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[ by Charles Cameron ]
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Okay, you may groan and skip quickly to the next post or perhaps read with bemused interest every time I post here about Islamic eschatology — but in either case you might have hoped that the death of bin Laden would have no apocalyptic resonance whatsoever.

Sadly enough, Anjem Choudary — co-founder with Omar Bakri Muhammad of the UK’s Islamist group al-Muhajiroun – has a press release posted on his website today titled May Allah grant Sheikh Usama Martyrdom. It begins:

The announcement this morning of the death of Sheikh Usama Bin laden has been met with joy in the United States and by other enemies of Islam and Muslims. I would like remind everyone that someone much better and much more significant then Sheikh Usama Bin laden passed away in the past, namely the Messenger Muhammad (saw) and that this never stopped the Jihad nor the spread of Islam to the East and West. Indeed the Messenger Muhammad (saw) said that the day of judgement will not come until a group of Muslims conquer the White House.

The hadith in question comes from Sahih Muslim, Book 19, On Government (Kitab Al- Imara) 4483, and reads as follows:

Narrated Jabir ibn Samurah:
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It has been narrated on the authority of Amir ibn Sa’d ibn AbuWaqqas who said: I wrote (a letter) to Jabir ibn Samurah and sent it to him through my servant, Nafi’, asking him to inform me of something he had heard from the Messenger of Allah (peace_be_upon_him). He wrote to me (in reply): I heard the Messenger of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) say on Friday, the day on which al- Aslami was stoned to death (for committing adultery): The Islamic religion will continue until the Hour has been established, or you have been ruled by twelve Caliphs, all of them being from the Quraysh. I also heard him say: A small force of the Muslims will capture the white palace, the palace of the Persian Emperor or his descendants. I also heard him say: Before the Day of Judgment there will appear (a number of) imposters. You are to guard against them. I also heard him say: When God grants wealth to any one of you, he should first spend it on himself and his family (and then give it in charity to the poor). I heard him (also) say: I shall be your forerunner at the Cistern (expecting your arrival).

I suppose I should apologize, but “until the Hour has been established” and “Before the Day of Judgment” are both clear “end times” references.

A poster on SunniForum quotes this hadith from Muslim, one of the two hadith collections regarded as most reliable and given the epithet “sahih” (authentic), and follows it with another, citing Al-Tabarani, Al-Mu’jam al-Kabeer 2.198:

Jabir b. Samura said: I heard the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) say on Friday evening, the day on which Ma’ez al-Aslami was stoned to death (for committing adultery): A small force of the Muslims will capture the white house. I said: Kisra? he replied Kisra.

Be it noted that while “white palace” or “white house” would both be appropriate translations of the term used, Kisra clearly refers not to the house of the US President in Washington DC, but to the palace of Khosrau (Chosroes) I of Persia in Ctesiphon (now an impressive ruin in Iraq).

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I expect I found the Anjem Choudary press piece following a lead from Aaron Zelin, and if so I owe him double thanks – because he also pointed me to this quote from a member of the Ansar Forum:

al-Qaeda are the people of the Victorious Sect, which recognizes the last of the banner to the Mahdi

The victorious sect is the one sect of Islam out of very many that holds fast to the Prophet’s teaching, see the hadith collected here. As UCLA historian Jean Rosenfeld noted in a comment on the al-Sahwa blog:

Al-Qaida took the Salafi myth of the Saved Sect and the Victorious Group and applied it to themselves. This is in line with the need for converts to see themselves as heroes carrying out a transcendent purpose.The Saved Sect was turned into an eschatological myth by bin Ladin and his compatriots. It is a group of warriors who sacrifice themselves for the Din, the Land, and the people. The members of the Sect are a vanguard and they are few. Not only are they attacked by their opponents, but fellow Muslims may persecute them. Thus, if the group remains small and is regarded as practicing fitnah and is denounced, that only validates the group’s certitude that it is the Saved Sect. Only this sect — out of “72 sects” (note: this is probably a symbolic number meaning “many”) — will attain paradise at the end time.

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A couple more clear instances of end-times associations in the (Sunni) jihadist current…

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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Glenn Beck has a new documentary coming out tonight on Mahdism and the Antichrist.

He calls it “the documentary that you will not see on mainstream television” and to get to see it, you have to be a subscriber to Beck’s Insider Extreme channel on the web. But then that fits with Beck’s emphasis right now — he doesn’t mind crying shame on the media for not carrying the documentary, but he doesn’t want unbelievers to see it either — he told his radio audience today:

Make sure you see it tonight at nine o’clock. And if I may recommend that you watch it with some friends. Invite some friends over, some like-minded people, don’t try to get any converts in. Pull up the nets, man, pull up the nets.

So okay — it won’t be on “mainstream television” but it will be seen in a million “like-minded” homes, and it will influence them, it will influence their perspective on Islam, and on the Middle East.

Here’s a description of what they can expect, drawn from Joel Rosenberg‘s blog today. Joel is the author of the apocalyptic thriller The Twelfth Imam, has seen the rough cut and will be appearing on the video, along with those he lists here:

Tonight on his website, Glenn Beck will premiere his new documentary film, “Rumors of War — Part Two.” As with Part One, I was interviewed for the film…

The documentary examines current events and trends in the Middle East and the Islamic world from various vantage points — Biblical End Times theology, Jewish End Times theology, and Islamic End Times theology. It discusses the latest threats from the Radical Islamic world to Israel, the West and our allies. It features a wide range of Jewish, Muslim and evangelical Christian authors and commentators in a balanced yet provocative and fascinating way. Among them:

• Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the U.N.
• Reza Kahlili, former CIA agent inside Iran and author of A Time To Betray
• Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind novel series
• Brigitte Gabriel, author of They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It
• Joel Richardson, author of The Islamic Antichrist
• Dr. Zudi Jasser, president of American Islamic Forum for Democracy

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The thing is, Beck doesn’t know a whole lot about these things, and his advisers get things wrong — sometimes flat out wrong, sometimes just out of proportion — too.

I aim to review Beck’s documentary along with its predecessor, and the books of Joel Richardson and Joel Rosenberg, and also take a look at some other books and articles that cover the same materials with greater scholarship and less religious special interest — notably the works of David Cook, J-P Filiu and Timothy Furnish — clear up some of this issues in which definitive corrections are in order, suggest areas where the preponderance of evidence and informed commentary leans away from Beck’s position, and raise again those urgent questions which remain.

Because from where I sit, Glenn Beck has hit on one of our blind spots — and is giving us a dangerously distorted mirror in which to view it.

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Here’s Beck talking about the upcoming documentary this morning on his radio show:

Tonight, you don’t want to miss, on Insider Extreme, something that we have been trying to tell the story for quite some time, and I have told it to you many times before, the story of the Twelfth Imam, well this is not the full story of the Twelfth Imam, this is what people Middle East believe about the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi as the… Sunnis? Sunnis are in Egypt, Shias are in, ah, is it Shias in Iran or is it the other way around? I think it’s S.. Shias are in Iran. One believes in the Twelfth Imam, the others believe in the Mahdi, same guy, it is the… the… you would know it as the Antichrist. It is the, it has every earmarking of the Antichrist, every single one, I mean, he makes a peace for seven years with Egypt, he viol… — I mean with Israel, he violates it, he marks people with a number, he beheads people if they don’t submit, I mean it’s all there. It’s all there. And Ahmadinejad says that he is alive and well and orchestrating the things in the Middle East.

Did you get that? He’s not sure: “is it Shias in Iran or is it the other way around?”

If Beck has been working on this documentary for a year now, let’s hope he does in fact know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a, and that he’s using the popular gag technique of pretending not to know, so his audience — who haven’t all been working on a documentary and may well not know — can feel all the more strongly “he’s one of us”. And besides, Sunni, Shia, it’s all the same, Mahdi, Twelfth Imam, no difference at all, right?

So that’s the level of required accuracy that’s tolerated here. Which side was it wanted to keep slavery? I forget now, I think it may have been the South. Belfast — now is that Catholic, or Protestant?

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And one last quick note from the same post on Joel Rosenberg’s blog:

As far as I can tell, Glenn Beck is leaving the Fox News Channel in part because Fox is opposed to him devoting so much time on his program to End Times issues, Bible prophecy, Iran’s eschatology, and the linkage of these things to left wing efforts to sow seeds of revolution and chaos. It’s too bad, really.

That’s an interesting data point.

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There will be plenty to talk about, anyway:

the new documentary, Joel Rosenberg’s thriller, which I enjoyed, Joel Richardson, with whom I correspond and whom I like, the new Mahdist video in Iran which is causing quite a stir, and may or may not be an “official” Iranian production, the vexed question — vexed in all three Abrahamic faiths — of whether you can hasten the coming of the Awaited One and if so, how, and the implications of all this both in the United States and in the Middle East, the Iranian nuclear program…

The Glenn Beck, Mahdism & Antichrist blog series, coming up.

From the respected gents at BLACKFIVE:

Westboro Baptists Defeated

USMC Staff Sgt. Jason Rogers, 28, was killed in action by an IED while saving a fellow Marine in Helmand Province, Afghanistan on April 7.  Sgt. Rogers was assigned to the 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, out of Camp Lejeune, N.C.  This was his fifth combat tour in Afghanistan.  His fifth.

….Sgt. Rogers was buried in Brandon, Mississippi last Saturday.  Above is the view of Mississippi Highway Patrol Trooper Elmo Townsend as he escorted Sgt. Rogers from Airport Road and along U.S. 80 through a gauntlet of hundreds of local patriots who turned out to honor his sacrifice. 

The human vermin of the Phelps family, venomous traitors who style themselves the Westboro Baptist Church, who insult decent people from coast to coast by shouting vile slander at the funerals of heroes, threatened to protest this funeral as well.  Yet, not a whiff of their stench fouled the air anywhere near the procession nor funeral.  Therein lies the story….

Read the rest here.

If you are old enough to have ever lived under “old school” rules, you will love this story. More of this, please (Hat tip to Alyson the Good).

[ by Charles Cameron ]
See also part I: Scenario planning the end times

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Today I received a book in the mail from Powell’s: C Christine Fair and Sumit Ganguly‘s Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency operations in Sacred Spaces. That covers the spread of my interests pretty concisely. I’m reminded that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was complicit in several attempts to assassinate Hitler, once said, “Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants” – again, the intersection of the sacred and harsh “facts on the ground”.

I am interested in this intersection partly because my father was a warrior and my mentor a priest and peace-maker, and partly because that mentor, Fr. Trevor Huddleston CR, taught me to anchor my life in the contemplative and sacramental side of things, then reach out into world with a view to being of service – an idea that he movingly expressed in this key paragraph from his great book, Naught for your comfort:

On Maundy Thursday, in the Liturgy of the Catholic Church, when the Mass of the day is ended, the priest takes a towel and girds himself with it; he takes a basin in his hands, and kneeling in front of those who have been chosen, he washes their feet and wipes them, kissing them also one by one. So he takes, momentarily, the place of his Master. The centuries are swept away, the Upper Room in the stillness of the night is all around him: “If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.” I have knelt in the sanctuary of our lovely church in Rosettenville and washed the feet of African students, stooping to kiss them. In this also I have known the meaning of identification. The difficulty is to carry the truth out into Johannesberg, into South Africa, into the world.

A few days ago I saw a film that encompasses that same range – from the contemplative to the brutal – telling the story of the Cistercian (Trappist) monks of Tibhirine in the Atlas mountains of Algeria, the warmth of affection that existed between them and their Muslim neighbors, the mortal threat they came under from Muslim “rebels” whose wounded they had cared for, their individual and group decisions to stay there in Tibhirine under those threats, and their eventual deaths.

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It is an astonishing story, and my copy of John Kiser‘s book, The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love and Terror in Algeria, which also tells that story, already has more tabs in it noting phrases and whole paragraphs I’ll want to return to than any altar missal – and I’m only two-thirds of the way through it.

I don’t wish to retell the story – I’d rather you saw the film, Of Gods and Men, in the theater if possible, on DVD if not, or read the book, or both – but a few of those book-marked passages stand out for me.

First, Algeria – in the words of Albert Camus:

Algeria is land and sun. Algeria is a mother, cruel and yet adored, suffering and passionate, hard and nourishing. More than in our temperate zones, she is proof of the mix of good and evil, the inseparable dialectic of love and hate, the fusion of opposites that constitute mankind

That sets the scene – and I am inescapably reminded of that comment of Solzhenitsyn, which I quoted at the end of my first response to Abu Walid:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an uprooted small corner of evil.

Algeria brings that separation into sharp relief – the monks of Tibhirine knew and acted on their knowledge that it passes through each and every human heart.

Next, the Qur’an. When the monks first meet the militants, their prior, Fr. Christian de Chergé, begins to quote from Sura 5, and the militant leader completes the verse:

The nearest to the faithful are those who say “We are Christians.” That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are free of pride

The view I wish to present here in describing the monks of Tibhirine is not a view from left or right but from a contemplative perspective — and while I do not believe it the only perspective to be considered, I think we do well to heed the insights of Christian monks — a group to whom even the Muslim scriptures give praise.

Then, the Rule of St Benedict:

Just as there is the zeal of bitterness that is evil and separates us from God and leads to hell, so also there is a good zeal which removes vices and leads to God and eternal life.

This, then, was the spirit in which the monks of Tibhirine served and loved their God – and their neighbors as themselves.

And finally, the Bible, from the book of Job:

My face is flushed from weeping and on my eyelids is the shadow of death; although no violence is in my hands and my prayer is pure.

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It was with that shadow playing on his eyelids that Fr. de Chergé penned these words of immense generosity:

Facing a GOODBYE …

If it should happen one day — and it could be today — that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church and my family to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.

I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure.

I would ask them to pray for me: for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?

I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity.

My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value. In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood.

I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems to prevail so terribly in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.

I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.

I could not desire such a death. It seems to me important to state this.

I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder.

It would be too high a price to pay for what will perhaps be called, the “grace of martyrdom” to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he might be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.

I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on the Algerians indiscriminately.

I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism fosters.

It is too easy to soothe one’s conscience by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists.

For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: it is a body and a soul.

I have proclaimed this often enough, I think, in the light of what I have received from it.

I so often find there that true strand of the Gospel which I learned at my mother’s knee, my very first Church, precisely in Algeria, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.

Obviously, my death will appear to confirm those who hastily judged me naive or idealistic:
“Let him tell us now what he thinks of his ideals!”

But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free.

This is what I shall be able to do, God willing: immerse my gaze in that of the Father to contemplate with him His children of Islam just as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.

For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything.

In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, my friends of this place, along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families — you are the hundredfold granted as was promised!

And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing:

Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this GOODBYE to be a “GOD BLESS” for you, too, because in God’s face I see yours.

May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.

AMEN! INCHALLAH!

Algiers, 1st December 1993
Tibhirine, 1st January 1994

Christian +

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I note with sadness today the death of Tim Hetherington, photo-journalist and co-director of the film Restrepo, together with that of his colleague Chris Hondros, in Misrata, Libya. Their cameras, and those of others like them, brought and will bring the grimness of war home, into the living rooms of peace.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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Prospect magazine just published Raffaello Pantucci‘s piece Jihadi MCs — which is about Omar Hammami and his jihadist rap songs, and more generally, the use of pop culture and tech in jihadist recruitment.

Culture as recruitment: that interests me a great deal.

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I keep an eye out for Pantucci’s work. He’s an Associate Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation, and one of the people who writes about contemporary jihadism with insight. I follow his tweets and mostly click through up on the links he suggests, and we’ve exchanged emails a couple of times. So I clicked through to the Prospect site and read his piece.

And because I’m a writer, I tried to imagine his audience. Who, for instance, is this intended for?

But it is Somali group al Shabaab (“The Youth”) that is at the forefront of this new media approach. Omar Hammami’s recent hip-hop release is merely the latest from the jihadi MC. In his earlier work “First Stop Addis” he rapped about his earnest desire to become a martyr, over shots of him and his “brothers” training and fighting in Somalia. Released through extremist websites, but also widely available on YouTube, the MTV-inspired videos and songs seek to show kids how cool it is to be a mujahedin. Other videos released by the group show young warriors from around the world speaking happily into the camera as they boast, sometimes in perfect English, of how much fun it is to be fighting against the “kuffar” (unbeliever) government in Somalia.

First, like every researcher worth his salt, I imagine Pantucci peers into these things to inform himself, to figure out significant currents in the world he lives in: he’s interested, he’s engaged. Second, it seems to me, he must be writing with an eye to his peers in the field of jihadist studies, to inform them of what he’s been able to piece together, to alert and inform those who are actively engaged in decision-making as part of the war of ideas, and perhaps to hammer some sense into the pundits who routinely misinform the public.

But on this occasion he has a third audience: he’s also addressing interested parts of the general public himself — in this case, the readers of a British magazine.

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For most of his Prospect readers, this article will be informative background reading – but not, so to speak, “actionable intelligence”.

Let’s say that the “actionable” part of what he writes – more accurately, the analytic content – is the gold, and everything else is the glitter.

The general reader of a magazine like Prospect takes in the gold with the glitter, but in all probability wouldn’t get the gold at all if there was no glitter surrounding it. If Prospect had published Pantucci’s paper, The Tottenham Ayatollah and The Hook-Handed Cleric: An Examination of All Their Jihadi Children (it appeared in the academic journal, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism) or his more recent ICSR paper A Typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary Analysis of Lone Islamist Terrorists, I somehow doubt the readers of Prospect would have been so keen to read them. They contain, if you will, too high a ratio of “gold” to “glitter”.

The glitter is there in his Prospect piece on Hammami, we might say, to catch and hold those readers’ attention. To, if you will, recruit their interest.

Nothing new or bad about that, we all write for different audiences, with different ratios of anecdote and statistic, fact and anecdote, humor and persuasion…

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Here’s what interests me.

The “glitter” in Pantucci’s piece isn’t from Pantucci – it’s the glitter that the jihadists themselves are adding to the “gold” of their Islamist message.

So if you read Pantucci’s piece not just to inform yourself on a few new data points about al-Shabaab but in the relaxed mode of your average magazine reader, all the bits that seem like the neat “glitter” that make the article well-written and readable …

hip-hop .. rap .. socially networked revolution .. funky imagery and slang .. fanzine .. videos and songs .. how cool it is to be a mujahedin .. other non-traditional means .. dial-in conference calls .. how much fun it is to be fighting against the “kuffar” .. Facebook messages .. “‘Sup dawg. Bring yourself over here” to “M-town.”

… are also the specifics that al-Shabaab is using to recruit the attention of those who more or less idly surf YouTube and run across one of their videos…

The glitter is the gold.

In this case, I mean, the cool is the recruitment.

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Update:

Of course, if the rap itself is uncool as rap, that’s not so cool after all…

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross @DaveedGR tweets: “Seriously, John Walker Lindh is a better rapper than Omar Hammami: http://bit.ly/ifoafQ” — and Adam Serwer @AdamSerwer: “The lyrics to Omar Hammami’s rap don’t do it justice. Dude just has absolutely no rhythm whatsoever.”

Dawg.