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Apocalypse in Islam
Jean-Pierre Filiu, tr. MB DeBevoise
University of California Press (2011)
reviewed by Charles Cameron
Jean-Pierre Filiu’s book, Apocalypse in Islam (University of California Press, 2011) makes a crucially important contribution to our understanding of current events – it illuminates not just one but a cluster of closely-related blind-spots in our current thinking, and it does so with scholarship and verve.
Al-Qaida’s interest in acquiring nuclear weapons — and Iran’s – and the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear materiel – and the situation in Jerusalem – depending how you count ’em, there are a half dozen or so glaring world problems where one spark in the Mahdist underbrush might transform a critical situation. And yet as Ali Allawi put it in his talk to the Jamestown Foundation on Mahdism in Iraq a few years back, Mahdists ferments still tend to be “below our radar”.
Background:
People are always talking about unintended consequences: might I suggest that blind-spots are where unintended consequences come from – and offer some background on apocalyptic, before proceeding to discuss Filiu’s contribution?
We already have a tendency to dismiss religious drivers in considering current events, having concluded in many cases that religion is passé for the serious-minded types who populate diplomatic, military and governmental bureaucracies world-wide – and we are even more reluctant to focus on anyone who talks about the Last Days and Final Judgment, despite the presence of both in the faith statements and scriptures of both Islam and Christianity. We think vaguely of cartoons of bearded and bedraggled men with sandwich boards declaring The End is Nigh, and move along to something more easily understood, something conveniently quantitative like the number of centrifuges unaffected by Stuxnet in Iran, or purely hypothetical, like the association of Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan.
And yet, as I’ve argued before, apocalyptic belief can be a potent force-multiplier – because as Timothy Furnish puts it bluntly in the opening paragraph of his book, Holiest Wars (Praeger, 2005):
Islamic messianic insurrections are qualitatively different from mere fundamentalist ones such as bedevil the world today, despite their surface similarities. In fact, Muslim messianic movements are to fundamentalist uprisings what nuclear weapons are to conventional ones: triggered by the same detonating agents, but far more powerful in scope and effect.
Even if that’s somewhat overstated, it should give us pause.
Stephen O’Leary, in Arguing the Apocalypse (OUP, 1994), noted that apocalyptic studies have generally been considered disreputable, and went on to say,
Apocalyptic arguments made by people of good and sincere faith have apparently succeeded in persuading millions; it is unfair and dangerous to dismiss these arguments as irrational and the audiences persuaded by them as ignorant fools. In a world where bright utopic visions compete with increasingly plausible scenarios of global catastrophe, it seems imperative to understand how our anticipations of the future may be both inspired and limited by the ancient logic of apocalypticism.
Indeed, Jessica Stern, was taken aback at first by the apocalyptic intensity of the terrorists she studied, writing in Terrorism in the Name of God (Harper/Collins, 2003):
I have come to see that apocalyptic violence intended to “cleanse” the world of “impurities” can create a transcendent state. All the terrorist groups examined in this book believe — or at least started out believing — that they are creating a more perfect world. From their perspective, they are purifying the world of injustice, cruelty, and all that is antihuman. When I began this project, I could not understand why the killers I met seemed spiritually intoxicated. Now, I think I understand. They seem that way because they are.
So the bottom line is that we have a very real perceptual problem: an inability to take religious drivers seriously in terms of the special passions they evoke, and an even greater blindness to the most intense form those passions can take – a form which even now powers some significant undercurrents in both Sunni and Shi’ite affairs.
And that, in a nutshell, is why Filiu’s book makes such an important contribution: he’s turning a spot-light on a major blind-spot.
An early warning
Filiu is nothing if not urbane – a European diplomat-scholar with a lively curiosity – so his eye is caught by the garish covers of apocalyptic tracts sprouting across the countries he travels in, much as Drezner’s eye is caught by the current crop of zombie movies, and he begins to collect them, even though – or perhaps because – they’re at the very antipodes of cosmopolitan urbanity.
They mushroom, they explode. And they are indeed eye-catching, grotesque.
Yet just as Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (Zondervan, 1970) was the number one best-selling non-fiction book in the US in the 1970s, but somehow escaped mention in the Publisher’s Weekly listings, a plethora of pop Islamic apocalyptic titles only too easily escapes our notice.
And like an early jazz critic – or comic book, superhero, or video-game critic – catching on to the sense that something important is brewing, not just “beneath the radar” but frankly “outside the pale”, and intercepting it, interrogating it within the context of a wider literacy, Filiu intercepts Islamic millennialism, interrogating it, bringing it politely to our attention and interpreting it for us.
Angles and learnings
What can we learn from Filiu? What angles does he see that we might otherwise miss?
It may seem pretty basic, but the unit of thought in the Qur’an, equivalent to a Biblical verse, is an aya, a sign: Islam is a religion of reading the ayat, the signs – and prominent among them are the signs of the times, the apocalyptic signs of the end times, the coming of the Mahdi and Judgment day. Christianity has its “signs of the times” too – but Christianity isn’t a religion of “reading the signs” in the way that Islam is, and in Christianity signs don’t have the same force.
Filiu doesn’t emphasize this, but he does make it a departure point for his exploration of Islamic apocalyptic (p. 4), and follows it up by noting that in the first chapter of the Qur’an, God most merciful is spoken of as Master of the Day of Judgment.
But then that’s Islam -– and huge and diverse though Islam may be, it’s still a focus, and must be seen in context. So how’s this for context? Speaking of Iran’s Ahmadinejad and “the most farsighted of American neoconservatives” he notes their common conviction “that an implacable conflict is foretold in prophecy” and observes:
It is … less a clash of civilizations that is now beginning to take shape than a confrontation of millenarianisms.
— which doubles the poignancy of his comment in concluding his Prologue (pp. xix-xxi), just two paragraphs later:
The end of the world is a serious matter — especially for those who are busy preparing for it
And although Filiu’s topic is Apocalypse in Islam, this sense that Islamic apocalyptic finds its mirror image in its Christian analogue will run like a quiet thread through his book, appearing at odd moments, as when he points to Sheikh al-Hawali’s use of Christian apocalyptic materials in his polemic against Christian apocalyptic writers themselves (p. 109), and in the discussion of the parallelisms between Christian and Islamic apocalyptic and their divergences with which Filiu brings his book to a close (Epilogue, pp. 195-99).
The history
In the first half of his book, Filiu presents the history of Islamic apocalyptic…
David Cook has given us his scholarly account of the Sunni traditions in Studies in Islamic Apocalyptic (Darwin Press, 2002), and dealt with more recent developments in his Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse UP, 2005), though we have yet to see his corresponding work on the Shi’ite side, and Timothy Furnish has given us a treatment of a number of Mahdist movements, similarly weighted towards the Sunni. Filiu’s work covers both the historical and contemporary aspects, in both Sunni and Shi’a schools – and like Furnish, he writes with one eye on his scholarly audience and the other on the interested non-specialist reader.
For the history of Sunni apocalyptic thought, Filiu begins with beginnings – the clear presence of expectation of the Day of Judgment and absence of references to the Mahdi as such in the Qur’an, the paucity of strong Mahdist ahadith in the great hadith collections, and the gradual formation of a corpus of “signs” of impending apocalypse. His chapter “Grand Masters of the Medieval Apocalypse” then calls on Ibn Arabi, al-Qurtubi, Ibn Kathir, Ibn Khaldun and al-Suyuti.
The case of Ibn Arabi is instructive. In Filiu’s view, the great
