# Resurgence of Apocalyptic in Modern Islam

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Abbas Amanat, Resurgence of Apocalyptic in Modern Islam, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Resurgence of Apocalyptic in Modern Islam
> 
> Abbas Amanat
> published in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. III: Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age pp. 237-246
> 
> New York: Continuum, 2000
> 
> [page 237]
> 
> Shi`i Mahdism and the End of Time
> 
> Even in modern times expectations for the Mahdi were more prevalent in Shi`i
> Islam, particularly in Iranian Shi'ism, than in the Sunni world. Deeply
> ingrained in its belief systems and, in turn, into the Shi`i psyche, the
> doctrine of Imamate ensured continuity of divine inspiration. As designated
> descendants of the Prophet who inherited in a direct line the leadership of the
> community, the Imams' continued existence was considered "proof" (hujja)
> of the continuity of divine grace toward the "guided" Shi`i community. In
> Twelver Shi`ism the Mahdi is the Twelfth (and the last) Imam in the line, who
> is believed to have entered in the year 260 AH/873-874 into a state of
> Occultation and hence is invisible to believers through normal means. Essential
> to the Shi`i apocalyptic beliefs is that the advent of the Hidden Imam
> (al-Imam al-Gha'ib) will set in motion a course of events ultimately
> leading to the destruction of the world and the end of time. Though no specific
> time was ever set for his advent, it was generally believed that his revolt
> (khuruj) would occur at the turn of the millennium after his
> Occultation. As the Lord of Time (al-Sahib al-Zaman) and the Riser
> (Qá'im) of the House of the Prophet, he will restore justice and
> equity to the world when it is filled with evil and oppression. This sense of
> restoring justice was tied in Shi`i prophecies with reinstalling the right to
> political leadership of the House of the Prophet, vengeance against the
> usurpers of that authority, and consequently expansion through jihad and the
> Imam's world domination. This millennial scenario, elaborated and embellished
> over centuries in a vast body of apocalyptic literature, presented the advent
> of the Imam and his acomplishments against forces of the Dajjal, the false
> Messiah, as the prelude to the resurrection and the final judgement. Contrary
> to the Sunni Mahdi, whose advent was aimed to enhance the foundations of Islam
> on a periodic (centennial) basis, the Shi`i Islam essen-
> 
> [page 238]
> 
> tially strived to invoke the Imamate paradigm so as to bring about the
> resurrection and an end to the prevailing dispensation. The Imam's advent will
> differentiate the forces of good from evil in two confronting armies and
> establish the sovereignty of the House of the Prophet, but his kingdom was
> predicted to be ephemeral and only a preparatory stage before the cataclysmic
> end of the material world, the commencement of the day of judgement, and
> thereafter the final departure of the saved to paradise and the damned to hell.
> [6]
> 
> Despite this rich and dynamic apocalyptic tradition, however, during the
> period of expectation (intizar) for the Lord of Time to bring relief
> from oppression, no course of action was prescribed for the believers except
> vigilance and, if need be, dissimulation of true beliefs in the face of danger.
> Although Shi`ism began to develop, almost immediately after the Occultation, an
> elaborate body of formal religious sciences crowned by the study of
> jurisprudence, the question of political leadership of the community during the
> interregnum of the Imam's absence remained essentially unaddressed. A long
> tradition of madrasa education, reenforced under the patronage of the Safavid
> dynasty (1501-1732), led to the emergence of a community of jurists
> (mujtahids) who claimed a collective vicegerency (niyaba) on
> behalf of the Hidden Imam while condoning the shah's vague notion of political
> vicegerency. Partially independent from the state, these `ulama, who assumed
> for themselves the task of preserving the "essence of Islam" as experts in the
> holy law and its sole implementors, became increasingly self-conscious of their
> status after the fall of the Safavid state in the early eighteenth century. By
> the time the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) consolidated, the `ulama of the
> predominant Usuli legal school presented a socioreligious force to be reckoned
> with in the domain of the judiciary and of education. They seldom, however, in
> theory or practice, laid any claim to political authority in the state beyond
> occasional challenges to its conduct. The clergy-state equilibrium, a legacy of
> the Safavid period, had the natural tendency to relegate the advent of the
> Hidden Imam to a distant future and in turn dismiss as unorthodox, if not
> heretical, all such speculations. The actual messianic aspirations were
> tolerated even less, having routinely been labeled as fraudulent and heretical.
> [7]
> 
> Yet Shi`ism never fully dissociated itself from messianic aspirations, even
> though preoccupation with jurisprudence and supplementary sciences steered
> mainstream learning in a nonmessianic direction. No less important a scholar
> than Mulla Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (1628-1699), the celebrated theologian most
> responsible for popularizing Shi`ism, dedicated a substantial portion of his
> famous Al-Bihar al-Anwar and a number of Persian works to the subject of
> the Hidden Imam, the circumstances of his manifestation, the
> 
> [page 239]
> 
> struggle against the Dajjal, and the consequent eschatological occurrences
> leading to the return (raj`a) of the past prophets and Imams, the
> raising of the dead on the Plane of Gathering, the Final Judgement, the
> Heaven's bliss, and the torments of Hell. The apocalyptic literature produced
> by Majlisi, and later writers up to the twentieth century, was influential not
> only in keeping alive debates about the advent of the Imam in the madrasa
> circles, but more significantly, in the popular imagination. Beyond the calm
> and stern surface of formal Shi`ism there continued to surge a mass of
> millennial yearning often with revolutionary potentials against the prevailing
> religion of the `ulama and the institutions of the state (Amanat 1989, 1-47,
> 70-105).
> 
> Speculative Shi`ism also elaborated on Shi`i eschatology and, more
> specifically, on the circumstances of resurrection. The immortality of the
> soul, modes of existence in the hereafter, and, most troubling of all, the
> doctrine of the corporal resurrection (al-ma`ad al-jismani) came to
> occupy such philosophers as Sadr al-Din Shirazi, better known as Mulla Sadra
> (d. 1640), perhaps the greatest of Muslim philosophers of recent centuries. In
> contrast to Sunni Islam's relinquishing serious philosophical discourse,
> learned Shi`ism preserved a thriving and highly diverse philosophical tradition
> and articulated within the framework of mystical philosophy notions of time and
> modalities of being essential for innovative conceptualizations of the end.
> Unlike the historically static worldview of the Shari'a-minded `ulama. Mulla
> Sadra and his students, known as Muta'allahin (theosophists), envisioned a
> dynamic view of time that in final analysis was at odds with the conventional
> notion of the eschaton as the permanent point of termination. Sadra'ians
> essentially remained loyal to a blend of Peripatetic and Neoplatonic philosophy
> expounded by classical Muslim philosophers, but their notion of beings'
> everlasting motion in time was a breakthrough. In what Mulla Sadra defined as
> the "essential motion" (al-haraka al-jawhariyya) of all things, the
> universe "is ceaselessly being renewed and passing away, originating and
> enduring." Unlike the theory of the fixed cycles or the ahistorical approach of
> mainstream theology, the Sadra'ian concept of "essential motion" (or
> transubstantiation) pointed to an unending spiral, if not linear, course of
> humankind's spiritual and material progression. Even in its dormant
> philosophical rendition, this concept challenged conventional interpretation of
> the End and cast doubt on its occurrence as a providential cataclysm destined
> to bring the world to a permanent end. Yet Shi`i philosophical speculations
> remained essentially loyal to the doctrine of Islam's perfection and finality
> (Morris 1981, 119-29).
> 
> With the emergence of the Shaykhi school and the visionary theology of its
> founder, Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (1756-1826), Shi`ism generated a new
> 
> [page 240]
> 
> mystical-philosophical synthesis that was highly influential in shaping later
> millennial trends. A peripatetic and widely read scholar from al-Ahsa' (north
> of Arabian peninsula), Ahsa'i was familiar not only with the theosophist school
> of Isfahan (though he violently denounced Mulla Sadra) but also with the
> speculative Sufism of Ibn `Arabi and the illuminist philosophy of Shihab al-Din
> Suhrawardi, both known for their apocalyptic propensity. Ahsa'i's contribution
> to the Shi`i eschatological thinking was in three areas, which corresponded to
> the problematic that was long troubling Shi`i theology. Dealing with the Hidden
> Imam's physical endurance in the state of Occultation, Ahsa'i proposed a
> celestial visionary space, which he called Hurqalya, where the Hidden
> Imam resides until his return to the physical world. Speculating on the
> metaphysical means of communicating with the Imam, Ahsa'i emphasized personal
> and intuitive experiences. Furthermore, he redefined corporal resurrection
> through a complex process that aimed at humankind's spiritual recreation once
> the Imam returns to the physical world.
> 
> The luminous Hurqalya, a purgatory through which all beings must pass
> before being finally judged on the day of resurrection, was perceived as a
> world whose "state was neither the absolutely subtle state of separate
> substances nor the opaque density of the material things of our world." In this
> liminal space the Imam, who endured in a refined frame, could be encountered by
> the believers through intuitive visions, holy dreams, and occult sciences. The
> placement of the Imam in this visionary space in effect rescued him from the
> timeless, confused, and inaccessible tangle to which he was relegated by the
> Shi`i prophecies and instead subjected his existence to the dictates of time
> and space. Ahsa'i further maintained that so long as the Imam was in
> Occultation and while the world was still undergoing pre-resurrection
> preparation, only one person could acquire perfect awareness of the Imam at any
> moment of time. The belief in the Perfect Shi`a (al-Shi'a al-Kamil), the
> one who can visualize the Imam in an all-embracing state of intuitive
> experience, became the Fourth Principle (al-Rukn al-Rabi') of the
> Shaykhi school and the central point for its messianic speculations. Ahsa'i's
> chief disciple and successor, Sayyid Kazim Rashti (d. 1844), who further
> elaborated on his teacher's philosophy and created an organizational rudiment
> for Shaykhism, was viewed by his followers as the Perfect Shi'a and the gate
> (bab) through which the Imam's presence could be grasped though such
> identification was never made explicit beyond the circle of the adepts.
> Employing the same idea of celestial conservatory, Ahsa'i conceived of a
> fourfold human existence which goes through a complex process of quintessential
> overhaul before being refashioned in its orig-
> 
> [page 241]
> 
> inal form at the final judgment (Amanat 1989, 48-58; Corbin 1960, 281-338;
> 1977, 180-221).
> 
> Under Rashti, a small but active group of Shaykhi seminarians, trained in the
> madrasas of the Shi`i holy city of Karbala in Iraq, preached Shaykhism in
> mostly Iranian urban and rural communities. As Shaykhism gradually evolved from
> a theological school into a proto-messianic movement with followers among the
> lower- and middle-rank clergy, members of the urban guilds, merchant families,
> local government officials, and some peasant communities, it was increasingly
> received as a threat by the higher ranks of the clerical establishment. By the
> end of Rashti's time, the Shaykhis fully nurtured a sense of expectation for
> some form of messianic advent, which they hoped could save them from the
> harassment and denunciation of their opponents. With this sense of expectation
> there also emerged among the Shaykhis a more human-like picture of the Lord of
> the Age and of his mission. He no longer was perceived as a superhuman with
> fantastic powers which allowed him, according to Shi`i prophecies, to survive a
> thousand years; he was seen as a human being born to mortal parents. Nor was
> his divine mission for universal conquest to be accomplished through a set of
> bizarre and confused apocalyptic events that would ultimately lead to the
> destruction of the world. His main task, to restore justice and equity, was
> seen no longer as mere vengeance for the long-standing feud with the historical
> enemies of his holy family but as a gradual process whose success against his
> enemies depended on the support and sacrifice of his followers (Amanat 1989,
> 58-69).
> 
> The Babi Movement and the Bahá'í Faith
> 
> The rise of what came to be known as the Babi movement in Iran in the 1840s
> and 1850s was an outgrowth of a wide range of messianic speculations of which
> Shaykhism was the most prevalent. In May 1844 the founder of the new movement,
> Sayyid `Ali Muhammad Shirazi (1819-1850), a self-educated young merchant with
> Shaykhi leanings from Shiraz (the capital of the Fars province), declared that
> he is the bab (gate) to the Hidden Imam and the sole source of
> legitimate authority. Though the Bab, as he came to be known to the general
> public, employed the early Shi`i notion of "gateship" now revived by the
> Shaykhis, even in his earliest declarations he was equivocal about his exact
> status. To Mulla Husain Bushru'i, an ardent student of Rashti who became the
> Bab's first convert, as well as a group of mostly Shaykhi clerics who
> consti-
> 
> [page 242]
> 
> tuted his circle of early believers, the Bab gradually confided that he was
> not merely a gate to the Hidden Imam but the manifestation of the expected
> Imam, the Qá'im himself, whose appearance the Shi`is expected for a
> thousand years. Preoccupied with numerology and occult sciences, the Bab drew
> on the fact that his "manifestation of the [divine] cause" occurred in the year
> 1260 AH, a thousand years after the presumed Greater Occultation of the Twelfth
> Imam, Muhammad ibn Hasan al-`Askari, in the year 260 AH/873-874. He also drew
> on the fact that he was a sayyid, a descendant of the house of the
> Prophet, from which the Mahdi will appear, while stressing his own intuitive
> experiences and visions, his purity of character, and his ability to utter holy
> verses similar to the Qur'án. Implicitly denying the doctrine of
> Occultation, he further stated that his manifestation was a symbolic return of
> the Lord of the Age and not the flesh-and-blood reappearance of Muhammad ibn
> Hasan al-`Askari, who had died a millennium earlier (Amanat 1989, 109-211).
> 
> What was also remarkable about the Bab's claim, as it evolved in the course
> of the next five years, was that he considered his call not as a reassertion of
> Islamic Shari'ah, as was the case with the Sunni Mahdis, but as the beginning
> of an apocalyptic process that was destined to bring the Islamic dispensation
> to its cyclical end and to inaugurate instead a new dispensation, which he
> called the era of Bayan. Relying on a hermeneutical interpretation of
> the Shi`i prophecies, for the first time in the history of modern Islam, he
> claimed that with his advent the age of resurrection has started and the End of
> Time is to be understood as the end of the past prophetic cycle. Employing the
> ancient Iranian tree metaphor and its seasonal renewal, he explained in his
> major work, the Persian Bayan (literally, explication [of the past
> scriptures]) that religious dispensations come in cycles so as to renew for
> humankind the "pure religion," a concept with a long history in "esoteric"
> Islam. In his theory of progressive revelation he compared the successive
> dispensations to the life cycle of a tree with a spring of inception and early
> growth, a summer of strength and maturation, an autumn of gradual decline and
> decrepitude, and a winter of barrenness and death. This key notion of
> continuity in revelation not only legitimized the Bayan religion but recognized
> and anticipated future prophetic occurrences after the Bab. Contrary to the
> prevailing Islamic notion of a cataclysmic end, the Bab believed that the "time
> cycle is in progress." [8]
> 
> Beyond the theme of progressive revelation, Babi theology, deeply rooted in
> Perso-Islamic antinomian thought, brought to the surface new anthropocentric
> potentials. His manifestation, the Bab asserted in the Bayan, was not
> only the fulfillment of the Shi`i expectations for the Qá'im and the
> beginning of a new prophetic dispensation but also a new stage in humankind's
> continuous spiritual elevation in the process of reunification with the
> Creator.
> 
> [page 243]
> 
> Though wrapped in a complex and convoluted language with much neology, the
> Bab's emphasis on humanity as a corporal mirror reflecting the essence of the
> sun of divine truth offered a new outlook, in which the believers collectively,
> rather than the sheer will of Providence, were responsible for the success or
> failure of the new dispensation. This sense of collective enterprise was
> apparent from the start in the nascent organization of the movement and in the
> beliefs and conduct of early Babis. The Letters of the Living, as the Bab named
> the inceptive Babi Unit of nineteen consisting of himself and eighteen early
> believers, was at the heart of the renewed dispensation. In his conception of
> the new religion, the Bab was influenced also by the story of Jesus and his
> disciples as narrated in newly accessible printed translations of the New
> Testament. In his religious scheme, the Bab constituted the Primal Point
> (Nuqta-yi Ula) of a scriptural universe in which each convert was
> considered a building block, a symbolic point, in the Bayan's book,
> which was uttered not only in letters and words but in their human equivalents
> of the sacred text of the physical world. At the same time the Bab's assumed
> epithet to be the Sublime Lord (Rabb-i A'la) was close to the Christian
> characterization of Jesus, Son of God and the Savior, whose account of life and
> sufferings was appreciated by the Bab.
> 
> In the Bab's scripture-oriented worldview, the Europeans, whose increasing
> presence was felt in Iran around the middle of the nineteenth century, were
> recognized as the "letters of the Gospel." They were praised for their material
> advances and their savvy but were frowned upon for their unsavory intrusion
> into the land of the believers - a reflection, one may surmise, of the growing
> European commercial and diplomatic dominance. Indeed, the Bab, himself from the
> ancient province of Fars, expressed in his writings a nascent national
> awareness exemplified not only by his ban on Christian intrusion in the land of
> Bayan but also by the use of Persian (along with Arabic) as a scriptural
> language. His fierce criticism of conventional Islamic madrasa scholarship of
> his time, which was exclusively in Arabic, brought him to the point of banning
> the study of jurisprudence and scholastic philosophy and calling for burning
> all books that were contrary to the essence of the Bayan. He also
> adopted a new solar calendar (in part based on ancient Iranian time reckoning)
> in place of the Islamic lunar calendar and marked the date of his own
> manifestation as a beginning of a novel (badi') era. [9]
> 
> Yet the new Babi identity still carried a powerful Shi`i component that was
> best discernible in the reenactment of the Shi`ite apocalyptic paradigm. Based
> on the sufferings of the Shi`ite saints of the early Islamic period and aimed
> at redressing them, the apocalyptic myth was invoked as the Babis faced
> harassment and persecution. Following the arrest and incarceration of
> 
> [page 244]
> 
> the founder of the movement and experiencing a number of humiliating episodes,
> the initial Jesus-like program for peaceful propagation was surpassed by the
> ever-present Husain paradigm of martyrdom in the battlefield. In this shift of
> paradigms the Bab saw his own fate as identical to the fate of the Lord of the
> Age as foretold by prophecies. He was to be killed at the hand of the Dajjal of
> his time in the same way that the Third Imam, Husain ibn `Ali, was martyred at
> the hand of his Umayyad adversaries in the battle of Karbala.
> 
> The Babis, too, reflected this convergence of the Persian and Shi`i
> identities. The sociogeographic composition of the Babi movement revealed
> national characteristics consonant with the Babi beliefs but in contrast to the
> compartmentalized structure of the society in which it appeared. Babism was the
> first movement in the modern Middle East that brought together a wider spectrum
> of converts from different walks of life and throughout a vast geographical
> span. Confrontations with the forces of opposition, first the Shi`i clerical
> establishment and later the Qajar state, further reenforced this national
> fusion. In the siege of Tabarsi in Mazandaran province in northern Iran, when
> in 1848-1849 the Babis put up a stiff and bloody resistance against the
> government forces and their clerical allies, there came together converts from
> all over Iran, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, of different social classes
> with diverse occupational backgrounds, education, and religious leanings. The
> Tabarsi resistance, like a number of other Babi armed struggles around the same
> time in Zanjan and Nayriz, embodied the anticlerical and antistate sentiments
> that were combined at times with indigenous communistic proclivities, giving
> expression to urban and rural grievances and ethnic strife (Amanat 1989,
> 260-94, 332-71).
> 
> In addition to lower ranks of the clergy and members of the bazaar guilds, a
> number of women also joined the movement. Most notable among them was Zarrin
> Taj Baraghani (1814-1852), better known by her titles Qurrat al-`Ayn (the
> Solace of the Eye) and later, Tahira (the Pure). An ardent Shaykhi scholar and
> orator from a well-known clerical family, she probably was the first Muslim
> woman in modern times to remove her facial veil in public, reportedly while
> preaching to a male audience. A mystic and a poet, she highlighted the
> independent nature of the Babi dispensation in the gathering of Badasht in
> 1848. She held that the ongoing age of resurrection has put an end to the
> Islamic Shari'a and that during the interregnum between the old religion and
> the birth of the new one, such obligations as prayers and fasting and even
> institutions of marriage and divorce are abolished. Her very act of removing
> her facial veil was as much an expression of protest against women's inferior
> position as it was a symbolic declaration of the age of apocalypse and
> 
> [page 245]
> 
> the occurrence of the sedition (fitna). She declared that the age of
> "delivering the word" has only brought abuse and persecution and that the only
> option open to the Babis was resort to the sword (Amanat 1989, 295-332, and
> sources cited there).
> 
> By 1848, as the Babi armed resistance culminated, the government's attitude
> hardened toward the Babis. The new premier, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir, who
> viewed the movement as a revolutionary threat to the very survival of the
> state, with much trouble managed to suppress the revolts, and subsequently, in
> 1850, he executed the Bab in Tabriz. The leadership of the movement suffered
> badly, and large numbers of Babis were killed in action and massacred and their
> families enslaved. Two years later the remnant of the movement's elite was
> executed or lynched in the aftermath of a Babi assassination plot against the
> new shah, Nasir al-Din Qajar (1848-1896). Only a few of the leaders, most
> significantly Mirza Husain `Ali Nuri, better known as Bahá'ullah (1817-1892),
> were sent to exile to the Ottoman Iraq. Suppression of the Babi millennialism
> at the hands of the reform-minded premier, with the full blessing of the
> `ulama, was symptomatic of the triumph of one vision of change over another,
> namely, that of the state-sponsored secular modernism over an indigenous
> messianic revolution. The Babi movement, perhaps the most intensive example of
> apocalyptic aspirations in the modern Middle East, was thus militarily defeated
> and driven underground.
> 
> Disillusioned and persecuted, Babism nevertheless survived and even thrived
> in the following decades as a force of religious and political dissent. Despite
> horrifying mistreatment at the hand of the government officials, the fierce
> animosity of the `ulama, and frequent mob attacks and scenes of gruesome
> lynching, known as Babi-kush, and despite internecine conflicts and
> ideological divisions within the exiled leadership, the Babis continued to
> attract converts from discontented elements of all ranks. Bahá'ullah, who led
> the Babi-Bahá'í majority faction from exile in Baghdad, then Ederna, and later
> Akka in Palestine, was supported by converts from among the petty merchants and
> other sectors of the middle classes. A member of the bureaucratic elite,
> Bahá'ullah renounced the Babi militant stance against the state in favor of a
> pacifist approach based on a moral reassessment of the Babi principles. The
> minority Babi-Azali faction, on the other hand, remained theoretically loyal to
> the Babi revolt against the state and the `ulama and refused redefinition of
> the Babi scripture (Amanat 1989, 372-416).
> 
> The emerging Babi-Bahá'í faith represented a religious outlook based on
> Bayani religion but in many respects, particularly its socio-moral message,
> distinct from it. Bahá'ullah, who first claimed in 1864 to be "He whom God
> 
> [page 246]
> 
> shall manifest," the awaited savior of the Bayani dispensation, combined in
> his teachings aspects of mysticism with utopian discourse of possible European
> origin while preserving the Babi messianic outlook and communal vigor. In the
> spirit of the Babi theophany, he claimed to be the manifestation of the divine
> word uttered in the day of the encounter with God. His ecumenical call drew
> upon Islam as well as Judaism and Christianity as he claimed to be the
> messianic fulfillment of all monotheistic religions, a manifestation aimed at
> elevating humankind to the status of cognition while Bahá'ullah himself was to
> be the ultimate pinnacle of this divine manifestation. Bahá'ullah viewed the
> arrival of this apocalyptic moment, God's Day, as a sign of maturation of human
> moral and civil potentials. The call for the "unity of humankind," the ultimate
> goal of the anticipated "universal peace," reflected the Bahá'í wish to break
> with the ethnic, racial, and gender norms and loyalties prevalent at the time.
> Bahá'ullah's later writing emphasized racial and gender equality, economic
> harmony, constitutional monarchy, and religious toleration. His independent
> investigation of truth as the guiding principle for personal enlightenment and
> for the community's intellectual life also dismissed religious conviction on
> the basis of ancestral, communal, or scriptural identities and instead
> underscored a shade of modern individuality. "Universal maturation" was thus
> viewed as the prelude to a new age of cognition, rather than abiding dogma, and
> individual responsibility, rather than collective ritualism. The Babi teachings
> were further modified so as to remove the relics of the Islamic past in the
> areas of devotional acts, legalistic provenance of the `ulama, women's
> segregation, strictures in dealing with nonbelievers, and dietary rules. More
> importantly, as a post-apocalyptic faith, Bahá'ísm sought to disengage from
> Islam's preoccupation with the hereafter, at least in its heaven-hell
> dichotomy, and to highlight instead the gradual elevation of human soul in the
> afterlife. [10]
> 
> The unfolding of millenarian potentials of Iranian Shi`ism in the Babi
> movement, and its later Bahá'í and Azali manifestations, occurred at a critical
> juncture when Islamic societies had begun to encounter the threatening and yet
> luring West. The Babi movement thus represented a novel answer to the question
> of religious modernization by breaking with Islam while preserving the
> continuity of the Middle East's prophetic tradition.
> 
> Notes
> 
> On Shi'i Mahdism and the Occultation, see
> M. A. Amir-Moezzi, Divine Guide in Early Shi'ism (Albany: State
> University of New York Press, 1994); S. A. Arjomand, "The Crisis of the Imamate
> and the Institution of Occultation in Twelver Shi'ism: A Sociohistorical
> Perspective," International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996):
> 491-515; H. Modarresi, Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of
> Shi'ite Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1993), 53-105; Sachedina,
> Islamic Messianism, 78-183.
> 
> For Shi'i messianism in the early modern period, see S. A. Arjomand,
> The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order and
> Societal Change in Shi'ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (Chicago:
> University of Chicago Press, 1984), 66-104; H. Halm, Shiism (Edinburgh:
> Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 71-91. See also A. Amanat, "The Nuqtawi
> Movement of Mahmud Pisikhani and His Persian Cycle of Mystical-Materialism,"
> Mediaeval Isma'ili History and Thought, ed. F. Daftary (New York:
> Cambridge University Press, 1996), 281-98.
> 
> Bayan (Tehran, n.d.), 2:7 (pp. 30-33) and 3:13 (93-97); cf.
> Le Beyan Persan, trans. A.L.M. Nicolas (Paris: Librairie Paul Geuthner,
> 1911), 68-73, 50-58. For other pertinent references, see E. G. Browne's "Index
> of chief contents of the Persian Bayan," in his edition of Hajji Mirza Jani of
> Kashan, Kitab-i Nuqtatul'-Kaf (Leyden: E.J. Brill/London: Luzac &
> Co., 1910), under "Resurrection" (p. lxxxvii), "Revelation" (p. 1xxxvii), and
> "Zuhur" (p. xciv).
> 
> For a summary of the Babi doctrine, see E. G. Browne, "The Babis of
> Persia: II, Their Literature and Doctrines," Journal of the Royal Asiatic
> Society 21 (1889): 881-933 reprinted in Selections from the Writings of
> E.G. Browne on the Babi and the Bahá'í Religions, ed. M. Momen (Oxford:
> George Ronals, 1987), 187-239.
> 
> For the Babi-Bahá'í fulfillment of past prophecies, see Bahá'ullah,
> Kitab-i Iqan (Cairo, n.d.), trans. Shoghi Effendi as Kitab-i Iqan,
> the Book of Certitude (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá'í Publications Committee,
> 1931). On the Bahá'í faith, see J. R. I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium:
> The Genesis of the Bahá'í Faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (New
> York: Columbia University Press, 1998); P. Smith, The Babi-Bahá'í Religions:
> From Messianic Shi'ism to a World Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University
> Press, 1987).
> 
> Works cited in the excerpt
> 
> Amanat, A. 1989. Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement
> in Iran, 1844-1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
> 
> Corbin, H. 1960. Terre celeste et corps de résurrection de l'iran
> mazdeen à l'iran shi'ite. Paris. Eng. trans. below.
> 
> Corbin H. 1977. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth from Mazdean Iran to
> Shi'ite Iran Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
> 
> Other passing mentions of the Bahá'í Faith in the rest of the article [not
> included]
> 
> p. 247f. - "For the Ahmadiyya hereafter was meant to be a continuous journey of
> the soul toward spiritual perfection, an interpretation distinct from the
> literal Qur'anic rendition of heaven and hell but close to the Sufi, and the
> later Bahá'í view."
> 
> p. 252 - the first paragraph of the section titled "Modern Shi'ism and the
> Islamic Revolution" ends with this sentence: "This new tendency may be detected
> first in polemical responses to Marxists, secularists, and Bahá'í critics who
> raised questions about doctrines of Occultation, corporal resurrection, and the
> last judgment."
> 
> p. 255 - the "Islamic utopianism" of Murtaza Mutahhari is described as follows:
> "Though wrapped in an Islamic guise, such utopian Mahdism was a far cry from
> the customary Shi'i view of Mahdi's return and in some respects close to the
> Babi-Bahá'í ideals a century earlier as well as to the very Marxist utopianism
> against which he proposed his "Islamic ideology."
> 
> p. 256 - mention of Khomeini's paranoia about "anti-Islamic propaganda by the
> Bahá'ís and the Chrisitian missionaries"
> 
> p. 257 - Shaykh Mahmud Halabi is called "an old preacher and an extreme
> anti-Bahá'í activist".
> 
> METADATA
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> Views20603 views since posted 2002-09-01; last edit 2025-03-10 06:45 UTC;
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> previous at archive.org.../amanat_resurgence_apocalyptic_islam;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
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> Citation: ris/538
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> — *Resurgence of Apocalyptic in Modern Islam (Used by permission of the curator)*