The paradigm shift post-October 7th, the roots of AGC, the post-WW2 civilizational narrative, the myth of Muslim diaspora exceptionalism, the Hijra debate, the American election, and more: a conversation with the esteemed anonymous poster Ibn Maghreb:
Note: this interview was conducted on 02/28/2024.
AY: Assalamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullah. Hope you’re doing great brother. I became familiar with your posts quite some time ago as I finally found myself immersed in what for a while I’ve been calling the “Alt-Muslim” sphere, the alternative to the infamous and rightfully hated “Muslim Twitter” filled with midwit thought that doesn’t extend beyond millennial sexual frustration and gynocentric fart huffing. In truth, as I told another Qawwam brother the other day, there are probably a few hundred of us at best online right now, with the number only increasing to those who are spiritually aligned with us and specialize in some sort of niche but are largely ignorant of the depth of today’s inhuman horrors. I’m going to start by asking: many with myself included, even those of us who unbeknownst to the public are at very high levels of academia and political consultation, have been so struck with the ongoing crisis in Gaza since Oct. 7th that they feel that the beliefs they’ve held for decades are coming undone. Did you have a similar change in thinking in one aspect or another?
IM: Walaykum assalam — thanks for taking the time to chat, and the feeling is a common theme that something has gone deeply wrong with the direction of travel within the Western Muslim diasporas over the last twenty years or so.
Yes, if I’m completely honest, although I have long held a view about the irredeemably anti-Islamic and Lahabite nature of American Empire, I cannot say that the developments following October 7th have not been disturbing. It has in many respects shaken my conviction in Sh. Abdal Hakim Murad’s project about establishing a coalition of virtue, a sacred alliance so to speak amongst Abrahamic believers and secondly also about the existence of an ethical and principled Christian and Jewish peace constituency that is cognisant of the excesses of American Empire but also understands that fundamentally the Empire is quintessentially progressive and spiritually leftist. I’m open to changing my mind about it but the overwhelming evidence is that first of all, Christian and Jewish conscience, ethical cultivation and activity is all but exhausted and fatigued in the West — it is dead for all intents and purposes and whatever embers of it remain are deeply aligned for various reasons with the Zionist project. The camps that are anti-Zionist have their deep-seated problems — namely that they have capitulated to all the central dogmas and principles of progressivism, which ironically ends up propping up the larger project of American Empire — in many respects they are useful idiots.
So definitely, my faith in the Muradian Project — a sort of convivial Abrahamic awakening in the wastelands of the post-secular West with an optimistic disposition and attitude that the Muslim presence can potentially be a catalyst for a positive and culturally enriching reforging and reformation of Western identity, that he is such a wonderful advocate for has waned. Of course I still encourage people to listen to what the Shaykh has to say and to listen carefully — he is an ocean of knowledge and a true shining gem for our communities, and the work he has done individually and also socially in terms of establishing an institution of higher Muslim learning in the West will inshAllah endure for generations.
However, I think October 7th definitely reveals the logical exhaustion of the Muradian Project that again eloquently prioritised good faith engagement, considered dialogue and patient excavation of a new animated Abrahamic sensibility for Western populations. These are of course wonderful personal traits and in themselves offer a virtuous training for the hearts and minds of a believer but they are ultimately rendered futile in the face of belligerent and cunning enemies, if they are continuously channeled within the boundaries of “civic reason” and “democratic engagement”. The theatre within which the Muradian Project tries to anchor itself in, is fundamentally broken and not fit for purpose.
What comes after the Muradian Project, which I just use as a shorthand for principled and conscientious Muslim engagement is something that I think at this moment, Muslims all over American Empire and its vassal states in the UK and Europe are discussing amongst themselves, and I’m not sure what will come out of it.
AY: I’ve long been a believer in the Muradian project as well, but nearly all semblance of that “hopium” and optimism were extinguished from my mind after seeing the concerted effort to protect AGC (Advanced Gay Civilization, my more general term for American Empire that’s supplemented by it’s treacherous aides) at any cost. It seems that at the end of the day, it all comes down to Friend vs. Enemy distinction, where arguing becomes an intellectual exercise that in the end is pointless because you both know there are foundational beliefs you both hold that are irreconcilable through mere speech, and thus reveals the utterly impossible nature of modern politics at large where warfare is selectively employed and encouraged/discouraged but never for the right reasons.
I don’t know the full answer now, but in the end when I think about the argument made primarily by religiously insane neoconservatives about the “war between Islam and West,” I find myself agreeing somewhat, but not for the reasons they claim. When I read Homer, Xenephon, etc. I find a rich and brutal history that tells of the foundations of a civilization that, though would define the West in later centuries, is a completely different dimension from what defines it now. Many cope and try and frame the aesthetics-obsessed and sexually vibrant culture of ancient Greece as liberal and cosmopolitan, but to any rational reader it comes off much differently — do you think the modern hatred of Islam, which now defines “the East” to them, has roots in these foundational aspects of their civilization? Or is it in aberration?
IM: There has always been a state of competition between various civilizations or civilizational zones in the past which I think naturally will impact and shape the way the “Other” is perceived and I don’t necessarily begrudge that. I think historically speaking this competition opens up spaces particularly when we talk Islam that are both “Islamophobic” and “Islamophilic” — so on the one hand you will have someone like Schopnehaeur, that poor miserable soul who had a particular antipathy towards Islam but equally you will have a spiritual genius like Goethe who appreciates the inner dimensions of what Islamicate civilization and spiritual cultivation had to offer and becomes a participant in cultural exchange. So I think in some vague sense I do subscribe to Huntington’s basic thesis of civilizational competition. I agree with you that the modern West as we understand it today under the shadow of Advanced Gay Civilization is no heir to the many different civilizational configurations in history that occupied the West. This is a new enemy that has “arrived from the Future” in the sense Nick Land talks about, to wage war on behalf of the Machine God — so the current hatred of Islam is based in something entirely different and new — it is not from Rome, Greece or even necessarily based on Christian zeal — this hatred has a new genealogy etc.
AY: It seems like a genealogy of cope if you ask me, one reinforced heavily with the desire to “regroup” as a civilization after the great destruction of two world wars, as well the capture of those nearly destroyed institutions by those who feel the world must repay them for a set of war crimes committed against many other groups; none of whom came with the same complaints. Many don’t know about the millions of German Balts or Balkan peoples who were also exterminated in World War 2, yet you don’t hear those people still beating the drum of invoking Anglo-Saxon guilt to reap benefits. More concerning to me, personally, was the genocide of more than seven million Muslims from lost Ottoman lands during the Russo-Turkish war and loss of the Balkans and Greece. Strangely today, you don’t hear any of their descendants mention this at all because more often than not they bought into the new civil religion that their massacred forefathers rejected. Within the West it’s the opposite — those decrying the massacres they experienced are those who brought the new civil religion and insist on it as it leads to a destruction in the quality of life at a very slow pace for hundreds of millions.
One of those things leading to this destruction is, seemingly, mass immigration. This is a sensitive topic among Muslim diaspora, but I wanted to see your take on it. Do you think most Muslims here even know what they’re talking about when it comes to evaluating the effects their presence has in Western lands?
IM: There definitely is a search for some new civilizational narrative after the ashes of two world wars. And regardless of how you feel about it, for better or for worse, American Empire has come to fulfill that absolutely gaping void. The establishment of that empire certainly began in the early 20th century with progressivism anchoring the foundations of what today we would call the administrative state which is euphemistically called the “deep state” by those feel uncomfortable with such a stringently technocratic and centralised form of governance and that type of technocratic rule has attracted a variety of critiques from various eclectic strands.
But I suspect what we see today in the struggle to define a new civilizational narrative or vision is not a culture war in the West, not at all. There are no fundamental competing visions of the good battling it out in a gladiatorial spectacle in the public square. That is a complete mythology. What we are instead seeing is pure intra-elite factionalism and intra-elite warfare. There is incredible cross-political consensus on some of the most absolutely fundamental building blocks of American Empire, namely the deep state with its technocratic organizations, central banking, technological/cybernetic corporate control with Big Tech, hyper-financialization and so on.
So what you end up with is this absolute farce of a spectacle where there are people who genuinely think that the type of cultural aesthetic that Elon Musk along with the rest of the PayPal Mafia (like Peter Thiel) have adopted is somehow in deep philosophical conflict with the governance agenda of the WEF and the Bill Gates crowd when fundamentally they represent two sides of the same coin, just with a different aesthetic wrapper. These are all technocrats who worship the Machine God.
Honestly, in many respects, the current moment that we are in, I have never seen such consolidated political consensus on the fundamental priorities that are clearly at play in maintaining the longevity of American Empire. We are currently in a moment where there is even less dissent than the post-9/11 moment, if that was even possible. There is a strong cross party consensus around stamping out financial privacy, digital rights, encryption and many other critical areas such as central banking and biotech (of which transgenderism is just the first iteration of what is to come). A lot of these seemingly disparate topics are deeply connected and intertwined.
Which brings me to your second question. This is a very delicate matter and I don’t think there’s been a proper reckoning about what our presence represents here and how our presence in Western lands has evolved over the last few decades. And often I find because the people who are discussing this topic have a clear incentive to paint a rosy picture. I mean there are clear economic and social incentives now in terms of being an “activist” for particular religious and ethnic communities — AstroTurf activism is a lucrative business and peoples livelihoods depend on it.
And I want to discuss, for my part, mainly the state of the Muslim diaspora in the UK and to a certain extent this potentially could apply to continental Europe – I think where we could potentially look at as a microcosm for this discussion are the French riots that happened last year.
I think the French riots demonstrated that Muslims have not attained a certain social, cultural mastery in terms of the way Houellebecq fantasizes about in his book Submission. We are not Houellebecqian dissidents living amidst dystopia. We have actually become deeply integrated; and the story of utter decay and decline that you see in white working-class areas in post-industrial Britain is also the story of Muslim Britain or Muslim France. I think the timing of migration is not causal. The timing of migration comes at a time when there was a complete hollowing out of the civilizational narrative and culture within Europe after the devastating impact of the two World Wars and the ensuing metastatic spread of cultural liberalism — essentially there was, and even today there is nothing left to integrate into.
In effect, when the migrants came, they were confronted with an already fatigued, exhausted and quite frankly dying civilization that was on its last knees and now we’re really seeing a sort of death rattle. And Muslim migration ends up actually being consumed by and repeating the same forms of cultural decay and decline of their host societies in effect “integrating into the system”.
There is this myth of a particular kind when we look at British Muslims and you juxtapose them to American Muslims, there is this enduring and comfortable myth that we like to tell ourselves that British Muslims are somehow uniquely hyper resistant to liberalisation and the social effects of it, but quite frankly that is simply not the case.
Instead of what you see today is Muslim areas, particularly in Britain, deeply impoverished. And because of that material impoverishment, there is a culture of decay and inequity that in many ways mirrors the same cultural death occurring in white working-class areas which have become susceptible to brainwashing and propaganda by the billionaire class who are obfuscating the true roots of this incredibly dire set of circumstances. Muslim areas have significant challenges vis a vis crime — not random or sporadic but deeply systematic and organized forms of it such as the drug trade, gangsterism and an inability to create beautiful prosperous civic spaces — so Bradford is just as dire and hopeless as Hartlepool.
The other great myth that particularly Muslim millennials and zoomers in Britain tell themselves is that they don’t follow any particular culture, they “just follow Islam” and they buy into this Salafi delusion that you can create beauty in the absence of embodied cultural forms. However what has actually happened is because of the neglect of tackling the cultural question they just end up emulating the utter flatness of the monoculture of American Empire — midwit social activism, Instagram influencers, TikTok morons, algorithmic gaming to create media empires, hacking the attention economy. These are all very much a part and parcel of modern British Muslim cultural production.
So my whole view of Muslim migration is that we should stop looking at Muslim minorities as somehow exceptional or hyper-resistant or particularly virile or that they possess this irresistible vitalism that is impacting the cultural destiny of the West. Instead the vast majority of Muslims certainly in the UK have integrated into the hollowed out post-industrial and distressed urban monoculture of American Empire and done it rather well.
The truth is much more bleak — it is that Muslims are just like every other cultural and religious community bending the knee to the idol of the Machine god. And you can see this quite clearly in terms of the popular forms of political advocacy in the Muslim diaspora in the UK which have predominantly for the last 20 years or so, veer towards the far left, who are just useful idiots for the Deep State.
The roots of Muslim migration to Europe and the United Kingdom were based on a very sort of cold monetary logic. They were effectively patterns of economic migration, not necessarily in terms of expanding the outposts of the Islamicate in new lands. There was no conscious concerted civilizational effort to spread Islam’s borders in a way that would facilitate the emergence of a new cultural or theopolitical zone.
This isn’t necessarily a critique, it’s just a very blunt and descriptive way of looking at the whole phenomena of Muslim migration. And I can certainly say in the case of the United Kingdom, this is actually the crux of the story. And you can look at the reasons for why this economic migration was necessary. And I think that’s fair. And there are certainly things that you could look at in terms of the impact of colonial rule and the sorry state of post-colonial Muslim political experience but ultimately it does come down to a transactional and economic grounding for migration.
AY: You’re reminding me of the time I’d scandalized thousands of people in a tweet, especially delusional Muslims online, when I told them the French riots were indicative of all you just described. Muslims in France, UK, or even the mythological “melting pot” of America are not special, they’re just clients to a set number of people with malicious desires and plans more messed up than most working class Muslims have the capacity to imagine. Though I don’t agree with my friend @sharghzadeh on absolutely everything, what I love about him is his main skill in posting where he shatters the delusions of these folks who spout insane pipe dreams like “Sharia being the future” in the West.
The only difference in the modern world, sadly, between Muslims in Arab or Asian states and Western ones is demographics. Arab Muslims today are clients of treacherous heretics who are indebted to the same banks Western leaders are, and much of why I remain unconvinced of the Hijrah argument is that the benefits you gain from “living in Muslim lands” today are not those reaped by being in a Muslim-ruled state that provides full political and social sovereignty to Sunni Muslims, as that no longer exists, but are instead benefits of mere coincidence and demographics — of living in a place where 90% of the population is Muslim — the lot of them toiling in the husk of an Islamicate built up by their ancestors. I felt this as a boy — I spent the first couple of years in schooling in an American public school filled with anxiety and the nagging of flustered neurotic school mammies, but my parents would soon send me off to a private Islamic school where I was brought great relief and comfort from being in a place with a masjid, where the other students and even teachers were all Muslim, etc.
However, I was still being fed the same American education trash cocktail, and our school was still legally subjected to a certain curriculum. The same textbooks, same lies, same slightly Islamic imitations of Western school discipline. This is what this Hijrah argument sounds like to me, like wanting to flee to a system where you’re subject to nearly the same kind of repressions as a kafir nation but are merely comforted by demographic likeness. Do you view the Hijrah argument the same way, what other merits could it possibly hold?
IM: I think a big part to blame for this for holding up this delusion of Muslim exceptionalism is this insidious and sprawling behemoth that I refer to as Dawah Inc. where all of the trappings and aesthetics of sterile left-wing activism and Youtuber culture has made its way into Muslim cultural spaces. I echo your sentiments about Sharghzadeh that although he may shock a lot of people with his commentary, the underlying substance of what he is saying cannot really be challenged because it isn’t really an assertion, more of a running time description and commentary of the state of affairs on the ground. And there have been others as well in this space who have found something deeply wrong with the way Islamic discourse has conducted itself over the last 20 years or so with the likes of Mobeen Vaid and Dr William Barylo’s work which I don’t fully agree with but It think he touches on a lot of these dysfunctional themes with some excellent ethnographic and anthropological research. The fundamental problem that we currently have with the way the Muslim attention economy operates in the West is that unless you fervently uphold the myth of Muslim exceptionalism, you simply won’t have a media career. There is no audience for sober critique that you can monetize and “self merch” off which is a tad problematic for those who want to profit from their advocacy.
In terms of the Hijrah debate, I think it definitely has to now be revisited and re-looked at in the light of recent events. I don’t think Hijra is the panacea or the magic bullet for a lot of the social ills that Muslim communities currently have in the diaspora. I think if anything, Hijra may very well just physically locate these problems to different environments rather than fix anything more meaningful at a deeper level. However, the advocacy of the likes of Sheikh Hasan Spiker (@RealHasanSpiker) and Sheikh Anwar (@movetomuscat) needs to be looked at more seriously and closely, because it is far from a foregone conclusion that there can be something like an authentically “British Islam” or “European Islam” certainly in the sense that the likes of Tariq Ramadan envisioned or that wonderfully memory holed movement in the 2000s in the UK — The Radical Middle Way.
And you have to also couple this with the background that the last ten to twenty years have been quite disillusioning in terms of the prospects of any meaningful political and social reform in the heartlands of the Islamicate. Erdoganism in Turkey really hasn’t delivered a lot of the promises and the rhetoric that made everyone a very enthusiastic supporter for the “Turkey model” in the mid 2010s. Pakistan has now regressed to an unfathomably tragicomic police state with an incredibly corrupt and traitorous praetorian guard and the same description can apply to other such central heartlands such as Egypt, for example, and many parts of the Arab world.
I think if you consider Hijra, you really will be making it more from the standpoint of trying to protect some form of intergenerational Islamic virtue. I don’t think anywhere in the world within the Islamicate there is a civilizational state that can anchor Muslim aspiration. I think in that sort of regard, if you’re imagining you want to make a Hijra in terms of fulfilling an aspiration to revive in some corner of the Islamicate civilizational competence, you have to take a step back and aim for something a little bit more pragmatic and ultimately individualize on a personal level, which doesn’t sound glorious but it is reasonable and more grounded at least.
AY: I want to move on to the American election later this year. In this issue there’s a piece by myself where I argue for a complete abandonment of the democratic party for the purpose of pure political punishment and revenge against the “interfaith” phonies and those nominal Muslims who sought to establish a leftist-Muslim coalition for decades in the United States — all because, obviously, they betrayed us in such brazen and disgusting fashion after October 7th and went after the genuine figures amongst us with the kind of vicious hatred unseen since the early 2000s. I distinctly remember Jewish and Evangelical American “religious figures” and accounts online who built up a good reputation with American Muslim communities for their friendliness and cooperation for civil rights causes in the past absolutely lose their minds on their public social medias the second week of October, frothing at the mouth as they called for Israel to exterminate all of Gaza.
We’re conducting this interview just a few days after Biden lost the city of Dearborn by a 6% margin in the primaries — something unprecedented for an incumbent running in a Democrat stronghold county for decades. I don’t want to repeat my thesis here, but it’s basically down to this: the figurehead president in charge doesn’t solely determine American kowtowing for Israel (recall the Republican morons who think the Abraham Accords were the sole creation of Trump’s genius), so let’s use this election to at least cause a ruckus within the counties where our vote is consequential. Muslims in New York, for example, even if they were to entirely vote Trump would be rendered irrelevant by the fact they live in an entirely faggotized Democrat state that votes 20+ points that way every election. This isn’t the case for Midwest and Southern state Muslims. I know you have a unique view on this, so I wanted to ask you about it here. Knowing everything we just discussed, is this even worth doing for the long term?
IM: I think on this particular issue I have a distinct view of looking at Muslim electoral political activity within American Empire. I start off with a very basic premise that all of the vassal states within the American Empire are inherently hostile to any authentically anchored expression of Islamic political advocacy, which is rooted in Sharia and Revelation. And I don’t think that’s a particularly groundbreaking view to hold, I think that’s just common sense.
I also share the view that the policies of the American Empire are not coming from the superficial layer of electoral politics that we see, not just in the imperial heartland of Washington, but across all of the other important provinces such as the United Kingdom and France. Ultimately these policies are generated, from what Francis Fukuyama would call as the semi-permanent super structure of the liberal project which is the administrative state or what critics would euphemistically call the deep state.
It’s really important for Muslims to understand that policy genesis doesn’t occur at the site of electoral politics. It occurs at this much deeper base layer of the administrative state, which consists of a range of civil service organs, think tank institutions, technocratic organizations, military assets and the sprawling expansionary intelligence or alphabet agency apparatuses — all of these have a symbiotic relationship between private and public sector. In fact the public v private sector distinction is for all intents useless and no longer coherent — it’s all blurred. These policies from the administrative state are then transitioned into the public sphere through incredibly sophisticated forms of cognitive warfare, attention economy hacking, psychological operations and media warfare to manufacture democratic consent.
So you have to understand that the direction of the empire is dependent on the smooth running and effective evolution of the base layer of the empire, which is the administrative state. The only figures within the American Empire that even have an inkling or an interest in rolling back the administrative state and also dismantling the Empire peacefully so that the whole American project, the whole American experiment can go back to being what it was originally thought up to be, which was a constitutional framework of limited government are the likes of Ron Paul and Thomas Massey who have no real influence today and are isolated.
So this outlines my initial premise that both Democrats and Republicans, even the Trumpian version of it, are part of a larger uni-party that are all interested in sustaining the base layer of the American Empire, even though they might have very strong disagreements about the way this is done. Strong, intra elite factionalism and strong cultural disagreements within the ruling class should not be mistaken for dissidence and it shouldn’t be mistaken for reform. The likes of Balaji and Mearsheimer, even though these figures and many others like them today form the saner aspects of the American imperial commentariat, all of them are fundamentally interested in prolonging the longevity of the American empire, they are just going about it in a different way. And the same goes for the so-called “dissident sphere”, including the likes of BAP and so on. They are all fundamentally interested in prolonging the project of American Empire. Based on all of this, my reading is that currently the Democrats are practicing a form of empire which served them well during the late 20th century when American power was at its peak as a unipolar entity. However, the world is changing, and it’s changing fast. The Democrats have always been the most faithful servants of American empire, and by faithful I mean the most intelligent, the most driven, the most ambitious, and the most ruthless. However, we now live at a very important historical moment where all of the successes that the Democrats had in the past for sustaining American empire are now starting to culminate in arrogance, imperial fatigue, over-extension, hubris, and individuals like Trump recognized this. What Trump represents is a romanticised sentimental version of trying to rein in Democratic indulgences for the sake of protecting what is left of the Empire so that it can extend into the next century. This is the core of MAGA.
And historically speaking, this is nothing new. Imperial fatigue, empires overextending themselves, overstretching themselves, lapsing into hubris and arrogance, is very cliche.
The current Democrat part of the elite, what Balaji calls the blue tribe, and there is a red tribe as well (plus gray tribe), both of them represent competing priorities, different sides of the same elite, but the blue tribe, I believe, are accelerating and potentially providing the catalysts for American decline. Culture war alienation at home, military of extension abroad, monetary delusions, accelerating the fiat standard, overestimating the power projection of American military forces abroad, underestimating the internal public revulsion for open conflict domestically — the Blue Tribe is taking the Empire towards the abyss.
So my argument is why would you interrupt your enemy when they’re in the middle of making a mistake? And I want to back this up by providing a historical precedent that in the United Kingdom after the Iraq War, the community spent 10 years wasting resources, capital and time by trying to “punish” mainstream parties — it doesn’t work, it has no lasting influence.
The other thing that is key to the longevity of American Empire is the illusion that electoral politics is responsive to the public mood. A Biden victory would fundamentally shatter that illusion and set off a chain of internal domestic reactions that would be hugely unpredictable. But in that unpredictability lies a chance at destabilizing the engine room and Imperial core. Americans losing faith in the electoral process and losing faith in the vote and democracy is a very important prerequisite in terms of seeing the end of American power. We know these are delusions, but these are important cultural delusions that allow, for instance, the greatest expansion of surveillance in the history of man, which people voted in and democratically permitted to happen.
A Biden victory would create unprecedented levels of alienation, frustration and domestic unrest that would ultimately accelerate imperial fatigue and accelerate internal discord.
A Biden victory would cause unparalleled culture war accelerationism, citizens turning against each other as states within the union do. And fundamentally the democratic glue that binds the empire starts to be shaken and starts to unravel. Balaji has already mentioned that the country is already partitioning itself along the lines of blue tribe and red tribe, in terms of where people are choosing to live. It is my belief that a loss for the red tribe at this particular moment in time would accelerate that splintering, that partition process that Balaji has talked about.
There will never be a peaceful resolution or peaceful internal reform of American empire, that time has passed and it is delusional thinking that Americans would voluntarily pack up the empire and go back to being a Madisonian republic. That is simply not going to happen. To see the end of such tremendous power you will have to see tremendous fitna. There is no left or right within American Empire. All of the live political players within the Empire are progressives. The “Republicans” are simply progressives with a 10-year time-lapse. They will eventually come around to the same political platform and the same program because the Democrats actually, or well, the part of the elite that have Democrats’ sensibilities are the ones historically associated with innovating the cutting edge of expanding empire.
And what is fundamentally undeniable since the War on Terror and since 9/11 is that on both sides of the Atlantic actually, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, both parts of the Uniparty, the Labour/Democrats, the Republican/Conservatives, both of them pursued agendas that were absolutely deadly to any aspirations of Islamicate Sovereignty.
There has to be an understanding that at this moment in time, as I’ve said before and I’ll continue to say this, there is incredible united cross-political consensus on the fundamental building blocks of the primacy of American power which is predicated on the monetary and fiscal framework that Michael Hudson has described beautifully in Super Imperialism, the rapid expansion of surveillance architectures and technocratic governance. There isn’t really a space for Muslims amidst all this, so adopting the framework of picking the part of the elite that will accelerate imperial fatigue is the natural avenue. You can do this in multiple ways not just electorally through voting but that is a separate discussion altogether.
And some of the motivations behind Muslims wanting to “punish” certain electoral parties and actors comes out of a very misplaced sense of sentimentalism about the democratic process and a naivety that our votes will actually shift the bedrock of policy making. Despite everything that’s happened since the Gaza genocide, I still think there are a lot of Muslims who generally feel that the West in its current configuration is still “home” and can be “saved” and “reformed”. That’s wishful thinking and those sentiments need to be pushed aside.
AY: Well this is pretty blackpilling. In truth, I don’t really disagree with any of this, but my rationale is that for the time being Muslims in America especially aren’t prepared for the bloody violence that kind of accelerationism would incur, so at least a Trump victory (which is very likely, from what I’m seeing, unless massive cheating happens once again and your scenario is triggered regardless) would buy us some time. Parallel to that, I’m not super depressed by the idea of “going back” if I had to, as long as I have full access to espressos and an internet connection. I feel like in terms of “first world luxuries” those are modest requests. I said in jest to a friend the other day, that even if Muslims tried to flee en masse, many would find that they had no one that wanted them. Arab and Asian world tyrants have pretty much gotten the image at this point that Muslim Westerners are either aspiring Islamists who hate them or libtard revolutionaries. I’m assuming you also believe Muslims wouldn’t see the signs and just get steamrolled by what’s around them regardless?
IM: The ideal scenario, if you can even say that, is that Trump actually wins quite convincingly, and it’s obvious to any observer who is impartial, but the administrative state manufactures the vote to such a degree that Biden ends up winning. Another possible scenario that would be quite interesting is if somehow Trump is barred from running at some point during the process, and someone like Nikki Haley takes the helm of the Republicans, I think truthfully that would be absolutely crushing. A Nikki Haley presidency would be a true gift.
The question whether this would spark off bloody violence domestically is an unpredictable one. I don’t think one can confidently say that violence would occur on such a national scale so quickly. The caveat to what I outlined is that there is an incredible resilience to the American administrative state that cannot be underestimated. After all, we have been hearing about the decline of the US since at least the 90s and it has defied its critics by continuing to demonstrate and project strength.
The argument behind the accelerationist thesis is not geared towards violence per se as a goal, it’s geared towards unpredictability and uncertainty.
Coming to your question, as a general rule I think the Muslim normie mainstream today are even more clueless about what’s happening around them than compared to the post 9/11 period and prior to the War on Terror.
To give you an example we just had an important election in Rochdale, which is a hopelessly bleak town in the United Kingdom, but it has a significant Muslim population, about 30-40%. And the Muslims of that town instead of fielding an independent MP which is possible in a parliamentary electoral system that we have in the UK, decided in their infinite wisdom to go with the Workers’ Party of Britain as their “protest vote” with George Galloway who is a professional fraud. My timeline is full of deluded fools clapping like seals and patting themselves on the back for this noble achievement. That sums it all I think.
AY: That leaves a lot to meditate on. Final question, would you be upset with me if QAWWAM became a mega corp?
IM: Only if I don’t have a position on the board.
AY: Good to know. Assalamu Alaykum, be well my friend!
IM: Walaykum assalam.
Ibn Maghreb is an online writer interested in tech, the rise and fall of regimes, intellectual Islamic history and everything related. He posts @IbnMaghrebi on X, and you can find more of his writing @TheIqraFiles on Listed.