Thread by @MayShaddel

The study of Islamic apocalypticism is, really, truly, in its infancy. One quite commonly runs across glib references to ‘apocalyptic fantasies’ to justify tenuous readings by scholars of Islam, as if there is no inherent logic to apocalyptic texts, beliefs, and tendencies. In

other words, for most scholars of Islam, who are generally unfamiliar with the theoretical work on the subject by scholars of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, ‘apocalypticism’ is some kind of deus ex machina to ‘make sense’ of seemingly unintelligible texts. A particularly

noteworthy example of this is how Wilferd Madelung appealed to ‘apocalypticism’ to justify his impossible reading of the famous ‘hadith of the Mahdī’—this reading was later shown to be problematic by Michael Cook, and I then proposed an alternative, self-consistent

reinterpretation of it that gives meaning to the whole text (see here: academia.edu/8210987/ʿAbd_Allāh_ibn_al-Zubayr_and_the_Mahdī_Between_Propaganda_and_Historical_Memory_in_the_Second_Civil_War_Bulletin_of_the_School_of_Oriental_and_African_Studies_80_2017_pp._1-19_).

Another example of this came up recently; this one isn’t a vague appeal to ‘apocalypticism’ to advance a tenuous reading, but it shows how lack of theoretical knowledge on apocalypticism could lead to widely, and wildly, off-the-mark theories being proposed. The example in

question is a particular understanding of the famous opening verses of the Q 30 al-rūm 1-7 proposed by Stephen Shoemaker and Tommaso Tesei. My observations will be based, mostly, on Tesei’s new article (here: degruyter.com/view/j/islam.2…). Tesei proposes that Q 30:1-7 is an

echo of Byzantine apocalypses of the period. I can’t really see an ‘intertextuality’ between the quranic passage and the Byzantine apocalypses he adduces, but, for the sake of argument, let’s assume there is one. These Byzantine texts are apocalypses in the proper sense of the

term, meaning they contain a narration of events that have already taken place together with some prophecies of what will come next, but ALL of these are narrated in the future tense. This is what this kind of apocalypse is about: narrating the past in the future tense, as if it

were a prophecy; earning the reader’s confidence; and then topping it with an actual prophecy, which the reader would easily believe now. The quranic passage, however, is different: the verbs in the first half use the past tense, and the verbs in the second half of the passage

the non-past (muḍāriʿ—which could describe the future in Arabic as well). Having worked with literally hundreds of this kind of apocalypses/prophecies from ancient Mesopotamia to mediaeval times, I can’t think of a single one that is only PARTLY in the future tense; in other

words, the passage’s formal features don’t resemble an apocalypse’s. Tesei exacerbates his interpretation by saying that this ‘prophecy’ was later inserted into the Quran to provide its ‘author’ with prophetic powers. So what was it, an echo of Byzantine apocalypses, and hence

reflecting the apocalyptic anxiety of the ‘author’ of the Quran, or an attempt to provide the ‘author’ with prophetic powers? It certainly can’t be both. Besides, echoing Byzantine apocalypses means you share their eschatological anxieties and are expecting a quick end to the

world immediately after Byzantine victory, but the world didn’t end after their victory and so there was no point in reprising those prophecies anymore. Not quite clear in the article. The article is actually very confused and makes a number of conflicting and self-defeating

arguments, along with dozens of errors, especially with regard to Muslim sources, but here I’ve only presented my case against the apocalyptic reading of the text. In sum, while an emphasis on the imminence of the end is certainly present in the text, it clearly isn’t

an apocalypse. Take-home lesson: reference to the end of the world≠apocalypse (i.e., not necessarily). What is more, and more important, apocalypticism shouldn't be used as a buzzword to advance impossible scenarios.