Posted 5:03 PM by Charles Cameron

Note to John Robb

I posted a comment on John Robb's excellent blog, after he'd said:

I'm almost finished reading Imperial Hubris by the CIA's Anonymous. Excellent book and well worth reading. It fits with Global Guerrillas tongue and groove.

I'va almost finished it myself, and have little colored book-mark stickies calling my attention back to specific paragraphs on almost every page -- the thing looks more like a missal than a book I picked up at Borders...

In any case, I agreed with John's assessment, and in particular with the clarity with which Anonynmous handles the religious aspect of al-Qaida and friends. But the one quarrel I do have with the book seems important. As I commented to John:

It [Anon's book] is indeed excellent. My only real nit-pick with it is that he doesn't grasp the theologically precise meaning of the term apocalyptic, and hence says OBL is not an apocalyptic figure (meaning he's not foamingly end-of-the-world crazy) when that is, in fact, a major feature of the background he's working in.
But then that's par for the course: the apocalytpic trend in Islam is all too easily overlooked, as this quote from Benjamin and Simon indicates: "So much of what was heard from al-Qaeda after the attacks sounded to Americans like gibberish that many chords of the apocalypse were missed."

Luckily, Benjamin and Simon themselves provide a corrective here, in _The Age of Sacred Terror_ pp. 91 and following, drawing on the fine work of David Cook. For a real sense of the importance of apocalyptic in all sorts of situations from al-Qaida to the Marxist-Leninists by way of Aum Shinrikyo, and not forgetting the contemporary US, see Robert Jay Lifton's brilliant squib of a book, _Superpower Syndrome_. And for an immediate, quick hit on the importance of apocalyptic thought to OBL himself, consider that he quotes the hadith of the Gharqad Tree, describing the battle which takes place immediately before Judgment Day:

"Judgment day shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, whereas the Jews will hide behind trees and stones, and the tree and the stone will speak and say 'Muslim, behind me a Jew come and kill him', except for the al-Ghargad (sic) tree, which is a Jewish plant." -- ABC News interview with John Miller, May 28 1998.

Interestingly enough, this particular hadith also features in the Hamas charter…