To Islamic State, Dabiq is important but its not the end of the wor... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/oct/10/is...

To Islamic State, Dabiq is important but its not

the end of the world
Giles Fraser
The apocalyptic imagination continues to inuence religious thought. But secular politics is
not immune from it either
Friday 10 October 2014 13.53 BST

Dabiq is a small, rather nondescript town in northern Syria, close by the border with Turkey. Its
more of a large village really, with just a few thousand inhabitants.

And it is of limited strategic interest. Not far south, in the sprawling city of Aleppo, where battle
rages, Bashar al-Assad continues to drop his untargeted barrel bombs on its Sunni population,
thus rallying more and morejihadis to the black ag. Yet it is Dabiq after which Islamic State
(Isis) names its glossy recruiting magazine. For this is the place where the world will come to an
end.

Like Judaism and Christianity and strongly inuenced by them Islam has a powerful
eschatological strain. It anticipates the end of the world and a nal historical confrontation
between good and evil, after which human life is set to be miraculously transformed. And
according to one reading of Islamic tradition (hadith), the place where thisnal malahim
(apocalypse) will happen is of all places Dabiq. This is where the Muslim and Christian
armies will nally face each other and the Crusaders will be destroyed. And this iswhy Dabiq is
the name on the lips of Isis recruiting sergeants.

It is worth noting that Isis is extremely selective in its use of hadith. For instance, other parts of
the tradition have it that Jesus, dressed in yellow robes, will return east of Damascus and will
join forces with the Islamic messiah, the Mahdi, in a battle against the false messiah, the Dajjal.
After the death of the Mahdi, it is the Muslim Jesus who will rule the Earth. This hadith is less
useful to Isis, though its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, looks to many observers to be trying to
style himself as the Mahdi.

To the secular imagination, all this is ridiculous mumbo-jumbo. I have a non-religious friend
who lives on a kibbutz, a few miles from Megiddo in the southern part of the Galilee. This is the
place from which Armageddon gets its name and is often a pilgrimage site for various end-of-
the-worlders and their fruitcake theories. She chuckles at them all as she looks on from chicken
farm.

I do get the chuckling and the obvious satisfaction there is in seeing this sort of religious
fantasy pricked by reality. The world did not end in 2000, and those strange religious oddballs
retreated from the mountain crestfallen. They are the modern-day equivalents of those
Baptists who, on the basis of a reading of the book of Daniel, thought the world would end on
22 October 1844. The very existence of 23 October became known as the Great
Disappointment.

But before we spend all our time making fun out of what seems to us like such obvious
foolishness and dangerous foolishness in the case of Isis it is worth considering the extent to
whichthis sort of thinking continues toexert its inuence, even in secular and atheistic world

1 de 2 12/09/2016 20:09
To Islamic State, Dabiq is important but its not the end of the wor... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/oct/10/is...

views. As Norman Cohn powerfully puts it in his seminal book, The Pursuit of the Millennium,
apocalyptic fantasies had a sustained impact throughout the 20th century, with both
communism and nazism subscribing to the idea of collective salvation through some nal
battle between good and evil.

The God bit may not have been there but the pattern of thought is structurally the same. And,
as John Gray argues, this same eschatological imagination was expressed by neoconservatives
who saw regime change as the start of a global democratic revolution and by liberal
interventionists who imagined that toppling Saddam Hussein would inaugurate a new world
order ruled by human rights.

Thus Gray makes the case that our current idea of saving the Middle East through military
action is a secularised version of medieval eschatology. So perhaps before we chuckle too much
at what we see as the peculiar theologies of other times and cultures, we would do well to
examine a few of our own.

@giles_fraser

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