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[ by Charles Cameron — the first O of OODA, as one photographer applied it to Mubarak’s destiny ]
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Angel's Trumpet, Brugmansia arborea, image credit BH&G

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As you all know, I am fascinated by the intersection of the poetic (sacramental, irrational, magical, pre-scientific) and the prosaic (secular, rational, mundane, scientific) worldviews, so ably captured by John Donne with the four words “round earth’s imagin’d corners” in one of his Holy Sonnets:

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go…

One such intersection comes where prophecy meets prediction.

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I was accordingly interested when Erin Cunningham pointed us to these two remarkable tweets, the first from earlier today:

As Mubarak lands at the Maadi hospital I’ll just leave this 17 day old tweet here: https://t.co/WfaWoWSMuu

— David Degner (@degner) August 22, 2013

and the second, to which the first refers, from two weeks ago:

The Military Hospital in Maadi is reinforcing their perimeter fence with sheet metal. Expecting a controversial patient?

— David Degner (@degner) August 4, 2013

I believe that second tweet permits photographer David Degner the (secular) rank of Prophet — but it would take, in my view, an entity with the secular rank of Angel, Recording Angel to be precise, to give us an accurate and complete timeline of mental, communications and physical events here, from the first stirring of an idea in the mind of some Egyptian judge, general or staffer through multiple discussions, decisions and levels of implementation, to today’s outcome.

One might even say that the IC with its all source intel aspires to, but will never quite obtain, such an angelic function… while for those of us wholly reliant on open source intelligence, observation and intelligent extrapolation (in the case of Degner) and keeping one’s eye on appropriate parts of the twitterstream (for the rest of us) seems to be the way to go.

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How foolish of me, therefore, to be unaware of the tweets and works of Degner, whose photographs of Churches looted and burnt in Upper Egypt and current project on Liminal states in Egyptian Maharagan music are both of keen interest to me.

Egypt, from the prosaic to the poetic — our world is rich in both.

[ by Charles Cameron — not the world’s most illuminating game, but popular in some circles ]
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Add these two together, and you get “Zionists and Crusaders” — with a tragic chorus chanting, “told you so”..

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Sources:

Zach Novetsky

Thomas Hegghammer

[ by Charles Cameron — always glad to see good will on both sides of a widening chasm ]
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In these days when Egyptian churches have been repeatedly attacked and burned by Ikhwan supporters, it is good to remember that there is love as well as enmity at work… Putting that in Johannine terms (John 1.5, RSV): The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The captions that go along with these two images read, respectively:

above, Muslim men protecting a Catholic Church in Egypt during mass. Beautiful.

below, Christians pray inside one of the charred churches. Their papers read: “My extremist brother, I came to pray for you.”

[ by Charles Cameron — burial flags, shrouds on the unknown, and the black banner seen from a new angle ]
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I feel grief.

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We are, by now, all too well aware of the cost of war in lives. Sometimes those lives are of unknown souls, perhaps belligerents, perhaps partisans, perhaps peace-makers, perhaps simple souls caught in the cross-fire…

Caitlin Fit Gerald has a suitable memorial for those recently dead in Egypt, which I won’t reproduce here because I would make her already scaled-down images even smaller and less impressive if I did — click through to The Dead, When The Dying Is Done, then click again to see the images at better scale.

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Sometimes the dead are our foes.

What interests me particularly on this occasion is seeing the Sunni Islamist black banner in what is for me a new context — draped like the Shi’ite flag of Islamist Hezballah on the martyrs of their faith.

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It raises for me another question: Hezbollah and the Salafi jihadists alike term their dead “martyrs”. We honor ours no less, wrapping them in symbols of that greater cause for which they gave their lives — “country” — and call them “patriots” to distinguish their cause, and “heroes” to salute their courage.

Yet they gave their lives. To indicate and honor this, we call them “the Fallen” — and perhaps in its quiet way it is enough.

[ by Charles Cameron — don’t let’s go overboard, eh? ]
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I’d like to note up front that Liz Sly was talking about a pro-Morsi rally, and Leah very possibly about an anti-Morsi event…

In any case, these two tweets between them remind me that my own interpretation of “black banners” in terms of the army from Khorasan may well be due for retirement except when specifically indicated.

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I’ve been writing here for a while about the black banners of Khorasan and their apocalyptic resonance, especially for those in Afghanistan and recruiting for AQ: today I’d like to suggest two qualifications.

The first is that there are a variety of black flags flown in various parts of the world for various purposes, and have been since the Prophet first flew his black flag, the Raya. It seems plausible that the Khorasan ahadith originated with the ‘Abbasids, in support of their own miltary activities, and certainly black banners taken together with those ahadith have been a powerful recruiting tool for AQ, as illuuminated in their respective books by Ali Soufan and Syed Saleem Shahzad.

But there are black flags and black flags, some plain black, some bearing the shahada, some with what looks to be a replica of the Prophet’s seal — and the one that is most commonly called “the Al-Qaida flag” is the one that originated with the Islamic State of Iraq — see Aaron Zelin‘s post on the matterr at al-Wasat. That post, btw, is likely the one that seeded my thoughts here.

My second point, then? A problem arises when we begin to think that any black flag seen, photographed, or reported in any Islamist context is “the AQ flag” — or indeed that any of the varieties of black flag reported hither and yon would qualify for that appellation.

In Iraq, the flag with seal, okay. A black flag with shahada in a Khorasan / Mahdist context — yes, and with Mahdist overtones. Otherwise — maybe, or maybe not so much.

So could we be a little more cautious, and more specific?

As for Cairo — I wasn’t there, and haven’t see a Liz Sly photo, so I don’t know which black flag or flags she saw. And yes, she was at a pro-Morsi rally. But as Leah notes, in recent days black flags have been less prominent, and Egyptian flags more in evidence — as indeed, this photo from an anti-Morsi rally on July 3 this year suggests:

If my guess is any good, then, black flags showing up in Egypt now presumably indicate MB or Islamist but not necessarily by any means AQ sympathies, while Egyptian flags would appear to indicate dissatisfaction with Morsi and his Islamist cohorts, combined with strong nationalist sentiment and pride.

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Corrections, amplifications etc are welcome… This is a test post, really: a big question mark. I’ve an inquisitive mind to be sure — but as you’ll have seen in my previous post, I also admit to ignorance.

Oh —

And now I’m totally confused, too — El Cid just pointed me to Arch Enemy‘s Under Black Flags We March video. Eh?