^{A Time to Reap}
(1999 MESA Presidential Address) 
Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Georgetown University
 

The title for this address is taken from the book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher who said of life that it is “vanity of vanities and a vexation of the spirit.” Yet faced with the frailties of life and the knowledge of our individual mortality, we try to impose order and infuse, or derive, meaning. In considering where we are or what's ahead, our crystal balls function like rearview mirrors on what, where, why, when, and how we might ‘reap.’ To most of us the influential power of these mirrors lies in our assumption that what they reflect be as rational, analytical, and modern as we are; while in reality our collective cultural looking glasses, and their images, are both bigger and older, and their contents frequently subconscious. Carl Jung called them ‘symbols.’[1] On this 20th November 1999, forty plus one days before the beginning of the year 2000, I will consider two such separate but interrelated conceptual constructs which are meant to provide purpose: calendars and millennialism.

Calendars and time-keeping
An unlikely candidate has recently emerged in the media for his fifteen minutes of fame: Dionysius Exiguus, Dennis the Little, a sixth-century Abbott from Scythia (now Moldavia) whose nickname derived from his self-demeaning manner. Dennis, in his writings about how to improve the calculation of the date of Easter in the liturgical year, also invented a new era, the Christian. Dennis's “Year One of the Lord” (Annus Domini unus) began on the first of January of the year that followed the year of the birth of Christ. There was no year zero. Hence our old confusion about just when centuries and millennia begin. Dennis was also calculating and probably miscalculating from previous Alexandrine Easter Tables and thus placed the birth of Christ at a date that scholars believe is most likely three years too late, or perhaps seven years too early.[2] More interesting is the fact that Dennis's new chronology was not officially adopted until two centuries later [in A.D. 741, right after the time of the venerable Bede (d. 732)] by the Carolingians, and for reasons that perhaps bear closely upon our second topic.[3]

Dennis' story reminds us that calendars are mental constructs. Ultimately they are abstract things. One way or another, of course, the structuring of observable time is based on astronomy: the succession of days and nights punctuated by the waxing and waning of the moon, or the movement of the sun and the rhythm of the seasons, or a combination of the two. But the rest is manipulation. The twelve-month year with its seven-day weeks that now underlies the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic calendars is one of the oldest in that the ancient Mesopotamians also had it. Their year was lunisolar and worked through the device of intercalation of an extra month according to a cycle determined by sophisticated astronomical observation and mathematical calculation. Regardless of how long the cycle was that cultures defined as their calendar-year, the manner in which they subdivided it has also varied widely, with weeks that consisted of four, or eight, or thirteen, or sixteen days; ten days made a week in ancient Egypt and then again in the Calendar of Reason and Liberty of post-Revolutionary Republican France, and 19 days make a month in the Baha'i calendar.

Time is always structured for a purpose, and usually more than one. Historically these have been a mixture of the economic, the political, and, in a broader sense, the ideological. When Julius Caesar devised the Julian calendar in 46 B.C.E. by replacing the Roman lunar year with the solar, he kept the old irregular Roman subdivisions of the months (kalends, nones, and ides) that held political, commercial and religious significance for traditional Roman culture,[4] even though the seven-day planetary week had become popular. That seven-day week did not achieve official status until the Emperor Constantine, newly emerged patron of the Christian religion, in or around 321 C.E. designated Sunday the first day of the week and Day of the Lord;[5] undoubtedly this decision derived (at least in part) from his perception of the seven-day week as a monotheistic, biblical device.

In most solar and lunisolar calendars, the beginning of the year was fixed in spring or fall. The Romans adopted January 1 for their New Year's after 158 B.C.E. because January 1 was when their consuls took office.[6] Since the Church wished to dissociate itself from pre-Christian practices, it preferred the liturgical year as the determining subtext on when a calender year would begin. In Latin Christianity, Advent, Christmas, the Annunciation, or Easter (the latter especially inconvenient since local calculations of the correct date of Easter varied considerably) all served as New Year’s dates in various countries of the Christian West until the eighteenth century, that is, well beyond 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII established the Gregorian calendar which came with a New Year’s date of January 1 and also entailed a new canon for the calculation of Easter. Because it had been enjoined by a pope and they generally considered popes the Antichrist, most Protestant states rejected the Gregorian calendar until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (Russia went Gregorian after the Revolution, while the Eastern Church has never accepted the Gregorian reform).[7] The US Founding Fathers were typically born in a Julian calendar year and buried in a Gregorian one.

With Western technological progress and the formation and expansion of Western empires came calendrical standardization. Technology has also created the concept of linear time, a relatively recent Western invention that is replacing, or is poised to replace, the multiple, subjective, and situation-specific times of the past.[8] Precondition—but also potent symbol of our present-day, technology-induced global age—may very well be what has happened and is happening to ‘time’ in various cultures around the globe, be it by chronography, where the Western calendar provides at the very least a global point of reference even if an indigenous calendar continues to be the official one, or by clock-based time that is producing a new global psychology where time is equated with efficiency and economic rationality.[9]

Chronography
Dating systems are also culture-specific social constructs. Throughout history, local schemes (such as regnal years) have predominated, but literate cultures have always tended to produce larger chronological systems. The question of whether these were also always universalist in intent is difficult to answer. Here our clues may lie in their symbolic parameters, especially the retrospective significance of the ‘starting date.’ Calendar reforms can likewise shed light on how a culture, and an age, perceived themselves in relation to a universal order.

During the last years of the Republic, in Caesar’s time, the Romans elaborated a new chronology that began with the foundation of Rome (A.U.C., Ab Urbe Condita), a mythical event in the far distant past that was fixed in 753 B.C.E.; in 247 C.E., during the height of their empire's territorial expansion, the Romans minted coins to commemorate the one-thousandth anniversary of their Eternal City.[10] A symbol of successful empire-building, this chronography to the Romans was clearly a matter of universal import; at the time of Rome's one-thousandth anniversary, the empire was also persecuting its monotheistic minorities.

The Islamic era was likewise marked by an empire-building culture. Its chronography is said to have been instituted in 642 C.E. by the caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Khattab. Ten years earlier, during the Farewell Pilgrimage and shortly before he died, the Prophet had abolished the lunisolar calender of pre-Islamic Arabia and decreed the new lunar year. No revelation had instructed him to do so, but Qur'an 9:36-37, revealed the year before, had entailed censorship of the pagan method of intercalation that periodically wedged an additional month between the two sacred months of Dhu l-Hijja and Muharram, interrupted the sequence of the three sacred spring months of the lunisolar year, and thereby played havoc with the trucial laws of Arabian tradition. In this revelation, the believers are called to “fight the pagans altogether, as they are fighting you altogether,” and intercalation is pronounced “an excess of unbelief.” Some interpreters have therefore proposed that the intercalation issue co-signified the Qur’anic sanction to sever the paradigm of Muslim warfare from the rules of pre-Islamic fighting.[11] The ten (lunisolar) years of Muhammad’s life in Medina and the ten (lunar) years following his death were not numbered but carried names of memorable events. It was only in 642, twenty years after the Hijra, that Umar initiated the Islamic chronographical system by taking July 16 of the year 622 (Julian calendar) as the starting date of the Islamic era (in Latin, A.H. one, Annus Hegirae unus). The date corresponded neither to Muhammad's departure from Mecca nor his arrival in Medina but represented a sophisticated mathematical calculation on how, retrospectively, the new lunar calendar could be fitted most seemlessly with the old lunisolar one.[12] By 642, under Umar, the Islamic institution of jihad was fully in place, the great multi-front wars of expansion were in full swing, Islam was becoming a world power, and the new chronology affirmed the self-identity of the Islamic commonwealth and obliterated access to the old tribal past. In its global and universalist thrust, the new Islamic calendar was a fitting symbol for the culture and the age that produced it.

The Jewish and early Christian chronographies were developed by communities experiencing not political victory but political persecution. Ruled by an empire that had recently begun to count its years from the mythical date of Rome’s foundation, Judaism and Christianity during the early centuries of the Common Era more or less simultaneously adopted chronologies that started with the creation of the world as they estimated it (A.M., Annus Mundi) to symbolize the antiquity and universal relevance of the Jewish-Christian tradition.

One of the rabbinic creators of the Jewish dating system, Ben Halafta, during the second century of the Common Era, calculated the age of the world by adding up the lifespans of patriarchs and kings and other historical periods listed in the genealogies and histories of the Bible and estimating the number of years from the Creation described in Genesis I to an historical event whose date was known: the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans; by these calculations he arrived at the equivalent of 3761 B.C.E. for the creation of Adam.[13] There were also other Jewish calculations that produced different starting dates, and in any case the Jewish A.M. era was not generally applied until much later.

The early Christian A.M. calendar differed from the Jewish in that it placed the world’s creation at a considerably earlier date, 5500 years before the Incarnation. The second- and third-century Christians who designed it thus posited themselves into the second half of the sixth millennium of the age of the world. With the approaching end of that sixth millennium A.M., some among the Latin churchfathers reformed the calendar downward by three centuries. Another 300 years later, when the end of the sixth millennium was once again approaching, the Carolingians, patrons of the chronographic work of the Venerable Bede (d. A.D. 732), officially abandoned the A.M. system in favor of Dennis the Little’s and Bede’s A.D., whose era, however labelled, is now close to being the global standard. With this shift, the focus of the end of (any) millennium was retargeted to A.D. 1000, then safely two-and-a-half centuries away.[14] These curious (since they were largely unexplained) patristic and medieval West European calendar revisions have been ‘read’ as evidence of an ongoing oral, popular, and largely underground millenarian tradition based on the early Christian notion of the millennial week that combined Genesis I, “the six days of creation,” with Psalm 90:4, “1000 years are as a day passed in the sight of the Lord,” and dated the Second Coming at the start of the seventh millennium.[15] We have now reached our second topic.

Eschatology, the apocalypse, millennialism/millenarianism/chiliasm, messianic Ex-pectations/the Parousia

The significance of round numbers
Most cultures have developed end-of-the-world concepts and scenarios.[16] Like calendars, they are constructs. But their symbolic power is greater than that of calendars because their verity is often grounded in prophesies and revelation and their focus is transcendental. Teachings about the last things, however, must occur in human language and entail reference points, of which a primary one is time. Scriptures have mostly dealt with this reference problem (if they dealt with it at all) in metaphoric fashion. But exegetic numerology was usually not far behind. Round numbers, in and of themselves, are powerful factors in social imagination; in the eschatological context, chronography and calendars acquired symbolic meaning, indeed, cosmic significance.[17] The feeling that the world and time are coming to an end does not need a century’s or millennium’s closure. But the two notions have historically quickened and spurred each other. Millennialism has often identified the end of chronological cycles as moments of crisis, while the reverse has also been true, and the end of a century, or a millennium, brought forth millenarian expectations.

Among medievalists, the significance of the year A.D. 1000 for Christians East and West is a highly contested item. One school of historians downplays the credibility of a mob scene at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on New Year’s Eve A.D. 999 that an eyewitness, the Burgundian monk Radulfus (Raoul) Glaber, described in his Chronicle. Christendom, after all, was then celebrating New Year's on different days: Christmas Day in Rome, Easter in France, January 1 in Spain, and July 9 in Armenia, and endowing that date with such terror, anticipation, and hope was the work of revisionist nineteenth-century Romanticism.[18] The other school condemns this positivist assessment—that “1000 was a year like any other”—as capstone or 20/20 hindsight historiography where credence is only placed in the retrospective narrative of official, hence politically-correct, medieval sources. Not only were A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1033 years of intense popular (and therefore largely unrecorded) apocalyptic expectation, they defined a millennial generation of newly activist Christians who initiated heresies and reform movements, embarked on large-scale pilgrimages (and, eventually, Crusades) to Jerusalem, and organized Peace assemblies and communes, all (according to this second school of thought) indicative of the spiritual renewal that the advent of the millennium had brought.[19]

Five-hundred and ninety-two years later (in A.D. 1592), the end of the first millennium of the Hijra calendar seems to have brought similar apocalyptic fears and expectations in the Islamic world. A contemporary, the Ottoman bureaucrat and intellectual Mustafa Âli (1541-1600), described the end-of-the-world mood that was gripping Istanbul on the eve of A.H. 1000, preceded and intensified by three years of evil omens: a Janissary uprising, provincial revolts, two great fires, and a plague. Even though Mustafa Âli affirmed that he personally did not believe that the end was approaching, he identified, perhaps largely for reasons of failed professional expectations, with the millennial mood of Istanbul; and when the calendar had turned and the world was still intact, his own personal mood also changed to one of contemplation and nostalgia.[20] The letters of another eye-witness to the millennium, the Moghul Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) make no mention of the event. India at the time adhered to the Persian calendar in its eleventh-century Seljuk refiguration,[21] so that in A.H. 999/1000, Akbar had no official millennial threshold to cross. Nevertheless he was aware of a Muslim millenarian tradition that viewed the turn of the first Hijri millennium as fulfillment of the earth's 7000-year lifespan, also of the fact that in some Indian Muslim circles his person was identified with the messianic figure expected to appear at the end of time; for his own reasons, Akbar appears to have supported both assumptions.[22]

On the threshold of A.D. 2000 we are (once again) surrounded by examples of the interaction between round numbers and eschatological expectations. The present apocalyptic scenario, of course, also has a technological dimension, the impending Y2K computer crisis. This, however—as I will try to address in what follows—is not the only reason why, in multiple and unprecedented ways, the date’s import has spread well beyond the Christian cadres for whom A.D. 2000 holds religious significance, including to the Islamic world where the calendar presently reads A.H. 1420.

So much for the import of round numbers. We now turn to matters of ultimate order and purpose:

• Eschatology is the belief in the End of Time and a conception of the ultimate destiny or purpose of mankind and the world. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God will bring the end of history and with it His Judgment.

• Apocalypse means disaster, cosmic catastrophe, the end of the world; in Scripture it is a vision of the future shape of eschatological events. The rich Jewish tradition of apocalyptic visions[23] was inherited by Christ and his disciples,[24] especially the second-generation figure of John of Patmos, author of the book of Revelations (also called Apocalypse) (ca. 95 C.E.). Both the Jewish and Christian traditions, themselves profoundly influenced by Zoroastrianism, reverberate in the Qur'anic accounts[25] and, especially, the apocalyptic Hadith.

• Apocalypticism is the belief that the end is imminent. When an apocalyptic sense of imminence spreads, eschatological groups typically emerge under charismatic leaders. Every age produces a variety of apocalyptic movements appropriate to its circumstances, and their actions may focus on private salvation, sometimes through a combination of quietism and a withdrawal from the world, or on reform, or radical segregation of the righteous from the sinful majority, or on militant activism bent on restructuring society in order to hasten the final event.

• Millennialism, or millenarianism is the belief in the kingdom of holiness, peace, justice, and plenty that the Messiah will establish on earth before the Last Judgment. Although the term millennium implies a thousand year kingdom, its duration—which is predicted in a variety of time frames especially in Jewish and Islamic sources—is of secondary importance; what matters is that, initiated by signs portending the cataclysmic end of ordinary time and after a preliminary period of purging and transformation, human society reaches its final state on earth when all conflicts are resolved and all injustices removed. While apocalypticism is about disruption, upheaval, devastation, and ends, millennialism is about new beginnings, restoration, and regeneration. But the millennium itself is only a transitional, liminal ‘band of time.’ All Jewish eschatological thought is millenarian, centered on the expectation of the long-awaited arrival of the Messiah (David, or from the house of David) who defeats Belial—the lying seducer calling to worship false gods[26]—the Antichrist, the deceiver, Gog and Magog;[27] he redeems Zion and Jerusalem and builds the new Temple.[28] Christians, whose messianic expectation was fulfilled with the Incarnation await Christ's Second Coming, the Parousia,[29] when an angel comes down from heaven, binds Satan for one-thousand years, casts him in a bottomless pit and shuts and seals it, after which Christ and the saints will reign on earth.[30] According to a popular Christian tradition, Christ's Second Coming will occur when the Jews are restored as a nation to their homeland and recognize Jesus as Messiah and king.[31]

• Chiliasm is another term for the belief that Christ’s kingdom, the ‘first resurrection’ of the elect, will last for a thousand years before the final consummation. Then God’s enemies, the antichrists with their false messages,[32] the blasphemous Beast,[33] Satan loosed out of his prison, and Gog and Magog will be defeated and punished forever,[34] while the blessed dwell eternally in God’s city, the New Jerusalem.[35]

In Islam, the themes of the final struggle between good and evil and the kingdom of a messianic figure on earth are developed in the Hadith far beyond their Qur’anic base. The Qur’an identifies some of “the signs of the Hour” as disintegration of established familial, societal, and economic norms;[36] “a Beast of [or from] the earth” will arise;[37] Gog and Magog will break through their ancient barrier wall and sweep down to scourge the earth;[38] and Jesus is a Sign of the Hour.[39] The Hadith provides more abundant information on the dissensions and trials (fitan) of social disintegration and moral decay that signal the end.[40] The Beast from the earth is often identified as Dajjal, ‘the Imposter,’ or al-Masikh, or al-Masih al-Dajjal, ‘the False Messiah;’ this Antichrist, who is either beast, monster, or a human figure (whose appearance is often described in physical detail) seduces the Muslim community away from God’s worship and establishes himself as their ruler for forty years or perhaps forty days. There is no consensus on whether this figure is identical with Satan/Iblis. To some, Jesus is the eschatological savior whom the Hadith calls the Mahdi; to most others they are two distinct figures. Jerusalem and Damascus are places mentioned for Jesus’ Second Coming, Mecca for the Mahdi’s reappearance. Jesus, or Jesus and the Mahdi, will kill the Antichrist. In many Sunni, and all Shi’ traditions, the Mahdi is a man from the family of the Prophet. In post-tenth century Imamite (Twelver) Shi’ism he is usually identified as the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad, the son of Hasan al-’Askari, who returns from occultation to fulfill the hopes of the Shi’i community and deliver mankind from degeneration. Earlier imams had been similarly awaited. A special eschatological place is also reserved for the third Imam, Husayn, the great martyr and final avenger, whose return together with a group of loyal followers signals the ‘first resurrection’ of the elect.[41] The Mahdi’s kingdom is that millennial band of time when peace and justice rule the earth, the authentic Sunna is reestablished, and wealth is equally distributed. This period will last for five, seven, nine, forty, or many more years before, in a final cataclysm, the earth is devastated and the process of creation reversed.[42]

• Apocalyptic millenarianism is defined as a form of activism that directs groups of believers who see themselves at the threshold of the awaited Millennium (in the eschatological sense) toward radical political action, including anti-establishment attempts at restructuring society. It is a reaction to a collective sense of extremity, dislocation, and the feeling of living in truly terrible times.[43] Natural disasters, political persecution, economic deprivation, even change itself—in the form of a negative discrepancy between expectation and reality—have triggered it, while atomic and ecological eschatology have recently added a new dimension.

• Apocalyptic millenarianism, Church and State. Establishments, both State and Church, have always considered apocalyptic millenarianism extremely dangerous. The Jewish revolts against Rome in 70 and 135 C.E. were examples of it, and spooked the fathers of the early Christian Church into condemning the concept as a heresy. Jesus had told his disciples to expect signs within their generation, but that the day and hour were known only to God.[44] Peter wrote that “the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.”[45] The early architects of the institutionalized Christian Church, Paul (first century) and Augustine (late fourth/early fifth century) emphasized that the eschatological process had already begun with Christ’s Incarnation; his Second Coming, whenever it occurred, would bring it to an end, and in the meantime his Church acted as his representative on earth. Following Augustine’s lead, the Council of Ephesus in 431 C.E. denounced the eschatological interpretation of the Millennium and all ‘Jewish’ apocalypses as error and fantasy. The tradition, however, survived and flourished, at first mostly outside the Christian Church (while it was unified) but later also within some of its newer branches. Apocalyptic prophesies have been powerful devices in the imagination of the religious for whom beliefs act as facts in society and politics. In addition, the idiom of religion is adaptable to secular mindframes and secular millennialisms. And both religious and secular millennialisms are open to exploitation by political systems for alternate purposes.

          That the Bible’s millenarian constructs, and popular Christian traditions, have affected not only the fervently pious and their charismatic leaders but also Church and State policies is illustrated by the Christian West’s multilayered relationship with the Holy Land and, especially, Jerusalem. The Crusades;[46] nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American support for Restorationism (the restoration of a Jewish kingdom, or homeland, in Zion); nineteenth-century multinational Evangelical settlements in Palestine; nineteenth- and twentieth-century Evangelical efforts to propagate Christianity among the Jews;[47] Evangelical Zionism’s newly invigorated version of Dispensationalism that predicates the Second Coming on the building of the third Temple in Jerusalem;[48] these are all examples of the dizzying complexity of the millenarian impulse and its uses in the religions and politics of the Christian West.

In the Qur’'an, the time of the arrival of the End is likewise not specified; “it [the Hour] is drawing near; none beside God can disclose it,”[49] “knowledge of it is only with God.”[50] Like the Christian Church, and for the same reasons, Sunni-establishment Islam took a dim view of apocalyptic movements that came with messianic claims and promises of this-worldly redemption. State-supporting ‘ulama’ have therefore found themselves in a precarious position between public knowledge, often orally traded, of an abundance of eschatological traditions—large numbers of which are found in even the most impeccable Hadith collections, the six Sahih books—and their own role as scripturalist experts in government service. Over time they have used and even expanded upon these texts, in ‘mirror of the times’ fashion to criticize unwelcome social and political (especially Western political) practices, but mainly to call for repentance.[51] Millenarian expectation and political radicalism often fit each other’s needs. To the oppressed and persecuted, in Islam as elsewhere, their suffering designates them as the elect who hold the promise of redemption. It was, therefore, mainly with the Shi’a that apocalyptic millenarianism came into its own. After several failed attempts to wrest political power from the Umayyads and Abbasids (Husayn’'s martyrdom in 680 and failed uprisings in 689, 758, and 864 C.E.), however, Husayn's successors in the Imamate increasingly withdrew from politics to concentrate on developing Shi’i doctrine and law.[52] Simultaneously, the concept of occultation gained prominence in their theology. With the declaration of the Twelfth Imam’s Major Occultation in 939 C.E., the Imamites reinforced their position of political quietism; the Hidden Imam would return at a future point in time that was “known only to him and God.” With this doctrine, the Twelver Shi’a also distanced itself from the activist and revolutionary agenda of the Sevener Isma’iliyya that held attractions for many of the Shi’i faithful at the time.[53] In this fashion, the Twelver establishment came to deal with their eschatological traditions much as the Sunni theologians did: cautiously. Their millenarian Hadith contained detail on the political and social turmoil of their own time in the form of prophesies, followed by prophesies on the final outcome, but the emphasis was on the duty to wait patiently.[54]

This ‘corporatist’ position of the Muslim religious establishments has not prevented reformers and revolutionary activists, both Sunna and Shi’a, from appropriating an apocalyptic framework for their activities, and the apocalyptic indicator of a timetable of ‘round numbers’ may have helped to sharpen the focus of some of them. The 1979 Iranian revolution (A.H. 1400) used apocalyptic material to communicate the urgency of its reformist message. Islamic history provides abundant examples of Mahdi figures who rose with millenarian claims and intentions, some of whom found establishment support. In a recent instance, the 1979 takeover of the Holy Mosque in Mecca, institutional support was lacking but the calendar date was significant: in the dawn hour of New Year’s Day, 1 Muharram, A.H. 1400, a group of Arab Muslim revolutionaries occupied the Meccan sanctuary and proclaimed that the Mahdi had come. This was a momentous date, because—according to a very popular apocalyptic tradition—five-thousand years separated Adam from Jesus, six-hundred years separated Jesus from Muhammad, so that the year 1400 of the Muslim calendar signified the Year 7000 which God had decreed as Creation’s End. The core group of the rebels was formed of young puritanical Saudis, several of them former law and theology students at Medina and Mecca. Their Mahdi was Muhammad ibn ’Abdallah al-Qahtani whose ‘signs’ fulfilled the eschatological Hadith in that he was of the Prophet's tribe, had proclaimed himself a descendant of the Prophet, his and his father’s names were the same as the Prophet’s and the Prophet’s father’s, he had arrived in Mecca from the North¼The second leader of the group, Juhayman ibn Muhammad al-’Utaybi, had tribal as well as ideological links to the Saudi Ikhwan of the 1920s and was known for previous attacks on the alliance between the ruling dynasty and the ‘ulama’, denunciation of their shared corruption, and castigations of modernization and all modern devices in the Kingdom. The ‘ulama’, in alliance with the royal family, issued a fatwa that permitted the use of military force to remove the rebels from the Holy Mosque and kill the pretender for sowing dissension among the faithful.[55]

The millenarian theme, however, continues to occupy many minds among the faithful. With the approach of A.D. 2000 an abundance of Muslim books and pamphlets have appeared on the Arab market that peg the coming millennium of the Christian calendar to the final defeat of the West. Often predicated on old prophecizing hadiths about the coming fall of Byzantium (which did, indeed, occur) is the prediction of the collapse of Byzantium’s latter-day-incarnations, Europe and America. One author, whose book carries the unusual publication date of “before 1999,” castigates Arab and Muslim intellectuals for their “almost total disregard of traditions about the Antichrist and the bloody battles at the end of time¼[while] today the members of Western civilization themselves speak of nothing else but the day of doom, the end of history, the clash of civilizations, the atomic Armageddon. How can intelligent men not see that the enemies have fixed their bayonets and closed their ranks, while we talk about culture and civilization and development¼mere intellectual prattle¼[which is, itself] a sign of the Hour, when intelligent minds become twisted and almost none [still sound] are to be found.”[56]

So, The Year 2000
The media began to masticate on the apocalypse a good decade ago and spat it out in the form of sensationalist bestsellers, scary movies, and top of the charts pop songs, from a revival of Judy Garland's “Forget your troubles, come on, get happy! Chase all your cares away. Shout, ‘Hallelujah!’, come on, get happy! Get ready for the Judgment Day,” which is selling perfume, to Marilyn Manson’s ‘Antichrist Superstar.’ Daystar International Ministry, an Evangelical Christian group, last June announced that it was setting up a ‘messiahcam’ (“somewhere on the Mount of Olives”) trained on Jerusalem’s Eastern Gate to capture the Messiah’s entry into the city. The group says that with the sky filled with lightning and the shouts of archangels, the world will be able to see the signs of the End without a camera, but it hopes that having film from the Golden Gate on their TV screen will allow people to focus their prayers.[57] Last year, Israeli security authorities set up a task force to deal with possible violence by cults and messianic groups in the Holy Land, and announced an $11.5 million security plan to protect holy sites from potential millennial attacks; to date three groups of Evangelical Christians have been deported from Israel because they were said to be planning to provoke the Apocalypse. FBI Director Louis Freeh, at congressional hearings on counterterrorism and elsewhere, has warned of the potential domestic and international threat posed by apocalyptic groups and individuals. Law enforcement agencies in the US and overseas are on alert (especially Scotland Yard, with a $10 million operation to protect the area around Greenwich, because the prime meridian of zero degree longitude runs through it).[58] Ted Daniels of the Millennium Watch Institute and Richard Landes of the Center for Millennial Studies[59] act as media consultants and advisors to US policymakers and security agencies. To some, the year’s devastating earthquakes in Colombia, Turkey, Greece, Taiwan, and elsewhere, as well as the summer’s solar eclipse that was widely visible in Asia and Europe, and now an encephalitic plague in our nation's Northeast seemed only too timely.

To conclude: Calendars are cultural devices that intend to provide order and purpose to the flow of time. Round numbers and sacred numbers arouse attention and suggest mental associations that can turn metaphor into reality. Apocalyptic and millenarian beliefs are cultural modes of coping with collective anguish; they are also projections of a hopeful human individuality in that they endow individual suffering and mortality with a cosmic relevance. The apocalyptic discourse is about the final aspects and purpose of life; as such it has long been part of cultures the world over.

At present, however, apocalypticism has gone global, in the new sense of that word. Globalization is a time and a process where old barriers, economic as well as cultural, are systematically dismantled by gigantic leaps in information technology. The new ‘system’ comes with push and pull dynamics where everything is interdependent and, at the same time, more easily and swiftly in conflict. A.D. 2000 is now one of its ‘symbols’: for the globalized economy, the date brings a shared threat (computer network crashes) to the system that made this economy possible, while culturally it is taken as ‘something momentous’ even by societies whose indigenous calendars differ from that of the West. The millenarian theme, as shown earlier, is common to the three monotheistic religions, exemplifying the fact that cultures have always drawn from one another in a competitive, spontaneous, and undesigned process. But the Internet has now given apocalyptic prophecy a new, pervasive, and persuasive medium in which to find expression. The apocalyptic fever is catching, especially among groups that decry the corrosive effect of modernization. At the same time, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim apocalypses are mutually exclusive and their visions, were they ever fulfilled, on a crash course, because each religion perceives the millennium in terms of its own global vindication. The Internet now is a new measure not just of what we can sow, but also what we may ‘reap.’

To most people, of course, it is the Y2K computer problem that they presently worry about (which adds a whole other dimension to the fin-de-millennium mood). But even it has become an intercultural metaphor. An example of this is when the Muslim Webpage of MuttaqunOnLine, pronouncing the Year 2000 bug “the Information Age's inevitable problem of human short-sightedness,” proclaims that “Islam is Y2K Compliant.”[60]

With this, it is my privilege to wish you all a very happy New Year. And keep your lamp lit.[61]