Until the end of time

• Last Updated: January 16. 2009 8:30AM UAE / January 16. 2009 4:30AM GMT

Armageddon time: Antichrists, secret governments, Elders of Zion and flying saucers – all appear on the book jackets featured in Jean-Pierre Filiu's L'Apocalypse dans l'Islam. Courtesy of the author

Thomas Hegghammer reads a new book tracing the spread of apocalyptic thought in the Islamic world.


L'Apocalypse dans l'Islam
Jean-Pierre Filiu
Fayard
€19 (Dh93)


To many people in the West, al Qa’eda and its affiliates are nothing but religious fanatics. But on closer inspection jihadists are not as irrational as we might think. Despite their religious slogans, jihadists talk politics, think strategy and operate in the real world.

The jihadists begin to appear particularly down-to-earth when set alongside another class of Islamic extremists that have been all but ignored in the West: Islamic apocalypticists. These are people who believe an end-of-the-world battle between the forces of good and evil is forthcoming. Belief in the imminence of the end of time has been on the rise in the Muslim world since the late 1970s, and in a fascinating new book, Jean-Pierre Filiu investigates the origins of Islamic apocalyptic thought and its disturbing modern manifestations. Filiu examines both the Shiite and Sunni traditions from the seventh to the 21st century, and shows that the past two decades have seen a spectacular rise in the scope and popularity of apocalyptic literature.

It is tempting to dismiss the outlandish ideas of apocalypticists as sheer lunacy. After all, one of the most prominent apocalyptic writers, the Egyptian Muhammad Isa Dawud, argues that the Antichrist resides in the Bermuda triangle and controls the world with flying saucers. But the sheer number of readers – millions all over the Muslim world, mostly from the lower classes – forces us to take them seriously. And some apocalypticists do commit acts of violence: in 1979, a group of rebels forcibly seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, declaring that one of their associates was the Mahdi, the prophesied redeemer of Islam. But the most important reason to take apocalypticism seriously is that people’s beliefs about the end of the world reflect and inform their political and social views in the present.

Despite their esoteric conclusions, Muslim apocalyptic writings have an important political dimension. They point to contemporary developments – especially examples of Muslim defeat and Jewish-Christian victories – as signs that the end is nigh. Apocalyptic thought and other conspiracy theories have an important compensatory function – they provide a way to make sense of adversity. As such, the rise of Muslim apocalypticism is symptomatic of the deep sense of victimisation and geopolitical deprivation so widespread in the Muslim world since the 1970s.

Of course, the basic idea that the world will end is intrinsic to all the monotheistic religions: a 2002 poll revealed that 59 per cent of Americans believe the battle of Armageddon will take place. Modern apocalypticism was long associated primarily with Christian fundamentalism, and Christian millenarianists have been a major source of inspiration to contemporary Muslim apocalypticists. In the 1980s and 1990s, the latter borrowed extensively from Christian eschatology – with some writers relying more on Christian sources than on Islamic ones. By the early 2000s, the flow of influence had come full circle, with Christian millenarians beginning to borrow tropes from Muslim apocalyptic literature.

This is not to say that the Islamic tradition lacked sources of its own. The day of judgment, amply described in the Quran, constitutes the most impenetrable mystery of Islam; its timing is known only by God. This has not prevented believers from speculating, especially since the holy texts speak of the “signs” that will precede “the Hour”. Descriptions of the apocalypse in Islamic texts – especially in the hadith – include a variety of mythical figures, creatures and place-names, such as the Antichrist, the Mahdi, the Messiah, the Beast, the “Two-Horned One”, The “Yemeni” , the peoples of Gog and Magog, and the Mountain.

Belief in the return of the Mahdi is a defining theological feature in Shia Islam, but the Sunni tradition has developed its own orthodox apocalyptic views, centred on the return of Jesus and the Mahdi and their battle with the Antichrist. The clerical establishment has always sought to guard this tradition from lay speculation and imagination, but popular superstitions cannot be suppressed, and throughout history – especially in times of crisis – groups of Muslims have rallied around individuals claiming to be the Mahdi.

The contemporary wave of apocalypticism began with what Filiu calls “the triple blow of 1979”. First was the Iranian revolution, which institutionalised Shiite doctrines about the eventual return of the Mahdi. Second was the violent takeover of the Mecca mosque by Sunni radicals led by Juhayman al Utaybi. Third was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which gave resonance to a prediction from the apocalyptic tradition about a messianic army emerging from Khorasan (the historic region corresponding roughly to Afghanistan).

The new wave of apocalypticism manifested itself in what Filiu calls “apocalyptic fiction”. These books presented wildly imaginative theories about the world and its imminent end, mixing classical apocalyptic themes with conspiracy theories and a hotchpotch of non-Islamic cultural references. The pioneer of this genre was the Egyptian journalist Said Ayyub, who in 1986 published a bestselling book called The Antichrist. Ayyub argued that world history had been merely a series of ploys by the Jewish Antichrist to suppress Islam, and that the Antichrist – based in Israel – would soon emerge and face the forces of Islam in a final battle. Ayyub inspired a veritable deluge of Egyptian apocalyptic literature by prolific and highly creative writers such as Muhammad Isa Dawud (he of the flying saucers in the Bermuda Triangle), Muhammad Izzat Arif, Muhammad Fuad Shakir, Atif Lamada and others.

In the mid-1990s a similar flowering of apocalyptic fiction emerged in the Levant, especially in Jordan and Palestine. The psychological roots of apocalypticism make this no surprise, Filiu argues: it is Egypt, Jordan and Palestine that have borne the brunt of Israel’s military might and gone on to sign treaties with the Jewish state. The humiliation has been intensified by the series of blows dealt by the United States and Israel to Muslims in the 1980s and 1990s: the 1982 Lebanon invasion, the aerial strikes on Tunisia and Tripoli in 1985 and 1986, the 1991 Gulf war, and so on. Apocalyptic thinking thus becomes a way of dealing with defeat.

Apocalyptic literature found a readership all over the Muslim world, in large part because it was explicitly political and no doubt more entertaining than regular theological texts. These writers constructed an extraordinarily eclectic intellectual universe, drawing freely from sources as varied as the Apocalypse of St John, the Chronicles of the Elders of Zion, Nostradamus, Samuel Huntington and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The fertile imaginations of apocalyptic writers have identified forces ranging from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the illusionist David Copperfield as agents of the Antichrist.

This eclecticism worried the religious establishment, which tried to counter the radical street literature with its own, more conservative apocalyptic treatises. While this strategy worked in places like Saudi Arabia, where we find relatively few radical apocalyptic writers, it seems only to have added to the apocalyptic fervor in Egypt and elsewhere. By the early 2000s, apocalyptic fiction was firmly established and widely available.

This was before the US invasion of Iraq, which had a major impact on the flowering of apocalyptic thought in the Islamic world. After 2003 the literature grew considerably and became more alarmist, with many writers pointing to a final phase of confrontation between believers and infidels; there was also a qualitative shift from anti-Semitism to anti-Americanism.

The Iraq war has had an even more dramatic effect on apocalyptic fervour in the Shiite world. The most prominent example might be Muqtada al Sadr, who has used popular mahdist discourse to mobilise his followers – and his militia, the Mahdi Army – for an essentially nationalist cause. Less well known is Ansar al Imam al Mahdi, a Basra-based sect led by Ahmad al Hassan, who claims to be “The Yemeni” – a mythical figure who will immediately precede the return of the Mahdi, according to Shiite tradition.

Fiercely opposed to the US presence and to the Iraqi and Iranian governments, al Hassan declared jihad on the Americans in 2003 and demanded that Ayatollah Khamenei and all other Muslim rulers cede their political power to him. He allegedly attracted a following of around 5000 people, the most radical of whom set up camp north of Najaf and formed a militia, Jund al Sama (Soldiers of Heaven).

The 500-man militia proceeded to plan a takeover of Najaf and the assassination of the four great ayatollahs, including Ali al Sistani, but before they could get that far, they were slaughtered by the Iraqi and US military in January 2007. Ansar al Islam al Mahdi and Jund al Sama are footnotes in the history of the Iraqi insurgency – but they represent the first outbreak of violent Islamic apocalypticism since 1979, and both groups are still active in southern Iraq.

The rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has spurred a resurgence of radical mahdist thought in the Shiite world: while past Iranian presidents shared the clerics’ conservatism in matters messianic, Ahmadinejad has employed more populist mahdist rhetoric. He has increased funding for the mosque in Jamkaran (where the Mahdi is supposed to reemerge), celebrated the anniversary of the Mahdi’s birth by distributing gifts to the poor, and commissioned a series of radio programs on the return of the Mahdi. Ahmadinejad’s populist turn has caused friction with the religious establishment, but it has also inspired apocalyptic writing of the kind that emerged in the Sunni world in the mid-1980s. In 2006, the Iranian cultural center in Damascus published several such works, including a book by Shadi Faqih entitled Ahmadinejad and the Next World Revolution, which stated that “Ahmadinejad is the leader of the Mahdi’s forces that will liberate Jerusalem […] the nuclear project is linked to the appearance of the Imam Mahdi.”

How dangerous is the rise of apocalypticism? A messianic sect with weapons of mass destruction is certainly everyone’s idea of a nightmare. But while it should certainly be taken seriously, Islamic messianism is not as dangerous in security terms as one might think. Apocalypticism contains several self-limiting mechanisms. Sects like Jund al Sama usually attract the disenfranchised, and they radicalise in isolation; hence they rarely possess the human capital and experience to conduct sophisticated operations. Plus there is an incentive for passivity: why change the world if it is going to end anyway? And finally, apocalyptic doctrines have an expiration date: if the world does not end at the time promised by the sect’s leader (and it usually does not), the legitimacy of the movement evaporates.

What about al Qa’eda – could it turn apocalyptic? Filiu, who has also written a book on jihadism, argues that it is not likely: he found very few apocalyptic references in the jihadist literature. Jihadists are too busy changing the world to care about its ending.

This does not mean that the resurgence of apocalypticism should be dismissed as inconsequential. Much of the apocalyptic literature traffics in anti-Semitism and anti-westernism and will fuel the already rampant problem of conspiracy theories in the Muslim world. These books are much more widely read than the jihadist literature, even though apocalyptic propagandists have yet to exploit the Internet. (Filiu has thus far identified few apocalyptic websites).

L’Apocalypse dans l’Islam is a impressive piece of scholarship. It offers a thorough yet very readable analysis of a largely unexplored part of the Islamist ideological landscape. The book would have benefited from a more extensive introduction, for this is a topic that is unfamiliar and complex territory even for specialists on Islamism. Nevertheless, it is highly recommended for anyone interested in political Islam – Islamic apocalypticism clearly deserves more attention. As Filiu writes, “the end of the world is a serious matter, especially for those who are preparing for it.”

Thomas Hegghammer is a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.