claimed, involved preparations for advanced armament, including rockets and drones, to aid Hamas and Hezbollah. But this “resistance” posture, as always, masked a deeper strategy: The Brotherhood’s habitual priority is to first consolidate control at home, transforming the host country into a staging ground for cross-border Islamist operations.
The collapse of electoral routes to power — amid shifting public opinion — has revived a familiar formula: A disciplined vanguard, a media machine, and a sudden maneuver to unseat authority. This script has been rehearsed before, like in the assassination of Anwar Sadat (1981), the failed attempts on the life of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the botched plot, again, to kill Hosni Mubarak in 1995. In every instance, the Brotherhood’s resort to violence came not in open warfare, but as a betrayal of a tactical pause — a violent rupture cloaked in the pretense of political engagement.
In the two decades leading up to the 2010 Arab uprisings, Islamist politics underwent what could be described as an era of functional negotiation. Islamist parties focused on claims of popular legitimacy, political majority, enlightenment, legislative reform, and the gradual application of Sharia law. The 2010 death of Osama bin Laden was widely celebrated as a turning point — evidence that the violent Islamist model had lost ground to a more “moderate” Brotherhood variant, exemplified by those poised to take power in the Arab world.
The path to electoral success appeared to be paved by both doves and hawks alike. But soon, the wolf emerged. The rise of Daesh — and its rapid territorial expansion — captivated a younger, more radical generation of Islamist cadres. The Brotherhood’s “softer” variant quickly found itself relegated to second place in the extremist hierarchy of ideological severity. When the movement lost power in Cairo, it began to accelerate efforts to reclaim the legitimacy of armed resistance — and to reassert control over the very space it had once disavowed.
If the Cold War era gave birth to the phenomenon of the “Afghan Arabs” and their dedicated training camps, then future analysts may look back on the current geopolitical moment — defined by US-China rivalry and American retrenchment — as the incubator of a new Islamist resurgence. As Washington pivots toward strategic competition in East Asia, it has left behind vacuums in places where the United States once held the line. In these empty spaces, armed Islamist movements are staging a quiet but determined return.
Extremist groups have seized on American absence not just to expand their footprint, but to shape the narrative of their own legitimacy. Across these cases, one common thread is unmistakable: The vacuum is not merely operational; it is symbolic. For recruiters and ideologues, the image of a superpower in retreat is an invitation, a proof of concept, and a call to arms. And amid the fog of withdrawal, militant actors have wasted no time in building new mobilization pipelines, interpreting the moment as evidence that the balance of global power is shifting in their favor.
One of the more perilous illusions of the current geopolitical era is the belief that the world is undergoing a transformation reminiscent of 1814 — when great powers gathered in Vienna not to build justice, but to divide influence. This mindset, whether consciously adopted or not, has reemerged in certain strategic circles: The idea that it is time for the major powers to renegotiate spheres of control through fragile understandings that come at the expense of weaker states and societies. Such thinking makes the use of armed Islamist groups increasingly attractive, not as adversaries in a global war on terror, but as informal proxies in conflicts that no state wants to enter directly.
In this logic, Islamists become functional instruments of power projection. They are used to shape facts on the ground, to unsettle rivals, or to signal strength — all while affording plausible deniability to their sponsors. With the erosion of normative frameworks and the fading moral clarity of international law, chaos itself becomes an asset. Islamist violence, once universally condemned, is now recontextualized by some as a useful tool — deployed from afar by powerful actors unwilling to bleed on unfamiliar soil. In this post-liberal order, the story of armed Islamism is no longer solely a tale of ideology — it is increasingly a tale of delegation, of transactional utility, and of regional exhaustion bearing the cost of global cynicism.
Today, Sudan is engulfed in a brutal war, one marked by total polarization, albeit with clear roots. Few are eager to revisit the early flashpoints of the 1990s, when a regional schism began to fester within the ruling Islamist party. It was from that fracture that Khalil Ibrahim emerged, along with the circle that would later author the Black Book. At the time, Hassan Al Turabi launched a biting critique of the Islamist elite, alleging that corruption had reached 90%. But before his warnings could take root, that very elite, backed by President Omar Al Bashir, had expelled him entirely from power, using the full weight of the Sudanese Armed Forces. Turabi, for his part, responded with derision. He mocked the Sudanese Armed Forces’ composition, its officers, and its institutional ethos. These critiques were not whispered; they were delivered in long, disdainful segments broadcast on Sudanese state television as part of his propagandistic repertoire. His words lingered like an indictment, not only of the military as an institution, but also of the structure the Islamists themselves had built, and which now threatened to devour them from within.
Instead of propelling Islamist supporters toward greater political maturity, the movement’s internal rupture had the opposite effect. The ideological disillusionment — compounded by accusations of corruption and the rise of marginalization narratives — drove cadres to retreat into pre-state formations, eroding their commitment to the nation-state as an organizing ideal. From that retreat emerged a wave of regional grievance and vengeance. No one stepped forward to interrupt the hardening of identity lines; on the contrary, they helped deepen them.
In those years, Islamist camps echoed with tales of thwarted coups and failed maneuvers, allegedly crushed by security forces. Some insiders claimed that the constitutional court helped absorb the anger of reformers. But the historical record tells another story: Defectors from Darfur emerged as a critical force in the armed rebellion against Bashir’s regime. Legal and constitutional ideas, ironically, helped propel their case to the International Criminal Court. These frameworks were embraced by one faction of the Islamist movement and denounced as heretical by the other.
For his part, Bashir responded by weaponizing ethnicity. In the face of rebellion in Darfur, he recruited militias that the breakaway Islamist wing derisively labeled “the Arabs”— not in reference to Arabs as an ethnicity, but rather to marginal desert dwellers, perceived as outsiders to both the state and the settled social order.
At the time, the Islamists in Sudan were both constructing the apparatus of authority — and standing against the very idea of the state. They preserved a fortified right to armament, embedded in a system of parallel institutions that mirrored official structures but operated independently, with remarkable coordination and efficiency. For every formal security organ, there existed a “popular” or “self-defense” counterpart; in place of a unified army, there stood the Popular Defense Forces, the Rapid Support Forces, and a host of allied militias. These entities endured beyond factional splits and even survived the collapse of the regime itself, operating openly, under the very eyes of the transitional dismantling committees, and astonishingly, they still persist today. As Malik Agar, the current Vice President of the Sovereignty Council, noted in a pointed attack on the Islamists: “To this day, in every institution of authority, there exists a parallel one — manufactured, auxiliary, and devoid of constitutional legitimacy.” So entrenched are these doubles that it is often difficult to tell which is the original and which is the shadow. As for legality, codification was never the aim. The ambiguity, in fact, allowed for greater freedom to maneuver.
When Bashir was ousted, the Islamists saw in his collapse not a defeat, but an opportunity — a chance to arrest his project of sidelining them. They did not resist his removal. They believed that through their parallel structures — and the opposition’s failure to govern—they would return with ease.
Sensing an opportunity in Sudan’s mobilization efforts, the Islamists moved to reassert themselves, on their own terms. They insisted, it seems, that their participation not occur under the legal framework of national emergency laws, but beneath the banner of their own battalions. In the chaos of a militia-saturated battlefield, they resurrected their extremist literature, rekindled ideological fervor, and began preparing a new generation for rule. Still, their reemergence was more calculated than immediate.
Islamists don’t rule Sudan now. The future could move past their history, including their cardinal sin: The 1989 coup that overthrew a democratic government. And yet, their shadow remains. One of their ideologues has already threatened to turn against General Abdul Fattah Al Burhan, perhaps even violently, just as they once did with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. Indeed, they have laid out the right wartime strategy to pave their path to power through force of arms. What they have yet to offer, however, is a serious reckoning with the foundational errors that drowned them — twice. Chief among these was a dilemma they once articulated in Arabic, with rhetorical flourish: The conflict between the ḥarakah (movement), the ḥizb (party), and the ḥukūmah (government): Three institutions, all beginning with the Arabic letter ḥāʾ (ح), yet none willing to follow the other.
This unresolved tension, about who follows whom, has long haunted the Islamist project in Sudan. During the rift between the two main Islamist factions, the Popular Congress (Turabi) and the National Congress (Bashir), one question dominated private and public discourse: Is the state an instrument of the movement, or is the movement a servant of the state? Does the president offer bayʿah (a pledge of obedience and loyalty) to the movement’s emir, or does the emir extend his bayʿah to the head of state?
The inability to answer these questions goes far in explaining why — and how — a group in Jordan would construct weapons, rockets, and even drones under the banner of joining a broader war alongside foreign Islamists. It also sheds light on the state’s current dilemma: Should it dismantle the original entity or its shadow? And can a shadow ever be made straight if the trunk itself is crooked?
If political realism has tempted some to accept the expansion of Islamist movements into national capitals, then logical realism must reckon with where that path leads. At best, it transforms such groups into replicas of Hezbollah — with all the devastation that model has brought upon Lebanon and its political order. Before entertaining any future participation by armed Islamist factions in political life, terms must be clarified. What is the state? What does citizenship entail? And above all, there must be an unequivocal consensus that the monopoly on the use of force belongs solely to the national army — without exception.
When Islamist movements possess weapons, the outcome is predictable. The arms are turned inward—against rivals, critics, and ultimately the state itself. Power is seized, and then hoarded. But such hoarding, in the absence of answers to foundational questions, leads to a permanent cycle of confrontation: Who governs the state—the movement or the government? Under Islamist rule, the state fragments. Parallel entities emerge, loyalties fracture, and the specter of excommunication and treason accusations hangs overhead. Those who oppose the march toward a so-called caliphate are readily branded as enemies of God.
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