Tamerlan Tsarnaev end times videos I: the Mahdist video, pt 1
[ by Charles Cameron — possibility of Mahdist belief or sympathies on the part of one of the Boston bombers surfaces, with some details of the relevant video ]
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Source: https://twitter.com/gregorydjohnsen/status/325264215025782788
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Having said that, here’s the explicitly Mahdist video that Tamerlan Tsarnaev liked on FaceBook — one of two “end times” videos as it happens, and worth viewing in context with the other.
The theme here of the black banners of Khorasan is one I have been writing about for years now, as the editors at NRO kindly noted yesterday.
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I’m not alone in noticing this video [1, 2, 3], but I may have more interest in it than many others, because I believe Mahdism — and “end times” excitement in general — is a volatile conceptual additive and should be handled with considerable caution.
In particular, I would note that the “black banners of Khorasan” ahadith, cited in the video, have been widely used in AQ recruitment as reported by ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan and Syed Saleem Shahzad in their respective books [1, 2], although the ahadith are of probable Abbasid origin as suggested by David Cook [Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, Chapter 8, Apocalyptic Predictions concerning Afghanistan and the Taliban, pp. 172 ff.] — and indeed, I’d recently asked the tweeting American mujahid Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki (Omar Hammami):
to which he’d responded:
[ I started to tweet occasional theological questions to Abu M after he instructed his followers to read Zenpundit, here and more emphatically here — I believe the post he was specifically referring to was this one ]
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Okay.
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