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I've had a recent rebirth of interest in studying Islam. This happened to overlap with the time of year that is 9/11. Now, I was mainly reading ancient thinkers and I didn't think that 9/11 would become relevant to my efforts.
Alas, I was also listening to podcasts on the side. From Talking with Teachers (at 39:50):
After parsing this as charitably and carefully as I could, it does not seem to me that he is directly claiming either that Muslims weren't on the plane, or that the plane didn't cause the building to fall. I believe that his basic claim is that one way to avoid the single-minded conclusion that Muslims are evil is to note that "Islamic terrorism" is not the only story that people have alleged here.
Ironically, this was spoken by the host, and not the guest Imam Farhan Siddiqi, who as far as I can tell appears to be the same Imam of the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque who claimed that he didn't condemn Hamas because he he had seen no proof of Hamas atrocities. He then said (in this video, not the podcast):
I'm beginning to wonder if the basic drive behind these startlingly alien statements is a kind of negative pluralism: take or promote any other perspectives than the allegedly thought-stopping truth of violence committed in the name of Islam. Why? Because those perspectives exist (People believe them! It's not just Muslims!), and because the central story that Muslims are just must be upheld.
Personally, I do not think that the tactics these two have chosen to deal with controversies will work in the long term, though in times of widespread distrust, it may appear to be effective.
This post doesn't really have a point. I've found that podcasts are the greatest gift that the internet has given us. I listen to people who I never would read. Reading them makes me feel dirty. But when there's a voice, they're people, even if they're bad people, or people who I tentatively want to see burn in hell for at least a few seconds and maybe even a little longer. I had no expectation that either of these two would make me do a double take when I started listening. I was there to learn about a community which I know little about, and to seek knowledge, as the Muslims say.
This episode began by talking about their experiences of studying Islam in majority-Arabic areas and continued with the experience of leading a flock. The discussion of different perspectives of faith, of avoiding partisanship in matters of faith, and of being tolerant of what people need in order to continue in their faith, even with doubts, was genuinely humanistic and worthwhile. It was what I came for, and I can't deny that to a certain extent I sought knowledge and I found it.
After the rather "wait, what" 9/11 part, the conversation continues to talk about how (apparently) Muslim clergy (I'm assuming this is in America) is mostly left-leaning, that MLFA and CAIR are left-leaning, that the host and guest are among the few right leaning in their circles. They talk about racism and discrimination towards whites, and appear to criticize Muslims who think that racism happens to everyone except whites. They talk about how some in the America First movement are talking about Zionists and mass immigration, but they don't necessarily care for the Palestinians either, as both are seen as foreign concerns. They talk about libertarianism and the virtues of Austrian economics (highly praised). At one point a story is told about how people confided in Siddiqi that they voted for Trump, and his response was "vote whoever." Dr. Abdullah reflects on pushback he got for promoting vaccine freedom during the pandemic.
I don't think they're making it up. There's a lot to ponder here about the possibilities and perils of Muslim integration in the West.
To quote Sam Harris: "Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas."
Obviously every religion has its fringe elements of crazy extremists, so I won't condemn them for that. But in Islam, even the mainstream central religion just seems bad in a way I don't see in other religions.
It starts with Mohammed himself. This isn't some ancient figure who's life is shrouded in mystery, he's pretty well documented. He was a warlord who led his tribe to conquer the Arabian peninsula, by a combination of cunning tactics, charisma, and ruthlessness. He frequently executed captives and allowed his men to take sex slaves. This was brutal even by the standards of his time, so he made up his own religion to justify it.
He was also illiterate. In Islam, this is considered a miracle, for how could an illiterate man produce a book like the Quran? Except... when you read it, it's just not a very good book. It's mostly vague references to the bible, with a lot of aimless repition. It's almost like a family guy joke: "hey, remember that time when Jonah got swallowed by a whale? Huh? Wasn't that a good story?" It doesn't have any of the interesting insights or metaphors that other famous holy books have. In other words, it's exactly the kind of thing screed I'd expect from a charismatic, but illiterate leader. This is why the Quran is usually not actually read, but simply chanted, mindlessly, five times a day, as a form of brainwashing.
In older times, Europeans called Muslims "Mohammedans". That's now considered outdated, but I think they were onto something there. The real, central core of Islam is a cult of personality, centered on that one man. That's why so many of them name their kids after him, that's why there's so many fanatics who kill anyone who even draws a picture of him, and that's why the entire religion still seems weirdly stuck in the past, in a way that even the much older religions like Hindu or Buddhism are not. The modern Muslim-American clergy who are trying to whitewash or modernise are having to struggly, mightily, against the core problems.
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In the end, a lot of the ‘alternative blame stories’ for 9/11 don’t really make a lot of sense. Even blaming the Saudi Arabian state, which is kind of the ‘safe edgy’ of 9/11 theories, isn’t really fair. The Saudi monarchy was in some ways substantially more anti-Islamist, than, say, the (Republic of) Irish political leadership was anti-PIRA, although both were broadly opposed to terrorism. There were just a lot of rich individual Saudis who had access to plenty of oil money and political and religious institutions that heavily sympathized with Islamist aims, and the pact between the House of Saud and the clergy after the siege of Mecca made it very difficult to root out bin Laden allies and sympathizers from state institutions, so everybody kind of ignored it. The CIA also knew this. It is not hugely surprising that some Saudi diplomats, security officials, embassy employees etc might be involved.
The worst that the ‘Saudi state’ as a whole can be credibly accused of is tolerating religious extremists for understandable reasons and not undertaking a religious purge that would have risked the entire legitimacy of the state and made enemies of millions of its own people.
As MBS showed it is quite easy. Sometimes cutting the Gordian knot or heads is the good way to do something.
MBS had to do an emergency crash purge to root out a conspiracy against him. That was after his father made fundamental changes to what was in effect the Saudi Constitution. It seems like he’s a smart guy, and he pulled it off. But none of that was easy or safe, and there were a lot scenarios where the whole thing could have turned into one of the more lurid Call of Duty sequels.
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It was easy but a lot of people had also died out, younger middle class Saudis had become more liberal, or spent more time in Dubai, globalization had become more entrenched, the time was comparatively ripe. It would have been extraordinarily brave to not do what they did after 1979 and I don’t think one can really fault them for it.
An interesting counterfactual I sometimes wonder is if Reza Shah, or more likely a replacement monarch, could’ve made a similar Pahlavi-Political Islam pact in Iran to what we saw in Saudi Arabia.
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It's just garden variety tribal defensiveness, of the sort other groups with even less justification to deny their people are responsible use.
Muslims were more defensive and conciliatory in the wake of 9/11 and it didn't change that some people still suspect that there's something particular about Islam (in fact, it may have gotten worse) and it justified many things Muslims don't like both on the foreign policy and immigration fronts so why bother? Blacks don't ever go "Yeah, crime is on our heads alone. We need to be the ones work on it" and politically they've probably been better served by just forming an ever deeper phalanx of scapegoats and rationalizations.
Now that the left wing is totally on board with the alternate theories and has applied the "blaming culture==racist" paradigm and the Muslim population is just a fact of life, it all seems a bit embarrassing to have gone so far for so little. Just blame the West/American foreign policy/white supremacy like everyone else. Whitey clearly buys that shit.
The important thing is that it doesn't stop at terrorism, which most would be willing to write off. Muslims have been wrestling with the West and being seen as backwards across the board for centuries (I know some apologists who complain bitterly that the complaints about Mohammed bedding a pre-teen Aisha were unknown before modernity, implying modern liberal Westerners are the weird ones, which...well. How they raise their children, manage relations with women, etc. are all under suspicion under strong liberalism. Granting that there's something illiberal and backwards about Islam opens the door to correction on a broad number of matters from the West and that's just unacceptable because liberals don't know how to stop at a reasonable concession. They just take more and and more and more. As Americans, they see that.
They've seen what happened to Christianity. You cede that your religion should be subject to review by kaffir and next thing you know the the degenerate gays are dancing in your cathedrals and your daughters are being transed. Why wouldn't they? They saw you trying to be more British than the British, apologizing for the faith. You've ceded the moral authority to them.
No, nip it in the bud. We have our own ideas about justice and that's all there is to it. Some people did something, as a certain Congresswoman said, but we're not going to cede the whole moral core of the faith by saying it's Muslims as such
Sometimes it seems to me that the social currency of DSA types is just, well, unabashed shamelessness. It certainly explains the number of self-identified "working class" fail sons that had daddy buy their first house or live rent-free, or hyper-progressive businesses that haven't paid their taxes.
If that's really true, it seems like all you'd need to subvert it is a critical mass willing to play along by its own rules. Get a bunch of Eastern Europeans to show up to a meeting and center that "in living memory, Slavs have been the primary victims of capitalism", and raise etymological concerns every time someone else uses the word "slave". Those facts are, arguably, not even wrong. If they kick you out, raise discrimination claims under the Civil Rights Act. There is certainly an element of the crab bucket to it, too. On the other hand, I'd recommend against it because of what could happen if you were successful: what is literal Naziism if not turbo-woke except centering blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans as the primary victims of history at the hands of Jews and other European powers?
To tie it back to Islamism, I haven't listened to OP's podcast, but my broader concerns there are that many on the left (not even always Muslim believers themselves!) lack the self-awareness expected of "the rest of us". I'm expected to appreciate the historical nuance and implications, but to them, history always begins at a very convenient choice of time.
ByzantiumConstantinopleIstanbul has always been Muslim land (see also Jerusalem). The only slave trade worth mentioning is the Western Atlantic one. It's only "genocide" when it's done by perceived-as-white people; pay no attention to the last century in, to name a few, Armenia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Kashmir, South Sudan (in some cases, literal skin-color-based murderism), or religious minorities within the Middle East like Druze or Lebanese Christians. I'll pretty reasonably acknowledge that bad things have been done by Christians and in the name of Christendom, but it feels very much like a one-way street.To be clear, this isn't an "all Muslims" thing. There are plenty of quite reasonable minds here. Whom amongst us doesn't have weird teachings in corners of our religious texts that we are at least a bit uncomfortable with? It's more a question of what you choose to do with it and where we go from here. The Reformation was, to put it bluntly, not the best time to live in Europe, but the Westphalian peace and the Enlightenment seem important results from that which aren't as universally-assumed as they ought to be.
I’m not sure how many of those failsons or tax-evaders are out there, but it’s almost certainly fewer than you think.
This is a stupid plan with several obvious failure points. Where are you getting these Slavs? How are you training them to promote your party line? Do you pay them? Why should you expect the target organizations to listen to a bunch of obvious plants?
Oh, come on. I can think of half a dozen load-bearing differences, and I bet you can too. How about “revanchism” or “self-abasement” or “overthrowing a fucking government”?
Your models are cartoonish.
I'll concede it's a bit of an overzealous, maybe even facile model. But I'm not sure I have a much better model for most extremist ideologies (except maybe the Quakers, if they count as such) that doesn't devolve into totalizing revanchism regardless of initial direction: it's a common thread among literal Nazis, through Pol Pot, all the way to the Hutus, Lost Cause stans, and both side in Israel/Palestine. It's really easy as humans to blame all sorts of things on our outgroups; I won't claim to be immune to that one.
But I have trouble finding any sort of consistent principles in modern progressivism that don't boil down to "who, whom". Genocide is bad, but maybe we can poll watchers of The Young Turks how they feel about Armenians. Blasphemy laws are bad, but don't you dare draw The Prophet. Black lives matter, except the ones in Africa killed by (often-Muslim) militants. The most reliable metric for "Omni cause" support seems to be more along the lines of voting blocs than moral principles, and I have real misgivings that the political standards that are IMHO not-even-unreasonably applied to Christianity are largely brushed off for everyone else that will vote for them at present. That part gives me pause.
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This post made me more firmly opposed to Muslim immigration. Sorry, but they're free to have their own ideas about justice in any of the 50 Muslim nations. Here they have to tolerate Piss Mohammad and getting tickets if they park illegally when they hear the call to prayer.
If not, remigration/expulsion are the kind, moderate options.
Leftists will skinsuit the religion; traditional Muslims will be attacked as backwards right-wingers. Its unlikely they will get deported. What I'm not sure about is if verbal attacks on "Islam" will be phrased exactly the same way as against Christianity ("Islam" having a residual connotation of being a victim). I am pretty sure the Cathedral can coordinate a phase change once necessary. This probably will be near the end of our lifetime, if even within our lifetime.
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Your prerogative. I just don't think they believe you. Where's the great groundswell of support for the banning of Muslims? Even Europe, which has much more serious problems, probably won't.
So what's the point of catering to people like you anymore? You lost, as they see it. If 9/11 and the rise of ISIS or the grooming gangs didn't cause a ban or rethink nothing will.
If any part of my post is sympathetic to the case it makes about how people think it's that we all know it won't stop at this. Plenty or even most American Muslims tolerate this (I grant there's just a seemingly impossible to filter minority that become deranged and use violence that punches way above its weight) but "live and let live" is a lie. The minimal secular state is a lie.
Liberalism doesn't really compromise, it just pauses to reload. On many matters American Muslims are just conservative religious people circa a couple of decades ago and that is theoretically acceptable within the secular framework of the country, but will constantly be put under pressure by liberal hegemony.
What exactly has the constant compromising bought Christians? Have evangelicals stopped being the boogeymen? Did the liberal state take the win on gay marriage and leave it at that? Or is it demanding the right to trans and indoctrinate your kids as well? And what's the response to complaints? That it's just like gay marriage, which you were on the wrong side of history for. This argument actually works on people.
Muslims might be willing to accept some sort of millet system or one where each faith has its own way but with neutral strictures to protect freedom but clearly that's not what's being debated.
The debate is one side saying Muslims are incompatible with the country, and the other side saying they're compatible so long as they cede moral sovereignty and start down the long road of becoming Unitarians or some other faith colored appendage of globohomo that's gonna die anyway (the churches with the lowest apostasy rates are not the ones that just go along to get along). Hell, it's arguably already begun with Mamdani and co. You can see why people don't want to give inches away rhetorically.
You may have heard of this guy named Donald Trump. His anti-immigration ire is only marginally focused on Muslims right now, but your rhetoric would make my "Ginsberg t-shirt and coffee mug" mother want to limit and deport.
Liberalism is the compromise. If you don't care for it, the alternative is Deus Vult and blood eagles and the red ruin of your culture.
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I think education is and always will be the crux here. The progressive view trends towards the idea that religious freedom is a right to be exercised by legal adults making an informed, personal decision as to which religion seems true to them after being exposed to the full spectrum of options, such that attempts by parents to raise young children within a particular religion scan as prima facie sinister attempts to box in their thinking before they're old enough to make up their minds for themselves as they're entitled to. The conservative view, meanwhile, is rooted in a deep feeling that the right of parents to raise their children within their hereditary belief system is sacrosanct, and any attempt by the state to mitigate this amounts to a sinister totalitarian plot to brainwash kids and break apart communities. One is individualistic, the other is communitarian.
These are idealized views, of course: religious conservatives would struggle to defend against the charge that they're just upset at somebody brainwashing their children other than themselves rather than anything more principled, while progressives don't cover themselves with glory with regards to "okay, but are you actually giving young minds an unbiased range of options or are you just weighing the scales in a different direction". And misc. interference patterns arise from the ol'Oppression Olympics, such as progressives sweating bullets when asked to criticize sharia schools as their principles should normally dictate. But nevertheless, I think that's the basic dichotomy at work, the scissor-statement nature of "the state should stop parents from indoctrinating children into their religion" as a proposition.
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You're definitely correct about everything except that the Muslims are also going to go gay and trans just like Christians did.
Take a look at the cratering birth rates in Muslim countries. Look at the absolute softness of their military forces. The selection process of modernity hasn't even fully hit them yet. Can Abdul from Riyadh resist internet porn and video games? Doubtful.
You're thinking like a Puritan. The point isn't to eliminate sin, it's moral hegemony.
Abdul from Riyadh can both watch porn and still be all for the murder of any gay person who got uppity and tried to challenge the faith.
Notice that adultery never triggers the same defense mechanism as homosexuality, because it's widely seen as a sin while the homo stuff is a challenge to the prevailing moral order. (A lot of Muslims love to sin while vociferously resisting pork since it's an outgroup marker, for another example)
The real problem is whether Mohammed bin Salman feels the same. The state can only keep it's people fat on oil-created do nothing jobs for so long.
...Then what are honor killings about?
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I'm more thinking that the only groups that have successfully resisted modernity are the ones that have extremely strict systems set up to defend against it like the Amish and Hasidic Jews. Even groups like Mormons are getting steamrolled. I think Muslims will get steamrolled too. They might still maintain their "otherness", but they'll abandon their true belief and become feminized just like other groups have.
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The simplest explaination is that the speakers agree with Osama Bin Laden's overall worldview but think that his tactics aren't very productive (obviously they can't admit this outright).
Like, imagine yourself in the mindset of an open-minded devout young Muslim man and read Bin Laden's Letter to the American People. Your response is probably something like, "well I am not about to fly a plane into a building, but he makes some good points." He's worried about the same things you are: Israel, secularization, sexual debauchery, consumerism, the plight of the Ummah. When you think about it, the tragedy of 9/11 isn't really Islam's fault, because America started it.
Wasn't that a trend with young leftist women on Tiktok at one point? Which, I know, is meaningless, but still.
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Cool motive; still murder!
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