AY
Assalamu Alaykum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh
This is funny because, without divulging too many details, I feel I had an accidental hand in starting a lot of SAIF.
EH
Yeah, you definitely did. I was thinking about it today in light of this interview, and one thing that struck me is that the articles I wrote for Qawwam before this current instantiation of SAIF became a thing already laid down the theory that would later embody us, so yeah, I think you’re correct on that. Thank you.
AY
How did we get to a point from where we were very obscure, and then within a matter of time, which feels to me like a few weeks –– due to me distancing myself from X more due to the destruction of the website by the Supreme Nerd Elon Musk –– I open the app and see random Muslim accounts, people who don’t really produce anything, yet seem to know what SAIF is?
And as a result, there are also these oldtroons and boomer coalers who freak out about us thinking we’re the real-life version of the “we’re going to f***ing kill you” meme.
EH
Perhaps they’re partly right there. But yeah, it has moved in very nonlinear ways, through various coincidental circumstances, which you can give whatever meaning to that you want. It has certainly grown since we thought of forming a collective.
AY
How would you explain SAIF to a typical young, sensitive Muslim guy who feels completely disheartened by what I like to call the McDawah, or Dawah Inc. that seems to produce nothing other than the same cycle of “look at us, we’re debating this cringe atheist, then we’re going to TEAR down and EXPOSE this feminist, then a few weeks after that a member of the McDawah gets exposed for doing the terrible things they were raving about in their talks. Young, intelligent Muslim guys see this and hate it. They come to see that the online world is integrating more into their real-world experiences, and think, okay — the Muslims online aren’t producing anything of real worth. It’s all just reactionary, culturally late, or cringeworthy. So, what’s the point? Why should I keep following along with this? Lots of them have the potential to be very industrious in real, culturally powerful endeavors led by Muslims if they were given the means. What would SAIF mean to that kind of guy?
EH
Answering this is more difficult than it seems; there are so many layers to this. I think the best way to answer is in two steps, where I first talk a bit about what the project is in general and what it tries to do, and then how that can relate to these sensitive young men. If I were to state the goal of SAIF as a broader project in the simplest way, it is an attempt to go against modernity’s dehumanizing tendencies without falling back into reactionary positions. That comes from this massive influence on us, which is Landian Accelerationism and this accelerationist diagnosis of modernity.
Now obviously, that’s already weird, because there’s no mention of Islam in that broadest goal, right? The reason Islam is not mentioned is that our main goal is not just the creation of a futurological Islam for its own sake. We are Muslims, obviously, and the reason why we point towards Islam is because we believe that Islam holds the key to solving the problem of modernity, that dehumanizing problem within it, and also holds the answer to rehumanizing modernity. But it is that question of rehumanization itself which is what SAIF is mainly looking at, seeing Islam as the way to get there.
Simultaneously, our analysis has always been that, while Islam has this potential, the Muslim community has just been completely failing to tap into and explore this potential, mainly because it fails to understand and deal with the contemporary world as it is. Among many other things, like you’ve mentioned, this whole Dawah scene — it’s extremely self-absorbed, it’s narcissistic, it’s stupid…it has no bearing upon the actual world, whether they’re backwards looking traditionalists or Salafis that want to wage war, it’s all completely out of touch with contemporary society.
AY
They’re so bad at what they do, they can’t even ‘destroy’ right.
EH
Yeah, exactly. Also, it is extremely insular and reactive, right? Because it only focuses on these nonsensical, non-important discussions between Muslims and Christians or between Shi’is and Sunnis, and all this type of stuff, which, besides the fact that these are almost always done in the most stupid of ways, it’s like, come on, this has no bearing upon reality. This has no bearing on the actual problems that we face nowadays. So my answer to these young sensitive types is that what we are attempting to do is not remain in this coal mine of stupid discussions and debates and all that type of stuff, that we want to create an actual future for Islam, which also for us means a future for humanity.
AY
I saw Pashadelics, the guy who started Kasurian Magazine, talk about this as well, I think it was yesterday that if you make your whole personality about just attacking the slop and memeing about coal this and coal that, you’re not creating anything at the end of the day. You’re not making anything of worth; you’re just being a reactionary whiner.
EH
Yeah, I think [pauses]…you know, people sometimes level that accusation towards us as well. I think it is correct to say that you shouldn’t merely diagnose, though I’d say that the problem with the Dawah scene is also that their diagnosis itself is wrong. It is exactly because their diagnosis is wrong that they focus on the wrong things. So even if they speak about modernity, they will do it in this debate-bro way where they’ll tell random atheists on the street that they have no justification for opposing incest or whatever. I think it is because they don’t have a deep understanding of our contemporary problems that they occupy themselves with such useless issues in the first place. But I do agree with that statement, we shouldn’t just diagnose stuff, we should use our diagnosis to change things, but I would add that one first needs to have a proper diagnosis. If one understands the contemporary process for what it is, it seems to me that it becomes almost impossible to be reactionary because any true understanding would have to also come with the understanding that there is no return to an earlier time.
AY
So related to that — I don’t know how soon I should get into this — the complaints and spats that you got into on X, I saw that you were most active in replying to a lot of this, like the jokes from Sheikh Hasan Spiker and others (who I’m friends with), though I think the worst of them [REDACTED], but yeah, each of them had their bits to say, some negative and some positive, though it was interesting that it was that side of the Muslim online sphere that was responding to us as opposed to any of the usual polemicists. I think that’s a good sign in and of itself, if it’s that level of Muslim intellectual that’s taking interest or dropping soft inquiries of that nature.
I apologize for the ramble, so I’ll just ask — where did the occultism accusation come from?
EH
I think it was [REDACTED] who said that nonsense.
AY
Yeah, I think I know why, too.
EH
From what I understand, he saw some tweets by the user Peron. I’m not sure what it is.
AY
Yeah, he associated Peron with us, though he’s not affiliated with us in any way.
EH
We like Peron, though, he’s great with all that stuff. He’s great.
AY
There’s one thing about him which I think makes him great, completely besides the tantric gooner texts that he posts, is his occasional historical posts where he shatters the normie delusions of historical Islam.
EH
Yeah, I like his posting. I like most of the gooner stuff as well, though [laughs].
AY
One of my favorites was when he posted something about how when the Ottomans found out about the Muslims in China, they sent an emissary, and they discovered that over the generations, whatever Sufi teachings they learned in Central Asia didn’t come down the generations effectively. So they eventually became a group that called themselves Muslims as a distinct group but all they did was not eat pork. That’s it.
EH
So yeah, anyway, I think that’s where that occult accusation comes from. But I think with [REDACTED], it’s just a sort of pathological faggotry, to be honest.
AY
I don’t want to talk about him at all, to be honest. What is the SAIF view of the occult? Obviously not in terms of “okay or not okay,” we know the answer there. But specifically, to what extent is it something to be taken seriously as having an effect in the world’s happenings, and if the enemies out there do use it to advance their means?
EH
Hmm, I have to be honest, I’m not sure whether I am the person to answer this, because within the group, we all have our specialties. So Abu Zenovia is the guy who knows a lot about this, but I can try to provide a simple answer.
So, I would say – as someone whose main thing is this socio-cultural accelerationism and who is not an expert on this occultism stuff – that we see it mainly as a historical fact that Muslims dabbled in the occult in various forms. But then also many of the practices, both historically and from what I understand from Abu Zenovia, that we call occult with the English word, aren’t necessarily the same as Sihr or something like that. So that’s from a historical angle, we just say, look, this has been a fact. So, in that sense,
:: auth transmission [AbuZ]: [SAIF’s position to the occult is one of skeptical openness. As in we’re not ones to undermine the great deal of importance it’s played in sociopolitical formation both within and without the Muslim world. But in places like North Africa, West Africa, Yemen, the Subcontinent, really anywhere Sufism is alive, it wouldn’t be odd to find a trained Faqih also giving his students specific litanies or talismans to induce pregnancy for instance. This stuff exists, it’s important to people’s lives, and the Islamic typologization of it is more complex than Sihr-Not Sihr. People kind of understand this unconsciously ofc: drinking Quran, washing with certain verses, etc. So beyond just lore-farming, SAIF isn’t really interested in occult practice as such, in fact we’re probably more interested in it as a genealogy of modernity than an actual lived phenomenon.]
And I don’t think we should just look away or disengage from that. And then from a more content-related perspective, I guess we think the occult is interesting, depending on which form, obviously. And we have an interest even in [that part of the] occult, which perhaps doesn’t fall under that historical form. But that’s mainly just from the perspective of intellectual interest. We don’t dabble in the occult, especially not to the degree of the accusation, not really at all, I would say. So yeah, that’s the way I understand it.
AY
Yeah, the way I understood it was when it came to Muslim “use” of occult knowledge, it wasn’t at all in the same vein as magic. I say this as somebody who 100% believes in the fact that it exists, that it’s in fact a recurrent theme that certain wicked humans and jinn collaborate and have long-term relationships to produce evil in the form of things that seem to us paranormal and “magical.” All that stuff exists. I also believe that it takes on a completely different form in the modern day. I think lots of jinn, if I may speak freely about this, basically found their way into the digital cyberspace and manipulate lots of people, even some very, very intelligent and conscientious people. It’s far more likely than the traditional “man stumbles into a cave and covers himself in feces for three days and a jinn appears to him.” I don’t think those physical encounters with the occult happen as much anymore. Just thinking about it logically, even a jinn would have a much easier time manipulating millions that way.
When it comes to the Muslim “counter” to the occult in older times, of course, I think the main strategy for them, especially in places like Morocco and Ottoman Turkey, was how do we use actual Islamic practices to counter it? Like for example, a lot of Ottoman sultans kept various litanies and Qur’an verses stitched on the inside of their clothing. Any learned person is free to argue and say that’s superstition and wrong from a practical standpoint. And if you want to take that route, you know what, that’s completely fine. But those Muslims of the past knew these forces existed, and that they had to shield themselves from them in some way. So yeah, I think the accusation, not just against SAIF, but, you know, against lots of historical Muslims, isn’t valid at all.
EH
Yeah, can I just chime in real quick, because I think you touched upon a crucial point, which is that there is, in some way, shape, or form, this demonic thing about cyberspace itself. Especially in its earlier forms, [cyberspace was] an intense catalyst for this occult formation. So, a lot of what we [SAIF] do is analyze these formations, which are largely hidden from the broader public, which necessitates that we talk about it and deal with/engage with it. And this is a thing that we constantly do, our view on almost everything is we shouldn’t just, say, “Oh, this is bad”, and then look away from it, we should engage with it, we should understand what is happening, instead of having this reactive attitude that’s far more common today. I think a lot of the anger towards SAIF is because Muslims are not used to doing this, they’re used to just saying “This is haram so we should stay away from that” or “only the scholars can touch upon that” and only if they look at it merely to denounce it. So, they cannot understand this attitude towards things that they might see as not good or haram or whatever; that you nonetheless engage with these things or phenomena in a relatively neutral and truly interested way to understand them better.
AY
Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. I know you also spoke with [REDACTED], who, from what I understand, his main problem is “you’re just a bunch of young guys who are reading some stuff and saying a lot online, but you’re not actually doing anything or building anything.” Do you want to sum up what the argument was for anyone who doesn’t know?
EH
Well, there seems to be this tendency from multiple of the people you spoke about where there is a certain attitude that annoys me. And this was also what kind of set me off with regards to the Spiker split. By the way, I do want to say real quick, I think Spiker is incredibly intelligent and obviously an expert in his field of Ibn Arabi and Wahdatul Wujud, and all that stuff. So I’m not putting him on the same level as [REDACTED], obviously. But there’s this tendency by these people to dictate what we should do. They call it giving advice, but it’s usually saying things such as: SAIF is doing this wrong, SAIF is doing that wrong. With Spiker, it was just that he made a jab towards SAIF, which is fine, you know, you can make it a friendly jab, and we don’t mind. But when I made a jab back as a joke it led to 10 tweets denouncing us and our attitude, making fun of futurology, and that we didn’t understand this, that and the other. That just made us say, “where is this coming from”? There seems to be an underlying attitude or an assumption that we should just sit there and accept being lectured and criticized, even if we don’t agree with what they’re saying.
Also, I do want to say, there has been this image created of SAIF that we are out for beef and stuff like that. But in general, we don’t try to start stuff. We try to be nice unless people are either saying stuff which we think has to be called out because of it being both stupid and influential, or when people negatively talk about the project and we read what they say, and we’re like, yeah, you just either didn’t read what we wrote, or you don’t understand it. But outside of that, we usually try to be relatively cordial. We’re fine with criticism. But there seems to be a pervasive attitude, not so much with Spiker but more so in general by some of the older Islamic figures, of this being a one way street and I’m just not interested in being lectured like I’m a kid by someone taking on the role of a nagging middle school teacher.
AY
Well, hopefully they end up changing their mind later, because I really like their stuff. And yeah, I don’t think any of what they produce is against what we’re doing. Actually, I think there’s a great synthesis of it.
EH
I agree.
AY
The main talk now about anything tech is AI. I remember when AI first started to go viral years ago. You know, we used to say, “Oh look, we finally got AI to recognize a picture of a dog as opposed to mistaking it for an elephant. And this was supposed to be groundbreaking news, but nobody at the time cared, of course, because most people don’t care about new technological utilities unless they can use it for one of their sexual impulses or make funny fart and genital jokes with it. Within a matter of a few years, though, we’re now seeing all companies developing it for their ends. To what extent will SAIF find utility in AI in the coming age? Where will it get to?
EH
Hmm… I don’t have a straightforward answer that amounts to “it’s definitely going to get to point X”. SAIF takes a Landian view of artificial intelligence, which means that this positive feedback loop between technology and capital accumulation is in a sense aimed at the creation of non-human intelligence, which Land maps upon the current large language models (LLMs). I’m not too convinced we’re there yet, but I think in general, whether we’re getting AGI and whether that would look like the current LLMs or not aside, I think it is just another step towards the dehumanization we just discussed. Whether that’s because it’s going to misalign and turn against humanity, or whether it’s just because it is this self-feeding thing that decouples itself from humanity and makes us obsolete, is not really the point. You probably know about dead internet theory, which I think is apt when we’re speaking about AI in its current form. AI is producing all this slop, which then gets onto the internet, and then AI scrapes the internet to create more (and worse) slop. So now you have all these Jeets who are using ChatGPT or whatever 24/7, that’s all coming onto the internet, and then AI is scraping that again. And obviously, this has massive problems, even if you don’t accept this Landian teleology. There are massive problems here for human epistemology. I think a great example is the whole @Grok thing on Twitter/X now.
AY
Everybody’s asking “@Grok is this true?” instead of using their heads to think for two seconds or Google it. Nobody who’s moderately online can form arguments or trains of thought anymore.
EH
And that’s only the surface problem. Everyone is getting dumber because we’re outsourcing our thought to this LLM, but the bigger problem here is that through this process of becoming dumber, we’re going to face huge epistemic problems, because we are not going to be able to discern what is true from what is false [at a very basic level.] Almost all of us get our news from the internet today, and if everything is AI-produced and AI gets its information from earlier AI-produced information, we’re just not going to be able to discern what is true and what is not true. We’re just all going to depend on this machine. I would say that, even if it’s not AGI or complete machinic runaway, it’s already a big step towards this inhuman thing where it’s not us guiding the machine, it’s the machine guiding us.
AY
A lot of people love to say that AI is becoming more and more human. Yes, it’s precisely becoming “human” in the sense that it’s coming ever closer to our current baseline of normie stupidity because of what you described, because human beings depend on pre-existing databases of human beings acting retarded organically already pre-AI. So much of what’s written before this insanity, even about history, science, etc., is already wrong, and it’s only ever been detectable to a small group of are occasionally able to bring the mainstream view closer to the truth, and that’s usually for some minor, trivial benefit. So AI isn’t scraping pre-established absolute truths, it’s scraping the current human approximation of truth that we’ve uploaded to the internet only over the past 50 years or so.
And also, it’s not like this pre-existing internet database of [some] human knowledge since the beginning of digitization exists in the brain of every human being. So even then, everyone is only contributing partial pieces of stuff they constantly misremember and get wrong. I guess the only conceivable response to all this from someone in tech would be, “Oh, we just need to keep filtering the dumb shit better to minimize the slop to near zero.” But at some point, you’re going to create a machine that is so, I guess, if it’s capable of expressing it, some digital formation of something that hates human beings so much that it’s going to be unable to help us anyway.
EH
Yeah, and that’s a good point because I want to say another layer to this is that if you take that AGI runaway conclusion seriously, then what it is doing is not necessarily becoming dumber, it is just making us dumber. So it is regurgitating the worst forms of slop. This comes from the fact that what most human-produced information is slop, right? It’s only a small portion of the elite that’s producing higher knowledge. It’s regurgitating this slop and making it indiscernible from truth to us in this longer process. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the machine is becoming dumber. It just means that it’s another step in the machine steering us towards dumbness. Whether that means that the machine itself is dumb, that remains to be seen. From this more extreme science fiction point of view [laughs], which I don’t think is necessarily true, it might very well be that the machine is getting smarter and, like you said, getting a terrible view of what humanity is like.
AY
Yeah, I fully agree with that. You mention Nick Land a lot, and I know a lot of his philosophy is crucial to the formation of SAIF — but what I want to ask is, how would you explain his work to somebody interested in the SAIF stuff, but is unsettled by the Landian philosophy? I haven’t read any of Nick Land’s books yet, but from what I understand skimming a lot of it as well as what you’ve written, and correct me if I’m wrong, the basic tenet is: there’s no point in stopping these modern political and cultural forces that have come up in the past 150 years; capitalism, technological revolution, the trash that comes from mass democracy and all this, and the only thing you can do is just accelerate it to its end, whether it produces our extinction or a completely new future, whichever is best. A lot of people see this and, again with their dumb kumbaya vision they have of Islam, go “but we’re not supposed to destroy things. We’re supposed to ‘cultivate.’”
Well, you can’t cultivate on spoiled land. You can’t cultivate in a trash online world formed by AI and the slopification of the internet. More and more of the landfill of humanity is filling up with stuff that you can’t even work with, you can’t breed a champion racehorse from a donkey. They don’t seem to understand that at a philosophical level, so they project that onto their view of what Islam is and all this.
But from what I get from SAIF, especially because I see you talk about Land’s work more than anybody else in SAIF, is that a lot of what he talks about does, in fact, fit within an Islamic paradigm. But a lot of people just don’t see it because of their modern moral-fag sensibilities. So, how close am I?
EH
Yeah, I think fairly close. The example you named is interesting — about how you can’t really start something on a pile of trash. I think that’s partly true. Land doesn’t see it that way, because Land sees techno-capital as a process of increasing intelligence, where he sees a future in which this constant increase in intelligence and efficiency, but also what we talked about before in this steering of humanity by machines instead of the other way around, will lead to the inevitable collapse of the human and being overcome by these machinic processes. He sees that as a good thing because the universe has to evolve further. He would ask, “Why should we care about humanity if humanity is just such a small part of this much larger story”? Now, while I should say that Land is not the only theorist we draw upon and some members are much more influenced by other thinkers, in general, we agree with large chunks of Land’s diagnosis of the modern process. His whole idea of this techno capital acceleration, that it is inhuman, etc. We agree with that. We just stop before we make the conclusion: “and that’s a good thing” [laughs].
But simultaneously, the overwhelming part of humanity who would say that this is not a good thing also do not want to accept the diagnosis itself or deal with its consequences and instead just say “we should do things differently” or “we should decouple from this process”. We would say that such an approach is wrong and we think this leads to several mistakes in both thought and action. It is the mistake many Muslims make, leading to these ideas of returning to pre-modernity, which is just a completely stupid and impossible step to take if you understand this process.
So, what SAIF is trying to do is take the Landian conclusion, look at the process of acceleration of modernity that he has described, and analyze how we can bring this process, I guess you could say, perhaps human control is not a good word, but how can we make this process human again? How can we make humanity reign over this process of innovation and efficiency and grow further as a species? We want that process of further development because we think that’s a very important part of being human, humanity has always grown further and found more complex ways of living. It is just that the process of increasing progressive growth of complexity has now become inhuman, so what we are trying to do is to find out how to make that process human again. So, we wouldn’t say it’s good, like Land does; we also wouldn’t say it’s bad, and we don’t want anything to do with it because we think the alternative, opposing growth, is both impossible and also just another form of inhumanness.
AY
That sounds much more appealing. This is just a question for fun. What would you say to all the people complaining about the fonts on the SAIF website?
EH
I would say they’re a bunch of [REDACTED]. Well, you know, what am I supposed to say? We think it’s fun. It is very specifically a homage to this older, now-defunct website by this online cult that was somewhat of an influence on us.
AY
Yeah, speaking of cults, have you seen that video, the one that went around yesterday with the guy wearing all black declaring himself the Mahdi?
EH
Yeah, they’re not Ahmadiyya [Qadianis], but they’re called Ahmadiyya.
AY
Yeah, the Ahmadi religion of peace and whatever.
EH
Yeah. I saw that video where he calls himself the second Mahdi or something like that.
AY
They’ve been a meme for a while, apparently.
EH
I just saw it yesterday. I remember about a year ago I came across them and then I just very briefly read apart the Wikipedia. To be honest, we love the idea of cults, but this guy’s just making YouTube slop.
AY
Obviously yeah. Seriously, though, I think the best cults in the modern day are ones without a leader.
EH
Yeah, 100%. I agree with that. Cults, by definition, have to operate in the shadows, and this is incredibly difficult in the modern day, where everything is so accessible and open. But simultaneously, in cyberspace, because it’s not linked to your personal identity, it offers all kinds of new opportunities for this, as long as you understand how to go about that. But what he’s doing is not how to go about that, I would say.
AY
You know, the history of cults and secret societies has always been something that’s appealed to me. Especially when I was younger, on an aesthetic level, but now I’m seeing more and more that even with a lot of historical examples, I know it was secret societies or very elite societies, I should say, that are the only ones that move things in times of great stagnation. For example, the Sufi tariqas did so in the aftermath of Mongol devastation when there wasn’t much room for physical or military mobility under Mongol hegemony. But the tariqas had the eye to see what was needed. Today though, I don’t think it’s something exclusive to the hardcore Sufis anymore. It’s weird. I don’t even think any real Sufi tariqas exist nowadays, not in the classical sense at least. I think this is another thing, actually, that reminded me of something that I guess we could touch on, the “Sufi to Salafi spectrum,” and I guess the SAIF view is that, as long as you’re SAIF, we don’t care where you land on it.
EH
Yeah, I guess that’s partly true. I would say that to be SAIF is to also be very atypical in these identities. But that’s definitely true. I guess this is coming from my article and what I wrote about Salafi Sufism. So where that idea was coming from was that both of these strands in their theoretical forms have a lot of potential, but that potential has not come to fruition and that instead, we see the worst forms of both – either the Sufi trad circles, who are all about attempting to remain stuck in or revive the pre modern days or the Salafi with their violence and lashing out or extremism in other ways. So what I attempted to do in this article is say, look, if we look at the basis of this, the theoretical basis, we think that there’s huge potential in both of them, both in this metaphysical property of Sufism and this more worldly property of destruction in Salafism. But what SAIF prescribes with regards to them is not necessarily an in-between position but rather a sublation of both. So it tries to take these theoretical insights and fuse them into something greater than the whole.
AY
Yeah, that makes sense. All right, great. All right, I think that pretty much is much of what I’d like to go over, unless you have anything else you want to add.
EH
Yeah, I’m not sure whether you have time, but I think one thing that we didn’t go over is what SAIF’s problem is with this traditionalism, whether in its Sufi form or various other political forms.
AY
If you could expand more on that, I’d love it, yeah.
EH
Yes, I think we’ve touched upon a bunch of topics that are adjacent to this. So basically, we see the entire reaction of the Muslim world as this huge reactionary panic. Obviously you have a huge Salafi current, which is its own problem, but then on the traditionalist side, the entire idea is to move away from the process and go insular and to just disengage from the process. I think it’s extremely obvious that for many reasons, this is both not possible and also not desirable. I think it’s not possible, because we’re at a point where this process of accelerationism is globally reigning. And so it seems to me that any attempt to move away from that, to disengage from that process, will inevitably be overcome by it; either by falling eternally behind or by being forced to catch up. At that point, all that you have achieved, then, is that you are now even more behind than you formerly were.
One example that I love to give of this, which is one on the individual level but I think it resonates regardless, is the example of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who was an arch Luddite. He wanted to move away from modern society, so he went to the woods, and he lived fine for a number of years, but then eventually they built a highway through the forest where he was living, and that is what finally drove him insane. You can try to disengage from the process, and you might even temporarily succeed, but in the end, you will just inevitably be overcome by it, because it’s just such a global phenomenon, and one of its key qualities is that it wants to continue growing. And this goes all the way from the individual to the collective to the global level.
Look at countries like North Korea, for example, that are trying to keep this process out, look at the state that they’re in; extreme totalitarianism, famines. And North Korea is at least industrializing, if you want to be pre-modern, you wouldn’t even do that.
There is a huge variety in flavor of trads and I’m not saying all of them just want to get rid of all technology but the entire tendency of disengaging with the process or to reinstate something old just seems completely disconnected from what is going on and not understanding that you have to work with this process, because it has been become so all consuming. You have to master it, but to master it, you have to deal with it openly, you have to become part of it to a certain degree.
And even if we would entertain this idea of a “return” …One of the other influences on SAIF has been the milady sphere and its broader genealogy, specifically the texts by Miya or Charlotte Fang.
In some of his older works, he proclaimed that the only way to stop the accelerationist process is by having a scenario of Armageddon where most of humanity gets wiped out, and whatever survives will return to the Stone Age. We think that observation, that the only way to stop the process is to have a doomsday scenario, is extremely apt. Just from that example alone, it should become very clear why, even if returning was somehow possible, the only possible route is just completely insane; who wants 98% of people to die, and have the remaining few live like monkeys in the Stone Age? Even when foregoing the insanity of such a standpoint, we believe that humanity ultimately is specifically exceptional because it has always managed to evolve, and that such a return is in itself anti-human, even when not taking into account the mass death.
Humanity has always managed to find new ways to create new tools to innovate, to build great civilizations, and to build grand things. The idea that we should just let all that go and return to this state of nature, almost, or even if it’s not a state of nature, the pre-modern days, to us, that’s not what humanity is about. It’s not about stasis. Humanity inherently is about building further, expanding, and building upwards. So, instead of rejecting the process, we say that the only acceptable future that is truly human necessitates a mastery of the process. So I think that’s an important thing to add at the end there.
AY
Yeah, definitely. You reminded me of a lot of Muslims, even lots of scholars, whose philosophy when it comes to this stuff, is “if sticking to our morals and principles sends us back to the stone age and we must live like cavemen again, so be it.” And they deem this to be something that’s divinely acceptable and admirable even. Yeah, for sure, there is nobility and virtue in, I’d say, turning back the clock on you or your group if it means retaining virtue and not being disgraced in some vast political or cultural conflict as opposed to mindlessly adapting to what’s coming. But at the level some of them are convinced by, then no, I don’t think that’s something God requires of you. He requires you to protect the faith and community as best as you can, to make it apparent on earth, but not to accept becoming monkeys compared to the rest of humanity.
I’m almost done reading Islam and the Destiny of Man by Gai Eaton — I mentioned this on my timeline as well, one of my favorite passages was, that if you look back to the history of Islam after all the righteous caliphs had passed on, the Muslims never really required that the succeeding caliphs be incredibly pious. What they required of him was to be as stringent about protecting the Muslim community as possible, even if they were terrible men in their private lives, because protecting the Muslims and protecting the world in which Islam could flourish was much more important than him being good at his personal worship. But today, Muslims don’t seem to understand any of that. They have a completely dumb mythologized version of virtually everything in the Muslim past.
EH
Yes, and there’s also this extremely common thing among Muslims where on the one hand we all know we have lost, but then we are also extremely proud, and feel that we’re better than everybody else, which just seems to create massive confusion. And so, we say things like “if they just came to fight us man to man instead of with drones, we would show them who’s boss” and this and that. It’s just such a stupid cope, and it’s such an inhuman idea as well. Not to propose evolutionary theories here, but if you look at this myth of these caveman half-monkeys, the cavemen who won out did so because they knew how to grab a big stick and beat the other guy over the head with it. That’s our strength, this innovative usage of tools, same with swords; the entire human enterprise has always been to innovate, find new tools, and create new complex structures through that.
AY
That desire to innovate to take humans beyond is also a characteristic of the Prophets. I can’t wait for a time when things start to shift to where Muslims actually innovate and develop their own identity once again, as opposed to just coping and complaining which marks the status quo now. That’s why SAIF is important. We can’t tolerate this impotent desire of wanting to be cavemen because you think that then you’ll finally have an advantage.
EH
Yes, 100%.
AY
Oh, yeah. Well, I guess that’s a good ending. Thank you so much.
EH
Yeah, thank you.
:: TRANSMISSION COMPLETE [salam]
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