More on Iraqi Mahdism and its potential for terror

On my Hipbone Out Loud blog yesterday, I wrote:

The content which most interests me is the emotional and archetypal content of apocalyptic arousal, and (for practical reasons) its potential expression in jihad should the Mahdist (messianic) tendencies already visible in both Sunni and Shiite circles reach the tipping point and add their intensity to an already inflamed situation.

Today, MEMRI posted their Special Dispatch # 1886 as part of their Iraq / Jihad & Terrorism Studies Project, titled Iraqi Tells Bizarre Story of Recruitment to a Messianic Shi’ite Terror Group.

In an interview, “Abu Sajjad,” a military commander in the Ansar Al-Imam Al-Mahdi movement in Iraq, tells how he used to be a follower of Sayyid Muhammad Sadeq Al-Sadr but was persuaded by an Iraqi whom he met when he was “in a neighboring country” that the Mahdi, the Shi’ite Messiah, had appeared, as proven by TV cartoons.

Transcribed and translated excerpts from the interview, which aired on Al-Iraqiya TV on February 25, 2008, can be found here, while the clip itself can be viewed here.

Similarly important for gaining a vivid insight into contemporary Mahdism in Iraq is Tim Furnish’s interview with an Iraqi Mahdist and Ali A Allawi’s speech at the Jamestown Foundation a little over a year ago.

Moqtada on relation of Jaysh to Mahdi

In an interview on Al-Jazeera, March 29, 2008, Moqtada al-Sadr said:

This will be the army of the Reformer [the Mahdi], Allah willing. At the end of time, the Mahdi will appear, and if by that time, we are still around, and if we are capable mentally, physically, militarily, and in terms of faith, we will all be his soldiers, Allah willing. Hence, the Al-Mahdi Army is a matter of faith, and it cannot be disbanded.

Source: Memri

Gaffes

As Uri Avnery pointed out in an article entitled Kill A Hundred Turks And Rest earlier this month, a retired Israeli general recently committed a gaffe by saying the Palestinians would face a Shoah if they didn’t stop their attacks on Israel:

A warning by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna’i to the Palestinians that they face a bigger “Shoah” if they increase rocket attacks from Gaza set off a diplomatic and public relations maelstrom, Israeli officials said Sunday. … “As the rocket fire grows, and the range increases… they are bringing upon themselves a greater ‘Shoah’ because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate,” Vilna’i told Army Radio. … Vilna’i’s spokesman, Eitan Ginzburg, subsequently clarified that the deputy defense minister had used the Hebrew word only to mean “disaster, ruin or destruction.” … “It could be that he should have picked another word,” Vilna’i’s spokesman conceded Sunday.

‘Shoah’ remark sparks uproar, Jerusalem Post, March 2, 2008

It’s clumsy phrasing, to be sure, and highly reminiscent of GW Bush’s remark about fighting a crusade against al Qaida in the early days after 9-11:

On Sunday, Bush warned Americans that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile.” … His use of the word “crusade,” said Soheib Bensheikh, Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseille, France, “was most unfortunate”, “It recalled the barbarous and unjust military operations against the Muslim world,” by Christian knights, who launched repeated attempts to capture Jerusalem over the course of several hundred years.

Europe cringes at Bush ‘crusade’ against terrorists, Christian Science Monitor, September 19, 2001

You know, I googled the word “crusade” shortly after Bush used it, because I suspect he wasn’t intending to fan the flames of interfaith hatred any higher just at that moment, and the first use of “crusade” that Google offered me was something along the lines of a crusade for dental hygiene. So Bush used a word that has, shall we say, less inflammatory meanings, but which was liable to be highly inflammatory in Arab or Muslim ears.

I believe the same is true of Vilna’i. I think he intended “Shoah” in a milder sense, but should have been sensitive enough to avoid the term, given its close association with the Nazi Holocaust.

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But then neither Bush nor Vilna’i was mistaking Shi’ite for Sunni — as McCain did more than once this week…

Tim Furnish posts significant Q&A on Iraqi Mahdism

My blog-friend Dr. Timothy Furnish, who wrote the book on Mahdism, has been in recent contact with representatives of Sayyid al-Yamani, the head of the Ansar al-Mahdi group which was involved in violent altercations (they were accused of instigating them) in Basra and Nasiriya around the commemoration of Muharram in late January of this year.

Mahdism tends to be “under the radar” but already plays a significant role in the region, which could become very significant indeed very quickly if a major Mahdist movement caught on.

His MahdiWatch blog article carries significant information not easily available elsewhere:

http://www.mahdiwatch.org/2008.03.01_arch.html#1205465357892

Background can be found at the sites of Reidar Visser and at the Jamestown Foundation:

http://www.historiae.org/mahdists.asp
http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2373990

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I have a minor quibble with Tim Furnish’s post — he quotes his Ansar informant as writing, “Imam al Mahdi and Sayid al Yamani expect followers from all sects and religions. They’re for all and from all.” and comments:

This is a sort of universalism not normally seen in Mahdist thought.

It is found in the writings of the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, though. I’ve been fascinated by this passage since I first encountered it:

The Mahdi is not an embodiment of the Islamic belief but he is also the symbol of an aspiration cherished by mankind irrespective of its divergent religious doctrines. He is also the crystallization of an instructive inspiration through which all people, regardless of their religious affiliations, have learnt to await a day when heavenly missions, with all their implications, will achieve their final goal and the tiring march of humanity across history will culminate satisfactory in peace and tranquility. This consciousness of the expected future has not been confined to those who believe in the supernatural phenomenon but has also been reflected in the ideologies and cult which totally deny the existence of what is imperceptible. For example, the dialectical materialism which interprets history on the basis of contradiction believes that a day will come when all contradictions will disappear and complete peace and tranquility will prevail.

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Furnish has already posted a couple of other important notices, one about a Mahdist claim from Sunni Palestine, this month.

Quake on Temple Mount

There was a Richter 5.3 level earthquake in Israel yesterday — fairly minor, but it damaged the paving on top of Temple Mount.

The Islamic Wakf “tried to blame Israel for the 6-foot by 5-foot hole, which is about three feet deep, claiming it was caused by Israel, which it accuses of tunneling beneath the Temple Mount.”

Jewish responses to the news reports include “AND THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN..Could HASH-M be growing weary of a mosque sitting over HIS HOLY TEMPLE. Would that HIS ANGER shortly cause the entire al-aqsa mosque (masjid al-aqsa) fall into a hole in the earth. B”H. — Ben Tzion, Chicago”

Christian responses include “This is so Prophetic & in a way exciting to believers in Jesus — this is surely-”part of the “Birth Pangs” talked about in the Bible & we pray faithfully that no human will ever desecrate the Temple Mount of the God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob!! Shalom & Maranatha & Hallaujah !!!!! Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem!! — Mary Ann, Essex Jct.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125277#replies

We’re taking the pulse of the world, here…

For now, these Israeli and Christian comments are outliers — but an 8 point earthquake would bring all three of these viewpoints to the boil.

Belated Response to Dave at The Glittering Eye

Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye (after some kind words I don’t need to repeat here) commented re: my paper on the religious and apocalyptic background to nuclear policy making as follows:

In none of the countries that are major players in nuclear weapons (Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel) are policy makers with a primary focus on eschatology a dominant factor.

Before getting into my comments on this list, I would like to say that religious drivers can be of considerable impact even when they’re not apocalyptic, and to note too that apocalyptic itself is a “brush fire” phenomenon, by which I mean that it can erupt unexpectedly, sweeping a population with it, when the right spark meets the right dry tinder.

So even if the policy makers in question aren’t driven by apocalyptic fervor, they may have to deal with it at short notice, and it’s often “under the radar” — a point made tellingly by Ali Allawi in his Jamestown Foundation talk, vieweable [1 hr plus of fascinating video] here

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Just for the record, and tackling Dave’s list in order:

Russia:

Dr. Marat Shterin, a sociologist of religion at Kings College London, recently told the BBC, “millenarian beliefs are fairly widespread in Russian Orthodoxy, both within the formal structures of the Church and outside it.” One of a number of Russian apocalyptic groups is currently waiting out the end of the world in May this year, in a cave 400 miles from Moscow.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7101727.stm

The United States:

It has not been easy to determine quite how deeply George W Bush is influenced by apocalyptic thinking — Ronald Reagan fairly clearly was — but recent remarks by Huckabee’s Iowa campaign manager, Bob Vander Plaats, on Tucker on MSNBC to the effect that “we’re fighting a radical religion in Islam” and that “the war on terror is a theological war” suggests that evangelical theopolitics is alive and well in the present Presidential campaign.

France, United Kingdom:

Nothing much to report that concerns me at present unless we approach an Islamization tipping point.

China:

Falun Gong is an instance of a group that grew rapidly, took the CP by surprise, and seems to have terrified them because it reminded them of the rapid growth of the Taiping rebellion, another apocalyptic movement (which claimed 20 million plus lives before it ended). The FG leader believes the current world crisis is that aliens are taking over human bodies, and that the practice of Falun Dafa is urgently needed to defeat this effort.

Let’s just say China *could* be swept by a messianic movement, it has happened before with tragic outcome.

India:Nothing explicitly apocalyptic here, but the Hindutva movement, represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party and allied religious movement, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, seemed infatuated with their bomb after the 1998 Pokhran texts:

On May 11th 1998, within days of the BJP-led government coming to power, India declared itself to be an overt SNW (State with Nuclear Weapons), by detonating nuclear devices at Pokhran. “The decision to conduct the blasts was not taken in the cabinet, following a ’strategic review’ or consultations with the defence services. As RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan boasted, it was taken by the Sangh. Only a handful of RSS-loyal ministers were privy to it.Thus, the VHP’s (Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s) first response to Pokhran was to declare that the Hindus had finally “awakened” with the “Shakti” series of tests, and to demand that India be formally, constitutionally, declared a “Hindu State”. … the VHP announced it would build a temple to a new national goddess, “Atomic Shakti”, and carry Pokhran’s radioactive sands in a rath yatra to each corner of India.”

BJP – The Saffron Years
http://www.sabrang.com/news/spaper.htm

Pakistan:

Here the risk is of “loose” nuclear materials coming into the possession of Islamist sympathizers, an outcome that Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, discussed recently, commenting “I do not know the answers. Nobody does.”

Popular superstition in Pakistan, too, tends towards the miraculous in ways that can void our “rational actor” expectations.

In Pakistan the Jamaat-I-Islami transported a cardboard “Islamic Bomb” around the country, while right-wing Urdu magazines like Zindagi wrote about the wondrous miracles of Chaghi. They told stories of divine intervention that protected the mard-e-momin from poison-spitting snakes as they prepared the nuclear test-site, of four chickens that sufficed to feast a thousand of the faithful after the tests, and of Prophet Mohammed taking personal charge of protecting the centrifuges of Kahuta.

Israel:

Here the government isn’t messianic / apocalyptic, to be sure, but nuclear weapons do exist and Iran might make a tempting target at some point.

My major concern here, however, would be an attempt on the part of a Jewish or Christian Zionist radical to blow up the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary, so that the Third Temple could be built there in anticipation of the coming of Moshiach / Second Coming of Christ, an event which would radically alter Israel and US relations with the entire Islamic community worldwide — and which has already been attempted more than once.

Other:

That concludes Dave’s list of “countries that are major players in nuclear weapons” — but surely we shouldn’t forget Iran, which *doesz* have an apocalyptic / Mahdist streak in government, and which *has* had a nuclear weapons program even if it is currently on hiatus.

Nor should we ignore al-Qaeda, a non-state actor with strong religious drivers and some apocalyptic tendencies which has also (like Aum Shinrikyo) attempted to obtain nuclear weapons — bin Laden told Time magazine in 1998:

If I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.

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Where I go from here:

Dave wrote:

While we need to take the outliers and rogues into account, I think it would be pretty imprudent to make the countries who can or might produce a handful of nuclear weapons the central factor in our policy other than to take steps to reduce the likelihood that they’ll be able to do so and to reduce the utility of the weapons should they obtain them.

I’m not so much disagreeing as noting that there can be more going on in the apocalyptic and religious realms than we are aware of — and in line with my consistent interest in finding possible blind spots and concentrating on them, I believe the “outliers and rogues” deserve closer attention than we often give them.

Which is therefore where I put much of my own focus.

Pakistan and nuclear safety

Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear and high-energy physics, and chairman of the department of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, responding to a question from Stefania Maurizi of Il Venerdi, the Friday supplement of La Repubblica:

The government says there is absolutely no danger of loose nukes. Pakistan has been sending serving officers of the Strategic Plans Division, which is the agency responsible for handling nuclear weapons, to the United States for training in safety measures (PAL’s locking devices, storing procedures, etc). But there’s no way of telling if this will be effective. Extremists have already penetrated deep into the army and the intelligence agencies. We now see repeated evidence: for example, last month an unmarked bus carrying employees of the Inter Services Intelligence [Pakistan's secret intelligence], was collecting employees early in the morning. It was boarded by a suicide bomber who blew himself up killing 25. It was an inside job.

And now there are many other such examples, such as that of an army man killing 16 Special Services Group commandos in a suicide attack at Ghazi Barotha. A part of the establishment is clearly at war with another part. There are also scientists, as well as military people, who are radical Islamists. Many questions come to mind: can there be collusion between different field-level commanders, resulting in the hijacking of a nuclear weapon? Could outsider groups develop links with insiders? Given the absence of accurate records of fissile material production, can one be certain that small quantities of highly enriched uranium or weapons grade plutonium have not already been diverted? I do not know the answers. Nobody does.

For the full interview, see “Pakistan After the Assassijation”: Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy on Juan Cole’s ICGA blog.

Religious and apocalyptic background to nuclear policy making

Charles Cameron, hipbone at earthlink dot net

Precis:

I read about Cheryl Rofer’s invitation to the blogosphere of 18 December, suggesting that we should form a “blog-tank” on nuclear policy, on my blog-friend Zenpundit’s blog. My purpose here is to offer as background to that ongoing discussion of nuclear policy, some reminders from the spheres of religion and mythology.

It is my purpose here to suggest that the actions, plans and motives of those who are subject to religious drivers, and in particular drivers of an apocalyptic or “end times” nature, are, by reason of their seeming irrationality and fringe quality, often overlooked by those whose specialties revolve around such things as centrifuges and the enrichment of uranium, short-range missiles and their forward deployment, and so forth — and that a theological understanding of the place of nuclear weapons in the eschatological thinking of radical religionists of a variety of stripes is one of the key desiderata in an effort to come to grips with the realities of proliferation and peace.

Part 1 presents a view from religious studies, and describes the impact of doctrines of scriptural inerrancy on geopolitics, and explores the present context: it is introductory. Part 2 details some of the scriptures, teachings and fatwas which figure in popular consideration of nuclear weapons cross-culturally, with specific reference to the three Abrahamic faiths: it contains the meat of the matter. In some respects, however, Part 3 goes even deeper into the religious context, addressing the archetypal imagery of war, sacrifice, and purifying fire in recorded reactions to the Trinity test at Alamogordo, the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, drawing on folklore, mythology and both Christian and Hindu traditions. Part 4 closes the presentation with two brief quotes from Carl Jung.

I: The view from religious studies

Theology used to be considered “the Queen of the Sciences” back in the day when “the sciences” were the recognized bodies of knowledge in general, and arguably she lost her claim to that title at least in part as a result of Galileo’s discussion of the matter in his 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany. It shouldn’t entirely surprise us, however, that something which had for centuries occupied front and center in our concerns and thinking and was then dropped like a bad penny should return again, if for no other reason then by virtue of Freud’s often repeated comment about “the return of the repressed”.

We are most easily surprised, perhaps, by that which we have spurned.

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To continue reading this document, which runs approximately 7,000 words, please open either the Word document Religious background to nuclear policy making [Word], or the .pdf file, Religious background to nuclear policy making [Adobe Acrobat].

Blogging forensic theology

There’s a tendency for decision-makers and analysts to reduce all religious phenomena to matters of power and hierarchy, politics, or hard cash. This blog leans to the religious side of things.

Here you will find materials on religious violence of one sort or another, apocalyptic or otherwise, in the form of terrorism, warfare, philosophizing or freedom-fighting, historical or contemporary, official or individual, in thought as well as deed, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Jewish or whatever, in games, in virtual space, in blood and lives — with an attempt to take the religious “drivers” seriously.

Religious aspirations towards, and aspects of, peace will have their place here too.