Muslim Heretics Conference

By Alexander Cockburn

This article appeared in the July 21, 2008 edition of The Nation.

July 1, 2008

• This story has been corrected to reflect an error in the original version. In fact, Sami Al-Arian was not found guilty of any charge, but subsequently signed a plea agreement in which he plead guilty to one charge of providing nonviolent services to people associated with a designated terrorist organization.

There are few prospects in the justice system so grimly awful as when the feds decide never to let go. Rebuffed in their persecutions of some target by juries, or by contrary judges, they shift ground, betray solemn agreements, dream up new stratagems to exhaust their victims, drive them into bankruptcy, despair and even to suicide. They have all the money and all the time in the world. Sixteen months ago I wrote here about the appalling vendetta conducted by the Justice Department against Sami Al-Arian, a professor from Florida who had the book thrown at him in 2003 by Attorney General John Ashcroft. As I described it then, Dr. Al-Arian was charged in a bloated terrorism and conspiracy case and spent two and a half years in prison, in solitary confinement.

In December 2005, despite the efforts of a blatantly biased judge, a jury acquitted Dr. Al-Arian of the most serious charges. Dr. Al-Arian’s lawyers urged him to plead guilty to a watered-down version of one relatively minor offense to put an end to his ordeal and the suffering of his family. A central aspect of the plea agreement was an understanding that Dr. Al-Arian would not be subject to further prosecution or called to cooperate with the government on any matter. The plea agreement signed with Florida prosecutors explicitly protected him from cooperating in any additional cases. The government recommended the shortest possible sentence, no more than time served.

But then, almost certainly after a visit to the local federal prosecutors in Tampa by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the feds double-crossed him on the plea agreement, and he was thrown back into prison. The biased judge handed down the maximum sentence, which meant a further eleven months of incarceration before release and deportation slated for April 2007. Then Dr. Al-Arian passed into the malign orbit of prosecutors in Virginia, notably assistant federal prosecutor Gordon Kromberg. The Justice Department’s plan was to set up Dr. Al-Arian in a perjury trap, compelling him to testify before a grand jury investigating an Islamic think tank called the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in a case completely unrelated to his. The institute has been the target of a six-year witch hunt by Kromberg.

On November 16, 2006, dragged up to Virginia, Dr. Al-Arian was brought before a grand jury and placed in civil contempt for refusing to testify–because the actual intent of the subpoena was the attempt to trap him. When the grand jury’s term expired, Kromberg promptly empaneled a new one. Dr. Al-Arian was again subpoenaed and again refused to testify. Shunted among prisons in Atlanta and Petersburg and Alexandria, Virginia, Dr. Al-Arian endured hunger strikes and maltreatment from guards.

Even with the additional time served, Dr. Al-Arian’s sentence ended on April 6 of this year. He was then taken into the custody of immigration authorities, who were making preparations for his deportation. On June 26 the Justice Department elected to plunge Dr. Al-Arian and his family into fresh torments, thus prolonging the slow-moving auto-da-fé of the past five years. A new federal indictment charges Dr. Al-Arian with two counts of criminal contempt, relating to the efforts by Virginia prosecutors to bring him before a grand jury investigating other Muslim organizations. Dr. Al-Arian faces additional prison time if convicted. Criminal contempt in the American legal system has no maximum penalty.

“This indictment proves that the government was never interested in any information that Dr. Al-Arian has on the IIIT matter,” said his attorney, Professor Jonathan Turley, who has represented Dr. Al-Arian since April 2007. “They have indicted him despite the fact that the prosecutors admitted that he is a minor witness in the IIIT investigation, and he has already given two detailed statements under oath to the government and offered to take a polygraph examination to prove that he has given true information about his knowledge of IIIT. Dr. Al-Arian has addressed every document cited by the government as the reason for his being called before the grand jury. He has shown that he has no incriminating information to offer against either IIIT or its officers.”

On June 30, Dr. Al-Arian was arraigned before US District Judge Leonie Brinkema for the Eastern District of Columbia, but Dr. Al-Arian did not enter a plea, as Turley stated they were not prepared to do so. The court then entered a plea of not guilty and scheduled a trial to begin August 13. According to a statement issued by Turley, the government is further seeking to indict Dr. Al-Arian for the period during which he was under civil contempt confinement. Thus, after holding him for a year, the government now seeks to punish him for the same period of the confinement.

Why the continued efforts to destroy Dr. Al-Arian? He’s just one more object lesson to the world of what can happen to a Muslim–a Palestinian–who tried with some success to combat ignorance and prejudice in the Middle Eastern debate and who established his innocence to a jury on the grave charges the government spent millions to sustain in that Florida court. His assailants in the Justice Department have probably anticipated with relish that Dr. Al-Arian would succumb to malnutrition and illness in one of the holes into which he has been flung. They were mistaken. Sustained by his family, capable attorneys and vast sympathy across the world, Dr. Al-Arian has stayed in the ring with his fearsome and vindictive persecutors. Every word of support and encouragement is important to Dr. Al-Arian and his family. Send such words to tampabayjustice@yahoo.com.

(Thanks to Nation intern Sousan Hammad for pulling together developments in Dr. Al-Arian’s case.)

The Persecution of Sami Al-Arian

The Rise of Apocalyptic Islam

Causes and Implications

by Jean-Pierre Filiu & Mehdi Khalaji
17-Nov-2008

On October 29, 2008, Jean-Pierre Filiu and Mehdi Khalaji addressed a Policy Forum luncheon at The Washington Institute. Mr. Filiu, a former French diplomat and ministerial advisor, currently serves as a visiting professor at Georgetown University. Mehdi Khalaji is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute. The following is a rapporteur’s summary of their remarks.

Jean-Pierre Filiu
Washing across the Islamic world is a growing wave of grim and gory literature predicting the aher al-zaman, the Arabic concept for apocalypse that literally translates as the “end of time.” This genre is both ancient and modern, as it revisits historic Islamic narratives and incorporates newer, non-Islamic elements. Three trends of apocalypticism have emerged from this literature, making it difficult to assess the implications for foreign policymaking.

Both Sunni and Shiite Islam contain traditional narratives about the end of days. In the Sunni narrative, Jesus returns to fight the anti-Christ in Damascus, defeats him in Lud, and leads the army of the faithful at the end of time. In the predominant Shiite narrative, the occulted twelfth imam, also referred to as the “Hidden Imam” or Mahdi, will appear in Mecca and lead the Mahdi’s Army, defeating the unbelievers. In contrast to these old narratives, the current wave of apocalyptic literature draws heavily from non-Islamic sources. This heterogeneous genre follows the approach of its founder, a minor Egyptian journalist whose 1986 book The Anti-Christ incorporated Biblical revelations, Nostradamus’s prophesies, anti-Semitic propaganda, and Protestant evangelicalism.

As the majority of its readership does not interpret apocalypticism literally, the genre’s rise does not represent an immediate political threat. Instead, apocalyptic literature is a coping mechanism for day-to-day frustration. It helps “compensate” for the current economic and social crises by associating them with the foretold decline of Islam before the end of days. Without motivating the reader to any particular action, it promises retribution against the perceived evildoers and a post-apocalyptic recompense: the rise of Islam, justice, and peace.

Despite the predominance of apolitical apocalypticism, two smaller trends use this same propaganda for political gain. “Apocalyptic opportunism” is embodied by militia leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr and Hassan Nasrallah. These leaders lack strong religious credentials and may not be Mahdists themselves, but they use this literature to challenge established religious authority and reach out to the Mahdists for political support. Although more commonly affiliated with Shiite Islam today, this opportunist use of apocalypticism has been a characteristic of both Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in the past.

The third trend, “apocalyptic vertigo,” poses the most direct political threat, as it employs apocalyptic literature to support violence. It is visible at the margins of al-Qaeda, especially in the agendas of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Musab al-Suri, whose publication, The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance, includes a hundred-page apocalyptic tract. The most cohesive and clearly apocalyptic movement is the Ansaar al-Mahdi militia in Iraq. Their leader, Sheikh al-Yamani, claims to be the vanguard of the Mahdi and has demanded allegiance from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad. Even after losing its strongest supporters in a 2007 bloodbath in Najaf, Ansaar al-Mahdi remains a serious threat. The mutual rejection of these two movements and Ansaar al-Mahdi’s extreme anti-Iranian stance diminish the likelihood that a combined apocalyptic movement will form.

Mehdi Khalaji
Ahmadinezhad is responsible for much of the rise in the apocalyptic trend’s popularity and visibility in Iran. Prior to his election, Iranians knew very little of Ahmadinezhad’s religious mindset, and he never mentioned Mahdism during his campaign. After taking office, however, he began supporting institutes working with the apocalyptic ideology and included prayers for the return of the Hidden Imam at the beginning of every speech. Still, Ahmadinezhad’s apocalypticism is a greater threat to the religious establishment of Iran than to the West or Israel.

The apocalypticism of Ahmadinezhad and his close circle is distinct from the narratives of traditional religious authority. Ahmadinezhad’s primary influence is Ahmad Fardid, an Iranian philosopher who attempted to reconcile Islamic concepts with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Some of the hardliners in Ahmadinezhad’s group are direct transfers from Fardid’s circle, while others are German-educated intellectuals and activists with connections to the neo-Nazis. This group rejects outright the authority of traditional clerics and does not include any prominent clerics among its ranks. However, as university graduates who are ignorant of the methods of Quranic interpretation and exegesis, they rarely express their radical apocalypticism publicly.

With the failure of Islamic ideology to respond to social needs, apocalyptic ideology appealed to Iranians. Suffering from economic, social, cultural, and political crises, religion became the people’s only refuge. After thirty years of revolution, many Iranians were tired of the Islam associated with the clerics and the government. Instead, they sought a simple, ritual version. Apocalypticism became a form of political resistance.

This context explains the recent popularity of religious sites such as Jamkaran Mosque near Qom. A hundred years after the Hidden Imam appeared in a dream and ordered it built, it remained a simple one-room mosque. With the rise of Mahdism in the last decade, however, it has become very important. A reported 16 million Iranians visited it last year, even more popular than the Imam Ridha shrine in Mashhad, the mosque of the eighth imam. During the same period, the number of people claiming association with the Hidden Imam has increased, signaling both widespread social frustration and a desire to capitalize off of these feelings. Before Ahmadinezhad’s presidency, contact with the Hidden Imam was personal and private; now, it has become socio-political and public.

Ahmadinezhad’s rejection of clerical authority and the rise of a new apocalypticism prompted a strong response from Shiite clerics and Iranian politicians. Former Presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, prominent cleric Dr. Hassan Rowhani, former Speaker of the Majlis Akbar Nouri, and others have rejected this popular apocalypticism as dangerous and non-Islamic. Two months ago, Supreme Leader Khamenei condemned these trends, citing the prohibition on claiming credit or benefiting from contact with the Hidden Imam. Khamenei follows the anti-apocalypticism of the Iranian Revolution, which rejected the need to wait for the Mahdi before establishing an Islamic government. His attitude toward Ahmadinezhad is complicated; he wants to maintain executive control and pacify the clerics, but he cannot allow Ahmadinezhad to collapse. The “sky of Iranian politics should [only] have one star,” but political instability would harm the Islamic Republic’s reputation.

Despite Ahmadinezhad’s threats, Iranian apocalypticism should not be of major concern to foreign policymakers. Ordinary Iranians are largely unaware of the Mahdist trends in Iraq, so it is improbable that a concerted apocalyptic effort will form. Ahmadinezhad’s increasing radicalism and disastrous economic policies have eroded his popularity and political power. Artists and intellectuals despise him for controlling the cultural machinery, and the Majlis has started to interfere with his political appointments. Apocalyptic political trends are in decline, and even Ahmadinezhad has tried to disassociate himself from these trends and deny his previous statements.

This rapporteur’s summary was prepared by Larisa Baste. View this PolicyWatch on our website.

The Rise of Apocalyptic Islam | Iranian.com