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[ by Charles Cameron — there were just too many dots for me to connect, I guess — plus Harry Potter, extra!! ]
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Okay, I’ve already explored the Mahdist end times video that Tamerlan Tsarnaev aka “muazseyfullah” liked on Youtube [1, 2, 2a, and 3] — and when I visited that site on April 19 it also included a link to the Vinnie Paz video, End of Days, which I discussed separately [4] — but what I didn’t know was that there was a third end times scenario, of interest to Tamerlan’s younger brother Dzhokhar — the “Zombie Apocalypse” believe it or not — about which he dreamed, well, often, and tweeted at least twice:

With all due respect to Dan Drezner and his Night of the Living Wonks, I just haven’t been following zombies too closely — and am only just coming to understand the Centers for Disease Control and their Zombie Preparedness campaign, the US Navy and its zombie deployment guide and the Department of Homeland Security with its zombie apocalypse simulation at a HALO Counter-Terrorism Summit in San Diego were all just portents and prophecies of an upcoming zombie jihad!

So long, fellas!

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The Vinnie Paz video has now been removed from Tamerlan’s YouTube page, although you can find it elsewhere — and so has the Harry Potter video that was there the first time I looked: someone has been tidying up.

Happily the Harry Potter video too is still available, although no longer linked at Tamerlan’s “muazseyfullah” YouTube site. It’s by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed — who clearly dislikes Magic and is proud to be a Muggle.

Here it is, for your further edification:

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DoubleQuote Sources:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, December 2012

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, July 2012

[ by Charles Cameron — concerning the Dajjal, the Muslim antichrist — and introducing “jottings” ]
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That’s witty — Wikipeetia, a version of Wikipedia that you may some day find yourself reading if you mis-spell a search term.

Like, if you write Entichrist.

Fascinating.

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Jottings:

I am hoping to make Jottings a continuing series of brief posts, some serious and some light-hearted, that release the toxins of fascination and abhorrence from my system rapidly, ie without too much time spent in research. Jottings — hey, my degree was in Theology, Mother of the Sciences — derives from the English “jot” — and thence from the Greek iota and Hebrew yod, see Wikipedia on jots and tittles.

[ by Charles Cameron — how to tell an authentic Mahdist “black banner” — from a false flag, perhaps? ]
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There has been considerable talk about black flags featuring the Shahada:

This is the creed of Islam, and reads, “There is not God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah.”

And more recently, of black flags featuring the seal of Muhammad:

Will McCants wrote of this:

When the ISI adopted the flag, it issued a statement in 2007 explaining its design. In the statement, the group relates oral traditions portraying Mohammad’s battle flag as either black or white (other traditions say yellow) with the words “No god but God, Mohammad is the messenger of God” written on it. The ISI chose black for its flag because most accounts say the Prophet’s flag was black, and chose the Muslim testimony of faith because many accounts said it was written on the Prophet’s flag.

For the second half of the testimony of faith, “Mohammad is the messenger of God,” the ISI reproduces the Prophet’s seal. They contend that the seal’s design is preserved in Ottoman manuscripts and its three-lined text, “God/Messenger/Mohammad,” is mentioned in oral traditions about the Prophet. They have added this seal to their flag, they explain, because some Muslim scholars say that it appeared on the Prophet’s flag.

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I therefore thought it worth noting that al-Islam.org — which presents Islam “with particular emphasis on Twelver Shia Islamic school of thought” — has a section on The Slogan on the Flag of the Uprising in Chapter 7, The Uprising of the Imam of the Time (‘atfs) of Najmuddin Tabasi‘s An Overview of the Mahdi’s (‘atfs) Government, which reads:

Every government has a flag by which it can be recognized, and uprisings and revolutions also have particular flags whose logos bespeak of the objectives of their leaders. The global revolution of Hadrat al-Mahdi (‘a) has also a specific flag on which a slogan has been inscribed. Of course, although there are differences with respect to the slogan on his flag, there is a common point in all the statements and that is: It invites the people to obey him (‘a).

Now, it would suffice to mention some pertinent instances:

It has been recorded in a hadith: “It is thus written on the flag of Hadrat al-Mahdi (‘atfs): ‘Listen and obey him’.”

Elsewhere, we read: “The slogan of al-Mahdi’s (‘atfs) flag is al-bay‘atu lillah (the allegiance for the sake of Allah).”

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Just a little different, eh?

Well, that’s it — just a footnote to ponder.

[ by Charles Cameron — because the Bene Gesserit understand the power of Mahdism and jihad ]
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Further reading:

Frank Herbert, Appendix II: The Religion of Dune

Peter Tarchin, The ‘Dune Hypothesis’

Peter Tarchin, Psychohistory and Cliodynamics

Peter Tarchin, Science on Screen: DUNE

Peter Tarchin, How to Overthrow an Empire – and Replace It with Your Own

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

Doris Lessing, Canopus in Argos: Archives

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As T Greer, friend of this blog, notes in a comment to that last Tarchin post, his explorations would fit in nicely with the work at Grand Blog Tarkin

[ by Charles Cameron — a single word in a very small book, and the world that hangs in the balance ]
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I’ve just read Hegghammer & Lacroix on The Meccan Rebellion. At 78 pages and 5.3 x 8.3 inches, it’s a tiny book in hardback and quite a delight to hold — the electricity in my city block went out for a while the other day, and I took pleasure in reading it out under the sun — and it contains, in essence, the two authors’ paper, Rejectionist Islamism in Saudi Arabia (Int. J. Middle East Stud. 39 (2007), 103–122) and a companion piece by Lacroix titled Between Revolution and Apoliticism: Nasir al-Din al-Albanai and his Impact on the Shaping of Contemporary Salafism.

Blog posts tend to present a point of view – whether to preach to the choir, promote it to unbelievers, stir up trouble, or simply add detail or a fresh angle to an existing narrative. Seldom do they ask questions.

My own instincts — in line with Madhyamaka as I briefly encountered it in the teachings of Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel — lead me to leave some kinds of questions open: I use my DoubleQuotes format to set the juices flowing, by providing nudges to thought rather than outright statements – but on this occasion I have a question to ask, and as it’s too long for Twitter I’ll post it here.

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Here’s my question. Juhayman al-Utaybi believed one of his companions, Muhammad al-Qahtani, was the Mahdi, the awaited Coming One of Islam — and that, in our authors’ words, “consecrating him [al-Qahtani] in Mecca on the turn of the hijra century” would ”precipitate the end of the world”.

In my view, a great deal rests on that simple word, “precipitate”. Would “usher in” do as well? Or “mark the beginning of” perhaps? Or is the idea of forcing the hand of God present, as it is in Reuven Paz’ phrase, “hot-wiring the apocalypse”?

There’s a lot riding on that issue: whether or not it is possible to force the hand of God, to accelerate destiny, to hasten apocalypse.

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Okay, let’s go light-footed into this issue. In The Question in the DC Comics universe, we have a character described thus:

During service in Vietnam Jeremiah Hatch got insane, he began to hear the voice that urged him to do the will of the Lord by serving the Devil. He thought that his mission was “to hasten the corruption, to nurture the foulness until the almighty has no choice but to rain down fire and brimstone and overthrow the cities and the plain and all the inhabitants of cities and all that grows on the ground…”

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Hastening the apocalypse — it’s an idea you can find in the world of DC Comics, but it was Israeli analyst Dr Reuven Paz who presented it to us in canonical “national security” form in his paper, Hot-wiring the Apocalypse, where his actual words are:

The Jihadi and nationalist insurgency in Iraq, which feeds the motivations and enthusiasm of growing number of Islamist youth to search for Jihad, look for the “culture of death and sacrifice,” and self-radicalize themselves, is another factor in the growing sense of Jihadi pride, which also hotwires the sense of the apocalypse.

That’s a faily imprecise form of words (‘The sense of apocalypse”) from a careful scholar, and Paz applies the concept in a specifically Sunni context. This, however, doesn’t prevent a popular Christian writer such as Joel Rosenberg from applying the same idea to the Shi’ite rulers of Iran:

Only when we understand the eschatology currently driving Iranian foreign policy, can we truly begin to understand how dangerous the regime in Tehran is. Only then can we fully appreciate how events like the revolution underway in Egypt only encourages Twelvers like Khamenei to take still further provocative and perilous actions to hasten the coming of the Twelfth Imam.

So the idea is afloat that both Sunni jihadists in Iraq and the Shi’ite state of Iran ay be about the “hastening” business.

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Blog-friend Dr. Timothy Furnish, as I’ve noted here before, rebuts the application of Paz’ concept by Rosenberg, Glenn Beck and others to the situation in Iran, saying of it:

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?)”

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And if I might ask a follow-up question — is the first of the Juhayman Letters, which is devoted to the theme of the coming of the Mahdi, available in English?