15

Mahdis and Caliphs

The internet bubble rang down the curtain on the twentieth century’s theater of popular manias. As the twenty-first opened, the now familiar end-times narrative of the world’s youngest Abrahamic religion would astound the world with its ability to attract adherents from around the world, and with its violence.

On November 16, 2014, rebels of the Islamic State (IS) beheaded an American named Peter Kassig, along with eighteen Syrian captives. The ex–U.S. Army Ranger had been doing humanitarian work. The perpetrators’ video did not show the atrocity itself; rather, Kassig’s severed head lay at the feet of “Jihadi John,” believed to be a U.K. citizen named Mohammed Emwazi, who intoned in a British accent, “Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly awaiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive.”825

Over the preceding year, IS’s slick and effective social media campaign had drawn thousands of fighters and other volunteers, even from the prosperous and peaceful West, to one of the world’s worst places. The town mentioned by Jihadi John, Dabiq, and the IS magazine of the same name go a long way toward understanding the remarkable success of their recruitment efforts.826

The magazine was named after the town in northwestern Syria where the Ottoman Turks defeated the Egyptian Mamluks in 1516, a victory that gave the Turks control over the Levant and, symbolically for modern jihadis, marked the rebirth of a caliphate—a state led by a successor of Muhammad with dominion over all Muslims—that would last four centuries. The town’s association with the Ottoman caliphate places it, despite its unimposing appearance and strategic unimportance, front and center in the Islamic end-times narrative.

The apocalyptic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam resemble one another, which is not surprising in light of their common origins. During the early medieval period, both the Byzantines and Muslims divined their battle plans against each other from the same verses of Daniel.827 Because of its military history, Dabiq became an Islamic Armageddon, a place where the forces of the Antichrist, in Islam most commonly called the Dajjal, would battle the armies of the righteous.

There are differences. Christian eschatology springs mainly from a small number of well-circumscribed scriptural locations, especially Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, whereas Islamic eschatology has more diffuse, and so less well defined, wellsprings: the hadith, the recorded sayings of the Prophet (in Arabic, “news” or “reports”). In contrast to Christian eschatology, the Muslim “book,” the Koran, contains almost no prophecy and, like Saint Augustine and subsequent Catholic theological tradition, specifically warns against calculating the date of the end-times.

But as it does for Christians, date-setting irresistibly tempts Muslims, and their end-times narratives spring like desert wildflowers from the hadith.828 Because of their great number, Islamic eschatology is even messier than the Christian variety. The Sunni tradition, for example, relates roughly ten thousand separate hadith, and different observers report each of them in often widely varying ways. One medieval scholar alone listed more than thirty thousand versions. For centuries following the Prophet’s death in 632, scholars have graded and cataloged his sayings according to their authenticity, from “authentic” down to “fabricated.”

The Prophet complicated matters by leaving no testament. His first four successors, or caliphs—Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali—saw the rapid expansion of Muslim territory well beyond the confines of western Arabia to the frontiers of Byzantium and Persia. Over the following centuries, the Arab empires warred with these two great neighboring infidel powers. In addition, the assassination of the fourth caliph, Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, and the subsequent death of Ali’s youngest son, Husayn, and his followers at Karbala in modern Iraq, set off a bloody sectarian split that has raged ever since. On one side of this great Islamic conflict lay the followers of Husayn, the Shiites, who limit the Prophet’s succession to his bloodline. The victors at Karbala, who evolved into the Sunnis, do not share this restriction of leadership.

Political scientist Samuel Huntington’s highly controversial The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order tabulated the large number of armed conflicts among Muslim countries, as well as their conflicts with their non-Muslim neighbors, and concluded that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”829 Critics accused him of “orientalism” and pointed out that Islam’s modern wars arose from Western domination. While Western colonialism certainly plays a prominent role in the troubles of the modern Middle East, Huntington’s infamous quote applies just as well to the medieval Islamic world, which, as the possessor of one of the world’s most intellectually advanced, wealthy, and powerful civilizations, was little troubled by the backward and impotent early post-Rome West.

And therein lies the appeal of apocalyptic Islam. American and European Christians live in relatively prosperous, safe, and geopolitically stable societies; furthermore, their religions are culturally dominant. Western Christian apocalypticists are thus forced to pick among a dog’s breakfast of moral panics for signs of The Hour (end-times): pervasive sexuality, socialism, and Satanism (or at least astrology).

Islam, by contrast, has been in relative political and economic decline ever since Vasco da Gama first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and began to dismantle the immensely prosperous Muslim-dominated Indian Ocean trade emporium. For the devout Muslim, then, signs of The Hour loom all too obvious and painful, with a long litany of humiliation and defeat that demands apocalyptic justice: in the twentieth century alone, the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Muslim heartland between the French and British; the 1948 establishment of Israel; its 1967 seizure of the West Bank and Old City of Jerusalem with its sacred Temple Mount; the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt; and the 1990 First Gulf War, which made embarrassingly visible the Western military presence in, among other Middle East locations, Saudi Arabia, the custodian of the religion’s holiest shrines. Far more than Christians and Jews, Muslims have reasons to yearn for an Apocalypse that overturns the existing world order. It is impossible to miss the bitterness and anger felt by Muslim apocalypticists and their audiences. Wrote one,

Thus the Jewish slap on the faces of Christians continues, who apparently enjoy and allow this sort of humiliation. . . . The Crusader West continues like a whore who is screwed sadistically, and does not derive any pleasure from the act until after she is struck and humiliated, even by her pimps—who are the Jews in Christian Europe—and it will not be long before they are under the rubble as a result of the Jewish conspiracy.830

As do all seekers of the end-times, Muslim apocalypticists pine for Hesiod’s age of “golden men,” in their case, the salaf: the first three generations of Muslims, the Prophet’s companions and their offspring, the religion’s founding fathers. It’s not surprising, then, that today’s Muslim apocalypticist scholars and leaders plumb the hadith for the inspiration that will return Islam to its rightful place as the world’s dominant theology. A large number of hadith speak of the battles with the Byzantines, especially at Constantinople, that occurred during the few centuries after the Prophet’s death, when these sayings were first recorded. This explains IS’s obsession with a small dusty town in northern Syria, Dabiq, which is mentioned in one of the most famous and highly respected of the apocalyptic hadith: “The Last Hour will not come until the Byzantines attack Amaq or Dabiq.”831

The hadith scholar’s main task is establishing the provenance of their oral sources that stretch centuries back to the Prophet’s lifetime, a treacherous game of generational whispering down the lane. Two Persian scholars, Abu al-Husayn Muslim and Isma’il al-Bukhari, working two hundred years after Muhammad’s death, produced the most highly respected compilations. Bukhari reportedly dreamed of himself swatting away flies swarming around Muhammad, and decided to devote his life to the banishment of inauthentic hadith. Only 1 percent of them survived his exacting criteria.832 The hadith of Muslim and Bukhari occupy the highest tier, and the authority of any Islamic cleric, political leader, military leader, or commentator rests in no small part on his command of hadith, especially those compiled by these two scholars.

Needless to say, even the most “authentic” of hadith wind through several generations of oral transmission, and, in the words of Arabist William McCants,

End-times prophecies were an especially inviting target for fabricators. In the internecine wars that tore apart the early Muslim community, each side sought to justify its politics by predicting its inevitable victory and the other side’s preordained defeat. What better way to do this than to put the prophecy into the mouth of the Prophet. . . . Throughout the centuries, new politics would give the residue new meaning, a phenomenon familiar to readers of the Christian Book of Revelation.833

Many of Islam’s end-times narratives evolved out of those unhappy with the victors at Karbala, the Umayya clan, who established the first great Muslim dynasty and ruled it from Damascus. The central character who would rescue the devout from their increasingly corrupt and despotic masters in Damascus was the Muslim messiah, the Mahdi: “the Rightly Guided One.”

The Umayyads’s Arab and Persian opponents spread prophecies of soldiers flying black flags from Khorasan (roughly, modern eastern Iran and Afghanistan), who would sweep in from that direction to defeat the Umayyads: “If you see the black banners coming from Khorasan, go to them immediately even if you must crawl over ice because indeed among them is the caliph, al-Mahdi.”834 In 750, rebels flying the black flag overthrew the Umayyads. The rebels’ leader was a descendant of the Prophet’s uncle named Abbas, hence the name of the Baghdad-centered empire he founded, the Abbasid Dynasty, which would last half a millennium.

Hadith passages, like the ones quoted by the victorious Abbasid rebels, tend to be fragmentary and brief, usually of sentence or paragraph length, and rarely more than a page or two. As put by David Cook, the foremost American scholar of Muslim apocalyptic literature,

Because the Muslim traditions have no apparent context, except that provided artificially by the lengthy traditions (which are essentially attempts by scholars to place the material into usable chronological order), it is hardly surprising to find that there has been considerable disagreement as to the order in which events are to take place before the end of the world.835

In other words, the large number and brevity of hadith make possible an infinite number of end-times narratives; pour into this batter the day’s headlines and add a large dollop of confirmation bias, and the clever Islamic scholar has an even easier time serving up the desired apocalyptic narrative than his Christian dispensationalist cousin.

Nonetheless, hadith-derived Muslim apocalypses do have certain features in common with Christian eschatology: The world will, at some point, end. Jesus, who is a prophet, not the son of God, returns to Earth, most often via the east minaret of the Damascus Umayyad Mosque, borne by two white angels. He does battle with the Dajjal, who is almost always a Jew, and often the Jewish messiah. Unlike the beguiling Christian Antichrist, the Dajjal has a displeasing personality and cuts a hideous physical figure, with a large hooked nose, one deformed, bulging eye, and hands of different sizes—a nonpareil demonstration of the role of anatomic symmetry in the perception of beauty.836

Anti-Semitism is such an established part of Muslim apocalypticism that it accepts even the most fraudulent racist canards. The late Saudi king Faisal routinely harangued foreign dignitaries about the communist-Jewish world conspiracy, and at the end of meetings he would turn to his protocol chief and ask, “Have they got the book?” meaning The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On one occasion, the American ambassador pointed out to him that Protocols, a screed postulating a global conspiracy by Jews for world rule, had been forged by the czar’s secret police. Nonsense, answered Faisal; the kingdom had printed it up in multiple languages to widen its circulation. The king was and still is not alone in his anti-Semitism; for virtually all Muslim apocalypticists, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is Exhibit A of Jewish treachery.837

Muslim apocalypticists, also like Christian dispensationalists, search current events for signs of The Hour that herald the End. These are of two types. The first are known as “lesser signs,” and would warm the hearts of Lindsey and LaHaye: sexual laxity, including bestiality and both male and female homosexuality, and, most prophetic of all, public intercourse. Even song and dance, wealth, and men’s silk clothing also come in for approbation, as do automobiles, since they allow women to drive. Other lesser signs include earthquakes, floods, droughts, and financial misbehavior, particularly the charging of interest and the employment of men by women (the last of which ignores the fact that the young Prophet was hired by the widowed trader, Khadija, who eventually became his wife and first follower).

One particularly well-known hadith states that the “Last Hour” will be characterized when “two figures come to blows,” even though the two preach the same thing; when thirty false messiahs appear; when all religious knowledge vanishes; when murder becomes frequent; when everyone is so wealthy that none will accept alms; and when tombs are so magnificent that the living wish themselves inside them.

Muslim apocalypticists also look for “Greater Signs”: more specific predicted events. During the early Muslim period, the yet-to-be accomplished Muslim conquest of Christian Constantinople stood at the top of the list. Successive Muslim rulers deployed the hadith to justify multiple unsuccessful attempts to conquer the city; when the Ottomans finally succeeded in 1453 and the End did not follow, theologians alternatively prophesized great battles would take place at other locations, most recently, Dabiq.

As with Christian Zionists, another Greater Sign is the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. And if the Christian version is, from the Jewish perspective, grim—convert and proselytize or be destroyed—the Muslim version is even more brutal: Allah will return the Jews to Palestine as, in the words of one apocalypticist, “a declaration of the proximity of God’s vengeance upon them by gathering them into [Palestine]”: the apocalyptic Muslim version of the Final Solution.838

Other Greater Signs include the appearance of the Dajjal (who is in one hadith dispatched by Jesus’s lethal halitosis) and the sun rising in the west. Gog and Magog make appearances in the hadith, as does a character unique to Islam known as the Sufyani, a powerful Sunni tyrant who rampages through Syria. As a Sunni, he is reviled by Shiites, a sentiment not always shared by Sunnis; the Umayyad opponents of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, for example, lionized him.839

The Sufyani’s ultimate goal is the murder of the central character of The End, the Mahdi, but he is most commonly stopped short when the earth swallows him. In most tellings, not until Jesus has dispatched the Dajjal does the Mahdi lead the armies of Islam to victory and establish just rule over the world. Shiites believe that the twelfth, or “hidden” imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who disappeared in the tenth century, will, as suggested by his name, reappear at The End.840

In 1978, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords, which led directly to the 1979 Egypt-Israeli Peace Treaty, which Islamists considered an abomination. In particular, in 1987, an obscure Egyptian journalist named Sayyid Ayyub wrote a book entitled Al-Masih ad-Dajjal (The Antichrist), which had a simple message: The entire history of the human race was poisoned by the perfidy of the Jews, who would be defeated by the forces of Islam in an apocalyptic battle.

Prior to the 1980s, Muslim apocalyptic literature was a sleepy genre, heavy on the Mahdi and the millennium, and light on Gog and Magog, and on Jesus doing single combat with the Dajjal. The publication of The Antichrist was Muslim apocalyptic literature’s Hal Lindsey moment. Similar to the shift in Christian apocalyptic literature that occurred with The Late Great Planet Earth, Ayyub’s book invigorated the genre by emphasizing a lurid, bloody final victory over the Jews and deemphasizing the goodness and light that presumably follows.841

According to Ayyub, the Dajjal’s first Jewish agent on earth was Saint Paul, followed by Constantine, then the Freemasons, American Jews, and Atatürk, followed by the United States, NATO, and, finally, Israel. Ayyub wrote that “earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and droughts will precede the appearance of the Antichrist, [and] the temperature will rise perceptibly.” There follows a final great battle whose hallucinatory details give Revelation and Lindsey a run for their money. In The End, Israel is destroyed, and the capital of world-dominant Islam is relocated from Damascus to Jerusalem. Along the way Ayyub condemns the pope for once visiting a synagogue and denies the Holocaust.

As with Christian dispensationalist fiction, the Temple Mount plays a leading role. Taking his cue from Denis Michael Rohan and Rabbi Goren, Ayyub wrote, “The dwelling place of [the Dajjal] will be in the Temple in Jerusalem. For this reason they sometimes try to burn al-Aqsa, and try to conduct archaeological excavations, and even try to buy the ground through the Masons of America.”842 The similarities among the end-times narratives of the three Abrahamic religions are so striking that Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg observed,

The theater of the End is triangular, and in the eyes of apocalyptic believers on all three sides, the great drama has begun. The sound system is hope and fear; each time an actor speaks, his words reverberate wildly. Three scripts are being performed. The cast of Jewish messianists has starring roles in the Christian play; Jews and Christians alike have parts in the Muslim drama. What one sees as a flourish of rhetoric can be the other’s cue for a battle scene.843

The Antichrist sold wildly in the Arab world, and as did Lindsey, Ayyub followed his success with a stream of similar titles and spawned a host of imitators, some of whom made nearly everyone a Jew, including Martin Luther; one of Ayyub’s imitators, Fahad Salim, generously allowed that Saddam Hussein wasn’t Jewish, but that a close associate had a Jewish father and thus tainted his regime. One of the most prominent of Ayyub’s emulators was another Egyptian journalist, Muhammad Isa Dawud, who wrote for the Saudi press and who once published an apparently serious interview with a jinn (genie).

Dawud evidently considered Ayyub’s work too sober and tolerant toward the Jews, and in 1991, he published Beware: The Antichrist Has Invaded the World from the Bermuda Triangle, which is the location both for an eight-century midway point of the Dajjal’s sojourn to North America and a base for the flying saucers of an avenging Islamic air force.844

Popular apocalyptic literature pervades souks in Cairo, Riyadh, Beirut, Baghdad, and East Jerusalem and fills bookstore shelves from Morocco to Indonesia. More importantly, with the advent of social media, these books have become freely available and more influential, effectively providing the background music to twenty-first-century jihadism.845 Islamic scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu describes the genre’s increasingly anti-Semitic and anti-Western tone:

There is nothing harmless about this intensifying delirium, for it is saturated with a profound sense of resentment and vindictiveness. . . . The messianics of the third millennium distill their venomous bile with the self-assurance of those for whom the future—and the end—of the world is obvious. America, unalterably hostile to Islam and fundamentally Machiavellian, is damned and fated to die a dreadful death; Islam is truth, irresistible power, and everlasting victory.846

For centuries, then, Muslims pinned their hopes for delivery from humiliation and oppression on the savior figure of the Mahdi. This narrative has paid at least as much attention to round date numbers as have Christian millennialist narratives, and Mahdist eruptions have tended to punctuate the dawn of new Muslim centuries.

The Muslim calendar begins with the Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 622, the hijra, and the fourteenth century a.h. (anno hegirae) began on November 12, 1882.847 In the late thirteenth century a.h., which corresponded to the late 1870s a.d., a Sudanese Sufi cleric named Muhammad Ahmad became angered by the heresies of the Egyptian rulers of Sudan, who gave nominal tribute to the Ottoman Turks, but in fact were more beholden to the British. Ahmad thought the November 12, 1882, date a portent of The End, and in preparation he declared himself Mahdi in 1881 in order to give himself enough time to establish his rule in Khartoum to ring in the new century.848

His revolt initially succeeded, and his regime would likely have survived had not British general Charles “Chinese” Gordon been killed during Ahmad’s later siege of Khartoum. While Gordon had become a popular hero back home, he had annoyed the British crown and high command by exceeding his brief, the evacuation of Egyptian troops and administration, and instead attempting to defend the entire city.

The popular outrage in England over Gordon’s death forced the deployment of a costly expedition under Field Marshall Horatio Herbert Kitchener in 1898 to recover Khartoum. In the meantime Ahmad had died of typhus; Kitchener defeated Ahmad’s successor, Abdullah al-Taashi, at the Battle of Omdurman, in which British troops with advanced weaponry slaughtered twelve thousand Muslim soldiers while sustaining only light losses themselves.849 (Also present at the battle was a young lieutenant named Winston Churchill; the one-sidedness of this and other late-nineteenth-century colonial battles inspired poet Hilaire Belloc to rhyme, “Whatever happens we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.”)850

Khartoum, the location of the uprising marking the dawn of the fourteenth century a.h., is a peripheral site in Muslim geography. The tumultuous events that unfolded at the beginning of the fifteenth century a.h. would take place at Islam’s very epicenter, Mecca’s Grand Mosque. The shrine’s roots stretch back to well before Islam’s birth in 610, when the archangel Gabriel was said to dictate the first verses of the Koran on Mount Hira just outside his home city of Mecca to the trembling Prophet, by then a successful merchant.

Mecca’s wealth derived from the Kaaba, a granite building supposedly built by Abraham, and the probably meteoric Black Stone embedded in it. Long before Muhammad, pilgrims made the hajj to circumambulate the Kaaba and Black Stone, which were likely shrines to al-Llah, the principal god of the polytheistic pre-Islamic Arabs.

A trader of humble origins who prospered under the tutelage of his future wife Khadija, Muhammad was also a Qurayshi, the tribe that ruled Mecca, though hailing from one of its minor branches. His religious fervor, and particularly his efforts to cleanse the Kaaba of idolatrous totems to the city’s 360 pagan gods, threatened Mecca’s hajj trade and so angered the Qurayshi elite, who forced him to flee to Yathrib (Medina) in 622—the hegira, as his journey became known. When he finally returned to Mecca at the head of victorious Islamic forces in 630, he denied nonbelievers entry into both cities, a ban that stands to this day.851

The tension between the rich and luxury-loving merchant elites and the devout and ascetic faithful has intermittently roiled the peninsula ever since. In the early 1700s, a jurist by the name of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab began to preach a radical brand of Islam that revolved around two principles: the return to the Prophet’s original teachings and a resolute opposition to the luxury and wealth enjoyed by the aristocracies in Baghdad, Damascus, Istanbul, and Cairo. Dancing, jewelry, and even tobacco were haram (forbidden); so was Shiism, whose adherents were offered the choice between conversion and death.

Ibn Abd al-Wahhab allied himself with a fearsome warrior by the name of Muhammad bin Saud, and the synergy of the jurist’s theological chops and bin Saud’s military prowess swept Wahhabi Islam centrifugally out from its birthplace in the sun-baked emptiness of Arabia’s deep interior desert to command almost the entire peninsula and beyond.

As Ottoman power crumbled in the nineteenth century, one of Muhammad bin Saud’s descendants, Abdulaziz, known in the West as Ibn Saud, seized the Ottoman fort at Riyadh in 1902 and established a dynasty that retains power to this day. The new regime’s shock troops, the ultra-devout Ikhwan, literally, “brothers,” hailed from Bedouins in whose blood ran centuries of desert raiding and warfare. In 1924, Ikhwan troops besieging Mecca slaughtered four hundred residents of the neighboring town of Taif, sliced open the bellies of expectant mothers, and so frightened the Meccans into surrendering without a fight.

Unfortunately for the Ikhwan, the First World War altered the Middle East’s political landscape. Abdulaziz now needed to assuage the British Christians, the recent war’s victors who now loomed on his northern border. Additionally, the legitimacy of his guardianship of Islam’s holy shrines rested on the approval of the broader Muslim world that included not only the apostate Shiites but also Sufis and less adherent Sunnis. Accordingly, Abdulaziz began to back away from the monarchy’s Wahhabi Ikhwan allies.

Abdulaziz strained his relations with the Wahhabis by enthusiastically embracing modernity’s bounties, especially the automobile and telephone. He clamped down on the Wahhabis, who were intent on liquidating the eastern Arabian Shiites. Angered by the king’s heresies, the Ikhwan, the most conservative among the Wahhabis, revolted; in 1927, they launched an attack on Kuwait, and in due course experienced humiliation at the hands of another of modernity’s handmaidens, British military aircraft. Two years later Abdulaziz, who by that point had had enough of the Ikhwan, drove north from Riyadh in cars mounted with machine guns toward a deep interior oasis at Sbala, where he offered the Ikhwan an honorable surrender. The refusal of the horse- and camel-borne Ikhwan was answered with their slaughter.852

The Ikhwan flame had been smothered, but not extinguished, and among the survivors of the Sbala massacre was an Ikhwan named Mohammed bin Seif al-Uteybi; years after the battle, in 1936, he sired a son with a face seemingly fixed in a permanent scowl. Since Saudis are fond of rough-and-ready names, the baby was called Juhayman: “angry face,” an appellation he would later more than live up to.853

Just two years after Juhayman’s birth, American oilmen drilled the first gushers at Dhahran and visited upon the heretofore impoverished and devout nation a grand economic experiment of nature that endowed Abdulaziz’s heirs and hangers-on with unimaginable wealth. Six of Abdulaziz’s sons, born of six different wives, one half-brother after another, have ruled the kingdom since his death in 1953.

The second of the half-sibling kings, Faisal, further angered the Wahhabi faithful when he abolished slavery in 1962, instituted education for girls in 1963, and introduced television into the kingdom in 1965. Ten years later, he was assassinated by a member of the royal family whose relative had been killed in the rioting incited by the kingdom’s adoption of television.

While the sons of the new Saudi elites joined the army and air force, the more devout Ikhwan were shunted into the less prestigious National Guard. When Juhayman came of age, he served there for eighteen years before mustering out in 1973 as a mere corporal. While his undistinguished National Guard service did not advance his social or material status, its intense religious orientation drove him to more transcendent matters, especially Islamic eschatology.

After retiring from the Guard, he settled in Medina and joined a Wahhabist organization, the al-Jama’a al-Salafiyya al-Muhtasiba: the Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong (JSM). The organization was particularly influenced by Abdulaziz bin Baz, a brilliant, charismatic, and ambitious Islamic scholar, blind since age eight, who opposed the kingdom’s headlong rush into modernity.

The royal family’s fondness for the fleshpots of the French and Spanish Mediterranean particularly inflamed bin Baz; closer to home, he inveighed against tobacco, barber shops, and hand-clapping at public events.854 With bin Baz and other Islamists as their spiritual guides, the JSM built a theology straight out of Freud’s narcissism of small differences: Adherents broke the Ramadan fast not with the sunset, but with the disappearance of all light. (It was permissible, though, to hasten the meal by closing the room curtains.) Sandals could be worn at prayer, a deviation that annoyed other Muslims, and their mosques did not contain the traditional “niche” that faced Mecca (mihrab). The JSM established chapters in most of Saudi Arabia’s major cities, many with their own dedicated buildings, and quickly developed an international reputation and attracted adherents from around the Muslim world, particularly from Egypt and Pakistan. To the chagrin of the JSM, the Saudi monarchy gradually co-opted bin Baz, whose evolving realpolitik drove a wedge between him and the Ikhwan; while the blind cleric had chastised the royals’ modernizing and libertine proclivities, he nonetheless did not challenge the legitimacy of the regime. Eventually, the government appointed bin Baz to head the prestigious and influential Council of Senior Scholars, in which capacity he appeared every week with the king on the same medium, television, that had gotten the king’s half-brother assassinated, and served as the Saudi Grand Mufti from 1993 until his 1999 death.

The JSM’s theological quirks and, more importantly, its hostility to the royal family, soured its once-warm relationship with bin Baz, who by this point had departed for the monarchy’s capital in Riyadh. In the summer of 1977, it fell to bin Baz’s lieutenants in Medina to call a meeting with the JSM on a rooftop and demand that they renounce their heresies. The majority of JSM members, who were in their twenties, refused and reorganized themselves under the leadership of the older, charismatic Juhayman, and took the name of their Wahhabist forefathers, the Ikhwan.855

Sometime in December 1977, perhaps a few months after the rooftop meeting, the regime arrested two dozen of the followers of Juhayman, who escaped and appealed to bin Baz for help. The blind cleric interviewed the detainees and had the government release them.856

Juhayman elected to remain at large. For millennia, his ancestors had evaded their Byzantine, Ottoman, Persian, and Abyssinian overlords by vanishing into the desert on the one domesticated animal able to survive in that hostile, nearly waterless environment: the camel. For two years after his 1977 flight, Juhayman fell back on this Bedouin heritage and successfully avoided arrest in the peninsula’s empty interior. In the process he became a legend, generally traveling with three to five followers and arranging clandestine meetings with others; more frequently, he attended these conclaves in spirit only. On one occasion, he was warned off visiting his mother when informed at the last moment that the police were watching her home; on another he suffered a prolonged painful toothache before finding a dentist who would not report him to the authorities.857

Unhappy with bin Baz’s compromises, Juhayman dissociated himself from him. During his peregrinations, Juhayman buried himself in the hadith, particularly those involving the Mahdi and the end-times. He drew inspiration from perhaps the most famous apocalyptic saying of the Prophet,

The Last Hour will not come until the Byzantines attack Amaq or Dabiq. A Muslim army consisting of some of the best men on earth at this time will be sent from Medina to thwart them. . . . Then the battle will be joined. A third part of the [Muslim] army will admit defeat; Allah will never forgive them. A third will die; they will be excellent martyrs in the eyes of Allah. And a third will conquer: they will never have been tested and they will [go on] to conquer Constantinople.858

Dabiq and Amaq are, respectively, a town in Syria and a valley in Turkey; IS named its magazine after the former, and named its news agency after the latter. In Juhayman’s eschatology, Mecca and Medina took their places.

All Juhayman needed to trigger the end-times was a Mahdi, who happily turned out to be one of his Saudi followers, an otherworldly fair-skinned poet with light brown eyes named Mohammed Abdullah al-­Qahtani. After he joined forces with Juhayman, the poet’s sister dreamed that her brother received the baya (oath of allegiance) by the Kaaba, in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque. Within the standard Islamic end-times narrative, the dream made sense: Qahtani was a light-skinned Qurayshi, as was the Prophet, as had to be the Mahdi. As a bonus he also had a birthmark on his left cheek, as did, according to one widely quoted hadith, the Mahdi as well. Others in this group, including Juhayman himself, soon had the same dream.

Dreams have a special meaning in Islam, especially when experienced collectively, since Allah transmitted many of his revelations to the Prophet through them. (As put by one of Juhayman’s followers, “The fact that we dream proves that we are more religious.”)859 Qahtani grew close to Juhayman, who went so far as to divorce his wife and marry Qahtani’s dreaming sister.860

As Hal Lindsey would say, the pieces of the great jigsaw puzzle finally fit into place. Not only did Juhayman now have his Mahdi, his reading of the hadith also confirmed the precise spot where the Mahdi would receive the baya, adjacent to the graves of Hagar and Ishmael (respectively, Abraham’s first wife and son) just outside the Kaaba, exactly as dreamed by Qahtani’s sister. Juhayman’s research also revealed the date: a Sunni tradition predicts that a scholar known as the “renewer of the century” would appear on the first day of each hijri century: 1400 a.h. was to begin on November 20, 1979. Juhayman and his followers would thus have to seize the Grand Mosque in order that the Mahdi receive the baya at the prescribed spot next to the Kaaba, and on that exact date.

During his desert exile, Juhayman recorded audio cassettes and composed “letters of Juhayman,” in which he laid out his theology and eschatology. (He had only a fourth-grade education; although not illiterate, his writing skills were poor, so the “letters” were likely dictated.)861 No Saudi publisher would touch them, but eventually a left-wing Kuwaiti house printed up two separate compendiums, known as “the seven letters” and “the four letters,” which were widely circulated around the peninsula.

By recommending the release of Juhayman’s accomplices, bin Baz had committed a grave error; on the first day of 1400 a.h., Juhayman spectacularly reemerged into the public eye along with around three hundred of his followers at the Grand Mosque.862 Over the previous days, they had smuggled in weapons and provisions in the traditional shroud-covered litters used to bear the dead for final blessing. The occupation itself was nearly bloodless, initially killing only two unarmed policemen and an assistant imam. Juhayman grabbed the microphone from the imam while his men fired celebratory rifle shots and shouted, “Behold the Mahdi! Behold the right-guided one!”863

Juhayman then deployed snipers to the upper floors and minarets and left it to Qahtani’s older brother Sayyid, who spoke fluent classical Arabic, to announce the presence of the Mahdi to the crowd. So impressive was Sayyid’s performance, and particularly the offerings of the baya to Qahtani, that some of the hostages joined in with the occupiers and convinced at least one of the Mosque’s security guard commanders that the pale young poet was indeed the Mahdi.

Juhayman released many foreigners, particularly those who spoke no Arabic. But the nearly bloodless initial takeover would turn deadly as the rebels barred the tens of thousands of Saudi and other Arab pilgrim hostages from leaving the Grand Mosque, and instructed them to take up arms or assist the occupiers. Government troops and policemen who approached within a half kilometer of the shrine quickly found themselves under fire.

Two factors paralyzed the initial government response to the takeover: Even though the heavily armed rebels shot at any uniform they saw, the army was reluctant to return fire because the Prophet had banned weapons from Mecca. Also, a large number of the hostages, and the government forces themselves, worried that Qahtani just might be the Mahdi.

Only one governing body could resolve this standoff, namely, the ulema, or high religious council, led by bin Baz. Angered by the royal family’s impiousness, loose morals, and profligacy, the august body drove a stiff bargain: Not until the fifth day of the occupation did it declare Qah­tani an impostor and bless a counterattack. In exchange, the Saudi king, Khalid, would clamp down on public morals, most especially on alcohol and women appearing on television—precisely the same agenda at the core of Juhayman’s appeal.

Theological clearance in hand, the horrific assault began. Although the government quickly took out the minaret snipers with antitank missiles, the rebels firing from the main building remained in place, and infantry could not enter the Mosque itself without being cut to pieces at close range. The heavily Ikhwan-influenced National Guard made matters worse by refusing to fire on their tribal and theological brethren, in some cases supplying them with weapons.

Regular army units replaced the National Guard, but they had even less training in urban guerrilla warfare. Not until the Army trundled armored personal carriers inside the Mosque was any progress made. In addition to the losses on both sides, hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pilgrim hostages perished in the crossfire. Told too many times he was the Mahdi, Qahtani considered himself invulnerable and somehow survived exposure to direct fire. His immortality thus confirmed, he took to hurling back the army’s grenades until his luck finally ran out and one blew him almost to bits. The rebels slowly retreated to the Mosque’s basement, which the armored vehicles entered but in whose narrow passages they became immobilized.

The assault was stalemated. Although exact figures were never published, a week into the assault government casualties represented a significant portion of the nation’s thirty thousand army and twenty thousand National Guard personnel. King Khalid needed to call in foreign help. The Jordanians, the only Arab country both on friendly terms with the Saudis and with a credible commando force, offered assistance.

From the Saudi perspective, the Jordanian offer was a nonstarter. In the 1924–1925 campaign that included the brutal 1924 attack on Taif, Ikhwan forces, still allied at that point with Abdulaziz, Khalid’s father, had ejected the Hashemite great-grandfather of the current Jordanian monarch, Hussein, from his Hejaz kingdom, which contained Mecca and Medina; to accept assistance from the despised Hashemites would have entailed an unacceptable loss of face.864

The kingdom was thus forced to countenance the unthinkable: aid from Christian forces at Islam’s holiest site. This would be the hadith’s infidel “army from the north”; it eventually arrived, but in diminutive and fleeting form. Khalid, who considered President Jimmy Carter and the CIA impotent after the ongoing Tehran embassy hostage fiasco, settled on the French intelligence service for assistance. Because of the extreme sensitivity of allowing nonbelievers, let alone Christian troops, into Mecca, the French sent just three elite operatives, along with a large amount of advanced weaponry, which included several hundred pounds of an advanced irritant anesthetic gas.

Essential to the ongoing attack’s planning were the building plans for the Mosque’s extensive renovation and expansion in the 1960s, drawn by the man who had undertaken the vast project, a construction magnate named Muhammad bin Laden. His son Salem, who had taken over the firm’s leadership after the 1967 death of his father, hurried to the Mosque with the plans, and he and his employees drilled holes in the Mosque floor through which to toss the French gas canisters down onto the rebels in the basement. The tactic proved only temporarily effective, which forced the Saudis to mount an almost unimaginably brutal French-designed coordinated final direct assault on the rebels’ basement redoubt.865

When the siege ended on December 4, fourteen days later, thousands of combatants and hostages lay dead. At least a hundred rebels were taken captive, among whom was a dejected Juhayman. Doctors examined the prisoners; shoulder pain or bruises, which suggested the active firing of weapons, marked 69 prisoners for public beheading, with Juhayman first on the list. The Saudis executed others secretly, and the rest received long jail sentences. No one took seriously the official death toll of just 270 rebels, troops, and hostages.866

Although Juhayman’s strategy was largely driven by his apocalyptic delusions, subsequent interviews with the surviving participants made clear that many did not believe his end-times theology, but rather paid it lip service out of their respect for him; others participated because the operation furthered their political goals. In any case, even those who swallowed Juhayman’s apocalyptic scenario were discouraged when Qahtani, the supposedly invulnerable Mahdi, fell to a grenade on the siege’s third day.867 But the fact remains: Absent end-times belief, the Grand Mosque siege would not have occurred.

The Saudis had smothered the Ikhwan fire of 1979, just as they had done with the Ikhwan Revolt of 1927–1930. But in both cases, that fire continued to smolder, and in the coming decades the winds of global conflict would carry the embers of the Grand Mosque siege well beyond the kingdom’s borders. This time, new technology would enable Juhayman’s heirs to fan the flames much hotter and brighter than in 1979.

Those embers began to burn brighter even before the Mosque had been cleared of blood and debris. Three weeks after Saudi forces had taken care of the last of Juhayman’s rebels, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. This was no coincidence; the Soviets sensed weakness in both the American response to Iran’s 1979 Tehran embassy siezure and also in the Saudi monarchy, which had just suffered not only the Grand Mosque siege, but also an unrelated Shiite rebellion in the eastern peninsula.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan proved a catastrophic mistake; the country became a magnet for the new breed of jihadis, many of whom were supporters and sympathizers of Juhayman, who had gained legendary status in the Afghan mujahideen camps. Smarting from its hands-off policies in the Middle East, the United States aggressively supported the fighters who flooded into Afghanistan from around the Muslim world. One combatant was the son of the man who had renovated and expanded the Grand Mosque, and whose brother’s blueprints proved invaluable in its retaking: the young Osama bin Laden.

In the wake of the Mosque seizure, a Palestinian living in Kuwait named Isam al-Barqawi, who at some point changed his name to Muhammad al-Maqdisi, discovered Juhayman’s letters and found his way to that nation’s JSM branch, which provided refuge to the sect’s fugitive members. Maqdisi then went to Medina for religious study and in the following years traveled around Saudi Arabia and Jordan prior to arriving in Peshawar, Pakistan, the main portal into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. At each stop, he sought out Juhayman’s followers. Maqdisi was so taken with Juhayman’s legend that he mimicked his hero’s physical appearance by growing long hair and a tangled beard and claiming a nonexistent blood relationship with the Ikhwan hero.868

Eventually, Maqdisi settled down in Jordan, where he rotated in and out of jails between 1995 and 2014. More than any other Muslim thinker, he laid the ideological foundation for today’s jihadism. A recent study of jihadi scholars found that Maqdisi, who had spent his adult life immersed in the Koran and hadith, was the radical Islamist most cited in Muslim apocalyptic literature.869

During his first Jordanian jail stint in 1995–1999, Maqdisi mentored a Jordanian petty criminal named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Both were released in 1999, at which point they separated in both space and theology. The teacher remained in Jordan, and while he at times criticized extreme colleagues, he was certain of one thing: Devout Muslims were duty-bound to travel to Syria to participate in the coming end-times struggle against the Dajjal, and if not to Syria, then to Yemen. The student, Zarqawi, decamped for Afghanistan and developed an intolerant and murderous ideology that endures to this day despite his death.

Zarqawi had an uncanny knack for arriving at places just before U.S.-led military actions, first Afghanistan, and then upon his escape from there, Iraq, where he almost single-handedly wrote the violent jihadi playbook of suicide attacks, kidnapping, and beheading of Westerners, along with skillful internet-based recruitment.

In 2004, Zarqawi participated in both battles for Falluja and declared his allegiance to Osama bin Laden. By this point, Maqdisi had rejected Juhayman’s apocalypticism, but Zarqawi did not, and with the swift defeat of Saddam Hussein’s forces, Zarqawi’s propaganda took on an increasingly end-times tenor. Early on, he learned that apocalyptic propaganda attracted recruits, a lesson that the Islamic State would later absorb, which set in motion a vicious cycle: The worse things went for him on the battlefield, the more apocalyptic his tone became, attracting yet more recruits, which yielded yet more battlefield casualties.

Zarqawi never took his eye off his primary goal, the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy, which in 1994 had inked a peace treaty with the Israelis. Describing the Jordanians as “slaves of the Zionists,” he often applied the prophetic term “the corrupt ruler” to its king, Abdullah II. Zarqawi also despised Shiites and their Iranian power center, and he often referred to ancient prophecies that denigrated Shiism, especially those relating to the initial Arab defeat of the Persian Sasanian Empire at al-Qadisiyah in a.d. 636, as well as other prophecies that associated later Persian Islam with the hated Mongols. To Zarqawi, it was clear that Shiites, not the Jews, were the Dajjal, as were the U.S. invaders; not only was murdering them a theological necessity, but as a bonus such acts would ignite a sectarian war that would hasten the end-times.

By exploiting the rich apocalyptic literature associated with the early Muslim struggles against the Byzantines, Zarqawi referred to U.S. forces using the ancient shorthand for both the Byzantines and western Rome, rum. (Al-Qaeda, by contrast, applied the equally damning label of “crusader” to U.S.-led forces.) Whenever he could, he likened the battles of the Prophet to his own. He was especially fond of the well-known hadith of Thawban, in which the Prophet tells his followers that “the nations are about to flock against you from every horizon, just as hungry people flock to a kettle.” He viewed Iraq’s 2005 democratic constitution a catastrophe, and to console himself quoted from a Bukhari-approved hadith that even when the righteous are defeated, “in this way the messengers are tested then they win in the end.” 870

Zarqawi’s indiscriminate suicide bombings, beheadings, and disregard for innocent lives eventually alienated even members of his organization, who likely betrayed the location of his “spiritual adviser,” Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, which then enabled bomb-laden U.S. F-16s to find Zarqawi on June 7, 2006.871

Zarqawi had also spoken of reestablishing the caliphate, the last pale iteration of which had been abolished by Turkey in 1924, a goal he ultimately rejected, since a legitimate caliphate required conquered territory and the support of its population. The caliphate would have to wait; both he and bin Laden had proclaimed a less exalted entity, an “emirate,” in, respectively, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The difference between an emirate and a caliphate is critical; an emirate rules over limited territory, whereas the caliphate rules over all Muslims, and it also implies the onset of the end-times. While Zarqawi thought the Apocalypse was drawing near, he did not think it had arrived yet. Nonetheless, the issue of the precise arrival of the end-times and caliphate would split apart bin Laden’s “Al-Qaeda Central” operation in Afghanistan from Zarqawi’s in Iraq. Just before Zarqawi succumbed in the 2006 air attack, he commanded his followers to declare the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). His organization did so four months later, on October 15, 2006, an action that gobsmacked al-Qaeda, which deemed it foolish to announce the new state without territorial control.

The split between al-Qaeda and the ISI in some way resembled that between mainstream and evangelical Protestants. Just as urbane and well-educated Episcopalians and Presbyterians looked down disdainfully on the end-times speculation of their dispensationalist co-religionists as gibberish spouted by the unwashed, so, too, did the privileged bin Laden disdain the uninformed apocalypticism of Zarqawi as that of a barely literate small-time thug. His terrorism notwithstanding, bin Laden was an aristocrat. His father, Mohammed bin Laden, was a patriarch peculiar to that part of the world. Originally from Yemen, he began his adult life as a porter in Mecca’s port city of Jeddah, and eventually became the general contractor for the Saudi royal family; today, the Saudi Binladen Group is one of the world’s largest contracting firms. He married no fewer than twenty-two women and fathered fifty-four children, the seventeenth of whom was Osama, whose mother gave birth to him at age fifteen.

Mohammed divorced her soon after Osama’s birth and married her off to a company executive, who became Osama’s stepfather, and although the boy was no longer under Mohammed’s roof, the two maintained loose ties; more importantly, the young man enjoyed his father’s largess. This included an elite education at multiple private institutions, most importantly at Jeddah’s prestigious Al-Thagr School, at that time a hotbed of both Arab nationalist and Islamist ideology, the latter of which the young Osama adopted. In 1967, his father died in a plane crash when Osama was only ten; later, after graduating from King Abdulaziz University in 1979, he joined the family construction business. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan that same year, it became fashionable for young Saudis to journey there to do humanitarian work or fight with the mujahideen. Initially sent there by the company, Osama segued from the business of construction to the business of jihad.872

To the high-born and engineering-minded bin Laden, jihad was a methodical, hardheaded affair, not a messianic one. To cite just one example, he would later warn his apocalyptic-minded followers in Somalia, al-Shabab, that climate change threatened Islam in its arid homelands as much as did foreign troops, and would recommend that they plant heat-resistant trees. Wisecracked Arabist William McCants, “If you didn’t know he ran the world’s most notorious terrorist organization, you’d think bin Laden was an officer working for the United States Agency for International Development.”873

Bin Laden had another reason to distrust Zarqawi’s apocalypticism. His 1979 graduation year saw the Grand Mosque seizure, which his brother Salem, with his knowledge of its renovation, had participated in retaking.874 The bin Ladens thus saw firsthand just what happens when a poorly thought-out end-times–soaked strategy collides with real-world geopolitical power, particularly when the former possesses neither political nor military control of its geographical base.

Al-Qaeda’s first order of business would be to strike at the “far enemy,” the United States, and drive its troops out of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. The 9/11 attacks accomplished exactly the opposite. Bin Laden’s strategy for the “near enemy” in the Middle East was the overthrow of its corrupt leaderships, and doing so required a “hearts and minds” approach that eschewed the suicide bombings, beheadings, and the mass extermination of Shiites perpetrated by his more zealous followers in Iraq.

The concept of near and far enemies had been coined by an Egyptian Islamist named Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj, who applied the former term to his own government, and the latter term to Israel. This terminology was picked up by Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who became bin Laden’s lieutenant. In 1982, the Egyptians executed Faraj for his role in the Sadat assassination, while the prickly and uncharismatic Zawahiri inherited al-Qaeda’s leadership after bin Laden’s elimination in 2011, and shared his disdain for apocalypticism.

ISI stopped short of establishing the caliphate, but in 2006, its nominal ruling body, the Mujahideen Shura Council, named an almost completely unknown figure, Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, as “commander of the faithful.” Baghdadi claimed descent from the Prophet and was thus technically qualified as caliph, but his putative prophetic bloodline was likely bogus. His real name was Hamid al-Zawi, a former policeman, electronics repairman, and imam of no great learning or repute. In reality, an Egyptian disciple of Zarqawi, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was running ISI’s operations.

Earlier in that same year, ISI had chosen as its symbol the black flag, which carried the seal of the prophet and the inscription “No god but God, Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” Given the apocalyptic hadith prophecy that spoke of “the black banners coming from Khorasan” (i.e., Afghanistan), the end-times augury of ISI’s flag could hardly have been more clear.875

ISI had struck a rich vein in a Muslim world riven by strife and poverty. Survey data show that even more of the world’s Muslims expect the end-times than do Christians. One Pew Center study found that 51 percent of the Middle East’s Muslims believe in the Mahdi’s imminent return, a figure that was likely higher in the cauldron of post-invasion Iraq.876 (As with other sociologic data on religiosity, the poorer the nation, the more fervent the belief; the figure was 60 percent among South Asian Muslims, but only 18 percent among Balkan Muslims.)877 Intentionally or not, ISI had adopted an apocalyptic narrative far more compelling than the stale salafist theology of bin Laden, and particularly that of his uncharismatic successor, Zawahiri.

If anyone believed in the imminence of the Mahdi’s arrival, it was ISI’s de facto leader, Masri. To expedite the process, he had his troops build pulpits for the Mahdi’s transit through the three great mosques in Medina, Jerusalem, and Damascus. Masri also needed to conquer and hold territory to speed the Mahdi’s arrival. To doubters, he offered this simple reply: “The Mahdi will come any day.”878

Masri’s zeal and granite religious certitude justified a string of atrocities even worse than Zarqawi’s. ISI slaughtered not only Shiites, but also any Sunni who withheld allegiance; used as human shields women and sick children; and blew up homes and hospitals. It widely enforced hudud: the stoning of adulterers, amputation for theft, and flogging for alcohol consumption. On one occasion ISI beheaded an eight-year-old girl.

As reports of escalating ISI butchery reached al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, bin Laden and Zawahiri tried to regain control of their Iraqi franchise, but received back only dilatory responses, when they got them at all.879 American officials observed Masri’s gross strategic and tactical errors with wonder and reduced the price on his head from $5 million to $100,000; some analysts speculated that he was an actor playing a theatrical role. Masri’s wife offered perhaps the most succinct description of her husband’s pigheaded, inept brutality: “Where is the Islamic State of Iraq you’re talking about? We’re living in the desert!” On April 18, 2010, a joint raid by Iraqi and American forces cornered both Masri and Baghdadi near Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown. Faced with surrender, they blew themselves up.880

For all its failures, ISI had rediscovered a truth well known to Lindsey, LaHaye, and Jenkins: Apocalypse sells, and the bloodier, the better. In the twenty-first century, ISI could advertise the Apocalypse to the whole world via websites and social media. Its most common media product was the simple press release:

A brave, daring brother, one of the heroes of the Islamic State of Iraq, a member of the Martyrdom-Seekers-Brigade . . . plunged his explosives-laden car into a command post of the American crusader army at the Jerusalem intersection in the Al-Mafriq district of Diyala Governorate. Our heroic brother cried out, “Allahu Akbar,” and detonated the car . . . killing more than 11 soldiers of the Idolatrous Guard and destroying two Bradley armored fighting vehicles.881

The internet made possible not only a wide range of written material, but even more compelling videos. ISI sympathizers in both the Middle East and the West thrilled to clips depicting attacks on “crusader” troops, often from multiple camera angles; the caption of one video of the destruction of an American truck with an improvised explosive device read, “Their last moments.” Longer videos featured “greatest hits” attack compilations, martyr profiles, plan-to-execution documentaries, and motivational montages. Nor were American and Iraqi troops the only targets; films featuring the execution of Shiite prisoners proved especially popular.882

As early as 2008, the Yemeni bin Laden franchise, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), had already advanced the art of Islamic apocalyptic propaganda with a pair of magazines, The Echo of Battles and Inspire. The latter was an English-language periodical run by a Pakistani raised in North Carolina, Samir Khan, who had a knack for catchy article titles, such as “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”; around 2010, he began to write apocalypse-laden pieces for Inspire.

Khan was the disciple of a charismatic and influential imam, an ­American-raised U.S. citizen of Yemeni extraction named Anwar al-­Awlaki, who intoned in one of his articles:

Mu’jam al-Kabir and others by way of Ibn Abbas [report that] the Prophet said: “An army of twelve-thousand will come out of Aden-Abyan [Yemen]. They will give victory to Allah and His messenger. They are the best between myself and them!”

About that hadith the honorable Shaykh Sulayman ibn Nasir al-Ulwan—may Allah hasten his release—said that the hadith’s chain is good and its narrators are acceptable.883

Rather than rely on his own analysis of the first paragraph of the above passage, Awlaki cited a higher authority in the second, in this case a prestigious, and imprisoned, Saudi Islamist theologian named Sulayman ibn Nasir al-Ulwan, who vouched for the integrity of the hadith’s transmission chain back to the Prophet.884

Awlaki’s apocalypse-laden articles, lectures, and videos inspired a number of terror attacks. Some of them were effected by disciples he had been in personal contact with, and may even have directed, such as “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; while others were inspired to act from afar, such as Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist with whom he had exchanged emails; and the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, who described himself as merely Awlaki’s “fan and follower.”885

In the end, AQAP went down the same senselessly violent road as ISI; this drew the disapproval of the parent organization in Afghanistan, whose command had devolved to Zawahiri after bin Laden’s death in 2011. AQAP failed to provide adequate services to people in the small territory it controlled and succumbed to superior foreign forces. On September 30, 2011, a controversial U.S. drone strike in Yemen killed Khan and Awlaki—both U.S. citizens. Tragically, another drone strike killed Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son Abdulrahman, supposedly by accident; and on January 29, 2017, a disastrous commando raid resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL and Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter.886

By 2010, ISI seemed to be on the ropes, but this would change when the United States withdrew its fighting troops from Iraq during the beginning of the Obama administration, leaving behind a much smaller cadre of trainers and advisers. The United States threw its support behind Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, a highly partisan Shiite politician whose repressive tactics drove even moderate Sunnis into the arms of ISI.

A month after the April 2010 deaths of Masri and Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, an opportunist and minor Islamic scholar named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi assumed leadership.887 Little is known for sure about him, since his immediate family members, said to be of descent from the Prophet, have disappeared. He seems to have been a bookish young man whose poor eyesight kept him out of Saddam’s army and who early on earned the nickname “the Believer.” He immersed himself in the Koran and hadith and may or may not have earned a Ph.D. from Baghdad’s Saddam University for Islamic Studies, which the dictator established to co-opt the religious establishment.

Aside from Islamic scripture, the “new Baghdadi” had two other passions: soccer, at which he excelled, and the enforcement of public morality. He was said to have a fiery temper that could be ignited either by a missed goal attempt or the sight of mixed couples dancing at a wedding.

Soon after the 2003 American invasion, Baghdadi organized an obscure resistance group and was captured in Falluja in February 2004. He was popular among his fellow inmates at Camp Bucca, which held twenty-four thousand detainees and was called by one observer a “virtual terrorist university” where jihadis compared notes, networked, and wrote each other’s contact information in the elastic bands of their boxer shorts. Almost immediately after release, they would undress, cut out the critical data from their underwear, and use it to regroup and organize.

Baghdadi charmed his American captors into an early release, likely after just several months, upon which he almost immediately connected with Zarqawi’s outfit. As a religious scholar, he was a valuable commodity who could provide theological cover for ISI’s brutal campaign of stoning adulterers, amputating the limbs of thieves, and massacring Shiites and other apostates. In 2007, he took a break from these labors and traveled to Baghdad to defend his doctoral dissertation.

The April 2010 loss of Masri and Abu Umar opened up the leadership positions to Camp Bucca alumni, and Baghdadi, with his charisma, scholarly reputation, internment camp connections, and supposed Qurayshi descent, topped the list.888

Over the next several years, the dwindling American presence in Iraq allowed Baghdadi to expand his influence throughout the country, and then into Syria. In April 2013, he asserted leadership over al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria, much to its surprise as well as that of al-Qaeda Central, now under the control of Zawahiri, who kicked ISI out of its organization. With the Syrian civil conflict in full swing, President Bashar al-Assad effectively sided with ISI by selectively bombing its rivals and leaving ISI nearly untouched.

By mid-June, ISI had conquered Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and Baghdadi now found himself in charge of a fiefdom that had obliterated the frontier between Syria and Iraq, drawn in 1916 by the hated Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement.889 The turnaround in ISI’s fortunes stunned the Western alliance; only six months before, President Obama had told journalist David Remnick that “if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Although Obama was talking specifically about al-Qaeda’s ability to strike U.S. territory, his timing could not have been worse.890

As with Hal Lindsey and Juhayman’s Grand Mosque siege, “the great jigsaw puzzle” had fallen nearly into place for ISI: with the world in moral and political disarray and a borderless kingdom under the rule of one of the prophet’s descendants, the caliphate was surely at hand. All that was needed was a theological foundation for the caliph’s anointment.

That task fell to a jihadi scholar by the name of Turki al-Binali, a Bahraini theologian formidable enough to be considered Maqdisi’s heir apparent. Like his teacher, he had moved in and out of prison, and as ISI was gathering steam in Syria in early 2014, he arrived there to witness the birth of the caliphate: “Is it reasonable that we would return, having arrived in the Sham [Syria] of epic battles and warfare? . . . A land wherein the rule is Islam is my home; there is my dwelling and there do I belong.”891

To the chagrin of his mentor Maqdisi, who certainly didn’t believe that the caliphate was at hand, Binali would shortly pen an essay entitled “Extend Your Hands to Give Baya to Baghdadi.”892

On June 29, 2014, the first day of Ramadan, Baghdadi declared the reestablishment of the caliphate, with himself as Caliph Ibrahim. Five days later, the caliph, who had never before appeared before a public gathering, mounted the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in newly conquered Mosul bedecked in a black turban and robe, humbly accepted leadership, then demanded obedience from the world’s Muslims. In addition to the classical clerical garb, he also sported a flashy, expensive watch of the sort favored by high-level jihadis that, among other features, announced the five daily prayers.893

Henceforth, ISI’s leadership decided that it was now to be known simply as the Islamic State (IS). Several weeks later, IS propagandists would publish the first issue of Dabiq, headlined “The Return of Khilafah”: the rebirth of the caliphate. Initially posted only on the “dark web,” Dabiq published fifteen issues between 2014 and 2016 that are now freely available on the open internet.894

By late 2015, approximately thirty thousand foreign fighters, hailing from at least eighty-six nations, had traveled to join IS, about one-sixth of them from Western nations.895 The contrast with bin Laden’s lengthy, turgid Arabic language communiqués could hardly have been more striking; IS aimed its snappy English-, French-, and German-language editions of Dabiq’s maiden issue squarely at potential Western recruits, especially those lacking a deep understanding of Islamic eschatology.

Prophetic allusions to the coming Armageddon with the West filled its pages, starting with its version of the most famous apocalyptic hadith, in their printing, “The Hour will not be established until the Romans land at Amaq or Dabiq,” and proceeded through the prophesized return of Jesus, before whom the enemy “will melt as salt melts with water.” For those who still didn’t grasp the prophetic meaning, the authors supplied an abbreviated version:

According to the hadith, the area [around Dabiq] will play a historical role in the battles leading up to the conquests of Constantinople, then Rome. Presently, Dabiq is under the control of the crusader-backed sahwat [Sunni puppets], close to the warfront between them and the Khilafah [caliphate].896

Shortly, IS would fulfill that prophecy by taking the symbolic but strategically inconsequential town of Dabiq. The Islamic State’s forces, swollen with fighters from around the globe, would, according to its narrative, re-create the caliphate and restore Islam to its proper place in the world: “Soon, by Allah’s permission, a day will come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master, having honor, being revered, with his head raised high and his dignity preserved.”897

Save for the identity of the heroes and villains, the magazine’s Manichean worldview was nearly identical to Lindsey and LaHaye’s:

Indeed the world today has been divided into two camps and two trenches, with no third camp present: The camp of Islam and faith, and the camp of kufr (disbelief) and hypocrisy—the camp of the Muslims and the mujahidin everywhere, and the camp of the Jews, the crusaders, their allies, and with them the rest of the nations and religions of kufr, all being led by America and Russia, and being mobilized by the Jews.898

This prophecy was followed by gory images of atrocities against Sunnis and the execution of their Shiite perpetrators, the former to generate sympathy among supporters, the latter to generate fear among opponents. Glowing descriptions ensued of Caliph Ibrahim and, bizarrely, a photo of a distinguished-looking U.S. National Security Council official, Douglas Ollivant, behind a Cato Institute podium accompanied by text of his description of IS’s fearsome capabilities.899 The magazine then laid out IS’s five-step roadmap to victory, which led from hegira (emigration to IS territory) to Khilafah.

Strangely, the Mahdi, who had figured so prominently in the Grand Mosque siege, went largely unmentioned. Exactly why is uncertain; perhaps his appearance demands a date and is thus prone to a Great Disappointment; perhaps the Mahdi’s disastrous role in the 1979 siege devalued his stock. Instead, the IS narrative, rather, focused to a great extent on the victory of the prophet Jesus over the Dajjal.900

The Westerners who made the hegira to IS territory generally didn’t speak Arabic and had no military training, and so were of little use, with one exception: those with media experience. One of IS’s productions, a thirteen-minute video, featured multiple jihadis from Europe and Australia who extolled the caliphate: “We understand no borders—we have participated in battles in Sham [Syria] and we will go to Iraq in a few days and fight there and come back. We will even go to Jordan and Lebanon with no problems.” Another video showed an IS fighter bragging of attacking Israel and lamenting deformed babies born to “our sisters in Falluja,” while another delivered the punch line: leave your “fat jobs” in the West: “Ask yourself what prevents you and what keeps you behind. It’s your wealth.”901

Jihadi media specialists used music, the royal road to the limbic system, as adroitly as did Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will or as in the slickest American campaign ad. Since devout Muslims eschew musical instruments, the Islamist tunes featured hypnotic a cappella songs, anashid (singular, nashid) that declaimed the praises of the coming caliphate and exhorted the faithful to martyrdom.

Anashid have figured prominently during multiple Islamist terror attacks. For example, after the Tsarnaev brothers perpetrated the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when they failed to connect their iPhones to the stereo of their carjacked vehicle to listen to militant anashid, they took the risk of driving back to their own abandoned car to retrieve the CD that contained them. Anwar al-Awlaki was especially impressed with the magnetism of jihadi music: “A good nashid can spread so widely it can reach to an audience that you could not reach through a lecture or a book.”902

The prospect of taking part in a grand adventure built on a fourteen-century-old apocalyptic narrative proved irresistible to many young people alienated by their aimless and seemingly meaningless lives in the West, and was manifest in a high percentage of recent converts among European jihadi recruits.903 As one Syrian Sunni rebel told a Reuters correspondent, “If you think all these mujahideen came from across the world to fight Assad, you’re mistaken. They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised—it is the Grand Battle.”904905

As psychologists Timothy Brock and Melanie Green pointed out, the more powerful the narrative, the more it corrodes critical thinking. To the alienated recruits fed up with a Western-dominated world, IS’s narrative was powerful enough to supply theological cover for a chamber of horrors that included ethnically based mass murder, rape, and slavery.

Following the spectacular IS conquests in August 2014 in northern Iraq, members of the large Yazidi sect of Islam in Sinjar Province found themselves under IS rule. The fourth issue of Dabiq, published on October 11, 2014, did not just rationalize the persecution of the sect, but glorified it as a means of encouraging adherents to participate in racially driven mass slavery, rape, and murder.

The Yazidis believe that Allah entrusted the world to seven angels, prime among them being the Malik Tous, whom they especially revere. Such heresy, explained Dabiq, rendered the Yazidis “mushrikin”—­polytheists/pagans: “Their creed is so deviant from the truth that even cross-worshipping Christians for ages consider them devil-worshippers and Satanists.” And when it came to mushrikin, the Koran, said Dabiq, was clear:

And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the mushrikin wherever you find them, and capture them, and besiege them, and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, establish prayer, and give zakah [tax paid by Muslims], let them [go] on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.

Unlike Christians and Jews, “people of the book” who could skate by with payment of a jizyah (tax paid by non-Muslims) IS viewed the Yazidis as pagans. IS theologians debated whether Yazidis had always been pagans, or had first been Muslims who later became apostate. This distinction was critical, since apostate women had to be offered the same choice as their men—conversion or death—whereas women of an originally pagan race could be enslaved.

Dabiq informed readers that IS had decided the Yazidis had always been pagans, which condemned their women to slavery. But Allah is merciful, and did not allow their sex slaves to be separated from their children. Better yet, according to one hadith, when “the slave girl gives birth to her master,” it is a sign of The Hour, though there seemed to be confusion as how to interpret this ambiguous phrase. Maybe it meant that the child of the master becomes the master, or that the increase in slaves by itself is a sign of The Hour, or that in the End men turn away from marriage and make do with concubines alone. In any case, taking the women of nonbelievers, according to Dabiq, “is a firmly established aspect of the Sharia that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet, and thereby apostatizing from Islam.”906

As a consequence, IS offered Yazidi men conversion; IS fighters slit the throats or blew out the brains of those who refused, often in front of their families. Four-fifths of the women and children were divided among the fighters, and the remaining fifth went to the organization, with the women captives often enduring repeated gang rape. Many Yazidis did manage to escape only to die of starvation. As of 2017, the United Nations estimated that IS had killed three thousand Yazidis and abducted seven thousand.907

Beginning in mid-2014, IS directed and inspired attacks around the world, most spectacularly the November 13, 2015, slaughter at the Bataclan concert hall and other Paris locations that killed 130 and injured 530; and the July 14, 2016, National Day truck attack in Nice that killed 84 and injured 458. It’s estimated that by August 2019, IS-directed and IS-inspired attacks outside Syria and Iraq had taken more than 3,800 lives.908

The mid-2014 ascension of Baghdadi to Caliph Ibrahim more or less marked the apogee of IS, which then controlled a population of approximately eight million and vast stores of arms and income from oil fields and refineries. Its shocking victories in Iraq and Syria and worldwide terrorism capability drew a Western military response, and the combination of IS’s extreme brutality and the replacement of Iraqi prime minister Maliki with the more conciliatory Hiader al-Abadi loosened IS’s hold on Sunnis. Beginning in October 2016, an increasingly effective Iraqi military, aided by U.S.-led air strikes and Kurdish forces, slowly regained territory in the Mosul region, capped by the cataclysmic recapture of the eastern section of the city in late January 2017. In excess of ten thousand civilians and about one thousand coalition forces may have died in the assault; as many as sixteen thousand of IS’s fighters were killed in this single action, by which point it was a shadow of its former self; on October 26, 2019, a U.S. Special Forces raid in northwestern Syria cornered al-Baghdadi, who detonated an explosive vest that killed him and two of his children.909

Over the course of the entire conflict with ISI/IS, Iraqi- and U.S.-led foreign forces may have killed as many as sixty thousand IS fighters. The reversal of IS’s fortunes on the battlefield corroded its ability to plan and inspire terrorist attacks in the West, although it is still capable of mounting devastating operations in the Middle East and Asia. Dabiq ceased publication in 2016, and by early 2018, the flow of propaganda had fallen by about two-thirds.

As predicted by many observers of Islamic apocalypticism, the cessation of further conquest was preordained by mid-2014; IS already controlled the Sunni heartlands of Iraq and Syria, and it was hardly going to make further conquests into Turkey, Kurdish-held territory, and Shiite areas. Absent any ongoing conquests, the caliphate lost its legitimacy and recruiting power.910

In addition, IS’s initial victories produced a strategic backlash from Iraqi Shiite militias, particularly from forces led by the influential imam Muqtada al-Sadr. In late 2014, a plea from the usually peaceable Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s highest Shiite cleric, for fighters to “defend the country, its people, the honor of its citizens and its sacred places” produced a torrent of enthusiastic recruits. These Shiite militia forces were heavily supported by Iranian money, men, and matériel of the elite Quds Force, led by its legendary commander, Qassem Soleimani (who was killed in 2020 by a U.S. drone strike). In the brutal follow-up revenge operations, they murdered thousands of otherwise innocent Sunnis.911

With no further territory to acquire and a rapidly reversing military situation, the prospect of accelerating the Apocalypse, along with its financial reward and infidel sex slaves, shrank; and by mid-2016, those training camps that had not been bombed into rubble closed for lack of recruits. On October 17, 2017, IS’s “capital” at Raqqa, Syria, fell to a force of Syrian rebels backed by U.S. Special Forces, and in late March 2019, coalition forces conquered the last IS-held territory.912

While the Islamic State remains a potent actor in the Middle East and its disciples in the West are still capable of mounting lone-wolf attacks, the apocalyptic narrative leading to a triumphant, ever-expanding caliphate has evaporated, and IS no longer attracts thousands of starry-eyed young adherents from developed nations.

Nonetheless, wherever there is society-wide humiliation and disappointment, apocalypticism can and will flourish. This is certainly true in much of the Muslim world today, especially where it has suffered defeat, real or imagined, at the hands of the West.

Furthermore, as the late-twentieth-century rise of Christian apocalypticism demonstrates, end-times narratives can flourish even in successful, prosperous societies, and all three Abrahamic faiths have proven fertile ground for them. The human hunger for compelling narratives, of which the end-times is the most seductive, almost invariably exacerbates another unfortunate human tendency, our proclivity to in-group/out-group behavior. A significant minority of people will always find irresistible the notion that they are members of an elect few who will usher in a virtuous new order that condemns nonbelievers to burn, a delusion that has driven religious mass manias for centuries, from John Bockelson and his followers in Münster to William Miller’s and Jerry Falwell’s in the United States, to the tens of thousands attracted to the inferno of the Islamic State.

825. “Dabiq: Why is Syrian town so important for IS?” BBC News (October 4, 2016), http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-30083303, accessed May 30, 2018.

826. On June 29, 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the caliphate, its name was shortened to the Islamic State (IS, Daesh). Before that date, it was most commonly referred to as ISI (Islamic State of Iraq), ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), or ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (Syria).

827. David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, Inc., 2002), 8.

828. David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 84.

829. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996), 257–258.

830. ‘Arif, Muhammad ‘Izzat, Hal al-Dajjal yahkum al-‘alam al-an? (Cairo: Dar al-I’tisam, 1997), 85, quoted in Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 220.

831. Jean-Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam, trans. M.B. Devoise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 14; and Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 16.

832. Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, 6–13.

833. William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2015), 23.

834. Ibid., 26.

835. Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 7.

836. Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, 95–97.

837. Thomas Lippman, Inside the Mirage (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), 220; Bruce Riedel, Kings and Presidents (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 50; and Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 23, 33.

838. Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 117.

839. Filiu, 14; and Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 8, 50–52.

840. Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 8–11; Filiu, xi, 11–18.

841. Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 232–233.

842. Quoted in Gorenberg, 188.

843. Ibid., 191.

844. Filiu, 83–94, quote 86; and Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, 64, 68.

845. Personal communication, Jean-Pierre Filiu.

846. Filiu, 140.

847. The Islamic year runs on a lunar cycle for 354 or 355 days, so converting from a.d. to a.h. (anno hegirae) is not a simple matter of subtraction; with each passing century, the gap between a.d. and a.h. decreases by about two years. (This is a little counterintuitive; in the year of the hijra, the a.d./a.h. gap was obviously 622 – 1, or 621 years. The year of this book’s publication in 2021 corresponds, depending on the exact month, to around a.h. 1442; the a.d./a.h. gap has thus shrunk to 2021 – 1442 = 579 years.)

848. Filiu, 62–63.

849. Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 76–79.

850. Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveler (London: Edward Arnold, 1898), 41.

851. The ban now applies to all of metropolitan Mecca, but only the immediate vicinity of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.

852. Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom (New York: Viking Press, 2009), 15–16.

853. Ibid., 3.

854. Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix, “Rejectionist Islamism in Saudi Arabia: The Story of Juyahman al-‘Utaybi Revisited,” International Journal of Middle East Studies Vol. 39 (2007): 104–106; and Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 11–28.

855. Hegghammer and Lacroix, 106–109.

856. Trofimov, 20–49.

857. Hegghammer and Lacroix, 108–110.

858. Filiu, 16.

859. Lacey, 21.

860. Trofimov, 51.

861. For a detailed description of the letters, see Joseph A. Kechichian, “Islamic Revivalism and Change in Saudi Arabia: Juhaymān Al’Utaybī’s ‘Letters’ to the Saudi People,” The Muslim World Vol. 80, No. 1 (January 1990): 9–15. The author plays down the importance of the letters’ eschatological content, and describes their aim as at the corruption of the Saudi regime and ulema (the high religious council), particularly bin Baz. He also states that Qahtani was not declared Mahdi at the Mosque uprising, which contradicts most other observers.

862. Sticklers will note that just as with the Western Gregorian calendar, the new century did not in actuality begin until 1401 a.h.

863. Lacey, 22–23.

864. Trofimov, 170–172.

865. Trofimov, 68–255; and Kechichian, 1–8.

866. Hegghammer and Lacroix, 109–112.

867. Ibid., 114.

868. Ibid., 29, 248–249.

869. McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 50–51, 196n12.

870. David Cook, “Abu Musa’b al-Suri and Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi: The Apocalyptic Theorist and the Apocalyptic Practitioner,” private working paper, cited with permission from the author. Quote from hadith of Thawban from Cook, “Fighting to Create a Just State: Apocalypticism in Radical Muslim Discourse,” in Sohail H. Hashimi, Ed., Just Wars, Holy Wars, and Jihads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 374.

871. Dexter Filkins et al., “How Surveillance and Betrayal Led to a Hunt’s End,” The New York Times, June 9, 2006.

872. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), 12–15, 137–152, 252–256.

873. McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 66.

874. Trofimov, 161.

875. McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 10–22.

876. Pew Research Center, “The World’s Muslims: Unity and Diversity,” 57, http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2012/08/the-worlds-muslims-full-report.pdf.

877. Ibid.

878. McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 32.

879. Ibid., 32–42.

880. Cole Bunzel, From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State (Washington, DC: Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, 2015), 22–23.

881. Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo, Iraqi Insurgent Media (Washington, DC: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2007), 4–5.

882. Ibid., 27–29, 70–71.

883. Anwar al-Awlaki, Full text of “Anwar Nasser Aulaqi” from FBI files, available at https://archive.org/stream/AnwarNasserAulaqi/Anwar%20Nasser%20Aulaqi%2010_djvu.txt, accessed June 6, 2018.

884. The FBI’s transliteration of Alwan’s name varies from his more commonly used one.

885. Hugh Macleod, “YouTube Islamist: how Anwar al-Awlaki became al-Qaeda’s link to local terror,” The Guardian, May 7, 2010.

886. Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Commando Killed in Yemen in Trump’s First Counterterrorism Operation,” The New York Times, January 29, 2017; Charlie Savage, “Court Releases Large Parts of Memo Approving Killing of American in Yemen,” The New York Times, June 23, 2014; Mark Mazetti et al., “Two-Year Manhunt Led to Killing of Awlaki in Yemen, The New York Times, September 30, 2011; and McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 60.

887. The similarity in names is trivial: “al-Baghdadi” simply indicates that someone is from Baghdad (which also conveys the historical prestige of the former Abassid capital). Abu Bakr and Umar are common Arabic appellations, since those were the first and second caliphs after Muhammad; Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is thus the Iraqi equivalent of “David from New York.”

888. Martin Chulov, “ISIS: the inside story,” The Guardian, December 11, 2014; Janine di Giovanni, “Who Is ISIS Leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi?,” Newsweek, December 8, 2014; and William McCants, “The Believer,” Brookings Essay (September 1, 2015), http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2015/thebeliever.html, accessed June 8, 2018.

889. McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 85–98.

890. David Remnick, “Going the Distance: On and off the road with Barack Obama,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2014.

891. http://www.jihadica.com/the-caliphate%E2%80%99s-scholar-in-arms/, accessed September 6, 2019.

892. Cole Bunzel, “The Caliphate’s Scholar-in-Arms,” http://www.jihadica.com/the-caliphate%E2%80%99s-scholar-in-arms/, accessed June 10, 2018.

893. Amar Benaziz and Nick Thompson, “Is ISIS leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi’s bling timepiece a Rolex or an ‘Islamic watch’?,” CNN, July 10, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/10/world/meast/iraq-baghdadi-watch/index.html, accessed June 12, 2018.

894. The English language issues of Dabiq are available from wide variety of sources, ranging from Islamist to Islamophobic to public policy sites. For the last issue, for example, see “The Return of the Khilafah,” https://jihadology.net/2016/07/31/new-issue-of-the-islamic-states-magazine-dabiq-15/, then follow the “previous issue” links back to Issue 1. The magazine was also published in Arabic, French, and German.

895. The Soufan Group, “Foreign Fighters: An Updated Assessment of the Flow of Foreign Fighters into Syria and Iraq,” December 2015.

896. Dabiq, “The Return of the Khilafah,” 4–5, 26.

897. Ibid., 8.

898. Ibid., 10.

899. Ibid., 32–33.

900. McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 142–143.

901. Robert Mackey, “The Case for ISIS, Made in a British Accent,” The New York Times, June 20, 2014.

902. Nelly Lahoud and Jonathan Pieslak, “Music of the Islamic State,” Survival Vol. 61, No. 1 (2018): 153–168, quote 155.

903. Richard Barrett, “Foreign Fighters in Syria,” The Soufan Group, June 2014.

904. In Arabic, “Grand Battle” also translates as “slaughter.”

905. Mariam Karouny, “Apocalyptic prophecies drive both sides to Syrian battle for end of time,” Reuters, April 1, 2014, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-prophecy-insight/apocalyptic-prophecies-drive-both-sides-to-syrian-battle-for-end-of-time-idUSBREA3013420140401, accessed June 12, 2018.

906. Anonymous, “The Revival of Slavery before the Hour,” Dabiq No. 4 (September 2014), 17.

907. Nick Cumming-Bruce, “ISIS Committed Genocide Against Yazidis in Syria and Iraq, U.N. Panel Says,” The New York Times, June 16, 2018; and Valeria Cetorelli, “Mortality and kidnapping estimates for the Yazidi population in the area of Mount Sinjar, Iraq, in August 2014: A retrospective household survey,” PLOS Medicine May 9, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002297, accessed June 12, 2018.

908. For a tabulation of IS-directed and -inspired attacks as of early 2018, see Tim Lister et al., “ISIS goes global: 143 attacks in 29 countries have killed 2,043,” CNN, February 12, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/world/mapping-isis-­attacks-around-the-world/index.html, accessed June 12, 2018. The estimate of 3,800 deaths as of August 2019 is tabulated from Karen Yourish et al., “How Many People Have Been Killed in ISIS Attacks Around the World,” The New York Times, July 16, 2016; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_linked_to_ISIL, accessed September 6, 2019.

909. Ben Watson, “What the Largest Battle of the Decade Says about the Future of War,” Defense One (2017), https://www.defenseone.com/feature/mosul-largest-battle-decade-future-of-war/, accessed July 19, 2019; and Rukmini Callimachi and Eric Schmitt, “ISIS Names New Leader and Confirms al-Baghdadi’s Death,” The New York Times, October 31, 2019.

910. See, for example, Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March 2015.

911. Janine di Giovanni, “The Militias of Baghdad,” Newsweek, November 26, 2014.

912. Jason Burke, “Rise and fall of Isis: its dream of a caliphate is over, so what now?,” The Guardian, October 21, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/21/isis-caliphate-islamic-state-raqqa-iraq-islamist, accessed June 12, 2018; and Aaron Y. Zelin, “Interpreting the Fall of Islamic State Governance,” Washington Institute, October 16, 2017, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/interpreting-the-fall-of-islamic-state-governance, accessed June 12, 2018; and Sune Engel Rasmussen, “U.S.-Led Coalition Captures Last ISIS Bastion in Syria, Ending Caliphate,” The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2019.