Tim Furnish: Occidental Jihadist
One of the Islamic Republic of Iran's official media outlets, Ahulbayt News Agency ("Family of the House [of the prophet Muhammad]"--which focuses on disseminating Twelver Shi`ism and Mahdism--is crowing about some recent, pro-Muslim statements by a high-ranking Anglican bishop. Nick Baines, the Bishop of Bradford, U.K., said the following recently at the synodical conference in York:
*Some parishes in his diocese are 95% Muslim, but this should not...
Usama bin Ladin’s termination with extreme prejudice by US Navy SEALs—under, to his great credit, President Obama’s orders—should hopefully lead to the 9/11 mastermind’s memory “becoming a mere spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows, but cannot again grow or take shape” (as Gandalf said of Sauron, post-Ring-destruction, in The Return of the King).
But will it? The Islamic world, unlike Western Christian civilization (or its fictional analog, Middle-earth) , has a long and internally-legitimate tradition of messianic and quasi-messianic figures who appear to die but actually go into ghaybah, or “occultation,” only to return later within history to set matters aright—that is, to re-invigorate the Islamic community and to lead it to victory over its enemies, usually via jihad. (Christendom has, of course, the messianic...
A recent conservative “sting” operation taped National Public Radio fund-raising executive Ron Schiller maligning members of the Tea Party as “white,” “gun-toting” and “seriously racist.” (This would be news to the chief Tea Partier I know, a black friend at my church who owns his own jewelery store chain and despises Barack Obama.) Schiller also slandered the paramount conservative movement of our time as "fundamentalist Christian" and "xenophobic" and claimed that it has “hijacked” the GOP. As fatuous and unmoored from reality as these statements are, Schiller has in fact received more attention for stating that NPR would be better off sans federal...
Back in the bad old days when I was a college professor (2000-2007), students in my world and Middle East history classes regularly had to be disabused of bad habits and thinking: sleeping in class (that usually only happened once, to be sure); horrible grammar and syntax on essays (a regular occurrence); calling the professor “dude” (again, usually a singular event in each class). Perhaps the most dispiriting (at least to me) problem besetting these public-school-educated Georgian youth (from the American South, not the Caucasus) was the seeming inability to wield any sort of logic—in particular, my students were prone to arguing that because you can’t disprove something, it must necessarily be true. My favorite way of disproving the argumentum ad ignoratiamwas to...
It's a sad day in the long and formerly glorious history of Western civilization when the pastor of a tiny, much-maligned fundamentalist Protestant church in Florida more staunchly defends the First Amendment than does America's Attorney General, Secretary of State and greatest living General .
In three days (on September 11), according to its pastor Dr. Terry Jones, Dove Ministries in Gainesville, Florida, plans on burning copies of the Qur'an. The usual suspects in the Obama Administration have (yet again) unveiled their inner dhimmis: AG Holder said Jones' idea was "idiotic" and "dangerous;" Hillary...
Whoever is correct, the much more important issue is the violent petulance with which many Muslims around the world are responding to an event which has not even happened yet! According to AP:
*An Indonesian Muslim cleric said that “whether or not he burns the Quran, Jones had already hurt the heart of the Muslim world. If he'd gone through with it, it would have been tantamount to war,” the cleric said in the coastal town of Lhokseumawe. “A war that would have...
Recently the newspaper “al-Masry al-Youm” [“Egypt Today”] reported that a number of prominent Egyptian Muslim leaders were threatening to “respond aggressively” to the “insane” and “cowardly” ripping of pages from the Qur’an, which Randall Terry and a number of other conservative Christian activists did in front of the White House on September 11, 2010. With the proliferation of these Islamic temper tantrums in recent years, such a story would hardly rate further commentary—except that the ranters this time are those “pet” (to borrow Harry Reid's term for Delaware Senate hopeful Chris Coons) Muslims beloved by every Western academic, journalist and...
“The Nation,” Pakistan’s most prominent English-language newspaper, reported last week that that country’s State Minister of Industry, Dr. Ayatullah Durrani, “has urged US President Barack Obama to offer Eid prayers at Ground Zero Mosque and become the `Ameer-ul-Momineen’ [sic] of Muslim Ummah.” Eid al-Fitr is the feast at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan and occurs this year on September 10. According to Durrani, “the coming Eid would expectedly be observed on 9/11” which would be “a golden opportunity for President Obama to…become Amir-ul-Momineen or Caliph of all Muslims. In this way, all...
Opponents of the proposed Ground Zero mosque in New York City (Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, most prominently) have adduced the feelings of the 9/11 victims’ families as the primary reason why it should not be built several blocks from the site of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. But at the risk of appearing even more heartless than these aforementioned conservatives,wounded emotions are not the reason to be against this particular Islamic worship center. Rather, the psychological and geo-religious symbolism a mosque at Ground Zero would represent is the problem. As former Muslim Sam Solomon so accurately puts it:
[A] mosque, totally unlike a church or synagogue, is a “sign” and a “symbol” of the establishment of “authority”—both religious and political—not just a place of worship for its adherents. A mosque is the symbol of the...
This past week PBS' Frontline ran a dispatch by Babak Sarfaraz,"The Hidden Imam and His Cult," which while showing flashes of astute analysis also makes a number of questionable statements about Mahdism in Iran. For example, Sarfaraz claims that"the cult of Mahdi...had never become a full-fledged mass movement until the last 20 years." He also refers to the"ultra reactionary millennialist Hojjatieh [sic] Society." Twelver Shi`ism--with its core belief...
Timothy R. Furnish, Ph.D., is a recovering college professor and current writer, researcher and analyst specializing in Islamic history, sects, eschatology, ideology and Mahdism. He learned Arabic at taxpayers' expense while in the U.S. Army and, later, studied Farsi, Turkish and Ottoman while a doctoral student at Ohio State University. His first book was Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden and his second, due out in 2010, is The Caliphate: Threat or Opportunity? He maintains an HNN blog, Occidental Jihadist, as well as a website dedicated to covering Mahdism and Muslim eschatology: mahdiwatch.org.
AP reported yesterday that “ten members of [a] Christian medical team,” six of them American, “were gunned down in a...
Ayatollah Mohammed Bagher Kharrazi's recent call for a Greater Iran encompassing "the entire Middle East and Central Asia" has caused a veritable epidemic of Internet hyperventilating among the armchair alarmist eschatologists, many of whom are living proof that "a little learning is a dangerous thing." Allow me to correct some of the more glaring inaccuracies and provide a modicum of informed analysis:
1) The Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT enamored of (re)creating a caliphate.
The Caliphate--that historical redoubt of SUNNI Muslim institutional authority and power, from the Umayyads to the Ottomans--is the LAST thing that any ayatollah in Tehran or Qom wants. Rather, the Twelver Shi`is of Iran (as well as Iraq, Lebanon, and other concentrations throughout the region) look for the restoration of the Imamate--a ruling office inhabited...
1) Religious utopianism
*61% of Christians expect Jesus to return during their lifetimes (ranging from 50% in Nigeria to 69% in Congo)
*52% of Muslims expect the restoration of the caliphate in their lifetimes (from 29% in Sengal to 69% in Mozambique).
While Pew subsumes both these beliefs under the “end times” rubric, that is not really accurate—unless the latter is connected, among Muslims, to the belief that the Mahdi will come/the 12th Imam return to do so, in which case it does become functionally eschatological. Also, note that a belief...
Obama implicitly, but wisely, conceded to critics by opening his address acknowledging the thinness of the rationale for his receiving the Nobel peace prize—“compared to…Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela, my accomplishments are slight”—and continued by standing up for the employment of American force: “the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six...
The last refuge of those sporting COEXIST bumper stickers on their Volvos—...
