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rfmcdonaldWhile reading Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The Age of Sacred Terror, I was interested to come across their description of the subject matter what seems to be the vital and growing field of Islamic religious apocalyptic literature.
Benjamin and Simon's description goes on at length to describe the subjects covered by these works. They turn out to be fairly consistent: the conversion of the weak Christians, the annihilation of the traitorous Jews, the arrival of the messiah, death and massacre on an apocalyptic scale somehow justified by the return of the messiah. Analyzed as literary works, they seem to be about as accomplished as their counterparts in Christian religious apocalyptic literature, like the execrable Left Behind series, with cookie-cutter characters driven by utterly unimaginative and unchangeable purpose to do exactly what they're supposed to. The more that I read of them and about them, the more that I am reminded of Hitler's Second Book and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow series, titles which create worlds populated by countries with all of the depth of Risk players and by human beings whose personalities have been replaced by personality types.
Religious apocalyptic literature demonstrates the truism that bad fiction is only loosely connected to the way that people actually behave. The problem is that this literature is used by serious people as a guide to what is to come, and what they should do. One thing that the Slacktivist notes in his fisking of the Left Behind series is that the putative heroes are quite capable of ignoring appalling human suffering, or worse, thinking that God wants there to be massive amounts of pain and anguish in the world. Apocalypse, in these works, is a good thing. The world is fallen, after all.
So. Christians who are supposed to believe that God loved the world so much that he offered His only son for torture and death want to do Him one better by offering him a dying world. (I won't speak about Islamic apocalyptic literature since I'm not competent to speak about Islamic eschatology.) And, measured in terms of sales, the Left Behind series is likely the most popular series of Christian fiction ever published in human history. An entire generation of young Christians--particularly, though not only, American Christians--is being raised to read books which praise a most singular hard-heartedness as the only moral response to the sufferings of the End Times.
Won't the 21st century be fun?
Muhammad Isa Saud [. . .] writing in the late 1990s, predicted that the messiah "will emerge at the festival of the hajj in 1419 [1998-99], and in Muharram 1420 [1999-2000] he will proclaim the return of the caliphate. Of the issue is delayed, it will not be beyond 1425 [2004-2005] . . . and in 2000 there will be the battle of the Mediterranean and in 2001 will be Armageddon, which will be preceded by or be close to a great nuclear battle between France and America in which Paris will be destroyed, and the sea will swallow up New York." Another apocalyptic writer, Bashir Muhammad, writes that the United States is actually the mysterious tribe of Ad. In the Quran, Ad is a city destroyed by God as punishment for its repudiation of his authority. Bashir Muhammad interprets scriptural references to Ad to show that it was an extraordinarily advanced society, with sophisticated weaponry including nuclear arms, a panoply of cultural achievements, a permissive attitude toward homosexuality, and skyscrapers. The tribe's arrogance is unbounded; to the writer, the signs that it is the United States are unmistakable (92-93).
Benjamin and Simon's description goes on at length to describe the subjects covered by these works. They turn out to be fairly consistent: the conversion of the weak Christians, the annihilation of the traitorous Jews, the arrival of the messiah, death and massacre on an apocalyptic scale somehow justified by the return of the messiah. Analyzed as literary works, they seem to be about as accomplished as their counterparts in Christian religious apocalyptic literature, like the execrable Left Behind series, with cookie-cutter characters driven by utterly unimaginative and unchangeable purpose to do exactly what they're supposed to. The more that I read of them and about them, the more that I am reminded of Hitler's Second Book and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow series, titles which create worlds populated by countries with all of the depth of Risk players and by human beings whose personalities have been replaced by personality types.
Religious apocalyptic literature demonstrates the truism that bad fiction is only loosely connected to the way that people actually behave. The problem is that this literature is used by serious people as a guide to what is to come, and what they should do. One thing that the Slacktivist notes in his fisking of the Left Behind series is that the putative heroes are quite capable of ignoring appalling human suffering, or worse, thinking that God wants there to be massive amounts of pain and anguish in the world. Apocalypse, in these works, is a good thing. The world is fallen, after all.
So. Christians who are supposed to believe that God loved the world so much that he offered His only son for torture and death want to do Him one better by offering him a dying world. (I won't speak about Islamic apocalyptic literature since I'm not competent to speak about Islamic eschatology.) And, measured in terms of sales, the Left Behind series is likely the most popular series of Christian fiction ever published in human history. An entire generation of young Christians--particularly, though not only, American Christians--is being raised to read books which praise a most singular hard-heartedness as the only moral response to the sufferings of the End Times.
Won't the 21st century be fun?
