How confusing does Islamic eschatology (“end times theology”) get when it comes to the Black Flags of Khorasan — and the idea of AQ or the Taliban marching victoriously on Jerusalem?
Contrast the view from the site where I found this map with the view found in Bilal Khan’s informally syndicated piece, Where is Khurasan Actually?.
The two pieces seem to use much of the same material — including in both cases the suggestion that the Pashtun / Pathans are descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel – but whereas Khan’s essay contains a quote attributed to Syed Saleem Shehzad of Asia Times Online to the effect that “Al Qaeda shares this belief with the Taliban that Afghanistan is the promised land of Bilad-e-Khurasan”, thus suggesting that an AQ-Taliban combo might be the army of the Mahdi, the map itself portrays the Taliban and AQ as “Jewish Agents” killing the Mahdi’s followers…
If I can figure them out myself, I hope to have a more detailed exploration of these and some related matters up at Zenpundit — where I’ve been tracking such things for some time — in the next few days.
Hi Charles,
Good to hear from you. Christian eschatology is equally in disarray. There is the pre-tribulation rapture crowd contending with the post-tribs, there is the non-raptures bubbas persisting with the church enduring the tribulation…. I’ve not read the Koran, but after a study of the Bible, I can make a pretty good case for about three or four different views on eschatology. That said, I’m not surprised at the ambiguity. There is a lot of confirmation bias that occurs when one reads/interprets the “scripture” and amazingly, the interpretation advocated by one’s group gets first dibs—human nature.
And things get particularly interesting when one person’s eschatology comes in conflict with another’s — as when some Christians expect the coming of the Mahdi as Antichrist. I’ve been in friendly communication with Joel Richardson for a while, and that’s his theory, as expounded in his book, The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth about the Real Nature of the Beast.
I just ran across this post from Ibn Siqilli earlier this year, in which he runs a Sunni account in which the Shi’ite Twelfth Imam or Mahdi is viewed as the Dajjal — the Muslim equivalent of an Antichrist figure.
I see that in a comment, I’d quoted Tim Furnish from his book, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden:
And here’s another post from Ibn Siqilli with an intriguing apocalyptic tie in — Blackwater / XE figuring as the Antichrist / Dajjal.