“So be patient, for the promise of Allah certainly is true. And do not be disturbed by those who have no sure faith.” — Qur’an 30:60

There’s a very specific cycle that’s existed since October 7 in particular, though it had already been prevalent for quite some time before that. A prominent Western Shaykh gets clipped engaging in historical revisionism in service of a very specific agenda; his sycophants immediately show up to insist that he’s being taken out of context; the full context is then provided (at which point it becomes clear that the broader point he was making is actually worse than what the original clip suggested); and once the “out of context” defense is no longer available, those same sycophants simply pivot to defending the agenda-driven historical revisionism itself. None of this is new, but it never stops being disheartening when it comes from people who played a role in your own growth and development. So all praise is due to Allah, who makes truth evident and falsehood evident, who raises whom He wills and exposes whom He wills, who grants guidance to whom He wills, and who allows those who choose misguidance to go further astray.

The Westerner, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, often sees life as a movie and themselves as its main character, which partly explains all these little performances they put on as a way of building out their character profile. Back during Trump’s first term, every other political development was filtered through Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Handmaid’s Tale, or whatever piece of fiction had first taught people how to recognize evil. And now you see the same instinct with sitcoms like Parks and Rec, where real political figures get absorbed into imagined storylines and comfort-character dynamics. And to be clear, the problem isn’t that people make references (everybody does that); the problem is when the reference becomes the framework, because if politics only makes sense to you after you’ve translated it into your favorite book or TV show, you’re probably gonna miss something essential. Like, it’s both astounding and sad that you need to explain to grown-ups (I’m talking to you, DSA folks) that life isn’t written by a novelist, history doesn’t move like a season finale, politicians aren’t characters whose moral meaning is revealed through clever dialogue and satisfying arcs, and evil doesn’t always announce itself in the vocabulary of the villain you learned to hate first. At some point, politics becomes impossible to understand because it’s been flattened into fandom, so people stop asking what’s actually happening, who has power, who’s being harmed, what interests are being served, and what language is being manipulated, and instead, they ask which fictional world this reminds them of. Then they’ll try to gaslight you into thinking this is astute analysis when it’s often just emotional pattern-matching. So what you essentially end up with is a massive cosplay convention with a voter registration card.

Hasan and Zohran are probably going to wear this like a badge of honor, but this kind of thing means absolutely nothing to me. Being denounced by Netanyahu is not, by itself, evidence of anything other than the fact that Netanyahu has a problem with you (remember, he attacked Joe freaking Biden, of all people, too at one point). Treating his attacks as some kind of political purity test only works on people who mistake having the right enemies for actually having the right politics.

When people say that the road to Donald Trump ran through Barack Obama, this is what they mean

Every single time, without fail

And who could forget the great Muslim sanctities of Bosnia’s Stari Most and Afghanistan’s Jam Minaret, which apparently explain why Muslims from around the world went there to fight. Are y’all aware that there’s an entire history of transnational Muslim solidarity and mobilization that predates the post-9/11 world you were born into?

More and more every day, it’s becoming harder for me to look at what Kamala Harris is doing and not conclude that she’s seriously positioning herself for another run in 2028; and what makes it especially obvious to me is these increasingly blatant attempts to rewrite the story of what happened with Muslim and Arab-American voters in 2024. The Dem establishment watched one of the few minority voting blocs that very publicly drew a red line, threatened political consequences for crossing it, and then actually followed through when that red line was ignored. So now, slowly but surely, it appears to be working to make sure that doesn’t happen again in 2028. This is a very deliberate political effort to reshape the narrative of 2024 and gradually sedate the constituency that demonstrated it was actually willing to impose electoral consequences. And if Harris does run again in 2028, I feel like we’re gonna look back at moments like this one in Michigan and realize that the campaign started long before anyone officially called it a campaign.

The funniest review I saw of Ben Shapiro’s film was basically: “Israelis dressing up as Arabs and committing acts of terror in the name of Islam? Honestly, pretty on brand.”

تذكرت كلمة لأبي عبيدة قال فيها: "قبل أن نصنع السلاح، قمنا بصنع الرجال" كان الخليج العربي، قبل حملات التضييق التي أعقبت أحداث الحادي عشر من سبتمبر، مصنعًا للرجال. رجالٌ إذا بلغتهم صرخات امرأة بوسنية أو أفغانية أو شيشانية اعتدى عليها جنود الغزاة، تركوا ما بأيديهم ومضوا نحو الأخطار التي يفرّ منها أكثر الناس، مستعدين لأن ينظروا إلى الموت في عينيه دون أن يطرف لهم جفن أو يتراجعوا قيد أنملة. أما معظم السنوات الخمس والعشرين الماضية في السعودية، فقد سارت في الاتجاه المعاكس: إحكام القبضة على المساجد والخطاب الديني، وإسكات العلماء، وتفكيك البيئات والمؤسسات التي كانت تصنع رجالًا يرون أن عليهم واجبًا يتجاوز ذواتهم، كل ذلك باسم الأمن والاستقرار والحفاظ على الدولة. ثم جاء محمد بن سلمان، فسرّع هذا التحول بصورة غير مسبوقة. وتوالت حملات الاعتقال التي طالت علماء ودعاة وأكاديميين ومثقفين وناشطين وأصواتًا بارزة أخرى، في الوقت الذي جرى فيه تقليص نفوذ المؤسسة الدينية، وتسريع وتيرة الانفتاح الاجتماعي، وتعميق الارتباط بالولايات المتحدة، وفتح الباب أمام مشروع التطبيع مع إسرائيل. فما نفع السلاح الذي يُشترى من الولايات المتحدة إذا كانت المملكة لا تستطيع أن تحمي نفسها إلا بالاستنجاد بغيرها؟ لقد ولّت أيام سمير السويلم وعبد العزيز الغامدي. وهذه أيام مملكةٍ كانت يومًا تمشي بين الأمم مرفوعة الرأس، فإذا بها اليوم تنتقل من عاصمة إلى عاصمة، تلتمس من الآخرين أن ينقذوها من أخطار لم تعد قادرة على مواجهتها وحدها.

“US policymakers for all their faults do not deliberately try to kill Muslim civilians” It’s astounding to me that someone who has lived through the last three years, watching US policymakers repeatedly rush to provide weapons to Israel while it carried out a genocide in Gaza before the entire world’s eyes, would make this argument. At what point does “we don’t deliberately kill civilians” cease to be a meaningful defense when you knowingly continue providing the weapons being used to kill them? You don’t get to reduce moral responsibility to whether someone explicitly wrote “kill civilians” on the order form.

What’s interesting about this one is that there was probably an opportunity for the economic pain to come in waves, giving people at least some ability to absorb it and adjust gradually. Instead, every possible lever has been pulled to keep it at bay for as long as possible (dipping into reserves, pushing fake ceasefire news, etc.). So now, instead of dealing with several smaller waves over time, we’re standing in front of a creaking dam that has been holding back more and more pressure, and when it finally gives, we’re getting Interstellar-type waves that are going to wash over everything at once.

25 years later, and this is still one of the greatest interview answers ever given, especially considering that the United States, with all the tools and intelligence capabilities at its disposal, could never locate him, only for it to emerge later that he had spent years living just a few miles from one of their own bases, something the world only learned after his death.

People love to pretend like this current generation is uniquely stupid, as though we weren’t alive to watch enormous swaths of post-9/11 America nod along solemnly while grown adults explained that men hijacked planes and flew them into buildings because they were apparently driven into a murderous rage by the existence of free speech and the Bill of Rights

Those of us who kept warning about Haqiqatjou watching everyone else slowly arrive at the conclusion we reached nearly a decade ago

I think part of the reason the 25th anniversary of 9/11 feels strangely more prominent than previous anniversaries is that Israel and its supporters have invested heavily in reviving anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment in the post-October 7 environment, particularly as Israel has faced severe and unprecedented global backlash over its genocide in Gaza. The anniversary offers an obvious opportunity to drag the public back into a much more favorable and familiar framework: “Never forget what Arabs and Muslims did to us, and never forget why America needs Israel.” It reactivates the same fear, suspicion, and civilizational framing that dominated American political culture after September 11, while once again presenting Israel as the indispensable frontline ally against the same supposed threat. And what makes this especially striking is that 9/11 performed almost exactly the same political function for Israel the first time around. The Second Intifada had erupted the year before, and Israel’s image had been badly damaged by the images coming out of Palestine, most famously the killing of Muhammad Al-Durrah, who was shot dead by Israeli forces on camera while his father desperately tried to shield him. That footage became one of the defining images of the Intifada and circulated around the world at precisely the moment Israel was facing intense scrutiny over its treatment of Palestinians. So by September 2001, Israel badly needed a different framework through which Western audiences would understand the conflict. Then 9/11 happened, and almost overnight it got one. Palestinians could now be folded into the broader category of “Islamic terrorism,” Palestinian resistance could be rhetorically collapsed into Al-Qaeda, and Israel could recast itself from an occupying power being confronted with horrifying images of what it was doing to Palestinians into a frontline Western ally supposedly fighting the exact same enemy that had just attacked the United States. That is what makes the present moment feel so familiar. Twenty-five years later, Israel’s image has once again been devastated by images of Palestinian suffering circulating around the world, only this time on an incomparably larger scale. And once again, the political incentive is to move the public’s attention away from what Israel is doing to Palestinians and back toward what Arabs and Muslims supposedly represent as a threat to the West. In that sense, the renewed emphasis on 9/11 isn’t just about remembrance; it’s an attempt to recover the political and moral framework that proved so extraordinarily useful to Israel the first time around.

It almost feels as if he spent years trying to make himself unforgettable, saying whatever it took to provoke people and keep his name circulating, only to end up being remembered in one of the most humiliating ways imaginable. From the moment he died until now, there’s been a new meme of him practically every single day. He got the permanence he seemed to want, just not in the form anyone would’ve chosen.

“I have forgotten more about that operation than your 5 minute Wiki search told you”