The Gertrude Bell Jar

Apocalypse Then And Now

Well, the David Cook books, Understanding Jihad and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, have come in the mail, and dipping into the latter, I find that its relevance to parsing the public statements of our Shia Persian of interest will be uncertain, since Cook notes that he is focussing exclusively on Arab Sunni sources. (In his introduction to another book I found at the library, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden, author Timothy R. Furnish states that he will deal exclusively with Sunni Mahdist movements, and further that he began working on correcting the misperception that Madhism is primarily a Shia phenomenon in his own doctoral dissertation, so perhaps that will be the best place for me to look for references to works that deal with Shia variants of Mahdism).

Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature looks like it will be a profitable read nonetheless. See this, for example:

[One level] of the anti-Semitic conspiracy stems from the frustrations Muslims feel about their inability to deal with Israel and their inability to convince the larger world of the justice of their concerns.

He continues the thought in a footnote:

There is also the inability to understand the freedom of choice and the marketplace of ability created by a free society, which promotes the view that since the Jews are prominent in Western society (and are regarded as even more so by the exagerrations created by discovery of "hidden Jews"), there must be some conspiracy to explain this fact. Coming from a hierarchical society where ability is not necessarily rewarded and where it is more important to have a protective group supporting an individual than to get a good education and to work hard, the conspiracy accusation at this level is understandable.

Ah. The footnotes concludes, "See H. 'Abd-al Hamid (1996, 5-6)," but probably you don't want to, since the reference is to his work Yajuj and Majuj, or, Gog and Magog, so the book most likely presents an example of this phenomenon rather than a critique of it. On the other hand, it's an English translation, so go nuts if you want to, I guess.

Beyond this, it looks like Cook will be fleshing out one of the central claims in Bernard Lewis' Semites and Anti-Semites, that modern Arab anti-Semitism is almost entirely dependent on European and Christian sources and influences for its theory, and pretty much dates from the latter half of the 20th Century. As Lewis explains, though Jews and Christians were indeed thought inferior and assigned secondary dhimmi status and subject to many special restictions in Islamic civilizations, the notion that Jews are any kind of threat to Muslims is a modern one. After all, in Islamic history the Muslims triumphed over Jews on the battlefield, and though the Jews did plot to kill Jesus, they were too incompetent to succeed (Muslims believe that Jesus did not really die on the cross and was simply taken bodily into heaven by God rather than resurrected). Persecution of Jews in Islamic civilization did occasionally occur, but was exceptionally rare as compared to Europe, which is why Muslim lands were a haven for European Jews during the European Middle Ages.

Cook states that the so-called "rocks and trees" hadith,

The time [of Resurrection] will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees whence the call is raised: ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew hiding! Come and kill him.’

which is cited repeatedly by Islamists and apocalypticists alike (and even appears verbatim in the Hamas Charter) is actually the only hadith or reference of any kind in classic Muslim apocalyptic literature which assigns the Jews a particular role in the end times, and that in some versions of the hadith, the Jews are not mentioned at all. This is too slender a reed for contemporary apocalyptic writers who want to connect theories about the end times to the International Jewish Conspiracy, so they tend to lean heavily instead on sources from outside the Islamic tradition, chiefly Biblical passages, European anti-Semitic writing (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a core text), and all manner of Western crackpot books on topics like the Masons and UFOs.

Choose Your Conspiracy

1. Iran has accused the UK.

2. From a link posted by Daniel Brett in comments to the Harry’s Place post on Iran's accusation, an alternate theory that Ahmadenijad may have been behind the bombings in Ahwaz rather than the target of them.

3. An article on the “Mullah Wars” blaming a previous assassination attempt and the recent crash of a plane-load of Ahmadenijad's military supporters on opposition factions within the Iranian government suggests yet another possibility. (Well, not so much in the words of the author of the article as in my own fevered imagination. How nice it would be for Ahmadenijad to just go away without the U.S. or Israel bombing anybody! Alas this is probably not the most likely explanation of Tuesday’s bombing. If I had to put money on one, I'd pick conspiracy theory no.2).

Levity!

I was clicking through some Iranian blogs today to see whether people generally think this was an assassination attempt on Ahmadinejad. No comments yet on the ones I’ve looked at, but I encountered multiple recommendations for this satirical Guide to Understanding the Iranian Nuclear Crisis.

End Of Days 101

I’ve been trying to learn a bit more about Muslim apocalyptic since Iranian President Ahmadinejad starting coming over all Mahdist in his rhetoric. You might recall my earlier synopsis (here and here) of Barry Cooper’s book about religious political movements, in which I learned two things that seem relevant here: 1) Prophecy-oriented political movements have shown a tendency to try and make the events they predict happen rather than wait around from them to come of their own accord; and 2) Muslim apocalyptic involves a final annihilatory conflict with the Jews which Muslims will win with the help of God. (There’s a Wikipedia entry on the role of the Mahdi in the end times here; however neither it nor the related entry on Islamic eschatology discuss the battles that will accompany all of these events. The devil is in the details as usual!) Put this together with Ahmadinejad's various remarks about Jews and his World Without Zionism speech, in which he argued that the destruction of Israel and the United States is both possible and desireable, along with his resumption of Iran’s nuclear program, and it seems we may have what you could call a very bracing couple of months or years ahead of us.

David Cook’s books on Muslim apocalyptic and jihad dominated Cooper’s list of references (see the 2nd entry on Cooper), and it seems that Cook is currently the world’s foremost expert on the subject. Making a library run, I discovered that others have had the same thought about what goes at the top of the reading list just now, and and I’ve had to order my own copies. While I’m waiting for them to come in, I’ve found an interesting interview with Cook about the history of Muslim apocalypticism and its relationship to current events. He also has an article titled “Islam and Apocalyptic” online containing an interesting summary of what is found lately in apocalyptic literature, plus the following cautionary note about the difficulty of interpreting the relationship between Muslim apocalyptic and Islamist terrorism:

One would obviously wish to know what exactly is the relationship between apocalyptic literature and apocalyptic-messianic groups. In other words, when there is a plethora of literature in the market on the end times or on the Antichrist or the Mahdi, can we expect for a figure or group to appear and put the material to use? Does a Hamas terrorist really read an apocalyptic pamphlet before picking up a bomb to commit suicide? Is he thinking that the end of the world is so close that there is no point in living, or that perhaps he is bringing the apocalypse closer to reality as he pulls the trigger? Unfortunately, there has been no real research in this area, and we really do not know what the answer to this question is. In my judgment, the closest analogy of the relationship of apocalyptic material to terrorist activities is that of pornographic material to sexual assault. While one cannot say that all obscene material leads directly to violent sexual practices, one can say that the vast majority of those who commit these actions have more than a passing acquaintance with pornography. Likewise, people of good will can come to opposite conclusions as far as the significance of the inciting material to the action.

Further Googling on the subject turned up this interesting discussion with Richard Landes about the role of antisemitism in Muslim eschatology, including what may be an example of the kind of phenomenon Cooper identified in New Political Religions:

”Lately, disturbing evidence suggests that the hadith that claims that at the end of time, every Muslim will have 'a Jew or Christian to substitute for him in hell,' has been interpreted to mean that every Muslim has a Jew - or a Christian - to kill in order to be saved. The Arab Muslim French youngster who slaughtered and mutilated a neighbor since childhood, a successful Jewish disc jockey, last winter, came up to his parents' apartment with bloodied hands and said, 'I've killed my Jew, I can go to Paradise.’

And at the library, I was able to find a journal article of Cook’s, “Muslim Apocalyptic and Jihad”, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam v.20 1996 pp. 66-104. This article is mostly about what we may discern about the apocalypic beliefs of early Muslims from hadith literature, including many overtly eschatological hadith about the purpose of jihad as a spiritual exercise in warfare, many of which have been excluded from the canon due to their deep incompatibility with the general agenda of establishing and building a social order that was the basic purpose of hadith collection in the first place. I have no idea at the moment how relevant the specific issues Cook discusses in this piece are to contemporary Muslim apocalyptic literature, but this passage seems apposite:

The feeling is strong among these groups that society is basically wrong, and so it becomes the enemy by whom (through their struggle) and from whom they are purified. Both apocalyptic groups and jihad oriented groups require a strong external enemy upon which they can focus their fervor. This enemy must be, on the face of things, unbeatable, since these groups wish to display their total reliance on God to bring about the apparently impossible. Through this struggle, they are liberated from the confines of the world, sometimes by death in battle, but frequently by the simple fact of their otherworldly attitudes.

Islamic Feminism and its Discontents

I’ve added a new item to the “Readings” sidebar, ”Islamic Feminism and its Discontents: Toward a Resolution of the Debate” by Valentine M. Moghadem (from Signs, v.27 no.24, 2002). It’s largely a response to Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis by Haideh Moghissi (which I reviewed here). It’s a good and concise overview of scholarship in the field from a more sympathetic perspective to Islamic feminism than in Moghissi’s treatment (although it’s a bit harsh on Moghissi, whose position is I think more nuanced than Moghadem acknowledges here. Although Moghadem’s work was criticized in Moghissi’s book and it’s clear Moghadem felt pretty attacked by that, so there ya go.) It’s also well worth a read for the summary of what Islamic feminists have managed to accomplish within the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But above all, I love an academic paper that comes with its own punchline. Because in the end, Moghadem's “resolution” to the debate between Islamic and secularist feminists is basically that everyone just adopt her own Marxist-feminist perspective, which is that of course we should talk nice about Islamic feminism but still posit complete secularization of the state as the only effective route to women’s empowerment. Except still keep the Islamic injunction against usury as state law, we like that part since it’s anti-capitalist. Problem solved!

Of Constitutions and Men

I’m currently reading Radical Islam's Rules, a survey of extremist Sharia law lately published by Freedom House. From Mehrangis Kar’s essay on Iran, regarding the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which turned Iran into a constitutional monarchy:

"…the first and second amendments to the constitution were added, showing that the revolution never effectively relegated shari’a to the periphery.

First Amendment: The State Religion of Iran is Islam as in Twelve Shi’ism, and the King must abide by, and promulgate this religion.

Second Amendment: The National Assembly, which has been established with the assistance of the Hidden Imam (may God hasten His arrival), the benevolence of His Royal Highness the King of Kings of Islam (may God make his reign everlasting), the Islamic heirarchy (may God increase their abundance), and masses of the Iranian nation, must not at any time pass any law that would be in contradiction with the holy provisions of Islam of the laws of His Holiness Muhammad, the Best of the Peoples (Peace be upon him). It is evident that to determine whether passed laws are in conflict with Islamic laws or not is the expertise of the prominent clerics (May God render everlasting the joy of their presence). Therefore, it is hereby enjoined that in all times a council will be appointed with no fewer than five members and consisting of pious jurists who are also aware of the necessity of the times. This will be done in the following manner: The prominent clerics, the Proofs of Islam, and the Shi’a Source of Emulation* will submit the names of twenty clerics who possess the aforementioned qualifications to the National Assembly. The members of the National Assembly will, either through reaching a consensus, or by a lottery, appoint five or more of the candidates as members of this council. As members of this council they will review and debate the measures that are discussed in the National Assembly, and they will reject the measures that they find to be in breach of the Islamic laws. … The ruling of this council will be final. This Amendment to the Constitution cannot be altered until the advent of the Hidden Imam (may God hasten His arrival).

The constitutionalists’ modernist tendency stirred also fierce opposition in religious circles … The traditionalist leaders, especially Shaykh Fadlu’llah Nuri, a well-known jurist, called for the creation of a "shari’a-based government." On the other side were the adherents of constitutional rule, including a number of liberal-minded clerics. They avoided confrontation by compromise and agreed to the addition of the first two amendments to the constitution. However, the proponents of constitutional rule resented Shaykh Nuri’s opposition and, once they got the chance, executed him by hanging.

On the surface, it seemed that "shari’a-based government" had emerged victorious. However, its victory was limited to these two amendments. Furthermore, the second amendment proved neither effective nor practical and, over time, was marginalized. In practice, the secularization of the legislative process continued, even to the point that the five jurists of the overseeing council were consulted.

The proconstitution forces were thus able to neutralize the two amendments without repealing them. However, some representatives still had their own personal religious convictions, which thus limited the secularization of legislation. For example, the members of Parliament did not accept the secular legislation on women’s rights. Successive Parliaments following the revolution had been expected to improve women’s conditions but failed to do so. In fact, they enacted laws that explicitly denied suffrage to women. Based on shari’a or, rather, the representatives’ understanding of shari’a, women were lumped together with minors and the mentally ill and were denied the right to vote or be elected to office."

*Translator’s note: Sources of Emulation are Shi’a jurists who achieve high recognition and are accepted as independent interpreters of the shari’a.

Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism/Haideh Moghissi

Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis by Haideh Moghissi.

I’ve mentioned this book before, with a long quote from the introduction. Moghissi is an Iranian ex-pat dismayed by what she sees as Western academic apologism for the misogynist aspects of the wave of Islamization that swept Muslim countries generally in the 80s and 90s, as well as for the low status of women in revolutionary Islamist states themselves (particularly Iran). She challenges the notion that secularist democracy and equalitarian feminism should be seen as culturally inappropriate or for Middle Eastern peoples, and attempts to map out a method for critiqueing the status of women in Muslim nations without playing into Orientalist imagery or anti-Muslim bigotry. Moghissi is especially skeptical of the enthusiasm for Islamic feminism when it is treated not as a necessary resistance strategy for women living in Islamist states, but as the only appropriate mode of feminist consciousness for women in Muslim nations in general. Moghissi herself sees strict limits on how much the status of women can be improved from within Islamic tradition, and so favors secularization as the best method of accomplishing feminist goals. It’s an interesting read and serves as a good introduction to the range of thought among Muslim and ex-Muslim women on feminism and Islam.

Iranian Women

There are some cool pictures of Iranian women in this recent issue of Paris Match.

This Year's Model

I laid Sacred Rage aside for a time, partly to read the New Political Religions book (which turned out to be disappointing, of which more later), and partly because the author's commitment to explaining Islamism as basically just Shiism was getting on my nerves. As I mentioned in the previous entry on this, the book was written in the mid-80s when the to-do was all about Iran and Hizbollah. And the thing is, Wright's a journalist, so she's just reporting what the experts are telling her. She does provide all the quotes and everything, including extensive quotes from Islamist sources and eyewitnesses in Lebanon and so forth, so it will be well worth reading at some point. But I got to the part where someone tells her that Shiism somehow wasn't causing a violent revolutionary movement for the previous 1400 years because it was busy "simmering," and that was just about enough for a little while.

So, on to a rare title (from 1994) focusing on the often overlooked Jama'at-I Islami of Pakistan that I found remaindered at Powell's a few weeks ago. The introduction states: "The study of Islamic revivalism has until now concentrated primarily on Iran and the Arab world and has, as a result, been somewhat restricted in its outlook. A comprehensive theoretical approach will need to consider revivalist activity elsewhere." Oh, you don't say. The book is entitled The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, of course. And actually the JI will be so indeed if they ever manage to assassinate Musharraf. Fun follows when, etc. (It's kind of hair-raising to imagine what it would have been like if 9/11 had had to be called off for some reason and never happened, and Jama'at sympathizers managing a coup in nuclear Pakistan became the thing that finally and suddenly got our attention instead. Apart from the whole riveting Islamists with nukes thing, everyone would be obsessing about these guys and totally ignoring al Qaeda, which would nonetheless still be very much al Qaeda.)

But 9/11 did happen, and Jama'at must soldier on in obscurity yet a little while longer. Remember Muslim Brotherhood-obsessed ex-CIA man Robert Baer? His colleague, "Anonymous," praises him effusively in the preface to his own book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, and then never mentions the MB again in the entire book. That's because in his book (published in 2004), Islamism is al Qaeda. Jama'at is also mentioned about a dozen times, in a detailed summary of all Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide since 9/11, although the name is spelled 3or 4 different ways (apparently English transliteration of Arabic and Urdu is not very standardized), and it is sometimes only referred to as "a Pakistani group." (Although in fairness there are several Pakistani Islamist groups that could be the group being referenced; I haven't gone through and looked up the specific instances. JI is just the most active on average). I don't know if the different spellings have been left in the text because "Anonymous" doesn't actually know that they all refer to the same entity, or if he presumes that his readers don't, and doesn't want them to get all distracted from his thesis by noticing anybody other than Osama bin Laden.

Well, it's all beginning to look a bit like carelessness, if you ask me.

All Roads Lead To Denial

I picked up a remaindered copy of Sacred Rage: the Wrath of Militant Islam by Robin Wright last weekend; it's one of those insta-books that appeared shortly after 9/11. I've gradually realized that avoiding this particular publishing category in the assumption that it was likely to be hysterical and unhelpful was probably a mistake, for one thing because it has meant that I don't know what everybody else believes about Islamism based on that type of publication, and am continually flummoxed and irritated by what seems to me to be the extremely weird and beside-the-point sort of things people say about it in the media and in conversation. But it turns out this is actually a book originally published in 1985 by a journalist who had spent a lot of time in Iran, with a couple of new chapters about Al Qaeda slapped on at the end.

It's from the era people are talking about in publications from the 1990s when they say "Everybody expected the Islamic revolution in Iran and Khomeinism to have huge influence and impact throughout the Muslim world, but then it didn't so much." Not least, it appears, because the Sunni version of Islamism draws heavily on the theology of medieval-era Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyya, who considered Shiism a form of apostasy. So it is that a 1981 conference Wright is warming up to do a chapter on, between Khomeinists and Sunni Islamists from several nations, which he describes as having been unjustly neglected by journalists at the time who only now are beginning to realize how important it was, has apparently been forgotten again, or at least hasn't been mentioned in any of the other more recent books and articles I've read.

The book begins by carefully noting that, even though Khomeini and the Iran-sponsored Shia Islamist group Hizbollah in Lebanon are at the top of the news right now for all of their attacks on Americans, Islamism doesn't really "come from" Iran or Shiism, then goes on to obsess about them anyway, much in the same way a current book might duly note that Islamism isn't merely an emanation of Saudi Arabia or Wahhabism before going on to talk about nothing else. (Incidentally, Wright does not use the term Islamism, which possibly had not yet been coined at the time. Instead he refers to "the Crusade," the nearest English language equivalent to jihad. The question of what effect different linguistic approaches to translating Islamic concepts has on how outsiders understand them would be an interesting one for somebody with a lot more time on their hands than myself). I wonder if the average person picking up this book would notice how it illustrates the contingent and ultimately self-preoccupied way Westerners tend to approach this subject, or simply conclude that Islamism "really" came mostly from Iran. (A book has recently been published on just that theory, actually, tracing it a little further back to mid-20th Century U.S. foreign policy there; it passed across my desk at the library a few weeks ago but I haven't read it).

In any case, we seem to have a persistent not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees problem in grappling with Islamism. It's a little dispiriting to me that, three full years past the point when this ideology finally captured the rapt attention of the Western public, many intelligent and educated people still consider "capturing Osama" and "destroying Al Qaeda" to be the alpha and omega of the war on Islamism and Islamist terrorism. It would of course be beneficial to capture Osama in particular; he is a very charismatic leader and therefore quite useful to the cause. But the primary contribution of Al Qaeda to the movement--that of bumping everything up one organizational tech level in terms of finally figuring out how to make the movement as transnational operationally as it has always been ideologically, in a way that greatly multiplies its effectiveness--is a permanent one that cannot be undone by capturing any number of Al Qaeda members, or even all of them.

There's a default sort of way of thinking about this, which tends to treat Al Qaeda as some kind of extremely insane and evil mafia or James-Bond-style supervillain organization, instead of as merely the latest iteration of a broad political movement that's been forming up for at least 100 years, and a major player in Middle Eastern politics since the late 1960s. I liked this quote Robin Wright uses from Marvin Zonis:

The message from Iran--no matter how bizarre or trivial it sounds on first, second, fourth, or thirty-ninth hearing--is in my opinion the single most impressive political ideology which has been proposed in the 20th Century since the Bolshevik Revolution … If we accept that Bolshevism is a remnant of the 19th Century, then I want to argue that we've only had one good one in the 20th Century--and it's this one … This powerful message will be with us for a very long time--no matter what happens to Ayatollah Khomeini.

… mostly because it partly illustrates why it's hard to talk honestly about how powerful Islamism really is. Clearly there's a bit of a danger that one's abstract admiration for it as an ideological construct--the way it answers every question, and ties up every loose end of Islamic history into a very neat and attractive package, and twists the lens on Islam itself, bringing the background suddenly into the foreground, in an oddly compelling way that makes many say "Ah, yes, this is what is always has been and was supposed to be all along," the way it neatly enlists the logic and rhetoric of secularist revolutionary movements and re-deploys it to denounce their perfidy and failure in the Muslim world--can turn into real approval. Zonis of course was not alone in seeing Khomeinism at the time as an "authentic" Muslim liberatory politics. (Events have largely overtaken that interpretation in the West, but not so much in the East). To me the really interesting question is not why any Muslims in the Middle East have embraced Islamism to the extent of being willing to kill and die for it, but instead, why haven't they all?

I don't really know the answer to that question, but I suspect part of it might lie in how extensively Westernized the Arab and Muslim world already is. And it turns out we're in pretty deep denial about that as well. A friend sent me a link a while back to an essay by Ian Baruma, in which the author, in discussing the civilizational aspects of the Western-Islamist conflict, simply puts Nazism in the "non-Western" category, which allows a fairly interesting discussion of Eastern perceptions of the West to end up a nonsense. What has the Middle Eastern experience with Western secularism actually been? How much does this experience account for Eastern "ignorance" of Western virtues? Because of course Nazism and Communism are no less iterations of Western thought and history for having been ultimately defeated within it. We are accustomed to thinking of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as "ours" because that's the way the Cold War sorted them, when the "other" was the Westernized Soviet Union rather than the East, but in any intellectual honest notion of a "clash of civilizations," Assad and Saddam and Nasser have been "ours" as well, along with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. I do understand the ideological need to define 20th Century Western totalitarianisms as "not us" for the purpose of preserving the gains we've made by defeating them, but it makes for one hell of a big blind spot (and perhaps a crucially enabling one) when discussing Middle Eastern politics in terms of "us" and "them." It also, I think, helps to obscure the obvious influence of the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th Century on Islamist thought; the eerily familiar tone and vocabulary of Islamist rhetoric jumps so clearly off the page when you read unvarnished quotations that you would think this would be impossible to conceal. Yet we still seem to prefer to see Islamists as "medieval" or "savage." I once answered a person who said to me "The terrorists are just not like us, you know," with "No, they're pretty much like us, it's just that they're like the Nazis of us," which certainly ended the conversation. I think we like to think of Nazis as almost supernatural devils too, or the outcome of some unaccountable episode of German mass hysteria, or something local and containable like that, rather than as part of our collective history as Westerners, emanating in a logical way from risks posed by our secular and rationalist world view. Perhaps our habitual trivialization of the Islamist enemy (whether as confined to a single shadowy group, or as consisting of a purely reactive phenomenon that we can somehow control with our own behavior) ultimately serves as a similar type of false comfort.