Apocalypse, Revolution and Terrorism

From the Sicari to the American Revolt against the Modern World

Jeffrey Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138483651
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351054362
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This book focuses on religiously driven oppositional violence through the ages. Beginning with the 1st-century Sicari, it examines the commonalities that link apocalypticism, revolution, and terrorism occurring in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam past and present.

It is divided into two sections, 'This was Then' and 'This is Now', which together examine the cultural and religious history of oppositional violence from the time of Jesus to the aftermath of the 2016 American election. The historical focus centers on how the movements, leaders and revolutionaries from earlier times are interpreted today through the lenses of historical memory and popular culture. The radical right is the primary but not exclusive focus of the second part of the book. At the same time, the work is intensely personal, in that it incorporates the author's experiences in the worlds of communist Eastern Europe, in the Iranian Revolution, and in the uprisings and wars in the Middle East and East Africa.

This book will be of much interest to students of religious and political violence, religious studies, history, and security studies.

Part I
This was then

1
Nothing is true, everything is permitted

Premodern religious terrorism

Introduction

In the age of the Islamic State, the mere mention of the word ‘terrorism’ instantly commands visions of murderous jihadists, of burka clad women, of sex slaves for the taking, and a golden post-mortem future filled with beautiful virgins eager to fulfill the slightest whims of the martyrs of the faith. Such is the New Orientalism – a violent fever dream unimagined by such gentle academics as Edward Said.¹

Before the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment, religion was an inherent component of every thought and every action. Secularity did not exist, but terrorism certainly did. David C. Rapoport was the first scholar of terrorism to demonstrate the historicity of religious terrorism, whose roots far predate Mohammad and the birth of Islam.² The first terrorist group in the modern sense of the word appeared in the Holy Land in the time of Jesus. The Jewish Sicari, named for the daggers which were their signature weapon, may be credited with the invention of terrorism as we understand it today in the 1st century CE. It ended rather badly, with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE and the Diaspora – the exile of the Jewish people which would not officially end until 1948.

Terrorism is after all a court of last resort. It is always an action of those who perceive themselves to be weak against an enemy perceived to be infinitely stronger. What hope is there for the weak, even if they resort to terrorist violence? How can they possibly overcome the overwhelming might of their enemies? In the Western world, the answer is invariably the same: God. If it is always darkest before the dawn, goes the logic, we need only make our world hopelessly dark to induce God to at the last moment intervene in a process the rabbis came to call ‘Forcing the End.’ The Sicari knew this. Surrounded by the Roman legions, the final Jewish survivors in Masada were said to have dumped all their remaining water into the ground and burned the final provisions of food so as to hurry the Hand of God to smite their enemies and make their victory complete. God yet tarried and the first mass suicide – some 900 souls – followed. This is the power of religiously motivated terrorism.

Among Peoples of the Book – Jews, Christians, and Muslims – the apocalyptic promise and its denouement in a post-historical paradise has come couched in layers of metaphor and poetic mysticism. It speaks in the language of the near future and offers signs and symbols which offer the keys to paradise to any who could unravel their mysteries. Most are content to wait passively, hearing occasional sermons or khutba ³ or derashah ⁴ on the subject and perhaps visualizing scenes from such Hollywood films as “The Rapture” or “Coming of the Mahdi Malhama” as they listen.⁵ What these believers have in common is that, regardless of their faith, they are content to wait.

In every generation from the time of the Sicari to the present day however, there are always a few for whom the music of apocalypse resonates in their very souls. These men and, in more recent epochs, women are eager to give their lives to the quest to unlock the keys to the apocalyptic dream and to hope that, without passing through the veil of death, they will be among the first to set foot on the promised paradise to come.

Each of the Peoples of the Book have distinctly different visions of the chiliastic paradise to come.⁶ For Jews, the story is so old that it has been largely forgotten by all but the Haredim and Hasidic faithful, replaced by gauzy and deeply Christian visions of the Pearly Gates as depicted in the Hollywood chestnuts that are the traditional holiday fare of American network television. And small wonder as the Jewish texts depict multiple strands of belief, the most interesting of which are rendered in Raphael Patai’s timeless The Messiah Texts.⁷ Picture if you will an immensely vast oaken table in which all of the men who remained true to the faith are seated. Each morning God will present them with a new letter that they will ecstatically study, learning both its intrinsic and esoteric meanings, before adding it to the ongoing project of writing a new Torah, one letter at a time. Women may wonder where they are while the men study so assiduously from morning to night, noting that in the texts they too are promised a portion of the Hereafter. Ancient Judaism was a patriarchal faith indeed, so their portion of the paradise to come may well be lived keeping house and raising children so that the men could study. Much like Haredi women live today in fact.⁸

The Christian image of the road to the apocalyptic paradise is best known in the West given the fascination Revelation has had over the centuries.⁹ The Seven Seals of the Apocalypse, the first of which are the Four Horsemen (Antichrist, War, Famine and Death) as described in Revelation have always burned in the human imagination and are depicted in popular culture to this day. Less is known of the chiliastic kingdom where one thousand years of peace and plenty under the benevolent rule of Christ await the faithful. The Catholic Encyclopedia briefly describes its features:

• the early return of Christ in all His power and glory,
• the establishment of an earthly kingdom with the just,
• the resuscitation of the deceased saints and their participation in the glorious reign,
• the destruction of the powers hostile to God, and,
• at the end of the kingdom, the universal resurrection with the final judgment, after which the just will enter heaven, while the wicked will be consigned to the eternal fire of hell.¹⁰

Islamic eschatology is complex, and comes in two distinct though overlapping flavors, Sunni and Shi’ite. Their visions of apocalypse share much in common and in what follows the apocalyptic scenarios are virtually identical. As with so much in the Shi’ite/Sunni divide, the story is the same and only the cast of characters differ. First is the Dajjal.¹¹ The Dajjal is an Islamic anti-Christ figure. In the time of the Prophet, Dajjal was the lurking horror that could lie just beyond the light of the campfire, always waiting, always watching. Dajjal is not mentioned directly in the Qu’ran, but is assumed to be one of the Signs of the End. He is noted frequently however in the Hadith literature, believed by Muslims to be the words of the Prophet speaking as a man (i.e., when not revealing the Word of God):

that one day the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) mentioned in the presence of people about al-Masih al-dajjal. He said: Verily Allah (hallowed be He and High) is not blind of one eye. Behold, but the Masih al-dajjal is blind of right eye as if his eye is like a swollen grape, and the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: I was shown in a dream in the night that near the Kaabah there was a man fair-complexioned, fine amongst the white-complexioned men that you ever saw, his locks of hair were falling on his shoulders. He was a man whose hair were neither too curly nor too straight, and water trickled down from his head. He was placing his bands on the shoulders of two persons and amidst them was making a circuit around the Kaabah. I said: Who is he? They replied: Al-Masih son of Mary. And I saw behind him a man with intensely curly hair, blind of right eye. Amongst the persons I have ever seen Ibn Qatan has the greatest resemblance with him. He was making a circuit around the Kaabah by placing both his hands on the shoulders of two persons. I said: Who is he? They said; It is al-Masih al-dajjal.¹²

From this comes the image of the one-eyed Dajjal that would come down through the centuries. In the history of Dajjal belief, a distinct pattern emerges. In relatively good times, the Dajjal is a story often used to discipline recalcitrant children.¹³ In less settled times however, the Dajjal is ever present and an avalanche of literature and films seek the identity of the Dajjal in the contemporary world with as much vigor as fundamentalist Christians seek the anti-Christ among liberals or the characters in The Omen films try to identify and neutralize the evil Damian.¹⁴ Today, the Dajjal is ubiquitous, appearing in film, in the publications of both ISIS and Al Qaeda, and books, magazines, cartoons, and so much more from Pakistan to Palestine.¹⁵

The good news is that the appearance of Dajjal also heralds the coming of the messianic figures that will defeat Dajjal and bring an end to history. For Sunnis, it is Imam Mahdi who, with Jesus at his side, will lead the final battle and herald the universal judgment. Shi’ite eschatology is less certain given the fissiparous nature of the faith. But for the majority Twelver Shi’ites, Imam Mahdi will return in the form of Mohammad Al Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam who vanished as a young child and Jesus. In either case, the scenario is much the same. Islam does not posit a terrestrial interlude, be it a paradise or a study hall. Rather, in keeping with a faith born in the forbidding deserts of Arabia, the elect will dwell in the gardens of paradise as described at length in the Qu’ran.¹⁶

What all three Peoples of the Book share in common is the exclusiveness of the kingdom of the elect. Only those Jews who stayed true to the faith and resisted the allure of assimilation and miscegenation will find a seat at the table. Secular Jews need not apply in the Heredi view.¹⁷ Christians on the whole tend to be more ecumenical in this regard, although in more conservative reaches of American Protestantism heaven remains somewhat sectarian. In the age of the World Council of Churches, which had its first gathering in 1948, heaven is more often seen as open to good Christians of every variety. Increasingly liberal theologians are arguing that there be no confessional barriers to salvation.¹⁸

Islamic views of salvation remain as bitterly divided between Sunni and Shi’a as is contemporary politics.¹⁹ The Shi’ites are particularly sectarian in this regard – a logical reaction to centuries of persecution and discrimination.²⁰ Although most Sunnis are less focused on the issue than are the Shi’a, they too generally hold for the heavenly inadmissibility of Shi’ites.²¹ As for non-Muslims, the Qu’ran itself is quite clear on this point, for Islam is the most ecumenical of salvific faiths:

And there are, certainly, among the People of the Book, those who believe in Allah, in the revelation to you, and in the revelation to them, bowing in humility to Allah: They will not sell the Signs of Allah for a miserable gain! For them is a reward with their Lord, and Allah is swift in account.

(3:199)

Despite this moment of textual tolerance, the point to be made is that for the Western faiths, the Day of Judgment is a time of terrible winnowing. Few will find their way to paradise, and those who do not will find an eternity of torment to be their sad lot. Religiously moti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I This was then
• Part II This is now
• Index