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MahdiWatch.org
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Home | About Me | Links to My Articles | Info on My Books | Contact Me
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Welcome to MahdiWatch.org! NEWSFLASH! COMMENTS LINK
BELOW EACH POST IS ENABLED! FEEL FREE TO BURY ME, PRAISE ME--OR JUST ISSUE A PERSONAL FATWA!
al-Mahdi is "the rightly-guided one" who, according to Islamic Hadiths (traditions),
will come before the end of time to make the entire world Muslim. Over the last 1400 years numerous claimants to the
mantle of the Mahdi have arisen in both Shi`i and Sunni circles. Modern belief in the coming of the Mahdi has
manifested most famously in the 1979 al-`Utaybi uprising of Sa`udi Arabia, and more recently in the ongoing
Mahdist movements (some violent) in Iraq, as well as in the frequently-expressed public prayers of former Iranian
President Ahmadinezhad bidding the Mahdi to return and, in the larger Sunni Islamic world, by claims that Usamah bin Ladin
might be the (occulted) Mahdi. Now in 2014 Mahdism is active in Syria, as the jihadist opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra
claims to be fighting to prepare the way for his coming; and in the new "Islamic State/caliphate" spanning
Syrian and Iraqi territory, as its leadership promotes the upcoming apocalyptic battle with the West at Dabiq, Syria. This site will track such Mahdi-related movements, aspirations, propaganda and beliefs in both Sunni and Shi`i
milieus, as well as other Muslim eschatological yearnings.
For a primer
on Mahdism, see my 2005 article, "What's Worse than Violent Jihadists?," at the History News Network: http://hnn.us/articles/13146.html; for more in-depth info, see the links here to my other writings, including my book on Mahdism.
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Saturday, January 7, 2017
Misunderestimating Mahdism in the Muslim World--Yet Again
I should be prepping syllabi for the four Reinhardt University history classes I'm teaching this term, but in clearing off my desk I found an October 2016 article from
The Economist--"Apocalypse Postponed: Islamic State's Loss of Dabiq"--upon which I had never gotten around to commenting. So, in the interest of apocalyptic analysis,
and not just procrastination, here goes....  The Mahdi flanked by his right-hand man, Jesus, and the rest of his posse. As usual with articles in that publication,
the knowledge of the target subject is a mile wide but about a millimeter deep. The momentous battle of Dabiq to which
ISIS aspires (based on a hadith, or saying, of Muhammad's) is described several times as the "end-of-days" conflict--when
in point of fact this battle will not usher in the end of the world but, rather, Islamic conquest thereof
(according to mainstream Islamic eschatology, NOT just ISIS's allegedly-"extremist" understanding). The
Economist describes ISIS' eschatology as a "theology of death, judgment and the end of the world." But that
is not true at all. Death for infidels (both dhimmi--Christian and Jewish--and heretical Muslim)
is not the goal, but rather the primary methodology by which Islamic rule is extended over the whole world; there is nothing
in any of ISIS' many Dabiq publications about judgment at all, much less about riding to ruin and the world's ending. The article presents ISIS' eschatological fervor "more as a recruitment tool than a tenet of faith"--but
then my friend and Islamic apocalypse expert Dr. David Cook is adduced, and he says no such thing. Ratcheting up its level
of ignorance, the author of this article (adducing this time an "expert" who seems to know little of the topic)
then blames ISIS' Sunni eschatology on borrowings from Twelver Shi`ism--betraying a total ignorance of Sunni Islam's long,
bloody history of Mahdist violence. Mahdism such as ISIS exhibits is then described as "nihilistic," when
in reality it is not meaningless at all but quite well-thought-out and volitional. This massive misunderestimating of Mahdism is typical of the Western intelligentsia (and, alas, probably of the intelligence community
for the past eight years, as well). Three major points: 1) Mahdism has been as major a movement among Sunni
Muslims as among (Twelver) Shi`is over the last 14 centuries--if not more so. The Economist's ignorance of this is
breath-taking. While journalistic unfamiliarity with, say, the 12th century founder of the al-Muwahhids, Ibn Tumart, is to
be expected, one might reasonably hope that writers on the Muslim world would have heard of the 19th century Sudanese Mahdi
or the 1979 attempted apocalyptic coup in Mecca. Those, and other such movements, past and present, are detailed in my two relevant books: Ten Years' Captivation with the Mahdi's Camps: Essays on Muslim Eschatology, 2005-2015 and the older
Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden. 2) Likewise, the whole thrust of the article--in particular its dubious
claim that eschatological beliefs are cynically manipulative and not deeply-held--shows that the writer never bothered to
do any research on the power of Mahdist belief today. Well over 40% of all the world's 1.6 billion Muslims (Sunni as well
as Twelver Shi`i) expect the Mahdi to come (back) in this lifetime, as I explained in a long 2012 article. So apocalyptic messianism is not some "extremist" outlier in Islam, but is rather quite mainstream
and widespread. 3)
Finally, the vacuity of this article is well-illustrated by the illustration used therein:  Attack of the Cloned Twelver Imams. Those are the 12 Imams of, yes, Twelver Shi`ism. ISIS and the hundreds of millions
of Sunni Muslims do not believe in them but, rather, in a Sunni military-political leader who will emerge from their ranks
and be (eventually) acknowledged as Allah's rightly-guided one and divine instrument for Islamic conquest of Earth--not in
a bloodline descendant of Muhammad who has already been here and gone into mystical ghaybah ("occultation")
for over a millennium. This would be akin to writing an article about
Evangelical Christian theology and putting a picture of St. Peter's in it.
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| Jamkaran Mosque near Qom, Iran (during my trip there Aug. 2008) |
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