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.