Apocalyptic Islam and Bin Laden

[Guest guest]

Apocalyptic Islam and Bin Laden

Richard Landes, Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University

 

 

Most Americans ask themselves, " How could someone do this? What

madness? " The more prone to self-criticism and reflection then

ask, " What have we done that might provoke such anger. Palestinians

and other Muslims and Arabs explain that it is our support of Israel

that prompts this hatred. We do not understand the misery that

Palestinians live in under Israeli occupation, the rage and

frustration they feel. It is a terrible thing, what happened, but if

you westerners want to know why so many hate you around the world,

consider that the Palestinians suffer under this threat daily.

 

We need to consider both issues the motivations of Bin Laden and

the Arab-Israeli conflict in light of Islamism and its apocalyptic

world view. Bin Laden is a central player in a cosmic battle that

pits the warriors for truth against the agents of Satan and evil in

this world. (For a good idea of what this vision consists of, see

the web site named in honor of Abdullah Azzam, Bin Laden's (now

dead) mentor and the founder of MAK, the predecessor to Al Qa'ida,

http://www.azzam.com, especially the apocalyptic reading of the

present world situation by a respected Saudi theologian, Sifr al-

Hawali (http://www.azzam.com/html/dayofwrath.htm.) He uses Daniel to

prove that the second intifada began the " Day of Rage of the Lord. "

See also http://www.al-qiyamah.org/al-qiyamah/surah_20-21.htm by a

moderate theologian who dislikes the fundamentalists, but

nonetheless reads Sura 57 of the Koran as an apocalyptic prophecy

fulfilled in the Trade Center bombing.

 

Islamism represents what we might call a " fundamentalist " reaction

to the inroads of modernity. Assaulted by a multi-cultural, multi-

religious and secular world, with all that implies about the

" relativity " of both scripture and claims to absolute truth, as

well as to the laxities of observance and morality that seem so much

a part of modernity, Islam has, like Judaism and Christianity,

generated revival movements that seek to return to the " fundamentals "

of the faith Sharia (Islamic law), strict observances and purity

concerns, and an implacably hostile attitude towards the secular

world that undermines such efforts. In the case of Islam these

revival efforts align closely with political efforts to impose

religious uniformity the veil for women and public prayer for men

and ultimately connect with theocratic notions of state-sponsored

Sharia (including the mutilation of thieves and the execution of

adulterers). This latter tendency is directly related to the

earliest development of Islam in which military conquest prepared

the ground for religious dominion (and only later mass conversions),

and it has intensified in both Sunni and Shiicircles since

Khoumeini's revolution in Iran in 1979. Islamism represents the more

intense and coercive elements of this fundamentalist Islamic

revival, holding out as a solution to the whole world's problems the

vision of a global culture under Sharia.

 

The relative failure of these " utopian " religious ideologies (what

we generically call millennialism) in places like Iran, and their

devolution into terrible civil wars with devastating civilian

casualties (Sudan, Algeria) has, rather than give Islamicists pause,

only served to intensify the belief that, if only these things were

properly done, they would work (i.e., Sunni Taliban rather than

Shii Iranians). The political aspect of these conflicts has

further intensified around the unbearable blow to Islamic pride and

identity brought on by the existence of an autonomous (and

modernizing) Jewish state in the midst of territories under Islamic

dominion since the first generations of the religion. The vision of

a world successively brought under the peaceful dominion of Islam

(conquered areas known as Dar el Salaam, the realm of peace), while

it might have been halted by the West, was rolled back by Israel in

1948, and again in 1967.

 

Such developments have sharpened the sense of assault by the modern

West and have come together in a ferocious apocalyptic narrative of

the final battle between good and evil in radical Islamist circles

of the Middle East. For these radicals, the failure of Islam in the

modern world comes from corrupt monarchies and rapidly corrupting

secular revolutionary regimes. The West at a distance may have

presented a threat, but Israel represents a desecrating cultural

invasion. The Islamist narrative is not a story of the tides of

civilization, but relentlessly cosmic in scope and urgent in

rhetoric. Now rages the battle between cosmic good (we warriors for

Allah) and evil (the West, especially its most Satanic forces,

Israel and the USA).

 

According to numerous apocalyptic pamphlets circulating in

Palestinian and other Muslim circles, notably Bin Laden and similar

jihadist circles, Israel, and especially Jerusalem is the center of

this apocalyptic struggle. Jerusalem's (pre-Zionist) significance

in Islam derived primarily from its eschatological significance, the

role that it played on the day of the Resurrection of the Dead and

the Last Judgment. According to a popular eschatological hadith, the

Kaabah stone itself will come from Mecca to Jerusalem on that day.

In this world view, the West, with its secularism and materialism

represents a cosmic enemy that must be destroyed, and Israel, with

its control of the holy city of Jerusalem, the insufferable advance

column of that assault. As the rest of the world succumbs to Western

blandishments and corruption, Islam alone has resisted, at least

that element of Islam that has renewed and purified itself in recent

times in Islamism. The larger vision, championed by Bin Laden,

however goes beyond this fundamentalist revivalism so familiar to

historians of American culture, itself one of the most fertile soils

for revival movements in the world. For Bin Laden this is no see-saw

battle between two sides, this is the ultimate struggle.

 

For him, Sharia should rule the entire world, a project he believes

that Muhammed commanded almost 1500 years ago. " Behold! " claims an

early and oft-repeated Muslim text, " God sent me [the Prophet

Muhammad] with a sword, just before the Hour [of Judgment], and

placed my daily sustenance beneath the shadow of my spear, and

humiliation and contempt upon those who oppose me. " But as opposed

to (what we can reconstruct so far) of Islamic history, this time

the battle is not merely conquest, but annihilation of the enemy.

This is the apocalyptic world of " convert to the true faith or die. "

 

These are the characteristics of the most virulent forms apocalyptic

violence. As with the " first " Crusaders (1096-99), the enemy,

demonized, has no human traits; if they refuse to convert they

deserve mass slaughter. The massacre of Jews at home, of Muslims,

Jews, and even of the strange Christians in the Levant, were all

signs of the Lord's Day, the day of Vindication for his faithful

crusaders. Similarly, the 5-10,000 dead for Bin Laden better it

were 50,000 are a down payment. This is the first real blow of

Armageddon.

 

So why the Trade Center and the Pentagon? Why attack symbols when

you risk, as the Japanese did, awaking the slumbering giant? Why the

mad disregard for the realities of the situation? Because Bin Laden

lives in a symbolic universe which he reads apocalyptically.

Reflective apocalyptic violence, whether it comes from an individual

like Buford Thomas or Timothy McVeigh, or the leader of a " new

religious movement " like Shinohara and his Aum Shin Rikyo, views the

current (socio-political) world as great tectonic plates in immense

tension, and if the agent of apocalyptic destruction can only set

off an explosion at the very site where that tension is greatest,

they can free the fault line to completely realign the world.

 

How new is this Islamic apocalyptic reading? Significant recent

mutations in Muslim apocalyptic date back to 1979 (when, in the year

1400 A.H., Khoumeini took over Iran with millennial plans for a

perfect theocracy). In the last two decades, as this active

eschatology passed from Shii to Sunni circles in the context of

the Arab-Israeli conflict, this apocalyptic discourse has taken on

many of the traits and techniques of Western apocalyptic (Biblical

themes, sophisticated communication technologies). Al Halawi's

book The Day of Wrath, for example, is posted on the Web and its

content is enormously sophisticated and eclectic in its use of

Jewish and Christian sources. At the approach of 2000, the Christian

year became increasingly significant for Muslim apocalyptic writers,

who mixed conspiracy theory, UFOs, and classic Muslim and Christian

apocalyptic to target Israel, and especially their control of the

Temple Mount as the center of the cosmic battle. A Zionist coalition

of Christians and Jews, led by al Dajjal (Islam's " Antichrist "

figure), would trample Al Haram al Sharif in Jerusalem, triggering

the final battle. The " Al Aqsa " intifada, started in the year 2000

in reaction to the desecrating visit of Sharon. It set in motion the

attack of Muslim forces against the apocalyptic enemy of Israel. The

attack on the US strikes at the other " twin tower " of Western evil.

 

This kind of apocalyptic violence is hardly new. Indeed Western

European Christianity in its " middle ages " engaged in just this kind

of thinking, producing crusading massacres both against infidels

abroad and dissidents at home, as well as the totalitarian

institutions of inquisitorial Christendom. One of the most important

steps towards modern civil society was to abandon such narcissistic,

megalomanic self-perceptions, and restrain religion from using

coercion to articulate its message. Unfortunately, we seem to have

repressed the apocalyptic so firmly in the West, that we don't

seem capable of recognizing it when it reappears elsewhere. And we

don't know how to deal with the religious expressions of such

overwhelmingly anti-modern hostility to the demands of civil

society.

 

How do we confront such a terrifying and zealous enemy?

 

By minimizing his fanaticism, and telling ourselves, without further

investigation, that such insanity is really marginal, the work of a

madman? One shudders at the cost of underestimating such implacable

and urgent hatred.

 

By telling ourselves that our own sins have aroused his regrettable

but understandable hatred? It makes sense to take apocalyptic hatred

seriously; it is folly to imagine that our sins, however numerous

deserve this hatred.

 

By imagining that if we could just get Bin Laden and some of his

associates, we could also atone to the rest of the Muslim world by

sacrificing the sin offering that their Islamists demand Ð Israel?

The Palestinians, after all do not really partake of this mad

vision, and would settle for satisfaction in their cause. (As one

European put it to an American friend: " When are your Jews going to

realize that it is their support for Israel that is bringing this

misery upon you? " ) Such thinking, as admirably self-flagellating or

despicably hypocritical and treacherous as it might be to the cause

of civil society, is in any case willfully self-deceptive and

ultimately self-destructive.

 

And if we look more closely and see how widespread this virulent

form of demonizing apocalyptic has become in global Islam, from its

fanatic core to a widespread Muslim sympathy with its world view,

how do we deal with it? No civil society can tolerate active

cataclysmic apocalyptic religiosity, with its dualistic demonizing

and totalizing violence against any dissent. And any viable civil

society must confront the less visible passive forms such belief

takes and which, under conditions of stress, generates its more

violent manifestations. The USA has those tendencies (hence the

fearful symmetry of Robertson and Falwell's reading of the attack

as punishment for our sins of secularism), and we weathered them at

the approach of Y2K. That is the sign of a healthy civil society.

 

If we would rather not sacrifice Israel to the apocalyptic rage of

Islamism the way we sacrificed Czechoslovakia to the colder but no

less ambitious appetite of the Nazis, and we also do not want to tar

all of Islam with the brush of apocalyptic Islamism, thus joining in

their dualistc thinking, if we want to build a global community that

has a chance for peace, then we must begin to ask ourselves, and our

Muslim moderate friends, both political and personal, some very hard

questions about their apocalyptic visions.

 

This forces us to confront secular modernity's schizophrenic

attitude towards religion. On the one hand, Bin LadenÕs kind of

religiosity represents the worst of what we, as a culture, renounced

in the shift to modern civil societies Ð religion as a wielder of

power in the name of a dogmatic theology that cannot tolerate anyone

elseÕs religious freedoms. The denunciations of religion as

superstition, infantile neurosis, totalitarian oppression, all stem

from our horror at the inquisitorial institutions and religious wars

such fanaticism engendered. On the other hand, modern culture is

rightly proud of its capaciousness and tolerance of religions,

religions willing to renounce the claim to force others to follow

their precepts. Our secular culture, however, has never really

recovered from its anti-religious sentiments that first inaugurated

the age of civil societies (18th-19th century Enlightenment). Hence

we are in a very poor position to distinguish between the

religiosities that support and enhance civil societies, and those

that despise them and seek their destruction. It will not help to

pretend that elements of Islam that have yet to make the step into

the civic agreement of voluntarism have already done so (the

liberal " they're just like us " tendency); nor will it help to

brand all of Islam with the brush of its anti-modern tendencies (the

conservative culture-war tendency). To distinguish will take

maturity, discernment, and an honest dialogue with Muslims of

genuine good will who may not yet understand the problems plaguing

their troubled religion.

 

Richard Landes, Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University