On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages in the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. In the months that followed, Google searches for the Quran surged, TikTok Islamic content racked up billions of views, and a noticeable stream of young progressives, many of them women, publicly recited the “shahada.” The numbers are still modest. The strategic pattern is not.

This trend reflects a post-Cold War realignment. After the Berlin Wall fell, Western leftists traded class struggle for identity politics built around race, gender, and Palestinian “decolonization.” Islamist organizations seized the opportunity, recasting their agenda in anticolonial language and recruiting from disaffected progressive and secular circles. The result is an ideological pipeline that converts political solidarity into religious adherence and long-term political leverage.