In 1999, I was given a cassette tape containing an audio documentary by a friend in uniform. It was called The Shadows and was a Muslim version of every anti-Masonic conspiracy theory known to us all. The purpose was to portray the West as the abode of all evil, being controlled by a shadowy cabal. The West was described as the precursor to Dajjal, the Muslim variant of the Antichrist. It did not affect me too much. However, curiosity about an incidentally adjacent secular conspiracy took me down another rabbit hole, where I would be lost for many months.

I bring this up because it happened only a few years before 9/11. It was a surreal era. Muslims everywhere were waking up to the changed realities of the post-Cold War world, and they needed an answer. Almost overnight, they had metamorp

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