“Islamism is the sole growing, developing, and truly popular populist ideology in the Middle East,” wrote House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare Director Yossef Bodansky in 1999. His book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, documented the enduring appeal in Muslim-majority societies of Islam as a political system as opposed to other ideological alternatives.

“The Islamists had correctly read the dominant regional trends,” Bodansky noted. Namely, political Islam “has already replaced nationalism and other Westernized ideologies. Most people genuinely believe that ‘Islam is the solution,’ even though ideas vary about what this ‘Islam’ is.” Muslim thinkers such as Hassan al-Turabi, the intellectual guiding light behind the Islamic regime that came to power in Sudan’s 1989 military coup, believed that

Islamism constituted the sole expanding positive and promising ideology. Turabi noted the rapidly growing number of thinking people—including diehard Marxists and thoroughly Westernized intellectuals—who were discovering, returning to, and adapting Islamism.

Turabi elaborated upon his ideas with French author Alain Chevalerias, who collected these discussions in the 1997 French “book fittingly titled Islam—the Future of the World,” Bodansky observed. He especially emphasized:

For the Arab world, Turabi noted, the key challenge was the accelerating decline of pan­Arabism as a political doctrine. In every area politicized pan-Arabism had entered an era of regression. This was an inevitable by-product of the decline of the Arab state in the Muslim era. Many of the ardent supporters of pan­Arabism were currently looking for ties of a different kind to unify the Arabs and revitalize their self-respect. Growing numbers of them had already entered a profound discourse with the Islamist parties in an effort to find common language and objectives. Consequently, Turabi argued, many of these formally pan-Arab entities had evolved to such a degree that it was difficult to distinguish if they now held a pan-Arab or a pan-Islamic position.

Bodansky noted the belief similarities between pan-Arabists and Turabi:

Obviously all of these entities, whether pan-Arab or pan-Islamic, had continued to adamantly refuse any foreign rule. Nationalistic rhetoric notwithstanding, this was in essence an Islamic principle. Turabi stressed that as such this principle exceeded the confines of the Arab world to include the entire Muslim world.

Islam as a political ideology had dangerous implications for any regime deemed insufficiently obedient to God’s will, Bodansky summarized, for in Turabi’s view if the government in an ostensibly Muslim state actively suppressed the Islamists, the Islamists had a right to rebel and even use force, for such a government was apostate—suppressing political Islam and the propagation of Islamism.

Such considerations had worried Middle Eastern dictators including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, traditionally known for their relative secularism. Yet like other analysts, Bodansky noted how in 1998 “Baghdad’s overall attitude toward militant Islamism has changed.” Beset by various threats to regime survival in the aftermath of Iraq’s 1991 Gulf War defeat and the imposition of international sanctions, Hussein had taken a utilitarian approach to jihadists such as Osama bin Laden.