by Richard Landes

There's a concept in Islamic tradition that divides the world in two: the 'realm of Islam,' where Muslims are meant to rule, and the 'realm of war' — everywhere else, territory that, in the most hardline reading, is legitimately open to conquest and violence until it's brought under Islamic rule.

Al-Qaeda took the hardest possible version of this: American civilians weren't off-limits on 9/11, they were the target — precisely because they were not civilians, but rather, in the 'realm of war,' they were harbis, destined for the sword.

Almost nobody in the US knew this framework existed before 9/11. What's more surprising is that twenty-five years later, most people still don't — it barely comes up in schools, the news, or even most academic discussion of the attacks. The official 9/11 museum's own explanation of why the attacks happened runs to a few sentences, with almost no sourcing.

That gap matters. If you don't understand the worldview that treats you as a legitimate target simply for exercising your conscience, you can't make sense of the pattern of who gets attacked, or why.

And it matters now, because in the early 1980s, at a time of much dynamic movement in the Muslim world — 1400 in their calendar, a time when the Umma expects a Mujaddid, a “renewer” — the Muslim Brotherhood hatched a plot for Muslim world dominion, a hundred-year war of invasion and subjection of Dar al-Harb.

Headquartered in tolerant Switzerland, their plan for the conquest of the West focused not on jihad, a ridiculous fantasy, but on Da’wa, on getting Western infidels to stand down while they invaded.

It was a long war, multigenerational. But by the Mujaddid of 1500, the entire world will be ready for the Mahdi and collective redemption. We’re at the halfway point in that war, 1448, and by any estimation, the Caliphators have done much better than they could have hoped for back in 1400.

Infidel Awareness Month intervenes precisely at the halfway point in this long war.

Charles Small