Al-Gharib: From the search for meaning to the hasty end 2-5

What happens when a person finds the meaning of his life at the end of the world? When what others fearfully await becomes what he awaits as the completion of his role? Then the value of the present changes in his eyes, and the imagined future gains power over people, places, and events. Life may turn into waiting, then waiting turns into a task, and he sees for himself the right to intervene to bring what he believes is destined closer. To this distance between interpreting destiny and trying to implement it, Latifa Al-Shaalan leads us in her book, “The Stranger: A Study in the Mahdist Juhaymaniyah.”

In the first article, I focused on the breadth of the question that the book offers, and here we enter into the heart of its psychological addition. How do ideas relate to their owner’s need for meaning, and how does this need reorganize his relationship with the world?

The strength of the study comes from tracking what Juhayman does with his thoughts, and what his thoughts do with him, until his interpretation of existence becomes a task that determines his choices, and gives them in his consciousness a necessity that goes beyond his life to the fate of the community and the world. Chapter Five opens this path by distinguishing cosmic meaning from personal meaning; The first is related to the perception in which the world is organized, and the second is to the task by which a person gives his existence a position within that perception, and Latifa Al-Shaalan’s reading allows us to see the danger of their connection when the individual believes that the ordering of the world according to the truth requires a specific action from him. Then objection to the action becomes a threat to the meaning with which he defines himself, and the distance between his conviction in the idea and his feeling that he is chosen to achieve it narrows. The author reads "the religion of Abraham" in Juhayman's conception as the universal meaning in which his project is organized, and traces what he extracts from his own understanding of it of separation, innocence, and boycott, and what he builds on that of the entitlements of migration and clash. The value of this tracing is that it reveals how interpretation becomes a way of distributing positions; He gives himself a place among the people of truth, identifies others outside this place, and then sets practical duties within the boundaries he has drawn, so the perception that reassures him of his identity becomes the basis for his expanding alienation from his society.

The effect of this structure is evident in the author’s observation that Juhayman invoked the names Persia and the Romans to interpret contemporary forces, while going beyond the historical specificity of those entities. From this observation, we can understand how interpretation precedes the event in determining its meaning. The new forces find their names and roles prepared before considering their circumstances, and the present becomes a witness to the validity of the perception to which it was subjected. The broader the idea’s ability to absorb the facts in this way, the narrower the field in which the facts can correct the idea. One of the most subtle distinctions of the book is the separation between interest in end-time narratives and existential absorption in them. A person may read these narratives and his life remains divided between multiple actions, relationships, and hopes, and the expected end may become a center from which he derives the meaning of all his days. In the case studied by the author, the connections between facts and prophecy intensify, and social, political, and natural transformations become signs within an interpretation that promises its owner an understanding of the past, present, and future. This distinction is crucial; Because it shifts attention to how much of the life of its owner the idea takes over. When it answers him about his identity, his alienation, his opponents, and his fate, retreating from it becomes a test for an entire structure of meaning. From here I conclude that the strength of attachment may relate to what a person fears losing if he revises his belief; His position within the group, his interpretation of his history, and the mission that is expected to justify his existence, his need to believe in the idea increases as his life becomes more dependent on it. In this context, Latifa Al-Shaalan explains Juhayman’s personal meaning of the will to hasten the signs, based on his message “Seditions and the News of the Mahdi and the Antichrist and the Descent of Jesus,” and his care in arranging the events.And applying it to reality, and here the connection between those involved reaches its peak; The cosmic perception gives events an order, and the personal role gives its owner a task within this order

The reading reveals his transition from waiting for what will happen to trying to create the conditions that he believes its occurrence requires.

This distinction opens a discussion to which I will return; The specificity of the Mahdist project according to Juhayman, and its transition from waiting for the conditions to the belief that they must be implemented, makes its inclusion a link in a continuous chain between previous and subsequent trends that needs to be proven. Sharing narratives and references, and similarity in some positions, are not enough to prove direct intellectual influence. Here, the links of formation, project, subsequent reception, and historical impact must be separated, and evidence of continuity and discontinuity should be examined. Do we have a documented transmission of ideas, people and practices, or a similarity arising from common references, with a difference in approach and purpose?

To what extent did the momentous event and the responses to it provide an opportunity that was exploited by movements that were, to a large extent, outside of its project? From here, I will examine the difference between the transition of the infernal project and the expansion of the scope of movement before the awakening due to the repercussions of the incident, and I will examine the nature of its connection to subsequent jihadist movements. So that the similarity does not turn into evidence of intellectual lineage, and benefiting from the effects of the event is not taken as proof of the extension of the project of its authors. The value of combining textual examination and self-questioning is evident in this. The order of events in the letter acquires a significance related to the position of its writer in it, and the feeling of ability and selection that this position gives him, and in my estimation, here lies one of the deepest meanings of the book; The claim of knowing destiny may turn into a claim of knowing what people should do for its sake, and the present is then measured by the extent to which it serves the expected end, so the value of life is narrowed to the limits of the role assigned to it.

The picture becomes deeper when the author connects the meaning of isolation and fusion. In her analysis, there are three overlapping levels: the fusion of identity within the group, the fusion of the will of the members in the will of the leader, and the fusion of the fate of the leader in the Mahdist prophecy. The group gives its members shelter from their alienation, and the leader becomes a repository of their wills, and then he derives his position from belonging to a destiny he imagines as sacred. These levels reveal how dependency is distributed within the collective structure, and how it is connected. Loss of personal independence with the promise of salvation.

From this structure, we conclude that the cost of review increases when it threatens all human ties at the same time. Doubt about the interpretation may become doubt about the leader, about the group, and about the years that its owner lived with a promise, and here the importance of the differences between those who withdrew and those who continued becomes clear. The difference in destinies opens the question of the space each individual has reserved for himself, and his ability to restore his will when the requirements of belonging conflict with what he sees or fears. The study of the anxiety of annihilation adds to this picture the possibility of the collapse of the certainty with which existence was organized, so the fear of the end is connected to the fear of the invalidation of meaning, and reviewing the perception becomes a confrontation with the question of what remains of life if its interpretation fails. Thus, the questions of meaning, isolation, and annihilation combine in the structure presented by the author, and each of them gains its significance from its relationship with the other, and from its interaction with contexts, texts, and choices. This explanatory power is worth celebrating; It gives us tools to understand the way in which an idea gains power over its owner, and opens before us preventive questions about preserving a person’s independence within his affiliation, and keeping revision possible no matter how deeply rooted the belief is, and in this I see a deep significance for reading “The Stranger”:

To expand the sources of meaning in a person’s life, and to maintain a connection with the world through which he can reconsider and find a value in his life worth living, and a future worth building.