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Have you ever had the occasion to sit down and actually talk to a Jihadi or Revivalist Sunni face-to-face? Not some westernized Muslim living in some big cosmopolitan center, or edgy teenager posting music videos to /r/combatfootage, but an honest to
GodAllah, chin-strapped, true believer.I ask because you seem weirdly wound up about this topic. So much so that you appear to be grasping at straws. For instance, where the fuck is this idiotic nonsense about "nobody outside of a tiny number of scholars concerned with calendars" knowing the date coming from? The Gregorian Calendar, that is the Calendar in use today throughout the English and Romance language speaking world, was codified and adopted by the Catholic Church and by extension most of the major governments in Europe back in 1582, a full century before the Siege of Vienna. Yes the Ottomans continued to maintain their own separate Calendar up into the 20th century (as did Imperial Russia for that matter) but that doesn't mean they were unaware of the Gregorian Calendar or what date a given event happened on.
Likewise, you say you didn't find anything on the web. Well no shit. Wahhabis don't exactly maintain much of an online presence, something about the internet being a Satanic construct. What presence they do maintain is typically in Arabic rather than English.
You can demand "proof" from me, but your attitude is giving me the distinct impression that there is nothing I can provide that you would accept. So with that in mind, what is your alternative theory?
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.
First I think you need to remember that I am an American writing to a predominantly American and English-speaking European audience. Using Hijri dates in my OP would've been pointless and the opposite of "speaking clearly". Second, I think you need to go back and reread the OP. I never claimed the the numbers 9/11 held special significance to Muslims. I claimed that the date, that is the anniversary of the siege, was significant. Speaking of which your dates are wrong. The date would not have been announced as Ramadan 19, it would have been the 22nd or 23rd of Jumada depending on your time zone. Likewise we're not talking about "pre-modern Muslims" either we're talking about Muslims in the 21st century.
As to your question of "What exactly gave you that impression?"
These sorts of weirdly specific assumptions/misreadings described above coupled with a generally confrontational attitude are what gave me that impression.
You ask me why I think a Wahhabi or some other flavor of Sunni Revivalist would care about the Seige of Vienna and that's how I can tell that you've never actually talked to one and that your alleged "web search" must have been half-assed or non-existant because when given the opportunity to talk about this stuff it seems like half of them wont shut up.
First off, if my posts come across as confrontational or angry I apologize and will try to tone it down. My thought process wasn't "ha, I'm gonna nail him down on a potential minor mistake in a huge effortpost" but more like "huh, this sounds interesting but conflicts with my background knowledge (i.e. Muslim calendar vs Western ones), let's do a quick search to see if it checks out". FWIW, I upvoted and appreciated the original post.
But the Muslim anniversary would have been on December 5, 2001, because that's Ramadan 19, 1422 and the battle at the end of the Siege of Vienna was on September 11/12, 1683 Gregorian or Ramadan 19/20, 1094 Hijri, unless my date conversion is mistaken (see below). That's where I got skeptical: I understand that it's not about the numbers but about the anniversary, but using the calendar religious Muslims follow there is no anniversary to speak of on 9/11, 2001. If Muslims care about the anniversary (and I can buy that there are Muslims who do), I'd expect them to do so on wherever Ramadan 19 happens to fall on in a given Gregorian year.
You did already mention that it might be about sending a mutually understandable message and that does make sense. However, I'd still like to see more direct proof that this is a thing in these circles. The conversations you had with people on the ground are no doubt illustrative, but not accessible by me. I had simply hoped that there would be more material evidence out there to support that statement, something like a famous cleric writing a fatwa specifically referencing the Gregorian anniversary or something like that.
I'm using this website for conversion and it spits out the dates I mentioned above. I double-checked by typing "september 11 1683 in hijri" into Google and it concurs. 22nd and 23rd of Jumada[al-Thani/al-Akhirah probably] seem to be 9/11 2001. It's probably because the way I worded it was bad writing, but in that paragraph I was always talking about the date of the siege, not the terrorist attacks. Accordingly, the news I mentioned would be that of the defeat at Vienna, not of the Twin Towers.
That's a bit of a misread of what I meant, most likely due to clumsy writing on my part. It's not the idea that such people would care about the siege that I'm skeptical about, in fact I find such obsessions rather likely given other things we know about e.g. al-Qaeda in particular, it's the notion that they would do so under the label 9/11 instead of thinking about the date in their own native tradition, which given the above should be Ramadan 19 or 9/19 (unless I'm mistaken).
I did search for about 20 minutes and found several forum/stackoverflow-clone-for-history threads talking about the same idea, which is how I found the contributions by Lawrence and Hitchens as well as the CNN article. I don't speak Arabic and accordingly don't have unfiltered access to the ideas from that part of the world. If you have a link to some kind of source, Western or Middle Eastern, to share I'd genuinely appreciate it, I'm a sucker for these kind of minor historical anecdotes and connections.
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