Messianic symmetries
What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance”, its chilling disregard for non-American lives… Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. … Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake”. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference.
Note here that Kepel’s “vision of global rectification through violent means” and Roy’s “loose millenarian currency of good and evil” both have resonance that falls clearly within Richard Landes’ corpus of “varieties of millennial experience“.
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Even more explicitly messianic is the parallelism / opposition observed by Jean-Pierre Filiu, Kepel’s Sciences Po colleague, in his Apocalypse in Islam, where he notes that:
the emergence of al-Qaida has been accompanied by a millenarian rereading of jihadist terrorism that considers the Taliban sanctuary in Afghanistan to be only a first step toward the establishment of a universal caliphate… the Hour is near. The signs are there for all to see.
and writes with reference to Ahmadinejad and his Mahdist cohorts in the next paragraph:
These tragic visionaries share with the most farsighted of American neoconservatives the conviction that an implacable conflict is foretold in prophecy.
concluding (with regard to both, I would imagine):
It is therefor less a clash of civilizations that is now beginning to take shape than a confrontation of millenarianisms.
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Tim Furnish has a milder variant on the classic “One man’s Christ is another man’s Antichrist” theme as the opening sentence of his study of Mahdisms, Holiest Wars — he writes:
One man’s messiah is another man’s heretic…
which in turn reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges and his short classic, The Theologians, in which he describes the vicissitudes of two men deeply concerned with the nature of God — the heretic John of Panonia and the heresy-hunter Aurelian, his nemesis: Borges concludes his tale of these two intertwined lives with an extraordinary symmetry:
The end of this story can only be related in metaphors since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where there is no time. Perhaps it would be correct to say that Aurelian spoke with God and that He was so little interested in religious differences that He took him for John of Pannonia. This, however, would imply a confusion in the divine mind. It is more correct to say that in Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorrer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single person.
But let there be no mistake about it, theologies differ. Safar Al-Hawali may use some of Hal Lindsey‘s exegetical devices to elucidate the end times from an Islamic perspective and proclaim “the Messiah = Christ Jesus Son of Mary, Allah’s servant and messenger” — but Islam’s Mahdi is pretty clearly Joel Richardson‘s Antichrist.
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What I hope to have accomplished thus far is to show two things: that keeping an eye out for symmetries and antitheses is a powerful tool for exploring conflict, especially at the qualitative and ideological level, and that messianic juxtapositions in particular have great force, and crop up with significant frequency in the literature of the “sacred vs secular war” also known to some as “jihad vs crusade”.
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