Just recently, I had been in Amman, Jordan, after not having been back for exactly a decade. I’d already spent some years there as a child, so I enjoy having the perspective of an American-born diaspora whose parents tried the “Hijra” experience with us, came back to America, and in my case, coming back after many years of proclaimed advancements in this part of the world that I always remembered as a kid as being far behind the material luxuries of the first world. In tune with this were the usual discussions and thoughts I’ve been having for years now with friends of a variety of backgrounds on the current fate of the Muslim world, and what’s in store for the future of our native counterparts. My trip so far has, unfortunately, both confirmed my previously held beliefs about the backwards third worldism holding the Muslims of the world back, as well as given me deeper insights into how “over” it looks thus far.

To give a prime example: many American citizens whose parents or grandparents come from a third-world nation (especially if they’re dual citizens there) will at some point, when they’re back there, get their government affairs in order for either marriage, collecting inheritance from a deceased family member, starting a business, buying property, etc. You get the picture. I went through some ordeals at government offices recently, which I don’t want to specify, but I’ll describe what I saw.

You get there, and just on the short walk from the unpaved, dirt car park to the door you’re borderline assaulted beggar-style by dozens of men, both young and old, coming out of encampments who all at once promise to take passport photos for you, fill out your applications, make copies of anything, get translations of foreign documents, and all related things. They do perform these jobs in earnest, but often screw up with needless mistakes or drag you along if they think they can scam you. You get inside the government office itself, and the layout of the area is literally meant to maximize the number of people they can hire to perform every individual step of any process you need entirely on their own. There’s an entire separate human being whose job all day is merely taking QR code receipts to collect cash for processing fees, another who looks over your request and stamps papers, and another dozen or so working in the inside offices processing each step of producing a marriage certificate or a passport on their own, like the most basic automatons whose duty is perform the same set of movements repeatedly in a factory.

This isn’t strange or outrageous to anyone from the Global South; it's the standard here. In basic economics, it's “make-work” or Disguised Unemployment, where all forms of systemic infrastructure, various forms of automation, and industrial advancement are halted for the sake of keeping millions of uneducated (or rather, highly educated but unemployed for other reasons, which I’ll also get to) citizens employed doing garbage made-up jobs. If this sounds familiar even though you reading this might be a total first worlder, its because in recent years the right wing in the Anglosphere has argued repeatedly that this was a phenomenon infecting their societies as of recent, where minorities and immigrants are kept employed doing pointless, easily automated email jobs for the government (DMV, social services) as a form of welfare by other means. In the Muslim world, though, this is still the standard on a level that’s keeping various populations held back compared to the West by at least thirty years.

During my ordeals at these offices, I had to, at one point, go from one location in Amman (Place A) to another office across town (Place B), which would take forty minutes at least in the urban traffic hellscape that exists there now (a whole different topic). I was insistent on asking about every step of the process, so one employee at Place A told me I could finish everything up at Place B instead of coming back after getting some meaningless stamp that can only be done at Place B. So I go there, get the stamp, and ask the officer there where I can finish up. He says I have to go back to Place A. I say, why? Guy at Place A said I don’t need to go back. He shrugs and says, “I don’t know, figure it out.”

I go outside and ask a random bloke about it, and he confirms I just have to go around the corner to a little area with more workers behind windows tented with sheet metal to finish my specific business. I go and do so. I’m then left wondering why this particular officer instinctively felt he had to lie to me instead of just easily making my life easier that day.

This attitude exists everywhere in the third world, especially in nearly all civil affairs in Muslim nations, where the Western civility culture we diaspora take for granted doesn’t exist. Everyone just sheepishly goes through life being mindlessly unhelpful (even antagonistic) to everyone around them, viewing everything as a zero-sum game or one of exploitation, which runs contrary to any Islamic doctrine you might refer to as a layman that supposedly is meant to inform you what the background of our people is.

“We need to move back to Muslim lands, brother.”

One of the most annoying parts of the whole “Hijra” argument to me, on both a personal and intellectual level, is when its taken far from the basic “preservation of Deen and Family” aspect and the interlocutor tries to argue that in addition to this, we need to go back to our native Muslim homelands because we have a responsibility as more privileged Muslims (in academia, tech, philanthropy, etc.) with Western degrees and sufficient supply of USD capital to “improve the conditions of the Ummah.”

I always found this line of reasoning absurd and hysterical, and even more so upon going through the above in addition to a variety of other experiences over the years. It might seem dramatic to you that I’m drawing this from a few bad experiences at government offices (as you might believe everyone has trouble in those places anywhere in the world), but I wouldn’t have taken it so personally if I didn’t see the same behavior as part and parcel of every aspect of life there, except of course when gathering and doing anything with family and friends, in which case you all suffer these things together in laughter and harmony.

Just look at the culture of dialogue itself. American society, for the better part of the last fifty years, has better selected for educated ethnics, who easily perform the "higher class" feature of being able to ruminate and explore ideas in a public forum without sentimentality for the sake of some intellectual goal. This is generally a Western feature, but in America, it’s far more easily the norm due to its ultra-classical-liberal founding.

The UK and much of Europe haven't been able to select or assimilate Muslim ethnics into adapting this, pretty much leaving them to retain the same third-world method of having intellectual/religious discourse as their native counterparts, because many of them just don't come from the same class backgrounds as those who end up in America. Allow me to further explain this at the risk of digressing: in daily life in much of the third world, especially the Arab and South Asian world, there's no such thing as a civil conversation done for objective, unemotional, detached purposes. Every single topic is interpreted as having some ulterior motive or signalling behind opening it up in conversation, and with it the assumption that you're fully endorsing whatever ideas you're bringing out in the open. You are always expected to perform an eastern “Song and Dance” to express yourself as a matter of decorum instead of just politely and directly saying how you feel.

This sounds incredibly backward and almost feminine, but it is very much the norm with large masses of any third-world nation. Every diaspora Arab or Desi who's spent a decent time back in their land of origin knows exactly what I'm talking about.

If you're one of them, you've likely believed on many occasions that you were just too autistic to deal with your own people back home because you just couldn't keep up with the Song and Dance: the ridiculous amount of social cues and indications of whether someone likes, dislikes, or wants something from you in just a simple conversation. This is also why many of us get scammed in these countries.

When this is the norm in daily life with practically no separation, it makes intellectual exploration and debate nearly impossible. Other than the fact that the highly educated, high-IQ minority of these countries are motivated by merely this to run from their native lands in search of careers and education where their more “elite” potential can be fulfilled, it makes any prospect for diaspora to return absolutely insufferable. Why would anyone willingly subject themselves and their families to this after growing up in the Anglosphere, having permanently adopted this “Anglo-Protestant” ethic of civil culture?

The economic situation is also worth noting. Education, first and foremost, in Jordan is of a very high level — tens of thousands of very intelligent, very talented minds graduate from high schools and colleges every year here who, barring language barriers, excel in math and science subjects in ways that would put many US states to shame. Lots of Arab nations, like Syria, have outcomes like this.

However, due to ridiculous corruption, laws barring organic entry into many industries, and a general lack of industrial and tech advancement, regardless, these highly educated graduates are left with nowhere to work. This is another overtold third world story, but it gets worse — for some odd reason, the mindset of those developing the education system here is stuck in this cruel loop where they think the reason Jordan is still suffering materially and falling behind is that they need more and better educated Jordanians (not even taking into account the cultural aspect where every family sees education, and not actually accomplishing anything of worth or improving daily ethics, as the key to upward social mobility) because it would be too hard for them to accept that the real reason is a stagnant, intentionally halted jobs market (because it would push out hundreds of thousands of managerial boomers and Gen Xers who are less educated, less intelligent, etc. who know an influx of young intelligent workers would spell their end).

So the result is they constantly add to and overhaul the education system with pointless subjects for posterity, or subjects the rest of the world wouldn’t ever put in a last-year high school curriculum and reserve for the collegiate level. All this does now is cut off a large number of students from the job market, unable to mentally take on this material bloat that punishes specialization, who would otherwise be productive and above-average workers, but don’t make the cutoffs compared to the top 5%. And for those who do make it, they have no choice but to try as much as they can to emigrate to a Western nation, ideally the USA or the Arab Gulf, where they have the opportunity to be useful in their fields and earn a humane living instead of driving Uber or selling assortments of Chinese wares in flea markets downtown. This exact situation also happens in Syria, where thousands of master’s degree, PhD, and medical degree holders became relegated to impoverishment in a stale dictatorship stuck in an olden past, all having worked harder for their degrees and lost more years of their youth than most in the first world, purely out of the spiteful stupidity of those once in charge of their country.

When I look at all this, it’s so incredibly difficult for me to accept this argument that we as diaspora (assuming you mean diaspora who are “Ummah Conscious” in the first place) need to toss ourselves into this mindlessly. At the very least, you need a really good plan before you subject yourself to all I described, as well as hundreds of ethnic family connections in high places to get anything done, because otherwise you’re going to throw yourself and your family for a trip of being disheartened and traumatized every step of the way. These attitudes aren’t just contrary to ideal Islamic doctrines of treating and caring for your fellow Muslims; they're an anti-spiritual weapon that actively disenchants and takes you out of your faith in “the Ummah” over time. This requires some further explanation, so bear with me.

On a basic level in terms of essential Islamic practice, yes, Muslim nations largely show “outward” Islamic behavior by filling the mosques on Friday, giving decent amounts of charity, having halal food as the standard, and gatekeeping their societies and culture from the familiar ills, now rampant in the Anglosphere, that lead to transvestite priests and homosexual government representatives on TV lecturing you about your moral responsibility to respect your autistic son’s choice to shag a toaster. Family ties are generally strong, positive, heartwarming cultural traditions that have been built up through their forefathers’ integration with Prophetically guided (SAW) ethics over centuries. But outside of this, or on a deeper, underground level, there’s nothing else to speak of. The Muslims of these nations still live in such a state of inertia and a “crab in the bucket” mentality that there’s zero motivation for the smartest, most talented Muslims among them to stay and waste their lives trying to change things as opposed to leaving for America or Canada and making something out of themselves. Upon reading this, I already know you’re either espousing or thinking about the criticism of this inherent “colonized” or “Western” desire of the educated and “privileged.” Bear with me.

“The Ummah Deserves Better”

I want you to think about this sentence. What does it truly mean to “deserve” something? Every time you hear this line or one of its variants, that the Ummah needs X or will win in Y in the near future, do you see that energy reflected in reality? Or are you just being injected with another dose of copium from the X pages of slop posters (who I won’t name)? The implication from these people is always that, because of the inherent religiosity of the Muslim world that they’ve supposedly maintained until now, they deserve and will attain some physical or material victory in the future against the West (or more commonly spoken of, Israel).

I’m going to just come out and say it — no, that doesn’t necessarily mean Muslims deserve victory at all. In some ways, it's completely irrelevant. There absolutely is an inherent Islamic argument for competence in all technological, industrial, and infrastructure affairs, even if it means temporarily deferring the implementation of outward Islamic lawmaking or “Dawah,” the latter of which, contrary to popular belief, is becoming increasingly overrated and a useless endeavor in many places in the world.

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See the X post below:

I don’t know Jaan Islam, and before my opposition to this post of his back in May had never interacted with him. He’s probably a good brother and well-intentioned, and none of this is aimed at him; I’m merely using this as an example of the mentality I’m describing.

As everyone knows — back in December, Syria, a Muslim nation essential to the Muslim conscious, finally rid itself of a decades long tyrannical Alawite dynasty, the regime of which from top to bottom was a rotten collection of dictatorial suck-up filth who even before slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Sunnis in Syria and displacing millions of them, had kept the Syrian people behind in nearly all fields of development since the 1970s. My father was there recently and couldn’t stop telling me how it felt like taking a time machine to an older world. I also still remember as a child noticing the difference in how far behind much of Syria’s basic amenities were in the 00s, compared to Jordan, even. Nostalgia after the war’s destruction of the country eliminated this feeling at the time, however, and the rest is history, but once the Assad regime had been ousted, the Muslim world saw for once an opportunity for one of its nations to have a fresh start in governance and development.

Of course, this was met with natural opposition and skepticism, specifically when it came to the Israel question, carrying over a myriad of conspiracy theories from the time the Assad regime had dealt the rebels a serious blow between 2015-2017 with Russia’s heavy assistance, forcing them to regroup and eventually form the coalition under Al-Sharaa (known as Al-Jolani at the time) that would topple the regime last year. These discussions are usually reasoned and well thought, but what ticked me off the most were those who seemed stunned by the fact that when Al-Sharaa took command, his main concern was first and foremost the geopolitical stability of his nation and starting work on its most basic infrastructure and institutions as opposed to a variety of incredibly stupid suggestions that he should have turned Syria into another third world, psuedo-theocratic, militia-run slum.

It’s clear by now that they were led on to think things would be otherwise by his alleged past positions and fantastical history as a Salafi Jihadist who survived the GWOT unscathed, unlike many of his “colleagues,” who were all killed within short order of the USA diving headfirst into the Middle East militarily. To be honest, the fact that “otherwise” didn’t happen was a very pleasant surprise to me and my friends. We didn’t expect him to immediately mend a variety of foreign relations, even unexpected ones, keep diplomatic channels open for the rest, and overall be the kind of leader whose striking deals first and foremost to get Syria to be a country that keeps the lights on and has functioning infrastructure as opposed to immediately chimping on the Syrian people with mandatory niqab laws, banning women’s education, and declaring eternal war on the US and Israel.

This didn’t sit well with many, though. They seem to be infected with this political form of “Jinn Brain” where they think that as long as you pray Fajr and two extra units sunnah that God will grant your ragtag militia that’s out of bullets, has no aerial defense systems, and consuming nothing but scraps of kaak and goat cheese instant victory over Israel in a direct confrontation.

Also, just to quickly address this: enough with this “Greater Israel” bullshyte. It’s not happening. Imagine you’re sitting in your living room and a chef with a collection of maids is bringing your food to you, and you decide to send them all home one day so you can go to the kitchen and cook for yourself. That’s what the “Greater Israel” theory is. Just shut up.

Again, I hate that I have to clarify this, but I am in no way mocking true religious piety and dedication. Members of the new Syrian government themselves, for example, appear even in the most outward terms to be religiously dedicated and mixing with the general public that’s in and out of Quran classes and nightly halaqas, and that’s great for any Muslim country’s morale.

But, there’s a point many of these critics have reached that’s beyond the point of insanity. It's a known goal of the Sharia that prioritizing life itself overrides outward implementation of the religion when the former is under threat. None of us seem to gain any rational explanation from this class of hectoring academics (and many Imams, sadly) as to why they expect a Muslim nation that’s been stuck in 1970 for 30 years and a bloody revolution for 10 years to commit political and physical suicide at worst, or become a pariah Axis of Retards proxy like Iran at best, as opposed to bringing their nation to some semblance of social and political stability where buildings are livable and workable, doctors always have medicine for the sick, and clean running water is always available.

There is nothing, and I repeat, nothing Western, colonized, or contrary to the Islamic ethos about demanding basic competence and humane living from the land you live in, and from those you work for and deal with in daily life as a believing Muslim. The desire to have working roads, clean water and air, an advanced medical system, highly sophisticated defense technologies, is all part and parcel of making it through the world without losing your sanity, and on a macro level, essential to attaining any sort of sovereign recognition and dominance. Again, this seems obvious to state, but relatively recent arguments I had on X (launched by posts similar to the screenshot above) with some “highly respected” Muslim academics show many of them don’t believe this at all, much to my shock at the time.

There are two extremes that many point to. When you look at the UAE, you see the perfect example of a nominally Muslim technocracy that’s prioritized technological advancement, comfort, luxury, and economic prosperity over all forms of religious fundamentalism and piety expressed as political power, and the Muslim educated class by consensus agrees that when they’ve made a grave error in building their nation this way, and that this is something that also reflects in the insane geopolitical ambitions of its rulers in the past decade. On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, you have a country like Afghanistan, the relatively new rulers of which sadly decided upon seizing control of the country to piety-max into oblivion with seemingly no plans to assert themselves in a powerful way in the Central Asian sphere, nor provide a bright, prosperous future to the average Afghan.

Just think of all the Afghans in America, Canada, and the UK now who originally fled Afghanistan in the past three decades due to its war and impoverished state. Do you think any of them, in the next three decades, will be motivated at all to ever move back there? Do you think they at all regret their decision to leave, given where Afghanistan is now?

Those who support the current Afghan regime might say: We don’t need them, they’re traitors, etc., but that’s the thing: why don’t you think you do? Why don’t you care about bringing back the most educated and talented of your people to their homeland, opening it up as a haven for investment and growth? None of this seems to be even a remote priority for not just that country, but virtually every other Muslim nation suffering from this brain drain. And we’re all the worse for it.

Faith in “The Ummah”

At the risk of sounding like a cringe philosopher, I’m going to pontificate a bit to make this point. The exoteric and esoteric reasons for what happens in this world are undeniable, and as a Muslim, it’s imperative to believe that the exoteric (dhahir) is a direct manifestation of the esoteric (bațin), neither rendering the other obsolete, always in tune with the divine nature expressed in the Quran and the Sunnah. When one advocates for “secular” material excellence, many a “West critic” makes the mistake of believing that this is something entirely unrelated or contradictory to inward, spiritual excellence in matters of religion that they take pride in as Muslims who lack the former. I’ll hold my tongue on what I think of these fellows in simpler terms and just say they’re wrong.

At so many different times in our fragmented, widespread history, we were led by people who demanded the best from their people of knowledge. They earnestly wanted the best weapons, the best amenities in their cities, the best transportation, and so on; not as a marker of reduced religiosity, but as part and parcel of protecting their share of the Ummah under their protection, regardless of which fitnas they were undergoing at that moment. The Umayyads still revolutionized multicultural governance when faced with the fitna of the Shia and Khawarij. The Abbasids still maintained their frontiers and funded algebra, astronomy, and robotic automatons when dealing with the fitna of the Mutazila and the Buyids. The Ottomans, Mughals, and a multitude of sultanates among the Andalusians, Mamluks, and Ayyubids still fought to advance their weaponry, postal systems, irrigation, and medicine as they were split apart by foreign invasions and intrareligious battles.

It’s only recently that we began to cope with this ridiculous belief that there’s no such thing as Ihsan in matters of making the daily life of the average Muslim more comfortable, prestigious, and enviable, all because we struggle religiously with a number of widespread fitan in the modern day.

Progress must continue regardless of what spiritual ills we’re going through, because having a society of living Muslims who are massive sinners is still better than a society of monk-like Muslims who are slaves. The outward meaning of wanting this material advancement may be things like “comfort,” “luxury,” and “military dominance,” but the inward meaning is that having a group of Muslims who are alive, safe, and economically secure (no matter how much they sin) is better than having a group of Muslims who are spiritually, politically, and economically enslaved even in their own Muslim-majority nations.

(Part 2 soon)

But, it did another incredible thing for me which holds far more value, which I still take as a sign of acceptance from Allah that writing and publishing my novel was the right thing to do on both a personal and social level. It changed my entire trajectory as an “online poster” and writer, mainly through the pious, insightful friends it made me, which I’ll get into in a bit.

I set the release of my novel here as the cusp in my thinking because the second thing that I was notorious for was way different from the first, and the more known part of my “online persona” by my earliest readers of my Substack and tweets/X posts (2021-2022). I was quite firmly known as one of the two, maybe three minor Muslim personalities in the once small corner of the internet populated by non-politically correct, anonymous right-wing posters who predated me by many years on forums and the like. It’s known by many names (Frog Twitter, Dissident Right, RW Anons, etc.).

There are some accounts I can mention who are commonly seen as the “leaders” of this “right-wing movement” till the point of writing this, but here’s where things aren’t so simple. I won’t name any of them in this article, because to do so would detract from the entire point of me writing this. This is about my political journey, something I’m dedicating to the many Muslim men in my position who’ve never made their true views public even to most Muslims in their lives; naming some online accounts barely anyone in real life knows would make them think this is a “hit piece” against them or the like. You can make your guesses as to who I mean and you’ll most likely be right. These leaders also insist they aren’t leaders, as well as on the fact that what they are isn’t a “movement” of any kind, just an original space online where actual new, cool ideas and discussions are had without care for the suffocating and effeminate smothering of politically sensitive normies. Hard facts and realities about gender, race, history, and politics were everyday topics. It seemed, especially from 2019 onward, that it was the one corner of the internet where personalities and creators were judged and ranked in a true meritocracy. We followed each other because of our posts and allegiance to the everlasting goal of humiliating delusional progressives and enforcers of the sick, stagnant world of “normal folk” where young men spiritually and psychologically suffocate.

The very beginning of my political journey started where it did for many men chronically online: the Red Pill movement. I found it quite young — when it had not been known in any mainstream capacity by the media or the majority of people semi-active on social media. Andrew Tate had, at most, ten thousand Twitter followers and made YouTube video rants watched by a few hundred at most (think 2017-2018). One of the “manosphere” or Red Pill’s most prolific writers, Heartiste, was one of my favorite blogs. He was naughty and hilarious, and though I knew none of his attitudes or overall view of women fit in my very basic, teenage Muslim worldview — I found that I couldn’t get enough of his writing. I could tell even as a teenager that though a lot of these guys writing into the void about the dreaded “Woman Question” were frustrated with their lots in life and were either mentally unstable, closeted homosexuals, or some combination of the above; they were onto something very real that every young man in the modern world feels from boyhood. It was the fact that the world today, especially for men with any degree of higher consciousness, is a toxic prison.

If you believe in anything more transcendent than the regulated course the secular has to offer, this modern world hates you. Well of course, you may say, as we already know from the hadith of the Prophet (SAW): this dunya is a prison for the believers and heaven for the disbelievers. We all know this, and it always remains true no matter the specific point in the timeline, but there’s something about the modern world after a certain debated historical point that makes it so much worse than not that long ago. Every young man since the early nineties sees if he opens his eyes the sheer scale of the cultural revolution (especially in the West) that’s devastated any semblance of a “normal society” compared to the one their grandparents had. I’m not just talking about the LGBT illness or racial communism. The way life is set up now for a supposedly normal man, of any race or religion — from the things he’s expected to tolerate from his womenfolk, to what should be considered “fun” recreation to him, to the standards for which he should look physically and behave, to what happens to him if he tries to be a true maverick against these things — it was all so utterly horrifying and disgusting to me as a boy and still is to me now.

I wasn’t in America during my middle school years. I’d spent them abroad being educated in the Middle East due to my parent’s insistence that my siblings and I needed to get a better grasp of Islam and our Arab roots. Many Muslim parents do this with varying degrees of success. When I came back though (late into Obama’s second term), I’d returned to an America that I felt became zombified. Though many drastic changes occurred that I shouldn’t technically have been affected by (as I was too young to be conscious of them when I’d left America), I had accidentally self-groomed myself to believe in an America that no longer existed. In my time in Jordan, one of the ways I learned Arabic was by watching American films with Arabic subtitles, concentrating on reading the text — mostly Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal 80s action films. I was obsessed with them. They possessed a masculine American ideal, though full of propaganda and a facade in and of itself, that America itself would spit on and toss away a few short decades later.

You can imagine then when I returned just how disappointed I was as a freshman high schooler. I came back to a country where co-ed schools (both public and private) are populated by mentally ill, corpulent schoolmarms picking fights and rivalries with their licentious teen students is the norm. Where even the somewhat smart boys are so henpecked and browbeaten by these teachers, commissars deployed by an inherently broken and devolved education system, that the height of wonder and interest for them is sports and Instagram girls. Most American cities have transformed into dull, filthy amalgamations of Soviet-era architectural monstrosities littered with homeless and haunting LED adverts filled with land whale “models” exposing their inflated adornments. Mindless and repetitive hip-hop music that’s easily forgotten blasts in every public space, playing in the background of masses of soylennials reading CNN on their smartphones announcing the latest set of innocent children abroad blown up by an American or Israeli drone strike.

Trump won the election when I was still a high school student. For a whole year, everyone in my Islamic private school was sure that he’d lose yet panicked simultaneously at the prospect of him winning. And when he did, life just resumed. Throughout his presidency though (during which I’d end up in an American college, a radical environment shift from my graduating class of 17 kids), all I saw for four years was the same ridiculous behavior often seen on the left that didn’t care for religious practice, even though for most of the Muslims involved in “resisting Trump”, life didn’t change, and their foreign policy reasons (related to Israel) for opposing him were just a repetitive cycle of groaning about inevitable regime policies everyone knows happens regardless of the specific president in power (and indicative of much larger problems that virtually no Muslim “community” is solving or aware of, which I’ll get into later).

The failings of Muslim figures and communities in the anglosphere in that era began to show me a trend about us that ranged further than just the realm of politics. Most Muslims in these places don’t know what they’re doing, or what they’re working for. Much like in the accusatory tone levied at me early in my posting days when I was told I was not a Very Good Muslim writer, most Muslim communities are much better classified as ethnic minority communities who happen to be Muslim. They follow the same sheepish track as all immigrant communities in the West where, under constant threat of assimilation into the sewage that is American monoculture, can only be maintained by government welfare/assistance with a constant influx of coethnics from back home and communal donations for any kind of institutional project. A few exceptions are moving past this status quo now, and they do so carving their way not caring for the criticism of an endless sea of Arabs and Desis online who’ve never stepped foot in the West in the first place. Still, they don’t reflect the 90% who can only offer a confusing life underlined by the same secular and effeminate nation-state baggage that killed their home countries less than a hundred years ago.

Then the 2020 pandemic happened, which vindicated much of what guys in our space were saying about how our cowardly, treacherous states and societies worked nowadays. Regardless of which conspiracy theories you believe about what happened and why, it stress-tested the globe to expose that for the most part, in a secular world where religious faith and trust in God’s ultimate decree is a debated question rather than a reality — something as pathetic as a stronger-than-average flu puts humanity in a rat-like fear of reality and rational thinking. If you didn’t realize this as a Muslim now, as the primary lesson to be taken from that fiasco, I don’t know what to tell you. Years of our lives were wasted. Hundreds of millions of children to this day have been robbed of formative experiences that will retard them for the rest of their lives. Most of us were injected with an unstable vaccine that negatively affected the health of millions for years with zero mass acknowledgment of fault (Both my parents, within a year of each other, got different forms of cancer after getting the booster. Both are in remission now though, thank God). It was a horrid, inverted religious formation where the most sickly, deranged people in so-called “healthcare”, politics, and academia tried to fill the gaping hole in their souls with some messianic purpose. I wasn’t able to work out at a gym for eight months and spent most of 2020 in my room. Good thing all it took to destroy this was Putin invading Ukraine. Then everyone involved pretended they didn’t engage in the skinwalker-like possession that animated them for two years straight.

My growing obsession with ideas about history, religion, wars, and what peoples of the past were like — this all exploded for me shortly after. It just didn’t yet take an exclusively Islamic flavor, which wouldn’t happen until after I graduated college and finished writing Blood of the Levant. I realized that what I was reading in the Seerah of the Prophet (SAW), the history of our empires and beyond didn’t yield any of the modern-day conclusions that justify how our elders run things.

Feminism is a big ‘clue’ for most guys. Being “anti-feminist” for a young man or boy should never be the end-all-be-all, because it’s just a symptom of the much larger civilizational problem. Finding out everyone and everything has been lying to you about women since you were born shouldn’t just make you resentful of feminist dogma, it should make you realize you’ve been lied to about a whole lot more in life. Fitness, nutrition, modern money and banking, politics; the fact history happens not because of the communal mammies of the grass hut, but because of men who God employed to burn cities in one place and build larger ones in another. Incredible amounts of lies about Islam, and not even from so-called “racists” or the right. The devious lie that the Prophet (SAW) purely fought defensive wars with no overarching political theme. The disgusting idealization of the history of Islam as that filled with timid hipster queers and that our men of science were stuffed-shirt liberal retards like those that exist now.

Through this path, before I knew or had read much, I admittedly became a lurker, mutual, then writer myself akin to many “right-wing” anonymous accounts you may be familiar with, who write about the topics above. Many are still my friends. Many were repulsed by me due to being a Muslim, which I didn’t and don’t care about at all. The main accounts who had original ideas to offer were very receptive to me and my anecdotes, as for once they were bearing witness to an English-speaking Muslim online who wasn’t a rabid race communist, a deranged feminist, or a radical fedposting ISIS fanboy from London. Across this little corner you had young guys posting just about everything you think would interest men: history, philosophy, fitness, nutrition, etc.; but without any of the mainstream oversight and female hankering that made the usual big platforms for those spaces so repulsive to a guy like me. The main differentiator in this context for “based” and “normie” was simple: do you believe the modern, secular lie about history and nature? No? Based.

They got me into some amazing literature that I still read; Yukio Mishima, Ernst Junger, and Louis Ferdinand Celine are a few. But what shocked me most of all — and this is what kept me going in that space — there were plenty of Muslims there too. I kept finding them in the rough. Most had little to no following, but when they noticed me they’d DM immediately and shared similar thoughts and interests. Turns out they were just like me, estranged Muslim diaspora or converts who were sick of the Anglosphere Muslim status quo and Dawah Inc. culture that made us cringe in agony, wishing we had a cultural space that offered so much more than screeching infernal about the same ten topics in rotation.

I was almost done with Blood of the Levant by this point. I realized that young Muslim guys needed a community like this to go to — not Reddit, not Dawah Inc., not the sewer refuse that is “Muslim Twitter”; they needed creators and accounts precisely like these guys that I’m talking to as a real alternative. The idea for Qawwam Magazine would come out of this much later, but this was the seed. And I knew it couldn’t be some premature grift of me launching a new page or “group” with these few guys I had yet to verify the authenticity of. It had to form organically. So how was I going to do that?

I thought: simple. There is no solution other than to be honest and keep doing what I was doing. I’m a Muslim in this very niche right-wing space that posts about my reading of Homer as well as the authentic history of the Quranic text. I’m going to write about the infiltration of heretic turbanjabis into our mosques as well as the Marxist messaging in modern American TV shows. I took great joy in pissing off both ridiculous right-wingers (probably browner than me) complaining that my threads were getting attention, as well as simple-minded Muslims who thought reading ancient Greek works was the inspiration of the devil. I still enjoy it. All of these topics deeply interested me, and I saw that the more unapologetic I was the more I was attracting the kind of followers (and later friends) who I could promote and elevate as a parallel to the non-Muslim, non-mainstream spaces and also gaining their footing on the platform of “seeking the truth despite the fake, gay mainstream.” The problem I didn’t foresee was that the more I progressed, now approaching an election year, the more I was being torn by both ends. I had right-wing friends who violently posted about not wanting Muslims in their country despite very much liking me and my content. I also had Muslim friends at this point, true students of knowledge and some sheikhs, who had an incomplete understanding of this “new right” and were confused at my place in it all. There was one moment that had quite the effect on me — I’d heard from a friend that his sheikh (whose work I love and respect) followed my content and said I was a good kid but needed some mentoring. Qawwam Magazine took off, and I started to wonder: how would I resolve this contradiction? Turns out I didn’t have to. God did it for me.

I woke up on October 7th to my phone blowing up, as most of us did. We all know what happened, no need to repeat it. The reactions of many on the so-called Right Wing were priceless. To be clear, I wasn’t expecting any of them to side with the Palestinians outright. I knew beforehand that for the most principled guys on the right, after many conversations on my part, was that of total disengagement from the Middle East (something I agree with). Many however got weak in the knees immediately upon witnessing what happened that day. Accounts that were feigning to be animated by past stories of military glory — of a minority of men giving their lives in battle for some divine cause — were publicly crying in agony at what they saw. Almost immediately, all guns were tuned on Muslims and Islam itself. I found this so absurd — not because of the content of the hate being levied against us, but by what triggered it. To even most well-read conservatives and right-wingers, the Israel/Palestine conflict is a regional Middle Eastern conflict that’s spanned decades, with its most historically notable time being when a secular, leftist Palestinian liberation group (the PLO) was at the front of it. Why the immediate focus, algorithmic and moral, on the two billion Muslims who for the most part have proved to be detached from the kinetic conflicts in the Levant?

Some would say this is just their usual 9/11-era hatred resurfacing. I partially believe this as well. But it strikes much deeper than that. Muslims as a civilization used to be on equal standing with the rest of the world (and often overwhelmed it at various points) before the era of nation-states. Due to changes pontificated upon ad infimum, we fell behind and became civilizational losers. Worse yet, any internal criticism of this is always met with hubris and a bullying, defensive attitude rather than serious reflection. Just open up most Dawah Inc. adjacent accounts at any time — it’s all cope glorifying past victories. Our enemies know this, they saw it, and that’s what they were used to. The reality about October 7th was that those responsible surged into animating a small, one-day flash of our former glory, and not in the form of internet memes about how infidels are cuckolds or the infidelity of non-Muslim women. Those conservatives, right-wingers, whatever you want to call them — they were and are seething in rage because they couldn’t believe a bunch of “losers” punched them hard and left a mark. They couldn’t spiritually take it.

Of course, no Muslim power capitalized on this. The heretical Shia powers did nothing as usual, content with menacingly filming b-rolls pointing at maps and loading up missiles that would be fired at empty guard towers. At that time, all I did with my content was go in the direction my heart took me, and I saw the results of it. I’m still mutuals with all but a couple of those I knew on the right pre Oct. 7th, but it’s not the same anymore. They know this too, and it’s not just concerning me (they aren’t thinking about me much at all, I imagine), but internally between themselves as well. Before this point in time, I felt there was a lot of good to be done on that side of Twitter/X. I still believe this, just in a different way now.

The developments since then gave all of us a lot of time to spill out how we feel about the whole thing. What I saw, in earnest and with all due respect, is even the majority of those in this niche sphere I used to respect don’t have any real politics. Their hatred of modernity, the iron prison, and the yearning for a past “bronze age” was to a degree genuine, yes, but it’s only inside the frame of keeping the American Empire going for as long as possible. They don’t seem to have emotionally accepted the inevitable decline of their precious “West” (or rather, Advanced Gay Civilization). There’s a big distinction, believe it or not, to be drawn between the American Empire and the West in general. When the Roman Empire fell apart and resumed as the Byzantines, they were still considered Romans. Hoping for the death of the American Empire isn’t wishing for the death of the West, or White people, or America even. It’s hoping for a Byzantine transition, a dynamic future where the rest of the empire’s former domains transform and flourish under the decrees of their own people. The majority of dissident anons don’t seem to have this factored into their equation. In fact, they still brag about the terror the American Empire brings when certain nations don’t beckon to its command (recall the dog-pissing glee when America sent warships to free the Red Sea blockade the Houthis imposed), not realizing they’re cheering on the same desperate apparatus that wants to trans their children and is transforming itself into a technocrat regime that scans them scalp to toenail.

My friends now know who they are, but to those who grew upset with “my people” over the past year: you don’t know as much as you think, and some of your alleged brightest guys don’t even know what they don’t know. Hating the Islam you’re hilariously illiterate about beyond some neocon books you read from the 90s won’t change this reality. Calling yourself a dissident but still landing inside the Empire’s clutches after jumping won’t change it. All that remains to those that haven’t realized these transformations in the past year is an endless cycle of posting outrage porn on the timeline about the latest migrant knife attack or mass shooting, and publishing podcasts and substacks about race statistics that’ll go nowhere. I wish them luck. But if they want a more enlightened path, I pray they know where to look. The need to do so will only become more dire in the coming decade.

Just like when arguing with an insane woman, what mattered to the many on Muslim Twitter (MT) wasn’t what Ibn Maghreb was saying, but how he said it. It was outrageous to them that he dared use the term “biomass” as an abstract description, thus provoking an emotional reaction that yielded zero reflection instead of arguing against any of the points he was making. That majority however wasn’t what disappointed me, it was those who tried to engage with IM’s point but failed due to either their own functional illiteracy or a more subtle emotional narcissism that, in their own heads, puts their madrassa credentialism or Dawah Inc. social connections as giving their opinions more worth than that of anonymous posters despite the former’s failing track record.

Here is a more formal explanation of the whole “biomass” argument, since its definition as it's used by IM, others, and me is wildly different from how most Muslims online interpreted it. The same kind of misuse of terms happened when things like “redpill” and “incel” were discovered by MT, usually driven by online “bints” who don’t understand the meanings of words and only understand language in sequences of TikToks and Instagram reels, which is then reinforced by orbiting mid-level male accounts agreeing with them, who are taken more seriously in Dawah scenes due to their own real life activism holding feel-good halaqas or previous online writing about the Fiqh of raising a chihuahua in your one bedroom apartment in Dearborn. It’s mini-Mufti Menks consoling the hurt feelings of undulating puffy-lipped sistahs in an infinite feedback loop, that no one other than a small number of intelligent Muslims online (and it’s always men) seem to crack through. Please pray for the singularity.

An example to illustrate what I mean — when the term incel became popular and spilled into the MT media market sometime after 2019, the definition of it, unlike “biomass”, wasn’t inherently vague at all. You could google it in three seconds. It plainly meant “frustrated young man who wants to have sex but can’t due to the rejection of women.” Most of the hysterical Muslims online who became aware of it however, despite probably reading that definition and many associated 4chan memes and green text, didn’t absorb it as is; and in clear tribalistic fashion interpreted it on their own solely based on the posts of their friends. They don’t know how to just read text, it had to instead go through the Muslamic hivemind filter in order to derive any meaning. The resulting definition of “incel” then became the following: man who is critical of liberal politics and modernized, female-centric gender roles — AKA, if you’re an evil meanie man. It didn’t matter if you were a fellow sex-haver, whether you were married with kids — Muslims online kept throwing the term “incel” at anyone as if the real meaning didn’t exist. Genghis Khan was an incel. Donald Trump is the king of incels. The local Imam with great grandchildren who scolds female masjid goers to stop wearing those abayas with corset waistbands is an incel. Hordes of diaspora with pointless college degrees, conditioned by leftist professors to believe that words don’t actually mean what they do but instead whatever you want reinforced this behavior.

As such, the same happens to any other controversial internet term, not just “biomass.” In this case many interpreted it to mean “elitist” Muslims making fun of the poor or those with generally simple and unenterprising lives (which, in those terms, is something even most normie Muslims will agree applies to the vast majority of the modern Muslim world), and it makes sense why they’d see it that way considering their interpretation of what an “elite” class consists of is also distorted, influenced by pinko jargon and a fundamentally racially communist background also grown in academia. The problem is when you interpret it that way, you’re then allowed to say that every point in history had “biomass,” as the majority of humanity in any culture have never been involved in creating mentionable history or performing overturning political acts that change the lives of millions in short order, because “biomass” in its true definition aren’t capable of serious political action. It’s precisely the denial of this reality of human nature and history that’s led to the horrors of mass democracy, liberalism, and all other derivative viruses like feminism and such that are mistakenly diagnosed as causes instead of symptoms. The spiritual state that is “biomass” is also a symptom of what is ultimately the modern project.

Biomass, put plainly, describes the unnatural and inflated state of third world human populations that are in a position of near total economic, social, and in most cases spiritual slavery; rendering lives that are not only useless in the grand scheme of politics and history, but the misery of which grows exponentially as time goes on. It’s a set of assumptions based on the fact that many nations across the third world, which includes much of the Muslim world, have their large populations and fragile socio-political cohesion upheld solely through foreign (Western) interest-based machinations. It’s all fake. Pakistan and Egypt, two popular examples, hold the most debt to the IMF in all of Asia and Africa respectively, and each receive billions in both military aid and economic assistance yearly from the United States and the EU. Even critics of the “biomass” concept will agree to the insanity of this and its implications.

To put it plainly: say a village in a third world nation has five hundred starving people. You give them $50,000 in aid so that those five hundred people don’t starve anymore. They’re fed, but once the money is spent they’re not in any better position to be self-sustaining — they’re just well enough now temporarily to have more kids as a result of upheld cultural dogmas that encourage family-building no matter the circumstance — the result? Years pass and now those five hundred are a thousand, but they’re all hungry again. Muslim English-speaker narcissism likes to pretend that because certain nations are Muslim, that they’re above this calculus by virtue of things like the incredible personal faith of the poor in God, their consistent practice of Islam, or how much they value “family,” which, again, comes from an inherently commie-based view of the “virtue” of peasantry and the poor.

Anas (RA) reports that Rasulullah (SAW) said: ‘Poverty almost leads to disbelief.’ (Musnad Ahmad ibn Mani’, Al-Mu’jamul Awsat, Hadith: 4056)

The idea that the masses of poor people in any nation were capable of “coming together” and making positive political decisions was unheard of in pre-modernity. To believe this is to childishly take the Socialist revolutions of the past at face value when they tell you that they were “for the people,” when the basic history shows that even the most mass-appealing Socialist movements in history ended up being capitalized on by another set of elites who took the reins instead (the Bolsheviks, Iran, etc.) When any kingdom or Empire was healthy, it was the felt responsibility of nobility anywhere to protect and provide for them out of a sense of Noblesse Oblige, but it was never once believed that those masses had anything to do with how a civilized urban culture proceeds with its most known history. Muslims aren’t unique to this split, the equivalent to the modern-day liberal insanity of seeing the poor as having some inherent virtue would be if after the Prophet (SAW) passed on, the Companions (RA) went to the remote Bedouins of Arabia who were trying to send bags of grain half-filled with sand to Madinah as Zakah to consult them about who the next Caliph should be. There’s a reason why once Muslim lands were colonized, the Europeans in charge took great care to promote the syncretic, village style Islam over the sophisticated, urban city style Islam where all the heavyweight scholars of our history kept the scholarly tradition alive and well for that long.

This is the precursor and true story of Kemalism in Turkey, by the way — Mustafa Kemal came from a family of no status or renown, no Islamic intellectual background; the son of some lowly official from Salonica who served as the perfect model of what a “new, Modern Islam” would look like in the newly founded Turkish Republic. As nationalistic for Turkey as he was, he could never escape the shadow of the West’s desires for him as the perfect “private-Muslim-turned-civilized-man.” Even in his case — he didn’t succeed through leading any mass uprising, he succeeded by climbing through a decaying state and becoming part of the new elite class.

Despite its failures, the popularization of Salafism across the post-colonial Middle East post-1970 was carried out for the most part as a reaction to the damage done by this, an attempt to revive urban scholarly Islam in an age where the only choices were either drunken belly dancing in the night clubs of Cairo or this newly founded Biomass Islam that was so revolting it would eventually lead everyone to the former.

There’s also the bit about obsessive communitarianism I mentioned that rubbed everyone the wrong way. I’m reminded of a quote:

“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.” - Francis Bacon

In a corrupt third world nation that survives solely by interest-based banking debts, and therefore a state of political and economic slavery towards the lenders, there is little to no inherent virtue in the everyday life of that nation. A post-colonial country with that description is also ruled by a minority irreligious, insecure demographic who serve as middle-men between the colonizers/bankers and the rest of the population (the Alawites in Syria, for example, whose entire history is based on being syncretic savages with extreme resentment towards the long-ruling Sunni majority) — as such, the only way to advance is through your own tribe, connections of close co-ethnic friends, parents, cousins, etc. — no, none of this is to disparage close family relations. The trick is that intuitively you think these arrangements are good, but the reality is this style of daily life actually destroys any genuine sense of belonging in your own family. You’re born into a system where you are forced to appease disingenuous and hateful relatives and in-laws so that the entire rest of your life becomes even mildly manageable. You spend dozens of hours a week in lifeless, effeminate family dramas (often goaded on by your fellow family matriarchs), disgusting disputes over inheritance or ownership of a useless piece of land, and overall a life where you find yourself treating everyone for the sake of one ulterior motive or the other to advance in this corrupt society where making it by your own individual virtue is impossible. This sallow existence continues for fifty, maybe sixty years, then you die of heart disease leaving behind six children who will now go on to live the same life. You sell out not to a big corporation or a Zionist banking system, but to your own family and countrymen to survive.

It’s exactly this feeling, I suspect, that Muslims who are now living in the Western world were trying to subconsciously escape, and are still trying to escape as we speak. Their problems now, however, are entirely different, and aren’t equivalent to what I just described. Just because your local diaspora is less religious or commit X or Y sin doesn’t make them “biomass” too. I also suspect that each time Muslims fell into dire straits, it was because they were domesticated by a similar set of circumstances in a repeating cycle for hundreds of years. The Turanian takeover of Islamic civilization post-Abbasids in the tenth century isn’t so strange when you look at it this way.

There’s also this predictable confusion as to what creates an “elite” class as opposed to the masses. Contrary to accusations, just having money doesn’t make you an “elite.” Even today, there are plenty of top billionaires who hold zero political or social sway just because of their money. At the same time however, having a family on its own doesn't make you “biomass.” You’re not “biomass” just because you’re not a multi-billion-dollar tech tycoon who reads Persian poetry. So what’s the solution? How do you escape it?

Many of you might be sick of me using the 13th Century Mamluks as examples all the time, but it’s worth repeating: when As-Salih Ayyub rose to power as Sultan of Egypt, he became obsessed with filling his army with Turkic slaves. Previous Sultans all used them as soldiers, but he overdid it and it got to the point that by the end of his rule, he had amassed two whole divisions of them with thousands strong. All armed to the teeth, highly trained men without families, educated in the Islamic way by many prominent Imams (Baybars was a direct student of Ibn Arabi when he was still a boy), who knew nothing but brotherhood and war. They didn’t hate their situation — quite the opposite in fact, they thought they were having the time of their lives every day. The Ayyubid Sultan had, by accident, created a rival elite class who overthrew his own after his death, who were elite not by virtue of wealth, political grifting, or family connections. They prevailed by their masculine virtue, complete loyalty to their class, and a heavy swing of their sword arms.

When Ayyubid nobles were mass apostating, allying with local Christians, and ready to bend over for the coming Mongol invaders, the Mamluks were in the perfect position to take the reins. They didn’t just settle for “having a normal life” when the negotiations for such a thing came to them. Maybe it's hard to define for a lay audience what “biomass” is, but I can confidently say that these men were the exact opposite. Make of that what you will.

Many of my friends and I, including those who are writers as well, all admit that we were initially quite impressed by Dune when we first read it. I discovered when speaking to some Muslims older than I that bookworms at the time felt it was the first instance of “mainstream representation” for Islamic ideas and culture. Even today, one of the biggest push backs against the Dune movies was that they were being “whitewashed” of their so-called Islamic inspiration. As time went on, I realized the problems with calling it “Islamic” in any sense, in particular the message it was sending regarding the Islamic-inspired story elements it was using. Herbert was on to something with the setting itself, but the problem lay in how he portrayed the fate of the characters relative to the spirituality and story beats he was trying to convey. The result is irreconcilable problems for any rational Muslim reader of the series who mistakenly thinks it’s a genuine work of admiration of our traditions and ideas, instead of what it really is; a confirmation of the old and lasting biases made of Muslims and traditional cultures. A disclaimer is needed that this isn’t related to the quality of Dune as a standalone work of literature. The following is a thesis and interpretation of why these problems exist in Dune for us, and not a one-to-one sourcing of Frank Herbert’s stated intentions when writing the series. What I’m against is the attachment many literary-inclined Muslims have towards a story that only hurts future prospects for real Islamic fiction and storytelling.

Dune was published in 1965. This is three years after the Algerians fought a brutal war for their independence from France, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and a demographic transfer that remains controversial in many circles to this day. The Muslim perspective was a sense of pride in our martyrs for the sake of Allah, as this was a necessary and glorious win for Islam worldwide (granting Algeria the title of the Land of a Million Martyrs). The French occupation of Algeria was one of the last remaining European colonies after all — it had been years since Libya, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, etc. all (technically) gained states of their own. It had reached the point that many parties in the United States, even, were agitating for Algerian liberation and urging France to let go of an imperial practice that their Anglo-Saxon cousins up north had forsaken just recently. With this sentiment penetrating the hearts of both liberal, anti-colonial Westerners and spiritually connected Muslims across the Middle East alike, the media view of tan-skinned Algerians as cool and rogue guerilla warriors leading a righteous revolt against colonial oppressors was easy to give away to the masses.

Frank Herbert being among those inspired by this underdog story of “desert rebels” fighting for liberation is undeniable. The famous war cry from Paul Atreides in the novel, Yahya Elchouhada (Long Live the Martyrs), comes directly from a newspaper article at the time describing what a journalist there heard shouted from the fighters after their victory. You also see heavy inspiration drawn from Lesley Blanch’s biography of Imam Shamil, the Avar leader of the Chechens against Imperial Russia, Sabres of Paradise (1960), for the formation of the culture of the Fremen, showing many details that were sometimes taken out whole cloth for use in Dune. Chakobsa, the hunting language, is copied as a concept directly for use in the story. “May thy Kindjal Rust” becomes “May thy knife chip and shatter”, and so on.

Of course, Herbert couldn’t translate Elchouhada directly as “the martyrs” because, I suspect, he knew that a Western audience couldn’t understand this concept of martyrdom at a deep, epistemic level the way Oriental and Asian cultures immersed in Islamic theology understood it. There is a less common phenomena that’s the opposite polar end of “Islamophobia” (a term we’re yet to replace with something better), of “Islamophilia” which is at risk of misinterpreting Islamic ideas and metaphysics much more than hating it does — love being blind, but on a more macro scale. Yukio Mishima once described the non-Japanese understanding of Japanese culture as only admiring the Chrysanthemum and missing the Sword (a difficulty Paul Schrader faced when making his movie about Mishima’s life, particularly in portraying his dramatic seppuku suicide to a Western audience). With many Islamic cultures, it’s the same thing — outsiders love the aesthetics and the freedom of the sand dunes, but the truth of the scimitar — what it really means, terrifies them.

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Even though there wouldn’t be a worldwide “anti-Jihad” reign of media terror for four more decades, the idea of throwing your life away in a gruesome battle for a divinely promised afterlife was still seen in most of the developed world as outlandish, exotic, and completely non-Western — a sentiment that prevails to this day, where dying of AIDs as a closeted homosexual is seen as more worthy of the Western definition of martyrdom in modern popular culture than the foreign fighters in Afghanistan who died in the Jihad against the Soviet Union.

If Frank Herbert really wanted to go this route of writing a science fiction chronicle that had Eastern religious and mystical commentary (which was also inspired by his time in Oregon and psychedelic mushroom use, both leading to the Arrakis-like environment and spice drug in the story), he needed to make the story more relatable to a Western audience in this vital, mythological sense. To any learned Muslim, they recognize immediately that, with the knowledge of Dune being an “Islamically inspired” story, the tale of a messianic prophet guiding a desert people onto liberation and conquest of the outer world seems awfully similar to the Orientalist view of the Seerah of the Prophet (SAW).

This is where the big diversion from the true Islamic pattern happens — in the actual Seerah, our Prophet Muhammad (SAW) is a man from among those he preaches to and guides. Those who rejected him most violently were people who knew him from the day he was born; becoming a favored man recognized for his elite lineage and reputation of the utmost pristine character long before he received revelation. In Dune however, Paul Muad’Dib is an outsider to the Fremen. They’re awaiting a messiah to liberate them and lead them to conquer galaxies, but unlike the semitic tradition of prophethood (remember the shock of the Jews of Medina that the Prophet (SAW) was who he was, yet was not Jewish), are somehow open to the idea that it’s not another Fremen, and instead a foreigner who doesn’t know the depth of their lineages, traditions, and ancestral mythologies. For the sake of the story and Herbert emphasizing his environmental obsessions as well, Paul even comes from a tropical water planet that’s the exact opposite of the barren Arrakis. The only thing that separates him from the Harkonnen is that he’s imperially benevolent.

Paul’s story in the first Dune book is much more akin to the Indo-European story trope that belies the ancient tales and mythologies referred to in the canon of the ancient world, and thus the core of Western civilization that doesn’t experience Oriental influence until much later. In the Indo-European myth, a foreign hero of great might and a capacity for taming animals (The Atreides, descendants of the Greek king Agamemnon from the Iliad, wrestle bulls) invade and take charge of a people under religious or mythological pretense, transforms them, then launches an outward conquest on their neighbors. Sometimes this is done by two brothers (as is the case with ancient Rome) as well. Dune, at its core, is a Western story in an Eastern setting and world, based around a tale that unfortunately breaks with the values that caused his inspiration in the first place.

Though I doubt Herbert thought this deeply about it, this is why many readers who are part of the cultures he takes inspiration from feel the story is self-contradictory and out of place. A more uncharitable interpretation is that Dune insults the idea of Abrahamic Prophethood and Jihad in the first place by making the religious justifications for it in its own lore so loose and vaguely defined. In the first book, none of the functions of the lore or the characters behave in accordance with belief in the unseen other than the clueless Fremen. Everything in the nihilistic world of Dune has a scientific explanation, or a hidden plot of betrayal, or a drug induced hallucination, or a set of myths that are explicitly said to be implanted as a centuries long psy-op (the Bene Gesserit). Paul Atreides isn’t ever intrigued or guided by divine forces that cause him to make decisions which seem irrational in the moment but pan out later as ordained by a fate greater than himself. The Fremen, though have deep ancestral beliefs with regard to the worms and spice, have no daily rituals of “connecting to the divine” that attach them to that belief. They’re a tribal people, constantly high on a mystical drug, who abide by a primitive and barbarian way of life far more akin to how pre-Islamic cultures acted — like the Pashtun, Caucasian mountainfolk, Turks, and Arabs pre-Islam.

It’s worth addressing another view some friends of mine hold — that Dune is good because it makes the concept of imperial jihad cool and palatable to Westerners. My only response is that the second book, which I’m assuming many don’t read, literally goes right against this sentiment. A central theme in Dune Messiah, where the story launches away from any of the inspirations that made up its first book, is that Paul regrets and reneges on the Jihad he initiated, seeing his “evil prophecy” and ideas go too far and is hijacked by zealousness and Fremen lunacy. It’s hard not to see how this goes in parallel with the modernist idea that the only “good Muslims” are those who only take 70% of their faith where Jihad is only “personal struggle” seriously, or implying that our spiritual leadership would have doubts about this aspect of the religion if they were more prescient.

This doesn’t take away from the story itself, as it became Herbert’s own thing. The problem is today, Dune is constantly referred to by cultural critics and — foolishly, many Muslims — as a story that positively reflects the ontology and archetypes of the Islamic story and universal goal for mankind. All you’re doing by promoting Dune in this way is confirming every orientalist stereotype used by our enemies in the media to constrict us into a bubble of their choosing. If Frank Herbert’s goal was to actually drive interest to Islam and the cultures it created (it wasn’t), then Dune in that respect does a terrible job, and the only reason Muslims are attached to it still in this way is due to a lack of their own fictional mediums and media lore. It’s a cry of desperation and desire for their own thing, not true pride in a work of art that does us justice. Another great point my editor Samiha made is it’s the perfect way for mainstream publishers to constantly refer Muslim authors, agents, etc. to a “safe alternative” to a truly Islamic story whenever they come upon anything in one that makes them uncomfortable or is politically incorrect.

The way you get past this, however, isn’t by crying about “cultural appropriation”. It isn’t by throwing a fit because Americans want to wear “Dune-style” long robes, or demanding that Zionist publishing houses with quotas to fill conform to our moral codes. It’s by working to establish and improve the Islamic Secular, in short, by building our own media that isn’t defined by reaction or ethnic resentment. Our inspirations and the “root” to the unexplored treasure trove of Muslim stories in a modern world lie in our own books and history, not in the imaginations of those unconvinced of our ideals in the first place.

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Though this comparison is nothing new — it was exhaustively used as political rhetoric for decades in the Arab world by nationalist politicians who were not even worth the dirt under the boots of Sultan Salahudin or Emir Nur al-Din Zengi — many are unfamiliar with the political and social parallels and almost one to one comparisons that can be drawn not from politician to emir, but to the trends and waves of political establishment, betrayal, and decline on both the Frankish and Muslim sides in a total of 194 years of invasions and wars of reconquest that came about as a result. These are all worth looking at not just for hope and pleasure in knowing this is merely a cycle repeating itself, as Ibn Khaldun would put it, but to settle our expectations and strategies as we move forward, knowing that after October 7th especially a great shift has overcome the Palestinian cause that it’ll never turn back from.

Around my time wondering when to get into this reading, my dear friend Waqar had just finished reading The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf, who very enthusiastically recommended it to me. I was aware of Maalouf due to another friend, but hadn’t gotten to reading him at all yet. Needless to say, due to the fact I’m writing this now, the book impressed me quite a bit. It’s a mid-length detailed history of the events using solely Muslim sources (pieced together on a timeline using mainstream Western books, which I found acceptable), yet the way Maalouf writes you wouldn’t think it was a history book at all. The volume is structured the way a novel is, and you get absorbed so quickly into the events that are described with such stylistic excellence that even the very expected, oriental happenings of Arab and Islamic history seem like fairytales - even though the sources, like Ibn al-Atheer and Ibn Munqidh, were all primary witnesses to these true events and held close relations, sometimes no more than one degree of separation, with the heroes and central figures described.

Maalouf isn’t a Muslim, yet it’s clear from his writing he’s an unbiased writer with great admiration for the history of the era and sees the modern-day connection and implications. I didn’t expect him to lean in favor of the Islamic perspective, but just through his insistence on using the sources honestly with a matter-of-fact eye, I found the book to be very conducive to showing much of the true, positive Islamic attitude and its resurgence in the Ummah as the invasions went along, especially as the Muslims were making their great riposte in Imad al-Din Zangi’s (Nur al-Din’s father’s) time, which we’ll come to in a moment.

A Loss of Zeal

Abdullah ibn Amr reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Verily, the faith of one of you will wear out within him, just as a shirt becomes worn out, so ask Allah to renew faith in your hearts.”1

As any student of Islamic history knows, by the beginning of the 11th century the Abbasid caliphate had become a desolate shadow compared to the glory days of Harun al-Rashid. Even though it was Muslims who still ruled and occupied much of the same land mass, the caliphs gradually then all at once lost their spiritual and political fortitude — secluding themselves in the palace harems and gardens as the real power was taken by the Turkic and Persian warlords, who controlled nearly all the military; and Egypt and most of North Africa had fallen in the hands of heretical Shia known as the Fatimids. The “Arab” Muslim empire was no longer Arab, and wouldn’t be until the dissolution of the system of the caliphate altogether by the nation-state of Turkey in 1923.

The Seljuks, the new rulers of most of the Ummah, were still Sunni Muslims who relied on the same class of scholars and clerics to lay down the religious law. However, what both they and those who look in retrospect miss (especially those who undermine the importance of a caliphate) is that the station of a caliph is not merely a monarchic or hereditary role, even if that’s how it changed hands for most of Islamic history. A caliph, as the name implies, is one who “steps in” not just politically, but religiously to fill in the role of distributor and enforcer of Allah’s law in place of their predecessor — it is the blend of both the political archetype and the inheritor of a spiritual chain that goes back to the Prophet ﷺ. Very often, the spiritual health of the Muslim citizenry was directly correlated to the religious commitment and benevolence of the caliph, which of course heavily affected his policies. Whenever the caliph was a drunk hedonist who busied himself with women, poetry, and obsession with material luxury, even if in a time of peace and relative prosperity, that would reflect in the Muslim masses; and the same held when they were virtuous.

Thus, by the time the crusader invasions were approaching, the caliphate as a “spiritual center” of the Muslim world was nearly dead. The term jihad didn’t mean anything to most Muslims anymore, like something arcane and strange that, much like today, heats people’s nerves with its strangeness when it’s spoken. The people would hear it, but the word no longer meant a constant zeal and drive for conquest and Islamic expansion, and instead to the warrior classes became a convenient card pulled by Seljuks who wouldn’t stop slaughtering one another to justify their claims over each other's lands and inheritance every decade. Even later on throughout the crusader invasions when it was crucial to have uninterrupted and quick succession, it was an absolute disaster each time an effective emir who was just starting to win against the Franks passed away, as immediately every notable in the region would scrape their riches and men to run, or fight their fellow Muslims for the rest, often even allying with crusaders against the Muslims to do it. It’s easy to look at the early history of the magnificent Rashidun caliphate and whine about Muawiyah’s decision to establish a dynasty that’s hard to interrupt through succession claims; however, even though he was in the wrong in his time due to the claim of a far more worthy man contemporary to him, it turns out he had the right idea. He was just way ahead of his time.

It was this level of turmoil that the first crusaders first bore witness to upon arriving in the Levant. Almost immediately after their first couple of victories, petty and treacherous Seljuk princes were drawing and quartering their little kingdoms for themselves (which today don’t make up more than a city or two), groveling to the new invaders and assisting them almost unprompted to gain their favor. I find it comical that critics of Islam and its beginnings like to point out that the initial rise of the caliphate “only” occurred because the Byzantine and Sassanid empires had destroyed one another and experienced widespread famine and plague beforehand, yet themselves love the crusades and see it as a grand Christian adventure and conquest, which only survived more than a decade due to the direct interventions and help of heretical sects, treacherous warlords, and a religious and social fabric that had been worn out and barely kept together by a foreign elite. The Shi’i Fatimids and Order of Assassins (whom you’re led to believe by popular media to have been antagonistic to the Crusaders and their religious orders) also appeased the Crusaders as well after a few fruitless skirmishes and united instead on undermining Sunni Islam (their only true ideology) to prevent it from gaining a foothold in the region again. It’s all quite interesting, isn’t it?

The first 50 years of the Crusades feel like a slog to get through, and painful to read as a Muslim because you’ll just keep seeing more of the same story. Over and over: most Muslims are left clueless, and a few gather the courage under a dedicated emir to wage jihad against the Franks. They struggle heavily at the beginning but start to win, but then one of the following happens:

• A Shia Assassin kills them, and the cause of Shi’ism/Ismailism gains nothing from it. They continue to repeat this act despite this.

• A rival Seljuk prince fights and undermines them with Crusader funding/troops.

• They’re betrayed by one of their ethnic minorities who were originally under their protection.

You can’t make any of this up.

The Wasted Winner

There’s this strange belief modern Muslims have, I’m assuming due to their general desperation, that the victors who will destroy our enemies will show up one day the way one flicks a light switch or turns on a generator. Reality is it’s more like tumbling a small snowball from the top of a large mountain. Things reach their bottom at some point, and then the climb back up is led by a minority of Muslims who, despite enormous criticism from the entire world, including most Muslims, persevere anyway; numb to all things but hope for either an advancement in the cause or a good death that pays itself off eternally. Then, after decades and decades of this occurring, you start to get some winners. Most get genocided by the enemy, but one or two come out of the pile of mud and manage to deliver some fatal blows.

The thing is, by the time this happens, Muslims will have lost so much hope that they’re not even thinking of total victory in their lifetime. They just want improvement and the return of guardians of the Ummah who don’t crumble or become corrupted at the first temptation. It’s only when you reach this point does the very long march to victory occurs.

In our case, we’re looking at Imad al-Din Zangi, father of the most notable Nur al-Din. Ibn Atheer describes him as an immense gift to the cause of Islam, but he was also honest about who he was. As Muslim and dedicated to reviving the meaning of Jihad as he was, the guy wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. He was a gigantic drunk (a sin that would lead to his death). Barely spoke to men of knowledge in Islam. Excessively cruel for petty reasons; during one of his victories where he captured a city, he slaughtered many of its prisoners purely because he felt they’d annoyed him and his army too much during the siege. Not exactly a Friend of God when it came to showing people their rights in wartime.

Yet — he was just enough to be accepted by Allah as the man who started the long march to, after a generation, see the blessed Jerusalem freed at the hands of Salahudin.

The reason was simple. His harshness came in handy when it came to disciplining even his closest deputies. He stuck to tradition, and despite his sins, it was clear he had much deeper concerns than most people would assume:

Zangi, the Mosul historian says, was also very concerned about the honor of women, especially of the wives of his soldiers. He used to say that if they were not well looked after, they would soon be corrupted, because of the long absence of their husbands during campaigns.2

He wasn’t a traitor. When he’d take a city, he’d refuse to go into its palace and enjoy the luxuries he’d just earned. Imad al-Din loved the tent life, a man always on the move who spat in the face of the wahn3 that the Prophet ﷺ told us we’d be consumed by. When crusaders and traitor princes united to take a city full of Muslims, they assumed Imad wouldn’t come, but as Maalouf put it, they didn’t know the man. He came to their aid and struck fear in the hearts of his enemies not with the image of a man fighting for his riches, but one fighting for the establishment of a grand project that would outlast him.

And, as his reputation spread, the people would gather to sing his praises and support him. It was in his lifetime did a real sense of “Muslim unity” go from fantasy to reality. It’s worth noting here that the masses were fully aware of who he was. They know he wasn’t anywhere near the ranks of the high and pious, but they united behind him anyway. This stands in sharp contrast to many fools today concerning the Palestinian cause (and beyond) who think the norm is to sit on your hands and wait for the perfect, untouched Mahdi to come and save us all, and spend their time doing propaganda for the enemy as they criticize the only men doing resistance. There is zero historical precedent for what these people are suggesting out of fear that our enemies will see as nihilistic and “worse” than what we are. Pre-modern Muslims didn’t have this ridiculous miasma and were far more pragmatic about who they supported because they understood what worked whether it “looked bad” or not. Today, those who are in a position far more unique have no time for this childish thinking.

Of course, this does not contradict the need for good propaganda, but this is something I’ll have to address in a future part where I discuss the victory era, as well as the hurdles that came along with that until the eventual expulsion of the last Franks in the Mamluk era. Stay tuned for that.

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You notice this most when such brothers visit our mosques here in America, often in the city centers where Muslims have been plentiful for decades such as Chicago, Dearborn, New Jersey, Dallas, and so on. Questions arise when they witness the operation of our communities or conventions, such as:

• Why are the sisters seated adjacent to the brothers during this talk?

• Why are there adverts for female speakers in mixed events?

• Why are there so few children and young folk here?

• Wait, you guys are just declaring that being anti-LGBT is a normal position for Muslims in your school district?

Often, we don’t have a response at all. We just shrug and quietly acknowledge that many of the social aspects of “American Muslim Education” that are now heated debates across the world have already been lost in North America ages ago. Debates about the marriage process, makeup & hijab, gender segregation, halal/haram food, and such weren’t even had, in fact, in most of the country — instead, we relied on a couple of ex-Muslim Brotherhood-style councils and organizations to make these decisions for us, and the rest of us called it a day. After all, we had more important things to deal with, like how we were going to convince the sleazy local building inspector to let the construction of a masjid the size of a small house go through already, so brothers aren’t praying in the street anymore every Friday.

Our current position on this side of the pond is infantile, moronic, and outright embarrassing; to the extent it’s now beginning to infect Muslim communities worldwide due to the vast social media influence of the leaders of our communities here. When starting a discussion about this, often you’ll be met with “But we’re still a developing community,” and frankly, I don’t buy that excuse anymore. It’s a copout for the fact that Muslims in North America simply have other materialistic priorities as a result of the overwhelming Western culture that runs the lives of everyone that lives here. For how long can you call yourself “a rookie player” in basketball if you’re still making stupid mistakes years later?

When it comes to finances, for example, everyone knows why we find it so hard to fund new mosque expansions or consistent projects and investments in resources for Muslim youth. Muslims in America, despite making a lot more money than Muslims everywhere else in the world, aren’t spending it that way because, firstly, many of the young who have the ideas and energy are struggling to get married, a high priority for them out of college. Did you manage to scrounge up what you could to get married? Great, now you need to buy a house when kids happen, specifically in an area with good demographics and schools. Well, what if the public schools are full of blue-haired lunatics trying to teach your elementary school daughters what condoms are, and your boys might actually be girls and should have their genitals cut off? Now you need to send them to a private Islamic school, which costs thousands of dollars a year. In all likelihood, your wife needs to work too to make these consecutive steps happen.

See where I’m going with this? This is just an example. “Financial success” for Muslim Westerners is merely a strategy for how to insulate themselves from the decaying state of the countries they moved to. There’s no upward flourishing if this is your utmost concern.

That whole topic can be its own article but is beyond the general scope here. In the same vein that Muslims are distracted from doing anything useful with upward growth using their money because they’re too busy with reactionary expenses (and rightfully so, for the sake of their and their family’s safety and quality of life), they also, just like most in this country, are too busy struggling against a suffocating gynocracy that mirrors most American institutions, just to have a normal family & community life.

As it stands in the Western, liberal world — most high-level business-owning men aren’t really in charge of their own companies and institutes. What this means is, yes, they approve the large systems of operation and make big transactional decisions for the continuation and growth of the organization, but when stress-tested in a tough social climate, whether due to external conditions or a sudden internal calamity, they will default to appeasing the many affirmative action hires they brought on and allowing them ridiculous levels of executive control out of fear and pressure.

Most Islamic organizations, seminaries, etc. aren’t any different. These places too have investors, HR departments, and boards of directors. Today, most are run by the increasingly longhoused1 Gen X and early Millenial generations who make the occasional moronic and defensive decisions that cause so much controversy in Muslim communities today. An organization like Yaqeen Institute and Qalam didn’t develop its stereotypes because it’s overrun with explicit, hardcore feminists who have open anti-Islamic ideologies. It’s because it’s (or was) run by naive millenials who were desperate for social approval through the HR types that they allowed into the organizations in the first place.

The Free Mixing Problem

We’re reminded of this, of course, by recent events that quickly went around online where a supposedly well-known female “teacher,” prominent in the Dallas Muslim community, had a video come out against her by her ex-husband with the most serious of allegations.

I’ll give an important disclaimer that I don’t take this guy’s word for everything he says here. Divorce stories just suck. It’s a long two-hour video filled with insane hysterics by this woman he’s accusing, and most of what he says is irrelevant to why I’m bringing it up. In fact, I encourage you all to ignore the case entirely, and for a moment consider that every accusation he made in that video might be a lie. What this man did, pretty much, was inadvertently make a documentary about the current state of these millennial Muslim-American Speaker circuits and organizations, their alleged negligence to this man’s case being just one of the incriminating sins against them that are revealed.

I don’t know how else to say it — this video, to average Muslims unattuned to the social climate fostered by celebrity imams, must look like some alternate reality fiction. To the young who idolize them, this is emotional genocide. Several big-name Imams and “scholars” make the strangest cameos in this saga. None of these men have any direct connection to this man’s divorce case, yet are mentioned due to none other than their independent involvement with either him or his ex-wife as friends or acquaintances.

This then brings up the question, how would any of them be affiliated with his ex-wife other than very formally, considering they’re of the same social class as celebrity speakers? That’s what’s interesting here.

Keep in mind, that this woman built herself up publicly as a Muslim “marriage expert”, licensed therapist, and “teacher” for young women and girls. Audio clips are played throughout that show these male speakers, married men with children, having one-on-one casual, catty conversations with this her. She complains to one elder Imam about how “disgusting Muslim men are” and gossips about Muslim male speakers allegedly performing heinous sexual exploitation when they travel. She complains to another about how Muslim speakers go contrary to marriage therapy advice, and how they don’t talk enough about women’s sexual satisfaction. There’s a clip where she’s recorded screaming at her ex-husband that another speaker told her that “in Islam, men don’t really have rights in a marriage”.2

One then becomes confused; isn’t this class of Muslim Imams and “Scholars” supposedly the learned ones in North America, contrary to the masses who look up to them? Why are they so comfortable with mixing at this level then, especially mixing with women who exhibit the worst aspects of BPD behavior, who present a very clear OPSEC risk to you if you’re a public Muslim male figure?

I mean, it’s not a mystery if you pay attention. Look at their gatherings:

This is no longer a matter of individual fatwas and varying dress codes in different madhabs or whatever. This is cultural. When much time had passed after the conquest of Syria by the Companions of the Prophet ﷺ and they saw what kids raised in Damascus were coming out like, they said: he who is raised in the lands of the Romans becomes like them. Now, that cultural artifact in North America happens to be female infiltration into what used to be considered entirely male spaces3, or as traditional scholars call it, “free mixing”.

When it comes to the subject itself, the strategy of most of these Imams noawadays is to philosophaster about definitions of words and the absolute specifics of male/female interaction. It’s like when the moderate centrist gets into useless arguments about what a woman is as the drag show at his child’s school goes on uninterrupted. We’re beyond that point. Each one of us needs to look at the results in our own community. What has this done for Muslims over time? Is this strategy of yours thats been prevalent for the past twenty years proven at all to keep young people free of ridiculous fahisha and social dramas? It doesn’t matter how many scholars you can quote if you can’t answer this, and acknowledge that a change of course is needed in an entirely different age.

Fear and Loathing in New America

Much of it started, I imagine, due to the fear of Gen X immigrant parents who saw how American girls turned out (Hannah Montana, lipstick, heels) and thought, rightfully, that they needed their daughters to have stringent Islamic educations to circumvent that. Foolishly, however, they advocated for their daughters and sisters to be a part of the same events, summer camps, & conferences they built as a way of “keeping them in the community” and not establishing clear boundaries from the beginning about segregation during these college-lecture-style events and lessons. Furthermore, they combined this with a lack of real tarbiya in literally all other areas of life. Most of these parents still sent these girls to college and encouraged them to take up corporate careers in mixed environments, let them watch mainstream Western media as kids that taught them what having Girl Power was like, listen to the same music that warped their romantic expectations, etc., so all that happened was they catapulted their culturally poisoned daughters into traditionally male spaces where loads of men were also struggling with massive fitna due to the same cultural influences in their lives.

Whereas before when it used to be just women who were at risk of communal loneliness, now everyone is suffering from it. The misery of these girls was never eradicated by bringing them into our lectures, instead, it just got multiplied and distributed to everyone. Great job guys!

It’s good to clarify: I don’t blame many of these girls today. In a way, they’re victims too. There were plenty of different strategies this generation and their leaders could have taken that didn’t involve this level of free mixing and laxity. However, for some reason, it just wasn’t done. Why aren’t we allowed to ask why without being accused of extremism?

Maybe it was the pressure they too were receiving from the culture at large. Think about it — who is funding these big projects in Muslim communities? It’s the guys who make enough money to have the disposable income to invest in them in the first place. Your average middle-class Muslim father who refuses every usurious transaction can only afford, at most, to support his local masjid from time to time. The big guys however, the car dealership and gas station owners, the big business lawyers and doctors, who make the compromise with usury whilst convincing themselves it’s halal in their special case, are also the ones funding big mosques and institutions in most of North America.

Usury (Riba) and eating from such haram money, put plainly, hardens the heart. When your heart is hardened, it desensitizes and demoralizes you, and it is no longer difficult for the devil to take you down the cynical path of compromising on far more. You think you love your children, but you come to realize that your cynicism has gotten in the way of that too when you allow the kind of ridiculous “freedoms” in your communities that you rationalize for the sake of “keeping them in the masjid.”

Another reason, sometimes leading directly from the previous point, is allowing many of these older women to be in charge and part of these mosque boards and organizations in the first place. I’ll be the first to come out and say I’ve personally seen plenty of hardcore, conservative sisters both older and younger who have an iron fist when it comes to creeping feminism and LGBT for example, but that unfortunately isn’t the general case at all the higher up you go in mainstream North American Dawah. That’s not to say that they explicitly tolerate these things; but it is, for the most part, these women who are the laxest when it comes to gender segregation rules and encouraging absurd, baseless fatwas and allowances on account of protecting young and impressionable girls’ feelings.

The result of this, over time, was the unofficial and unspoken evolution of North American Dawah into a gynocratic, celebrity rockstar culture where Imams and scholars went from reclusive figures who raised generations of students who would in turn go on to raise the Ummah; to glorified motivational speakers for confused, impressionable young girls.

Flip it Over and Start Again

Dr. Altaf Husain, vice president of Yaqeen Institute, loves to make a certain point every time he gets in front of a microphone. You might catch a few clips of it online. It’s when he says, like he’s been saying for the past five years4, that 60-70% of viewers of Yaqeen’s online content are women. This isn’t something to brag about, or even something to bludgeon the brothers with to futilely earn their loyalty. The reality is that this is just a self-indictment of the style of content and topics they chose to pursue, and turning themselves into an organization that aims for approval in this manner instead of thinking, realistically, what it is they could be doing that alienates men to such a degree and changing course based off that.

What’s tragic is that Yaqeen’s struggle simply reflects many big-scale masjid communities today that are struggling to reign in young men and boys. The spiritual boomers organizing masjids today don’t get that these guys already feel suffocated by the femcentric, homosexual-worshipping aspects of daily life in school and work in the modern West. They don’t need, when they attend the masjid, to be browbeaten about their supposed propensity for “abuse” and “violence.” They don’t want to hear about how they aren’t “good enough” husband material, that they ackshually don’t have rights or privileges over their own families when they do become married with children, that there isn’t a capacity for them to embody the spirit of the men they hear about in the Seerah (and that’s if they’re being taught about the men of the Seerah in the first place). They need to know that the alternative path exists and that it calls to them.

It’s easy to complain about the natural matriarchies that form in traditional societies when the men weaken over time or are otherwise turned into work rats without any higher priorities, but I’m more interested in solutions. This is where the question of flipping things in a more masculine and patriarchal direction lies — in the invigoration of young boys and men again, to believing that a better future is possible for them and their future families that doesn’t involve being a castrated coward on one extreme or in jail or dead on the other. Sorry, but none of this can begin unless women are taken out of the environment these boys learn from in the first place. This is, of course, the hardest part; because the conditioning runs deep for most of these people. They won’t even question the insanity of, for example, female teachers instructing boys in school past third grade at most, let alone segregating their Islamic schools.

Whatever our role is now as those who want to make such invigoration possible, it’s our responsibility to openly ridicule and seek the replacement of the effeminate aspects and operations in our community that are outright haram, that do nothing but pit men and women against each other and allows the ruling liberal regimes of our countries, the sole purpose of which now is to worship sexual degeneracy, to further infiltrate us and make us adopt their systems. We need newer ways of funding and from better places. Better ways to improve where we get our food from, even. The “Dawah Mafia” is called such in a negative manner, but there is no problem with “mafias” as such if Muslim men see that way of doing things (in a halal and legal way) as the model to have unconditional loyalty to one another in the community. We live in a time today where exclusively-male spaces are becoming a thing of the past. It doesn’t matter what excuses or whiny complaints that are brought up regarding this, the bottom line that needs to be fought for is this. No proper male bonding, no futuwwah, no ascendant masculinity takes root in the presence of giggling young girls and women.

We are done with this failed experiment. It’s time we cleared the table and started again, this time on our own terms.

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The Imam shut the door to his office. It was the early afternoon, after the completion of Jummah at his Masjid in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. A growing community had proliferated there as a result of the influx of refugees from the Iran-Afghan war. Somehow through the settlement process, most of the Sunnis among the downtrodden had been relocated to this underrated, cozy midwestern town.

The day was beautiful with warm temperatures, yet Imam Dawood Johnson was sweating bullets. He’d once been filled with them when he served in the Iraq war as a young man in his Jahiliya days, but such times rarely popped into his head — such as when they were brought up by his critics in the media. He’d just finished giving an impassioned khutba about the dangers of free mixing, filled with a zest and passion he hadn’t felt course through his veins since his days at the University of Madina. To cool off, he decided he’d make a coffee and catch up on his online content, which had taken off in recent years.

He opened his laptop to find 31 new emails, 54 Twitter notifications, and hundreds more comments on his latest Youtube khatira about the purification of the heart. It racked up 136,679 views. A popular Sufi Youtuber had made a response video, but he didn’t even bother watching it. Dawood employed the personal chatbot on his laptop to watch it instead, then make a response video using his likeness. SubhanAllah, what a time-saver! When Dawood opened another tab to check his blog, however, he was welcomed with a gripping headline.

His default browser page was Yahoo News. In a small corner of the news section was a picture of a crying woman in a hijab, with the following headline:

MIXED REACTIONS AS NEW “AFFIRM OUR KIDS” BILL TAKES EFFECT

Huh, interesting, thought the Imam. He clicked on the headline and was greeted with the article, published just that morning. The enlarged photo showed the crying mother in the photo was actually being taken away in handcuffs by police in rainbow-colored armbands. The caption under the photo was titled:

Asiya Mahmoud, the popular Muslim mom blogger, weeps as her trans child, Junaida, is rescued by a local QUEER division, the newest addition to many local police forces across the country aimed at securing the safety and rights of LGBTQ children.

The article itself elaborated. Dawood’s face took a malformed shape as his eyes drifted up and down the paragraphs he was reading. In the middle of the article was a picture of the child, Junaida, standing rotundly as she took a selfie with the QUEER division officers beside her.

“…as one might expect, these decisions are never easy,” says Chief DeShawnda, the officer in charge of the QUEER division that transported Alison to safe care, “it was the usual excuses you hear from these types. ‘My child is autistic, not trans’ and ‘they’re too young to know that’ are what we hear most, but after lots of experience around the block it’s all the same.”

Chief DeShawnda went on to explain that each QUEER division employs renowned experts in the fields of Gender Studies, Child Psychology, and Queer Theory to assess each case of child abuse they handle. In this case, they credit Dr. Aziza Martinez, assistant professor at Yale, who obtained their Ph.D. in Gender Studies from Colombia and a Bachelor of Arts in South Asian Studies from the University of Chicago. They gave the following statement:

“Junaida had been expressing her desire to be a girl for a long time in her social media posts. Lots of indications of depression, anxiety, and discontent with the Islamofascist environment that her mother had been smothering her with. She would frequently post video evidence of her mother’s verbal abuse towards her identity, as well as employing spiritual abuse with religious texts to justify her transphobia. Poor thing, I’m just glad we were able to act in time —”

Dawood clicked away. He’d had enough. He pulled his head back and realized he hadn’t taken a sip of his coffee, which upon touching it to his lips found it had turned cold. He put it to the side. Despite his air-conditioned office, he was sweating again, the rage at this revelation making him boil from his toes all the way to his kufi. Imam Dawood knew he had to do something about this.

The fear then began to drip in his heart, thinking how he would respond if anyone in his congregation asked him about this. No, he thought. They can’t even read English. He sighed in relief.

But his following online would question him about it, wouldn’t they? He quickly took hold of his laptop again and began checking the notifications he’d neglected, and lo and behold, most comments under his recent posts and direct messages were about this very story. It had gone viral in the few hours it had been up, now the prominent topic on Muslim Twitter, Muslim Facebook, and Muslim Tiktok.

Then it hit him. Why not do things the old-fashioned way, with a public statement? Make it official and formal. Perhaps many other Imams and scholars he knew would take part.

Imam Dawood spent the next hour contacting every big Imam he knew, famous online and otherwise. It seemed they’d all had the same Friday afternoon — all concerned with how to deal with this shocking tragedy. By the time Asr prayer had come they’d come to sync up about what to do. By Maghrib, it was decided and all the Muslim American clergy he knew were on board — they were going to draft a real statement in outcry about this pressing issue, all thanks to the initiative of Brother Dawood Johnson.

The next few months were exhausting. It had taken them just a week to draft the initial statement, but then came the process of tweaking it to make sure they got it right. They had to leave no open gaps for misinterpretation, no room for anyone to question their intent behind the public letter.

More than three hundred Imams had at least had a look at the draft by eight weeks since conception. They’d employed lawyers, dozens of Islamic Studies professors in all the Ivy League universities, communication experts from across the political spectrum, Islamic jurists, and heads of every Islamic organization in North America. By the tenth week, after many sleepless nights, it was finally done.

By then, Imam Dawood’s scraggly beard had turned just a bit more white. He could feel the onset of carpal tunnel in both his wrists, the migraines that began to overtake him in the evenings were intensifying. This project, all for the sake of Allah, had taken a physical toll on him in addition to the spiritual. He prayed it would be worth it in the end.

It was time to publish the statement, during Pride Month, nonetheless. They’d agreed on an exact time, and minutes before Imam Dawood sat at his same desk with sweaty hands. He refreshed his page the second it hit noon, and like clockwork, the webpage had updated. He read the work he’d started like a proud father on the day of his eldest son’s graduation. When he reached the end, he scrolled back up to read it again. He thanked God he had the moral courage to do this, to risk his livelihood (and possibly his life!) in this pursuit, as well as all these other brave Imams. Bravo, he told himself and his Imam friends, bravo.

He got up and walked away, so filled with joy he forgot to shut off his laptop, the headline blaring in full definition at the highest brightness:

MANEUVERING DISTINCTIONS: CLARIFYING SEX AND GENDER IN ISLAM

Talking about sexuality has been difficult for religious communities lately. Islamic beliefs about sexuality and gender are different from what some people in society think. This creates tension for Muslims who want to follow their religion but also fit in with what society expects. Some people don't agree with LGBTQ practices and ideas, but they get accused of being intolerant and mean. What's even more concerning is that there are laws and rules trying to teach children LGBTQ ideas without asking their parents first. This goes against the rights of Muslim parents to teach their kids about their own beliefs and stops them from objecting if they disagree. These rules also make it harder for religious communities to be accepted.

We are Muslim scholars and preachers from different schools of thought. We want to explain what Islam says about sexuality and gender. We are a religious group that often faces unfair treatment and being left out. But we don't believe that disagreeing about morals means we're being mean or causing violence. We have the right to express our beliefs while also knowing that we have to live peacefully with people who believe differently.

The most important thing in Islam is to fully, willingly, and lovingly submit to God. God says that when He and His Messenger make a decision, believers should follow it without any other choice. By submitting to God, we are saying that only He knows everything and what is right and wrong. So, we believe that morality comes from God's guidance, not just from what makes sense or what is popular.

Islam has a long history of rules and different ways of thinking that respect different cultures. But there are some important principles in Islam that cannot be changed. They come directly from God, and even the most important religious leaders can't change them. God says in the Quran that His words are true and no one can change them.

According to Islam, people can have sexual relations, but only if they are married. Marriage is only between a man and a woman. God is clear in the Quran that having sexual relations with someone of the same sex is wrong. Islam also says that people should not have sex before marriage or with someone other than their spouse. God says that it is a bad thing to do. These rules are clearly stated in the Quran, the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and the long tradition of Islamic scholars. So, they are widely accepted by Muslims.

God created humans as males and females. He made them different so they can learn from each other and live together in peace. In Islam, men and women are equal in the eyes of God, even though they have different qualities and roles. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ believed that women are just as important as men. But he also said that it is not right to try to look like the opposite gender. God wants us to respect His choices in creating us. That's why Islam doesn't allow medical procedures to change a person's sex, even if they are called "affirming" or "confirming." However, if someone is born with a condition that makes their sex unclear, Islam says it is okay for them to get medical help to fix it.

In Islam, there is a distinction between thoughts and actions. God judges people based on their actions and words, not on their thoughts and feelings that they can't control. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that Muslims are forgiven for their thoughts as long as they don't speak or act on them. Islam teaches that a person's actions shouldn't define their identity. That's why it's not allowed for Muslims to take pride in labels that categorize them by their sins. Islam also values privacy and discourages talking about private sexual behavior.

We know that some religious groups have changed their teachings to be more inclusive of LGBTQ ideas, and some people in the Muslim community have tried to reinterpret Islamic texts in favor of LGBTQ acceptance. But we strongly disagree with these efforts because they go against the unchangeable principles of our faith.

We understand that our moral beliefs clash with the goals of LGBTQ supporters. We respect their right to live peacefully and without harm. However, we want to emphasize that we also have the right to hold, practice, and share our religious beliefs in a respectful way. We should be able to do so without facing legal punishment or being marginalized. Living together peacefully doesn't mean we have to agree or accept each other's views. We refuse to be forced into changing our beliefs or be called bigots without reason. Such pressures make it hard for us to live in harmony.

We ask lawmakers to protect our right to practice our religion freely, without fear of harassment. We also oppose any laws that try to limit the religious freedom of faith communities. We are committed to working with people of all religious and political backgrounds to defend the rights of faith communities and promote justice for everyone.

We urge Muslim public figures to respect the importance of our faith and not make false statements on behalf of Islam. We reject any attempt to claim that Islam supports views on sexual and gender ethics that go against our established teachings. It's important to understand that intentionally going against God's will can have serious spiritual consequences.

To those among us who struggle with desires that go against God's boundaries, we want you to know that even the most righteous people can make mistakes. Every Muslim, no matter how sinful, has the chance to be forgiven. Resisting temptation and staying devoted to God is considered brave and has great spiritual rewards. Our main goal is to prioritize our devotion to God over our desires and not give up on our faith. We pray for the strength and commitment to live up to our ideals. May we find inner peace and happiness through our submission to God, and may God consider us among the faithful, which is the most honorable title.

Though Wolfe never mentions it as it is solely an art criticism book, the sort of slavish dynamic between the creative (of often questionable talent) and the elitist group that guides their hand isn’t restricted to the field of visual art. You see it most commonly today with journalism, a profession where barring a few real aficionado investigators is entirely made up of the blob of eunuchs and femcel shrews, whose job is to run propaganda pieces from the latest regime memo. It’s more shameless, in-your-face, and explicit than hardcore pornography — yet many Americans insist on the idea that journalists are a protected class of truth-seekers immune to criticism from the public; and that their work entirely revolves around the noble desire to uncover what lies in the inner machinations of the grimy political machine against all odds!

Since the Gulf War of the late nineties and 9/11, the same thing can be seen with Muslim communities in the anglosphere at large where for the past twenty years, despite the best efforts and intentions of the esteemed folk in prestigious roles such as “community leader” and “outreach director”; the process of Dawah was no longer organic nor lending from the natural observations of learned scholars and Imams throughout North America and Western Europe of their respective communities, but rather guided by the ISSUES OF OUR TIME (the motto of the contemporary Western Imam). Of course, what is really meant by that, without the Imam even knowing, is the issues the regime dictates are of our time.

I really wonder — how many lectures, books, conference meetings, etc. by Muslims in the west on the concept of “race” in Islam existed before the exponential growth of American racial animosity during the Obama era? I’m willing to bet a particular explosion occurred after the Ferguson riots of 2014, which hasn’t ended since.

Is there a single classical scholar before the 20th century who presented the transgression of Satan against God in the Quran as an antiracist allegory? It’s quite bizarre that the ridiculous quote: Iblees was the first racist, which has become a hallmark phrase repeated any time the issue of race is discussed in Muslim circles, ever appeared in the first place. You’d think that these University-of-Medina and Al-Azhar graduates would review the original tafsirs of Tabari or Ibn-Kathir to see if even an inkling of such a comparison could exist before turning it into the Gold Standard of Western Muslim rhetoric on anti-racism, but alas we had a different outcome.

We’re looking for an honest answer. Which came first? These American celebrity scholars’ groundbreaking concepts on the Islamic ethics of race relations, or the overwhelming pressure to go along with the communist, government & corporation endorsed BLM movement by the bright and powerful Linda Sarsours and Dalia Mogaheds of their community, those absolute giants in spirit and justice?

I’m merely using race here as an example. The same applies to the gender question and “equality”, to economics, to the complete neutering of our vital history as a result of widespread fear post-9/11. This is a tough issue, I imagine, not only because these celebrity Imams and Dawah figures have never been formally confronted about their trend-chasing and enslavement to regime agitation propaganda, but because most if not all are not even aware of it themselves. Like the artists Tom Wolfe mentions who intellectualize themselves into thinking their scatological paint splatters on a 22x36 canvas are “breakthrough art”, these figures have hypnotized themselves into believing that forming stories, analogies, and syllogisms that squeeze Islam into the latest regime memo for mass production is actually a form of Ijtihad.

The reason they don’t know is, of course, because they believe the mythologies about modern life that they were students of in the Western education system. They’ll sincerely tell you that you’re a conspiracy theorist, that they don’t profit off of this, and that they’re just going after issues they know the public suffers from. Of course, many American Imams for example may be talented in their memorization and understanding of Tafsir, Fiqh, and so on and graduate from an esteemed Islamic university — but to what extent are they able to apply their knowledge if their secular learning entirely took place in the states, where they were fed lies from childhood?

What lies, you might ask? Women have always been “oppressed” and continue to be so. White colonialists invented all evil in the third world and beyond. Water and rodent-caused diseases had no role in the “death counts” of WW2. The USA civil rights activists of the 60s and 70s were all peaceful, Gandhi-like folk who never committed acts of domestic terrorism. People can be born homosexuals. Democracy is good, and monarchy is bad. These are just a few of them.

Here lies the reality that it’s not the issues that afflict the regular public that they grow obsessed with as they chase the next interfaith conference or solidarity march, but those issues that are agitated into existence by the liberal regimes they live under. If your entire view of the world is a charade and a lie, then how far can your religious knowledge go when it comes to your ability to commentate on social and political issues? This is why so many Imams sound beautifully eloquent when talking about prayer, fasting, and the day of judgment — but give them the mic to talk about anything political abroad or about why POC are an underclass and they drop 50 IQ points.

Just like how when real Ijtihad was virtually illegal in the late Ottoman Empire forcing all the scholars worth their salt to have their discussions through hidden channels; such is the case today where most scholars who address the real issues facing youngsters aren’t granted the big stages, but are in their respective mosques teaching groups of students worthy of the knowledge they’re receiving. They’re like the underground artists whose work you have to look for instead of that which is shoved down your throat with every billboard and social media ad. And often, the search is worth it when you listen to what they have to say…

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It’s become commonplace across social media and real-life discussions on the marriage crisis across the developed world, for groups of nearly all cultures and religions, for young women among the Generation Z and Millenial generations to proclaim that they want a “religious” or “traditional” man, and lament their inability to find such a man. They rant, shout, and sometimes even cry on camera about the fact that most of the men they see don’t pray, frequent clubs for alcohol and illicit sex, are addicted to pornography, etc., and fantasize of the man in folkloric robes with prayer beads who will complete them. They dream, or claim to, of a man who works hard, prays, and will never stray in terms of fidelity and dedication to providing for their families.

On the surface, this is a noble desire. I’m sure many girls who say this in private really mean it, and God bless them. When it’s done publicly in this pharisaic manner however, it gets a lot of gullible men to present themselves as servile, obedient, and willing to be the perfect man for a prospective wife; and here’s the thing — that was the point all along. It’s not difficult at all, when confronted with a woman who says she desires religiosity in a man, to tell whether she’s being sincere or not. All you have to do is indeed be that religious man without compromising your values, and you’ll see for sure whether she’s telling the truth or not. The reality for most of these girls, unfortunately, is that their claims are an affectation. They don’t envision a religious man the way you, an actual religious man, envisions it.

They think of all the qualities that are of immediate benefit (the property rights, the financial provisions, the desire for children, the praying and fasting, etc.) but not at all of the parts that involve your rights and provisions as a man, that involve sacrificing petty and narcissistic desires on their part (prohibition of withholding intimacy as a weapon, obedience, undying fidelity, not taking jobs that interfere with wifely duties, etc.).

The desire they proclaim for you to be “religious” is only insofar as you’re a prop to show off to other women in their family as the girl that “got the good one.” They only see you praying consistently as a plus not because it shows your dedication to God, but because it’s somehow an indication you’ll be “consistent with her.” You’re only allowed to give as much charity as long as it doesn’t interfere with the lifestyle she imagines. You’re only allowed to be jealous over her as long as you never interfere with how she dresses or inquire about the places she frequents. They want you to be religious, but not too much!

This way, the main object of your religious worship no longer becomes God on His own, but her. To the kind of girl I’m describing, your religious life is only valid as long as it appeases her. Otherwise, it’s “wrong” and “extremist.” Question any of their behaviors (as their husband or father, mind you), and they will treat you the way CIA operatives treated Muslim guys in NYC post 9/11 who prayed Fajr in the Mosque every morning.

I haven’t seen a short-term for this phenomenon yet, I’m sure it exists, but Spiritual Cuckoldry seems pretty accurate. I find this to be a greater insult and humiliation than the already insane financial and logistical demands made of men seeking matrimony today; the fact many of them who are well-intentioned & God-fearing have their religious sincerity questioned, interrogated, and eventually subverted for the sake of Simpdom if they ever want a chance at marrying a girl from one of these benighted Western nations they grew up in.

A good example that I remember was some years ago, I was talking to a group of friends (some Muslim, some not) and one asked me about the punishment of adultery in Islam, I explained and mentioned how it’s equal for both men and women. As I spoke I made the grave mistake, apparently, of mentioning how a man “having sex with another woman and HURTING HIS WIFE” wasn’t the point, but rather that it was a direct disobedience of God’s command, as illicit sex outside marriage in general has disastrous consequences at scale. The “feelings” of a woman towards it were irrelevant, as polygamy obviously existed, an arrangement that doesn’t require the first wife’s permission to be religiously legal.

The guys, though hesitant, seemed to understand this. The women however, including the Muslim ones, were utterly enraged and incapable of understanding how the man wasn’t sinful for the pure fact that he was with a woman that wasn’t his first, only, monogamous wife; exceptions and exclusions be damned.

It’s quite sad, many girls grew up without the proper religious education that would make them come to these truths on their own; but even those that do get a sugar-coated version void of any responsibility and self-sacrifice. This even leads many of them to leave religion altogether when they grow up and encounter actual religious people. There’s a minor, but growing number of women now who are saying the opposite of what I describe here: that they hate “religious” men, where they either despise the religion altogether now due to a bad relationship; or like many western Muslim girls are doing now, engage in cope apologia about how those guys “aren’t really religious, just misogynists,” as if they’re the true authority now.

Now I ask, has there ever been, or will there ever be a Muslim Imam or Christian pastor brave enough to call this Male Purdah out as a form of social shirk/idolatry? I’m constantly told that poor girls today are shamed and pressured into marriage, that they’re abused emotionally and spiritually within marriages, but I’m yet to see the other side of this.

I’m no expert, but I’m just wondering here how long this clown show can go on. Aren’t you?

My interest in TRP as an abstinent Muslim teen had far less to do with the relationship aspect, and more to do with the catastrophic implications on a mass scale feminism had on the upbringing of boys and men. Despite it causing me several problems throughout my youth in high school and university, I’ve always been outspoken on the ever-encroaching prison of Male Purdah that I knew was a core characteristic of the education system I experienced; especially after spending many years abroad beforehand in a Muslim country where schools were gender-segregated — preventing much of the issues with young Muslim folk that has been the talk of the town in the West for the past couple of years, which on the contrary prides itself on the inclusion of women in all spheres of public life.

Muslims in the West by and large came a little late to realizing what TRP is as both an ideology and online culture due to our unique “east and west”, feet in both camps situation. Most of us grew up in households with defined gender roles and traditional ideas about men and women backed by religious scripture and thousands of years of ethnocultural practices. Yet, at the same time, each consecutive generation of us that lives in the west is forced to contend in a sphere where those traditions are considered strange, “old school”, out of place, etc., resulting in a lot of self-compromise when interacting with social spheres outside our own in academia and the workplace. After decades of this, many second-generation Muslims came to the realization when wanting to start families that they didn’t recognize their counterparts of the opposite sex anymore; who had become fully engrossed in the hellish, backward culture of Western Liberalism which refuses to define any limits for itself.

I’d like to focus on the Muslim male perspective here which led to the embrace of this ideology among many, as I’ve studied it and seen it through the hundreds of hours of conversation I’ve had with young Muslim men throughout my time as a writer and critic online, as it’s obviously this subset of Muslims that’s grasped onto the red pill subculture as their boon. The scenarios I’m about to describe used to be for a minority of men decades ago, but they have grown a lot in proportion since, and continue to grow.

For most Middle-Eastern cultures today, the primary rite of passage for men is getting married. I personally find it disgusting and shameful that this is how far we’ve degraded, that this is what’s considered the “big step” to maturity as a Muslim man, especially knowing how marriage was never viewed in this manner by early Muslims; but that’s a topic for another day. It’s the cause of much anxiety and mental, emotional, and spiritual preparation for those of us who come of age. Many Muslim men brave enough to marry in Western nations, vetted the girls well with the help of family, were lucky enough to mature with their spouse past its decadent culture.

Others not so much, finding themselves instead in a state of caveat emptor when it came to who exactly they were getting as a spouse, and at what cost. The big promise of their youth, after all, was that if they maintained a religious and abstinent life free of fornication then God (and by proxy, their parents) would grant them a righteous, grateful spouse that made their sacrifices in their youth worth it. Sadly, this pitiful demographic reaches the proper age and alleged financial suitability for marriage and is hammered between the eyes with a different outcome.

They find out that, despite their greatest efforts, the “marriage market” in their community and elsewhere more resembles a slaughterhouse. They become privy to much of the insane fiscal demands placed on the average bachelor in their area, which for even marrying a girl they love becomes a series of sacrifices they can’t afford to make as a matter of personal survival. I can’t count for you the many stories I’ve heard over the years from readers and friends alike of engagements falling apart due to this reason alone. More often than not, they experience firsthand how the genius parents of these girls encourage these situations repeatedly. It’s quite taboo in the Muslim community, especially in the West, to refer in any way to the fact the modern marriage process for many men is nothing more than a disadvantageous transaction — yet the shameful geriatrics and young ladies who get most offended at this, who scream at you and insist that this is “normal”, forget that they’re the ones who set it up that way — not the men who complain about it — who just want a peaceful married life that doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg, who know for a fact things weren’t always this way.

That’s just one side of the fence. The other comes to married life itself, where the men who survive this demented boomer gauntlet realize the demands made on them don’t translate to the other side of the street. Muslim boys learn growing up in a traditional home what the duties of a wife and mother are, and find out when married their (hopefully) young wife isn’t so keen on fitting that mold. And let’s be honest here, why should they? I don’t even blame them. In all likelihood, this man’s wife gets fed ridiculous modernist delusions her whole life just as he has. She gets fed constant lies and propoganda about how men are and should be, which don’t hold up to reality. She gets told she needs to waste years of her life (where she could have been married earlier in) on a degree she’ll most likely never use; that nothing Islamically is required of her other than a vague set of responsibilities that are never spelled out for her; that marriage is an “equal” partnership (a western definition by the way, with zero references to anything equivalent in Islam), and not a hierarchy where the man leads his household.

A common counterpoint to the motto told by Red Pill guys that “women aren’t submissive anymore” is that “the men we meet aren’t worth submitting to.” This is a valid complaint. Most men, believe it or not, are acutely aware of the fact that part of the reason their woman isn’t submitting to them is that they’re doing something wrong. Thus comes another terrifying realization to the naive Muslim men in this scenario: they were never taught how to deal with a wife in their care. After decades of prudish, vague, outright insulting lack of guidance by the generation made up of their parents, Islamic teachers/Imams, and other figures, they realize they know nothing about the “game” required to keep up a loving and sustainable relationship with a woman. There’s no getting around this: without the internet, the vast majority of Muslim millennial and Gen Z men would be completely lost on this subject.

How do you seduce your wife? How do you satisfy her intimately? How do you handle it when she’s upset and you don’t know why? What’s a good romance/work-life balance? What percentage of Muslim men under the age of 30 were given even barebones answers to any of these questions or related from a source that wasn’t the internet, often from non-Muslim sources that don’t have their religious context and constraints in mind? It doesn’t take a statistic to know for a fact that it’s very few.

So, naturally, you end up with hundreds of thousands of Muslim men like this across the developed world, failed by those meant to mentor them in their masculine endeavors, floating online clueless as to the solution to any of their marital and sexual issues. Some are single, some are married but are on the rocks, and many are divorced.1

Then the past five years happened — and what was once a niche set of online forums and blogs that was primarily the domain of non-Muslims fell into the laps of nearly every young Muslim man with a smartphone. Men like Daniel Haqiqatjou and Mohammed Hijab who excelled in Islamic polemics against the feminist and liberal movements thrived alongside more materialistic figures such as Andrew Tate, Sneako, and those who more often than not just had something to sell you.

The online reactions by Muslim women to this change were not surprising to anyone who followed these topics at an academic level before TRP blew up. Islamic anti-feminist literature by renowned scholars of Islam, both in the West and the Muslim world has been plentiful for decades, but it’s never reached the levels of intense, emotional wrath and virality that it’s reached today; and contrary to what most people hyperreacting to this phenomenon may think, most Muslim men are smart enough to realize it doesn’t fit the Islamic model 1 to 1. Thus, for our generation of phone-addicted internet consumers, there came the natural demand in this market for Muslim figures and content that presented the “Muslim version” of what guys like Andrew Tate (before his conversion to Islam) were to non-Muslims, waking them up to the reality of the scam they’ve been enduring for years now.

Needless to say, the results so far aren’t very promising.

I’ve followed the “manosphere” as it spilled into Twitter en masse following Trump’s election (yes, it absolutely had a lot to do with it), and when it comes to viral communities of this sort there’s always a general trend. The most productive, content-savvy, business-minded influencers in the space thrive and gain a lot of followers, some gather around them and copy their style, hoping for similar fame and attention; and the majority lurk and absorb it all. Many figures are eventually proven to be vapid grifters and demented perverts with nothing positive to offer long term, while others mature and find their niche in other areas like politics or fitness. Those first stages of notoriety become hilariously embarrassing, as intellectual weak points become exposed in a space where no one really knows what’s going on yet. Then, once all those popular figures find their respective niches, the big ideas of this subculture get digested into the mainstream, both for better or for worse.

Online Muslims who are inclined to “self-improvement” spaces are following a similar curve. Many young guys (and some girls) are starting to rise up as podcasters, YouTubers, and Tiktokers who make content almost exclusively on the topic of marriage, relationships, and women; and as usual, they use the moniker of “Islamic Content” to cover up their amateur tactics, despite almost none of them having a formal Islamic education or the 1 on 1 mentoring of a scholar. Of course, I’m included in that. I consider my Islamic education subpar compared to what it should be. But I’m not claiming to be a teacher or guru on anything marital. I’m just a humble internet addict with a novel out (which you should buy for other reasons entirely)

The main problem that I’ve been leading onto in this essay, then, becomes this: what is the message we’re letting out here when it comes to TRP, and why?

I don’t know about you, but my commentary on such matters is mainly because I want to bring more young, intelligent, sensitive young men onto our side as those who seek to shed the shackles of the wretched Western liberal longhouse I described above. Most men attracted to TRP in its early days were hurt, traumatized men by and large because the space required effort to find. The fact it’s gone mainstream should indicate to you that this state of “hurt” has wounded many men, in some way, on a massive scale. Lots of those writing vicious tweets and making out-of-line youtube videos about the evils of feminism are utilizing this growing, bottled-up anger for their own benefit, and don’t seem to have this intention at all. Not to toot my own horn here as some caring individual — but the lack of care and choir preaching that yields nothing vital and serves only as a vehicle for increasing subscriber counts is apparent for many who claim to be fighting the good fight.

What I see, as many of you do when you look out into this growing space, are grifters of all sorts, men and women motivated by deep-seated rage and resentment (the defining emotion of our time), who even if are factually correct don’t understand the task at hand. You have some of these teenagers with hundreds of thousands of social media followers spitting out pickup artist scripts with no direction or long-term planning — just clickbait material — not realizing the ridiculous ripple effect they’re causing on a daily basis. Not even despots ruling over similar numbers in a kingdom of the ancient world had this much influence on such a scale throughout their lifetimes.

I don’t think it’s anyone’s job to yell for teacher over this kind of irresponsibility, but it’s about time the more mature, learned, level-headed guys who don’t care for shallow machismo or “villain arc” Gen Z idiocy take the reins. We need admirable figures who provide competing ideas for how to fix these problems that don’t involve schoolmarm scolding to please aging turbanjabi activists, or un-Islamic tirades meant to stir up clicks rather than teach anyone anything.

The defining aspect of Western regime ideology many get sucked into is that feminism, or the “eternal feminine” is as important to them as a pagan idol was to ancient peoples. They have their own rituals, cult-like purity tests, humiliation tactics for disbelievers, and wicked ideas about how to make their ideology somehow even more polarizing to neutral parties. When you turn “the red pill,” even if you don’t name it, into this mystical thing that all Muslims must be “awoken” to, you’re making the same ridiculous error Muslim feminists do with their beliefs. It’s especially foolish when you paint yourselves as a niche, special group that can easily be squared away.

Remember, how did the Prophets and sages of similar times confront such wickedness and misguidance? They didn’t intentionally cause outrage for their own amusement, or to fill a bottomless hole in their hearts. Our father Ibrahim (AS) pulled a clever trick to bash (no pun intended) his point across to his father and people without saying a word. Our answer lies in examples like this — the gentleman’s mockery.

You don’t target individuals and single them out just because they attack you, for example. There come desperate times when some people need to be grilled to high heaven in public for the common good, but your arrows to your ego aren’t included in that. This is very stupid politically as well — all you’re doing then is making people afraid of being your next target, flipping them against you and what you believe. You also don’t get to use this correct realization of our situation as a way to satisfy some Underground Man urge you have because of your own personal issues.

The best method to bring people onto your side with any political or social endeavor isn’t just by showing the evil ways of the other side — it’s by doing it with ease, fleetingly, with a smile on your face and some wit to match. You need to show that you can get your hands dirty without diving into the filthy sewers whole as they have.

I’m not appealing to your compassion here. The level of harshness when it comes to the critique of liberal infiltration of our communities, of feminism, of the general weakness we’re trying to hammer out of young Muslim boys and men — all this needs to be the same. But just as in Dune, how you couldn’t just jab your sword at the shield straight on and had to strike it from an angle with calm and focus, the same applies to how we deal with this cultural malaise before it swallows us whole.

Be kind, just not too much though. That can be a bad thing, remember?

We relate to you, oh Prophet, the best of stories through Our revelation, though before this you were unaware of them. (Quran 12:3)

The twelfth chapter in the Quran of the story of Prophet Yusuf (AS), son of Jacob AS, has always been one of my favorites in the entirety of the book. Each chapter, verse, and letter in the Quran is perfect; and as we live our individual experiences as Muslims across history and the globe, some chapters prove more intimate to us over time than others and relate to us some comfort, lesson, sometimes even an instruction, on how to face our struggles with strength and humility. It’s a perfect story about love, envy, forgiveness, the reunion of father and son, but even more, it represents the evolution of the believer who never gives up and remains patient in spite of his torture in this world.

Surah Yusuf was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed ﷺ in Mecca when his conflict with the pagan chieftains of Quraysh was nearing its breaking point. His companions were under constant ridicule and random bouts of torture and humiliation, and his exile and/or death were being considered as the final solution by his enemies. At one point, the Jews of Madinah, the city he would later emigrate to, advised the chieftains to challenge the Prophet ﷺ by asking him multiple questions only their true messiah would know - among them the story of Yusuf (AS) and his brothers. It was at this moment when they asked the Prophet ﷺ about him that he was gifted the chapter in one sitting, reciting it all to their astonishment.

That is the how of the revelation, and our main concern also is the why, which relates to the contents of the story. It was not merely a deflection to the critiques of Quraysh, nor a simple history lesson. It was revealed to strengthen the heart of the Prophet ﷺ and of the hearts of all who followed him, to increase their resolve and faith. If you’re a writer of stories yourself, it’s invaluable to look at it not just for personal benefit but as an eternal set of lessons for writing stories that inspire, uplift, and charm others into believing more in themselves and each other.

So what makes the story so special to us, looking at it as such?

Brevity and Clarity: an inch wide, yet infinitely deep

This is a characteristic kept not just in Surah Yusuf but is something common across all the stories and descriptions of the Quran. What Allah places as a single verb or adjective, though is simple to read out and though the layman doesn’t grasp it right away, is filled with meanings and images that tie the abstract concept together. This is combined with the fact that the story of Yusuf (AS), though comprehensive in its depth, is told with extreme brevity with not a single unnecessary detail. Not a word is out of place, not a mark on the page without a deliberate meaning behind it either to confirm a historical/moral fact or to dispel a misconception. Older biblical scriptures (that we can’t confirm the authenticity of) are the opposite of this; many of them are filled to the brim with unnecessary details and tangents that bring the reader nowhere near the point of the story.

Every experienced story writer among mortals will tell you — from the most elite of published authors downwards — that the greatest skill you can hone in your practice of writing stories is to cut out as much fat as possible from your beginning drafts. I’ve been told by some writers that you should go as far as cutting out half the word count of your stories as practice, to see for yourself how your story can indeed survive without all the extraneous details you’ve fooled yourself into including. Stephen King refers to this strategy as “kill your darlings.” The goal, as it’s commonly said, is to say as much as possible with as few words as possible.

This is something many writers are told as amateurs, but you see it to its best effect in the Surah. One hundred and eleven verses of a story more powerful than most of us will ever understand to its fullest, and Allah knows best.1

The Heroes We Understand

The core of what makes the story of Yusuf (AS) so compelling are his and his family’s trials. The Prophets have been, and will always be a grade above the average mortal. They carried burdens beyond what we had the capacity for, and endured them with a beautiful patience whilst performing their duties; so it’s absurd to say that we will ever reach such heights. But we can and are encouraged to follow their examples as best we can, and it helps with that quite a bit to see in this chapter the kinds of spirit-shaking challenges that we endure in daily life. The story of Yusuf takes the reader through an adventure littered with hardship. Every single person Yusuf meets, other than his father and Egypt’s king, betrays him either out of negligence or malice. His brothers kidnapped and deserted him out of envy. The caravan that found him sold him into slavery. His master’s wife attempted to seduce him, then throws a fatal accusation upon him when it fails. His master doesn’t protect him out of cowardice - and it goes on.

It seems like Yusuf (AS) can’t catch a break, and up until the great turnaround when the king frees him and makes him the treasurer, he doesn’t, yet remains patient and vigilant throughout. Everyone whose lived long enough knows what it’s like to be cheated, lied to, neglected, seduced and crept on by an illicit character (maybe not most of you, but hey), and many of us still carry the hurt and resentment from those people who wronged us. Yusuf’s story shows that perseverance — and eventually, forgiveness and reunion — is possible when injured in these ways.

And it was this set of lessons that was meant to console our Prophet ﷺ and the believers when their situation had worsened. It was at this moment — when the blessed Chosen One was threatened from all sides, had lost his familial protection, and had witnessed so many of his companions tortured and/or killed, that God told him that once he gains power, once his authority is unquestionable, forgiveness and reconciliation were the answer.

They admitted, “By Allah! He has truly preferred you over us, and we have surely been sinful.”

Joseph said, “There is no blame on you today. May Allah forgive you! He is the Most Merciful of those who show mercy!” (Quran 12:91-92)

And it was those very words our Prophet ﷺ spoke to his tribe after he’d taken Mecca without spilling a drop of blood. After all, they’d been complicit and engaged in, our beloved Messenger ﷺ did what his brother Yusuf (AS) had done.

Yusuf (AS) also wasn’t the only hero we rooted for in this story. There were others throughout who played their parts ranging from the most wretched of villains to the best of heroes in their character alone — some transforming from beginning to end. Here we see the greatest developments of character in those who needed it, and the best exemplifications of it from those who didn’t. Jacob AS is the patron of patience in this story — betrayed and lied to by his own sons, left helpless as an old man unable to act because of his age and position, kept his faith, and never lost hope no matter how much time passed.

And when the caravan departed, their father [Jacob] said, “You believe me to be senile, but I smell the scent of Joseph.” (Quran 12:94)

We see the change that strikes those who wronged Yusuf (AS). His brothers started off as a group of envious criminals who took God’s rulings lightly, who through their extreme malice alienated the father they sought the love of so much. Near the end, we see how they’re willing to do anything so Benyamin doesn’t suffer Yusuf’s fate. The eldest of them goes as far as refusing to leave Egypt until Benyamin is released (unknowing of Yusuf’s ruse).

This change is satisfying to us and gives us hope, because it wasn’t granted to them with ease. We know how much and how long they’ve suffered from their mistakes. Their conversations with their father Jacob after the loss of Yusuf (AS) are labored and tense — you sense the dissatisfaction of Jacob with them no matter what they say or how they justify themselves. This is poetic irony at its finest, they committed their crime thinking it would bring their father closer to them, but all it did was push him further away. He never stops remembering or mentioning Yusuf. Even at the end when reunited with him, Jacob doesn’t even have it in him to forgive his other sons at that moment. He says he’ll ask Allah to forgive them — but later.

This is an obvious characteristic of a divine story; even in these small details, we notice how intimately Allah projects these emotions we experience so often in our lives. When we get hurt by someone and they ask for our forgiveness, even if we do forgive them, does that mean we forget all the hurt they caused us? For most of us no, and that’s okay. Now think of all the stories you’ve read or seen of the opposite: unrealistic, rushed, unfulfilling endings where the protagonist “forgives” the person/s that hurt them, despite there being none of the retribution or realism of time to process the human emotion displayed in a story like this.

All of these details aren’t separate or hold individual meanings, but are all tied together leading to that climactic ending, to build up to the great crescendo of the story: when Yusuf (AS) forgives them.

The Greatest of Conclusions: what makes a story ending great?

The impact Yusuf’s (AS) forgiveness holds as the “peak” of the story is layered and gives us such joy and closure for many reasons. First, it’s powerful and holds meaning because at that moment, disregarding the feelings of everyone involved, Yusuf is one of the most powerful men in the world when he forgives them. The new king of Egypt allows his full authority as treasurer, and at this time Egypt is the greatest and richest kingdom in the Mediterranean, the center of civilization before, during, and for many centuries after the Bronze Age. It’s because he can do whatever he wants to his brothers that his forgiveness is impactful. He transcended his need for revenge and punishment and chose to spite Satan instead.

Another reason is, as mentioned above, that his brothers earned it and were already shown to have paid their dues. Every character in this story who committed a wrong worked for their retribution or was humiliated for refusing to humble themselves. Yusuf (AS), though directed by the divine, saw firsthand the great change that had affected his brothers over the decades he’d been gone. They learned their lesson after all, so any punishment wouldn’t have meant true justice — but heedless cruelty.

The story of Yusuf (AS) ends by filling your heart to the brim with one of the Quran’s most beautiful scenes: Yusuf places his father and aunt2 on the throne, his brothers fall in prostration to him, and he sees the fulfillment of his dream as a child:

Then he raised his parents to the throne, and they all fell down in prostration to Joseph, who then said, “O my dear father! This is the interpretation of my old dream. My Lord has made it come true. He was kind to me when He freed me from prison, and brought you all from the desert after Satan had ignited rivalry between me and my siblings. Indeed my Lord is subtle in fulfilling what He wills. Surely He ˹alone˺ is the All-Knowing, All-Wise.” (Quran 12:100)

A story of envy, truth and deception, power and weakness, the importance of dreams, and the reunion and unbreakable bond between father and son, ends by tying all these themes together in synchronicity. All envy is shattered, the truth triumphs, power lands in the hands of those deserving of it — and the heartbroken father and son find one another in each other’s arms once again.

And so it is, that indeed as Allah tells us at the beginning of the story, it is He who tells us the best of stories. He creates perfections we’re unable to match, but due to His infinite mercy He allows us glimpses that allow us not only to improve our own character and re-establish the ties of kinship and love in our lives, but also to show us what the perfect story looks like.

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(The following is based on true events following the Battle of Ankara in 1402)

The tapping of the Amir’s cane woke the Sultan. The previous night had brought with it a strange calm before the thunderstorm that would follow, another strike of the thousands of tribesman ravaging Anatolia one town after another. It had been three months since his humiliating defeat at Ankara, where Timur the Lame’s men captured him and his delegation without much fuss.

The Sultan sat up from the tent cushions he was laying in. His wrists hadn’t felt chains since Timur ordered them off shortly after his capture, but he still knew the stinging of the iron on his skin. The burning associated with extreme cold shook him — it was not a feeling meant for someone of his blood. The old man walked over, a zestful bounce to his step for one in a cane, and sat across from him.

“Assalamu Alaikum, Sultan.”

“Wa Alaikum.”

Timur raised a brow. “Oh…so many moons we’ve known each other, yet you insist on not returning the peace? To an old man nonetheless, and a cripple!”

“A cripple who imprisons me and my family…” Bayezid wiped his eyes and looked down at his emerald ring. Unlike most prisoners who end up in the hands of Mongol hordes, he wasn’t stripped of the valuables on his person. Other than his armor, he remained in the same garments he’d been captured in other than the extra shawl given to him to withstand the chilly fall nights.

“It is Allah who grants freedom and takes it away. Perhaps if you’d woken up for the dawn prayer you could have prayed for it.”

“Why would I pray for that which I know for a fact you won’t give me? Besides, if your savage horsemen hadn’t kept me up beforehand, then I’d have the strength to rise for it.”

Timur laughed, “I tapped your side with my cane three times and you didn’t wake up. No excuse!”

Bayezid scoffed with a smirk, playing with his ring. He looked up at Timur and stared into his narrow eyes. “And what of my Olivera this morning? I wish to know how she fares.”

“My personal servant girl checked on her. She remains in good health, though refuses to speak still. Up from on your behind, we must continue our ghazwa!” he said, the roughness with which he said the sparse Arabic words he knew rubbing on the ears of Bayezid like steel on the grindstone.

Timur’s army, the great horde of Turkmen, Mongols, and Tatars that spanned the horizons of the Anatolian countryside continued heading west, meandering around where they knew of more bounties to be had. Bayezid was kept on a horse by Timur’s right, who rode alongside a few of his many sons and grandsons, some servants, and his chief advisor and religious chief — Imam Abdul-Jabbar al-Khwarizmi. He was a scholar of the Hanafi Islamic school of jurisprudence, a man of Timur’s generation, who in addition to knowing the entire Quran by heart and countless hadith, would tell many tales of war in older times from across Arabia, Persia, and the Levant. Often Timur asked him to recite the Quran aloud as they strode in their long marches, hundreds at the front falling in silence as his soothing voice echoed across the fields.

Other times Khwarizmi told them stories of the earlier conquests of the beloved Prophet, peace be upon him, or his great companions whom Timur adored and admired. Bayezid knew it all of course, but was stunned at the matter in which Timur and his Mongols interpreted certain events from the Prophet’s ﷺ life. Their favorite story, as Timur said twice to him during his captivity (he’d forgotten he’d told it to him the first time), was the time the Prophet ﷺ ordered the execution of every adult male of the Banu Quraidha tribe for their treachery during the Battle of the Trench against the polytheists, with every woman and child taken captive to be either ransomed off or enslaved. Bayezid understood it from his teacher as a special circumstance — a fate reserved for those who break their oaths — but to Timur and his men, this represented the standard, as all whom he besieged and stacked the skulls of had betrayed Allah, His Messenger, and that Messenger’s nation by not submitting to him; the one with the real mandate to rule.

Bayezid was too despondent the first time Timur told him of it, but the second time he had built up the will to object, “I hate to be the one to tell you, Amir of Samarkand, but despite your belief in Allah and his Messenger ﷺ, you insist on the habits of your non-believing ancestors. Did your Imam not recite to you the verse in Surah al-Baqarah: ‘Allah bestows kingship on whom he wills’? It is indeed possible for a man to be qualified in every manner — to be of noble blood, as I am for example, to be granted riches and palaces, strength of body and mind, the love and admiration of the rest of mankind that inspires them to die for him — as both of us have — and yet still not gain kingship at all if he is not virtuous and fearful of Allah with whom he rules.”

Timur listened when Bayezid spoke, a nod given each time the Prophet ﷺ or his companions were mentioned. He remained quiet for a minute, none daring to answer on his behalf.

“Is this how you justify your defeat, Bayezid? Do you recite these verses out of genuine contemplation, or do you seek to deflect blame for the loss of your freedom at my hands? We could have avoided this. I wrote to you repeatedly to return my enemies whom you hosted despite my objections, and if you had and submitted, there would be love and peace between us. There is Allah’s will indeed, but what of man’s responsibility to his kith and kin? I found no trouble at all when your Turkmen defected from your ranks and joined mine. May I remind you of the time our dear Prophet ﷺ was in the thicket of battle with his enemies at Hunayn, and said those famous words: ‘I am the Messenger, without doubt, I am the son of Abdul-Muttalib!’ When his ranks were shaken, it was his shared blood with the Arabs he reminded them of that restored their courage. You claim to have surrendered to God’s will in this matter, but what use does such submission have when done without man’s common sense for the world around him, which runs on blood and gold? It is like the man at the mosque whom our Prophet ﷺ advised: Tie your camel, then go inside and pray! What you have done instead, my dear Sultan, was carelessly let your camel loose upon my fields, then cried and complained when I took possession of it! My offer still stands, dear Sultan. Pledge your lands to me, and I’ll turn this army north to return you and your family to Edirne myself!”

They rode for hours until they came upon a spring to water their cattle and themselves. Bayezid let out a deep sigh before he dismounted, mourning the beauty of his country that he’d lost to his enemies in what seemed like an instant. He thought about the fate of his sons, how they’d quarrel over his throne should his death be certain. The once brisk air that added speed and gusto to his riding did nothing now but chill to his grieving heart, the turning colors of the grass fields and forests reminding him of the fair hair of his beautiful Olivera. Bayezid knew Timur treated him better than the rest of his imprisoned delegation — but it was not enough. He continued to think of his lovely consort, of her intense suffering without him. How afraid must she feel, he thought, to be in such close proximity to these devilish animals that claimed to be of his faith?

A servant ran to Timur with a freshwater pouch, which the old man emptied in a few seconds. As he drank he spotted the sullen Bayezid, sitting on the bare grass watching from afar the servant girls as they rushed about in their duties. Timur pointed for the same servant to give water to Bayezid immediately, and walked over accompanied by Khwarizmi.

He said nothing as he approached the Sultan, who drank the water without hurry. Moments of silence passed between them as the time for their short rest was close to an end. Bayezid grabbed Timur’s arm with strength the latter didn’t think such a depressed prisoner could muster. He tried to pull him close but the old man barely moved, Bayezid pulled himself towards Timur instead. Swords were drawn but their Amir raised his hand, and the Tribesmen had frozen like statues.

“Swear to me by Allah, if there’s a shred of honor and respect between us as Muslims, that if I perish you will spare my wife and not take her into your harem. I will not beg or plead like a slave, but I appeal to you as a brother in faith, despite our differences.”

Timur furrowed his dark brows and wrinkling face, showing his teeth. “I told you before that I wouldn't harm her.”

“Swear anyway. You admired the Serbians as warriors did you not? Then as a token of your admiration swear you’ll release their princess unharmed. Allow her to return to her brother Stefan in the north.”

The old Amir rolled his eyes, looking towards Khwarizmi who shrugged his shoulders. The Imam didn’t have to speak for Timur to hear the hadith in his voice: ‘The merciful ones shall receive mercy by He who is most merciful,’

“Fine. By Allah, your wife will not be harmed should she become widowed. If a man so much as touches her hand, I’ll have his head.”

Bayezid said nothing back. Soon they’d continue their march, and though few words were said as the orange sun escaped behind the plains, Timur felt the relief emanating from his prisoner as a lightness descended on the sound of his breathing.

Weeks would pass, and two more villages were descended upon like a swarm of locust on fresh crops. Timur usually spared Bayezid the sights by keeping him at camp, but other times he was tied up and brought forth to be paraded — to mock the defeated and ignorant chieftains who in their fresh captivity threatened the wrath of their Sultan upon Timur and his armies. He was walked down the streets for the people to bear witness, hit in the calves by a guard each time he tried to hide his face with his garments. Many young Turkmen taken prisoner opted to join Timur’s army when granted the opportunity and had little qualm raiding their own neighboring villages with tribes they’d been rivaling for as long as they could remember. It was not just to teach the newly-conquered that Bayezid was humiliated in this way; dirty, downtrodden, the dark eyes of his despair foretelling the fate of those who weren’t killed outright, but to show Bayezid himself where the loyalties of these converted tribes lay.

“Do you see, dear Sultan? Blood really does matter after all!”

Bayezid spat on the ground, prompting Timur to frown.

“It could be far worse, Bayezid! I could have put you in a palanquin, like a bird,” the Amir said, laughing as he rode through victorious.

Later in the night, after some light drinking, Timur walked over attended by his sons to the camp of the female servants and prisoners. He’d picked one of the new captives for himself, as did his sons. They’d developed a ratio after some time — for every hundred girls they had taken captive, there was always one or two gems among them that had great potential for the royal harem.

After Timur made his pick, passing by he saw the acclaimed Olivera. The scene was nothing like he’d ever witnessed, reminding him of the ancient mosaics his men uncovered in the Byzantine tombs of Syria. Olivera sat at the center of the tent, surrounded by dozens of captive girls engaged in no other activity besides lounging about, each sitting in a manner primed to get the best look at the princess from where they were. The princess, though no longer in the prime of her youth, proved more beautiful and enrapturing than nearly every other woman there. The grace of her calm look inspired these new captives to forget their own uncertain fates, as they admired a high veteran of their predicament.

One of Timur’s sons scoffed, “You are free to take her, father. What right does the defeated Sultan, stripped of all glory, have to object? All he can do is weep about it.”

The old man tapped his cane twice before entering. He adjusted his turban, spat into his fingers to comb down the stray hairs of his mustache. The picturesque scene was destroyed, like a colony of fish making way for him as they crawled to the edges of the tent in terror. Olivera, still seated in the center, looked up at him with emerald-green eyes that told of indifference rather than fear. Timur snapped his fingers at some servants he recognized and pointed to the ground in front of him, in an instant some patterned cushions were placed for him right across from her. He ordered his sons outside by the door, a toothy and yellow smile in the center of his black beard.

“Are you comfortable, Despina Hatun?”

She said nothing. Olivera still wore the Ottoman gown she was in at the time of her capture, a modest covering that left nothing but her face exposed. The hijab portion was loosened such that Timur could see the front locks of her braided hair, but nothing else. Her eyes darted at him up and down as he played with the pommel of his cane, waiting for an answer. Eventually, he spoke again.

“Your countrymen, the Serbian knights…I must admit they fought very well at Ankara, like packs of lions who preferred death over dishonor. I expected them to desert your husband and flee, as did the Tatars and Turkmen who joined me in turn. Instead, loyalty seems to be a strong suit of your people. Am I mistaken?”

Olivera shook her head. He’d gotten a reaction at least, it was progress. Timur continued, joking about his sons and grandsons, about the foolish mistakes some of his men made who were recent converts to Islam (leading to their execution), he even poked fun at some of the servant girls he knew Olivera would recognize. As he did so, he saw her relax as the minutes of their one-sided conversation went by. Her shoulders dropped, and her eyes stopped looking toward his blade and the tent’s entrance. Eventually, he realized it was futile. The poor woman must have gone in shock when captured and lost her ability to utter another word. He’d seen it before.

He rose with the help of his cane and turned, but as he was a few steps from the curtain he heard a voice bordering on sultriness.

“What…what will you do with my husband?”

Timur looked back. It was indeed her that spoke, as every other girl in the enclosure had their hands on their mouths fearing they’d be accused of an offense. He went back to where he was and sat back down.

“I have not decided. Are you hoping I spare him?”

“I do not rely on hope anymore, Amir. All I know is you parade him at each town and village we cross, so it seems you do not wish to kill him, at least not now.”

“And who says I won’t kill him when I’m done parading him? Your husband has offended me and my people in a great way, a debt remains in place.”

“So you do plan on it eventually?”

“It is not a clear decision. You wouldn’t understand.”

In an instant, Olivera’s face changed. She was inquisitive when she began speaking, now she shrugged her shoulders in a lack of care not seen from the most pompous of royal girls Timur witnessed across his life.

“I don’t need to understand. What will happen to me, though? Will I become yours?”

Timur squinted and pulled his head back. She seemed to have thought ahead in the case of Bayezid’s demise. He could only remember the panicking, neurotic Sultan earlier; whose foresight for his kingdom and men was halted by the fate of this measly princess. Yet despite the shock of what he heard, he didn’t tell her what was agreed upon between him and her husband. The situation had grown interesting to him.

Timur chuckled. “Your heart does not seem warm to him anymore, I see?”

Olivera breathed in before she spoke again. She didn’t move from her place, but seemed to have gotten closer. “My heart has never been warm to him. I was married to him as a young woman so peace between my people and his would be possible, and in the past twelve years, it was I who kept that peace standing, in the many times he was tempted to break it.”

“So you’re indifferent to his death?”

“No…rather I prefer it. In truth, Amir, I despise him. He has borne me no children and still insists his dastardly practices and beliefs on me, despite my objections. I have heard of the endless cruelties of you Mongols, but dealing with him upon his return from each battle was cruelty of its own! You tell me now my people fought beside him gallantly to the end, yet he ridiculed them to my face before that fateful day!”

The old Timur listened quietly, his face on his palm as he pondered in astonishment. The words of Bayezid struck his ears over and over like the trampling of horses. Swear by Allah! Spare my wife! My Olivera!

She continued when she saw Timur had nothing to say, “Please, Amir, if you do plan on killing him, allow me one request. You know despite my captivity that my status is far higher than any servant girl…may I ask one thing be done before you are rid of him.”

Timur clenched his fist. Olivera looked to the other girls, then leaned into the old man before she even had a response and whispered into his ear. When he leaned back after she said it, Timur looked away to see both his sons still standing at the entrance, each of their heads turned inwards with relentless curiosity.

“So,” she asked, “Is it possible?”

Timur fell silent for a moment, thinking. He then nodded in the affirmative. “It is…a servant will make the arrangements.”

He saw the princess smile, in an instant he was filled with disgust. He stood back up and walked off, not even paying mind to his sons who followed right behind him. He breathed out in the cold night, shaking his head. “La illaha illa Allah, there is no God but the one God,” he muttered. Indeed, he had not witnessed such wickedness up close before this day.

They were in the final leg of their journey across Anatolia, to lay siege to Smyrna, now in the hands of the Christians. Out of nowhere, Timur decided they should have a feast to celebrate their endless victories thus far. Their camp was quickly prepared for the occasion, a center table set up for the Amir, his family, and his greatest generals. Bayezid, much to his surprise, was taken out of the prisoner’s tent and directed to sit across from Timur at that very table. He caught many stares and wicked smiles from the Mongols as the celebration went underway. A number of bloody duels took place, wrestling matches, even some dancing. Before food was allowed to be served, however, Timur ordered Khwarizmi to open the occasion with a prayer for their good health and prosperity. All fell silent as he read some verses from the Quran raising his hands to the heavens, saying the prayer in Arabic first, then Chagatai. There was no translation to the Turkish of Bayezid.

The food was put out, mostly scavenged and looted from raids as well as some wild game caught on the march. The servant girls rushed past, going back and forth with the food and drink in a shaking hurry as if their lives were at stake. Bayezid smiled at their nervousness, but the entertaining sight did nothing to calm his own nerves. He looked over to Timur who did not eat much, which was unusual. The Amir was an old man, but ate plentiful for one so energetic, yet to retire from the thrill of warfare. Bayezid found the calm to begin eating, realizing the food wasn’t much better than what he was served the entire three months he’d been captive.

As he ate, he noticed all at once a commotion ensuing around him. It seemed everyone was looking either to the front of the table, or to himself. It took one glance to see why.

Bayezid’s heart dropped. Worse still, it felt as if it were ripped out of his rib cage and cut into a thousand pieces. A sense of burning and discomfort worse than any rusted chain overtook his head and chest, he felt he could drop dead in an instant. He didn’t even have the strength to say her name aloud, let alone yell it in a bout of righteous gheerah, for indeed his throat clenched up from the shock.

Olivera walked along the side of the table with her chin held high, in her same Ottoman garments, holding a bottle of wine. She came beside Timur, and that’s when it happened. She looked Bayezid right in the eye as she poured in his enemy’s cup, the unmistakable scorn pouring out of her gaze in kind. Timur sat with a neutral face at first, but upon seeing the color drain from Bayezid’s face he instead spoke to him with just the wrinkles of his forehead as if to say: do you see clearly now, who you argued so hard to protect?

For the remainder of the feast, Bayezid wouldn’t utter a word nor consume another morsel. His hands weren’t even seen upon the table again. When it was time to retire from the celebration, Bayezid followed the guards with no protest and his eyes to the floor. Olivera was sent back to her own tent, similarly despondent despite receiving her request in full.

The morning came, and out climbed Timur from his covers for the dawn prayer. A servant arrived with a bucket of water as the Amir pushed aside the concubine at each side of him. He performed the ritual washing, then went out in the breeze over to the prisoner’s tent. He entered upon Bayezid, who once again was asleep. He knocked him with his cane, nothing. He did it twice more, except the third time it was done with enough force that Bayezid turned — and Timur saw his blue lips. He fell to his knees and felt the Sultan’s cold skin, and screamed immediately for the servant to fetch his personal doctors. In the time it took for them to come, Timur looked down and noticed Bayezid’s ring. The gemstone was gone, a half-drop of dark liquid still moist upon the signet. He was driven to such a rage that he broke his cane against the back of one of the guards outside the tent.

The army did not move for hours as they awaited further orders. Before further commotion was drawn up, a command came. The entire delegation of the late Sultan was to be released, with Olivera herself to be escorted on her own to the lands of the north. Ahead of her and her escort, a horseman was sent with a letter of introduction to Prince Stefan of Serbia.

When their journey resumed, nothing but the hooves of horses would be heard at the front of the march. No Quran, no hadith, no stories. Timur rode quietly as he soon saw the high castle walls of Smyrna on the horizon. Still, he could not think of how to conduct the siege. How absurd, he thought, the fate that Allah had ascribed to the wicked and mendacious creatures He had formed called “humans”, and how frivolous their wants were. His foe was not a dumb or weak man. The Sultan had won every battle he’d fought before he’d encountered Timur, he was an appreciator of poetry and Islamic knowledge like himself, and of noble blood. Yet despite it all, he was as blind to the hatred of one so important to him as an old farm dog. How could such a man conquer so much, yet remain so ignorant, Timur thought.

Then, he began to laugh. He laughed harder than he had in months. Maybe it’s just as outrageous, Timur the Lame thought, that a crippled boy would go on to conquer the lands of his fathers, all of Khorasan, the Levant even, in less than the average man’s lifetime. How truly worthless this world is, as you have said oh Allah, if this is how gold and land are distributed amongst your creation. How utterly worthless!

Timur ghazi realized what he chased was far greater. The reason for his gallivanting, his insistence on riding and fighting as a crippled old man, razing a miniature hell wherever he saw fit — he needed an escape into the world that was eternal, heaven or hell it may be, that unlike this one actually meant something to his Creator. When he reached Smyrna, he laid siege to the Knights of Rhodes in their sea-castle for two weeks and breached their outer wall. The garrison and its inhabitants were destroyed completely, and each knight who withstood the siege was beheaded.

The fourth son of the late Bayezid, Mehmed, became Timur’s vassal. In the year 1402 the Amir began his return to Samarkand. Armenia, the Levant, and Georgia had not yet recovered from their razing. Baghdad was conquered, twice. When he finally reached home, Timur spent nine months celebrating his victories. He was the master of Asia.

Last week on September 16th, 2022, Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman died in Tehran. The circumstances of her death are somewhat unclear, but the narrative as of today is that she was killed in police custody after having been arrested due to not wearing the hijab (or not wearing it properly); as the Iranian law currently enforces it for all women in the country. Those who don’t abide by it are quickly arrested and in many cases beaten by the “Guidance Patrol”, Iran’s equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s religious police.

Of course, as is usual, this led to another igniting of the hijab debate among Muslims both in the Islamic world and the West, where the head covering was both questioned and affirmed by those who despise and are passionate about it (respectively). This is a common occurrence whenever a western nation puts restrictions on the hijab, or whenever a Muslim woman is physically attacked by demented goons in a western nation for wearing it. I want to talk a bit about the larger discussion it’s sparked, and why we continue to suffer from this debate year after year whenever something like this happens.

The extreme hard-lining when it comes to the traditional Islamic headscarf is an issue that is heavily charged and sensitive, but nonetheless a consequence that has only come about as a result of the last 100 years; much like every other token issue regarding the relationship between modern men and their women. It is no longer a matter of just modesty vs. scantiness, religiosity vs. secularism, but also of things like identity, social and economic class, and the clash it represents between Western civilization and the Orient. The greatest differentiator in the mind of anyone when asked to imagine the “big thing” that separates the modern western woman and an eastern one, is whether their hair and body are covered or not.

Unlike what is commonly believed, the rest of the Muslim world outside Iran and Saudi Arabia does not have national hijab laws, though it varies regarding female students in schools. In the most populated Muslim nation, Indonesia (207M+), the hijab is optional in public, but many of their schools mandate it. In Jordan (10M+ Muslims), now considered a leader among modernizing Muslim nations, the hijab is optional both in public and in most schools. In both of those countries the women who wear it don’t think much about it, it’s just a part of their daily uniform and the story tends to just end there.

In the West, it’s a different story entirely. Muslim women in the Anglosphere (USA, Canada, UK, where it’s allowed but seen as strange by the majority of the native populace) are split into so many camps of wearing it or not, for a variety of reasons, that it’s pretty nauseating for laymen when you get into the gritty details.

You can put it on a spectrum. On the far left of it are women who don’t wear the hijab at all and frankly despise the practice, even theologically. Then you have those who don’t wear it out of sheer lack of religiosity but know it’s mandatory in the divine law. After that, you have those who don’t wear it but “want to”, and believe they just need a little push like getting married, performing Hajj (the pilgrimage), having children, or all three.

Then for those who wear it, there are those who do so but “loosely” (hair showing, or wear clothes that accentuate their figures alongside it), those who wear it as a political statement (the Ilhan Omar/Linda Sarsour types), those who just do so because of familial and cultural pressure, and so on. As you can see, it’s not so cut and clear when you actually get into it, is it?

Considering this, let’s take a look at the theology behind it so we aren’t lost, and know from where we’re looking out from. The commandment for women to cover up in the form of the hijab came in the fifth year of the hijra (627 AD), 17 years from when the truth of Islam was first sent down to the Prophet (PBUH). This is an important detail. The commandments for the five daily prayers, rules of hygiene, ceasing fornication and adultery, all were relatively quick to be revealed in the first decade or so of Islam. The hijab however was one of the last major commandments, before the Farewell Hajj five years after that. Meaning, the hijab is important, but there’s a huge host of other practices and trials that the Prophet’s (PBUH) companions went through, including some of the most brutal battles of their lives, that adequately built up their faith and discipline before the hijab and lowering of the gaze, two commandments for each respective gender that were revealed simultaneously. It also helped that even before it was a commandment, it was customary for women to cover their hair in public anyway. What changed was, according to the verse in Surat al-Nur verse 31, that they use the scarf to cover their front (upper part of the body) instead of just throwing it behind their shoulders.

If Islam were a pyramid, the hijab would be one of the stones nearing the top. It’s a crown jewel to display the faith of the Muslim woman, and therefore it can not be there if the foundational blocks don’t exist first. A believing woman who prays, fasts, guards her chastity, and is good to her family will wear the hijab with much greater ease, with less persuasion, than a woman that does none of the above. Yes, there are many hijabis who also do not apply the foundations of the religion, just as there are many non-hijabis who do all those things and more, but those usually represent exceptions to the rule, not the rule itself.

Knowing this, and seeing the hijab in this way, it should be obvious that enforcing the hijab from the top down instead of fostering it from inward to outward is an insane idea. If you’re dealing with a religiosity issue in your “Islamic society”, and the only way your women will wear the hijab is if you threaten them with beatings and jail time, you’ve failed from the outset and are dealing with far larger problems than you’re willing to admit. It’s like trying to treat a samurai sword neck wound with bandages and ibuprofen.

Many Muslim women (and men) get offended by this since one is directly saying that not wearing the hijab is an issue of lacking faith (which it is), however, the kind of faith lacking here is distinct. A giant reason why many Muslim women, especially in the west hesitate to wear the hijab is that they know it’s a social handicap, and especially a handicap when it comes to getting attention and approval from the opposite sex. This effect has exponentially increased with the advent of the internet and social media. Their lack of faith isn’t regarding God, his commandments, or the Prophet (PBUH), it’s a lack of faith that they’ll be okay after the change in their social lives as a result of wearing it. If you’re a young, Muslim, college-aged woman that doesn’t wear the hijab and regularly posts on social media, I’m willing to bet the following: many of those casual American girlfriends of yours are only comfortable around you because you dress and look like them. 90%+ of the guys who follow and try to DM you on Instagram would not do so if you had the page of an average hijabi.1

It’s very ironic that many Muslim girls who don’t wear the hijab like to cope with “it doesn’t define me, I’m still a good Muslim without it, it has no effect on who I am,” but none of them ever behave as if that’s true. They know it matters. They know that their coworkers, professors, friends, desperate male-orbiters, and so on all view them a certain way, and are terrified of the immediate change it would bring to those relationships if they were to cover up and act as a hijabi should, without the distinct advantage of open feminine attractiveness. It’s not that you don’t trust God is right, it’s that you don’t trust your own ability to cope in society without your looks and physicality making everything easier for you. This is the hardest part of the hijab debate for many to accept, as it requires a basic understanding of how men and women operate that western, feminist ideology turns upside down.

Adding on to this, another reason is that the hijab levels the “looks hierarchy” women uphold among one another. Women pretend to hate hierarchy in polite conversation, but no one worships it more than they do in their direct actions. Hijab is an incredible equalizer of female looks. It’s true the face alone does a lot, but when you restrict what a woman can flaunt, it puts the vast majority of women in an Islamic society on the same playing field in everyday life, preventing extremely seductive women at the very top from slinking past their lessers, and allowing women who are less fortunate in the looks department to skate by with a bit more ease. The hijab is one of those things that work best when most women do it. Many of these problems we’re discussing arise precisely when a minority are the only ones sticking to the practice (and yes, Allah will reward them exponentially more for suffering this grievance).

The tough reality is that whether you get mass wearing of hijab or not depends on whether you’ve cultivated the kind of society that allows women to operate without these fears, many of which come about as a result of the cancerous, secular western society that has been pedestaled as the role model for the rest of the world. The pressure on a woman to wear the hijab should not come from the state or a society built on filthy coomerism, but from familial, spiritual, and cultural discipline. Some will read that and think “but that means it’s forced!”, which is a childish and stupid argument. You’re forced to do things that you know are required but you don’t “like” doing every day, and most of the time it’s the government that makes you do them. You compromise your dignity, self-esteem, finances, and a general sense of fulfillment every single day for useless bureaucrats and jobs that you hate. You obeyed the government from the bottom of your heart when they told you to stay home, inject a mystery serum, and wear a diaper on your face for two straight years. So yeah, I think it’s not that big of an issue if a woman’s family and sacred religious texts “make” her dress a certain way by raising her upon that path, in a gradual and smooth manner. Get a hold of yourself.

The reasons for the protests in Iran are not surprising at all, and most of those causing chaos don’t really care much about women or “their rights” at all, but that’s not the point. Iran has a growing society of young people that clearly want to be secular but legally can’t, and the dumb and incompetent regime full of tyrannical boomers thinks the solution is just to beat and shoot them a little more, and that they’ll quiet down. I don’t know how one fixes that, but it’s clear that if your goal as a group of Islamic leaders was to “get women to wear the hijab”, you’d recognize how misplaced your priorities are. Your goal should be to have a society of practicing Muslims who value religion in their lives and see the foundations of the religion as essential first, and we’re yet to get a set of Muslim leaders who recognize this. Maybe we will in another century, where we become worthy of such men in the first place.

Though this is a review about a different show, I feel the need to preface with what was it I hated exactly about it’s spiritual predecessor. I enjoyed some episodes of Ramy, but overall, the show — with its moral subtext, its insistence on lurid displays of sexual filth, its vying for liberal “tolerance”, and above all its horribly unrelatable, narcissistic protagonist — made it unbearable and a chore to get through. No high enough budget or production value can let someone get over the utter dissapointment the ending of that second season was, which I’m hoping is rectified in the third (which I’m honestly only going to watch for review purposes at this point). Its greatest sin, which I judge all shows that portray the journey of a Muslim man or woman, is whether it’s set on the course of the character at the very least trying to find their way to a righteous life for Allah’s sake, and making progress towards that goal. I, and many others who crave content like this, are not demanding perfection. We don’t want saints that are not accessible to us, but at the same time reject the nihilism that has constantly been the trademark of these slice-of-life genre shows. Ramy makes zero attempt at this, and instead insists on the messaging that “nothing really matters bro, this is life, get over it.”

Mo however, though is co-created by Youssef, shows a drastic improvement. We don’t know whether this is due to Youssef learning from his prior mistakes, or perhaps Amer (the far better stand-up comedian, in my opinion) was more heavily involved in the production of this one. The bottom line is all my gripes with Ramy were either heavily minimized or cut out entirely from this show, which makes me believe that the people producing them are realizing what makes good art about a culture and what doesn’t.

The season in total only comes up to less than 200 minutes, which made me wonder why they just didn’t produce this as a movie instead. Each episode was around 20-25 minutes, leading to some awkward cliffhangers and pacing for some episodes, especially in the beginning. It’s clear they didn’t have as expansive a budget as Ramy.

Unlike Ramy, the protagonist Mo Najjar is actually quite funny and relatable, because his goal in this show is not some yogi cop-out “path to enlightenment”. Mo is a refugee trying to secure the future of himself and his family. His goal from the beginning is survival, and trying the best he can with his struggles and trauma to overcome and move on with life. He has clear moments of weakness and breakdowns, but you’re shown clearly why that is. His lack of religiosity and sins are not due to peer pressure or carnal temptations, but are coping mechanisms as he tries to live day by day. This kind of story makes far more sense than what was purported in previous portrayals.

The show strays from sex scenes, violence, or nudity. Mo has a Mexican girlfriend whom he (actually) loves, which though many will disapprove of I find far more preferrable than other characters who destroy entire families with their sexual indulgence. It also presented a great contrast between his character and that of his sister, who married a white man as soon as she could for citizenship. He refuses to perform the same act to save just himself (as he still has his mother and autistic brother who need asylum), a noble and admirable act.

The acting on the part of his family members, friends, and other parodies were superb. The contrast between the horrific second-generation Arab lawyer and the dedicated Jewish one, the hilarious dichotomy of the Palestinian uncle with a close Jewish friend, and the parody of the white liberal tech dork who marries a colored woman for diversity points were all great. I’m glad these were kept in.

My favorite part, which I think brings this series to greater heights than any of its similar conceptions, was the focus on olive oil. This was impactful to me not just as a Palestinian, but as a writer who recognized the genius of that strategy of storytelling, where the characters have to dig deep into their own heritage and pride to make a way for themselves. Its one rung below seeking help from God and religion in a direct manner, but even then it was combined with Islam in minor ways (like in the last episode).

I didn’t like how rushed everything was. I wish more time was dedicated to scenes of him and his father, as to me that stole the show from the rest of it. A few of the racism jokes and rants were weird. Overall though, it was great to see this betterment in American Muslim media, and I hope it keeps getting better. Mo Amer is good people, seems like he knows what he’s doing and I hope he doesn’t screw this up later. This was based on his own life, after all.

8/10

A podcast with my friend Basil on his show BareBactrian, where we laugh hysterically and roast the demented token-Muslims of the American Regime:

In the seventh issue of MAN’S WORLD, the greatest men’s magazine out in the world right now run by my good friend Raw Egg Nationalist, I have a polemic article on page 165 where I make the argument that the “Women’s Rights” movement is akin in form to a porn addiction:

And today IM1776, the best political magazine for the dissident-right, I write about the vandalism in academia occuring to the classics of the Western canon, specifically the epics of Homer:

Thank you all for your support. More, bigger things coming in the future, including my second book. Till next time!

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The Iliad

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Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

Blood of The Levant (be me)

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Productivity Principles of ʿUmar II: ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Paperback

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Books Mentioned:
Slavery and Islam by Jonathan A.C. Brown

Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell

Blood of The Levant by Abdullah Yousef

I present here a technical theory. I expect this stuff to be mostly news to my non-Muslim readers who don’t know just how much our traditions coincide in eschatology. As always, I ask for Allah’s guidance and am open to conflicting views, and I hope that if I make any theological errors those qualified will correct me.

Who is the Dajjal/Antichrist?

The Prophet ﷺ described him as being a young, crippled man, from around the area that is modern-day Isfahan, Iran. He will come from a couple that is righteous, who have been barren and prayed for many years for a child, and are eventually granted this one son. He will have curly hair, and be deformed in a distinguishing manner; one of his eyes (there are differences in the narration whether it’s his left or right) will be bloated like a rotten grape, unable to see from it. Our Prophet ﷺ also said that any human being with an ounce of faith in Allah in his heart will recognize the word ‘DISBELIEVER’ written on his forehead.

This last sign is probably not a physical sign. This is a spiritual gift to the believers, as those who follow the Dajjal will not be able to see a thing. Think of it like a belief-based invisible ink.

The Dajjal will visit every city on earth in a period of 40 days. Some interpret this literally and think every crevice where humans settle will be touched, thus giving doubts to the hyper-rational of us, but that’s not necessarily the case. In Quranic Arabic, “كلّ” generally means “all”, but can also mean “most”. So it’s safe to assume every sizable population center on earth will be subject to being visited by the Antichrist.

The issue of Dajjal, where he comes from, at what time, and so on has caused confusion and conflict for generations, from within the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime to this day. Some of the logistics about him don’t make sense. There’s an authentic hadith that is popular with many called the hadith of Tameem al-Daari, which though is very interesting and technically authentic, contradicts pretty much all the rest of what we know about the Dajjal. Many scholars took issue with this hadith despite its authentic chain of narration, and agreed that it’s worth suspecting because of its lack of consistency with the rest of the hadiths about the Dajjal, so this isn’t a big part of my theory.

We know that the times we’re living in now are worsening quite a bit. Food shortages seem on the horizon for many, inflation, soaring prices of goods and fuel — and greater than all of that which is just a demo of what the “powers that be” have planned, is their two-layered society not all that dissimilar to something like Elysium or Altered Carbon, where the highest elites live in the luxurious comfort of their own making as the masses suffer a cyberpunk shithole existence, where basic necessities are scarce in spite of massive technological advancement. You all know the meme. Live in the pod, eat the bugs, drink the soy. A spiritual Haiti made possible by multiple cycles of manufactured famine, population swapping, and advancement of mind-numbing entertainment that controls any with the potential to rebel. The ideologies that motivate their plans for these things — climate “control”, social justice/equality, open-borders immigration, all of it is window dressing for these things. They don’t care about the advancement of specific races or a “civilization”, they just want that technocratic heaven of theirs (and hell for others) that they’ll get to enjoy for the last twenty years of them gracelessly wasting away.

Another hadith about the Dajjal is as follows:

"There will be three hard years before the Dajjal (appears). During them, people will be stricken by a great famine. In the first year, Allah will command the sky to withhold a third of its rain, and the earth to withhold a third a third of its produce. In the second year, Allah will command the sky to withhold two thirds of its rain, and the earth to withhold two thirds of its produce. In the third year, Allah will command the sky to withhold all of its rain, and it will not rain a single drop of rain. He will command the earth to withhold all of its produce, and no plant will grow. All hoofed animals will perish, except that which Allah wills."1

What we know for a fact is that for a period before the time of the Dajjal, a worldwide crisis of shortages for food, water, and other necessities will overtake the earth. Many hundreds of millions can be expected to perish as a result, this much we can expect. But afterwards, in humanity’s darkest moment, this Antichrist will appear with a sudden plentifulness of all these things for his followers. This is where the crux of my theory begins: he will be in that upper class, from those elites who are scrounging up whatever miniscule amount of resources are left for themselves, while the rest of humanity is fighting Mad Max style over a few liters of water.

The Islamic prophecy is that this man will be struck by something in his personal life that drives him to a great rage, at which point he goes on his quest to becoming the Dajjal. Perhaps this young man born in this elite class is a little different from them. More sinister, depraved, out of it, despite the righteousness of his parents. It could be that he tries to imitate them — maybe they are benefactors who try to help the poor around them with their wealth in this post-apocalyptic world — but one day his veneer of outward virtue is exposed, and that’s when he loses it and decides to start his cult. He will be a celebrity, but without any outward beauty or aesthetic fascination. He’s an oligarch who can only sway with his riches and the false miracles he will use to bring those into his massive, ever-growing cult.

Ibn Umar reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “The False Messiah will come upon this marsh of Marriqanat. Most of those who go out to him will be women, until a man goes back to his wife, his mother, his daughter, his sister, and his aunt to shackle them tightly, fearing they would go out to him.”2

It is said also that of those who follow him, most will be women. In times of great crisis when most men are dead or abdicate responsibility, women will as a survival instinct naturally gravitate to whoever is providing the most resources, for their safety and their children’s. It is also the case, and we see this today, that most who are enraptured by celebrities, mythological stories, tricks, and cults are estranged women without a strong father or husband around. So just like in every cult we know from history, this guy will have a depraved harem of his own.

Next come the “miracles” of the Dajjal. The main ones that will sway the masses will be these:

The Prophet ﷺ said: the Dajjal will say to a Bedouin Arab, “what will you think if I bring your father and mother back to life for you? Will you bear witness that I am your lord?  The Bedouin will say, “Yes.”  So two devils will assume the appearance of his father and mother, and say, “O my son, follow him for he is your lord…”3

We know the technological advancements of our age have reached a point where now we try and explore the impossible. A few years ago there was a Black Mirror episode called “Be Right Back” where a young woman loses her husband to a car crash. Immediately after she’s referred to a tech startup that offers a “way to still contact them” — the way being that when she purchases their service, she also hands over all the personal data and social media info of her late husband to an AI. This AI then uses everything about this man’s online life — his likes, dislikes, style of talking, the way he poses in selfies, favorite foods and allergies, etc. to form a chat bot that talks just like him.

This is creepy at first, but it’s no longer enough for the poor widow after a while. Later on she upgrades this service where she’s sent a synthetically made body with the same AI implanted. Literally her late husband in robot form, using nothing but his digital social media footprint as his base.

You’re definitely wondering, “well Abdullah, this is just dystopian fiction”. Well, not really:

This is real. It’s been attempted before, and most likely they haven’t entirely given up on this. Maybe it’s not for this exact time, but it’s something that won’t exactly be unknown in fifty years or less. And if Americans don’t do it, some other foreign power will. My guess it will be the Chinese.

So it really makes you think about that hadith in today’s context. We put outrageous amounts of our personal lives online, far more than what’s shown in that Black Mirror episode. The focal point of the episode is that yes, indeed, it’s not truly real because it’s not a living being, it doesn’t have a living soul, but in a time of crisis like that of the Dajjal? That would play out quite differently. It’s possible that something similar to this is what is meant as the Dajjal “bringing back” someone’s parents in such a deceitful manner, tricking them using these technological horrors. And it’s not uncommon that we refer to these horrors as devilish and satanic, do we not?

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying:

May I not inform you about the Dajjal what no Apostle of Allah narrated to his people? He would be blind and he would bring along with him an Image of Paradise and Hell-Fire and what he would call as Paradise that would be Hell-Fire and I warn you as Noah warned his people.4

A Heaven and a Hell, but as “images”. What does this mean?

If we are to continue with our technological horror theory this elite, technologically advantaged Dajjal will use these methods to enact his false miracles, then the same applies here. We’re all familiar with virtual reality, since at the time of writing this it’s now pretty usable for video games and flight simulations. However as it advances, many companies are looking into not only improving the quality of the visuals, but using sensory attachments to make your sense of touch and pain accessible by the VR as well. The main objective is for use in video games, as usual, but once again I’m reminded of something in the vein of Altered Carbon or Westworld, the latter of which uses AI skin suits and a built world seperate from real life. Westworld was a show about a fantasy world built for the rich and powerful, who could live out their sick, depraved criminal and sexual fantasies with zero consequences. Could something like this, or closer to VR be what is meant by the “images” of heaven and hell? Will the obedient of his cult be given a “heaven” world where they live free of consequences, and thus earning Allah’s hell, while an opposite creation is used to torture the true believers in God who deny the False Messiah?

We said: 'O Messenger of Allah, how long will he stay on earth?' He said: 'Forty days, one day like a year, one day like a month, one day like a week, and the rest of his days like your days.' 5

The Prophet ﷺ advised us by saying that if we are among those who are tested with this tribulation, to know that it is not a real hell, and that the reward for enduring its pain will be heaven, so it’s best to just jump into it. Just another aspect to think about. This also relates to what was mentioned at the beginning, that his reign will last forty days, but that first day will feel like a year, the following day will feel like a month, the rest will be in real time. Could it be that it feels that way because of a mass mind-control event that puts many with a certain CONNECTION in their brains to these things into a VR hell?

Another hadith describes those who will remain steadfast:

Abu Sa’id al-Khudri reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “The False Messiah will come and he will be forbidden from entering the boundary of Medina. He will descend upon some of the salty barren areas around Medina. On that day, a man among the best of the people will say come out and say: I testify that you are the same impostor whom the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, told us about. The False Messiah will say: Do you all think if I killed you and brought you back to life, would you have any doubt in the matter? The man will say no. Then, he will kill the man and bring him back to life and the man will say when he is alive again: By Allah, I have never seen so clearly as I do today! The False Messiah will intend to kill him, for he has not authority over him.”6

This could be literal, but the method very well could be that he puts such a person through a VR “death” that due to his strength of faith doesn’t break from when he awakens. As with everything I’m theorizing with here, Allah knows best.

I think that even if you disagree with some of these details, you should catch on to my main thesis here. Most, if not all of what will be brought forth by the Dajjal will be with the assistance of technological horrors beyond our comprehension, in a world that the global elites are vying for daily. The good side, however, is that this is nothing compared to those who remain vigorous and steadfast with their faith at such a perilous time. All of this is just speculation, but you tell me what you think as well. It’s all very interesting, is it not?

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Notes:

Topic’s covered w/ timestamps:

1. (2:15) You wrote your book at the tail end of 2016, in a time when political tensions across the world were at explosive levels (relative to the time) that people thought couldn’t possibly get worse in the world of liberal democracies and free republics - yet we look at the world now and realize we have surpassed it tenfold, especially towards what is worse. One of the big parts of your book’s thesis, as I understood it, was that much of the populations of the Anglosphere had now taken a populist stance in response to the abuses they’ve suffered due to mass migration, terrorism, and the general failures of late-stage liberal democracy; which has now become an occupational oligarchy. Since then we’ve had multiple world-changing events that I think warrant mentioning with regards to the claims in your book, especially those that many I know believe have been totally vindicated and proven. The biggest one is the COVID pandemic starting in 2020, which in addition to harming many through the actual disease came the detriment to billions more the harms of the response to the disease, which many are admitting has destroyed aspects of society and the economy far more than the virus itself. You mentioned in your book how Anglosphere Muslims are almost always in line with the more liberal political parties and mainstream media narratives, and just as we saw it was mainly the Democrats in the United States for example and their voter base that has conformed the most to useless and harmful COVID restrictions, going as far as calling for violence against those who dissent against them in Canada and Australia for example. Most of us have seen Muslim communities accept these restrictions in totality, with none in the popular scholarship or leadership from our institutes warning against the harms of, for example, allowing the state to have the precedent of power to shut down your place of worship whenever they like for any reason (as we have seen in Canada, most prominently), or allowing citizens to be cut off from all aspects of public life for refusing a medical treatment. Do you share these concerns?

2. (20:14) Each election year, there’s this detrimental cycle I keep witnessing both around me and from the sources I have from other states thanks to my friends: Muslims grow tired, sick, and disgusted with the way Democrats are handling things (or more recently, were quite satisfied with how thing were under Trump up to the end of 2019) and it seems as if they’re almost ready to break free from liberal democrat vassalage. I had many acquaintances, first and second-generation Muslims, male and female of various income levels who were set on voting for Trump in 2020 once it became clear that Joe Biden, currently the vegetable-in-chief, was due to be his competition, due to his clear history as a war hawk and corruption. Then all it took was one mass media psychological operation, in this case it the 2020 Summer riots, that shifted almost all of them to voting for Biden instead thinking that the US was going to turn into the Third Reich any minute now. What will it take for Anglosphere Muslims to truly break free from enslavement to mainstream narratives? Are most who grow up here destined to be assimilated into riding the waves of whatever the next “big thing” is (at the time of writing this, that would be Ukraine)? (20:14)

3. (30:00) We started this interview quite a while before this became the next “new thing”, but it seems Allah has willed that it was prolonged so that we may actually cover it. As of this specific question, the current hysteria is over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade, the catastrophically stupid Supreme Court decision that halted any sort of reasonable debate Americans could have had over the necessity of abortion (which Western Europe was able to have over a course of years, and as of now has much stricter abortion laws than American blue states, providing the reasonable exceptions for sex crimes and threatening medical issues). (As of yesterday, actually, the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade) The reason I bring this up is because much like all other issues concerning “women’s rights”, whenever this one comes up there’s a clear contrast between what we know for a fact is theologically acceptable, and what is promoted amongst the Western Muslim academic class. Particularly, this demographic of Muslims who are upper-middle-class strivers, who are now claiming that “Islam permits abortion” as a broad statement, eliminating the nuance entirely the same way extremists who are 100% anti-abortion do. It seems that radical feminism has become this sort of messianic secondary religion for Muslims of this caste, sometimes overriding their Islam entirely. What do you think about this?

4. (43:57) The biggest foreign policy story of this past year was the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, who are now ruling the Afghan government. I’m sure you know all the details, but beyond the actual events, I noticed something quite bizarre online - many, especially on the right and even veterans, welcomed the failure of the US and the collapse of the fake Afghan government, and took great joy in seeing the absolute destruction of the attempted liberalization of that region by Western powers. Meanwhile, many left-leaning and mainstream Muslims abhorred it and cried repeatedly about women’s rights and the “illegitimacy” of the Taliban. Twenty years ago, people would have never predicted this shift, intuitively you’d think it was the other way around. Why the switch?

5. (53:02) In your book, you outline on a macro-level what American Muslims and American Muslim organizations have been doing wrong for decades, and the flawed system of dawah that’s ongoing at the moment. What can individual Muslims who want to break out of this do? Mostly young Muslim men like me, of course.

6. (59:52) (Improvised detour to talk about recent LGBT debacle with Yaqeen Institute, Ilhan Omar stuff)

7. (1:09:17) The topic of “Muslim Representation in American Media” has been slowly heating up over the past few years. I’m an artist and author myself, with my debut fiction novel coming out this June which portrays a variety of Muslim characters, with my end goal and message being the glorification of my Lord and faith in the eyes of the many. Since I was a boy, I always grasped at any portrayal of my people I could find (One of my favorite movies is The Message). Since one of my main realizations as of recent has been the fact that not only is true art in media by Muslims sparse, but that it is currently being hijacked and built by the people I described; the leftist, liberal class of Muslims who are intent on destroying us through consumption of their trash while they vie for the approval of Hollyweird executives, so I decided to pursue and RECLAIM this area of artistic inquiry myself, and encourage other like-minded Muslim creators to do so. This is a topic that is very personal to me - what is the most important thing, if you are a Muslim creator of books, art, movies, etc. to keep in heart and mind if you are intent on spreading a message about your people, and if Allah wills it, have that translate into Da’wah?

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PRELUDE

IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE MOST MERCIFUL,

I hear his footsteps above me. I feel them against these stones as he descends to the dungeons that he allows to become a fetid bog to spite me. My brother is not sane nor well, but neither am I. My wrath comes to me in waves as I traverse this enclosure, torn between cursing myself and praying for a way out. When it envelops me, I am a sick man, a furious man, a resentful man…ever since I accepted Allah into my heart, I prayed for one that was free of the smoldering anger that has estranged me from my brother; that has left my son without a father, my wife without a husband, my beloved sister suffering so wretchedly. Every night I hear her cries, a torture which I endure alongside her yet am powerless to end.

But still, we suffer far less than most prisoners. My brother keeps me fed, and each night he comes down here to torment me. Or so he thinks, but really, he does me the favor of keeping me company before I must suffer the hellscape of my dreams. Something tells me that despite ruling much of the world, he is still drawn to this tiny part of it because he feels lonelier than ever before. When our dreams were no longer one, when the bond was severed in favor of our sister…it broke him. It was easy for me to recover, as I still had someone to be bonded with, but he was left with no one to re-attach to, not even father whom he so closely resembled. Even now since he is bonded with his youngest son, he is still not aware of it. Though, that is something that seems to have come to our benefit.

The honorable Imam Abu Hanifa, may Allah rest his soul, suffered far worse than I. He too was imprisoned by a vicious tyrant, but Allah has tested him with a severity I do not know because he lived to be a man I could not be. He did not deserve his torment yet accepted it in favor of what Allah had in store for him beyond this life. I deserve my fate and more, so to not accept this upon myself is the same as blasphemy in my eyes.

Here he comes. He takes his time as he descends, seeing me is as much an addiction to his shadow than he realizes. I bid this hidden journal farewell, and if it is ever found long after the demise of my tyrant brother, it is thanks to the young Zeke that I have it in the first place. Truly a blessed child, may Allah protect him,

The man’s writing was interrupted by a heavy knock on the tall door of the dungeon. He hurried to take out the loose stone he hid his letters behind. It was made stronger than steel and it shined like obsidian, the only part of his enclosure that looked new and untouched. The mesmerizing movement of the lock’s mechanism caught his eye once more as he struggled to shove back the stone after the journal he tossed inside. The door swung open. The prisoner had come to classify each visit by his brother’s level of sobriety, on a scale of zero to ten. Now however, it was not his brother, whose dread would come spurling out regardless of his sobriety, but a friend.

“Tell me, Seer, of the hearts that lie intertwined. Of the man who fights himself believing it to be another, of the woman that loves him believing it to be a single soul whose eyes she peers through. Tell me of their troubles and their joys, their tears and their laughter. Only if you tell me will I be able to do what is necessary when the hour comes, and spare those I can.”

The heavy door shut behind this familiar face, now the inquirer. It wasn’t his first time asking this. Each full moon he’d come to the Seer, and each time he’d claim to be knowing in all but what he asks. Except now, there was a different air about him that rejuvenated his presence. He was no longer the deathly spirit that haunted his underground, he was a young man again with a story to tell. The Seer stood and grasped his chest, almost tripping as he looked out wide-eyed to the man asking. He hobbled to the inquirer with his stick until he was just a few inches away and put a burning hand on his chest.

“I know of a boy. I see him now as he struggles, and so he will for much of his life. He suffers a confusion that will last for days, a feverish state that will strike him to the depths of his eternal soul. He will see ghosts spun up from the roots of his homeland, relics of a past he deemed forgotten. They beg for him to join them; they wrap around his arms like chains to pull him to the muddy earth. He falls with his head striking the ground, amid debris soaked with the acidic fires of a hell he has shaped to the last coal. Ashes fall on him that despite their heat, remain colder than the rage of a berserker that engulfs him from the heart, and branches outwards like a tree spreading its roots. Still, he will stand back up, tread forth even further than the thousands of leagues that have already separated him from his home. His demon sinks its claws further into his flesh urging him to continue no matter the cost. His screams are a volcanic force, born from the innocence that was stomped on and ripped apart limb from limb! A bayonet sticks out from his back, bullet holes riddle his body from top to bottom. The rounds of a Gatling gun are like fireflies to him, the smell of burning bodies swirl into the air and fill his heaving nostrils. But even as he strides and fights, the blood of a thousand enemies coating every exposed inch of his skin; he remembers the words of his dearest friend, lost through both time and distance as he marches alone.”

The man inquiring grabbed the Seer’s hand. He brought the hand to his lips and smiled, for after many years he was finally given a coherent answer. Though filled with riddles and mysteries, it was the best he’d gotten yet.

“And when will he reach us?”

“When the daughter of mystery emerges from the abyss discovered, and when the lost son finds his way home once more.”

The man sighed. The old bastard was too deep in his riddles again.

“And this first boy, the one in battle, will he have allies?”

“Friends and foes, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters all come and go for him. Of those that remain, each will know pain as great as he.”

“And what is his goal?”

“To find your father.”

The man moved with a fervent anger he kept under a tight lid, enthralled with cryptic desires he had no one else to express them with. His eyes were bulging as he grabbed the Seers bony shoulders and pulled him close.

“He wants to kill my father, doesn’t he?”

“Worse, he wants to take from him what he holds dearest in this world.”

The inquirer giggled, causing the Seer to drop his head. “I’m sorry uncle Hal, that was just too good.”

“You’re a class act Zeke, even better than last time. What’s your father up to?”

“Brooding, drinking, brooding some more. Mother is busy tormenting the nobles, as usual.”

“And your brothers?”

“None are here on the island if that’s what you’re asking. I have a question, uncle.”

“Ask, dear nephew.”

“What if this doesn’t work? What if Father finds out, perhaps like you have?”

Hal looked around his cell, the chains he was bound by, and the orange cat that lay on the chair near him. “Because I have faith, Zeke. Your father will meet my children. God has not granted me vision of the unseen as he has come to believe; but I know it in my heart, as I know that among the ninety-nine names of my Lord, The Just is one of them!”

CHAPTER 1 - SNOWBALLS AND TEA

On a freezing morning in December of 1873, a boy of six in the Syrian village of Deir Ezzor stepped into the snow. It was the first time he’d seen it. He marveled at the falling particles, each pure white landing onto his face and clothes. He stepped out and felt the biting dampness that reached up his knees. Then, as he heard that sweet, familiar voice behind him he began running away as fast as he could. “Omar, wait!” she yelled out, her voice excited yet soothing to all who heard it. His mother lifted her dress just an inch above her ankles to run after him, but he was already a few yards ahead laughing and looking back. He tried his best to get away, eventually came the firm, yet gentle hands that wrapped around him. Omar turned to see Mama smiling down at him gasping for air. Her ebony hair swept up in the frigid wind, crouching down to eye level with her boy. She tilted her head at how adorable and round he looked, all bundled up to near suffocation.

“You’re off to play with Kinan?”

“Yeah!” Omar nodded.

“And if any of those Empire soldiers come by again and try to talk to you, what do you say?”

He brought his finger to his chin, tilting his head down.

“Um, ‘my mother’s waiting for me, I have to go home?’ then I run.”

“Exactly. You run back and don’t speak to anyone else on the way. Even if they run after you, lead them to me and I’ll scare them off like I always do,” she said, reaching a finger out and tapping his nose. She hugged him, then landed one final kiss on his forehead before sending him off.

“Salam, be safe.”

Omar escaped her grip, his desire to play overcame him as he began to skip off again at greater speed. Once he reached the outer corner of his sand brick home, he felt the welcomed warmth of sunlight piercing through the clouds. In the distance, he heard the laughter of both children and adults getting louder. He was heading to the center of the village, near the unfinished bridge that would connect them to the east bank of the Euphrates River. He agreed with Kinan and Selma to meet there and play their new game there the night before, the surprise white coat from the sky added to that excitement.

He kept walking, the layer of snow at his feet became thinner. The village folk waved and greeted him as he hurried past. Surrounding merchants and children knew him through his mother when she strung him along for her errands, who was kind to just about everyone. She was known for brutal honesty, which soon earned her a distinct reputation not just in Deir Ezzor, but their surrounding villages as well. The boy waved and greeted them back, always with a bright and continuous laugh on his face.

He got to the village square and took a minute to look around, people passing and children making snowballs and throwing them at each other. He felt a wintry blast hit his shoulder; white powder scattered through the air in front of him. Not even a few seconds passed until he was tackled to the ground, with the muffled voice of a little girl heard through the snow that got into his hat.

“It’s real! This whole time I thought you were lying!” the black-haired girl yelled, a bright green scarf wrapped around her neck with its tail flying with the light winds. She stepped away and started to scoop more snow in her pale hands.

“Of course I wasn’t! Books don’t lie.”

“So are the dragons real too?”

“Maybe.”

Omar got up and tackled her back, tossing her to the ground with ease. She laughed at the harmless impact, and as soon as the boy got up she threw the next snowball in her hand, landing right on his face. He smiled at her, took his hat off to toss the snow that got in. As he did, he noticed her nose had turned bright red. Selma was one of two friends he played with every day. He heard his mother say often that friendships between boys and girls were inappropriate and his local adventures with the girl were only allowed due to their early age. Someday they’d have to cut it out. Selma was years younger than him, but with the solemn attitude and confidence of a girl much older. Her dark brown eyes beamed in the short glares of light that broke between the clouds as the morning went by.

Without much said after that, they kept chasing and playing around the square with the other children until Kinan came. After a while, the sun’s rays shone freely, and amidst their play the boy stopped to admire the clear skies.

* * *

On May 5th, 1895, a man in his late twenties turned his gaze from the clear summer skies that enraptured him for many minutes. He walked from the docks across to the Port of London, a car he recognized waiting for him. It was a black Rolls-Royce, on its hood was a gold-plated emblem conveying the status of its passenger. He nodded to the chauffeur who gave a sharp stare from afar, a soldier like him. Then leaning on the car was someone he gave a conflicted smile upon seeing.

“Back from the dead once more!” he said as he walked with his arms crossed, only opening his arms once Omar was close enough to embrace with the warmth of a long-awaited reunion. Omar let go of his bag and hugged him back, noticing his dear Major had lost some weight over the years he was gone.

“Hello Major, you look healthy.”

“Not for long if they keep this ring on me.”

“Is that why you had me come all the way from Jerusalem?” Omar said with a hand over Walter’s shoulder.

“It’s related. I’m not sick anymore, don’t worry. But much has happened since you left, we have a lot to discuss. I wouldn’t have written if it wasn’t my last choice.”

Omar’s look of unease worsened as he got in the car. On the ride to downtown London, he had a chance to get a better look at his commanding officer, and the many changes that transformed him as the years passed. Walter Braun was German by origin, Briton by upbringing. He was now forty-six by Omar’s estimate. His ebony black hair had grayed to a salt and pepper mix. His deep, accusing brown eyes had lost their edge and softened to a merciful demeanor and the clean-shaven porcelain skin on his face was losing its sharp angles. The scar that ran from his forehead across his left eye (which he saw perfectly with) and all the way down to his jawline seemed to settle quite well, compensating for the violent luster lost in his stare.

“Are we heading to La Grande Tour now?”

“No. There’s a café I want to pass by first.”

“They can serve you tea in the tower.”

“Their tea is shit. I think there’s something in the water.”

“You’re still on about that? Good Lord.”

Omar laughed with Walter as the car swerved its way around the London streets rarely touched by warm weather, both peasants and aristocrats took advantage of the clear air and blaring sun to do their errands out in the open. Many who would have driven walked, and those who rode horses enjoyed their work for the first time this season. Soon they’d be parked near one of the most lavish streets in Kensington, where Omar was accustomed to never seeing anyone darker than Walter. The pair walked along the side of the street, civilians making way for them as they came by, sometimes with a gasp or an outright look of shock. Omar glanced at the buildings, the vibrant colors of the flowers and walls that surrounded them in each street and balcony caught his eye. Mothers walked by dragging their troublesome children along, lovers passed by the shops, and the working people marched on to their next venture. Yet despite the wholesome joys of life making themselves apparent at every turn, Omar could only muster a rigid look of impatience.

“Have you heard from Arno?”

“He’s moved with his mother back to her hometown in Normandy, not too far from my family’s Chateau. He writes that he’s quite happy there, actually…” Walter smiled as he took a folded-up letter out of his breast pocket and showed Omar. He put his hand over the messy, incoherent handwriting that he pictured the boy writing in with great effort.

“I miss his father and uncle every day,” Omar said as his smile faded.

“As do I. We should visit them sometime.”

“We will.”

Omar felt a cold rush when he saw the new gear sported by fellow legion soldiers, who gave a warm greeting to Walter and him as they walked past. He could tell even from a yard away the changed geometry and exquisite metals that made them up. It was no surprise though, myriads of new technology and gadgets had been developed for the sake of Europa’s bottomless conquest, and he witnessed it all come into play firsthand in his youth. It started with Iceland in the 1870’s, when the first deposits of Ichor Metal were discovered. A metal stronger yet more malleable than anything they’d ever seen, with uses and applications that fueled every sector of technological innovation in Europa. Industry, medicine, and weapons, all were being revolutionized by Ichor metal. Unfortunately, they ran dry in less than a year, prompting the never-ending search for the earth’s greatest resource. Russia was not ignorant to the Ichor’s magic either, and thus the regular wars that were fought over just territory between them and Europa had intensified beyond prior belief.

“Here we are. I’ve come to this place for the past year.”

There was an empty table in the middle of the shop, despite the busy hour. Walter walked slow and deliberately, looking around on his way. He held a faint smile when a young lady with chestnut brown hair wearing an apron from the back kitchen came in. She smiled back, greeting him as he reached the table.

“Major Braun! Welcome back. Who is this you’ve brought along?” she asked, her eyes darting nervously towards Omar.

The woman got awkward when the Arab Captain caught her sight, recognizing him. It was something he had gotten used to ages ago.

“Anna; this is Omar, the man you’ve seen and heard so much about. The youngest Captain the Royal Legion has had in its history, knighted before he was even thirty.”

Omar heard and felt a violent ringing during the high praise. Shouting from the back of his mind, a curled-up memory spiraled out that made the compliments seem more like little stings to his spirit than a wave of joy to his ego. He found his seat across from Walter and didn’t seem to care much for the lady conversing with them, taking off his military cap. He looked up when he heard his name, finding the woman staring at him with a frazzled look.

Omar had black hair of mid-length and a thick beard that he shortened regularly. He took each step with a command that made the unprepared to his height and presence shudder. There was breadth to him where it was desired, and leanness where it was not. The Mediterranean tan of his childhood vanished, with the contrast of his hair giving him an aristocratic glow. He always held a natural smirk that showed his eagerness to wrestle with life’s many dangers, on a face that though mangled with a few scars kept its rugged handsomeness. He looked at her with eyes that all but shot out sparks of fire, with their one-of-a-kind color that was akin to amber jewels with hints of red in them.

Her lips parted, but she refrained from speaking. His look of indifference silenced her from saying more than she had to. The young woman smiled as she greeted him; her gaze stuck to him even as she turned away.

“Madame,” he nodded his head, rewarding her curiosity with his ever-present lack of interest, and turned away.

“It’s a pleasure to have a war hero come here, Captain. I’ll have someone come by in just a moment.”

“Thank you,” he said, grateful she didn’t harass him with questions like the others. He took out a box of cigars that he hadn’t yet finished on the boat. The lady scurried off to the kitchen, and a minute later a bit of commotion could be heard. Now the rest of the customers enjoying their meals and drinks had their attention caught by the line of employees gazing out the door to see him, chatting amongst themselves, and soon most of the cafe had noticed the famous foreigner in their midst. Omar didn’t react, shifting his hair over his ear as he took his watch out of his front pocket to check the time, tapping the table on occasion out of impatience as he smoked his cigar.

“I know you’re married, but a little flattery won’t kill you. The people love you here, remember? Especially the women,” Walter said as he sat back like he had all the time in the world.

“Order your tea so we can get this over with. Why did you summon me?”

“Let your guard down for just a moment. Relax, you’re home.”

“No, I was home. I’ll relax when you tell me why you dragged me from it.”

“I doubt you will, believe me.”

“So what is it then? Another brewing war with Russia, of the God-knows how many either of us started?”

“I wouldn’t call it a war. We have a plan so we don’t get a repeat of Scandinavia.”

The last sentence caught Omar’s attention and he perked up. Another cryptic hint as usual, or was it as simple as he could have put it? He was careful not to say anything compromising, they were in a public place after all. Another lady came by with a brass kettle and two cups. The young Captain sighed, knowing deep down he would have come no matter what Walter had written in his letter.

CONTINUE HERE