Quranic Savagery
Muhammad’s Ploy to Tame the Ummah
The Middle East is like a cockroach fossil.
The same species of cockroaches still exist today. By looking at their fossil, you can see how little has changed compared to a cockroach from a million years ago. And that the one that’s alive now is practically a copy of its ancient ancestor.
If you want to understand why Muhammad made Qisas (retributive justice) obligatory, and why the Quran says this law ensures the survival of society, just look at today’s Muslims.
Some of them are busy eating each other alive along the Lebanon–Syria border. One group crosses over, kidnaps two young men from a village, drags them into the desert, and kills them. The next day, the other side retaliates by randomly killing four young men from another village. And this cycle just keeps going.
Qisas was intended to say: “Kill once, but end it there.” Not the most civilized way to deal with conflict, but enough controlled savagery to prevent classic Middle Eastern bloodbaths.
But Muslims aren’t even willing to settle for that primitive Qisas solution from 1,400 years ago. It’s not just that they reject modern solutions and want to implement archaic Sharia laws in the modern world. They can’t even commit to their own ancient rules – Sohrab Asemaanparast and Yusof Ruyanfar
Russian Propaganda, Syrian Facade, and the Disease of “Middle East Studies”
When it comes to understanding countries and their political and cultural systems, it’s much harder to offer a clearer or even simply a fresh insight to someone who has studied that country academically than to someone who knows nothing at all.
It was the “Russia experts” who said Putin would never be stupid enough to launch a full-scale war against Ukraine and burn out his entire army for it.
And yet, we saw he was far more idiotic than anyone imagined and should have been locked up in a psychiatric ward long ago (preferably outside of Russia where they might’ve actually been able to treat him humanely, far different from the way psychiatric patients are treated in Russia).
Now it’s the “Middle East experts” churning out the same hopeful nonsense about Syria.
If I explain to a random person in the West, someone who knows nothing about the Middle East, that this region has no real hope of improvement, they would accept it more easily compared to the academic creatures in academia. Because the uninformed person, if they have no ideological bias, will look at raw, real-world evidence.
For example, I could show them videos of Sunni forces making captured Alawites, (whose involvement in the previous regime are unknown) lie down on the ground and bark like dogs. The random person with no background knowledge about Syria would immediately grasp what kind of society we are dealing with.
The Middle East academic creature, however, would throw up a brain-rotting word salad to claim that atrocities such as making prisoners bark like dogs are irrelevant compared to the “larger context”:
“The emergent modalities of retaliatory performative violence, inclusive of enforced canine vocalization practices, must be interpreted not as indicators of localized ideological deficiencies but rather as symptomatic enactments of historically sedimented colonial trauma, wherein the provisional leadership, whose prior embeddedness in transnational jihadist networks like ISIS should be understood as a survivalist adaptation to neocolonial dislocation, is navigating a transitional political topology fundamentally destabilized by Western hegemonic interventions and epistemic marginalization.”
But for the average person, this simple real-world example is enough to conclude that you can’t have any faith in these people.
I could tell the average person that the media outlet controlled by Tahrir al-Sham didn’t blur out the new leader’s neck tie, but they did blur out the hair of Germany’s foreign minister.
In theory, wearing a Christian-Western symbol should be a far greater offense to Muslims than a non-Muslim woman not covering her hair, something Islam itself permits. But that’s not how reality works.
For an unbiased person, with no claims of expertise, this proves that hijab among Muslims today isn’t a religious issue at all. It shows that hijab is a political project and a war against women. And it must not be normalized under the excuse of “respecting culture.”
But German government officials or American Middle East Studies experts, despite having read countless books about the Middle East and Islam, refuse to accept this basic reality.
This is just one of those cases where the more “educated” a group is, the more damage they cause to the actual people they claim to care for – Afshin Azad and Yusof Ruyanfar
O Mad Easterner!
Some of us Iranians are fundamentally different from political analysts and news junkies.
It might seem like we’re pessimists, but we’re not. The way we understand the world leads us to conclusions that look pessimistic.
We never had a fraction of the classified intelligence the Israeli security services had.
Yet we always knew Hamas was planning a major spectacle, and that one day they would unleash it. We weren’t just whispering about it in cafés or murmuring among friends.
We were shouting it everywhere. God knows we even left comments under Hebrew-language newspapers warning about it. But people assumed we were paranoid. That we had an irrational phobia.
Our problem with the Right and the Left isn’t just that we disagree with their beliefs.
It’s that both sides see us as aliens, because they live in a different reality altogether.
When Douglas Murray goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast to defend basic common sense against two comedians who often have no idea what they’re talking about, it still isn’t enough for the Left.
Because Murray defends Israel’s right to self-defense, he fails their binary purity test:
“Are you a supporter of genocide? If yes, you’re garbage!”
Never mind that Murray was the first one to challenge Rogan’s tribal talking points to his face, which not even Bernie Sanders did that.
My point isn’t that we should ask the Left “Why do you impose so many purity tests?” Go ahead. Impose as many binary tests as you want. But the real problem is that you, the Left, don’t know how to assess people accurately.
Douglas Murray, with all his immigration fears and criticisms of Islam, is still closer to you and more your ally than the people you’ve mistakenly embraced, like the ones dressing up their thousand-year-old barbarism as “humanity” and manipulating your pity to sell it to you. Your real friend isn’t the guy who cries over dead Hamas fighters.
But it’s not like we don’t have the same problem with the Right.
The Right’s obsession with “ending endless wars” has led them to believe that Trump’s unique personality could somehow perform a miracle in the Middle East, enabling him to do something no one else could achieve.
And this fantasy is based on the exact same ignorance.
They’ve invented their own litmus test:
“Are you in favor of continuing the war? If yes, you’re garbage!”
But they don’t understand that the Middle East doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s purity or litmus tests.
The Middle East doesn’t ask anyone’s permission to keep drowning in more battle.
The Middle East cannot stay at peace, because it cannot survive without jihad.
As a Westerner, you will never be able to just push a button and “turn jihad off.”
You can only decide which side of the jihad you want to be on.
The issue is not about Trump’s abilities or anyone else’s.
The real issue is that the timeline of the Middle East stretches far beyond the lifespan of the average person.
For the Middle East, the Bush era was just a blink of an eye.
Meanwhile, it aged your entire political system.
And that’s the core difference between us and them.
The gap in understanding is so deep, so different from what they’re used to hearing about us, that to them it might sound like I’m writing poetry or some fantasy novel. When all I’m doing, all we’re doing, is stating reality – Afshin Azad