Lenin, Stalin, and Jesus

After the 1917 revolution, and after the consolidation of power at the end of the Russian civil war two years later, the Soviet Union worked to erase the influence of Jesus in Russia. Thousands of Jesus followers were tortured, sent to prison camps, or sent to labor camps.

Schools, hospitals, and other charitable institutions which had been organized by Jesus followers were closed and destroyed. Because of their beliefs, Jesus followers were denied opportunities to study at universities.

The worst persecution was between 1917 and 1941. Although the Soviet government claimed to offer freedom of belief to its citizens, it also established the elimination of any belief except materialistic atheism as one of its domestic goals.

The most brutal efforts to remove any trace of Jesus from Russian society were made under Lenin’s rule. Lenin rigidly adhered to the view that materialistic atheism was the only acceptable intellectual foundation for the dictatorship he established.

Stalin, who took control after Lenin’s death in 1924, at first continued Lenin’s policies, and more than one hundred thousand Jesus followers were executed during the first decade or two of Stalin’s rule. But after 1943, Stalin moderated his efforts to eliminate the Jesus movement.

At the worst phases of the persecution, thousands of Jesus followers were executed. In following decades, the anti-Jesus activity was still severe, but not quite as ruthless as in the pre-1943 era. In 1982, Martin Scharlemann wrote:

In the Soviet Union only the Russian Orthodox clergy are given a little measure of liberty as they operate under the over-all supervision of the Ministry of Culture; for the Soviets owe a massive debt to the Russian Orthodox Church from the days of World War II. And thereby hangs an interesting tale!

The turning point, which slightly lessened the government’s actions against Jesus followers, came after Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.

The Nazis were well-armed and well-trained. The Soviet troops were pushed eastward back hundreds of miles, from their western border deep into the Russian interior. The situation looked grim for the Soviets.

In September 1943, Stalin met with Patriarch Sergius of Moscow, Patriarch Alexy I of Moscow, and Metropolitan Nicholas of Kiev. Stalin needed the help of the Jesus followers, even though they were the people whom Stalin had thrown into jail, tortured, beaten, and killed.

At a time when the German armies were within a few miles of Moscow, Stalin did a most extraordinary thing: he fetched the patriarch and a few other prelates from the very labor camps to which he had sent them some years before just because of their church activities. He now (1943) summoned them to the Kremlin and set them up in business. That is to say, he reestablished the Russian Orthodox Church; for Stalin knew that, to get the Russian people to fight to the end for their motherland, with their backs to the wall, he needed more than Marxist materialism. He was also perceptive enough to realize that the Party could use the Russian Orthodox Church to worm its way into the Middle East and into Manchuria. (Historical footnote: the present patriarch in Istanbul, who is the spiritual leader and ranking member of all Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, was and is the Russian nominee for that office unlike his predecessor, who was an American citizen before being selected as “His All-Holiness.”)

In fact, when Martin Scharlemann wrote this in 1982, Demetrios I was the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople; he served his group of Jesus followers from July 1972 to October 1991. His predecessor was Athenagoras I, who was patriarch from November 1948 to July 1972. Bartholomew I became patriarch in October 1991.

The Soviets, especially those after Lenin, were opportunists. Although they resented Jesus and those who wanted to be Jesus followers, they also knew when they could benefit from these people.

There was an uptick in the persecution of Jesus followers, after Stalin’s death, during the rules of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. But even then, large percentages of babies were baptized, and Jesus followers conducted a large number of funerals. By some estimates, a majority - more than 50% of babies were baptized, and more than 50% of burials were conducted by Jesus followers.

Apocryphal stories describe how high-ranking members of the Communist Party inside the Soviet Union secretly had their children baptized by Jesus followers.

The history of Jesus followers in the Soviet Union is complex: it is a history of merciless persecution by militant atheists, but also a story of grudging accommodation by a realistic government, and a story of resilient survival in which the influence of Jesus remained widespread and was passed on to new generations.

The 1982 UN Statement on Religious Freedom

Religious freedom has been an issue at least since 313 A.D., when Constantine legalized the teachings of Jesus inside the Roman Empire. (Galerius had made a similar edict in 311.)

One noteworthy aspect of Constantine’s policy is that, while making it legal to follow Jesus, he allowed the polytheistic pagans to continue their practices. He instituted freedom of religion.

This was perhaps in some ways unexpected, because the followers of Jesus had been persecuted - jailed, beaten, tortured, and killed - for nearly three centuries. Historians estimate that anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000 Jesus followers were executed. It is difficult to form a precise estimate, given the sketchy data.

When the followers of Jesus finally gained legal status, nature and human psychology would seem to have dictated that they would use this status to gain revenge. Finally being legal, would they use that opportunity to inflict retribution upon the pagans?

Surprisingly, the Constantine, himself a follower of Jesus, instituted tolerance. The followers of Jesus allowed their former persecutors to freely and peacefully practice their polytheism.

At the same time, another dimension of the freedom of religion would impact the Jews during the last two centuries of the Roman Empire and into the early Middle Ages. The situation was mixed, with horrific pogroms alternating with periods of constructive coexistence. Previously, they had suffered under uninterrupted persecution.

In 1215 A.D., King John signed the Magna Carta in England. This document stated that the government should not interfere in the organization of the Jesus followers. This created a “safe zone” and prevented the government from intruding into spiritual matters.

The freedom of religion would manifest itself again as modes of coexistence were developed in the wake of the Reformation. As different groups of Lutherans, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics learned to lived peacefully with each other, further tolerance was extended to the Jewish community.

In North America, freedom of religion became most explicit in the revolution of 1776. As religious freedom expanded based on the American model, it also spread to other parts of the world, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Even in those places and times in which the implementation of religious freedom failed - e.g., in the French Revolution of 1789, which began by seeking such freedom ended by reducing it - the language of religious tolerance became accepted and even expected.

Thus discourse about religious freedom became de rigueur, both sincerely on the part of governments which attempted to grant it, and cynically on the part of governments which had no intention of granting it.

A well-intended statement on the topic was issued in 1982 by the United Nations. In that year, Martin Scharlemann wrote:

In a way the concept of religious freedom was already implied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations as far back as 1948. The International Covenant on Human Rights, prepared somewhat later, could hardly be fully appreciated without assuming that it, too, stood for this somewhat basic liberty. Yet, ever since the early sixties, some countries kept calling for a separate UN document dealing specifically with religion and personal belief.

The 1982 statement was intended to move religious freedom from an implicit agenda item to an explicit agenda item.

The text of the statement seems, at first, to be a clear statement of tolerance.

Such a declaration now exists. It took some twenty years of discussion and debate to bring it to birth. Just before last Christmas, the UN General Assembly officially adopted a statement on the elimination of religious intolerance. Taking into account the diverse ideologies and religions in today’s world, this document affirms “freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” Its second sentence continues by asserting that “this right shall include freedom to have a religion or whatever belief of one’s choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.”

But the text also contained qualifications which could be exploited by regimes which had no intention of exercising tolerance. In 1982, the religious freedom faced a double threat.

On the one hand, the Cold War was still shaping international diplomatic relations. Stalinist and other communist-statist governments worked to impose militant atheism in places like the Soviet Union, Cuba, mainland China, North Korea, etc.

On the other hand, Islam was at work. Although militant Islam gained the attention of the American public a few decades later, it was already a major factor in other parts of the world.

The UN statement did not wish to confront those regimes which were determined to restrict or prohibit religious belief. The 1982 statement therefore contained a loophole or escape clause. Martin Scharlemann continues:

The first drafts of this declaration were content to condemn religious persecution wherever it occurred, including particularly the Muslim practice of harassing and even killing Christians. However, as the discussion moved forward, the parameters of the document were broadened to incorporate the right of any person to share in religious liberty. The second sentence, just quoted above, reads as though freedom of belief, as we know it in the United States, were now being advocated for the whole world. There is a catch, however, in what the UN adopted; namely, the proviso that such liberty be “subject [only] to such limitations as are prescribed by law.”

The United Nations was content to express a sentiment, but did not want to risk arousing opposition by taking significant action.

Observers at that time wondered whether the statement should be counted as a victory, because the sentiment was at least expressed, or if it should be counted as a loss, because a toothless statement lacking meaningful impact would only embolden cynical states who mouthed the rhetoric of religious freedom but had no intention of implementing it.

Returning now to the UN declaration on religious freedom, we might also point out that no Muslim nation would have voted for the kind of document which took two decades to prepare if it did not contain the kind of hedge expressed in the proviso: “subject [only] to such limitations as are prescribed by law.” Even Anwar Sadat could not have allowed such a development, even though he had with him the Coptic patriarch of Egypt on the reviewing stand the day he was assassinated. (In point of fact, the patriarch died from the same hail of bullets that killed Sadat.)

Anwar Sadat, himself Sunni Muslim, had extended very little religious tolerance to Egypt’s Copts. (The Copts are Egyptian Jesus followers.) Leaders of the Copts were subject to harassment and arrests.

But certain Islamic groups in Egypt were dissatisfied that Sadat had not been harsher toward the Copts. They were also unhappy that Sadat had taken symbolic actions like establishing diplomatic connections with the Vatican, or speaking with Jesus followers while making state visits to other countries.

Islamic dissatisfaction with Sadat culminated in the assassination, when Sadat was killed together with the Coptic leader whom he’d recently released from prison.

In the face of this Islamic aggressiveness, the United Nations was willing, in 1982, to make a symbolic statement. But it was not willing to take any action which might have measurably promoted religious freedom.

Global Climate Change and Historiography

Knowing that the climate is unstable and changing is one thing; knowing why it is so is another.

Available observations stretch back centuries and even several millennia for some parts of the globe. Written records include data about snowfall, rainfall, and temperatures. Other measurements include tree-rings and preserved information in glaciers.

Climatologists have found a segment of time which they call “The Little Ice Age.” Exact beginning and ending points for this era are not precise, because it is a general trend and its endpoints are not marked by specific events.

Published research speaks of a narrow Little Ice Age running from approximately 1500 to 1850, and of a broader Little Ice Age starting around 1300 and terminating around 1850.

The coldest part of this epoch seems to stretch from 1600 to 1700. The change in temperature correlated with instability in precipitation and wind patterns.

Secondary effects included a decline in total farmable land available; glacial expansion obliterating villages in the Alps; crop failures and famines; a decline in the North Atlantic cod fishing business in the 1600s; settlements in Iceland and Greenland becoming isolated; increasing sea ice making North Atlantic navigation difficult and dangerous; and a decline in Native American cultures in the upper Mississippi River region.

Some historians have connected this climate change with the phenomenon known as the “Global Crisis” - a series of political, economic, and military upheavals. The Global Crisis has been a standard concept in historiography for some time; but its hypothesized connection to the Little Ice Age is new.

But what caused this? Historian Geoffrey Parker writes that he was prompted to think about the cause of these climate changes in a different way when he heard

an interview on BBC Radio with John A. Eddy, a solar physicist. Eddy had just published a paper in Science on the “Maunder Minimum” — the period between 1645 and 1705 when virtually no sunspots appeared — and he speculated that the prolonged “sunspot minimum” noted by contemporary astronomers during (ironically) the reign of the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, caused an episode of global cooling that earth scientists had christened the Little Ice Age. Eddy also hinted that the Little Ice Age might have contributed to the General Crisis.

Scientists have generated statistical models which locate the coldest section of the Little Ice Age during the seventeenth century, with the coolest segment being between 1650 and 1700. These years seem to be the coldest in at least a millennium, if not longer.

By contrast, an era known as the “Medieval Warm Period” runs from around 1150 to around 1250. This represents a high point for several centuries before and after.

Reduced sea ice during these years in the North Atlantic allowed Vikings to explore westward from Scandinavia.

These extremes happened before the massive burning of fossil fuels which we associate with the Industrial Revolution. Coal was rarely used. Oil and natural gas were almost unknown. The amount of wood burnt was small, given the total global population at the time. Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels cannot have been the cause of these climatic swings.

Geoffrey Parker writes that he was nudged toward considering solar activity and other non-anthropogenic causes for the Little Ice Age, and in turn nudged to see the Little Ice Age as the cause for the Global Crisis, after he

had combined material from the “natural archive” of the period (climate proxy data such as tree-ring size, harvest dates, and glacier advances) with data from the “human archive” (chronicles, letters, “weather diaries,” art, and archeology).

The Global Crisis is also called the ‘General Crisis’ or the ‘World Crisis’ by various historians.

Irregularities in solar radiation are only one potential cause for climatic instability. Other possible causes are fluctuations in volcanic activity, and changes in sea currents.

Volcanic eruptions throw particulates into the atmosphere, which block solar energy and reduce temperatures. Sea currents do not change the total amount of heat on the planet, but can alter its distribution.

Another historian, Kenneth Pomeranz, concurs with Parker’s analysis, writing that

Unusually cool and otherwise troublesome weather for most of the period 1600-1710 resulted in numerous poor harvests.

Thus it seems reasonable to entertain the notion that non-anthropogenic global climate instability was a contributing factor to events like the Thirty Years’ War (1618 to 1648) and Cromwell’s English Civil War (in the 1640s and 1650s).

The dramatic swings of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age almost make it reasonable to ask whether warming trends in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are also possibly non-anthropogenic.

British (In)security

The Soviet Union tried in many way to cause the collapse of the British government. One of its most powerful weapons was a group of espionage agents known as the Cambridge Five.

In this group of spies, the most effective was a man known as “Kim” Philby. His legal name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby. “Kim” was, in years past, a name often given to boys as well as girls.

Born in 1912, Philby studied at Cambridge University, but by 1933, was employed by an organization which seemed to be a charitable agency, but was in fact a “front” - a facade for Soviet espionage activity. Such front groups were organized by the Communist International, a branch of the Soviet Communist Party tasked with fomenting revolutions in countries around the world.

Often called the ‘Comintern,’ the Communist International established a group in Vienna which claimed to be helping refugees. Kim Philby was employed by this organization which, despite its allegedly humanitarian purposes, was an arm of the Soviet intelligence-gathering apparatus.

By 1934, Philby was back in England and employed by the NKVD, one of the Soviet intelligence agencies. He worked as a journalist in the 1930s, during which time he became an agent for MI6, the British intelligence agency. He remained part of MI6 until July 1951.

For about fifteen years, Kim Philby was on the payroll of the MI6, kept a “cover” job as a reporter, and actually work for the NKVD and later for the KGB. He was a double agent. He was able to gain more information, and more sensitive information, for the international communist conspiracy than an ordinary British citizen.

Eventually, suspicions were voiced about him, leading to his resignation from MI6 in 1951, but he remained employed as a newspaper reporter for more than a decade afterward. Although no longer in the employ of MI6, he had contacts and an experienced insight into international matters, and remained a valued asset for the KGB.

After leaving MI6 in 1951, suspicions continued to surround him. In 1955, after some public discussion of Philby’s loyalties, the matter was discussed in Parliament, and the government seemed to satisfy itself that Philby was not a Soviet agent. One historian, M. Stanton Evans, known as “Stan” Evans, writes about Harold Macmillan’s defense of Philby in the face of questions raised by Marcus Lipton, MP:

The secretary of state (for foreign affairs, to give him his full title) oozing all the reassurance was the Tory, Harold Macmillan; the legislator who brought the charges, Col. Marcus Lipton, Labor MP for Brixton; and the suspect so triumphantly cleared, Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, Red spy par excellence, who would later surface in Moscow as an “intelligence officer” of the Soviet KGB, and extremely proud to say so.

Finally, in 1963, Philby defected to Russia, to spend the rest of his life in Moscow. He believed that MI6 was preparing to arrest him.

Philby was able to function as an active communist agent in England for thirty years, feeding massive amounts of information to the Soviets. His success led to deaths around the world as the international communist conspiracy sought to start revolutions and undermine British democracy.

How could he maintain his cover for thirty years? Stan Evans writes:

That super mole Kim Philby was cleared by Harold Macmillan and the old-boy network in the United Kingdom speaks volumes about security standards prevailing there in the 1940s and early ’50s. As does, indeed, the whole fantastic story of Communist infiltration in which Philby was merely one, albeit a leading, player. The saga of Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, James Klugmann, and others of the formidable crowd of Moscow agents who fanned out from the University of Cambridge and wound up in the British government is among the most astounding tales in all the annals of subversion, testimony to the deceptive skills of those who engineered it.

Philby’s success in maintaining his cover rested in part upon the naivety of some government officials, who felt that an educated Cambridge man from a good family simply couldn’t be a Soviet agent, in part upon those who didn’t feel that the Soviet threat was serious enough to merit careful monitoring of those with access to classified information, and in part upon those who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause and who therefore did not carefully monitor government employees in hopes that some of them were in fact Soviet “plants.”

The British government learned a lesson from the case of Kim Philby. England could survive only through proper vigilance and caution. Philby’s actions were a proverbial “wake-up call.” Britain learned, although slowly.

It’s testimony as well, however, to the complacency and negligence of the people who let it happen. As the records plainly show, there were plenty of signs along the way that members of the Cambridge clique had Red connections, glaringly obvious in some cases, but these were ignored, discounted, or, in the latter phases of the scandal, shoved under the nearest Whitehall carpet. After all, most of the Philby group had gone to the right schools, belonged to the right clubs, and didn’t look or talk the way Bolsheviks were supposed to. It was unthinkable they could be Soviet agents or betray their country. So the evidence of their perfidy was brushed aside until the proof was overwhelming.

In late 2013 and early 2014, the British government declassified documents relating to Kim Philby. Those texts made it clear that MI6 had, in the 1950s, an instinct to defend its agents rather than examine them. This had been a factor in the blind eye turned to Philby’s work for the Soviets.

Philby gained public attention for the first time on a large scale in the 1950s, and this coverage was one factor which inspired the author John le Carre to write his successful spy novels. Philby’s defection in 1963, and the defections of other MI6 agents, played into the spy novels written by Ian Fleming.

Hadrian's Wall - What Was Its Real Purpose?

The Roman emperor Hadrian ruled from 117 A.D. to 138 A.D., and during his reign, a famous structure was built: Hadrian’s Wall, an impressive example of civil engineering that runs for over seventy miles across the island of Great Britain, from coast to coast, separating England from Scotland.

Although this wall is the most famous such structure, it is neither the longest nor the most architecturally sophisticated. Longer and more complex walls, parts of border systems which include watchtowers and garrisons, stretch across central Europe, mainly in the gap between the Rhine and Danube rivers.

These central European Limes were built both by Hadrian and by his immediate successors. Rome had overextended itself by attempting settlements northeast of this natural boundary line. The empire executed a strategic retreat, pulled the settlements back to the Limes, and dug in to hold this border permanently.

On the island of Great Britain, the Scots to the north of England were simply too fierce for the Roman military. The wall was erected along what seemed to be the outermost possible expansion of the empire. Historian Andrew Curry describes the structure:

In most places the stone wall was an intimidating 14 feet tall and 10 feet wide. Traces of a 9-foot-deep ditch running the length of the wall are still visible today. In the past few decades excavations have uncovered pits filled with stakes between ditch and wall, one more obstacle for intruders. A dedicated road helped soldiers respond to threats. Regularly spaced gates were supported by watchtowers every third of a mile.

The gates in the wall offer interesting possibilities. Did trade occur between the Romans and the Scots, once a border seemed to be in place? Did Scots nearer the border seem content to coexist with the Romans, but those further north organize occasional attacks? The wall had gates, yet also had defensive forces ready to repel attempted invasions:

A couple miles behind the wall, a string of forts was evenly spaced half a day’s march apart. Each fort could house between 500 and 1,000 men, capable of responding quickly to any attacks. In 1973 workers digging a drainage ditch at Vindolanda, a typical frontline fort, uncovered piles of Roman trash under a thick layer of clay. The wet layer held everything from 1,900-year-old building timbers to cloth, wooden combs, leather shoes, and dog droppings, all preserved by the oxygen-free conditions.

Written texts from the Romans who staffed the border defenses give insight into their lives. They apparently were stationed there for years at a time, and so settled in and considered these places to be home, even though they were, from a Roman perspective, the remotest possible outposts.

To some extent, there were family settlements, not merely barracks for soldiers. Roman children were born and raised along Hadrian’s Wall.

Digging deeper, excavators came across hundreds of fragile, wafer-thin wooden tablets covered in writing. They provide day-to-day details of life along Hadrian’s Wall: work assignments, duty rosters, supply requests, personal letters. There is even a birthday party invitation from one officer’s wife to another, the earliest surviving example of women’s handwriting in Latin.

The extensive development of Roman settlement along the wall was, in part, the cause of the wall, and, in part, caused by the wall: settlement caused the wall, inasmuch no wall would have been built, were there nothing to protect; the wall caused settlement, inasmuch as significant manpower was needed to plan, build, and maintain the wall, and to keep a standing army ready to defend.

The extensiveness of Roman settlement near the wall is indicated by the presence of goods provided for more than mere subsistence or survival.

The tablets suggest that watching over the “wretched little Britons,” as one Vindolanda writer describes the locals, was no picnic, but the fort wasn’t exactly a hardship post. Some soldiers lived with their families — dozens of children’s shoes, including baby booties, are among the footwear recovered. And the wall’s patrollers ate well: Bacon, ham, venison, chicken, oysters, apples, eggs, honey, Celtic beer, and wine were on the menu. There was even garum, a fermented fish concoction that was the Roman version of Worcestershire sauce. Homesick soldiers received care packages too. “I have sent you ... socks ... two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants,” writes one concerned correspondent.

How big was the threat from the Scots? In Europe, the Limes fortifications were built in the face of massive and skillful groups of Germanic warriors, who had already proven, in 9 A.D., that they could best the Roman military.

Were the Scots, while fierce, less likely to mount direct attacks on Roman positions? Or was a Scottish invasion into Roman territories in southern Britain a real threat?

Scholars today ask a key question that must have crossed the minds of Roman soldiers shivering through long watches in the English rain: What were they doing there in the first place? The scale of the wall and its system of ditches, ramparts, and roads suggest that the enemy could be deadly.

Perhaps the wall wasn’t primarily designed to deter a large-scale invasion force. Perhaps, instead, it was designed to stop smugglers or small-scale raiding parties.

Yet reports from Vindolanda hardly portray a garrison under pressure. Aside from a few scattered clues — like the tombstone of luckless centurion Titus Annius, who was “killed in the war” — there are no direct references to fighting anywhere on the British frontier. The big building project to the north isn’t even mentioned. “You get a sense something’s up. Colossal amounts of supplies are being ordered,” says Andrew Birley, director of excavations at Vindolanda and Hadrian biographer Anthony Birley’s nephew. “But they don’t refer to the wall itself.”

Hadrian’s wall in Britain, and the Limes in central Europe, would have been quickly overwhelmed by a large force. While Roman soldiers were stationed along these borders, they were perhaps not present in large enough numbers to repel a major invasion force. Instead, they might have been a border patrol force, looking to stop those who attempt to move goods without paying an import-export tax.

The Mahdi: an Anticipated Islamic Folk Hero

To gain an accurate perspective on Islam, one preliminary fact must be made clear: Islam is not monolithic. Within Islam, a spectrum of variations are found, and a vocabulary has been developed to characterize these varieties: Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, Sufi, etc.

Certain common factors are found in each of these versions of Islam, and each version of Islam has its own peculiar variant of these common factors. One of these common elements is the Mahdi, a mystical leadership figure whose appearance is anticipated.

While it is tempting to compare the Mahdi to the Judeo-Christian notion of the Messiah, and while there are some legitimate points of comparison between the two, the Mahdi is a distinct and separate concept. In some Islamic traditions, the Mahdi and Jesus team up at some point in the distant future.

The Mahdi is hoped to restore Islam’s political and military power, and to increase that power to heights not yet experienced. In some versions of the tradition, the Mahdi is expected to established a caliphate.

Since Islam’s inception, a number of individuals have claimed to be the Mahdi, or have been identified by others as the Mahdi. Such individuals are often revolutionaries, seeking to gain power and then use that power to impose a pure or purified version of Islam. “A number of conclusions can be drawn from” examining these would-be Mahdis who’ve appeared over the years, writes scholar Timothy Furnish, who produces a

survey of eight prominent Sunni Mahdist movements over the last millennium. First, and most obvious, they serve as proof that non-Shi’i Mahdism is alive and well and an ever-present threat in the Muslim world. The outbreaks of these movements spanned almost the entire geographical length of the African and Asian landmasses, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Bay of Bengal.

Mahdism, therefore, is found among Shi’i, among Sunni, and among other variations of Islam. Geographically, it’s found wherever Islam is found. In Turkey, a man named Mehmet proclaimed himself to be the Mahdi in 1930; historical records are vague and incomplete, but he and a group of his followers were killed because they apparently hoped to overthrow the government.

Another of history’s many would-be Mahdi candidates was Muḥammad bin abd Allah al-Qahtani, whose Mahdist movement seem to be more the product of his brother-in-law, Juhayman al-Otaybi, also spelled ‘al-Utaybi’ in variant transliterations. At some point in the late 1970s, al-Utaybi stated that al-Qahtani was the Mahdi, and in November 1979, the two organized a band of followers who seized a main mosque in Saudi Arabia as part of an attempted military overthrow of the Saud dynasty. In early December, Saudi police and military attacked the group, most of whom were killed in the fighting. The survivors were executed afterward.

Most were peripheral, if not in actual geographic origins, then in terms of their sociocultural or sociopolitical genesis (Mehmet, al-Utaybi). The four characteristics in common among almost all of these historical irruptions of Mahdism were a declared jihad, some degree of Sufi adherence, and grievances against an extant Muslim government and its European Christian allies. Mahdism with its holy wars was directed against allegedly illegitimate Islamic regimes and against Western imperialists seems at first glance to have much in common with modern Islamic fundamentalism. Yet Muslim fundamentalism, while necessary, is ultimately insufficient to explain Mahdism as a compelling force.

Mahdist movements, then, typically call for a ‘return’ to ‘pure’ Islam - a strict and literal following of the Qur’an (Koran), as well as Hadith and other texts. The Mahdi is hoped to exemplify Islamic virtues - military prowess, stern opposition to non-Muslim beliefs and cultures, and bold leadership.

Despite the variations between different sects or variations within Islam, Mahdism is constant, found in otherwise divergent forms of Islam. An understanding of Mahdism helps the reader to understand the spectrum of Islamic political, revolutionary, militant, and terrorist activities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Finally, the examples of these historical Mahdist movements, all of which predate the modern period of American unrivaled global supremacy, should help lay to rest the assertion by some Bush administration critics today that “apocalyptic holy warriors come into being primarily because of specific American actions.” “Apocalyptic” holy wars were around long before George Bush or, for that matter, any Western king, prime minister, or president sent troops into the Middle East. Mahdi movements and their religion-based insurrections often - indeed, usually - have more to do with the internal dynamics of the Islamic world than with Western foreign policy.

While terrorist leaders are hesitant to explicitly proclaim themselves to be the Mahdi, because it could provoke assassination attempts from competing Islamic groups, they nonetheless delight in dropping hints in words, or acting in ways, which might encourage their followers to consider the possibility.

The concept of Mahdi plays slightly different roles in the various forms of Islam, but this concept is necessary to understand the drive toward the establishment of a large caliphate, the drive to destroy Western culture, and the drive to establish a Sharia-driven dictatorship.