[ by Charles Cameron — a little something to consider while ZP proper is down ]
**
Sources:
Clint Watts, tweet Clint Watts, Did Obama Just Unify America’s Enemies? Guardian, tweet Guardian, Isis reconciles with al-Qaida group as Syria air strikes continue
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Clint Watts published September 26, Guardian confirmed 28 September.
Unforseen .. really? .. consequences?
[ by Charles Cameron – ISIS video, early Dabiq reference, satirical response ]
You may recall that almost exactly a year ago, Shiite truck drivers in Anbar province were stopped by ISIS patrols, questioned as to the exact form of Islamic prayer, and executed when they didn’t give an approved Sunni response. The event was captured on video, and visiting it today I was struck by the reference to Dabiq — see screencap above — already a crucial reference for pre-caliphal ISIS.
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I was watching that video again because the Palestinian TV show Watan al Watar recently satirized ISIS / IS in a video of their own, and the correspondences were pretty exact:
The gentlemen in the upper image, above, are acting. Those in the lower image died in late August 2013.
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You can view the satirican Watan al Watar video here:
The original video can be found here for comparison.
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It is perhaps worth noting that the Eretz-Zen post of that original video, back in late August 2013, describes the significance of Dabiq thus:
The video ends with a statement threatening the “Armies of the Cross in Dabiq” to be burnt by the fire whose spark was ignited in Iraq. Dabiq is a town near Aleppo where the battle of Marj Dabiq took place on August 24, 1516, and it ended up in a decisive victory of the Ottoman Empire over the Mamluk Sultanate.
As readers of Furnish, Filiu or myself will know, the Dabiq battle mentioned in the video references a future, specifically end times battle — a far more significant matter.
[ by Charles Cameron — J-P Filiu, who wrote the book Apocalypse in Islam, returns reluctantly to the same topic ]
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**
Jean-Pierre Filiu, blogging on L’Etat islamique ou les chevaliers de l’apocalypse djihadiste — The Islamic State, or Knights of the Jihadist Apocalypse — writes:
La violence extrême du monstre djihadiste tient largement aux convictions apocalyptiques de nombre de ses recrues. Ce monstre a réussi à imposer au monde entier l’appellation qu’il s’est choisie d’Etat islamique (EI), alors qu’il n’est pas un Etat, mais une machine de guerre, et que sa doctrine totalitaire menace avant tout les musulmans.
Roughly and rustily translated — for Filiu is the man who showed me that the French I thought I had was entirely insufficient for scholarly purposes –he’s saying:
The extreme violence of the jihadist monster is due in large part to the apocalyptic beliefs of many of its recruits.
— and he continues, strikingly, that IS:
now has dozens of testimonials from foreign IS “volunteers” in which they reveal their fears, but also their excitement at the approach of the end of time. The “land of Sham”, known to geographers as Greater Syria, is indeed, like Iraq, a land privileged for the fulfillment of such prophecies.
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Filiu is both a distinguished professor at SciencesPo, and a one time career French diplomat whose postings included a stint between 1996–99 as Deputy Chief of Mission in Syria. He is also the author of the major work, Apocalypse in Islam [see also my review on Jihadology], which draws on his extensive readings in both the history and current market for apocalyptic ideas in Islam. He knows the terrain.
Writing of the “Ultimate Battle” — which he characterizes as “a terrible bloodbath in which the Faithful are victorious” — Filiu says that “just this kind of terror apocalypse is portrayed as imminent on social networks” and notes that this argument is “hammered home to encourage immediate recruitment” to Baghdadi’s forces, since “fighting in this battle will be worth more than fighting in a thousand battles with less of an eschatological aura” (“car la participation à cette Bataille vaudra mille combats moins auréolés de gloire eschatologique.”)
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A good portion of Filiu’s post is taken up with the IS magazine Dabiq and the role of the town of that name both in the current conflict and in apocalyptic hadith.
Filiu’s conclusion? He fears he will soon be obliged to return once more to the apocalyptic meanderings of the jihad.
[ by Charles Cameron — when worldviews intersect, as they do today ]
Source for lower quote:
Borzou Daragahi, City on edge as Baghdad residents await Isis attack
[ by Charles Cameron — a remarkable conversation today between Greg Johnsen, Will McCants, and Thos Hegghammer ]
One of the key questions in discussions of the droning of Anwar al-Awlaqi, which has recently resurfaced as the result of the posting of the “drone memo” [here at pp 67 and following], has to do with whether or not Awlaqi was AQAP’s foreign operations chief, and thus an “imminent” threat to US national security, or “just” their best English-language social media preacher / propagandist, and thus effectively a “threat-once-removed” so to speak.
Gregory Johnsen posted a piece titled New Al-Qaeda Propaganda Video Appears To Undermine Obama Administration’s Drone Memo on Buzzfeed today, continuing a conversation that he’s been involved with for a few years now:
A new video from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula appears to undercut the Obama administration’s claim that Anwar al-Awlaki was the “head of external operations” for AQAP. The 39-minute video was posted to the internet on Saturday, just two days before the Second Circuit Court released a legal memo justifying Awlaki’s killing by a CIA drone in September 2011.
Despite its release date, the video doesn’t appear to be an attempt to pre-empt the Obama administration’s memo. In fact, the video has little to do with Anwar al-Awlaki. Instead it focuses on the life of Said al-Shihri, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who rose to become the deputy commander in AQAP before dying as a result of wounds suffered in a U.S. drone strike in late 2012.
The video says that it was Shihri — not Awlaki — who was “responsible for external operations against America.” For years, the Obama administration has argued the opposite, claiming that Awlaki was directing AQAP’s efforts against the U.S., including the failed underwear bomb on an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
On the day Awlaki was killed, Obama called him “the leader of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” and said he “directed” the 2009 attack. The video appears to refute both claims, giving credit to Shihri, the former Guantanamo Bay detainee.
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Let’s pick up the story there, and move to an extraordinary example of what Twitter can do, in the form of an exchange today between Johnsen himself, the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia, Will McCants, author of Founding Gods, Inventing Nations, lately of the CTC West Point and now at Brookings, and Thomas Hegghammer, aurthor of Jihad in Saudi Arabia and director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.
We’re overhearing three of the brightest minds in counterterrorism, chatting at the next table…
GregorydJohnsen @gregorydjohnsen:
What if the intel was wrong? http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/new-al-qaeda-propaganda-video-appears-to-undermine-obama-adm … my new piece on Awlaki and the drone memoWill McCants @will_mccants:
@gregorydjohnsen Was Shihri a Dickens fan? http://mideastafrica.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/11/24/the_case_for_chasing_al_awlaki … cc @HegghammerGregorydJohnsen @gregorydjohnsen:
@will_mccants @Hegghammer I would love to get both your take as well as Thomas’ on the new video and whether it changes anythingThomas Hegghammer @Hegghammer:
@gregorydjohnsen @will_mccants @intelwire video is very interesting, but it implicates Shihri more than it exonerates AwlaqiThomas Hegghammer @Hegghammer:
@gregorydjohnsen @will_mccants @intelwire films doesn’t actually say Shihri was executive head of external operations … 1/2Thomas Hegghammer @Hegghammer:
@gregorydjohnsen @will_mccants @intelwire it says (21’33’’) he supervised Christmas bombing “with his brothers in external op division”Thomas Hegghammer @Hegghammer:
@gregorydjohnsen @will_mccants @intelwire Shihri may have been higher in food chain, but Awlaqi may still have been chief executive officerThomas Hegghammer @Hegghammer:
@gregorydjohnsen @will_mccants @intelwire and Rajib Karim case docs clearly show Awlaqi’s operational roleThomas Hegghammer @Hegghammer:
@gregorydjohnsen @will_mccants @intelwire but Greg, your bigger point stands: We should be having this discussion in a court, not on Twitter
**
Here’s what I want to remind you of…
In what I can only call a “glancing tweet” towards the top of that exchange, Will McCants linked to a piece by Thomas Hegghammer dated November 24, 2010, The case for chasing al-Awlaki, which begins:
In a recent New York Times op-ed, renowned al Qaeda expert Gregory Johnsen argued that Anwar al-Awlaki is a peripheral figure in al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and that U.S. security services should worry less about Awlaki and more about AQAP’s top leaders, such as Nasir al-Wihayshi and Sa’idal-Shihri. Johnsen is right about the first part of his argument, but wrong about the second.
Hegghammer’s key para for my purposes reads:
Awlaki is AQAP’s Head of Foreign Operations. In the latest issue of the group’s English-language magazine Inspire, an article signed “Head of Foreign Operations” takes credit for the recent parcel bomb plot and outlines in great detail the planning and thinking behind it. The article is almost certainly written by Awlaki. We know this because the article references obscure figures from the history of Muslim Spain, a pet subject of Awlaki’s, and because it mentions Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, a book he reviewed on his blog in 2008. Moreover, Awlaki is a personal friend of the editor of Inspire, Samir Khan, and has published in the magazine in the past.
Here’s the image from that issue of Inspire magazine:
Here’s Inspire’s commentary, from the article titled “The Objectives if Operation Hemorrhage” by their “Head of the Foreign Operations Team”:
This current battle fought by the West is not an isolated battle but is a continuation of a long history of aggression by the West against the Muslim world. In order to revive and bring back this history we listed the names of Reynald Krak and Diego Diaz as the recipients of the packages. We got the former name from Reynald de Chatillon, the lord of Krak des Chevaliers who was one of the worst and most treacherous of the Crusade’s leaders. He fell into captivity and Salahuddeen personally beheaded him. The name we used for the second package was derived from that of Don Diego Deza, the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition after the fall of Granada who along with the Spanish monarchy supervised the extermination and expulsion of the Muslim presence on the Iberian Peninsula employing the most horrific methods of torture and done in the name of God and the Church. Today we are facing a coalition of Crusaders and Zionists and we in al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula will never forget Palestine. How can we forget it when our motto is: “Here we start and in al-Aqsa we meet”? So we listed the address of the “Congregation Or Chadash”, a Gay and Lesbian synagogue on our one of our packages. The second package was sent to “Congregation B’nai Zion”. Both synagogues are in Chicago, Obama’s city.
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We were very optimistic about the outcome of this operation. That is why we dropped into one of the boxes a novel titled, Great Expectations.
And here’s Awlaqi’s reading Great Expectations, as noted at an Ummah.com forum — the tasteful **** replacing the first four letters of Charles Dickens’ name is quite sweet:
Following Moby ****, I asked for more books without specifying which ones, so my parents brought me whatever was lying around in the house. This time it was King Lear by Shakespeare and Hard Times by Charles ****ens. Shakespeare was the worst thing I read during my entire stay in prison. I never liked him to start with. Probably the only reason he became so famous is because he was English and had the backing and promotion of the speakers of a global language. On the other hand, I read Hard Times thrice. So, I ordered more Charles ****ens and read Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and his masterpiece: David Copperfield. I read this one twice.
What fascinated me with these novels were the amazing characters ****ens created and the similarity of some of them to some people today. That made them very interesting.
Awlaqi also notes, for the benefit of those of us not in solitary who might waste precious time in literary pursuits:
I want to stress that I do not encourage any serious Muslim brother or sister to waste time with novels. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was prevented from anything else, I wouldn’t have read them. And, I read them because apparently a person can begin forgetting his language, even if it is his mother tongue, if he does not use it for long time. There is even a joke that a man emigrated from an Arab country to America and did not learn English and ended up forgetting Arabic. Being in solitary confinement and not speaking English for a long time I needed refreshment.
So, there is some benefit in reading novels for those in the fields of public speaking and writing. And, once in while, there is a novel that is worth reading because of a pointed message that it tries to convey; such as the message in Animal Farm about communism, and the relevance of 1984 regarding how the West is treating Muslims today. But, for he who has the choice, there are better alternatives. There is so much out there to read. One should not spend the valuable time Allah has blessed them with on anything except that which will draw one closer to Allah.
For those interested in Awlaqi’s book reviews — without the asterisks — there’s an archive from his own site here.
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FWIW I’d posted on the implications of that Awlaqi book review in light of the Inspire interview on Zenpundit on November 21st — the Zenpundit site is down at this time of writing, but the link is to http://zenpundit.com/?p=3611 — and I cross-posted the same piece, “What the Dickens? Symbolic details in Inspire issue 3″, at ChicagoBoyz, where it’s still accessible.
And again FWIW, connecting the “Inspire book cover” dot to the “Awlaqi book review” dot is a pure HipBone-Sembl game move — and an excellent example of what attentive reading coupled with HipBone-Sembl thinking can do for the analytic community.
[ by Charles Cameron — this whole Lawrence thing is getting tedious ]
What the Bell reporter manages to omit is that it was Gertrude Bell whose translations of Hafez introduced us to one of the greatest of Sufi poets.
Sources:
Lawrence of Afghanistan Gertrude of Arabia
[ by Charles Cameron — on The utility, as PR Beckman puts it, of the Poetic Imagination — with intelligence analysts in mind, and starring Orit Perlov ]
It’s a cognitive thing.
You may or may not be familiar with the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan‘s poem of that name, but it runs like this:
s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs Zs zs zs z
To the poet, this is play, play with words and letters, meaning and form — and Morgan’s fellow poet, Jonathan Williams (aka “Jargonathan”) thought highly enough of it to offer it to Doyle Moore of the Finial Press for interpretation, printing the results in the Jargon Press book seen above. One of the finer results was this one, produced by Moore’ students / studio at the Graphic Design Department at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana:
And what has this to do with ISIS, or the sixth President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi?
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It’s a cognitive matter.
The poet instinctively plays with, delights in, form. And form in its essence is pattern — one of the simplest and most engaging of forms being symmetry.
Poets, of course, are of no importance compared with intelligence analysts — despite being considered “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” by one of their own. Physicists, however, can be taken a little more seriously than poets in our technologically brilliant age, and even physicists succumb to the beauties of symmetry. Quoth the Stanford Encyclopedia of Physics:
Symmetry considerations dominate modern fundamental physics, both in quantum theory and in relativity.
Quoth David Gross in The role of symmetry in fundamental physics:
Einstein’s great advance in 1905 was to put symmetry first, to regard the symmetry principle as the primary feature of nature that constrains the allowable dynamical laws.
Oh, read on, read how symmetry was hiding in plain sight in the works of the Greeks, of Kepler, Newton, Galileo, Maxwell and Lorentz.
But again, what has this to do with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?
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It’s a style of exploring, comprehending, and explaining, the world. A cognitive thing.
Journalists — and the editors imposing headlines on them — not infrequently enjoy a little symmetry. And so it is that the New York Times yesterday posted Thomas Friedman‘s piece titled ISIS and SISI.
Friedman obviously liked the symmetry enough to write about it, his editor liked it enough to make or keep it as the title of Frienman’s piece, and as Friedman himself tells us in his article, the first person to delight in this particular symmetry was the Israeli analyst Orit Perlov, who tweeted back in October last:
SISI vs. ISIS, National Militarism vs. Religious Fundamentalism both will fail in this current revolutionary process…..
— orit perlov (@oritperlov) October 29, 2013
An analyst.
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Noting that the ISIS SISI juxtaposition that Perlov remarked on resembles the SZ ZS symmetry that delighted Edwin Morgan, Jonathan Williams and myself adds nothing practical to my knowledge of either President Sisi nor ISIS, any more than Edwin Morgan’s serpent tells me anything useful about Hungarian snake-bite risk-avoidance.
It tells me, however, that Orit Perlov is a sharp cookie, an analyst to follow. It’s a cognitive thing.
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The taste for form, and specifically the habit of noticing and appreciating symmetries, is something we all share to some degree — but to sharpen it from an occasional human mode of cognition into a tool, a mastery of instinctive pattern-recognition, is more like an acquired taste.
Orit Perlov, I deduce, is a connoisseur — she will notice thing that many other analysts will overlook, because she has acquired that taste.
I’m posting this, because I’m a poet by vocation, and because I find myself practicing a poet’s version of open source intelligence analysis as I attempt to explore, comprehend, and explain the various ways in which religion plays out in the violence that plagues our world.
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And I’m posting it because as a poet-analyst hybrid, I can perhaps provide some further insight into the significant ideas presented by PR Beckman in Reflections on the Utility of the Poetic Imagination — an important (“must read”) post addressed to the military and decision-makers rather than to analysts, but equally relevant IMO to the analytic profession.
In that piece, Beckman writes:
I had been thinking about the potential utility of the poetic or aesthetic imagination in the context of the national debate about the value of various college majors. Too often this debate resulted in the STEM subjects being touted as the answer to our problems and literature and the arts reduced to “nice to have” not “need to have” subjects. But I think that we need them more than we realize. One of the challenges is that the utility of the STEM subjects is obvious especially in heavily tech-oriented organizations like the military, whereas literature and the arts don’t have that same obvious utility. I believe there is a utility here, but it is not ready-made for us, rather it is something we are going to have to discover (and that is actually a great opportunity.) Whether it is in the military or other institutions, I do believe that this is indeed “a job for poets.” But in order to demonstrate this we have to identify what the poetic imagination brings to the table and develop methodology for practically applying the poetic imagination.
My purpose in this post is to reveal one small corner of “what the poetic imagination brings to the table” — and to do so without foregoing my own poetic imagination for the emaciated and etiolated prose of a white paper or power-point brief.
In my HipBone Games and Cath Styles’ and my Sembl venture, one aspect of the larger vision we both hold is to “develop methodology for practically applying the poetic imagination”. It’s a cognitive thing — and analysts (and any others interested in creative insight) would do well to add this style of cognition to their world-reading arsenal.
[ By Charles Cameron — thanks to Gershom Gorenberg for clarifying this for me ]
Dalia Hatuqa, in a Foreign Policy piece titled Am I My Brother’s Keeper? and subtitled How the disappearance of three Israeli boys in the West Bank is upending Palestinian politics, wrote:
Since June 12, the Israeli army has killed at least four Palestinians and arrested more than 470 others in an operation dubbed Brother’s Keeper.
I was interested: Am I my brother’s keeper? is the question Cain asks about Abel in Genesis 4, after they have both offered sacrifices to God, and God had been pleased with Abel’s, and not so much with Cain’s:
And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
This is the foundational text for murder in general, and fratricide in particular, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and also a key text for the notion of sacrifice, also central to both traditions. I don’t want to “read” it with twenty-first century Anglo-American eyes, and I’m no rabbinic scholar, so I won’t attempt to explain the whole narrative, but simply draw your attention to the fact that the name of the Israeli operation in that FP piece is Brother’s Keeper, which would make it a clear reference to Cain and Abel.
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Meanwhile, Matt Levitt asked in a tweet:
Name the Passover reference used as code name for an Israeli op targeting Hamas $ http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118349/kidnapped-israeli-teens-cause-scrutiny-hamas-international-finance
— to which I responded, not realizing it was a different op he was talking about, “Brother’s Keeper”. The op in Matt’s question, which I’d have known if I’d followed the link he offered — to his own article Kidnapped Israeli Teens Compel Scrutiny of Hamas’s International Finances in the New Republic — was named Biur Hametz, and although intensified by the kidnappings, had nothing to do with Cain and Abel, being as Matt had suggested, a Pesach reference:
In fact, Israel has been quietly targeting Hamas’s financial infrastructure for some time now as part of Operation Biur Hametz. (The name refers to the pre-Passover custom of burning any leftover bread before the onset of the holiday.) Much of Israel’s focus the past few months has been on Hamas’s financing from abroad, but the kidnappings have thrust this campaign into full throttle.
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In any case, I wondered how the Israeli forces interpreted the name of the exercise, which I still thought of as Brother’s Keeper, and asked my old colleague from the Center for Millennial Studies, Gershom Gorenberg:
When Israel names op “Brother’s Keeper” – Israel keeper of “brother” Palestine, or some1 unnamed keeper of 3 Israeli brothers?
Gershom very kindly corrected me:
Original is “Return, brothers” in imperative. Still no Cain/Abel reference.
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So there you have it. We can forget Cain and Abel and Brother’s Keeper –the operation is named Return, brothers, or in Hebrew, Shuvu Ahim.
And every decent maze has its blind alleys!
Two items came over my transom recently that I want to report to you, since they tie ISIS — happening now — and the Mahdi — a timeless figure whose apperance in time is eagerly awaited by some, feared by others, ignored by many, and entirely unheard of by yet a fourth group.
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Item.
The “end times” writer Joel Richardson pointed myself and Tim Furnish to a recent “conversation” held (and videotaped) by Harun Yahya, aka Adnan Oktar, a Turkish writer on creationism, Mahdism and all points in between, in which he identifies ISIS entry into Syria as a clear, triple indicator of the imminent arrival of the Mahdi. Here’s my transcript, with Yahya in plain text and his interlocutors in italics:
(Hadith): Our Prophets (saas) told: “Black banners of Ibn Abbas appear from the East.” That is to say, among the Arabs those with black banners appear. After they proceed for a while, again this time a smaller group with black banners appear from the East (the Middle East). They fight against a man from the descend of Abu Sufyan and come under the obedience of Hazrat Mahdi.”
Who is Sufyan?
Assad. Hafez Assad. Notice that it is said “… fighting against someone from the descend of Sufyan”, see how clear it is, right? “They come under the obedience of Hazrat Mahdi.” At the end, they abide by Hazrat Mahdi (as). At the end, they abide by Hazrat Mahdi (as). Otherwise if that power were leaderless, that would devastate the world .. but because they will come under the obedience of Hazrat Mahdi (as), the problem would be settled.
First al-Qaida’s black flags appeared, the big black banners. Now, they are smaller, again from the East. “… this time small black banners appear and fighting against someone from the descend of Sufyan”, right now this is already happening, “… they come under the obedience of Hazrat Mahdi.” I said everything is related with Hazrat Mahdi (as), and they feigned ignorance about it.
(Hadith) [Another hadith] “Await for the reappearance of the awaited one on three occasions.” Notice that our prophet says, “Await for the reappearance of the awaited one on three occasions.” He was asked what those three occasions are:” “our Prophet (saas) replied: Syrians fight among themselves” This is the first one. There is a fight among the Syrians. Many groups in Syria can’t get along, they fight. “When black flags arrive” and “when there is terror and fear in the month of Ramadan” How many days let to the month of Ramadan now? So they are all true. Our Prophet (saas) tells the truth.
(Hadith) “Related from Muhammad ibn Hanaffiya:” Muhammad ibn Hanaffiya is my grandfather as you know in the lineage. He is the son of Hazrat Ali. My lineage goes back to him. “Black flags will appear. Then another group of black banners with black caps and white dresses will appear.” As you may have noticed, they all have black caps. They wear black and their clothes are white but they have black caps. “They will defeat Sufyan’s friends.” Right now Sufyan has already been defeated. Syria is razed to the ground. “Ultimately they will arrive at Bayt Al-Muqaddas, and they will prepare the governance for Hazrat Mahdi (as).” Whatever our Prophet (saas) foretold, they all come true.
Kirkuk came entirely under the grip of Peshmerga, Kurds are celebrating [this incident]. It seems that Iraq is being technically divided into three: Kurdistan, Sunni and Shia.
Our Prophet (saas) says that Iraq would be divided in the time of Hazrat Mahdi (as) .. as a portent of the appearance of Hazrat Mahdi (as). I wrote this 25 years ago in my book. That Iraq would be divided into three.
Barack Obama said that he does not exclude any group in providing help to Iraq. In case any security concerns related to his country arise, they are ready for military intervention. The rooting of such a radical structure in Syria and Iraq is not in the favor of the USA.
Obama must start explaining the issue of the system of the Mahdi. He should not wait until radicalism harms him. They always avoid it. What can they accomplish by avoidance? Radicalism is getting hold of them.
What they mean by intervention is launching airstrikes. Not sending any troops there.
Air strikes are what ISIS wants. Syria ruined its own country. ISIS also wants Iraq to ruin its own country. They want the devastation of buildings; that destruction already devastates the people in the spiritual sense. The people leave the city and they acquire a spirit of war.
They assume Islam to be a cruel religion made up of ugly women and men … a religion ordering the chopping up of people, shooting them with machine guns as ISIS does, preventing people from going out, depriving them of their freedom. The mindset does not allow women to laugh, or to use perfume. They have devastated Islam with this mindset. We are trying to purge this scourge. We are cleansing what you ruin.
Almighty God adorns Turkey day by day. The number of mosques are increasing.
The Islamic communities are expanding. But [first and foremost] Almighty God started to make us feel the existence of the system of Mahdi clearly. I said that radical Islam, that is the kind of Islam based on the hadith, would choke you and you won’t be able to cope with it. They did not care at all. They are now terrified. Radicalism is snowballing all over the world now. This scourge will end only by the system of the Mahdi.
The appearance of the ones with black banners is a portent and Hazrat Mahdi (as). In the hadith collections there are hundreds of hadith referring to them. The appearance of black banners, and they all come about as it is related.
You can find the video here.
**
Item.
Let’s just say that that’s an eerie match for Tim Furnish’s post of a few days back on MahdiWatch site, The Hour of ISIS Power, which is far too long for me to quote in full but worthy of your attention. Here are the key paras, for my purposes here:
5) As if ISIS is not bad enough with its jihadism, there are disturbing hints of eschatological thinking and Mahdism among that group and its allies. In a 2011 communique, al-Qa`ida in Iraq — the ISIS predecessor organization — referred to the Shi`i militia Jaysh al-Mahdi (“Army of the Mahdi”) as the “army of the Dajjal.” Al-Dajjal or more fully al-Masih al-Dajjal is “the Deceiving Messiah,” who comes before the end of time to combat the (Islamic) forces of the returned Muslim prophet Jesus and his ally, the Mahdi. Perhaps AQI was merely invoking the Dajjal to mock Muqtada al-Sadr’s group; if not, then AQI/ISIS would seem to have an eschatological bent.
This latter explanation is reinforced by the eschatological explanations offered just six months ago by the official spokesman for the Chechen contingent of ISIS in Syria: “Issa [Jesus] … will come down here, and al-Dajjal will come out here, it is the land of epics and the land of resurrection.” ISIS’s rival Jabhat al-Nusra was even more overtly eschatological, openly invoking the primary End Times figure of Islam: the Mahdi. For most, if not all, the Sunni groups fighting jihad in Syria and, now (again), Iraq, eschatology is a key motivator — in terms of enemies (“Safavids,” “army of the Dajjal”), motivation (preparing the way for the Mahdi’s coming) and goals (regional, then global caliphate as well as eventual conquest of al-Quds, Jersualem); ISIS is likely no exception to this world-view.
Some thought Usama bin Ladin was the Mahdi (and, after he assumed room temperature, that he had become the Hidden Imam. No one has yet proclaimed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi the Mahdi — but if Islamic history is any guide, it’s just a matter of time. Once the caliphate is firmly established, then the likelihood of a Mahdiyah being proclaimed increases. And as I noted in my book Holiest Wars, “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.”
[ by Charles Cameron — on three-fold movements in time in Islam, Christianity and Judaism – most recent post before Zenpundit was crashed ]
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The three ages of Joachim of Fiore, in the latter's Venn-like diagram
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The question of how Islam in its many varieties views other religions is a compelling one, and perhaps never more so than in our own times. Today I was informed that many of William Chittick‘s papers were available for download on Academia.edu, and the first couple I wanted to read were these:
The Theological roots of peace and war according to Islam A Sufi Approach to Religious Diversity — Ibn al-Arabi on the Metaphysics of Revelation
While scrounging around the net for an easily quotable form of the second paper, I ran across Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller and Shaykh Faraz Rabbani, Universal Validity of Religions and the Issue of Takfir — and like a dutiful netizen, I stopped off to read a little, and ran across the gem I’d like to bring you this morning>
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Shaykh Faraz Rabbani offers a fascinating example of the dialectic three-step in the prophetic books of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (Tawrah, Injil and Qur’an), writing:
A familiar example cited by ulama is the law of talion, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, which was obligatory in the religious law of Moses (upon whom be peace), subsequently forbidden by the religious law of Jesus (upon whom be peace) in which “turning the other cheek” was obligatory; and finally both were superseded by the law of Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), which permits victims to take retaliation (qisas) for purely intentional physical injuries, but in which it is religiously superior not to retaliate but forgive.
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In general, Christianity — having the Tanakh and New Testament for its scriptures — offers a binary or two-step process in place of this movement of the dialectic: the lex talionis is commanded in the Old Testament and rescinded in the New. Only in the work of Abbot Joachim of Fiore do we find a three-fold dispensation, in which the first term or “age of the Father” follows the many laws (mitzvot) of the Old Testament, the second follows Christ’s abridgement to include simply the two commandments of Matthew 22. 37-40:
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
And the third?
Mirabile dictu, it is the age in which the presence of the Holy Spirit liberates us from all necessity of law. Gianni Vattimo, writing in After Christianity, expresses Joachim’s vision thus:
Three are the stages of the world indicated by the sacred texts. The first is the stage in which we have lived under the law; the second is that in which we live under grace; the third is one in which we shall live in a more perfect state of grace. . . . The first passed in slavery; the second is characterized by filial slavery; the third wiII unfold in the name of freedom. The first is marked by awe, the second by faith, the third by charity. The first period regards the slaves; the second regards the sons; the third regards the friends. … The first stage is ascribed to the Father, who is the author of all things; the second to the Son, who has been esteemed worthy to share our mud; the third to the Holy Spirit, of which the apostle says “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
The Archdruid’s Report discussed Augustinian and Joachimite views of the nature of time a while back, and while his entire post is worth your attention, here I would like to pick out this one paragraph:
What made Joachim’s vision different from any of the visionary histories that came before it—and there were plenty of those in the Middle Ages — was that it was a story of progress. The Age of Love, as Joachim envisioned it, was a great improvement on the Age of Law, and the approaching Age of Liberty would be an improvement on the Age of Love; in the third age, he taught, the Church would wither away, and people would live together in perfect peace and harmony, with no need for political or religious institutions. To the church authorities of Joachim’s time, steeped in the Augustinian vision, all this was heresy; to the radicals of the age, it was manna from heaven, and nearly every revolutionary ideology in Europe from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries drew heavily on Joachimist ideas.
Indeed, Norman Cohn in his classic Pursuit of the Millennium sees Joachim’s Third age in the Drittes or Tausendjähriges Reich (the Third or Thousand Year = Millennial Kingdom) of Nazism, and in Friedrich Engels’ notion of the “withering away of the State” — both great tolitarian systems of the last century thus being under the spell of Joachim’s apocalyptic notion of utopia.
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And Judaism?
Judaism has its own developmental scheme, in which sacrificial Temple worship gives way to the synagogues, talmudic scholarship and the diaspora — yet always with the Pesach refrain:
Next year in Jerusalem.
Here too, it may be surmised, time moves to the music of the dialectic.
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