The phenomenon of Islamism in Afghanistan is of recent origin and owes more to the Egyptian Muslim Brothers than to Indian fundamentalism (in spite of the importance of Maududi). While it stands within the fundamentalist tradition, it nevertheless represents a complete break from Afghan cultural tradition. The Islamists are intellectuals, the product of modernist enclaves within traditional society; their social origins are what we have termed the state bourgeoisie – products of the government education system which leads only to employment in the state machine. Except for the group of “professors” in the faculty of theology, they do not consider themselves to be scholars (ʿulama) but as intellectuals (roshanfikr).

The Islamists are almost all products of the government education system, either of the scientific schools, or of the state madrasa. Very few of them have had an education in the Arts. On the campus, they mostly mix with the communists, to whom they are violently opposed, rather than with the ʿulama, towards whom they have an ambivalent attitude. They share many basic beliefs in common with the ʿulama (Qurʾan, sunnat, etc.), but Islamist thought has developed from contact with the great Western ideologies, which they see as holding the key to the West's technical development. For them, the problem is to develop a modern political ideology based on Islam, which they see as the only way to come to terms with the modern world and the best means of confronting foreign imperialism.