The Coming Islamic Apocalypse

The sudden death of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi raises vital issues for the future of the world. An ultimate Islamist hard-liner, notorious for his aggressive policy towards the West and Israel in particular, and for his brutal treatment of women and even the mildest of dissent, his passing throws into chaos the question of succession for the ailing, 85-year-old, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Only the second person to hold this exalted post, Khamenei has perpetuated the extremist policies of Ayatollah Khomeini, based on the belief that the End Times in the Islamic apocalyptic system are indeed approaching, and that Iran will lead the way in the final war of purification against the enemies of Islam.

Raisi’s death may be coincidental, but it is coming at the present time, with the Israel-Hamas war moving towards a final showdown can only be further destabilising. Based on previous experience, there is a great likelihood the succession process will shift Iran and its military and terrorist proxies even further along the continuum of extremism (if such is possible!), a prospect that becomes all the more terrifying as Iran proceeds towards its goal of becoming a nuclear power, courtesy of the Obama and Biden presidential administrations.

How should we assess such prospects in Australia? To begin with, the world is not a civilised place, and this is the basic fact that should guide any comprehensive understanding of the present crisis. Vast demographic, political, technological and religious forces are moving humanity ever closer to the edge of a civilisational abyss, out of which it may never emerge.  And while this is an apocalyptic vision — albeit a secular version — it is one shared at the level of religious extremism by Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Houthis, Iran, and the other radical Islamist forces leading the onslaught against the West, beginning with the current campaign to obliterate Israel and exterminate the Jewish race.

The Islamist world is an apocalyptic place of suicide bombers, mass-death martyrdom operations (e.g., 9/11), assassinations, beheadings, torture, mutilations, honour killings, rapes, large-scale sacrifices of civilian populations, and the purification of infidels from the earth, all in the cause of holy war and the advent of the End Times, according to the millennium-old Islamic Apocalyptic tradition. This is a very powerful religious and ideological force that elevates the politics of carnage to the level of the supernatural, and it has moved to centre-stage in the context of the global jihad that has been launched over the past half-century, general ignorance of which is crippling our capacity properly to confront the crisis that is overwhelming us.

Islamic apocalypticism follows the basic structure established by the Christian tradition and stated in the Book of Revelation. The key elements of can briefly be stated:

♦ The Mahdi: The Mahdi Corresponding with the Messiah in Judaism and Christianity, the Mahdi appears at the onset of the End Times to rid the world of evil and injustice. His advent is heralded by trials and tribulations, rampant immorality, mighty wars, unnatural phenomena, and an invasion of demonic forces. He will lead the Muslim Ummah (community) to dominion over the world. In Shiite Islam the Mahdi is identified with the Hidden Imam, a figure to whom we will return in connection with the Ayatollah Khomeini.

♦ The Dajjal: Also like Christianity, Islam developed an ‘Antichrist’ figure, the Dajjal, the ‘Great Deceiver’. Appearing during the End Times, he will imitate the miracles performed by Isa (i.e., Jesus, the penultimate prophet of Islam before Muhammad), assisted by an army of devils. Believing he is the promised Messiah, many people, especially the Jews, will join his ranks until he and they are vanquished by the Second Coming of Isa.

♦ Global dominion & submission to Sharia Law: The penultimate aim is unification of the world under Sharia Law. This will require the propagation of Islam through war, as Prophet Muhammad declares: “I have been sent to the human race in its entirety”, and “I have been commanded to fight the unbelievers until they testify: ‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet’.” A primary target will be corrupt governments and those controlling them — in Muslim eyes, the Jews. This will continue until the End Times usher in a realm of justice, plenty and equality to be enjoyed freely and universally by all Muslims.

♦ The Centrality of Jerusalem. The third-holiest site in Islam, Jerusalem is where Muhammad was taken up to heaven. And while Mecca is the primary centre of Islam in ‘normal time’, Jerusalem assumes a central focus in the End Times, with key eschatological events happening there.

♦ The Extermination of the Jews: As indicated by their traitorous role under the influence of the Dajjal, the Jews will be exterminated. Surah 5 of the Holy Koran condemns them for their unbelief:

… they are cursed for what they say … And we cast enmity and hatred among them till the Day of Resurrection. As often they ignite a flame for war, God extinguishes it. They endeavour to work corruption upon the earth. And God loves not workers of corruption.

A well-known hadith predicts the apocalyptic slaughter:

the time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry out: ‘Oh Muslim! O servant of Allah! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.

Guided by this apocalyptic system, the global jihad in pursuit of the final deliverance of Islam has been underway since the late 1960s and Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War — a mortifying but galvanising event for the Muslim world — and especially since the Iranian Revolution and the rise to supreme power over a regional super-power of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

Khomeini’s apocalypticism was rooted in the fundamentals of Shiite theology, especially in its belief in the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi or Messiah who will appear in the End Times to rid the world of evil and injustice. In the Imam’s absence, this was a role that Khomeini implicitly took upon himself as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran:

effectively appropriating the function of the Imam to himself (though staying short of claiming divine inspiration and infallibility) he loomed large as the prophetic figure in late 20th Century Islam … perhaps larger than any in Islamic history. — Abbas Amanat, The Resurgence of Apocalyptic in Modern Islam

Possessed by an apocalyptic vision, Khomeini immediately used the unprecedented grandeur of his office to command Iran in its bloody war with Iraq (1980-88). This was a conflict cast as a ‘struggle of truth against falsehood’, to be won through the martyrdom of young Iranians, serving as ‘warriors of Islam’, with a multitude wearing a plastic ‘key to paradise’ around their necks as they served as disposable minesweepers to protect tanks and infantry. As the elderly Khomeini declared:

A people that is not prepared to kill and to die in order to create a just society cannot expect any support from Allah. The dominion of Islam over the entire world must be hastened through Jihad, through our readiness to offer our lives and to shed the unclean blood of those who do not see the light brought from the heavens by Muhammad. It is Allah who puts the gun in our hand. But we cannot expect him to pull the trigger as well, simply because we are faint-hearted.

Anything but faint-hearted, Khomeini was content to send his troops to their deaths fortified by the certainty that martyrdom was the path to eternal salvation, a promise reinforced by public displays of ornate model replicas of the mystic wedding chambers within which martyrs would taste the sensual pleasures of Paradise, and by the blood-red tinted water gushing eternally from fountains in the Tehran cemetery.

Enchanted by all this, a godfather of postmodern anti-Semitism, Michel Foucault, rushed to Iran to embrace the death-cult and exalt Khomeini’s Islamist apocalypticism as “not simply a religion, but an entire way of life … a gigantic powder-keg at the level of hundreds of millions of men.” “Like a pyromaniac cheering on a forest fire, he illustrated a peculiar Western intellectual disease already seen at work in the case of communism and seen again in response to 9/11: a fascination with conflagration and mega-death”, as Richard Landes noted in his 2011 book Enraged Millennialism: Global Jihad

Surveying the carnage his revolution had wrought, and looking forward to the End Times and the economic and military forces he now commanded, Khomeini raged against the familiar malignancies of the West: immorality, vice, corruption, colonialism, capitalist exploitation of Islam’s natural resources, the global domination of the Jews, Zionism and Israel’s occupation of inalienable Muslim holy lands, the West’s suppression and corruption of Islamic culture, and various anti-Muslim conspiracies. And above all, he raged against America as the Great Satan, and Israel and the Jews as its leprous agents in the Muslim world. No quarter could be spared in the Final Battle against these demonic powers. As Khomeini declared:

If we kill infidels in order to put a stop to their corrupting activities, we have done them a service. To allow the infidels to stay alive means to let them do more corrupting activities. To kill them is a surgical operation commanded by Allah. War is a blessing for the world and for every nation. It is Allah himself who commands men to wage war and kill. The wars that our Prophet waged against the infidels were divine gifts to humanity. We have to wage war until all corruption, all disobedience of Islamic law ceases. The Koran commands: War! War until victory! A religion without war is a crippled religion. It is war that purifies the earth. To kill the infidels is one of the noblest missions Allah has reserved for mankind. — Qu. Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution, 1986.

NONE of these ominous developments have been secret, but have instead been made explicit by the key figures in this age of Islamic apocalypticism. For example, the founding Charter of Hamas (1988) explicitly states that Palestine is an inalienable waqf (endowment) of the Muslim world and that the existence of Israel is an intolerable blasphemy. No negotiation over this matter is permissible and any attempt to do so is treasonous. Consequently, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” (para.13) Hamas’s pursuit of Jihad is embedded in the theology of Islamic salvation: “the movement is a universal one [and] whoever resists it is challenging Fate itself!” (para. 7) As Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine, pronounced at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in May 2001, even as Hamas and al-Qaeda moved to centre-stage, and the Second Intifada escalated and the countdown to the September 11 attacks began:

We tell the Jews and Christians: in as much as you love life, the Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and martyrdom.

It is this which will bring the Muslim victory in the cosmic struggle that is underway.

The apocalyptic dimension of the Hamas attack on Israel is generally well understood throughout the Muslim world. Popular apocalyptic depictions of the apocalypse to come feature in innumerable cheap tracts sold on the streets throughout the Middle-East and indeed, “stacks of these books are available at bookstores near the entrances of mosques where they sell for a minimal price”. One title, “The Disappearance of the State of Israel is a Koranic Inevitability”, became a

major slogan and was spray painted on walls throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Cooks in Jericho, taxi drivers in Rafah, and video salesman in Ramallah, could all tell you something about the End Times. — Richard Landes

Such works were reinforced by the perennial presence throughout all forms of media in the Muslim world of the infamous ‘blood libel’ that depicts the Jews as killers of children for ritual purposes. Summing up, a recent article explains how

the recent events in the valiant Gaza denote a step closer to the apocalypse about which the teacher of all teachers – the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) – informed us in such vivid and minute details. The Prophet told us that a great sign of the imminence of the Day of Judgement will be when Muslims, as the only proponents of the Truth, will fight the Jews [the vanguard] of those who will follow Dajjal, the false Messiah whose emergence will herald the onset of the End Times. — Spahic Omer, Gaza tragedy: a step closer to the Apocalypse.

Incredibly, and despite the ubiquity of these ideas, the apocalyptic dimension of the Global Jihad is being studiously ignored in most current commentary on Hamas and its Iranian sponsor, despite it being the core belief of this ultra-terroristic death cult. Consequently, it is both tragic and bizarre to watch thousands of privileged, pampered, and over-indulged university and school students championing Hamas and raging against Israel, supported, guided and manipulated by radical socialist, anarchist, and Islamist forces, and demanding ‘Intifada’ and Palestinian possession of the land ‘from the river to the sea’. Watching the mindless chaos one must ask, how many of the megaphone- and iPhone-wielding leaders of those protests know they are mouthing slogans evocative of the most extreme form of Islamic apocalypticism?

Perhaps their ignorance can be understood, benefitting as they are from only the best education our universities can offer. But the same cannot be said about our Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and the various other poorly educated politicians, political advisers, career bureaucrats and apparatchiks, various university vice-chancellors, and prominent media outlets, all of whom appear comfortable with this mounting wave of hatred and rage, and are content to utter platitudes and mouth sound bites without ever approaching an awareness of the scale and the depth of the civilisational challenge our society faces.

This failure of basic awareness is all the more egregious because of the tens of millions of dollars that have been poured into the universities since 9/11 to establish ‘centres of excellence’ in Islamic studies and related fields. This in universities that refused to host fully-funded centres for the study of Western civilisation!

Where is the knowledge and intelligence that such centres of Islamic expertise can be expected to provide and that should be informing all discussion and debate, presuming these would be permitted? How is it that Australia, one of the most multi-cultural nations on earth, with an ever-growing Muslim population and an alarming incidence of aggressive anti-Semitism has such an abysmal understanding of what is going on the Islamic world, specifically the scale and depth of apocalyptic forces in play? Or have these centres themselves become key propaganda agencies in this civilisational conflict, joining with our university arts, humanities, and social science departments to foster the new postmodern form of anti-Semitism?

As the global jihad gathers momentum, is it too much to expect our political and academic leaders will realise it is their children and grandchildren who will be living in the future world their ignorance and inaction is rapidly bringing into being?