Kepel and Abu Musab al-Suri, with a side of poetry
Kepel’s comments on al-Suri have a touch of the dismissive to them, I’d say – but it was also Kepel who supervised the painstaking years of research that went into J-P Filiu‘s Apocalypse in Islam, and for that we should be very grateful.
Filiu himself notes that he hesitated for a long time before throwing himself into a detailed study of Islamic apocalyptic literature, fearing that he “would have to overcome academic against a subculture that had grown up around self-educated authors and cheaply produced books” and eventually deciding to commit himself to the work only after his Arab colleagues convinced him of “the necessity of taking this frenzied expression of apocalyptic feeling seriously.”
Getting back to Kepel, then — he’s a “cool” scholar, and al-Suri’s a “hot” apocalyptic warrior D’you suppose cool sometimes dismisses hot just a tad too easily?
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zen:
May 2nd, 2012 at 2:13 am
Hi Charles,
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excellent post. On Kepel:
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” As if he had shell-shocked himself with his practical, all-too-human theories of how to take over the world, he turned back to metaphysics at the end, lining up dozens of Quran verses and commentaries that predict the arrival of the Anti-Christ, the return of the messiah, or the battle of Gog and Magog. The rationalism that informs the body of his work gives way, in the Conclusion, to a mishmash of superstitions and ends with a testament “written in a time of misery: we are fleeing from one hiding-place to another, hunted down by the enemies of God, infidels, and the apostates who help them.
al-Suri/Settmariam/Whatever was not as serious a student of Muslim theology/law as he was of strategy and tactical matters. Not secular, but critical of those in what he called “the jihadi current” who substituted religious speculation and quranic debate for analytical consideration of strategic problems. And he resented that these fatwa -ists had more influence than jihadis like himself who had “field experience”. It may be that this rambling messianism was partly a nod to garnering more “street cred” among the simpletons and shielding himself from criticism from layabout pen jihadis by escalating the religious drivers of jihad to “the next level” of Mahdism