@profntwright 2/ Today, vernacular interpretations are increasingly pan-religious, even combinatorial. For example, we see Islamic prophecy culture often borrowing from American evangelical eschatology: a globalized “mirror effect” in which apocalyptic motifs hybridize across world cultures.
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Cover of ʿAqīdat al-Masīḥ al-Dajjāl fī al-Adyān: Qirāʾa fī al-Mustaqbal by Saʿid Ayyub (1991), the major work Filiu discusses as foundational to the modern genre of Islamic popular apocalypticism. Widely regarded as the book that launched the modern Arab genre of popular Islamic apocalyptic fiction in the 1980s, it spawned numerous imitators and marked a break from the classical scholarly tradition.
@alon_mizrahi 4/ Sure, the U.S. defines a fulminant apex of this derangement vortex, but the fever is epistemic, virulent, networked, global and, clearly, fast-metastasizing. No nation or culture can—or will—extract itself from such an epochal, totalized psychosis, in isolation.
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Here we are, then, upon the threshold of a transcultural, transnational, religio-political complex of fascist universalism and its demonic perversion of an authentic, planetary yearning offering us the only way out of our 'war of all against all', rightly called salvation. Image one: Agreed and, frankly, a worldwide contagion: Jihadists, Zionists, Hindutvavadis, 969ers, Crusaders, they're all at it. And whilst we're not the only only ones suffering from this plague, nor are we the only ones God welcomes. This, hardly news to planetary prophetology, of course. Quote Tweet Clearly, the supercharged universality of this phenomenon - pat, predictable, cookie-cutter dialectics of ethnonationalism, purity and exclusion, span a dizzying array of languages, cultures and borders, just now - powerfully affirms its common, transcultural, archetypal origins. Image two: 1/ Hence the fundamental nature, role and promise of the political liberator, savior or Great Emancipator, here to revision the bodies, minds and souls of men in a bastardized, religio-nationalist image of the messianic hopes of our times. The transcendent function, perverted. Quote Tweet In other words, the bastard appeal of such ethno-nationalist analogs is universally paradigmatic. How then, to effectively address the immense planetary forces encouraging the emergence and powerful enchantment of such personalities and their platforms? Quote tweet: Hardly news, even as the illuminating recognition that no one culture, creed, philosophy, religion, nation or otherwise can save us, inevitably requires a planetary reckoning with an inclusive eschatology. We're saved, finally, by the beauty and brilliance of our togetherness.
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