Month: February 2025

It’s Now or Never–for a Mahdism Primer

On By TRF

[Since I haven’t done so for some time, allow me to present a brief tutorial on Islamic eschatology, especially Mahdism, Islam’s brand of messianism.]

As the end times unfold, with civilization and “true religion” (Islam) crumbling, several familiar evil entities from the book of Revelation will appear:

  • al-Dabbah, “the Beast;”
  • Yajuj wa-Majuj, “Gog and Magog;”
  • al-Dajjal, “the Deceiver” or antichrist, who will lead the armies of darkness (non-Muslims, especially Jews).

Then `Isa (Jesus) will return, having been taken to Heaven while still alive in the first century. He will kill the Dajjal and then support the main Islamic eschatological figure, the divinely guided al-Mahdi, as he takes over the world and establishes a global caliphate.

Belief in the Mahdi Transcends Muslim Denominational Differences

Both Sunnis and Shi`is believe in this Mahdi, despite his appearance only in hadiths, not the Quran. (I’ve written two books on the topic: Holiest Wars and Ten Years’ Captivation with the Mahdi’s Camps.)

While the doctrine is intrinsic to Twelver Shi`ism (and formally incorporated into the government in the largest Twelver state, Iran), it’s less institutionalized in Sunnism — but still quite strong, as Pew data on this topic has shown. The biggest difference is that for Twelver Shi`is, the Mahdi has already been here as the twelfth imam, or leader, of their community, descended from Muhammad. However, he “disappeared” in the ninth century AD and will return as Allah deems appropriate — when Islam’s need is dire.

For Sunnis, the true Mahdi will step onto the stage of history as a great Muslim military and political leader, whose successes will eventually reveal him as Allah’s anointed.

The Devil in Disguise? Or a Mahdi with Whom You Can’t Help Falling in Love? Depends on Which Hadith You Follow [Actually a screenshot from the Elvis movie Harum Scarum!]

Many Mahdis in Islam’s Past

So for the Muslim world writ large, neither Mahdi has come yet. But there have been legions of pretenders to the throne across the centuries in both Sunni and Shi`i societies, many of whom gained a considerable following — and some of whom actually seized power. (I examined eight of the most prominent Sunni ones in Holiest Wars.)

Perhaps the most successful was Ibn Tumart, the twelfth-century Mahdi who convinced many people of his calling and took over much of what is now Morocco and Algeria.

Another such leader, Ibn Abu Mahallah, cropped up in the early seventeenth century in the same region, but fared less well. Ditto for the late nineteenth-century Mahdis in Algeria, who mainly fought the French.

In late fifteenth-century India, Muhammad Jawnpuri claimed the title and led warriors against the Mughal Empire. So did Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi in late nineteenth-century India.

The second most effective Mahdi was Muhammad Ahmad of Sudan, whose 1880s movement threw out the Ottomans and British (led by Major General Charles Gordon) and established a state that lasted until 1898. In early Republican Turkey, a chap named Mehmet declared himself the Mahdi but was quickly squelched by the Turkish Army.

The most recent alarming outbreak of Mahdism was in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in 1979, when armed followers of Muhammad al-Qahtani took over the Great Mosque of Mecca and called for the overthrow of the Saudi royal family. They were eventually put down by hired French forces.

Also Many Mahdis in Modern Islam

But since then, several other self-proclaimed Mahdis have materialized in the Muslim world. (I have written about 11 of these in the last six years at my website, The Occidental Jihadist.) Two were in the KSA, two in Egypt, one each in Bangladesh, Iraq, Morocco, and Sudan — and four in Turkey , the latest in October 2024, when Mustafa Çabuk, “declared himself the Mahdi.” This was in northwestern Turkey, the same area where Mehmet, the Mahdi in 1930, lived.

Çabuk had some 200 followers, who took “loyalty oaths” to him as Mahdi. He and 20 of them were arrested on “charges of establishing a criminal organization for profit and qualified fraud.” After being charged, “the false Mahdi Mustafa Çabuk” was taken to Istanbul and “admitted to Bakırköy Mental and Neurological Diseases Hospital to determine whether his mental health was intact.”

This is very similar to what transpired with Adnan Oktar, or “Harun Yahya,” who for several decades oversaw a cult of followers who revered him as the Mahdi. I traveled to Istanbul and interviewed him in 2006. Oktar was arrested in 2018 and later sentenced to life in prison, partly as a result of being implicated in the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey.

However, the plot thickens with Çabuk. Besides his crimes against Islam and Turkish law, he and his Mahdists were charged with “conducting illegal excavations.” For what? According to an Oct. 11 story [2024] on the English-language version of the Turkish news site Haberler.com:

The suspects were searching for an ‘ark of the covenant’ in the area they dug. The suspect Mustafa Çabuk, who claims to be the Mahdi mentioned in the hadiths, alleges that the location of the ark was revealed to him by angels.

I’ve been studying Mahdism since my doctoral work at Ohio State in the 1990s, and this is the first time I’ve heard or read of a self-proclaimed Mahdi emulating Indiana Jones or Joseph Smith. But it makes sense. Several hadiths state that the Mahdi will procure the Ark from its hiding place, either in Antioch or the Sea of Galilee. This will prove his claim to be sent from Allah — which would make the Mahdi and his followers “top men,” I suppose. Too bad Çabuk’s folks were digging in the wrong place.

Turkish Mahdism Could Be Quite Dangerous

Turkey is still secular (officially). Yet according to the aforementioned Pew polling, it has the third-highest number of people (68%) who believe in the Mahdi’s imminent return — trailing only Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Recep Erdoğan may see himself as a modern Ottoman sultan, and members of his government, including probably Erdoğan himself, seem to be looking for the true Mahdi over against false ones. Just four years ago, a senior military advisor to Erdoğan, who also was the head of a powerful Turkish private security firm, was forced to resign after saying publicly that his company was paving the way for the coming of the Mahdi.

Turkey isn’t some barren, bleak, fundamentalist-ruled backwater like Afghanistan. It’s a modern country with the second-largest military in NATO, enormous cachet in the Muslim world as the heir to the Ottoman Empire, and the largest non-oil-based Muslim economy in the Middle East. Self-styled Mahdis in much poorer and weaker states have wreaked havoc. Imagine what such a leader could do at Turkey’s helm.

Islam’s messianic heresy of Mahdism has proven to be both a political and military problem for Muslims and their neighbors for centuries. The belief is deeply embedded in Islam, and it isn’t going away.

One final note: Mahdis tend to appear at the approach of a new Islamic century. November 28, 2076 will be New Year’s Day, Hijri year 1500. So over the next 52 years, we can expect to see a plague of Mahdis. Let’s hope they remain to be one-offs consigned to mental hospitals. But if history is any guide, they won’t be.

The US Should Stop Flipping COINs

On By TRF

Terrorists run rampant in the modern world, from al-Qa`idah to Sendero Luminoso. Most (78%, according to our own State Department list) are Islamic. The US has never really devised a coherent, consistent counter-terrorism policy for dealing with such–in part because many of these movements qualify as Muslim insurgencies, which require a different analytical lens and counter. The Ottoman Empire, for half a millennium, was beset by such problems. (Ditto for its successor state, the Turkish Republic.) I wrote an entire book on this topic, which our policy makers NEED to consult. So I’ll make it easier for them by posting, below, the interview which the analytical shop Wikistrat did with me on this topic.

Q&A with Dr. Timothy R. Furnish on his new book, The COIN of the Islamic Realm: Insurgencies & The Ottoman Empire, 1416-1916.

Precis: Some major observations which I hope folks can take from this book are that there is really little, if nothing, new under the sun in terms of Islamic insurgencies; that the Ottoman Sultans faced opposition very much like today’s ISIS and AQ; that Ottoman COIN was as much ideological as kinetic, needing not just steel and hunger (as Julius Caesar said) to defeat rebels, but ink—for fatwas; and that Mahdism (Islamic messianism) “was perhaps the most potent, and prevalent, type of insurgency” (p. 280).

Wikistrat–Sep 25, 2020 (Updated: Sep 20, 2023)

Wikistrat: You mention you are a historian of the Islamic world, not the Ottoman Empire specifically. What compelled you to write this book, and what do you hope our experts in Wikistrat’s ME community will come away with?

TF: I studied the Ottomans at some length, as well as the Ottoman Turkish language, in my doctoral work at Ohio State. So, while I ultimately specialized in eschatological movements across space and time, using Arabic sources, I retained a keen interest in the Ottoman Empire. In recent years I have worked at US Special Operations Command, where I became familiar with the field of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency (COIN); in addition, I have taught history of terrorism, and military history, at Reinhardt University in Georgia. Both experiences showed me that US analysts and policymakers rarely look beyond Western examples of COIN: Rome, Napoleon, the Brits, or Americans in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. There are a few non-Western studies—on the Egyptians in Yemen in the 1960s, for example—but I could only find one on the Ottoman experience, and that just during World War I. This struck me, considering that I knew the Ottoman Empire faced many insurgencies in its half-millennium of rule in the Middle East, Southeast Europe, and northeast Africa. So, since Ottoman historians are generally ignorant of unconventional warfare, and the chaps at SOCOM don’t know much about the Ottomans, I decided to do what I could to bridge a gap in the scholarship. 

Some major observations which I hope folks can take from this book are that there is really little, if nothing, new under the sun in terms of Islamic insurgencies; that the Ottoman Sultans faced opposition very much like today’s ISIS and AQ; that Ottoman COIN was as much ideological as kinetic, needing not just steel and hunger (as Julius Caesar said) to defeat rebels, but ink—for fatwas; and that Mahdism (Islamic messianism) “was perhaps the most potent, and prevalent, type of insurgency” (p. 280). In fact, chapter four is my counter-example one, wherein I look at the medieval North African Almoravid (al-Murabitun) state, which was challenged and ultimately overthrown by the Almohad (al-Muwahhidun) Mahdists. I analyze why the Almoravids failed when the Ottomans succeeded.

Wikistrat: Your target audience is military and government professionals who study warfare and COIN (counter-insurgency), as well as the general public. What events or processes in the long and fascinating history of the Ottoman Empire stand as out as most relevant to your intended audience?

TF: I examine seven primary insurgencies against the Empire across space and time: Sufis, Celalis, Kadizadelis, Druzes, Zaydis, Wahhabis, and Sudanese Mahdists. Six of those were based in Islam itself or in a heterodox/heretical movement thereof (the Celalis, basically disgruntled soldiers, are the lone exception). I consider the Kadizadelis, Zaydis, Wahhabis, and Sudanese Mahdists the most relevant to the modern world. Kadizadelis were 17th century Ottoman Islamic fundamentalists, who hoped to change the system sans violence. They thus resemble, for example, today’s Hizb al-Tahrir or Muslim Brotherhood. The Zaydis of Yemen fought imperial control because they detested both foreign and Sunni rule. The Zaydis are still fighting the same two-pronged struggle.  

The Wahhabis have their own state now—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—but have spawned their own problematic offshoots in the guise of ISIS, AQ, and similar groups. And the same eschatology which drove Muhammad Ahmad in 19th century Sudan to declare himself the Mahdi is at work in a number of places in the Islamic world—most overtly ISIS, but also in Turkey where, just last year, a senior advisor to President Erdogan was fired for stating publicly that his defense contracting company was helping prepare the way for the Mahdi’s coming. And don’t forget that the 1979 attempt to overthrow the Saudis was led by a self-styled Mahdi.

Again, for these four insurgencies, in particular, we see that the Ottomans had already dealt with opposition movements that look very much like what our allies in the Islamic world face today. A modern paradigm provides for four COIN outcomes: insurgent victory, government victory, driving insurgents to turn into criminals/terrorists, or assimilating insurgents back into the system. The Ottomans had experience with all but the third—which, again, can be instructive for today.

Wikistrat: Studying insurgencies against Ottoman rule, particularly the 16th-17th century Druze uprisings, can you draw any parallels with Turkey’s response to internal resistance to Erdogan’s consolidation of power? Or Turkey’s response to Kurdish resistance inside the country and across the border in Syria?

TF: Actually, if I may, I think a better analogy for what’s going on inside Turkey today, in terms of resistance to Erdogan’s rule, would be the Kadizadeli movement. That group did not actually wage jihad against Istanbul, as most of the others did; rather, its adherents tried to change the Ottomans’ favoring of Sufis in imperial administration and to make the government more starkly pious (according to their own standards). With this challenge in particular, the Sultans responded not with shock and awe, as was the default position for other COIN operations, but with what I deemed “shock and law.”  

The Diyanet (Turkish Religious Authority) puts out lists of organizations deemed a threat to the Republic, and literature delegitimizing them. Should that prove insufficient, members are arrested. This includes individuals such as Adnan Oktar and would include Fetullah Gülen if the Turkish authorities could pry him out of Pennsylvania. On the other hand, Kurdish groups that have taken up arms against Ankara are treated much as the Ottomans would have any separatist groups—which would not have included the Druzes, who disliked Ottoman taxes but never really tried to break away to create their own Druze state.  

Perhaps the Kurds in modern Turkey thus most resemble the Zaydis—not in the brand of Islam (since Kurds are Sunnis), but in that they are a separate ethnolinguistic group chafing under Turkish rule.

Wikistrat: Would you describe Erdogan as neo-Ottoman, and if so, what “Ottoman predilections” in your opinion have reemerged in Turkey’s current government?

TF: I think it’s hyperbolic to refer to him that way. Yes, the Turkish president wants the Republic to be less secular and more Muslim, exemplified by prevailing upon the Turkish legal system to allow Hagia Sophia to function as a mosque again. He also wants to extend Ankara’s influence into the old Ottoman “near abroad.” And he clearly sees Turkey as the leading Islamic nation—not illogically, considering it still retains, to some degree, the Ottoman cachet. But he wins elections, which no Sultan ever did. He and the AK Party are suspicious of Sufism, whereas Sufis were entrenched in the Ottoman government and military. Finally, while seemingly sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood on the international scene, Erdogan is not trying to turn Turkey into Saudi Arabia or Iran. He’s probably like to be elected, or proclaimed, caliph—but that would be, for him, more a civilizational than a religious position.  

I say in the book that Turkey, even under Erdogan, “remains the most moderate Islamic influence—and thus the one with the most potential to delegitimize Islamic terrorists” (p. 282).