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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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