Rassam

the moat is people rooting for you

Biggest problem with the Muslims of today is that they’re fascinatingly not able to accept that the usul al fiqh they drew rulings from do not apply to this world anymore Critics calling Muslim nation states “slaves” to America rest on a fiqh built for a world that no longer exists, and that’s the actual problem Classical jihad doctrine assumed one caliphal authority commanding a single Muslim army, and a world split into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, with treaties as the mechanism for peace between the two. That architecture hasn’t existed for over a century. We live under a Westphalian system of fifty-some sovereign Muslim-majority states, many with conflicting policies, some actively fighting each other. Taking a ruling built for a unified caliphate and applying it directly onto a nation-state’s foreign policy is discarding the precondition the ruling depended on and keeping only the conclusion. Test it practically. Say Saudi Arabia invaded Israel tomorrow to “help Palestine.” Where would unified Muslim solidarity actually materialize to support that? It wouldn’t. It would trigger the same international system these critics otherwise accept, the UN Charter, international law, likely condemnation from other Muslim states worried about the precedent and an international coalition. There’s no Dar al-Islam left to absorb that action as one body, because the legal subject the old fiqh assumed is gone. The Quran itself draws this exact distinction. Allah tells the Prophet ﷺ that believers who didn’t emigrate to Medina, who stayed behind in Mecca under active persecution, were owed no obligation of support, unless they specifically asked for help against religious persecution, and even then, not if it violated an existing treaty. But those who believed and did not emigrate, for you there is no wilāyah (alliance or obligation of support) toward them until they emigrate. And if they seek your help in religion, then you must help them, except against a people between whom and you is a treaty. And Allah is Seeing of what you do.” 8:72 Shared faith alone, without a shared polity and bond of authority, never generated automatic military obligation, even for the founding generation of the ummah itself. So when modern commentators invoke a transnational Muslim unity that collapsed with the caliphate, then condemn nation-states for failing to act on it, they’re being delusional and ignoring its own premises. A state acting on its citizens’ interests first isn’t betraying Islam, it’s just acting like every state on earth, Muslim or not.

Three years ago, I started Alif. Today, I'm sharing the story behind why we're building it. The World is Changing Hands. alif.build/manifesto

this is so bleak

confession: i've yet to have that moment of feeling that frontier LLMs are geniuses, or super-human at ~anything broadly coherent that i deeply prize