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[ by Charles Cameron — a computer virus with mild Mahdist implications ]
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Mahdi: targeted entities, credit: Seculert via Wired

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Ah. From a religious studies standpoint, the targeting here is curious.

Iran is the country of the Mahdaviat, the nation whose President, wreathed in light, prays at the United Nationsfor the soon coming of the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace, the Mahdi.

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My own concern is not with the virus, but with the religious connotations of the name that has been given to it.

For those whose concern is with the virus itself, I’d suggest the Wired article, although if blog-friends involved in computer security would like to offer further pointers, I’m sure our readers would welcome them.

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In case you were wondering, here are the key paras regarding the implications as I see them, from the Jerusalem Post:

Seculert and Kaspersky dubbed the campaign Mahdi, a term referring to the prophesied redeemer of Islam, because evidence suggests the attackers used a folder with that name as they developed the software to run the project.

They also included a text file named mahdi.txt in the malicious software that infected target computers.

and from the Wired coverage:

The infections in Iran and Israel, along with the Farsi strings, suggest the malware may be the product of Iran, used to spy primarily on domestic targets but also on targets in Israel and a handful of surrounding countries. But the malware could also be a product of Israel or another country that’s simply been salted with Farsi strings in order to point the finger at Tehran.

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So we really can’t tell if it’s the Mahdi (Islam’s awaited one) or the Dajjal (Islam’s antichrist figure)?

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Here, for your edification, is the potrait of the Dajjal from the cover of Okasha Abdelmannan al-Tibi’s The Whole Truth about the Antichrist (courtesy of JP Filiu):

image credit: J-P Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam

According to the tradition as narrated by ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar, the Prophet said:

I turned my face to see another man with a huge body, red complexion and curly hair and blind in one eye. His eye looked like a protruding out grape. They said (to me), He is Ad-Dajjal.

And here is a portrait of the Mahdi, the “Birth of Hope” — insofar as the artist Mahmoud Farshchian feels able to depict him:

image credit: Mahmoud Farshchian

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While it’s pretty clear that neither Mahdi or Dajjal could be a computer virus, it also seems likely that the virus is associated, either mockingly or sympathetically, with the Mahdi — an indicator, if nothing else, that this end-times figure once little known outside Shi’ite Islam has by now become part of a wider “universe of discourse” and general conversation.

Mahdi has arrived among the geeks.

[ by Charles Cameron — different styles of online communication, main topic: Istanbul in three Islamic videos ]
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There’s passionate and visceral communication, and there’s communication that’s more scholarly, dispassionate and calm. Let’s begin and end with calm.

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Visceral communication is essential for getting people out of a theater on fire, but a 30% application of scholarly distance and calm may be prerequisite for avoiding panic — and scholarly communication may be important for conveying in detail the high-dimensionality of a complex topic, but a drop of visceral may ease the salient points into more general circulation.

In an earlier, text heavy post — Damascus, Dearborn, Rome, Vienna? — I belabored you with details as to just how much ambiguity and fog surrounds the use of place names in scriptural and prophetic contexts. Here I’d like to give you a visceral sense of what some prophetic voices are doing with those place names.

One of the easiest ways to move from scholarly to visceral is to switch from text quotation to video clip, so that’s what I’ll do here — but my first video clip will be relatively calm and scholarly as video clips go, the next one more visceral and exhortatory, while the third and final clip will use all the tricks of the feature movie trade to provide a Tolkien-heroic account of the Muslim siege and taking of then-Christian Constantinople in 1453.

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First, a very short clip from Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, widely known in the Islamic world for his lavishly illustrated books, CDs and DVDs presenting an Islamic version of creationism, the Mahdist end times — which he sees as entirely peaceable — and more besides.

In this clip, he’s talking about Istanbul, and he means that very city, even if it has sometimes been called Byzantium or Constantinople — or even on occasion, Rome.
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My second clip is far longer, and presents an interview with Sheikh Imran Nazar Hosein, Islamic scholar, sometime Trinidadian diplomat and sometimes fiery YouTube preacher, whom I have quoted previously in Al-Awlaki and the former and latter rains and elsewhere.

Hosein discusses the prophecies of the conquest of Constantinople by Muslim forces as part of the background for a grand sweep overview of what he terms the first and second Arab Springs — which he locates a century apart and views as both engineered by an Anglo-American alliance to advance a Zionist agenda — and contemporary events in Bahrain, Saudi, Syria, Iran, Israel, and Russia:
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It’s an hour-long interview, perhaps you didn’t watch the whole way through. Hosein concludes this interview, centered in Islamic prophecy about Constantinople, with a Saudi-American alliance facing off against an Iranian-Russian alliance in service to very long term Zionist interests, making the video a window not only on the Sheikh’s own worldview but also on how widely perceptions of the world situation can diverge:

I want the viewing audience to know that a situation is evolving in the world before our eyes, and we must understand it, that the two major powers in the world are now moving in a collision course, that collision course between these two major powers, the American-led alliance and the Russian-led alliance, is going to lead to nuclear warfare of such a magnitude that there is only one word that we can look for in the vocabulary to fit it, and that’s called Armageddon, that is, millions and millions and millions are going to die, most of them probably in North America and Europe, Europe of the East and Europe of the West — and what is left of the world after that, the Zionists hope that they can cope with it, and they can somehow survive and come out on top and Israel will rule the world, the rump that is left after the two giants engage in a war of mutual destruction, That is what we are facing now…

Is that what you thought scholarly Islamists were thinking? By what paths did a highly educated and world traveled man come to that conclusion?

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My third clip speaks for itself. It is a trailer for an upcoming motion picture about the siege of Constantinople, presented as heroic spectacle with improbable but striking feats of arms, beautiful but not excessively modestly dressed women, obligatory mass choruses of Allahu Akbar, and at least one reference to the Antichrist.
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I can’t wait to see it — but I expect to do so with mixed emotions. Perhaps they will stir up a decent blog post or two.

What emotions will they stir in those who identify with the heroic Mehmet II, and how much of an echo will those emotions find in the world around us? Long shot — any Turkey-NATO impact?

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To return to a calmer clime:

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Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. I have prayed in the Sultan Ahmed — click image above to glimpse its beauty — I have relaxed deliciously at a nearby hammam.

The history of Istanbul could be the rich study of many lifetimes, its promise — for better or worse or a little of both — may have been variously prophesied or predicted, but remains to be seen.

[ by Charles Cameron — yet another angle on religious violence ]
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Religion can be a lot stranger than one might think.
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Here, I’m going to tie in my recent post about Iranian clerics claiming Khamenei‘s saliva could cure diseases with the notions of religious danger and religious violence.

Bear with me, this will give us a richer understanding of how religious violence may work with people who are naturally rule-averse — and I’m thinking here of criminals who get into a mix of religion and violence, including criminals who get involved in jihad, but also the cultic side of cartel violence in Mexico.

My aim is not to explicate either of these phenomena specifically, nor to claim they necessarily resemble each other or the punk or Hindu practices I’ll reference, but simply to suggest again, from another angle, how astonishingly diverse, powerful — and frankly surprising, disgusting and on occasion dangerous — religious expressions can be.

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In my post about Iranian clerics’ claims of virtue for the Ayatollah’s saliva, I drew on other examples in Islamic, Hindu and Christian traditions where the saliva of saints was considered capable of conferring blessings. Marcus Ranum replied with a hilarious, down to earth comment about Chuck Norris‘ saliva, and Derek Robinson then chimed in with a link to a story about punk rockers and spit:

It was the glorious contemptuousness of spitting, of course, that lay behind its enthusiastic adoption by rock stars and others attempting an instant badge of streetwise chic. Spittle’s finest hour came when the activity was adopted as a collective pastime by fans of punk in the 70s, although, according to Jon Savage, the author of England’s Dreaming, a history of the period, the affection for flob may initially have been accidental. “There are various theories as to how it all started but it seems to have originated, with Johnny Rotten blowing his nose on stage when he had a bronchial problem. He may have started the whole thing, unconsciously.” What probably gave the habit legs, he says, was the penchant of the Damned to go to other bands’ gigs and spit at them from the mosh pit as a sign of disapproval.

“The interesting thing about punk spitting was that it was supposed to be friendly, a gesture of solidarity. It was a clever inversion by the punk audience: if you call us disgusting, we’ll show you that we can be disgusting. Bands at the period routinely complained about having to come offstage because they couldn’t play with their hands slipping all over their guitars, however, and if you look at footage of the period – there is some of the Clash in 77 – they are operating in a hail of spit. Completely disgusting.” The power of sputum in punk reached its zenith when Joe Strummer, the band’s lead singer, caught hepatitis after accidentally catching a blob of goo on stage.

What’s clear from this quote, I think, is that the idea behind all this spitting is what some scholars call “transgressive” — there’s a delight here in going beyond accepted boundaries? — and I think FWIW that that’s very much part of what some tantra is about.

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So we’re in the realm where excitement is generated by doing what’s against the code — moral, legal, social, whether written or unwritten. There’s a frisson of excitement there, in crossing the line, and in religion the technical term for religious practices that explore the crossing of lines and breaking of taboos is “antinomian”.

There are plenty of examples of antinomian behavior in religion. They often crop up when new religious movements are born in defiance of an existing order perceived as unjust, corrupt or hypocritical — as when some medieval heresies held that stealing from wealthy bishops to share food with the poor was more in line with Christ‘s teaching than paying tithes to support the bishop in his splendor.

Perhaps the most interesting example in Christian history is that of the agapetae or subintroductae, who in the early church made the experiment of sleeping together as couples without sex, as if to demonstrate by deed that their love in Christ (agape) was stronger than the love of sexual desire (eros). As Charles Williams noted, the experiment often failed, and the Church Fathers accordingly shut it down.

It’s instructive, I think, that Mahatma Gandhi attempted the same experiment, inviting his 19-year-old grand-niece Manu to share his bed without sexual relations. As Stanley Wolpert put it in Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi (OUP, 2002):

Gandhi was testing the “truth” of his faith in the fire of “experience.” His had always been a practical philosophy, an activist faith. He appears to have hoped that sleeping naked with Manu, without arousing in himself the slightest sexual desire, might help him to douse raging fires of communal hatred in the ocean of India, and so strengthen his body as to allow him to live to 125 in continued service to the world.

I have an extensive set of notes on both the subintroductae and Gandhi’s prayog, prepared as a briefing for a scholar friend’s use in legal proceedings, available on my Forensic Theology blog for further reading. Here, I’d simply note that the breaking of codes and taboos regarding purity, cleanliness and sexuality forms part of the approach to spiritual liberation known as tantra, in which all the energies of human desire, including those normally repressed, may be brought into play under focused, conscious spiritual direction, in the effort to achieve transcendance.

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Some Tantric practices are not transgressive of any boundaries — forms of meditation focusing on the energy of breath (pranayama) within the seated body, for instance. But some are, as we can see from Loriliai Biernacki‘s book, Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra (Oxford UP):

What do we mean when we talk about the “transgressive” in Tantra? The idea of the transgressive gets neatly encapsulated within the Tantric tradition in a simple and pervasive list of words all beginning with the letter m. The “Five Ms,” a list of five substances, including, for instance, liquor and sex, become incorporated within ritual worship of the goddess. The five elements are meat (mamsa), fish (matsya), alcohol (madya), parched grain (mudra), and illicit sexual relations (maithunam). The transgressive ritual that incorporates these substances is designated as “left-handed,” following a nomenclature also prevalent in the West where the right hand is the auspicious and normatively socially acceptable hand and the left represents that which must be repressed and expelled.

The “Five Ms” have elicited a concatenation of emotional Western and Indian appraisals of Tantra ranging from a Victorian repulsion and embarrassed dismissal to ecstatic embrace by contemporary popular culture in the West.

Another aspect of the same tantric strategy consists in arousing and transmuting the energies of disgust by meditating in charnel grounds — the location favored by Lord Siva himself. Mark Taylor has a fascinating and thought-provoking commentary on the cross-cultural role of bones, skulls and skeletons in religious practice in his Cabinet article, Sacred Bones.

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Now let’s get back to the our starting point: saliva.

Alf Hiltebeitel in his book Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism (SUNY Press) describes how the god Shiva (Siva) pulled a devotee of his who was a hunter “completely out of the web of conventions that make up the communal life of hunters”. I think you can get the gist even if you don’t know all the technical terms in these paragraphs, but “apna” is love or devotion, and a “linga” is the god Shiva worshiped in the form of a symbolic, stone penis, and the Agamas are scriptures:

When Tinnanar decided to clean his Lord up and to feed him, he did so in complete ignorance of the Agamas and acted as an infatuated Untouchable hunter would. He brought to the linga pig’s meat that he chewed in order to find the tastiest morsels, water that he carried in his mouth, and flowers that he stuck in his hair. He then performed puja in ways that the Agamas rank as defiling. He brushed the linga off with the sandal on his foot, he bathed it by spitting water over it, he dropped the flowers from his head onto Siva’s, and he fed him the saliva-drenched pork. He did this for six days.

In the meantime, Kalattiyappa explained to a Brahman who served the linga while Tinnanar was away hunting why he enjoyed Tinnanar’s abominable ritual, a lengthy explanation summed up by one example: “The water The water that he spits on us from his mouth, because it flows from the vessel made of love called his body, is more pure to us than even the Ganges and all auspicious tlrthas. Anpu is the normal experience we have when our feeling, thinking, and speaking are unified in an attentiveness to another that we call infatuation, but infatuation for Siva may carry one far beyond normal moral boundaries.

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Humans come in all shapes and sizes, qualities and kinds — and it appears that at least in this Indian example, the divine is prepared to bless the human “where the human is at” — in a manner according with his own nature.

If we can understand this, perhaps we can understand also the curious paradox by which the book Wild at Heart by the Colorado Springs evangelist John Eldredge, becomes part of the “Bible” of La Familia, the Mexican narco-terror group, how the deceased Mexican bandit, now a folk-saint, Jesus Malverde, receives prayers like “Lord Malverde, give your voluntary help to my people in the name of God. Defend me from justice and the jails of those powerful ones” — and how more generally, terror groups with a strong religious ideology can easily number petty criminals and the like among their enthusiastic members, without ceasing to draw on religious motivation.

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ADDENDUM regarding the illustration at the top of this post:

A wrathful deity is characteristically wrathful in the sense of Malachi 3.2:

And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire…

Speaking generally, the purpose of the wrath is purification. It may be helpful to bear this in mind as you contemplate the full image of that wrathful Tibetan deity which heads this post:

[ by Charles Cameron — when religion strongly influences politics — greetings on the Fourth of July ]
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At least in the words of the Library of Congress exhibit, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, the US we know today was conceived as a “Religious Refuge”:

The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens. Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of the concept, denounced by Roger Williams as “inforced uniformity of religion,” meant majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst.

Haven’t we had enough wars of religion? There’s much to be said for that idea.

Happy glorious Fourth to all my American friends!

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The image above of the Palace of Westminster in London looks quite lovely and tranquil, and some of what people hear when they quiet themselves and listen to the “still, small voice” is of inestimable value, beauty and insight. But it is not always so.

As Roger Williams shrewdly observed:

enforced uniformity, sooner or later, is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing consciences, persecution of Christ Jesus in His servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls

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United Kingdom Come

You will perhaps understand, therefore, why I am less than enthralled by the idea of a particular opinion within Christianity “declaring the plans of heaven” over my country of origin — as suggested in the graphic immediately above this — or any other country, the United States included, and why I hope that, in Williams’ words:

a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or anti-Christian consciences and worship be granted to all men, in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only, in Soul matters able to conquer, to wit; the sword of the Spirit–the Word of God

I wouldn’t mind seeing that idea take hold in Iran or Saudi, either. Yeah!

Consider:

Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth has been made clear from error. Whoever rejects false worship and believes in Allah has grasped the most trustworthy handhold that never breaks. And Allah hears and knows all things. — Qur’an, 2: 256

If it had been your Lord’s will, all of the people on Earth would have believed. Would you then compel the people so to have them believe? — Qur’an, 10: 99

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Besides which, having prayed often enough “Thy kingdom come” myself, I have to say I’m less than enthused to find the publicists of this particular outpouring of faith modifying the phrase to read “United Kingdom Come”.

What is this, the Cup Final?

[ by Charles Cameron — more on magical worldviews: first the curative power of saliva, Iran, India — then in the follow up, a breathtakingly beautiful tale a wise man told me ]
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First off, a hat-tip to Shoshank Joshi, because were it not for his tweet, I might not have noticed Muhammad Sahimi’s post, stirred old memories, and written what follows.

The tweet:

Lol – “Ayatollah Khamenei’s saliva can cure diseases” j.mp/LkP0t2

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) July 3, 2012

Frankly, it was the mention of saliva in a religious context that caught my attentiont.

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Sahimi’s post only mentions the Ayatollah Khamenei‘s saliva in passing, and is worth reading in its own right:

Some of the praise heaped on Khamenei is borderline blasphemy. But as the Prophet Muhammad said, “A ruler and his rule can survive blasphemy, but not injustice.” And terrible injustice is being done to a great nation and its people on a daily basis by Khamenei’s supporters. As far as the fate of the nation is concerned, the critical question is, Given that Khamenei is surrounded by minions, flatterers, and cronies who compete with each other to praise him lavishly, how realistic a view does he have of what is going on, either domestically or internationally? When his own chief of staff exaggerates and even lies about him, what type of information can he expect to receive? Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was surrounded by the same sort of coterie, and by the time he realized the gravity of the state’s situation in the fall of 1978, it was too late to reform his regime and put it on a democratic path.

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So, Charles, saliva. WTF?

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TF is this. Sahimi begins his article, in which mention is made of the sacred qualities attributed to Khamenei’s saliva, with the following observation:

Praising national leaders and elevating them to mythic levels is as old as human civilization. Iran is no exception; indeed, the phenomenon has a very long history in the country, as manifested by the many tales of kings’ bravery, vision, kindness, and generosity that one finds in the Persian literature. This practice continues — the difference is that it is now entering uncharted territory and reaching absurd heights.

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Okay, okay, the Shahnameh.

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But then Sahimi gives us these two paragraphs:

In addition to producing reactionary clerics to serve Khamenei and his power, Mesbah — as he is commonly known — has been the Supreme Leader’s exaggerator-in-chief. Here are a few examples:

“Ayatollah Khamenei’s saliva can cure diseases.” According to dogma, only a saint can possibly perform such “miracles.”

And I’m sorry — that absolutely isn’t “uncharted waters” — it’s definitely charted.

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As Sahimi says, in fact, it’s dogma — or, I’d prefer to think, an archetypal feature of pre-scientific religious thought.

Consider this, from Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900, (Cambridge South Asian Studies), p. 127:

The explanation for this is that throughout India bodily secretions, especially blood, semen, saliva and human wastes, are thought of as being charged with a form of power and energy which may be both menacing and protective. The god manifests his awesome potency with a great flow of blood; the individual’s wastes and secretions are a source of danger and pollution to others. Lesser beings accept saliva-impregnated leavings from their superiors, and so the Hindu devotee and so the Hindu devotee takes the divine ‘leavings’ or prasatam of the god as a token of fealty and a source of protective and transforming sacred energy.

In south India the pir’s devotees also perceive their lord’s saliva as a medium which carries and transmits his barakat. Here too the disciple seeks out contact with a transforming substance which would otherwise be conceived of as unclean and defiling…

So that’s the sacredness of a saint’s saliva attested to in both Hindu and Sufi traditions — but it was apparently also a part of Christian tradition, as this by turns charming and arresting quotation from the description of Saint Columban in Sean Kelly and Rosemary Rogers‘ Saints Preserve Us!: Everything You Need to Know About Every Saint You’ll Ever Need p. 67 attests:

He was known to everyone, and cut a distinctive figure — he shaved the front of his shoulder-length hair into a half-tonsure, squirrels nested in his cowl, and he wandered around brandishing his staff and downing oak trees with his fist While in France, Columban and his monks followed the Irish tradition, often criticized by many as being too severe: a monk who cut his finger badly while reaping had the wound cleaned by Our Saint’s saliva and was ordered back to work.

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But wait — there’s more… and it’s beautiful.