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[ by Charles Cameron — hadith, Aden-Abyan, Abu M. al-Maqdisi, major dream of young bin Laden, role of narration 1 month after his death, any comments? ]

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I was trying to follow up on a hadith which declares:

An army of twelve-thousand will come out of Aden-Abyan. They will give victory to Allah and His messenger. They are the best between myself and them.

There’s an extensive discussion of it on Somalinet offered by Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi [teh Sheikh Abu M al-Maqdisi?] and posted on June 4 of this year, but it doesn’t answer my question as to how this narration fits in with the various narrations about the army from Khorasan.

1.

While reading in and around this topic, however, I ran across this account of a dream on the young bin Laden, which appears on a number of sites favorable to jihad around June 4, 2011, i.e. after bin Laden’s death, and which I have not seen discussed on those analysts’ sites that I manage to follow.

It’s extremely interesting to me not only because dreams are potentially important vehicles for divine guidance in Islam, but also because it ties bin Laden specifically to the Khorasan / black banners hadith, and to the Mahdi.  In this dream, I( don’t think it’s going too far to say that bin Laden himself plays a preparatory role with regard to the Mahdi that we can perhaps understand in the west as equivalent to that of John the Baptist in preparation for Christ.

2. 

If this dream narrative has been explored in the open source analytic literature, I would be very interested to see what has been said.  In  the meantime, I will simply post the narration as I found it:

3.

This incident was narrated to me by a student of knowledge who spent more than 20 years in the company of scholars acquiring knowledge. He told me about a dream that Shaykh Osama bin Laden had when he was 9 years old, which indicated that Allah swt was preparing Shaykh Osama bin Laden, may Allah have mercy on him, since childhood, for battles against the Crusaders.

He told me that once he was sitting with a companion and discussing the deplorable condition of the Ummah but that all the incidents taking place in the Muslim Ummah are going according to Allah’s plan and that it is certain that the victory of Allah the Almighty will come. He will surely send a Leader and a Guide from amongst our Ummah who will deliver the humiliated and pitiful Ummah to the enlightened path of ascent and loftiness. We started thinking that who could be such a person!

Immediately, the thought of Shaykh Osama bin Laden came to our minds, since he has made innumerable sacrifices for the sake of the Ummah. On this, my companion smiled and said, “I will narrate to you a dream of Shaykh Osama bin Laden; you will be pleased to hear it, and your love for the mujahideen will only increase.”

He said, I was in al-Madinah al-Munawwarah at the house of a Scholar who used to lecture at the Prophet’s masjid. We had just arrived at his house when someone knocked on the door. The Shaykh returned with a person of luminous and honorable appearance who was about 80 years old.

The host welcomed him and requested the Tafsir of a few verses from the Qur’an. We quietly listened to him while the guest Shaykh recited a few verses, and then he gave the Tafsir of those verses. By Allah, I had studied a number of Tafsirs, but that Shaykh was a sea of knowledge. When he completed his lesson, the host invited him for a meal, but he declined politely, and we came to understand that he was fasting.

Eventually, the guest asked for permission to leave, but the host insisted, ‘Until you narrate to us the dream of Shaykh Osama bin Laden once more, you will not get the permission to leave.’

The Shaykh smiled and asked, ‘The dream that Shaykh Osama bin Laden had when he was 9 years old?’ The host replied in the affirmative.

This is how that Shaykh narrated the incident:

I was a close friend of Muhammed bin Laden, the father of Osama bin Laden. Many times I would be in his company. And many times, I used to visit his house regarding work related to construction. During the discussions, our talk would be disturbed by the playing of his children, and then he would ask them to go out and play.

But I was surprised to see that he would always ask one particular son to sit beside him. I asked him, “Why don’t you let this son of yours to play with his other brothers? Is he sick?”

Mohammed bin Laden smiled and said, “No, there something special about this son of mine.”’

When I asked his name, he said, “His name is Osama, and he is 9 years old. Let me share with you something strange which happened a few days ago. My son woke me up few minutes before the morning prayer and told me, ‘Dear father, I want to tell you about a dream that I had.’ I thought he must have had a nightmare. I made ablution and took him along with me to Masjid.

On the way, he told me, ‘In the dream, I saw myself in a huge, flat area. I saw an army mounted on white horses moving towards me. All of them were wearing black turbans. One of the horsemen, who had shiny eyes, came up to me and asked me, “Are you Osama bin Muhammed bin Laden?” I replied, “Yes.” He then asked me again, “Are you Osama bin Muhammed bin Laden?” I again replied, “Yes, that is me.” He again asked, “Are you Osama bin Muhammed bin Laden?” Then I said, “By Allah, I am Osama bin Laden.” He moved a flag towards me and said, “Hand this flag over to Imam Mahdi Muhammad bin Abdullah at the gates of Al-Quds.” I took the flag from him, and I saw that the army started marching behind me.’

Muhammed bin Laden said, “I was surprised at that but, due to business at work, I forgot about the dream. The next morning, he woke me up just before the morning prayer and narrated the same dream. The same thing happened on the third morning also. Now, I began to worry for my son. I decided to take him with me to a knowledgeable person who can interpret dreams.

Accordingly, I took Osama to a person of knowledge and informed him about the whole incident. He looked at us with surprise and asked, ‘Is this your same son who had the dream?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He kept staring at Osama for some time. My concern multiplied. He comforted me and said, ‘I will ask you a few questions. I am sure that you will answer them truthfully.’

He asked Osama, ‘Son, do you remember anything about that flag which that horseman gave you?’ Osama replied, ‘Yes, I remember it.’

He asked him, ‘Can you describe it, how it was?’

Osama said, ‘It was similar to the flag of Saudi Arabia, but its color was not green but black, and there was something written on it in white color.’

He then put the next question to Osama, ‘Did you ever see yourself also fighting?’

Osama replied, ‘I commonly see such dreams.’ He then asked Osama to go out of the room and do recitation of the Qur’an.

Then that person of knowledge turned towards me and asked, ‘Where is your ancestry from?’

I replied from Hadramawt in Yemen. Then, he asked me to tell him something about my tribe. I replied that we are related to the tribe of Shanwah which is a Qahtani tribe from Yemen. He then cried out the Takbir loudly and called in Osama and kissed him while crying. He also said that the signs of the hour are near.

‘O Muhammed bin Laden, this son of yours will prepare an army for Imam Mahdi and for the sake of protecting his religion, he will migrate to the region of Khurasan. O Osama ! Blessed is he who will do Jihad by your side and undone and disappointed be he who leaves you alone and fights against you.’

4.

It is notable that this account appears to have surfaced in the English-language literature about a month after the Abbottabad raid of May 2.  At least in this English-language form, it seems to be a posthumous account, hagiographic in tone, and directly linking  bin Laden and those who fought with him to the fulfillment of Mahdist prediction.

My questions would be whether anyone knows of an earlier appearance of this narrative, perhaps in Arabic — and if it indeed is first found after bin Laden’s death, how the readers of signs, both Islamist and  Western-analytic, read this particular text.

I have seen this narrative featured on sites relating to the Netherlands, Egypt, Somalia, South Africa, Kashmir, and Pakistan — and as a text video with nasheed accompaniment on YouTube – so it seems to have spread pretty rapidly, which suggests it “fits” powerfully with the needs of the jihadizing internet shortly after bin Laden’s death.

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Sources include:

• http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=185017914885438
• http://www.afghan.nl/forum/index.php?showtopic=13439&st=36#
• http://www.somalinet.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=277607#p3220737
• http://shuratulmujahideen.blogspot.com/2011/06/dream-of-shaykh-osama-bin-laden-may.html
• http://tahir2626.blogspot.com/2011/06/karachi-friends-lucid-dream-of-shaykh.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Or6_Tp7IJA

[by Charles Cameron — on warfare and social media ]

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Al-Shabaab‘s media wing now has a twitter interlocutor from the Kenyan Army…

as the Islamic Emirate (Afghan Taliban) does from the ISAF Press Office:

Is this just “silliness”, as @Rory_Medcalf tweeted — or is there something fresh and with potential going on?  I’m thinking of richer social media initiatives, like Leah Farrall‘s conversations with Abu Walid, here, too…

[ by Charles Cameron – Ghazwah-e-Hind, the other prong of Khorasan jihad, YouTube propaganda, Zaid Hamid, his warnings to the West (leave well alone!) and to the Hindus (convert!) ]

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1.

The Hadith:

The major sweep of the victorious army with black banners will be from Khorasan to Jerusalem, as described in various earlier posts here — but  there are ahadith that deal with the conquest of India (and China, but that’s another story, see David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, pp 170 ff) that are currently enjoying a vogue in Pakistan…

Here is one version of the hadith, as quoted  by the Shaikh of the Naqshbandi Owaisiah Sufis, Muhammad Akram Awan, to whom I shall return in a future post, in a speech he gave in Pakistan in November 2008:

From Abu Hurairah (rau), he said: (saws)

The Messenger (saws) of Allah promised us Ghazwah-tal Hind. Now, if I encounter it, I shall invest my wealth and life in it. Then, if I am killed I will be among the most chosen Shuhada (martyrs) and if I live, I would be Abu Hurairah ‘the freed’ (from Hell Fire).

2.

The plan:

So how does that translate into contemporary geopolitics?

Syed Saleem Shahzad (Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11, pp 206-215) offers a brief overview of the Indian Jihad / Ghazwa-e-Hind in its current incarnation, with the involvement of the Pakistani ISI and AQ’s (presumed late) Ilyas Kashmiri, bringing us fast forward to the present day:

This was the ISI plan drawn up 30 years ago with Harkat-ul-Jihad-iIslami, Jamaat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood connections, Islamic seminaries, and Sufi networks of constructing a theater of war from Central Asia to Bangladesh to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and simultaneously to acquire the right of self-determination for Kashmiris in India. Thirty years later, Al-Qaeda simply refurbished the plan after sketching out its ideological boundaries, to prepare the greater theaters of war of Khurasan and Ghazwa-e-Hind for victory, before its armies, holding the black flag aloft, entered in the Middle East for the final battle against the Western world.

From my POV, the ghazwa is one of the topics Stephen Tankel might profitably have addressed as theological matter relevant to the LeT and the Mumbai attack…

Here’s the close of Shahzad’s book, to make the apocalyptic thrust in all this quite clear:

However, the saga of Al-Qaeda’s One Thousand and One Nights tales continues with new strategies and new characters. For Al-Qaeda these are just measures to keep the West running from pillar to post until it exhausts itself and Al-Qaeda can announce victory in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda next aims to occupy the promised land of ancient Khurasan, with its boundaries stretching all the way from Central Asia to Khyber Paktoonwa through Afghanistan, and then expand the theater of war to India.

The promised messiah, the Mahdi, will then rise in the Middle East and Al-Qaeda will mobilize its forces from Ancient Khurasan for the liberation of Palestine, where a final victory will guarantee the revival of a Global Muslim Caliphate.

3.

The video: 

With that as background, I’d like to illustrate the emotional drive of the ghazwa idea, with screen shots from a video posted to YouTube in February of this year, titled Ghazwa-e-Hind (Prophecy) – Fall of India – Promised Victory. This section will take up quite a bit of screen space, but you can pretty much scroll on down and get the general idea, pausing where something seems a tad different or more interesting:

The video features stirring music throughout, presumably taken from Molossus (From “Batman Begins”) [2005] by Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard — which we are invited to purchase on iTunes or AmazonMP3…

It opens with a rally, at which an Indian speaker is castigating Pakistan —

next up: two frames that give a textual expression of the hope involved —

then, what we might call a “starting” map —

various evidences of military might —

another couple of text frames —

 

some arguably more intense weaponry —

and no less intense special forces —

then the hoped-for “close of play” map, book-ending the “opening” map above —

the ultimate threat —

and the flag of Pakistan flying over the Red Fort in Delhi —

4.

The warning: 

I have one final screen shot in the series, and it features Syed Zaid Hamid —

the man who has been most actively stirring up public sentiment in Pakistan for the Ghazwa-e-Hind.

I will close with two of Hamid’s speeches, posted on YouTube, each of them containing a warning.  The first is in English, geopolitical in tone, and contains a warning to the US, Israel and India, that they should not attack Pakistan.

The second is addressed to the Hindus:

Such an invitation to convert is mandatory “when you meet your enemies’ before waging jihad, as stated in the hadith in Sahih Muslim, Book 19, 4294:

Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them.

— and parallels bin Laden‘s Letter to America, in which UBL wrote:

The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them – peace be upon them all.

5.

The outline:

That’s the basic outline.

I hope to dig in deeper and provide more subtlety in future posts, but this topic is still pretty new to me — I first ran across it, somewhat tangentially, in the United States of Islam video which I began to discuss in October 2010, and which I may return to shortly.

I also wish to invite comment from others who have been looking into the Ghazwa for longer than I have.

Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba by Stephen Tankel

PRAGATI, India’s National Interest Review magazine has published my review of Dr. Stephen Tankel’s book on Lashkar-e-Taiba, titled Storming the World Stage. The article is not yet online (I will add the link when it is released) but the issue digest PDF version is below:

pragati-issue56-nov2011-communityed.pdf

“Jihad for all seasons”

….Carnegie and RAND scholar Stephen Tankel has endeavored to demystify and deconstruct LeT in his meticulously researched book, Storming The World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba and bring into the light the complex relationships that entwine LeT with the Pakistani state and the subterranean universe of radical jihadi politics.  Conducting extensive interviews with Islamist militants, Western and Indian intelligence officials, Pakistani politicians and ISI officers and buttressing his narrative with sixty-three pages of end-notes, Tankel has produced a portrait of Lashkar-e-Taiba that is accessible to the layman while remaining a methodical work of scholarship.

…. An organisation that, like Hezbollah, is state-sponsored but not controlled, Lashkar-e-Taiba is suited for waging what military analyst Frank Hoffman terms “Hybrid War”, but how LeT would play that role in an Indo-Pakistani War is left to the reader’s inference. LeT also demonstrated in Mumbai a fluid tactical excellence in its use of off-the-shelf technology, small arms and mobility to reap an enormous return-on-investment by attacking soft targets, much along the asymmetric lines advocated by warfare theorist John Robb. Tactics that are a critical threat to any open society by forcing it to take preventive measures which are ruinously expensive and contraindicated to keeping society free and democratic….

Will update post as matters develop.

[ by Charles Cameron — tracking an al-Awlaqi quote through Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Hindu sources ]

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I was reading JM Berger‘s CTC Sentinel piece about al-Awlaqi‘s Constants on the Path of Jihad, which is itself an expansion of al-Uyayri‘s original text, and found myself feeling vaguely uneasy about one of al-Awlaqi’s interpolations.

Berger’s example of how al-Awlaqi frequently “expanded al-‘Uyayri’s citations into living, breathing stories, often at significantly greater length, transforming the legalistic argument into an emotionally and politically loaded discourse” concerns the “People of the Ditch” motif found in the Qur’an and hadith:

In the story, a king is persecuting believers in Allah. He orders them to renounce their religion or be thrown into a flaming ditch or trench to die. All of the believers throw themselves in. One woman, carrying her baby, hesitates, and Allah inspires the baby to speak to her, saying “Oh Mother! You are following al-Haqq [the truth]! So be firm!” As a result, she carries him into the fire and succeeds in achieving martyrdom.

Al-Uyayri makes a brief mention of this story; Al-Awlaqi expands on it, transforming (in Berger’s words) “al-‘Uyayri’s perfunctory citation into an emotional journey that engages the listener and broadens the original point to emphasize the importance of taking even one step toward jihad.” He does this by commenting:

This woman, because she took the first step, and that is the willingness to jump in the trench, when she was about to retreat, Allah helped her. So if you take that first step towards Allah, Allah will make many steps towards you. If you walk towards Allah, Allah will run towards you.

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So far so good. But isn’t al-Awlaqi quoting someone here?  I had an itch in the back of my head…

I thought I should check, and what I found frankly surprised me. I mean, was he really quoting the Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis?

We have a promise from HaShem that if we take just one step toward Him, He will take two steps toward us.

Not likely.

Perhaps it was a Christian source he had in mind…

A common saying in my church and in many Christian circles is the following: “Take One Step Toward God and He Takes Two Steps Toward You”

Nope.  Surely, it must have been a Hadith:

Allah (swt) says: “Take one step towards me, I will take ten steps towards you. Walk towards me, I will run towards you.”

After all, he can hardly have been quoting the Hare Krishna devotees, can he?

in 1972 In Denver, I remember hearing all the time from the temple devotees to encourage me as a new bhakta… “you take one step towards Krsna and He’ll take 10 steps towards you”.

And no, that particular phrase doesn’t seem to be in the Routledge Dictionary of Religious and Spiritual Quotations — perhaps because it’s hard to know quite where to put it…

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My own favorite among cross-religious commonalities of this sort, fwiw, is this one:

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BTW, nice to see both Berger and Chris Anzalone in the Sentinel — and the Flagg Miller cover-piece on early bin Laden tapes is interesting, too.