Muslims is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between February 09, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Muslims, Jews, atheists, and every minority religion"; "Muslims set a train car full of Hindu pilgrims on fire"; "Mohammed asked Muslims not to eat pork". It most often appears alongside New York Times, Trump, Democrats.
- Article page
- Muslims
- Mention count
- 8
- Issue count
- 8
- First seen
- February 09, 2021
- Last seen
- January 16, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Klein calls this "the Democratic party more successfully resisting polarization", and thinks of this as related to structural differences between the two parties. He says that the Republican Party represents the modal American on various characteristics, eg Christian (the most common religion), white (the most common race), straight (the most common sexual orientation), etc, whereas the Democrats represent everyone else (eg Muslims, Jews, atheists, and every minority religion; blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and every minority race; etc). That means the Republicans are more ideologically uniform - Christians are genuinely similar to other Christians, but Jews are only superficially similar to Muslims by virtue of their non-Christianness. That means ideology can't really capture the Democratic Party in the same way it captures the Republican Party. One point kind of in support of this - ask Democrats their favorite news source, and you get a long tail of stuff (most popular is CNN at 15%, then NPR at 13%, and so on). But ask conservatives and it's dominated by FOX (47%). Does this lack of news-source diversity reflect a lack of ideological diversity? Could be.
According to Modi, when he was growing up (the 1950s) there was little racial division. Hindus and Muslims lived together and socialized together; Modi's own childhood best friend was a Muslim boy from a few blocks away. He attributes the worst prejudice and division in modern Indian society to the results of this Congress push to get everyone hating each other. Implausible? Kind of. But I remember reading Salman Rushdie, an Indian Muslim (though, uh, not a very good one), who also says there was almost no racial animus in his native Kashmir when he was growing up in the 1940s. And there's a historical pattern where there's decreased ethnic strife during colonial empires (since the colonizers are firmly in control, there's not much to be won in competitions between colonized groups), and then worsening strife after decolonization (different ethnic groups fight for control, or demagogues try to win elections by fanning inter-ethnic hatred). So I am not going to reject it out of hand when Modi says things were better back in the past - though I’m also can’t ignore everyone else’s position that worsening relations are due to Modi and people like him.
But it's not just Muslims. In one incident, he has to defuse anger over Congress' plan to give extra seats at colleges to Adivasis, a group translated into English as "forest-dwellers"; in another, Congress courts the Kshatriyas, "a warrior caste which felt its historical glories were insufficiently supported by its status in modern society". At least US identity politics have the common courtesy to sort everyone by skin color. The Indian version combines all the fun of racial sensitivity training with all the simplicity of one of those D&D expansions that have a bunch of species with names like "Aarakocra" or "Tabaxi" for the special snowflakes too cool to be elves or halflings. As Modi tells it, Congress tries to peel each of these groups off from the majority by promising them special rights and affirmative action, with disastrous results:
Modi describes spending his years of campaign consultancy trying to figure out a way around this dynamic. You could support more and more affirmative action, stoke more and more community tensions, and get those delicious minority votes while making the majority hate you - or you could roll back affirmative action, doom backward castes and Muslims to irrelevancy, get tarred as a racist, and ruin your electoral chances.
This might not be impossible. For example, Mohammed asked Muslims not to eat pork, and they still follow this command thousands of years later. The US Constitution made certain design decisions that still affect America today. Confucianism won the philosophical squabbles in China around the birth of Christ, and its ethos still influences modern China.
“Well,” said Anna-or-Elizabeth, “it depends on the religion. Most Christian sects are okay with organ donation, except Jehovah’s Witnesses. Muslims are a little more complicated; some of the old-fashioned ones believe the body belongs to God and you shouldn’t give parts of it away, but most scholars have come around. As always, the worst is the Jews.”
Adraste: You seek hard-and-fast rules, but these will always elude you. You can’t escape adding up the costs and benefits and having a specific object-level opinion. Banning Islam has few benefits and many costs. It violates religious freedom. It perpetuates racist stereotypes. You couldn’t do it if you tried, plus a billion people would declare jihad on you. And the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t commit terrorist acts anyway. Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to maintain. Rolling it back has many costs and few benefits. I say keep it banned.
Even though Arabs and Muslims are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country, especially after 9-11, they didn’t have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white. According to Hanania, the government’s dividing line for white vs. PoC is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about eg Uzbeks. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American and seems salty about this.
Let's spitball that a fair share of anti-Israel policy is a level of anti-Israelism where Harris loses half as many other marginal voters, as she gains in Muslim voters voting for her. (Maybe more sensible is "loses half as much in victory probability, as she gains from Muslims voting for her", which for small amounts of votes and the popular vote would be the same thing, but is not at all the same thing given the Electoral College.) Then if Harris offers less than this, Muslims could collectively decide to vote with a probability where Harris gains, eg, twice as much in voting win probability from Muslims, as Harris spent by alienating other voters with more anti-Israel policies than Trump has. Voting for Trump on the surface of things makes no sense, but maybe the Muslims want to demonstrate that they are in fact willing to vote and get out the vote. In this case, they could arrange for paired Harris and Trump votes (by region) to cancel each other out while still showing their strongest voting record.
Mentioned before: a group of Muslims in Michigan are backing Trump because they’re mad at the Biden/Harris administration for supporting Israel. They understand that Trump supports Israel even more. They just worry that if they always vote straight Democrat like every other minority group, the Democrats have no incentive to listen to them. They hope that if they elect Trump, even if he doesn’t listen to them, then the Democrats will work harder to woo them next time around.
On the other hand, it doesn’t seem great to actually elect someone who you hate and who will work as hard as he can to thwart your policy priorities. Imagine if every group tried this, and we ended up with gun owners and evangelicals voting Harris and Muslims and trans people voting Trump. It would be ridiculous. Is there some sort of middle ground?
The book is a novel (a real novel this time, with plot and everything) meant to dramatize the lessons of its predecessor. In the near future, the Muslims and Christians are on the verge of global war. Adams’ self-insert character, the Avatar, goes around hypnotizing and mind hacking everyone into cooperating with his hare-brained scheme for world peace.