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A while back, Charles Cameron had a post on the Ghazwa E Hind that served as my introduction to an oddball Pakistani agitator named  Zaid Hamid.  The colorful Mr. Hamid seems to be Pakistan’s fully militarized version of Glenn Beck fused with an Islamist George Friedman, with perhaps an astrologer and Rip Taylor thrown in for good measure. In discussing this figure, ZP commenter Omar offered:

….But this clown has serious backers. The deep state systematically uses these clowns to prepare the “information space” for their plans. ..and they are not kidding around. 

Zaid Hamid made a recent appearance in another post by Charles, so I felt inspired to look at him more closely and discovered that Hamid, who has a fondness for 4GW verbiage, has his own think tank, Brasstacks which publishes “geostrategic analysis”, largely about alleged “Hindu Zionist” (?) conspiracies to destroy Pakistan. These papers are fascinating, in a car-crash sort of way, much like a political intelligence letter from the LaRouchies. There is also a blog by Hamid, where his latest post remarkably declares Pakistan’s late dictator, the ruthless General Zia ul-Haq, a “shaheed”.

My question, since Hamid appears to stir controversy and criticism within Pakistan, is what is his real level of influence in Paskistani society? Comments welcome.

[ by Charles “told you so” Cameron — Pew figures for Mahdist expectation, also the Second Coming, Israel, and the potential influence of apocalyptic ideation on foreign policy ]
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The World’s Muslims: Unity and Diversity, p. 65

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I am Qualit, not Quant by nature, really much more interested in the workings of the imagination that in the aggregates of poll responses, so it’s a bit like pulling teeth for me to report on a Pew report — but in this case I can legitimately say “I told you so”, which massively outweighs the reluctance I might otherwise feel…

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Recently, Pew has been including questions about the expectation of the Mahdi in some of its reports, and even Tim Furnish — who wrote the book on Mahdist movements and has long been saying we neglect them at our peril — even Tim was surprised at how widespread Mahdist expectation is, as reported in their just released The World’s Muslims: Unity and Diversity. In a post aptly titled Don’t Leave a Live (or Occulted) Mahdi Out of Your Calculations, Tim says the report contains “The most notable — indeed, strikingly important — news” in the form of “fascinating — and disturbing — data on belief in the Mahdi’s imminent (in one’s lifetime) return.”

See graphic above.

I recommend you read Tim’s analysis for the full range of his points — I won’t, for instance, be touching on what he says about Turkey — here I am going to select a couple of his key issues, and make just a point or two of my own.

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Furnish:

Of the 23 countries whose Muslim citizens were polled, nine have majorities which expect the Mahdi in their lifetimes, with the overall average percentage at 41.8% … it is safe to extrapolate this percentage to Islam as a whole; ergo, 42% of 1.6 billion = 672 million Muslims who believe in the Mahdi’s imminent return! This is FAR greater than I had supposed.

Furnish also notes that Iran, the world’s most intensely Shi’ite nation and the one whose President has been speaking openly of Mahdist expectation, is not even included among the 23 countries Pew sampled.

Simply put, we have been blind to a very real phenomenon, and now we have a statistical alarm call to wake us up.

More subtly: there’s a difference between answering yes to the question “do you expect the Coming of X in your lifetime” and being on the edge of your seat, viewing every week as threshhold. Damian Thompson is very good on this in his book, Waiting for the Antichrist, and Stephen O’Leary in Arguing the Apocalypse suggests there’s an optimal “arousal” period — if you believe the Coming is too far away, you won’t be motivated to prepare for it quite yet, and if it’s too close it may be too late for you to do much to spread the word…

So, Pew — next time, ask a question with the opinions “in the next five to ten years” and “in my lifetime” — okay? The distinction is important, and a shift towards the shorter time-span would be highly significant.

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Furnish again:

Despite the conventional wisdom (repeated even by Pew, in the face of their own data) that Mahdism is primarily the province of Shi`is, note that three of the four countries with the highest percentage expecting the Mahdi are majority-Sunni ones: Afghanistan (83%), Turkey (68%) and Tunisia (67%). This has ramifications, respectively, for: US policy in a country we are currently occupying; the only NATO Muslim-majority nation; and the vanguard state of the “Arab Spring.”

In his Conclusions, Furnish says:

The usual State/Defense departments’ “rational actor” approach to international relations might be quite simply irrelevant, if almost half the world’s Muslims expect the imminent return of their eschatological deliverer.

So there you have it. I discussed the “rational actor” versus Scott Atran‘s “devoted actor” in a recent post. And yes indeed, there are “ramifications for U.S. policy”…

Notably with regard to Afghanistan …

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Here’s Furnish again:

Afghanistan is so rife with Islamic messianism because the 80% of the population that is Sunni and the 20% that is Shi`i (albeit Sevener/Isma’ili, as well as Twelver) both are in the middle of a war and occupation by a “Christian” power — which tends to ratchet up such expectations …

And again, in his Conclusions:

Afghanistan is a lost cause: over eight in ten of its people expect the Mahdi in their lifetime, and no amount of roads and clinics and girls’ schools built by the infidels will change that.

I don’t want to argue that second point in detail, although I think there’s a great deal more to life that Mahdist expectation for many who would answer “yes” to Pew’s question about expecting the Mahdi in one’s lifetime — see my comment on Damian’s book above. But how can I put it? A background Mahdist expectation can become a passionate involvement in a Mahdist movement if the right trigger comes along.

But what I find most striking here is that Afghanistan should be the country with the strongest Mahdist current out of all those Pew selected. And I’m struck not because Afghanistan has been a battlefield for so much of recent history — indeed, for so much of its history, period. I am struck because, in Al-Qaida’s recruitment narrative, supported by a number of ahadith, Afghanistan as Khorasan is the very locus from which the Mahdi’s victorious army will sweep out to conquer (finally) Jerusalem. And this too I have been posting about, eg in my discussions of Ali Soufan‘s The Black Banners and Syed Saleem Shahzad‘s Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

So the highest level of Mahdist expectation also happens to be found in an area with a potentially major role to play in an end times scenario…

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There’s at least one earlier report in which Pew raised the question of Mahdist expectation — this time tied in with both the expectation of the Caliphate, and Christian hope of the Second Coming — their 2010 report Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Here, for instance, we learn:

Both Christians and Muslims believe they are living in a time that will undergo momentous religious events. For example, at least half of Christians in every country with large enough samples of Christians to analyze believe that Jesus will return to earth during their lifetime, including nearly seven-in-ten Christians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (69%).

And at least half of Muslims in 10 of the 15 countries with large enough Muslim populations to analyze say they believe that the caliphate, the golden era of Islamic rule, will be re-established in their lifetime; this belief is most common among respondents in Mozambique (69%). And in 12 of these 15 countries, roughly six-in-ten or more Muslims believe in the return of the Mahdi, the guided one who will initiate the final period before the day of resurrection and judgment, though the survey did not ask respondents whether they expect this to occur during their lifetime.

And here is the relevant data on sub-Saharan Mahdist belief. In Q51 of this poll, Muslims were asked whether they believe “in the return of the Mahdi, the guided one who will initiate the final period before the Day of Resurrection and Judgment? Here’s the table of responses:

Given the “religious fault line” of mixed conflict and amicable coexistence between Christians and Muslims running across Africa from (so to speak) Nigeria to Somalia, with Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab among the less delightful participants, keeping an eye out for signs of Mahdist “semiotic arousal” would be important here, too.

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And “semiotic arousal” — that reminds me. Richard Landes, who coined the term, has the definitive, encyclopedic book out about all the many forms of apocalyptic, and why they’re important: Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience Essential reading, if you ask me, on a hugely neglected and no less critically important subject.

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Finally, here’s yet another Pew graphic —

— to be viewed in conjunction with this one, illustrating the ways in which belief in the Second Coming of Christ correlate with opinions about scriptures and the State of Israel:

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Prophecy has impact, both on public opinion and on believing leaders. Jews with an expectation of the Messianic era, Christians expecting the soon Coming of Christ, and Muslims with Mahdist expectations each have their own apocalyptic scenarios, and in each case those scenarios exert some influence on policies relating to the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian situation in particular.

The bottom line?

Scriptural interpretation — and prophetic eschatology in particular — can no longer be assumed to be a quiet backwater topic for rabbinic students, seminarians and future mullahs to study, each in terms of their own tradition. It is now a series of conflicting drivers of current affairs — of war and peace.

Have a new short article up at IVN.us:

Debt Traps, Defense and the Danger of Decline

Traditionally, in American politics, questions of budget deficits and national debt were seen as purely domestic issues that only had ancillary effects on foreign policy. The situation today is different: debt has become a strategic problem not only because of the magnitude of American debt ($14 trillion), but because our major allies and adversaries are interlocked economically and have their own severe systemic debt and monetary issues. Even China, which enjoys high GDP growth rates, has a crisis of “hidden debt” that reputedly exceeds $1.6 trillion and may, in fact, be several times larger. Among the great powers, when it comes to accumulating risky amounts of debt, no one has clean hands.

….However, enthusiasm in Washington for shrinking the numerous missions given to the military to line them up with the Pentagon’s reduced capabilities is nonexistent. This may fool the voters back home, but it doesn’t deceive mullahs in Teheran or North Korean generals that the American ability to respond in a crisis has been circumscribed by capability and costs, particularly when key American allies like Britain and France have made sharp defense reductions of their own. Realistically, we are effective now for one crisis at a time and our ability to juggle any other major problems will be extremely limited, removing some of the “super” from our superpower status that Americans are accustomed to….

Read the rest here.

[ by Charles Cameron — slaughters of Sikhs and Christians and questions of nomenclature: second addendum to my post responding to Scott Atran ]
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Scott Atran recently argued that it is imperative that we understand religions, and in my post Landmines in Paradise Garden I agreed, while differing with Atran on what kinds of people are best suited to the task.

Here I would like to offer a second addendum to that post of mine, this time inviting ZP’s readers to compare and contrast the two quotes above, and likewise the two tweets below:

using them as, in effect, verbal Rorschach blots — allowing each of us individually to see something of our own ways of comparing and contrasting the two situations, their respective contexts and the ways in which we feel they have been treated by the media — and the two ways of “accurately” describing the tragic event in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

We can see religion — we can see politics — we can see our own — we can see the other — the possible views and manners of relating to these events are many and varied, but the untimely deaths remain.

It is imperative for us to begin to get a better understanding of religion, in all its shadows and its lights. A little discussion might help.

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Sources:

Shooting at the Wisconsin Gurudwara
Shooting at the Nigerian Church

Accuracy Org tweet
Chip Berlet tweet

For a chilling account of the Nigerian shooting, see this Christian Science Monitor piece (h/t Daveed Gartenstein-Ross)

[ by Charles Cameron — pros and cons of an important piece by Scott Atran — who among us can comprehend religion? ]
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Scott Atran, the anthropologist who gave us the book Talking to the Enemy, has got it right (as to importance) but wrong (as to procedure) in his latest, significant piece on Foreign Policy, God and the Ivory Tower: What we don’t understand about religion just might kill us.

First, the importance of the issue he’s discussing – understanding religions (emphatically plural, IMO):

Religion molds a nation in which it thrives, sometimes producing solidarity and sacred causes so powerful that citizens are willing to kill or die for a common good (as when Judea’s Jews around the time of Christ persisted in rebellion unto political annihilation in the face of the Roman Empire’s overwhelmingly military might). But religion can also hinder a society’s ability to work out differences with others, especially if those others don’t understand what religion is all about. That’s the mess we find ourselves in today, not only among different groups of Americans in the so-called culture wars, but between secular and Judeo-Christian America and many Muslim countries.

Time and again, countries go to war without understanding the transcendent drives and dreams of adversaries who see a very different world. Yet we needn’t fly blindly into the storm.

Atran is exactly right: we needn’t fly blindly into the storm — but to avoid flying blindly we need to understand those “drives and dreams of adversaries who see a very different world” — and to avoid flying into the storm at all we may (all of us, friends and foes alike) need to understand our own “transcendent drives and dreams” better than we do at present.

The question is, who can help us do that?

That’s what I mean by the procedure — the path that should be taken to achieve that kind of understanding. And note: there are different kinds of understanding — theoretical, imaginative, visceral… dispassionate, empathetic, impassioned…

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Atran’s answer is science:

Science can help us understand religion and the sacred just as it can help us understand the genome or the structure of the universe. This, in turn, can make policy better informed.

There’s only one problem there. I can believe that scientists of extraordinary breadth and insight – Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Gell-Mann, Feynman probably – and social scientists — Bateson certainly, Victor Turner, Atran perhaps – my lists are not exhaustive – could make useful suggestions for scientific approaches to the field of religion.

But scientists in general? As Atran notes:

If you look at the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences or Britain’s Royal Society, well over 90 percent of members are non-religious. That may help explain why some of the bestselling books by scientists about religion aren’t about the science of religion as much as the reasons that it’s no longer necessary to believe.

Non-believers may “get” what’s dangerous about religions, but they almost certainly won’t “get” what’s marvelous and inspiring about them.

And believers are no better – they may get what’s great about their own tradition, but still see nothing but perdition in the traditions of others…

So to get a decent set of insights worth experimenting with — or modeling, for that matter — requires a blend of subtle thinkers to include some social anthropologists, some scholars of comparative religion, some sociologists with fine-tuned statistical skills, some depth psychologists… believers, skeptics, atheists and agnostics… with a whole wild variety of plumages, specialties and interests.

Yes, and some poets, historians, some hard scientists. Yes.

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How easy is it to get things wrong?

In his paper Reframing Sacred Values [link is to .pdf] written with Robert Axelrod — the political scientist whose contest for winning strategies for the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game put “tit for tat” and agent based modeling on the map in his books The Evolution of Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation — Atran speaks of “Rational versus Devoted Actors“.

The distinction is a significant one. And the paper itself is important because, as Atran and Axelrod suggest:

Counterintuitively, understanding an opponent’s sacred values, we believe, offers surprising opportunities for breakthroughs to peace. Because of the emotional unwillingness of those in conflict situations to negotiate sacred values, conventional wisdom suggests that negotiators should either leave sacred values for last in political negotiations or should try to bypass them with sufficient material incentives. Our empirical findings and historical analysis suggest that conventional wisdom is wrong. In fact, offering to provide material benefits in exchange for giving up a sacred value actually makes settlement more difficult because people see the offering as an insult rather than a compromise. But we also found that making symbolic concessions of no apparent material benefit might open the way to resolving seemingly irresolvable conflicts.

But who is to say which actors are “devoted”?

The most devoted may be the one who stands in most need of redemption, the one who has sinned the most, not the one who has been the most pious. Let me put that another way: the most devoted may be the drunken reveler rather than the regular church- or mosque-goer.

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Consider:

Inigo was a courtier, a conquistador, a musketeer. The commandments were of course unquestionable in theory, but practice was entirely another matter. Church was for times of danger or for celebration of victory, and he never prayed so hard to our Lady as before a duel. In his last years when he had no need to be boastful, he was quoted by his secretary- biographer: “Though he was attached to the faith, he lived no way in conformity with it and did not avoid sin. Rather, he was much addicted to gambling and dissolute in his dealings with women, contentious and keen about using his sword.”

Inigo found plenty of trouble…

A scientist might not think such a person a reliable example of religious fervor. An antagonist of religion might think it illustrates the flaws of religion perfectly.

The passage in question comes from a life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.

Religion is a subtle matter. We may think it a matter of belief, but it may be a matter of behavior – orthopraxy vs orthodoxy is the distinction the folks in religious studies make — or of visionary experience.

It may “take one to know one” – as Thomas Merton, the Catholic contemplative understood the Buddhist contemplatives he met. But then he was open to the possibility that others might have intuitions not dissimilar to those he himself had had. “I’m deeply impregnated with Sufism,” he once wrote — Sufism being the mystical strand in Islam. Indeed, I received a letter from him myself while still a student at Oxford, in which he wrote of his life in the Abbey of Gethsemani, “here you get beaten for being a dervish. I am bruised for this all day long.”

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But again, one can be blinded by one’s own faith to the merits of the faiths of others. And this is also a subtle business.

Retired US Gen. Jerry Boykin, for instance, said in April last year (link is to YouTube video):

Sharia law is a very serious threat in America. We are being invaded by a group of people who see it as their absolute imperative to establish a legal system in America which will in fact destroy our Constitution to be replaced by this thing called Sharia law.

One wonders what Boykin might make of the late California Presbyterian teacher, RJ Rushdoony — a figure, I’m guessing, far to the General’s right?

As is widely known, the New Testament contains a “Great Commission” which Christ gave to his apostles after his Resurrection:

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” — Matthew 28:18-20.

Rushdoony, in his master work The Institutes of Biblical Law, makes it clear that in his views, this constitutes a divine mandate to bring Biblical law into effect in all nations: “The fulfillment of that covenant is their great commission: to subdue all things and all nations to Christ and His law-word” (Institutes, p. 14) and this is to be achieved in terms of a single world order, “The goal is the developed Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem, a world order under God’s law” (Institutes, p. 357).

Sadly, the church no longer recognizes the full implications of the Great Commission, and has fallen into a heresy that is political in nature: “The church today has fallen prey to the heresy of democracy” (Institutes, p. 747). In truth, the laws of a democratic society will need to be replaced by the laws of God as set forth in the Old Testament: “While all Scripture is God’s law word, the heart of that law is the law of Moses” (Institutes, p. 675).

Here’s where it gets trickier, though:

Slavery, too, will need to be reinstituted: “The (Biblical) Law here is humane and also unsentimental. It recognizes that some people are by nature slaves and will always be so. It both requires that they be dealt with in a godly manner and also that the slave recognizes his position and accepts it with grace” (Institutes, p. 251).

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This thing called “religion” is difficult to pin down. It has extremes that appear unconscionable even to many who claim devotion to the same scriptures as do the extremists. It features violence, peace, apocalypse as destruction and apocalypse as fresh creation.

Atran is an anthropologist – he surely knows this.

The study of religion involves walking through a minefield — in the gardens of Paradise…