zenpundit.com

Charles Cameron responds at length to a comment left by RAND emeritus David Ronfeldt in the previous post:

In response to David Ronfeldt:

David Ronfeldt wrote an important comment on my last post, taking off from it in a very interesting direction, and I think its deserves its own thread. I am going to quote the main thrust of it here, then address some of the issues he raises. David writes:

What i wonder about is the nature of a mind bent on measured reciprocity vs. a millenarian mind (like those you’ve written about before)? Millenarians, I gather, aren’t much into measured tit-for-tat thinking. If they are, then maybe they really aren’t all that millenarian. they may think they are on a righteous, vengeful mission ordained by God – but it’s so tit-for-tat that it falls short of being truly millenarian.

Or is there a spectrum of combinations? I can imagine a millenarian using tit-for-tat thinking as part of a rationale for wanting to inflict apocalyptic punishment. But I can also suppose that it’s a mental game that a millenarian leader uses to help explain his views to attract new adherents. If so, who/what may be examples of minds that combine millenarian with measured reciprocity?

Here’s my response:

I think it boils down to a difference between two types of millenarian. Some millenarians are just outright antinomian from the gitgo. Their apocalyptic beliefs fundamentally contradict the moral tenets of the
surrounding culture, and they feel cut loose from them. The Brethren of the Free Spirit felt free to cut the purses of others for the benefit of the cause, but I’m not sure that the Perfecti of the Cathars did, and I’m pretty sure the early Franciscan “spirituals” wouldn’t dream of it. So there are others, like the Spirituals, who are far from antinomian, living according to a strict code — which in their case presumably included the moral injunctions of Christ in the Beatitudes, albeit interpreted pretty stringently.

This raises the possibility that some millenarians may feel obligated to the constraints of a traditional path up until such time as their messianic hope-figure appears, at which point he will himself be able to give specific, timely (end-timely) guidance. Thus reports of the Mahdi as warrior must be distinguished from reports of warfare engaged in by his followers in the hope of attracting him.

The Christian apocalyptic writer Joel Richardson made an interesting comment touching on this issue. Describing an interview he gave on NPR, he wrote (in what he would agree are broad strokes with possible
exceptions):

I explained to my host that unless a supernatural man bursts forth from the sky in glory, there is absolutely nothing that the world needs to worry about with regard to Christian end-time beliefs. Christians are called to passively await their defender. They are not attempting to usher in His return. Muslims, on the other hand, are actively pursuing the day when their militaristic leader comes to lead them on into victory. Many believe that they can usher in his coming.

The whole issue of “hastening the arrival”, including means proposed to achieve it, and whether indeed it is even possible, deserves serious comparative religious study. I’d only note here the Israeli analyst Reuven Paz’s seminal 2006 essay, “Hotwiring the Apocalypse: Jihadi Salafi Attitude Towards Hizballah and Iran“, and follow up with Tim Furnish’s comment on the way this concept has been stretched by others (Paz writes only about Sunni jihadists) to cover (putatively) Iran’s (Shi’a) nuclear program. Furnish, who attended one of the recent Mahdist conferences in Tehran, explains the misapplied notion:

It posits that there is a strain of Islamic eschatological thought which hopes to force Allah’s hand in sending the Mahdi, as it were, via sparking a major conflagration (nuclear, or otherwise) with the West (either the U.S. or Israel). This may be true of some of the Sunni jihadits with an apocalyptic bent, but there is very little evidence that such an idea is operative in the upper echelons of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The ayatollahs may be cut-throat, anti-Israeli and anti-American-but they are not stupid. They know full well that any nuclear attack on Israel of the U.S. would be met with a crushing retaliation. (Besides, what good would it do for the Mahdi to come and establish his global caliphate over smoking radioactive ruins?)”

Discussing Christian apocalyptic rhetoric in his book, Arguing the Apocalypse, Stephen O’Leary writes, “The End itself is beyond the capacity of human discourse to hasten or postpone; the deterministic construction of the tragic apocalypse eliminates contingency from history”.

By the time the arriving or returning one has arrived or returned, things are very different. Having the absolute divine sanction — being, in the case of the Mahdi, by definition “Rightly Guided” — he (or I suppose, “she” if appropriate) can order people killed in much the same way that Krishna at the Battle of Kurukshetra could, saying in effect, “they’re dead already”.

To be sure, this “black and white” quality of alignment between the forces of good and evil will more than likely be building towards a climax during the “end times” run-up to the appearance — Stephen O’Leary again, “as the predicted End approaches, apocalyptic rhetors increasingly tend to view their opponents or interlocutors as representatives of demonic forces…”

Bin Laden, it seems to me, clearly feels constrained by Quranic notions of warfare, and his address to the US before the 2004 elections contained by my count at least four echoes of the ayat I cited from the
Quran, the most vivid of which was his comment, “And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in
America in order that they taste some of what we tasted…” — which takes the idea of measured reciprocity very literally sense indeed! Another example: as Steve Coll noted in a Washington Post piece in 2005,
“Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God’s will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese
imperial surrender policy.”

Finally, I’d like to point out the enormous discrepancy here between two worldviews.

The view enshrined in the Geneva Conventions holds that certain acts are permissible in warfare, while certain others are so ruthlessly immoral as to constitute “war crimes” and are never permitted.

The Quranic view also holds this — but with the specific exception of measured reciprocity.Here is Brig. SK Malik on the topic, in his book The Qur’anic Concept of War:

According to an age-old tradition, fighting in Arabia was prohibited during the three sacred months of Ziqad, Zil Haj and Muharram, and the Holy Qur’an issued directions for the observance of this custom. ‘The prohibited month for the prohibited month,’ the Book said, ‘and so for all things prohibited,– there is the Law of Equality. If then anyone transgresses the prohibition against you, transgress ye likewise against him but fear Allah, and know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.’ [2.194] The book likewise commanded the Muslims to respect the Arab custom of observing truce at the Sacred Mosque, on a reciprocal basis. ‘But fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there,’ was the Quranic injunction in the matter [2.191]. On both these issues, the Muslims, no doubt, were nevertheless counseled to show restraint. The Quranic injunction that ‘Allah is with those who restrain themselves’ speaks of the importance attached to tolerance and forbearance.

One system draws a line, and what is below it is impermissible — the other holds a mirror up to the opposing force, and what goes beyond the limits of image it reflects is impermissible. And both systems call for
restraint — which in time of war is not the easiest of virtues to maintain.

But that’s another story — the story of the duel of Ali bin Abi Talib with ‘Amru bin ‘Abd Wudd, in fact…

 

Charles Cameron, who has appeared here before, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

Charles will be doing a new series of posts here at Zenpundit that will drill down into the important but often elusive religious-cultural connections that impact American national security and foreign policy issues.

Very pleased to have him aboard:

SPEAK THE LANGUAGES, KNOW THE MODES OF THOUGHT:

by Charles Cameron

SSgt. David Flaherty, currently deployed as the Zabul Provincial Reconstruction Team’s public information officer, is to be congratulated on speaking Pashto. But Wired‘s Danger Room comment, “The fact that this is considered newsworthy and exceptional — a U.S. military officer speaks one of the official languages of Afghanistan! — doesn’t reflect well on the national commitment to Afghanistan” is also to the point.

A couple of other recent items in the news about languages and translation at home and abroad should concern us.A report from the US Department of Justice on the FBI’s Translation Project was less than enthusiastic, not only finding that significant quantities of material collected in the Bureau’s highest-priority counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence collection categories were never evaluated, but that the number of translators inn the FBI pool had diminished since a 2005 audit, that in 2008 the FBI met its hiring goals for linguists in only 2 of its 14 critical languages, that security clearance and language proficiency training for a new linguist took 19 months before hiring could take place, and that 70 percent of the FBI’s own linguists in the field offices tested did not attend the FBIs required training course.

And retired and renowned Marine colonel Thomas X. Hammes was quoted in a recent piece on CBC News about allegations of “botched” translations in the Afghan theater leading NATO troops to faulty conclusions as saying, “We’re willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure ice cream and steak is there, and I would trade all of that for my entire tour if I could have one decent translator. Many times I’d trade body armor for a translator.”I want to suggest, though, that there is another aspect to this business. I was reminded of it when reading the FBI complaint against Luqman Ameen Abdullah and others connected with the recent events in Detroit. The complaint includes the phrase, “Abdullah also said that thegovernment plots and plans against them so they need to plot and plan in return”. The complaint doesn’t mention it, but that’s an echo of the words of the Qur’an, 8.30:

 “And when those who disbelieve plot against thee (O Muhammad) to wound thee fatally, or to kill thee or to drive thee forth; they plot, but Allah (also) plotteth; and Allah is the best of plotters.”

What this suggests to me is that we need to be able to speak / read not only spoken or written languages of our sources, suspects, informants and opponents — but also the language or underlying logic of their thought. A close reading of the Detroit complaint’s text in association with that of the Qur’an gives us an understanding that Abdullah views his plotting as aligned with Allah’s. This in itself may not seems surprising, but it suggests a manner of reading that may prove fruitful in other occasions, and that’s the point I want to make.

Whatever the merits of the particular case of Luqman Abdullah — and I note that some respected analysts have their questions about that — it will be found to hold true in general that jihadist thought moves along Qur’anic pathways as surely as jihadist behavior parallels the behavior of Mohammed. A keen awareness of both will thus allow us to understand where the touching of familiar chords is most apt to stir the hearts of fellow believers, and hence strengthen the bonds of community and dedication between them.

When bin Laden retreated to the caves of Tora Bora, he was following in his Prophet’s footsteps, as Lawrence Wright masterfully showed in *The Looming Tower*. His spoken words often follow Qur’anic precedent in much the same way.Bin Laden’s address to the US just before the 2004 elections was a case in point for me. I read three translations (CNN, MEMRI, Al-Jazeera), none of which included the Qur’anic citation that headed the whole thing, and figured out what it must be from the repeated echoes in the text, notably “and just as you lay waste to our Nation, so shall we lay waste to yours”.

That put me very strongly in mind of Qur’an 2.194:

“For the prohibited month, and so for all things prohibited, there is the law of equality. If then any one transgresses the prohibition against you, transgress ye likewise against him. But fear Allah, and know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.”

Okay, I could figure out that bin Laden had this passage in mind as I read the transcripts of his address — but it wasn’t until I saw ABC’s transcript that I could confirm that Bin laden did indeed reference that verse directly.

Which powerfully reinforces the idea that bin Laden views his jihad against the US in terms of measured reciprocity — a notion which should give us pause every time we take an action which we would not choose to have taken against us…

And how good are we at this kind of “reading in parallel” — both abroadand at home?

To return to the Detroit affair, as UCLA’s Jean Rosenfeld pointed out, the NYT report on the event contained the phrase “a faction of a group called the Ummah, meaning the Brotherhood” — a completely misleading
translation which might suggest ties with the Egyptian “Muslim Brotherhood” — when the plain meaning of “Ummah” is the transnational community of Muslims. The New York Times is our newspaper of record.

The Times, in turn, was likely paraphrasing the FBI’s own press release, which speaks of “part of a group which calls themselves Ummah (‘the brotherhood’)”. It’s notable, though, that there is no mention of the
“brotherhood” in the entire 45 pages of the actual FBI complaint, written by those more closely involved with the investigation.

What the complaint itself does say is that the name “Ummah” was used as a cover for the movement’s real name, the “Dar-ul-Islam Movement“.

Okay, that’s a beginning…

And still our transcriptions of jihadist messages all too often omit religious content. Indeed, when the Joint Forces Command asked Jim Lacey to edit abu Musab al-Suri’s massive Call to Global Islamic Resistance for publication in English translation, he (rightly) produced a condensed version, but (wrongly, IMO) “also removed most of the repetitive theological justifications undergirding” al-Suri’s project.

[ Zen  ed.  Note: copy released to general public as A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto by Jim Lacey]

Lacey’s work is still a significant contribution, as I intend to detail in an upcoming review. But the omission of almost all trace of al-Suri’s significant messianic-Mahdist content, as you’d expect, leaves me wincing.

We need to be able to “read” jihad — this really shouldn’t need saying, eight years after 9/11, ten after Nairobi and Dar — against its Islamic background.

Always.

Returning as a guest-blogger, Charles Cameron, who is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. The topic is an update on Cameron’s previous cautionary post on the potential implications of an emerging strand of Mahdism among radical Islamists.

( Ed. There will be an update later with two supporting images when I resolve a minor technical issue….)

Iran or Afghanistan? The Black Flags of Khorasan… 

By Charles Cameron.

 i

A couple of days ago I saw a video, posted on YouTube September 12, 2009, titled “The Army Of Imam Mahdi”. It carries the subtitle: “Soon the Army of Imam Mahdi will start its march from Afghanistan towards The Holy Land( Palestine ) and liberate it from the claws of Israel”. I have embedded it for your viewing convenience at the bottom of this post.

This video suggests that I should follow-up on my previous post, “Mahdism in the News” at , in which I noted that the personal representative of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Jurisprudent of (Shi’ite) Iran, had issued a call to neighboring and sympathetic nations to a joint mobilization in preparation for the return of the Mahdi.

That was a Shi’ite affair: but Sunni Muslims also await the Mahdi’s arrival, though not as the returning Shi’ite Twelfth Imam — and this video correspondingly offers us an appropriate parallel to Ali Saeedi’s call — but IMO should not be confused or conflated with it.

ii

I would like to make this much clear at the outset.

It is roughly as likely that the Ayatollah Khamenei would accept a Mahdi from among Al Qaida or the Taliban as it is that Pope Benedict would accept a Christ who staged his Second Coming in support of the fiercely anti-Catholic Rev. Ian Paisley of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

That’s not a scholarly comparison, by the way — more of a powerful hunch. But I think it needs to be said.

The Imam Mahdi of the Shi’ites is himself their Twelfth Imam, who was born in 869 CE and then “occulted” — hidden from mundane sight — centuries ago, returning among us in the fullness of time. He is Shi’a of the Shi’a, Muhammad ibn Hasan ibn ‘Ali, the last and greatest in the great Shi’ite lineage of the Twelve Imams.

iii

It was Joel Richardson’s blog at that first alerted me to this video (hat-tip, Joel). He writes:

This is the first time that I have seen solid proof that al-Qaeda and the Taliban is thoroughly guided by Islam’s demonic eschatology. For those who claim that Mahdism is only held by Shi’a, take note that it is a Sunni group that has created this thoroughly Mahdist video and not Shi’a. Al_Qaeda and the Taliban literally views themselves collectively as the Mahdi’s army carrying the Black Flags that will march to Jerusalem to “liberate” it from the Jews. This is a full blown Al-Qaeda / Mahdi Army recruitment video.

I think that’s a bit of an overstatement. I’d say more cautiously that this is evidence that al-Qaeda and the Taliban can be construed in light of Sunni Mahdist expectation, and may view themselves as the Mahdi’s army — and definitely shows that a Mahdist current is at work in some Sunni circles.

The sheikh who is quoted in the video is from Trinidad.

In a more far reaching post at , Joel also claims that the video was ” released under the al-Sahab label” — the al-Sahab logo appears on some of the footage, but the video itself is not from al-Sahab as far as I can determine — and his subtitle, which may have been provided for him by a WND editor, claims the video contains “footage confirming unity of apocalyptic Muslims”. Given Joel’s reference in the same post to the recent Iranian “mobilization” call on which my own earlier post was also based, I think it is important to emphasize:

(a) that while Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims may both be in expectation of the Mahdi, and may indeed both (sometimes) draw on ahadith about his army coming with black flags out of Khorasan, this does not mean that the two streams of Mahdism can be lumped together as a single movement, and

(b) that this video appears to be a production of sympathizers with the Taliban, rather than an Al-Q / al-Sahab production.

iv

The key passage in the video is a discourse attributed to Sufi Shayk Imran Nazar Hossein, who says:

The true messiah will destroy the false messiah. And when that happens then a Muslim army will liberate the Holy Land. The Prophet said, when you see the black flags coming from the direction of Khurasan, go and join that army. That army has already started its march. They know it, and that’s why they demonize as a terrorist anyone, anyone who supports that army. That army will liberate every single territory in a straight line until it reaches Jerusalem said Muhammad (as). At the heart of Khorasan is Afghanistan, and that’s why they have occupied Afghanistan. When that army liberates every territory on its way to Jerusalem, there will be in that army Imam al-Mahdi, and so the liberation from oppression in the Holy Land is not going to come about through any negotiations…

This would appear to be the Islamic scholar Imran Nazar Hosein (to use the spelling of his name used on the website dedicated to his work ), and the video clip that shows him was very likely taken some years back.

His biography can be found here. He appears to have had a distinguished career, including a period spent as Director of Islamic Studies for the Joint Committee of Muslim Organizations of Greater New York, and is the author of Jerusalem in the Qur’an – An Islamic View of the Destiny of Jerusalem.

v

The video includes clips of various mujahideen firing weapons and practicing martial arts, including one with shots of riders with a black flag…

and an image of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (Baitul Maqdas), which appears to be their final goal.

vi

The hadith about the “black flags of Khorasan” mentioned here are, as I understand it, not strongly supported in the hadith literature, but they are available for quotation by those who wish to suggest that the Mahdist army will come from the general area now known as Afghanistan — or Iran, for that matter — a suggestion that gains interest as Afghanistan — or Iran — gains in geopolitical prominence…

Some quick indicators:

Sheikh Salman al-Oadah — once imprisoned for criticizing the Saudi regime and now one of its approved religious spokesmen — writes:

The hadith about the army with black banners coming out of Khorasan has two chains of transmission, but both are weak and cannot be authenticated. If a Muslim believes in this hadith, he believes in something false. Anyone who cares about his religion and belief should avoid heading towards falsehood.

Some people have used this hadith to support their claim that the Mahdi is from the family of al-Abbas and that the Mahdi is from of the Abbasid dynasty. There were Abbasid Caliphs who went by the name al-Mahdi.

The banners of the Abbasid State were black. It is not hard to see how this weak hadith might have been fabricated or at least tampered with to support the Abbasid cause.

That’s the negative view, to be set against significant Sunni jihadist currents that find the hadith useful.

As David Cook notes in his Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, p. 173-74), Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor, “popularized the position of Afghanistan as the messianic precursor to the future liberation of Palestine” in his book, From Kabul to Jerusalem. Cook also quotes an Egyptian apocalyptic author, Amin Jamal al-Din, as identifying the Taliban with the black flags and the Mahdi’s awaited campaign.

And while Ali-Saeedi, the spokesman for Khamenei, did not mention the Khorasan and black flag hadith in his call for a general mobilization in preparation for the Mahdi’s coming, Cook notes that the hadith in question have earlier been applied to the Iranian revolution of the 1980s under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Timothy Furnish, in his book Holiest Wars: Islamic Manhdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden, discusses the Khorasan (“today eastern Iran and western Afghanistan”) and “black flags” hadith together with various Western theses as to their historicity, concluding that “the mass of hadiths” in general functions like a marketplace in which there is “a saying of the Prophet available off the shelf as a legitimizing agent for just about any position”.

Combine that with the apocalyptic habit of associating apocalyptic texts with events in today’s news, and you have a field ripe for what millennial historian Richard Landes calls “semeiotic arousal”.

vii

The video itself:

I am pleased to have as a guest-blogger, Charles Cameron, who is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

MAHDISM IN THE NEWS

by Charles Cameron

I.

What’s this about the Mahdi and a call for Islamic mobilization?

Al-Arabiya carried what seems to me to be a significant article about the Mahdi, Islam’s end-times savior on August 17th. The report stated that the personal representative of the Supreme Leader was calling on Iran’s neighboring states “to mobilize their forces in preparation for the coming of the savior of Islam”.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s spokesman, Ali Saeedi, said countries like Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan should gather together all their forces in order to make drastic changes to prepare for the coming of al-Mahdi al-Montazar, Arabic for “the awaited guided one.”

“We still have a long way to go in order to achieve this. We have to train honest forces that can stop the obstacles that may hinder the coming of the Mahdi like the United States and Israel,” Saeedi said in statement posted by the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA).

Muslims must unite for Islam’s Savior: Iran, Al-Arabiya, Monday, 17 August 2009

That’s a call to arms, put out by a Shi’ite nation state, and addressed to Sunni and Shi’ite alike — and it drew almost no attention in the western press.We can safely disregard it, right? After all, Mahdism is a Shi’ite phenomenon, and whereas Iran has a conservative rearguard that expects the Mahdi’s soon-coming along with President Ahmadinejad, the Sunni world has no time for that kind of thing.

Except that bin Laden seems to share the apocalyptic expectation, if not the exclusively Shi’ite details — the view that the Mahdi has already been born once, into a Shi’ite family, and is presently in occultation prior to his soon return.

So I am not arguing that we should worry too much about Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan all deciding to join forces with the Iranian Republican Guard any time soon. But I am arguing that we should be alert to Mahdism — and more generally, Messianism — as a contemporary driver.

II.

It so happens that Steve Coll was on the radio again this week, in a rebroadcast of a talk he gave in April, and here’s some of what he had to say on the subject of Osama bin Laden:

It’s a mistake to see him entirely as a political, or even to some extent mostly, as a political leader. He has a purchase on these grievances and he understands them and I’m sure he feels them — but he’s also a millenarian: he believes that he’s been called by God to wage a war that will only conclude at the end of time. He hasn’t built a political movement, he doesn’t offer any social services, he doesn’t build a hospital — he thinks he’s fighting until the end of time, that he’s carrying out a narrative that’s pre-ordained, and that his role is to awaken God’s followers to their righteous role so that they can pass to the next phase. And so there is this interaction of millenarian, apocalyptic thinking on the one hand — which justifies all violence — and this sort of terrestrial political critique on the other. And what happens when you read his statements in the west is that, well, everyone can understand the political critique, so that gets all the attention — and people’s eyes glaze over at the rest because it’s a little bit hard to digest. But when you read it in full it’s a very, very important aspect of why he’s doing what he’s doing and who he thinks he is.

Steve Coll, talking about his book The Bin Ladens for the World Affairs Council.

Should that surprise us?

Not if we noted Bin Laden’s quotation of the “Gharqad tree hadith” — which specifies the nature of the end times conflict:

Doomsday shall not come until Muslims fight Jews. A Jew would be hiding behind a tree or a stone. The tree or the stone would say, O Muslim, O subject of God, there is a Jew behind me come and kill him. The only exception is [Gharqad] tree is a tree that belongs to Jews.

and his comment:

Whoever claims that there is lasting peace with the Jews is a disbeliever of what the prophet, may the peace and blessings of God upon him, said. Our conflict with the enemies of Islam will continue until Doomsday.

No definite timeline is given, and bin Laden also remarks that his father waited forty years for the Mahdi — and indeed set aside $12 million to support him on his arrival — but the appeal is to end-times expectation,

FWIW, this isn’t the only time bin Laden has quoted the Gharqad tree hadith, and it is also quoted in the Charter of the Hamas — for more on the topic, see Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs’ Square, pp 19-21, and watch this chilling MEMRI video from of Sheikh Muhammad Al-Arifi, speaking on Al Aqsa TV, September 2008.

III.

Why is eschatological or apocalyptic rhetoric significant?

It is an accelerant. Simply put, it is a force-multiplier, acting on morale via the sphere of religion, by providing divine sanction for violence — zeal with a deadline.
.
Apocalyptic expectation is in part the expectation that “all the injustices of the old world will be put right” very soon, as Damian Thompson noted, and it creates “an especially potent form of charismatic authority, one that rubs off on ordinary believers as well as the prophet.” This extraordinary empowerment of the individual believer comes about because “foreknowledge about one of the most important subjects imaginable — the fate of the planet — creates a special, even intimate, bond between those who share it”:

In every case, the most striking feature of the millennial theodicy is the contrast between present misery and the glory to come: the latter justifies and makes tolerable the formed.

It may also justify and make tolerable the use of violence in the lead-up to apocalypse, as it clearly does in both the Shi’ite call to arms and the Sunni hadith quoted above. And furthermore, in all these cases the misery is the fruit of sin, whereas the glory is the glory of God.

The nature of millennial expectation is conditioned by culture, yet cross-cultural in its basic patterns, and transcendent in its authority. Thompson goes on to note that “the anticipation of violence does not constitute a cost of millenarianism, since the blood being shed will be that of the unsaved” — and Kerry Noble put the point quite succinctly in his retrospective account of a Christian millenarian movement he later left:

I was not looking forward to the coming war, but I was looking forward to the Kingdom of God that was to follow. That’s how many of us rationalized being soldiers of God. We wanted peace, but if purging had to precede peace, then let the purging begin.

Ahmadinejad or bin Laden might say much the same.

IV.

Who is awake to this pervasive strand of eschatological thinking, among the Shi’a, among the Sunni, and among ourselves?

I cannot speak for the intelligence community, except to say that a rational, secular analyst monitoring these matters is liable to note the “blips” of open source intel but miss the fire that underlies them. Or again, as Steve Coll put it,

people’s eyes glaze over at the rest because it’s a little bit hard to digest.

That’s not a feature — that’s a bug.

Some on the Christian right get it, because they live in the apocalyptic realm themselves. The two Joels, Rosenberg (author of Epicenter) and Richardson (author of The Islamic Antichrist), were among the few to blog Ali Saeedi’s comments, with Joel Rosenberg picking up on a piece on WND that quotes Joel Richardson, whose own blog,  Joel’s Trumpet, monitors Islamic apocalyptic closely from a Christian apocalyptic perspective.

But short of actual apocalyptic belief of one’s own — which will generally cause one to disparage if not dismiss the equivalent apocalypses of others — it takes an ear open to the whisperings of myth and dream, a mind open to the logic of music and poetry to understand such thinking, such imaginings.

Michael Vlahos of Johns Hopkins, the author of  Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change, certainly gets it, noting that 9/11 was the work of Holy Warriors “passionately steeped in ancient Muslim apocalyptic” — and that we responded “with out own brand of American apocalyptic”. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, senior members of Clinton’s National Security Council get it — noting in their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, that “so much of what was heard from al-Qaeda after the attacks sounded to Americans like gibberish that many chords of the apocalypse were missed.”

Ali Allawi knows it, and dedicated his 2007 talk at the Jamestown Foundation to noting the “under the radar” existence and significance of Mahdist millennialism in Iraq.

But who else?

V.

When the overtly millennial year two thousand CE was approaching, Boston University hosted the Center or Millennial Studies, brainchild of Richard Landes of BU and Stephen O’Leary of USC, and for almost a decade scholars gathered for conferences to share the commonalities and differences between millennial movements from before the birth of Christ to the coming century and beyond.

When the roll-over to 2000 passed without major apocalyptic incident, the Center closed — but the millennial season was not over, it has only just begun.

Just this month I saw a “birther” — someone who believes President Obama was born in Kenya, and is thus not eligible to be president of the United States — tying that position in with Joel Richardson’s “middle eastern” antichrist: apocalyptic fervor once again enhancing a political stance. There will be more…

We will keep seeing millennial outpourings of zeal — and perhaps, though not always, violence — at least until 2012, when Mayan calendar enthusiasts (and apparently some readers of the jihadist online magazine, Jihad Recollections, issue 3) expect apocalyptic changes. And if the world staggers through to 2013 then at least to 2033, when many Christians will no doubt wish to celebrate the 2000th anniversary of the crucifixion and resurrection of their Savior. And should that not suffice for an ending of an age, at least till the turn of the next Islamic century in 1500 AH or 2076 CE and arrival of that century’s mujaddid or “reformer”. Or indeed the climactic battle between Islam (represented by the Mahdi) and Buddhism, predicted, curiously enough, in one of the Dalai Lama’s preferred texts — the Kalachakra or Wheel of Time Tantra — to take place in 2424 CE..

VI.

Perhaps we should take a hint from the Kalachakra, which in addition to positing an end times war, suggests that this is no more than a “a metaphor for the inner battle of deep blissful awareness … against unawareness and destructive behavior”. Gandhi said much the same about the battle of Kurukshetra in the Bhagavad Gita.

One might wish that all apocalyptic believers felt that way: they don’t.

Blogfriend Charles Cameron alerted me to a very interesting and important post by Dr. Tim Furnish, a professor of Islamic Studies and an expert in Mahdism in particular, who managed to contact and interview a spokesman of Ansar al-Mahdi, the shadowy, Shiite-based Mahdist movement in Iraq ( Jamestown Foundation report here).

Father Knows Best (Especially When He’s the Mahdi)

….3) Is al-Mahdi the same as the Twelfth Imam returned from ghaybah?
Yes, it is quite true to say that Imam al Mahdi is the twelfth Imam Mohammed bin Hassan (p) returned from ghaybah, and also true to say that his son Sayid al Yamani (Ahmad al Hassan) also can be named Mahdi.
4) Is al-Yamani’s group Jund al-Sama’ or Ansar al-Mahdi?
al Yamani group called Ansar al-Mahdi or Ansar Allah, supporters of Imam Mahdi (p) and supporters of Sayid Ahmed Hassan al Yamani; the messenger  and guardian and the Imam Mahdi (p).
We are unrelated to the so-called (Jund al-Sama’ ), and there is great difference between us. Ansar al-Mahdi say that Ahmed Hassan (p) is the promised Yamani, a branch of Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p) and his son , while the group Jund al-Sama’ deny the existence of Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p) in total.
5) Do al-Yamani and his group have any connection to Moqtada al-Sadr and the Jaysh al-Mahdi?
No relationship whatsoever between us and Moqtada al Sadr and his army Jaysh al-Mahdi, in a passage names as it is known.
6) What is al-Yamani’s opinion of the American-sponsored Iraq government in Baghdad?
The government has to be based on the principle of the Governorship of God and must derive its legitimacy from God and from Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p).
7) What is al-Yamani’s opinion of vilayet-i faqih in Iran?

Not valid as the answer became clear to you from the previous question.

8 ) What sort of state in Iraq does al-Yamani envision? A caliphate? A Mahdiyah?
Government, which al Yamani see it is the government based on the principle of Governorship of God. Whatever you want to call it as the term crossing, but the lesson in reality is substance and meaning.
9) What will be the Mahdi’s role once he is revealed?

Imam al Mahdi will reveal justice and installment and will be published uniformity across the globe, and re-link the right relationship of God with humans after regrettably interrupted by the ego.

Read the rest here.

Historically, the world has previously seen a Mahdist regime in the Sudan in the 19th century, a mystical and xenophobic movement that slaughtered an Anglo-Egyptian expedition led by General Charles “Chinese” Gordon and was later destroyed in retaliation by the British under the implacable Lord Kitchener ( with a young Winston Churchill on hand, watching Sudanese Mahdist cavalry charge suicidally straight into British cannon and machine gun fire, swords in one hand and Qurans in the other). The terrorist group led by Juhaiman Saif al Otaiba  that seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and that were killed to the last man by elite KSA troops ( RUMINT says a  hastily converted platoon of French special-ops – whatever, dead is still dead) were Sunni Mahdists.

As I understand Mahdism, the Mahdi would transcend the normal strictures of the Quran and have the power to set them aside or issue new ones and in this fashion, Mahdism would not be unlike the claims put forth by the leaders of apocalyptic Christian sects in the West, famously David Khoresh’s Branch Davidians or splinter groups among fundamentalist Mormons. The relatively eucumenical attitude of Ansar al-Mahdi reported by Furnish might be one example of “transcending” customary beliefs.