Arab Spring and apocalyptic dawn

— and there’s even a reference to the “Mayan” chronology with its 2012 end-date — which (though Fathi doesn’t mention it) just happens to coincide with the Saudi dissident Sheikh Safar al-Hawali‘s ETA for the return of Jerusalem to Islam on the final page of his pamphlet, The Day of Wrath.

3.

Let’s go back to Fathi for a more nuanced — and theologically informed — view:

But according to Amena Nosseir, professor of Islamic theology and philosophy at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the true date of the “final hour” will never be revealed to mankind.

“God has not bestowed knowledge of the final hour to any of his prophets or worshippers, and there’s a holy wisdom behind his decision to withhold this information,” she said. “God created humans to create life on this planet, so it doesn’t make sense that he would give them the knowledge of when the end of time will be.”

Even al-Hawali qualifies his suggested date thus:

Therefore, the end -or the beginning of the end- will be 1967 + 45 = 2012, or in lunar years 1387 + 45 = 1433.

This is what we hope will happen, but we do not declare it to be absolutely certain, but if the fundamentalists would like to bet with us, as Quraysh did with Abu Bakr concerning the Qur’anic prophecy concerning the Romans, then without doubt they will lose, although we cannot guarantee that it will be that exact year!

Setting a date for time to end may be the most reliable method yet devised for proving oneself unreliable.

4.

There are other stirrings.

Harun Yahya, an influential Turkish figure, reports that a green horse and rider can be discerned in a recent Cairo video, and proposes that the rider is Khidr — the teacher of Moses in Sura 18 of the Qur’an (which the great scholar Louis Massignon terms “the apocalypse of Islam”) and a mysterious figure of inspiration in Islamic lore…

He also “reads” Mubarak as an eschatological figure — the Rook — and indeed, this entire video — only five minutes long and readily available on YouTube — is worth watching, to get a visceral sense of how strong this narrative current is:

BTW: see Halverson, Goodall and Corman‘s Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism for a sense of how significant “narrative” is… and then, yes, reread Filiu!

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Hat-tip for a hot tip to Bryan Alexander.

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