Sufi Islam has quietly emerged as a central pillar of US soft power strategy in the Muslim world. For over two decades, the United States has pursued a convoluted and contentious strategy , which critics characterize as a dual-track policy of promoting “moderate” religious expressions while systematically suppressing political Islam. At the heart of this approach lies a vast web of funding, cultural initiatives, security programs, and geopolitical interventions stretching from South Asia to the Middle East and North Africa.
Only in Pakistan, the United States is said to have channeled $164 million through USAID to promote Sufism, often framed as “tolerant” or “peace-oriented” Islam. These projects were part of a larger campaign aimed at weakening the militant ideologies by using alternative religious discourses. According to one such scheme, the Falak Sufi Fellowship, thousands of Sufi followers, shrine custodians, and pirzadas were given free education and exchange opportunities in the United States.
Critics argue that Sufi Islam was deliberately elevated under US soft power programs to counter political Islam and reshape religious influence in the Muslim world.
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On the other hand, Washington was also supportive of Sufi shrines restoration and renovation projects under the Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation, which is a cultural diplomacy strategy under the United States State Department. Running alongside this was the allocation of millions of dollars to Sufi-related groups under programs such as Countering Violent Extremism, which aimed to marginalize and isolate radical groups through the empowerment of religious groups that are presumably non-political and integrational.
Though the programmes were meant to be non-harmful and stabilizing, it is argued that they were accompanied by a much tougher policy against political Islam, which may be defined as the pursuit of politics through elections, social mobilizations, and ideological resistances against Western penetration.
In this paradigm, the Palestinian organization Hamas was declared a terror entity in effect ending its political legitimacy in the West. In Egypt, a democratically elected government in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood was toppled in collaboration with regional partners in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This event was followed by what has been considered one of the most repressive regimes in Egyptian modern history in terms of mass arrest and assassination in dismantling Islamic political infrastructure.
The Turkish experience was one of a different but no-less dramatic series of events. The country under its government of the Justice and Development Party successfully thwarted an attempt at a military coup, an occurrence Ankara has been adamant was an attempt to topple an Islamist-tilting government that had an international hand in the plot against it. In Tunisia, the Muslim-rooted Ennahdha Movement had been increasingly marginalized.
Yemen, Libya, and Sudan go on to show this trend. The electoral victory of Islah Party in Yemen led to a proxy war involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. In Libya, patronage rallied behind Khalifa Haftar, a strongman, to prevent Islamist-aligned groups from advancing. Sudan fell prey to a military coup led by foreigners, which overthrew an Islamist-influenced regime amid devastation.
The most recent, and symbolic, step in this fight came during the rule of President Donald Trump when he issued an executive order naming different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan as FTOs and SDGTs.
To those supporting U.S. policy, these policies are actions necessary taken against extremism and instability; to those opposing the policies, the actions point to the efforts of religious engineering and the criminalization of political dissent in the form of Islam itself.
As the debate continues, however, the following question remains to be seen: Is a stable framework something that can actually be constructed by determining what types of religion are acceptable or not?
