Supremacy and Victimhood: The Political Psychology of Islam

Maral Salmassi 

 

For decades, the debate about Islam has revolved around the wrong question.

Is Islam violent or peaceful?

Is it inherently authoritarian or compatible with democracy? And is Islamism its authentic expression, or a distortion of Islam?

These debates generate more heat than light because they begin with theology. Civilisations do not reveal themselves through doctrine alone. They reveal themselves through history.

The question we must ask is:

Why did Western civilisation produce the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific revolutions, technological innovation, constitutional government and economic prosperity over the past three centuries, while the Islamic civilisation did not?

Today, at every university, students and educators would name “colonialism” as the main factor for this asymmetry.

If colonialism was the decisive variable, why did India emerge as one of the world’s leading technological and economic powers after independence in 1947, while Pakistan has fallen so far behind?

Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon possessed schools, universities, courts, administrative systems, commercial classes and cosmopolitan cities. For a brief moment, several looked as if they might take off.

But what followed after their independence was regression enforced by sectarian military regimes, Islamisation, corruption and the repeated destruction of individual autonomy. India, for all its poverty and trauma, demonstrates that colonial inheritance wasn’t the decisive factor for stagnation. The question is therefore what kind of human being and what kind of institutions does a culture reproduce after independence.

Ideas matter—not because they are true, but because they shape families. Families form culture. Culture shapes institutions. Children inherit this architecture long before they can question it. They become adults. And adults reproduce civilisation.

That is how dysfunction is replicated for centuries.

If a civilisation repeatedly produces child marriage, ritual bloodletting, gender apartheid, rape laws that protect men, persecution of apostates, hatred of Jews, oppression of minorities, contempt for individual freedom and recurring political violence, then we are not dealing with harmless “tradition.” We are dealing with barbarism reproduced as culture.

To dismiss them as coincidence, colonialism or the work of a handful of extremists is intellectually lazy.

Nor is it enough to quote peaceful passages of scripture while ignoring the institutions and societies those scriptures have historically shaped.

But I’ve even heard worse: feminists legitimising the most atrocious crimes against other women and gay people under the label culture or religious freedom.

A civilisation should always be judged by the kinds of human beings and societies it consistently reproduces. Culture and religion can never be an excuse for fascism and atrocity.

If, generation after generation, children are taught that obedience is superior to autonomy, that suffering is holier than flourishing, that a woman’s dignity relies on submission and motherhood, that questioning authority is sinful, that outsiders are morally inferior, injected with anti-Jewish paranoia, obsession for real and imagined humiliation, nostalgia for past empires and desire for revenge, and told that this life is merely preparation for the next, these toxic ideas inevitably shape the psychological architecture of a society.

 

 

 The first classroom is not the mosque. It is the family. The first authority is not the state. It is the parents. The first lessons are not abstract theology. They are emotional.

The foundation of children’s understanding of who deserves obedience, who deserves authority, what suffering means, how women should behave, how men should behave, who belongs and who does not, is formed by the mothers in the first seven years of a child’s life, which is also the critical developmental window.

The Islamic ritual of Ashura represents this process in concentrated form.

It’s an intense ritual of public self-flagellation, bloodletting and mourning in Shiite communities—particularly in parts of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan. This is not harmless folklore. It is a choreography of sacred suffering.

After the Islamic Revolution, these processions became a regular public ceremony in Iran. My mother never let us outside on Ashura. She did not want us to see them.

But one day, on the way to my aunt’s house, I caught a glimpse of something I still remember as a display of primitivism and horror: a blood-drenched mother holding a crying toddler with a blood-soaked head.

That image etched itself into my childhood memory.

I still remember the chanting, the crying, the blood dripping onto the street and running into the gutter.

It was not devotion.

It was a competition of agony.

The story behind Ashura is the agonising death of Hussein, the third Shia Imam, who was betrayed and left to die on the battlefield of Karbala. During the processions, the flagellants do not merely mourn him. They enter the scene. They reimagine his abandonment in grief and guilt, reenacting his suffering with their own bodies.

Karbala is therefore not simply remembered as history.

It is installed psychologically through repetition.

And this matters. Repeated rituals transmit values before children can name them. They bypass argument and go straight to emotion, identity and belonging.

Long before a child understands theology, he has already been programmed to believe that suffering is sacred, pain is piety, and martyrdom is glory.

The same applies to the broader patriarchal order of Islam.

Many women become the primary transmitters of a system of severe sexual repression interwoven with male entitlement. A system that once subjugated them is carried on by them — not because they designed it, but because their dignity, status and security became tied to preserving it.

In societies where a woman’s value depends on marriage, motherhood, family honour and obedience, hierarchy becomes a condition of survival. And survival is often enforced with astonishing cunning and cruelty.

No authoritarian culture sustains itself through coercion alone. It needs mothers who raise obedient children, teachers who reward conformity, religious authorities who sanctify hierarchy, and rituals that turn suffering into virtue.

Only then can the political order reproduce itself without constant force.

However, one feature of Islamic civilisation stands out above all others.

For fourteen centuries, Islamic civilisation has understood itself as the final revelation of God, the highest truth and, ultimately, the civilisation destined to prevail.

Yet at the very same time, its self-understanding has become deeply rooted in narratives of suffering, humiliation and persecution.

How can a civilisation convinced of its own divine supremacy simultaneously define itself through victimhood?

The answer lies at the heart of its political psychology.

This is no contradiction. It is one of its most powerful mechanisms.

Supremacy provides identity. Victimhood provides legitimacy.

A civilisation that believes itself destined to triumph cannot easily explain centuries of political decline, military defeat or technological stagnation. Victimhood resolves that tension. Failure no longer demands self-examination; it becomes evidence of persecution. Every setback can be attributed to hostile forces rather than internal shortcomings.

This is why supremacy and victimhood are not opposites.

They are mutually reinforcing.

One elevates the collective above all others.

The other absolves it from self-criticism.

Together, they create an extraordinarily resilient political psychology.

Everything that follows—Ashura, martyrdom, jihad, Sharia, the Ummah, Da’wah, colonialism, collective memory, rejection of modernity, and the enduring resistance to reform—can be understood as expressions of that underlying psychological architecture.