By Silindokuhle Mthiyane
“The American order is an international order.” This is how American international relations scholar John Mearsheimer has described the global system that emerged from the end of the Cold War.
Since the Second World War, Western powers — led increasingly by the United States — have played a dominant role in shaping international institutions, economic structures, education systems and the political values promoted across much of the world. But this order has not been maintained through peace and persuasion alone. Wars, economic sanctions, debt dependency, media influence, military intervention and other forms of coercion have all played a role in preserving Western power.
In the post-colonial era, formal colonial rule has largely disappeared, but other forms of domination remain. Kwame Nkrumah called this neo-colonialism: countries that are formally sovereign while their economic and political choices remain heavily influenced from outside.
Yet rather than scrutinising those structures, populations are increasingly distracted by warnings of an “Islamic takeover” and encouraged to fear Muslims instead of questioning the international system they have been taught to accept.
The events of 2026 have demonstrated just how unequal that system can be.
Venezuela’s interior minister said 100 people were killed during the US military operation that captured President Nicolás Maduro in January. Meanwhile, thousands have been killed during the US-Israeli war against Iran, including 160 schoolgirls killed in a strike on a primary school in Minab.
What was their crime?
Whatever one thinks of the governments in Caracas or Tehran, civilians do not become legitimate targets simply because their rulers oppose Washington. If powerful states can disregard the sovereignty of weaker ones when they believe their interests demand it, the principle being demonstrated is an old one: might makes right.
Economic coercion is another instrument of international power.
The United States has been at the forefront of imposing unilateral sanctions on countries without requiring the approval of the United Nations. Whatever their stated political objectives, research increasingly suggests that broad economic sanctions can carry enormous human costs.
A 2025 study published in The Lancet Global Health, examining sanctions between 1971 and 2021, found a significant association between sanctions and increased mortality. The researchers estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with approximately 564,000 additional deaths annually between 2012 and 2021, with particularly strong effects among young children and older people.
This is precisely the kind of indirect domination Nkrumah warned about when he described neo-colonialism as potentially the most dangerous stage of imperialism: a system in which countries may possess the outward appearance of sovereignty while their political and economic choices remain constrained from outside.
Debt enslavement
Developing countries continue to spend enormous sums servicing debts while struggling to fund schools, hospitals, infrastructure and social protection. Oxfam has repeatedly warned that low- and middle-income countries are being forced to divert substantial public resources towards debt repayments, often while cutting essential services.
The role of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in this system has long been fiercely debated. Critics argue that lending programmes can restrict national policy choices through austerity measures, privatisation and economic conditions attached to loans. John Perkins famously described this process through the controversial language of “economic hit men”: actors who encourage developing states to assume enormous debts that subsequently increase external leverage over their economies and resources.
Whatever one thinks of Perkins’ characterisation, the underlying concern about debt and sovereignty is hardly new.
Thomas Sankara warned African leaders in 1987 that debt had become an instrument of neo-colonialism. His argument was simple: Africa could not claim genuine independence while resources desperately needed for its own development were being transferred to creditors abroad.
Under the “evil” Sharia that Muslims are repeatedly told to fear, interest on debt — riba — is prohibited.
That contrast deserves more attention than it receives.
The world is also experiencing extraordinary levels of wealth inequality. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has warned that “a new oligarchy in our global economy is becoming apparent”, while economists have increasingly raised concerns about the political influence accumulated alongside extreme wealth.
French economist Gabriel Zucman has become one of the leading advocates of imposing a minimum tax on the super-rich. His proposal for an annual tax of at least 2% on billionaire wealth was placed before the G20 as a mechanism for raising hundreds of billions of dollars that could be directed towards public needs.
Islam also insists that wealth carries social obligations.
Zakat is not voluntary philanthropy but a religious obligation, while the Quran warns against wealth circulating only among the rich. Islamic economic principles place restrictions on riba, gambling and exploitative transactions while imposing duties towards the poor, relatives, travellers and others in need.
Perhaps that helps explain why Islam is so frequently portrayed as something societies should fear rather than seriously study.
The point is not that every Muslim society has successfully implemented these principles, nor that every Western policy is inherently malicious. It is that Islam contains an alternative moral and economic framework that does not automatically accept the assumptions underpinning the dominant liberal capitalist order.
That makes it intellectually and politically disruptive.
Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) were once treated by parts of the Western political establishment as dangerous radicals because they challenged apartheid and refused to accept the alliances and interests surrounding it. Mandela remained subject to US terrorism-related immigration restrictions until Congress moved to remove them in 2008.
Muslims today are likewise frequently discussed through the language of extremism and terrorism whenever political Islamic ideas challenge assumptions about secularism, economics, foreign policy or governance.
The hypocrisy becomes particularly striking when violence is discussed.
Islamic law contains explicit prohibitions against deliberately killing women, children and other non-combatants in warfare. Yet civilians continue to die in wars conducted by states that simultaneously present themselves as defenders of an international rules-based order.
The West is therefore often throwing stones from a very thin glass house.
The current US administration has made its conception of power unusually explicit. Its national security strategy revived the Monroe Doctrine and declared its intention to restore American “preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”, preserve access to strategically important locations and resources, and prevent rival powers from controlling assets Washington considers important.
Its 2026 National Defense Strategy went further, promising to restore American military dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
Strip away the diplomatic language and the basic principle is difficult to miss: powerful states believe they are entitled to protect their interests far beyond their own borders.
Media framing helps make such power appear normal.
When Western countries use military force abroad, familiar descriptions include “intervention”, “operation” and “strikes”. When armed groups or hostile non-Western states employ violence, the language can become considerably more morally charged.
This does not mean the actions are necessarily equivalent. It does mean that language helps shape whose violence audiences are conditioned to perceive as legitimate.
Education and empowerment
For generations, African scholars and activists have criticised curricula that privilege European history, philosophy and political thought while treating indigenous intellectual traditions as peripheral. Calls to decolonise curricula have consequently sought to expand what students are taught beyond overwhelmingly Western frames of reference.
Thinkers such as Steve Biko challenged the psychological legacy of colonial education, while historians such as Howard Zinn criticised the sanitised presentation of American history within the United States itself.
The issue is not that Western knowledge should be discarded. It is that Western knowledge should not be mistaken for the entirety of human knowledge.
Africa possesses its own intellectual traditions, political histories and philosophies, including concepts such as Ubuntu. Muslim societies likewise possess centuries of scholarship in law, economics, governance, ethics, science and philosophy.
An education system that presents Western civilisation as the default measure of progress inevitably teaches students something beyond the formal curriculum: whose ideas matter most.
Media coverage of Muslims illustrates a related imbalance.
A study published in Justice Quarterly examining 136 terrorist attacks in the United States between 2006 and 2015 found that attacks committed by Muslim perpetrators received, on average, 357% more news coverage than attacks by non-Muslims, even after researchers controlled for factors including fatalities, arrests and the type of target.
That finding does not establish that every negative story about Muslims is propaganda. But it does demonstrate that Muslim violence can receive dramatically disproportionate attention, potentially shaping public perceptions of Islam and Muslims.
Against that backdrop, the repeated presentation of Islam as a civilisational threat deserves scrutiny.
Gambling, which generates enormous corporate revenues while inflicting severe social costs on vulnerable families, is prohibited in Islam. Interest-based financial transactions are prohibited. Alcohol, an industry worth vast sums globally despite its associated health and social harms, is prohibited. Islam also challenges hyper-consumerism, sexual commodification and the idea that material acquisition should define human success.
All of these prohibitions place Islamic moral values in tension with industries that depend upon precisely those behaviours.
Islam therefore cannot easily be reduced to private spirituality. It makes claims about economics, society, family, morality and political life. And that is precisely why debates about Islam so often become debates about much more than theology.
The idea that Islam belongs only to Arabs, South Asians or some foreign “other” consequently serves a powerful purpose: it allows Islam to be presented as alien rather than as a worldview whose claims can be considered on their own merits.
For people in Africa, this is particularly absurd. Islam has been part of the continent for more than 1,300 years and has shaped African societies, scholarship, trade, politics and civilisation for centuries.
The deeper issue is therefore not merely Islamophobia. It is who gets to define the intellectual and political boundaries within which societies are permitted to imagine alternatives.
The West has produced remarkable scientific, technological and intellectual achievements. But Western power has also been accompanied by colonialism, devastating wars, economic exploitation and political interference. Both realities can be true simultaneously.
Countries across Africa, Latin America and Asia should therefore be able to question the systems they inherited without being told that every alternative is backward, extremist or dangerous.
Muslims have a particular responsibility to challenge the caricatures surrounding their faith. If people encounter Islam primarily through political rhetoric and media coverage shaped by fear, Muslims cannot complain about misunderstanding while remaining absent from the conversation.
The answer is not hostility towards ordinary Western people, nor replacing one form of chauvinism with another. It is intellectual independence.
Muslims should confidently explain what Islam actually teaches, build relationships with other communities, expose misinformation and participate in serious discussions about inequality, debt, war, family, economics and social justice.
During the March and March mobilisation in South Africa, it became increasingly common to hear familiar claims about an Islamic “takeover” and the supposed incompatibility of Muslim values with South African society.
Those claims cannot simply be ignored. They must be answered. Because perhaps the greatest threat to an unjust system is not that people become angry with it. It is that they realise alternatives exist.
