The problem is not prejudice, but the predictable clash of rival value systems.
By: Jowan Mahmod
Published:
The question of whether Islam is compatible with Western values has become particularly loaded, as the discussion is assumed to revolve around binaries such as “good versus bad” or “progressive versus backward.” Framed that way, it turns into a moral question. It trivializes—and often obscures—a conclusion that is fairly straightforward from a historical and rational perspective, even if we set aside Islam’s more extreme manifestations.
Value systems don’t emerge from nothing. They are shaped by the social, political, and economic conditions in which they develop, and by the incentives and constraints they were forced to navigate. A comparison with medieval Europe makes the point without triggering the same defensiveness. No one argues that the sacred and moral order of thirteenth-century Europe—a world of religious absolutism and patriarchy, where women were legally and socially subordinate to men and heretics were persecuted—could function within today’s secular democracies.
What works under one set of conditions often does not hold under another. Seen this way, asking whether an Islamic value system sits comfortably within modern liberal democracies should be no more inflammatory than asking whether medieval European values are compatible with contemporary Western society.
Values are not just private beliefs about right and wrong. They are highly consequential because they shape motives, attitudes, and goals. They form an ordered set of priorities that characterizes and orients people—what they pursue, what they tolerate, what they fear losing, and what they are willing to sacrifice, both individually and collectively. When a society’s value system shifts, those priorities shift with it—and so does the society.
The irony is that Western societies are, at this very moment, in the middle of their own value shift—one in which postmodern sensibilities increasingly compete with the ideals of modernity. That clash makes something easy to see: when incompatible value systems insist on shaping public life, conflict and polarization are the predictable result. The friction shows up not only in policy, but in the regulation of language and speech. Yet this basic logic is often treated as impolite—or simply ignored—when the conversation turns to Islam. The omission is even more striking given that many of the postmodern generation’s normative expectations rest on a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with the Islamic one.
The Logic of Predictable Value Change
As societies modernize and become more economically and politically advanced, they undergo gradual but systematic changes in culture, social life, and governance. Mass education expands. Health improves. Technology reshapes daily life. As the material conditions of survival become less precarious, attention shifts from basic security to higher-order needs and aspirations. People begin to experience themselves as more agentic—as individuals with choices, claims, and rights. New worldviews emerge that place greater emphasis on political participation, freedom of expression, gender equality, and more permissive social norms.
This is the central idea of modernization theory. Decades of cross-national survey data suggest that social and economic development tends to set in motion a broadly predictable process in which values, priorities, and social norms evolve in tandem.1 Ronald Inglehart, most notably, argued that rising safety and material security move societies from survival-oriented “materialist” values to “post-materialist” values that emphasize autonomy and self-expression.
Conversely, where basic needs remain uncertain—where food, physical safety, or political stability cannot be taken for granted—social order more often consolidates around religious and authoritarian rule. In those conditions, gender equality and expansive individual rights are typically not central priorities. Instead, duty, obligation, and in-group conformity rise in salience, while suspicion of outsiders and intolerance remain comparatively high. These are not mysterious pathologies. They are, as Inglehart emphasizes, familiar human responses to existential insecurity.
For most of human history, value systems stayed relatively stable because the conditions of life changed little. Hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies alike were organized around chronic insecurity, meager surplus, and constant exposure to risk. That equilibrium was shattered only with the Enlightenment and the transition to industrial society, which reworked nearly every feature of social life. Key factors like economic growth, technological change, urbanization, and the rise of a middle class reduced material insecurity, increased mobility, and rewarded individual achievement. Under these new conditions, traditional hierarchies and inherited beliefs weakened, and values gradually shifted toward merit, productivity, progress, and more egalitarian and secular norms.
Sweden offers a vivid illustration of how quickly and radically values can change when the underlying social and economic facts change. Today it ranks among the world’s most prosperous and gender-equal countries, with high levels of personal freedom, an expansive welfare state, and broad social protections. But as recently as 1950, Sweden looked closer to modern-day Egypt on standard health-and-wealth measures, with roughly comparable income and life expectancy. Families faced everyday risks that are now largely forgotten. Basic safety infrastructure was lacking; childhood accidents that are rare today were common enough to be unremarkable. Go back to the 1920s and Sweden begins to resemble far poorer countries in the present, marked by rural hardship, widespread poverty, and stark inequality. Rewind further, and you find explicit religious coercion built into law: in the seventeenth century, Jews seeking to settle in Sweden were required to convert to Lutheran Christianity, and until 1858 conversion to Catholicism could be punished by exile.
Few people would seriously argue that contemporary Swedish norms are compatible with the norms that prevailed under those earlier conditions. Yet in important respects, the Islamic normative order today bears a closer resemblance to Sweden’s historical moral regime than either bears to present-day Swedish liberalism. Islam, like premodern European societies, is organized around obedience to sacred truth and prescribed social roles—especially gender roles—with women’s social standing tied closely to marriage, motherhood, and sexual propriety.
Value shifts and generational divides aren’t confined to the West. Younger cohorts everywhere come of age in social worlds their parents didn’t inhabit—including across much of the Muslim world. But the pace of change is slower, and rising income alone—even in the relatively wealthy Muslim-majority states—is not enough. The more decisive variable is existential security. And where religion governs public life, insecurity can become self-sustaining: it is continually reproduced through a moral narrative that emphasizes danger, decay, and external threat. The result is a heightened sense of vulnerability that can persist even when material conditions improve.
In other words, objective security can rise while perceived insecurity remains—and in some cases is even intensified. On this front, Islam is often distinctive, particularly in the way challenges to religious authority and limits on expression are treated and enforced, with reactions that are difficult to find—at least at comparable scale and intensity—in other contemporary religious contexts.
The tension between competing value systems is also evident. At the same time, Western societies are changing quickly in their own direction, drifting toward a more explicitly postmodern social order, one whose values, on many core questions, sit at the opposite pole from Islam’s.
From Modern to Postmodern: The Gap is Widening
Over the past several decades, Western countries have hit an inflection point and begun moving along a new trajectory. It goes by different names—postmodernism, post-traditionalism, post-industrial society—but the label matters less than the underlying shift. New values and demands have taken hold that diverge not only from older religious and conservative traditions, but also from the civic ideals of modernity itself. In broad terms, this is a reaction against the moral and epistemic foundations of the modern West that’s visible in changing attitudes toward authority, institutions, and the very idea of universal truth.
Many of these ideas have circulated in academic and intellectual spheres for years. What’s new is how widely they’ve been absorbed by younger cohorts—and how quickly they’ve been mainstreamed, accelerated by social media.
Having grown up largely insulated not only from war and poverty, but from the ordinary material deprivation that shaped earlier generations, young people experience social life differently and carry different assumptions about what society owes them.2 Self-expression and individualism are pushed further, as inherited identity categories—rooted in birth, nation, and even biology—are treated as suspect or oppressive. Priorities tilt away from family and national loyalty toward causes and identities framed in moral absolutes: climate, gender ideology, personal autonomy. The language of self-care, trauma, healing, and “validation” moves from private life into public norms. Experiences that older generations would have regarded as difficulties to endure or overcome are increasingly interpreted as harms, often as evidence of systemic injustice.
The main driver is rising expectations. When basic security becomes the default, people become less tolerant of constraint and more skeptical of authority; trust in institutions declines. A child raised in Sweden today will make demands—moral, political, psychological—that would have been unintelligible to a child raised there in the 1920s. Yet these inward-facing concerns have not produced political passivity. If anything, political activism has intensified even as national pride has weakened. In affluent democracies, fewer people say they are willing to fight or sacrifice for nation or faith, while that willingness remains higher where populations feel acute security threats—highest in West Asia and the Middle East, and lowest in Western Europe and North America.
Not Whether, But How
Despite decades of research showing that value systems arise from distinct material conditions and experiences of security or insecurity, this framework is rarely applied to Islam and secular modernity—either in the academic literature that pioneered it or in mainstream debates over multiculturalism. Instead, discussions are reduced to accusations of intolerance or “Islamophobia.”
Yet “Western values” did not descend from the sky. Modern liberal-democratic norms emerged gradually, through centuries of conflict, reform, and institutional development. We have no trouble acknowledging deep historical divergences within the West itself whether between medieval and modern Europe, or between different phases of Western society. But the moment Islam enters the picture, basic comparative analysis becomes taboo.
The real puzzle is not that value systems differ; it’s that so many people insist on denying—often reflexively—that meaningful differences exist at all.
The issue becomes even sharper in light of the West’s own internal transformation. A new postmodern social and political landscape is taking shape. Its full implications—including the role of new technologies like artificial intelligence—are still uncertain. But one thing is already apparent, which is that the emerging postmodern order is, in many respects, even less compatible with traditional Islamic norms than the modern industrial era was. And here the logic of “compatibility” turns on its head. In much of the same milieu that treats Christianity as uniquely suspect—and often seeks to purge its remaining influence, even as it continues to weaken—Islam is accommodated and treated as something that must be protected.3 Whatever one thinks of Christianity, Islam, or secularism, that asymmetry is hard to square on any principled grounds.
One can, of course, ask how much migrants carry their cultures and values with them, and how malleable those values really are. Few Europeans would abandon their core commitments simply because they moved abroad, and there is no reason to assume others operate by a different psychological logic. Values do shift with age and circumstance, but those shifts are usually modest compared with the deeper stability of a value system. Absent sustained pressure from the kinds of material and existential changes described earlier, value systems tend to remain intact, and in some cases can even harden after relocation.
None of this is to deny that many Muslims do adopt secular, modern, or even postmodern norms. But when that happens, it is often because “Muslim” functions—like “Christian” or “Jew”—as a nominal identity rather than a binding commitment to a prescriptive doctrine. Religiosity, in the stronger sense relevant here, is not simply group affiliation or even belief in God. It is the submission of mind and will to a governing worldview—one that makes claims on behavior, law, and public life. In that light, the familiar retort “not all Muslims…” misses the point by shifting the discussion from the structure of an ideology to the variability of individual adherence. These are two different questions.
It would also be naïve to treat Islam as an exception to a broader rule: comprehensive belief systems—religious or secular—tend to seek representation, legitimacy, and influence in liberal democracies, and sometimes dominance. Socialism and communism have done it. Nationalism and fascism have done it. So have newer ideological movements, including postmodernism and certain strains of feminism. The question, then, is not whether Islam will seek a larger role in shaping Western social and political life, but how it will do so.
This process is already underway, perhaps less through overt confrontation than through subtle and concrete forms of social, legal, and institutional positioning within society.
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About the Author
Jowan Mahmod, PhD, is a multidisciplinary researcher focused on how digital technologies, identity, and shifting social norms are transforming contemporary societies. Dr. Mahmod’s work challenges dominant narratives by examining the psychological and sociological forces behind polarization, perception, and collective behavior. She is currently writing a second book that shows why polarization makes more sense once the deeper dysfunctions driving it are understood. You can follow her work at wehavebeenfooled.substack.com.
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