After IS, what next? — the missing (apocalyptic) strand

May 23rd, 2016 by Charles Cameron

  • 2015, Graeme Wood, What ISIS Really Wants

  • 2015, Will McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse

    • But no, the question I’m interested in has not been raised:

    Is there a more potent form of apocalyptic movement than the two we have most recently seen?

  • a Mahdist movement, one focused on the army with black flags from Khorasan — AQ

  • a Caliphal movement, one focused on the establishment of the rightly-guided kingdom — IS

    • **

    Four hints:

    It seems to me that you can have a Caliphal (kingdom based), or a Mahdist (leader based) movement, and that the Caliphal approach, should IS be a clear failure as a global quasi-state, will be exhausted for quite some time — and that since AQ, to the extent that it is or was an apocalyptic movement, was one that looked to a future Mahdi, the only route “up” from either one would be the declaration of an actual Mahdi-claimant with armed insurrection to follow.

  • The worst messianic movement, in terms of fatalities, would still be China’s 19th Century Taiping Rebellion, 20-30 million dead. Strangely enough, Gordon of Khartoum was involved.

  • The most recent and widely notable Mahdist rebellion was the Sudanese one that killed Gordon, led initially by Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi.

  • The next highly plausible date for the appearance of a Mahdi would be at the start of the next Islamic century, 1500 AH / 2076 BCE, since ahadith suggest a Mujaddid or Reformer will be sent every 100 years, and there have been assertions that the Ummah will not endure longer than 1,500 years (see here eg)

    • My guess is that we’ll have a cooling-off period in terms of Islamic apocalyptic if IS is seen to fail — but as they say, mortal mind cannot know the time of the end, and Allah knows best.

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    Posted in al qaida, Apocalyptic, Charles Cameron, IS, ISIS, Islam, JM Berger, media, Uncategorized, will mccants | 3 comments

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    1. dave:

      May 23rd, 2016 at 2:45 pm

      Nobody from AQ ever claimed to the the Mahdi
      .
      The last person to claim to be the Mahdi was Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani who did the uprising in Mecca with Juhayman al-Otaybi

    2. Charles Cameron:

      May 23rd, 2016 at 3:02 pm

      Yup, that’s why I wrote “since AQ, to the extent that it is or was an apocalyptic movement, was one that looked to a future Mahdi”.
      .
      And indeed, the siege of Mecca was significant (i) as being a “full” Mahdist movement, ie one with a live Mahdi claimant (ii) occurring on the first day of the new century AH, (iii) in Mecca at the Grand Mosque, (iv) with force, and (v) with connections both to the Binladin Group and to OBL personally, peripherally at the time, and more deeply as an influence.
      .
      More on the Qahtani / Otaybi Mahdist claim from my perspective, here.

    3. Charles Cameron:

      May 23rd, 2016 at 5:40 pm

      I should have gone further, perhaps, and said that 1979 featured three events of rich eschatological significance:

      1 – the siege of Mecca, an overtly Mahdist uprising;
      .
      2 – Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran, with “twelfth Imam” resonance for the Shia, but which was also a turning point away from political and towards Islamic theological thinking for many Sunnis; and
      .
      3 – the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, which set in motion the quasi-Mahdist “black flags from Khorasan” tendency which AQ would exploit for recruitment purposes.

      Tracking any one of these three with care — and without overlooking theological repercussions — would have brought Islamic eschatology front and center, as would the 2003 Mahdist uprising in Iraq that Ali Allawi discussed at Jamestown, or the public pronouncements (2005 onwards) of Iran’s Ahmadinejad.
      .
      Of the three 1979 events, the siege of Mecca seems to me the most indicative of the Mahdist current in recent Islam — but we weren’t paying attention to any of them. The Iranian revolution was perhaps the biggest in terms of US interests, but Gary Sick reported that a

      State Department official remarked in some exasperation after the revolution, “Whoever took religion seriously?

      Now that’s a problem — that’s still a problem.