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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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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):

(Dr. Abdullah bin Hamid Ali) I think like one of the first mistakes that Muslims after 9/11 made was to embrace the narrative itself, right? You know, that it was Muslims, right, who did it. Now, I think it would have been okay if Muslims said, you know, that, listen, you know, yeah, it's a possibility.

We accept that Muslims may have been part of it, you know, but to embrace the whole idea that this was done by Muslims because of Muslim backwardness and things like that, you know, and yeah, there's a certain level of backwardness involved with that. But at the same time, what it did was it gave the empire, I guess you would say, an excuse to do everything that it did afterwards, you know, and so, but I think that Muslims have pushed back a bit more and said, hey, listen, you know, you know, there are different perspectives here, even a lot of non-Muslims [inaudible] sceptical of this narrative, right? And even if we accept something like that, you know, yeah, maybe Muslims were in those airplanes, you know, but the idea that Muslims, that the airplanes made the building fall down, it's like, well, you know, I mean, so now all these things are coming out now, and so it's humbly allowed to see that even a lot of non-Muslims who are actually questioning the narrative and they're not falling for a lot of the negative propaganda.

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):

(Imam Farhan Siddiqi) Many of us were sitting here, remember, after 9/11. The stops that we received at the airport, members of this community, unfortunately, who were jailed unjustly, some of them still sitting in jail. Funds were frozen. Laptops, computers taken. Raids were happening. This [ie. October 7] is not the first time we were called terrorists. And why was it then? Because we didn't agree with the narrative. And we said that Muslims are just.

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.

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.

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

As MBS showed it is quite easy. Sometimes cutting the Gordian knot or heads is the good way to do something.

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.

I suspect he could have but, especially being closer to Russia geographically, he saw the Islamists as a nuisance and the communists as the real threat, rather than the other way around. He was wrong, but so were a lot of people, including the communists. While being nominally Muslim he also spent a great deal of time and money hyping up the pre-Islamic glory days of the Persians past. To be fair, Sisi has gone all in on Ancient Egypt hype over the last decade, but secular Egyptian military dictators from previous eras were more careful before the brotherhood was fully crushed.

As a general, you are always preparing for the last war, and as an autocrat, you are always preparing for the last revolution. In Pahlavi’s case, that was the revolutions of 1917 (or maybe 1871, really) to the middle of the 20th century, not a religious insurgency.

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