My Political Journey

A reflection on where I'm at since the past year.

For many online who are familiar with me, my main claim to any sort of social media “notoriety” is two things. The first is that of my debut novel, Blood of the Levant. It was met with what I knew would be limited acclaim at first due to it being my first-ever production as an author and being as niche as niche gets. It’s science fiction, but also historical, focusing on Islamic themes and characters — you get the idea. Though it didn’t make me much money or sell as much as any author would typically dream of, it would permeate very well in the small but dedicated space of “Muslim fiction authors” still in its infancy, pioneered by great and hardworking brothers and sisters (among them is my publisher, Shaherazade Shelves, set to release a second, far more polished version of Blood of the Levant, on the 29th of this month).

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.