Strange: The breadth of the question about Juhayman (1-5)

I place here a comma in the series “Initial Readings in the Thought of His Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” after I have completed its most important parts: the four methodological articles that outlined the origins and limits of reading, and with this pause I make room for an event that I consider exceptional in our cognitive life: the publication of the book “The Stranger: A Study in Mahdist Juhaymaniyah, Existentialist Principles and Historical and Social Contexts of the Storming of the Grand Mosque (1979)” by Dr. Latifa Al-Shaalan; A book that struck me with the questions it opens, and the extension that gives me insight into a land whose paths we thought we knew. I will accompany you, in five articles beginning with this article, on a tour between its fields and streams, its flowers and its fruits. We contemplate what the author’s knowledge has produced, we follow the water to its sources, and we stop at the fruit that deserves to be carried in our questions about man, the nation, and the future. Perhaps the deepest thing we return with is to see in our past what habit has obscured, and to realize how some of its facts remain open to our need to understand. Societies still need to know what happened within the ideas that wounded their consciences. On the path to violence, perceptions are formed about the world and man’s place in it. Some convictions gain power over their possessor, which makes him take up arms in response to what he sees as a duty, salvation, or a role assigned to him by fate. In the distance between idea and action lies a very important question: How does a person make his interpretation of the world a reality that demands the world submit to it? From this question, I read “The Stranger,” and I see in it a work that deserves celebration commensurate with the horizon it opens to Saudi knowledge. The author enters into a topic that is very present in our memories using the tools of her specialty in psychology, and connects the historical event with the internal experience thatI contributed to its formation, tracing the relationship between what Juhayman lived, read, and believed, and the meaning and destiny he created from that for himself and his group. The depth of the addition comes from the question itself. Knowing the ideas that a person embraced opens up the question of the function it performed in his life: What did it give him? How did it rearrange his fears and his relationship with society? How did his personal existence become connected, in his consciousness, to a cosmic mission? At this level, the history of the idea is connected to the history of its need, and knowing its content becomes a gateway to understanding its power over its owner. From the thresholds of the book, its scientific prestige appears in details that stop the reader. Al-Shaalan draws attention to the rarity of the name “Juhayman,” despite the familiarity that its owner’s reputation has given him, to the point that its familiarity almost gives us the illusion of its commonness. Perhaps this is the first revelation of what has been obscured by habit, and she explains her choice not to attach the description of the “alleged” to the Mahdi, in keeping with the purpose of the interpretation and controlling the language of the discussion. Then she resolves her position on the intrusion by describing it as “flagrant aggression and a horrific crime,” and confirms Juhayman’s awareness of his action and his responsibility for it. In this separation between the requirements of analysis and judgment of the crime, the spirit of the work is evident: a fine literary statement and research assertiveness that preserves the limits of knowledge and the accuracy of its expression. In this context, Al-Shaalan defines the purpose of her book in exploring Juhayman’s interaction with the question of meaning, existential isolation, and the inevitability of annihilation, arriving at a model that explains the interaction of these data in his Mahdavi consciousness, which reached its peak in the storming of the Grand Mosque in 1979, and this purpose is given to the study. its unity; As facts and contexts connect to the formation of awareness and the choices resulting from it, the intrusion becomes the end of a path whose episodes and interactions deserve understanding. The solidity of the author’s scientific formation is evident in the accuracyDetermine the knowledge you seek; It emphasizes will, choice, and personal responsibility, and excludes providing a satisfactory diagnosis of Juhayman’s mental state. It traces how the self shapes its world and confronts the data of its existence, thus giving psychological study its precise subject, preserving the human action’s connection to its perpetrator, and delineating the limits of what the material assigns to the researcher in terms of conclusion. Here I find an aspect of the book’s maturity: that knowing oneself is a path to deepening the question about responsibility, as the person receives ideas within an experience that belongs to him, and gives them a place in his life. Through it, he chooses his relationship with others, and thus the space of understanding expands to include what the individual does with his heritage, environment, and fears, and the study of extremism becomes more capable of distinguishing the places in which interpretation, decision, and choice intervene. Observing the different fates of those affected by the same intellectual environment acquires foundational importance; Some of them left early, and those who left the group after the appointment of the Mahdi and the prediction of the imminent hour, and those who withdrew out of fear, frustration, or objection to the storming and raising of weapons, and Juhayman remained with him and a “special group” whose identification with the eschatological idea continued until the end, and in this disparity the position of the self and its way of receiving ideas and acting accordingly emerges. From this distinction emerges a question that goes beyond the case studied: What makes a single idea remain stable for one person within the limits of belief, and for another it turns into a project? impose it on reality? Here the value of psychology is revealed in tracing the link between conviction and action, between belonging and identification, and between the certainty that the group offers and the reassurance that the individual seeks in it. This depth is connected to historical care revealed by an example from Chapter Five; Al-Shaalan argues that Juhayman choseLiving in the city in 1973, and it is likely that he settled there since the mid-sixties, based on his participation in the photo-breaking incident in 1965, then his contribution to the founding of the Salafist group al-Muhtasibah in 1966, with its statement that there is no accurate documentation of the date of his move, so clarity of reasoning combines with honesty in explaining his rank. Then it discusses the statement of the ignorance of the reason for the move, using what Nasser Al-Huzaimi reported about Juhayman’s explanation for his choice of the city. With its virtues and preventing the Dajjal from entering it, it extracts from the testimony the possibility that end-time ideas have been present to him since at least the year 1965, and here the historical investigation serves the psychological interpretation. The timing of the idea’s presence helps him estimate its extension in his life, and understand the connection between his choice of place and his perceptions of the future. Thus, the detail gains its place within the argument; Moving to a city opens the question of safety and danger, determining the year rearranges the stages of the formation of consciousness, and the personal narrative becomes material for understanding the relationship between place and destiny, and in this connection the value of combining the accuracy of the historian and the questions of the psychologist appears, and from here comes my celebration of the book and its connection to an urgent national need; Protecting society from renewed extremism requires expanding our tools of knowledge about the stages in which it gains its power over man. From this reading, I extract preventive questions about the formation of closed certainty, the attraction of the group that gives the individual a comprehensive interpretation of his life, and the relationship of his need for meaning to his willingness to surrender his will. These are questions that deserve a continuous research effort. Latifa Al-Shaalan deserves appreciation for this work that gives the psychological specialty an active presence in reading our history, and one of its foundational values is that it trains the reader to More questionSynthetically, and by noticing the differences between people and paths that seem similar, and the deeper our knowledge of these differences becomes, the clearer the importance of preserving the human will, his connection to life, and his ability to review his beliefs.