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Let me be precise about what my position is: of course there were lots of people in the Muslim world pre-modernity that understood the Gregorian calendar. However, the great majority of intellectuals and the general population would at most be aware of its existence, but not of how to use it or convert their own dates in the Hijri calendar that everyone of them would be using, just as I or about 99,9% of all westerners can't tell the Julian date of a particular day without consulting an expert or a web app. Because of this, the idea that the numbers or the date 9/11 hold special significance for Muslims is suspect to me. The date would have been announced as Ramadan 19 as heralds spread the news throughout the Middle East. Where would a tradition of assigning 9/11 with special importance have organically come from instead of 10/19, the actual date almost everyone would have been thinking about before the 20th century?
Sure, but people translating and writing about them might. I can't read classic Greek, yet I still have access to a great deal of Greek thinking and commentary on it. For example, the original writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab survive and are available in English.
What exactly gave you that impression? I did directly mention things that would convince me: a statement by bin-Laden or someone else from the group responsible referencing Vienna and the context of the 9/11 date, writing by Muslim historians or scholars about the importance of the Battle of Vienna and particularly the (Gregorian) date it was on, basically anything that provides some evidence for the notion that the Gregorian date itself is really something that people paid attention to in the Islamic world other than hearsay or statements by outsiders like Hitchens or Lawrence.
I don't really have an alternative theory. My best guess would be that it was just random chance. For example, here on the Wiki it says that in a meeting in Spain in July 2001, a middleman expressed that bin-Laden wished for the operation to go ahead ASAP. This old CNN article about an Al-Jazeera documentary that talked with the same middleman before he was captured by US forces recounts the anecdote of how Atta revealed the final date of the attack to him, which has no mention at all of the significance of the date (while it does confirm that the date was in given in the Gregorian calendar). Both of these taken together imply to me that there was no or little group-wide discussion and that the date was chosen for practical reasons.
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