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 metamorphosed from willing allies to potential threats. When there is a thirst for an explanation, people who want to play mind games find an opportunity. Notice that these mind games were already knocking at the doors of our state institutions.

The emergent unipolar world witnessed two distinct efforts related to Muslims in the world. The first was to close and harden conservative Muslim minds. They were being convinced to adhere to the most conservative version of their identity. Separately, in the West, they were being framed as the Green Peril or the next great challenge to the democratic world. The game behind this priming was given away by Samuel Huntington. But his hypothesis was viewed in a positive light in this newly divided world. Suddenly, radical voices in the Muslim world were gaining traction, and Islamophobes were........

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