zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — a chance to have Tim Furnish’s recent writings in book form, plus a couple of recent apocalyptic issues bcoz apocalypse hasn’t gone away, oh no ]
.

Friend, blog friend and colleague Dr Tim Furnish recently tweeted:

I have two new books coming out this fall: one on #Islam & #eschatology, one on its history, doctrines & US policies: pic.twitter.com/irihInY7Cg

— Timothy Furnish, PhD (@Occidentaljihad) July 23, 2015

I hope to review these two volumes of Tim’s essays here on Zenpundit.

**

Plus Two:

While we’re on the topic of apocalypse..

Sara A. Carter of the American Media Institute posted on the 28th on USA Today:

Islamic State recruitment document seeks to provoke ‘end of the world’

An apparent Islamic State recruitment document found in Pakistan’s lawless tribal lands reveals that the extremist group has grand ambitions of building a new terrorist army in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and triggering a war in India to provoke an Armageddon-like “end of the world.”

The 32-page Urdu-language document obtained by American Media Institute (AMI) and reviewed by USA TODAY details a plot to attack U.S. soldiers as they withdraw from Afghanistan and target American diplomats and Pakistani officials.

AMI obtained the document from a Pakistani citizen with connections inside the Pakistani Taliban and had it independently translated from Urdu by Harvard researcher and translator Mustafa Samdani. The Pakistani’s identity was shared with USA TODAY, which has agreed not to identify him publicly because of concerns for his safety.
The document was reviewed by three U.S. intelligence officials, who said they believe the document is authentic based on its unique markings and the fact that language used to describe leaders, the writing style and religious wording match other documents from the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS. They asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The undated document, titled “A Brief History of the Islamic State Caliphate (ISC), The Caliphate According to the Prophet,” seeks to unite dozens of factions of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban into a single army of terror. It includes a never-before-seen history of the Islamic State, details chilling future battle plans, urges al-Qaeda to join the group and says the Islamic State’s leader should be recognized as the sole ruler of the world’s 1 billion Muslims under a religious empire called a “caliphate.”

“Accept the fact that this caliphate will survive and prosper until it takes over the entire world and beheads every last person that rebels against Allah,” it proclaims. “This is the bitter truth, swallow it.”

Retired Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who also reviewed the document, said it “represents the Islamic State’s campaign plan and is something, as an intelligence officer, I would not only want to capture, but fully exploit. It lays out their intent, their goals and objectives, a red flag to which we must pay attention.”

That. friends, is the Ghazwa e-Hind, which we’ve been discussing on occasion here on Zenpundit for several years:

http://zenpundit.com/?p=4462

http://zenpundit.com/?p=12683

http://zenpundit.com/?p=12756

http://zenpundit.com/?p=20592

http://zenpundit.com/?p=31402

http://zenpundit.com/?p=44267

Look for Tim Furnish to have more to say about this document and its implications

**

And…

from a Jewish source quoted and discussed in the Times of israel on March 11 this year — yes, I’m playing catch up here — comes an apocalyptic call for two nuclear attacks — with a specific reference to the coming of the Messiah in the final paragraph:

Op-ed calls on Israel to nuke Germany, Iran<

Right-wing media outlet Israel National News published an opinion piece Tuesday calling on Israel to launch nuclear bombs at Iran and Germany, only days after the outlet came under fire for publishing a piece accusing a war widow of killing her husband over her pro-peace views.

In the opinion article published Tuesday, the author claims that only through nuclear annihilation of Iran and Germany, with 20 or 30 nuclear bombs each, can Israelis prevent the state’s destruction.

“If Israel does not walk in the ways of God’s Bible,” author Chen Ben-Eliyahu wrote in Hebrew, “it will receive a heavy punishment of near complete destruction and doom and only a few will be saved.”

One of Israel’s missions is to remember the crimes of Amalek, a tribe representative of pure evil in the Bible, whom Jews are commanded to obliterate. Among those descended from the band, the author writes, are Iranian leaders Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and current President Hassan Rouhani.

“They don’t miss an opportunity to discuss the need for the annihilation of Israel,” he wrote.

To combat this Israel must respond in kind, Ben-Eliyahu declared. “To an existential threat we must respond with an existential threat,” he wrote, “not with speeches in Congress. We must make it clear to the Iranians that Israel will wipe out their nuclear program and Tehran and Isfahan as well.”

“If [an enemy] rises up to destroy you, rise earlier to destroy him: twenty, thirty nuclear bombs will do to assure the job gets done,” he continued.

He also called on the Jewish people to remember its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis and exact revenge on Germany, now a staunch ally of Israel.

When the Messiah comes, Ben-Eliyahu wrote, Israel will reverse the Final Solution. “Twenty, thirty atomic bombs on Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Dresden, Dortmund and so on to assure the job gets done. And the land will be quiet for a thousand years,” he wrote.

Of note here: The phrase rendered here “If [an enemy] rises up to destroy you, rise earlier to destroy him” is not a remark of Ben-Eliyahu — he is quoting the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 72a:

Im ba l’hargekha, hashkem l’hargo

variously translated “If he come to slay thee, forestall by slaying him<" in the Soncino edition and more colloquially "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him (first)" on the AJC site.

[ by Charles Cameron — I was (unexpectedly) almost totally deaf at the time, so the videos of the conference allowed me a second go-around, for which I’m profoundly grateful ]
.

Richard Landes, opening the Boston conference

**

With what I hope will turn out to be the wisdom of a fool, I am going to propose the importance of (a) Richard Landes‘ now defunct Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, and (b) its recent resurgence as a single and singular conference on Apocalyptic Hopes, Millennial Dreams and Global Jihad.

Bear with me, I’m an enthusiast.

**

Gregory Bateson died thirty-five years ago July 4th, the day I started writing this post — a fact I only know because I’m inclined to associate the Boston Conference as one of the great cross-disciplinary and initially underestimated conferences alongside the early Macy conferences on Cybernetics, in which Gregory Bateson was so significant a partner — or the seminal Eranos Conferences attended by the friends of CG Jung.

The Macy conferences ushered in the computer age, the Eranos conferences celebrated the highest level of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary exchanges between psychologists, philosophers, religious scholars and physicists — while the Millennial Studies conferences focused on a studiously ignored area of knowledge that has swung into heightened significance via the arrival on scene of Al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

**

Participants, Macy and Eranos:

The Macy Cybernetics Conferences included such participants as William Ross Ashby, William Grey Walter, Kurt Lewin, J. C. R. Licklider, Warren S. McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Oskar Morgenstern, F. S. C. Northrop, Walter Pitts, I. A. Richards, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener.

The Eranos Conferences included presentations by Carl Gustav Jung, Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, Wolfgang Pauli, Karl Kerényi, Erich Neumann, Henry Corbin, G van der Leeuw, Louis Massignon, Gilles Quispel, Hellmut Wilhelm, Hugo Rahner, Erwin Schrödinger, Gershom Scholem, Heinrich Zimmer and Martin Buber.

In each case, the ideation was intensely and deliberately cross-disciplinary, and the importance of the series of conferences only widely apparent at a later date.

**

Participants, Center for Millennial Studies:

In the case of the Boston conference on Apocalyptic Hopes, Millennial Dreams and Global Jihad, the series in whicb it partakes is that of the new defunct Center for Millennial Studies, an extraordinary organization which studied millennial movements from the Dead Sea Scrolls via the Taiping Rebellion (20-30 million dead), and the Siege of Mecca (1979 CE), to Aum Shinrikyo, Waco and Y2K — with implications for future events at least as far as the 2000th anniversary of the crucifixion in the 2030s and the start of the next Islamic century in the 2070s.

Among the attendees at this year’s conference were Richard Landes, William McCants, Graeme Wood, Timothy Furnish, Cole Bunzel, Jeffrey M. Bale, myself, David Cook, JM Berger, Itamar Marcus, David Redles, Paul Berman, Charles Strozier, Brenda Brasher, Mia Bloom and Charles Jacobs. Husain Haqqani was expected to attend and intended to speak about the Ghazwa e-Hind but couldn’t make it, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali cancelled her appearance for security reasons as a result of the Garland, TX, shooting the day before.

Speakers at previous CMS conferences included, in additiopn to some of the above, Steven O’Leary, Michael Barkun, Albert Baumgarten, Chip Berlet, Bruce Lincoln, Moshe Idel, Michael Tolkin, Gershom Gorenberg, Damian Thompson and Robert Jay Lifton.

**

You can see the entire series of CMS 2015 Conference videos

In particular and given my own special interests, I recommend the talks by

You can follow those up with such friends and worthies as Tim Furnish, JM Berger, and (on Palestinian messaging) Itamar Marcus — Itamar’s brilliant presentation shifted my thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian question by about ten degrees.

My own contribution is

**

My recent discombobulations (see previous post) and an over-busy writing schedule have prevented me from posting separately on each of the talks at the conference, which I had hoped to do — but McCant’s forthcoming book will soon be with us, and this brief introduction (and my three reading lists) will hopefully provide background while we await it.

The book I brought with me, for (heh!) light reading, was A. Azfar Moin‘s The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam. Path-breaking, scholarly, intelligent, unfailingly curious, written with grace — a true delight!

[ by Charles Cameron — concluding post in 3-part biblio series ]
.

I wanted to complete my series of posts, begun before the Boston conference, providing readings of use in understanding new religious movements, and “end times” movements in particular.

A dozen or more books on NRMs, apocalyptic, and violence

A dozen or so books on Islamic apocalyptic

This, the third and last post in that series, contains additions to the first of the two posts above, as recommended by scholars on a relevant mailing list I subscribe to.

**

Here are the comments made by three scholars of new religious movements in response to my request:

Gordon Melton:

I feel some need to call attention to the vast literature on millennialisms that have no violence connected with them. I have been working for the past few years, for example, on Pentecostalism, an intensely millennial movement that spread globally in its first generation with no hint of violence. In fact the great majority of millennial groups have had no violence connected with them, while the majority of violent nrms have had no particular millennial orientation. In asking why a few millennial groups turned violent, and others had violence inflicted upon them, we must always deal with the issue of why so many, from the Millerites to the modern Catholic Marian groups, have no hint of violent tendencies in spite of vibrant millennial expectations.

John Hall:

I want to emphasize again that religious violence is not restricted to apocalyptic/millenarian groups, a point I developed at length in ‘Religion and violence from a sociological perspective,’ [in Jerryson, Juergensmeyer, and Kitts’s 2013 Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence] which is not focused on religious movements per se, and thus, may have been missed by list members.

Jean Rosenfeld:

In How the Millennium Comes Violently, Cathy Wessinger has a chapter on the instructive case of Chen Tao, which I have used in class to demonstrate that even when the authorities are excited by the possibility of a group suicide, informed individuals from the group and outside can reassure everyone that nothing will happen. Even in the case of a very violent apocalyptic group, CSA, the collaboration of an insider (Noble) with the besieging authority (FBI HRT director Coulsen) averted a bloody denouement. In contrast, arguably peaceful groups, the Waco Davidians and the Rua Kenana group in North Island, NZ, were violently confronted by misguided (and frightened) authorities.

**

Further readings suggested by a variety of scholars:

Bromley & Melton, eds, Cults, Religion, and Violence
John Hall, Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History
Benjamin Zeller, Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion
James Lewis, ed, The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death
Eileen Barker, forthcoming, The Making is a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?

And some titles with brief comments:

Peter Webster, Rua and the Maori Millennium
— incredible early study by anthropologist Webster of an Antipodean “Koresh”
Paul Clark, Hauhau: the Pai Marire Search for Maori Identity
— how the wars that founded New Zealand began in response to N.Z.’s most influential prophet movement
GW Trompf, ed., Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements
— relevant today, oddly enough, and insightful)
Jean Rosenfeld, The Island Broken in Two Halves: Land and Renewal Movements Among the Maori of New Zealand
— 4-5 major nativist millennial/apoc. movements and Land Wars; NZ has some of the richest, most copious data on these subjects
Sylvia Thrupp. ed., Millennial Dreams in Action: Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements
— includes chapters on early N.A. Indian movements, lest we forget

[ by Charles Cameron — what hipbone thinking / gaming could and should bring to the natsec table ]
.

I have just been browsing the Institute for the Study of War‘s report on its ISIS wargame, and thought I’d wargame ISIS a bit myself, using my DoubleQuotes game.

**

The ISW report, in its 32 pages, barely mentions religious drivers, features one use of the word “apocalyptic” in a pretty non-specific sentence that implies nothing about what that word implies in terms of religious instensity — “ISIS intends to expand its Caliphate and eventually incite a global apocalyptic war” — and generally focuses on everything but “knowing” the enemy..

If they’d invited me and added a round or three of DoubleQuotes during a coffee break, I’d have been grateful for the coffee and the visit to DC, and very quickly played these two double-moves:

For wide context:

Upper panel: the Taiping Rebellion, an apocalyptic (in the true sense) movement in China, 1850 to 1864, with between 20 million and 30 million dead — as a reminder that apocalyptic movements can have, ahem, far-reaching consequences.

Lower panel: Refugees fleeing the Islamic State, a movement whose apocalyptic (in the true sense) strategy includes a focus on great end-times battle to be fought at Dabiq in Syria, Dabiq being the name of their English lnaguage magazine.

Read into the record in support of these two visuals:

Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan

William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State

And with narrower focus:

here, on the brutality levels permitted in two rival jihadist groups in Syria:

Upper panel: the Islamic State brutally executes British aid worker Alan Hemming

Lower panel: AQ affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra points out that he was under an offer of protection binding on all Muslims.

There would be background reading to explore and expand that DoubleQuote too. But the main point is: the contest of ideas, not simply that of troop movements and materiel, would have been part of the picture.

**

The Atlantic Council has also held two wargaming sessions on IS [1, 2], but again the insights to be gained into the Islamic State’s end-times motivations and their implications are almost nonexistent:

ISIS carries the seeds of its own destruction primarily because it has an extremely small constituency within Islamist populations around the world, an apocalyptic vision, an unsustainable strategy of us-against-theworld, and a failed governance project.

And that’s about it.

**

McCants’ presentation at the Boston conference, and his forthcoming book (above), both make it clear that the apocalyptic stress of today’s “caliphate” has morphed significantly from the more immediate apocaypticism in IS’ Zarqawi-era predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq.

And for a nuanced understanding of time-urgency in apocalyptic rhetoric, Stephen O’Leary‘s Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric is the definitive work.

So when do we start introducing ideational war (and/or peace) games alongside our games of brute force?

And how do you factor esprit, morale, and “angels, rank on rank” (Quran 8.9, 89.22) into troop movements and so forth?

Hint: they’re force-multipliers.

[ by Charles Cameron — negative hope in light of an eventual (hoped for) positive outcome ]
.

Hairpin with bend — photo credit Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 3.0

**

The particulars here have to do with the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage, but what interests me is the combination of eschatological expectation and the wish for the world to “slide from bad to worse” morally speaking..

Baptist pastor Clint Arthur:

It isn’t easy for Christians to identify a silver lining to Friday’s ruling that is worth celebration; unless you’re a premillennialist.

Whereas postmillennialism believes that Christ will return to earth when the gospel has triumphed over unbelief and conquered the globe, premillennialists aren’t holding their breath. Premills teach that the world will slide from bad to worse until it is so irrecoverably bad that only Jesus can fix it. That will be his cue to return and establish a rule of peace, righteousness, and sanity in the courts.

So, it is on days like this that I read with relish passages that others may dismiss as pessimistic. I prefer to see regress in society as a welcome sign that the Bible is accurate, and that Jesus is coming soon.

From both “rhetorical pattern” and “eschatological studies” points of view, that’s quite something to ponder.