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.

Questions For Hamas

Marc Lynch had some interesting comments about the Palestinian election yesterday:

The Bush administration has talked a lot about democracy, about past mistakes in American policy towards democracy in the region, and so forth, but I think it's fair to say that most Arabs remain deeply suspicious. Recent Arab elections haven't really tested whether this has changed. Iraq under American military occupation is sui generis. In Egypt there was never any chance that the Muslim Brotherhood would be allowed to actually win, and even if it somehow had Mubarak would have remained in control over a relatively impotent Parliament. Jordan's Parliamentary elections have been sufficiently gerrymandered (via electoral law) to ensure a strict ceiling on Islamist seats. Sudanese Islamists arrived on the back of a military coup.

Hamas winning and presumably moving to form a government is the first real instance of an Islamist movement on the brink of winning power democratically since 1992.* If they take power, we are going to see some major political science propositions put to the test: does power moderate or radicalize Islamist groups? Will they be willing and able to work with non-Islamist parties in a coalition? Will they use their democratic victory to abolish democracy? Will Islamist groups concentrate on the pragmatics of rule or resort to foreign policy grandstanding? Will they use their position of power to pursue terrorism? Will they be willing to set aside doctrine and work pragmatically with Israelis and Americans? Will they use government power to impose unpopular sharia rule over their people? Will they oppress Christian and non-Islamist Muslims? Most academic and policy analysis of these questions has remained counterfactual and hypothetical, since there have been no actual examples of an elected Islamist group in power. That could now change ....

For America, I think it's extremely important right now to handle this right: honor the will of the people, demonstrate a commitment to democratic process, and see what happens. Give Hamas the chance to prove its intentions. Don't get too upset about the inevitable bursts of objectionable rhetoric by excited victors - test deeds, not early words. Above alll, don't give the Islamist hardliners the winning argument they crave about American hypocrisy. Refusing to deal with Hamas right now could effectively kill American attempts to promote democracy in the Middle East for a generation.

That sounds about right to me. Dubya seemed to follow roughly this line in his press conference yesterday when questioned about the election. He made no outright refusal to deal with Hamas and many feel-good statements about the democratic process represented by the election.

But he also made it clear that U.S. willingness to deal with Hamas will be conditioned on Hamas abandoning its call for and commitment to the destruction of Israel. I’m not sure whether refusal to recognize the outcome of the election based on who won vs. refusal to deal with that government based on total opposition to its major policy will be viewed as much more than a distinction without a difference in the Arab world. It is surely an improvement on the outcome in Algeria; there will be no coup, U.S.-backed or otherwise. However, U.S. vs. Arab nation beliefs about what is fair and reasonable when it comes to Israel differ so radically that it may be a mug’s game for the U.S. to try and court Arab public opinion on the issue without substantially altering our policy, and well beyond anything that would be considered acceptable in the U.S.

Lynch is keeping an eye on the Arab media to see how the Palestinian election is being viewed in other Arab countries, so his blog will be well worth checking for the next few days (even more so than usual, I mean).

*Some commenters at Lynch's blog pointed out that an Islamist party had already won a majority, in Turkey. True, but not really comparable since that party is so much more moderate than Hamas, and the tradition of democracy is so much more firmly entrenched (and independently supported by the army) in Turkey than in Palestine. When AK won in Turkey, people were mostly worried about the impact on women’s rights and on Turkey’s ability to join the EU and that sort of thing, not whether there would ever be another election in Turkey. But with Hamas in power, a transition to theocratic fascism is indeed one possible outcome for Palestine.

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.

The Pope Talks Islam

There are two competing accounts of whether Pope Benedict XVI thinks Islam is compatible with democracy, according to two attendees of a recent conference with him on the topic, plus an essay by Ratzinger from about 10 years ago on the same subject, here.

(I think the University of Chicago Islamic scholar Fr. Fessio mentions, transcribed as “Rashan” in the radio transcript, must be Fazlur Rahman).

New Iraq Poll

From normblog: A new opinion poll showing apparently stronger support for secular democracy in general but weaker support for gender equality in particular than the poll I quoted earlier. Goes to show how much it matters which questions you’re asking, probably. And also, how much cultural attitudes towards women don’t map as completely to preferences about the role of religion in the state as you might think (see the link to the charts showing attitudes towards gender issues broken down by political preference on the page describing the new poll there). Secularists certainly rank lower than Islamic government supporters in opposing gender mixing in universities, for example, but 40-48% is still pretty high.

The Emperor Has Fabulous Clothes

An interesting exhibit at the Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian: Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey. It’s closing January 22nd, but perhaps the online tour will be up a bit longer than that.