The making of Muslim-majority countries into nation-states has also been the making of Islam into a modern religion. This means that political and cultural actors adopted, pruned, and grafted Western concepts (the nation-state and secularism) to make them acceptable within their respective cultural contexts. However, instead of purging religion from both political power and public space, the outcome was quite the opposite: the embedding of Islam within the state apparatus.

Contradicting most modernization theories, the exportation of the Western political project to the new Muslim nations led to a counter secularization of sorts, even in the most secularly oriented states such as Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, or Tunisia. In other words, the confessionalization of Islam led to its politicization.

Confessionalization refers to the premodern period between the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–49), during which European Protestant and Catholic clergy started to enforce certain rules to distinguish their specific religious identities. Importantly, during this pre-modern period, state and religion remained deeply intertwined because the churches controlled and influenced social behaviors. This confessionalization later developed into a religious domain separate from the state. However, the state ultimately took over control and punishment of improper behavior, so ultimately confessionalization of Christianity led to its depoliticization with greater interference of the state in social domains previously under the guidance of the church.