ABDUH, MUHAMMAD
(1849–1905)
Muhammad Abduh was one of the most influential Muslim
reformers and jurists of the nineteenth century. Abduh was
born in the Nile River delta in northern Egypt and received a
traditional Islamic education in Tanta. He graduated from al-
Azhar University in Cairo in 1877, where he taught for the
next two years. It was during this period that he met Jamal al-
Din Afghani, whose influence upon Abduh’s thought over
the next decade would be profound. When Afghani was
expelled from Egypt in 1879, Abduh was also briefly exiled
from Cairo to his native village. He returned to Cairo the
following year to become editor of the official government
gazette, al-Waqai al-Misriyya (Egyptian events), and began
publishing articles on the need for reform in the country.
When the British occupied Egypt following the Urabi revolt
of 1882, Abduh was sentenced to three years’s exile for
assisting the nationalists. He lived briefly in Beirut before
joining Afghani in Paris, where the two would publish the
short-lived but highly influential journal al-Urwa al-wuthqa
(“The firmest grip,” based on the Quranic references 2:256
and 31:22). Abduh returned to Beirut following the journal’s
demise in 1884, and it was during this sojourn that he first met
Rashid Rida, who would become his chief biographer and
most distinguished disciple.
In 1888, following his increasing estrangement from
Afghani and a consequent rethinking of his earlier revolutionary
ideas, Abduh was allowed to return to Cairo. He soon
began a rapid ascent in Egyptian judicial and political circles.
Beginning as a judge in the new “native courts” created by the
Egyptian government, Abduh became a member of the
newly created administrative board for al-Azhar University in
1895. In 1899, he was appointed a member of the Legislative
Council, an advisory body serving at the behest of the
khedive, the ruler of Egypt, and more importantly became in
the same year the grand mufti, or the chief Islamic jurist, of
Egypt. As the head of Egypt’s religious law courts, Abduh
championed reforms that he saw as necessary to make sharia
relevant to modern problems. He argued that the early
generations of Muslims (the salaf al-salihin, hence the name
Salafiyya, which is given to Abduh and his disciples) had
produced a vibrant civilization because they had creatively
interpreted the Quran and hadith to answer the needs of
their times. Such creative jurisprudence (ijtihad) was needed
in the present, Abduh urged. In particular, modern jurists
must consider public welfare (maslaha) over dogma when
rendering judgments. The legal opinions (fatwas) he wrote
for the government and private individuals on such issues as
polygamy, divorce, and the status of non-Muslims bore the
imprint of his reformist attitudes.
During the last years of his life, Abduh collaborated with
Rashid Rida in publishing the journal al-Manar, founded by
Rida in 1898. The journal became a forum for not only
Abduh’s legal rulings and reformist essays, but also a Quranic
commentary that had reached the middle of the fourth sura
(chapter) when Abduh died in 1905. Rida would continue
publishing the journal until his death in 1935.
The most systematic presentation of Abduh’s approach
to Islamic reform is found in his essay Risalat al-tawhid (The
theology of unity). In opposition to European positivist
philosophers, he argues that reason and revelation are separate
but inextricably linked sources for ethics: “The ground of
moral character is in beliefs and traditions and these can be
built only on religion. The religious factor is, therefore, the
most powerful of all, in respect both of public and of private
ethics. It exercises an authority over men’s souls superior to
that of reason, despite man’s uniquely rational powers” (p. 106).
See also Afghani, Jamal al-Din; Reform: Arab Middle
East and North Africa; Rida, Rashid; Salafiyya.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abduh, Muhammad. The Theology of Unity. Translated by
Ishaq Musaad and Kenneth Cragg. London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1966.
Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939.
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Kerr, Malcolm H. Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal
Theories of Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1966.
Sohail H. Hashmi
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
ABDUH, MUHAMMAD
ABD AL-WAHHAB, MUHAMMAD
ABD AL-WAHHAB, MUHAMMAD
IBN (1703–1792)
Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was a religious scholar and
conservative reformer whose teachings were elaborated by
his followers into the doctrines of Wahhabism. Ibn Abd al-
Wahhab was born in the small town of Uyayna located in the
Najd territory of north central Arabia. He came from a family
of Hanbali scholars and received his early education from his
father, who served as judge (qadi) and taught hadith and law at
the local mosque schools. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab left Uyayna
at an early age, and probably journeyed first to Mecca for the
pilgrimage and then continued to Medina, where he remained
for a longer period. Here he was influenced by the
lectures of Shaykh Abdallah b. Ibrahim al-Najdi on the neo-
Hanbali doctrines of Ibn Taymiyya.
From Medina, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab traveled to Basra,
where he apparently remained for some time, and then to
Isfahan. In Basra he was introduced directly to an array of
mystical (Sufi) practices and to Shiite beliefs and rituals. This
encounter undoubtedly reinforced his earlier beliefs that
Islam had been corrupted by the infusion of extraneous and
heretical influences. The beginning of his reformist activism
may be traced to the time when he left Basra around 1739 to
return to the Najd.
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab rejoined his family in Huraymila,
where his father had recently relocated. Here he composed
the small treatise entitled Kitab al-tawhid (Book of unity), in
which he most clearly outlines his religio-political mission.
He castigates not only the doctrines and practices of Sufism
and Shiism, but also more widespread popular customs
common to Sunnis as well, such as performing pilgrimages to
the graves of pious personages and beseeching the deceased
for intercession with God. More generally, following a line of
argument developed much earlier by Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Abd
al-Wahhab challenged the authority of the religious scholars
(ulema), not only of his own time, but also the majority of
those in preceding generations. These scholars had injected
unlawful innovations (bida) into Islam, he argued. In order to
restore the strict monotheism (tawhid) of true Islam, it was
necessary to strip the pristine Islam of human additions and
speculations and implement the laws contained in the Quran
as interpreted by the Prophet and his immediate companions.
Thus, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab called for the reopening of ijtihad
(independent legal judgment) by qualified persons to reform
Islam, but the end to which his ijtihad led was a conservative,
literal reading of certain parts of the Quran.
Aspects of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teachings, including
asceticism, simplicity of faith, and emphasis on an egalitarian
community, quickly drew followers to his cause. But his
condemnation of the alleged moral laxity of society, his
challenge to the ulema, and to the political authority that
supported them estranged him from his townspeople and,
some claim, even from his own family. In 1740, he returned to
his native village of Uyayna, where the local ruler (amir)
Uthman b. Bishr adopted his teachings and began to act on
some of them, such as destroying tombs in the area. When
this activity caused a popular backlash, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab
moved on to Diriyya, a small town in the Najd near presentday
Riyadh. Here he forged an alliance with the amir Muhammad
b. Saud (d. 1765), who pledged military support on
behalf of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s religious vocation. Ibn Abd
al-Wahhab spent the remainder of his life in Diriyya, teaching
in the local mosque, counseling first Muhammad b. Saud
and then his son Abd al-Aziz (d. 1801), and spreading his
teachings through followers in the Najd and Iraq.
See also Wahhabiyya.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Philby, Harry St. John Bridger. Arabia. New York:
Scribners, 1930.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Islam in Modern History. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Sohail H. Hashmi
ABD AL-RAZZAQ AL-SANHURI
ABD AL-RAZZAQ AL-SANHURI
(1895–1971)
Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri was one of the most distinguished
jurists and principal architects of modern Arab civil laws. Al-
Sanhuri, a native of Alexandria, Egypt, obtained his law
degree from what was then known as the Khedival School of
Law of Cairo in 1917. He held different public posts including
that of assistant prosecutor at the Mixed Courts of
Mansura and as a lecturer at the Sharia School for Judges. In
1921, he was awarded a scholarship to study law at the
University of Lyon in France. In France, he wrote two
doctoral dissertations, one on English law and the other on
the subject of the caliphate in the modern age. In 1926, al-
Sanhuri returned to Egypt where he became a law professor
at the National University (now the Cairo University), and
eventually became the dean of the law faculty. Because of his
involvement in politics, and defense of the Egyptian Constitution,
he was fired from his post in 1936, and left Egypt to
become the dean of the Law College in Baghdad.
After one year, he returned to Egypt where he held several
high-level cabinet posts before becoming the president of the
Council of State in 1949. Initially, al-Sanhuri supported the
movement of the Free Officers who overthrew the Egyptian
monarch in 1952, but because of al-Sanhuri’s insistence on a
return to civilian democratic rule and his defense of civil
rights, he was ousted from his position and persecuted. After
1954, al-Sanhuri withdrew from politics and focused his
efforts on scholarship and modernizing the civil codes of
several Arab countries. Al-Sanhuri heavily influenced the
drafting of the civil codes of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and
Kuwait. One year before his death in Egypt, al-Sanhuri
completed a huge multivolume commentary on civil law,
called al-Wasit fi sharh al-qanun al-madani, which is still
considered authoritative in many parts of the Arab world. He
also wrote several highly influential works on Islamic contractual
law, the most famous of which are Masadir al-haqq fi
al-fiqh al-Islami and Nazariyyat al-aqd fi al-fiqh al-Islami. One
of al-Sanhuri’s most notable accomplishments was that he
integrated and reconciled the civil law codes, which were
French based, with classical Islamic legal doctrines. For
instance, he is credited with making Egyptian civil law more
consistent with Islamic law.
See also Law; Modernization, Political: Constitutionalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hill, Enid. Al-Sanhuri and Islamic Law. Cairo: American
University of Cairo Press, 1987.
Khaled Abou El-Fadl
ABD AL-RAHMAN KAWAKIBI
ABD AL-RAHMAN KAWAKIBI
(1849?–1902)
An Arab nationalist and reformer, Abd al-Rahman Kawakibi
was born in Aleppo, Syria, where he was educated and worked
as an official and journalist until being forced by Ottoman
opposition to relocate to Cairo in 1898. He joined the circle
of Arab intellectuals surrounding Muhammad Abduh and
Rashid Rida. Kawakibi’s ideas are elaborated in two books,
Tabai al-istibdad (Characteristics of tyranny) and Umm alqura
(Mother of cities). In the first, he argues that the
Muslims’s political decline is the result of their straying from
original Islamic principles and the advent of mystical and
fatalist interpretations. Such passivity, he argues, plays into
the hands of despotic rulers, who historically have benefited
from false interpretations of Islam. The book was a condemnation
of the rule of the Ottoman Turks, and particularly of
the sultan Abd al-Hamid II. A revival of Islamic civilization
could come only after fresh interpretation of law (ijtihad),
educational reforms, and sweeping political change, beginning
with the institution of an Arab caliphate in the place of
the Ottoman Turks. The theme of renewed Arab leadership
in the Muslim umma is developed in the second book. The
title is taken from a Quranic reference to Mecca, where
Kawakibi places a fictional conference of representatives
from various Muslim countries aimed at charting the reform
of Muslim peoples.
See also Modernization, Political: Administrative, Military,
and Judicial Reform; Modernization, Political:
Authoritarianism and Democratization; Modernization,
Political: Constitutionalism; Modernization,
Political: Participation, Political Movements, and
Parties.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Husry, Khaldun S. Three Reformers: A Study in Modern Arab
Political Thought. Beirut: Khayats, 1966.
Kramer, Martin. Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim
Congresses. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Sohail H. Hashmi
ABD AL-QADIR, AMIR
ABD AL-QADIR, AMIR
(1807–1883)
During the early nineteenth century, Abd al-Qadir governed
a state in Algeria. His family, claiming descent from Muhammad,
led a Qadiriyya brotherhood center (zawiya) in western
Algeria. In 1831 the French conquered the port of Oran from
the Ottomans. Fighting broke out in the Oranais among
those tribes formerly subjected to Turkish taxes and those
privileged to collect them. The Moroccan sultan, failing to
pacify the tribes on his border, designated Abd al-Qadir’s
influential but aging father as his deputy. He, in turn, had
tribal leaders proclaim his son commander of the faithful
(amir al-muminin) in 1832.
The highly educated and well-traveled new amir negotiated
two treaties with France (1834–1837). Happy to cede the
job of tribal pacification to an indigenous leader, the French
acknowledged him as the sovereign of western Algeria. Abd
al-Qadir received French money and arms with which he
organized an administration, diplomatic service, and supply
services, including storage facilities, a foundry, and textile
workshops, for a standing army of six thousand men. Unfortunately,
frequent disputes, and even occasional battles, punctured
the treaties. The final rupture came when Abd al-
Qadir began expanding into eastern Algeria. In response, the
French decided on a complete conquest of Algeria and
destroyed Abd al-Qadir’s state (1839–1847), exiling him to
Damascus. During his exile, the amir immersed himself in
religious studies. He reemerged briefly into the public eye
when riots shook Damascus in July 1860. It was then that
Muslim resentment against perceived advantages enjoyed by
Christians under the Ottoman reform edict of 1839 exploded
into widespread killings and lootings. Virtually alone among
the notables of Damascus, Abd al-Qadir shielded Christians
from Muslim attackers.
See also Tasawwuf.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aouli, Smaï; Redjala, Ramdane; and Zoummeroff, Philippe.
Abd el-Kader. Paris: Fayard, 1994.
Danziger, Raphael. Abd al-Qadir and the Algerians: Resistance
to the French and Internal Consolidation New York: Homes
& Meier, 1977.
Peter von Sivers
Sunday, November 18, 2007
ABD AL-NASSER, JAMAL(1918–1970)
ABD AL-NASSER, JAMAL(1918–1970)
The Egyptian leader who dominated two decades of Arabhistory, Jamal Abd al-Nasser was born 15 January 1918, theson of a postal official. Raised in Alexandria and Cairo, heentered the military academy and was commissioned in 1938.Thereafter, he joined a secret Muslim Brotherhood cell,where he met fellow dissidents with whom he later foundedthe Free Officers. On 23 July 1952 the Free Officers seizedpower; within a year they outlawed political parties andestablished a republic. In 1954, they dismissed the figureheadpresident Muhammad Najib (Naguib) and repressed all opposition.Elected president in June 1956, Nasser ruled untilhis death. Under his leadership Egypt remained a one-partystate. The ruling party changed names several times; the ArabSocialist Union, formed in 1962, survived until 1978 whenNasser’s successor, Anwar al-Sadat, abolished it.A charismatic leader, Nasser drew regional acclaim andinternational notoriety for his championship of pan-Arabismand his leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement. Hispopularity soared during the 1956 Suez Crisis, sparked byEgypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company. Thetripartite British-French-Israeli invasion failed to topple hisregime and solidified his reputation. Frustrated with the paceof social and economic reform, in the early 1960s Nasserpromoted a series of socialist decrees nationalizing key sectorsof industry, agriculture, finance, and the arts. Egypt’srelations with the Soviet bloc improved, but Nasser neverturned entirely away from the West. In regional affairs theyears after Suez were marked by a series of setbacks. TheUnited Arab Republic (1958–1961) ended with Syria’s cessation,and the Yemeni civil war (1962–1967) entangled Egyptiantroops in a quagmire.Many contend that Nasser never recovered from thedisastrous defeat by Israel in June 1967. Yet he changed theface of Egypt, erasing class privileges, narrowing social gaps,and ushering in an era of optimism. If Egyptians fault hisfailure to democratize and debate the wisdom of Arab socialismor the state’s secular orientation, many still recall hispopulist intentions. When he died suddenly of a heart attackon 28 September 1970, millions accompanied his coffin tothe grave.See also Nationalism: Arab; Pan-Arabism.BIBLIOGRAPHYGordon, Joel. Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officersand the July Revolution. 2d ed. Cairo: American Universityin Cairo Press, 1996.Jankowski, James. Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and theUnited Arab Republic. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002.Joel Gordon
ABD AL-KARIM SORUSH (1945– )
ABD AL-KARIM SORUSH (1945– )
Abd al-Karim Sorush is the pen-name of Hassan Haj-FarajDabbagh. Born in 1945 in Tehran, Sorush attended AlaviHigh School, an alternative school that offered a rigorouscurriculum of Islamic studies in addition to the state-mandated,standardized education in math and sciences. He studiedIslamic law and exegesis with Reza Ruzbeh, one of thefounders of the school. He attended Tehran University, andin 1969 graduated with a degree in pharmacology. He continuedhis postgraduate education in history and philosophy ofscience at Chelsea College in London. In 1979 he returned toIran after the revolution, and soon thereafter was appointedby Ayatollah Khomeini to the Cultural Revolution Council.He resigned from this controversial post in 1983.In his most celebrated book, Qabz va Bast-i Teorik-iShariat (The theoretical constriction and expansion of thesharia), Sorush developed a general critique of dogmaticinterpretations of religion. He argued that, when turned intoa dogma, religion becomes ideological and loses its universality.He held that religious knowledge is inevitably historicaland culturally contingent, and that it is distinct from religion,the truth of which is solely possessed by God. He posited thatculture, language, history, and human subjectivity mediatethe comprehension of the revealed text. Therefore, humanunderstandings of the physical world, through science, forinstance, and the changing nature of the shared values ofhuman societies (such as citizenship and social and politicalrights) inform and condition religious knowledge.There was a contradiction between Sorush’s understandingof epistemological problems of human knowledge, whichhe saw as logical and methodical, and his emphasis on the historical contingencies of the hermeneutics of the divinetext. This contradiction was resolved in his later writing infavor of a more hermeneutical approach. In his early work, hewas influenced by analytical philosophy and skepticism of apost-positivist logic, whereas in his later writings he adopteda more hermeneutical approach to the meaning of the sacredtext. In his earlier work he put forward epistemologicalquestions about the limits and truthfulness of claims regardingknowledge, but in two important later books, Siratha-yimustaqim (1998, Straight paths) and Bast-e tajrubih-e Nabavi(1999, The expansion of the prophetic experience), he emphasizedthe reflexivity and plurality of human understanding.In his plural usage of the Quranic phrase “straightpaths,” Sorush offered a radical break with both modernistand orthodox traditions in Islamic theology.In the 1990s, Sorush emerged as one the most influentialMuslim thinkers in Iran. His theology contributed to theemergence of a generation of Muslim reformers who challengedthe legitimization of the Islamic Republic’s rule basedon divine sources rather than on democratic principles andpopular consent.See also Iran, Islamic Republic of; Khomeini, Ruhollah.BIBLIOGRAPHYSadri, Mahmoud, and Sadri, Ahmad, eds. Reason, Freedom, &Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
ABD AL-JABBAR (935–1025)
ABD AL-JABBAR (935–1025)
Abd al-Jabbar was a Mutazilite theologian and Shafiitejurist, known as Qadi Abd al-Jabbar b. Ahmad al-Hamadani.He was born in Asadabad in Iran about 935, studied kalamwith Abu Ishaq al-Ayyash in Basra, and associated with theprominent Mutazilite scholar Abu Abdullah al-Basri inBaghdad. Abd al-Jabbar was appointed as chief judge of Rayywith a great authority over other regions in northern Iran bythe Buyid wazir Sahib b. Abbad in 977. Following hisdismissal from the post after the death of Ibn Abbad, hedevoted his life to teaching. In 999 he made a pilgrimage toMecca through Baghdad, where he spent some time. Hetaught briefly in Kazvin (1018–1019) and died in 1025 in Ray.As the teacher of the well-known Mutazilites of theeleventh century, such as Abu Rashid al-Nisaburi, IbnMattawayh, Abu ’l-Husayn al-Basri, and as the master ofMutazilism in its late period, Abd al-Jabbar elaborated andexpanded the teachings of Bahshamiyya, the subgroup namedafter Abu Hashim al-Jubbai. He synthesized some of theMutazilite views with Sunni doctrine on the relation ofreason and revelation, and came close to the Shiite positionon the question of leadership (imama). He is also a significantsource of information on ancient Iranian and other monotheisticreligions.Abd al-Jabbar wrote many works on kalam, especially onthe defense of the Quran, and on the Prophet of Islam. Someof his books, including most of his twenty-volume work al-Mughni, have been published. Commentaries on two of hislost books, Sharh al-usul al-khamsa by Qiwam al-Din Mankdimand al-Muhit bi’l-taklif by Ibn Mattawayh, are also available.See also Kalam; Mutazilites, Mutazila.BIBLIOGRAPHYFrank, Richard M. “The Autonomy of the Human Agentin the Teaching of Abd al-Gabbar.” Le Museon 95(1982): 323–355.Heemskerk, M. T. Suffering in the Mutazilite Theology: Abdal-Jabbar’s Teaching on Pain and Divine Justice. Leiden:Brill, 2000.Hourani, George F. Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of Abd al-Jabbar. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1971.Peters, J. R. T. M. God’s Created Speech: A Study in theSpeculative Theology of the Mutazili Qadi l-Qudat Abul-Hasan Abd al-Jabbar bn Ahmad al-Hamadani. Leiden:Brill, 1976.M. Sait Özervarli
ABD AL-HAMID KISHK (SHAYKH)(1933–1996)
ABD AL-HAMID KISHK (SHAYKH)(1933–1996)
A pioneering “cassette preacher” of the 1970s, Abd al-Hamid Kishk was born in the Egyptian Delta village ofShubrakhut, the son of a small merchant. Early on he experiencedvision impairment, and lost his sight entirely as a youngteen. He memorized the Quran by age twelve, attendedreligious schools in Alexandria and Cairo, then enrolled at al-Azhar University. He graduated in 1962, first in his class, butrather than an expected nomination to the teaching faculty,he was appointed imam at a Cairo mosque.Kishk ran afoul of the Nasser regime in 1965. He claimedhe was instructed to denounce Sayyid Qutb, refused, andsubsequently was arrested and tortured in prison. In the early1970s, cassette recordings of his sermons and lessons beganto proliferate throughout Egypt; by the late 1970s he wasarguably the most popular preacher in the Arab world.Attendance at his mosque skyrocketed, reaching 100,000 forFriday sermons by the early 1980s. In September 1981 he wasarrested as part of Anwar al-Sadat’s crackdown on politicalopponents, and was in prison when Sadat was assassinated.Upon his release he regained his following. He published hisautobiography, The Story of My Days, in 1986. He died adecade later, in 1996.BIBLIOGRAPHYJansen, Johannes J. G. The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’sAssassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East. NewYork and London: Macmillan, 1986.Kepel, Gilles. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet andPharaoh. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1993.Joel Gordon
ABD AL-HAMID IBN BADIS(1889–1940)
ABD AL-HAMID IBN BADIS(1889–1940)
Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis was the leader of the Islamicreformist movement in Algeria and founder of the Associationdes Uléma Musulmanes Algériens (AUMA). He was born in1889 in Constantine, where he also died in 1940. Afterreceiving a traditional education in his hometown, Ibn Badis(locally referred to as Ben Badis) studied at the IslamicUniversity of Zaytuna, in Tunis, from 1908 to 1912. In thefollowing years he journeyed through the Middle East, particularlyin Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where he came intocontact with modernist and reformist currents of thoughtspreading within orthodox Sunni Islam.Ibn Badis became the most prominent promoter of theIslamic reformist movement in Algeria, first through hispreaching at the mosque of Sidi Lahdar in his hometown,and, after 1925, through his intensive journalistic activity. Hefounded a newspaper, Al-Muntaqid (The critic), which closedafter a few months. Immediately afterwards, however, hebegan a new and successful newspaper, Al-Shihab (The meteor),which soon became the platform of the reformistthinking in Algeria, until its closure in 1939. Through thepages of Al-Shihab, Ibn Badis spread the Salafiyya movementin Algeria, presented his Quranic exegesis, and argued theneed for Islamic reform and a rebirth of religion and religiousvalues within a society that, in his view, had been too influencedby French colonial rule. He further argued that theAlgerian nation had to be founded on its Muslim culture andits Arab identity, and for this reason he is also considered aprecursor of Algerian nationalism. He promoted the freeteaching of Arabic language, which had been marginalizedduring the years of French rule, and the establishment of freeschools for adults, where traditional Quranic studies couldbe taught.In May 1931 he founded the AUMA (also Association ofAlgerian Muslim Ulema), which gathered the country’s leadingMuslim thinkers, initially both reformist and conservative,and subsequently only reformist, and served as its presidentuntil his death. Whereas the reformist programs promotedthrough Al-Shihab had managed to reach an audience limitedto the elite educated class of the country, the AUMA becamethe tool for a nationwide campaign to revive Islam, Arabic,and religious studies, as well as a center for direct social andpolitical action. Throughout the country he founded a networkof Islamic cultural centers that provided the means forthe educational initiatives he advocated and the establishmentof Islamic youth groups. He also spearheaded a campaignagainst Sufi brotherhoods, accusing them of introducingblameworthy innovations to religious practice, and also ofcooperating with the colonial administration. He played animportant political role in the formation of the AlgerianMuslim Congress in 1936, which arose in reaction to thevictory of the Popular Front in France, and was activepolitically in the country until his premature death in 1940.Thanks to his activities as leader of the AUMA and to hiswriting in Al-Shihab, Ibn Badis is considered by some to bethe most important figure of the Arab-Islamic cultural revivalin Algeria during the 1930s.See also Reform: Arab Middle East and North Africa;Salafiyya.BIBLIOGRAPHYMerad, Ali. Le Réformisme Musulman en Algérie de 1925 a1940. Paris: Mouton, 1967.Safi, Hammadi. “Abdel Hamid Ben Badis entre les exigenciesdu dogme et la contrainte de la modernité.” InPenseurs Maghrébins Contemporains. Casablanca: EditionsEDDIF, 1993.Claudia Gazzini
ABD AL-BAHA (1844–1921)
ABD AL-BAHA (1844–1921)
Abd al-Baha Abbas, also known as Abbas Effendi, was theson of Bahaallah (Mirza Husayn Ali, 1817–1892), the founderof the Bahai religion. In his final will and testament, Bahaallahdesignated him as his successor and authoritative expounderof his teachings. Born in Tehran on 23 May 1844, he grew upin the household of a father committed to the teachings of theBabi movement and consequently shared his father’s fate ofexile and intermittent imprisonment until the Young Turkrevolution of 1909.As a result, Abd al-Baha received little formal educationand had to manage the affairs of his father’s household at avery early age. Despite these setbacks, he demonstrated anatural capacity for leadership and a prodigious knowledge ofhuman history and thought.Abd al-Baha corresponded with and enjoyed the respectof a number of the luminaries of his day, including theRussian author Leo Tolstoy and the Muslim reformer MuhammadAbduh. He left behind a small portion of what is alarge corpus of still-unexplored writings that include socialcommentaries, interpretations, and elaborations of his father’sworks, mystical treatises, and Quranic and biblicalexegeses.Upon his release from house imprisonment in 1909, Abdal-Baha traveled to North Africa, Europe, and North Americaadvocating a number of reforms for all countries, includingthe adoption of a universal auxiliary language, globalcollective security, mandatory education, and full legal andsocial equality for women and minorities. He also warned of acoming war in Europe and called for a just system of globalgovernment and international courts where disputes betweennations could be resolved peacefully.Abd al-Baha died on 28 November 1921. According tohis will and testament, his eldest grandson, Shoghi EffendiRabbani, became the head of the Bahai community and thesole authorized interpreter of his grandfather and greatgrandfather’steachings.See also Bahaallah; Bahai Faith.William McCants
ABD AL-BAHA (1844–1921)
ABD AL-BAHA (1844–1921)
Abd al-Baha Abbas, also known as Abbas Effendi, was theson of Bahaallah (Mirza Husayn Ali, 1817–1892), the founderof the Bahai religion. In his final will and testament, Bahaallahdesignated him as his successor and authoritative expounderof his teachings. Born in Tehran on 23 May 1844, he grew upin the household of a father committed to the teachings of theBabi movement and consequently shared his father’s fate ofexile and intermittent imprisonment until the Young Turkrevolution of 1909.As a result, Abd al-Baha received little formal educationand had to manage the affairs of his father’s household at avery early age. Despite these setbacks, he demonstrated anatural capacity for leadership and a prodigious knowledge ofhuman history and thought.Abd al-Baha corresponded with and enjoyed the respectof a number of the luminaries of his day, including theRussian author Leo Tolstoy and the Muslim reformer MuhammadAbduh. He left behind a small portion of what is alarge corpus of still-unexplored writings that include socialcommentaries, interpretations, and elaborations of his father’sworks, mystical treatises, and Quranic and biblicalexegeses.Upon his release from house imprisonment in 1909, Abdal-Baha traveled to North Africa, Europe, and North Americaadvocating a number of reforms for all countries, includingthe adoption of a universal auxiliary language, globalcollective security, mandatory education, and full legal andsocial equality for women and minorities. He also warned of acoming war in Europe and called for a just system of globalgovernment and international courts where disputes betweennations could be resolved peacefully.Abd al-Baha died on 28 November 1921. According tohis will and testament, his eldest grandson, Shoghi EffendiRabbani, became the head of the Bahai community and thesole authorized interpreter of his grandfather and greatgrandfather’steachings.See also Bahaallah; Bahai Faith.William McCants
ABBAS I, SHAH
ABBAS I, SHAH (1571–1629)
Shah Abbas I, the fifth ruler of the Safavid dynasty, ruled Iran
from 1587 until 1629, the year of his death. Shah Abbas came
to power at a time when tribal unrest and foreign invasion had
greatly reduced Iran’s territory. Once on the throne he set
out to regain the lands and authority that had been lost by his
immediate successors. His defeat of the Uzbeks in the northeast
and the peace he made with the Ottoman Empire, Iran’s
archenemy, enabled Shah Abbas to reform Iran’s military
and financial system. He diminished the military power of the
tribes by creating a standing army composed of slave soldiers
who were loyal only to him. These so-called ghulams (military
slaves) were mostly Armenians and Georgians captured during
raids in the Caucasus. In order to increase the revenue
needed for these reforms the shah centralized state control,
which included the appointment of ghulams to high administrative
positions.
With the same intent he fostered trade by reestablishing
road security and by building many caravan series throughout
the country. Under Shah Abbas, Isfahan became Iran’s
capital and most important city, endowed with a new commercial
and administrative center grouped around a splendid
square that survives today. His genius further manifested
itself in his military skills and his astute foreign policy. He
halted the eastward expansion of the Ottomans, defeating
them and taking Baghdad in 1623. To encourage trade and
thus gain treasure, he welcomed European merchants to the
Persian Gulf. He also allowed Christian missionaries to settle
in his country, hopeful that this might win him allies among
European powers in his anti-Ottoman struggle. Famously
down to earth, Shah Abbas was a pragmatic ruler who could
be cruel as well as generous. Rare among Iranian kings, he is
today remembered as a ruler who was concerned about his
own people.
A detail from a miniature painting of Abbas I (1571–1629)
appears in the volume one color plates.
See also Empires: Safavid and Qajar.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Matthee, Rudolph P. The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk
for Silver, 1600–1730. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Savory, Roger. Iran under the Safavids. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Rudi Matthee
British-Israel Theory
A theory tracing British origins in the Bible, with implications for national status and destiny.
The British-Israel theory was the most prominent of a number of theories about the Lost Tribes. As related in the Bible, the northern kingdom of Israel, comprising ten of the tribes reputedly descended from the patriarch Jacob, was destroyed by Assyrian deportations in the eighth century b.c. The deportees were transferred eastward and probably assimilated. However, the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37:21–24) assumes that their descendants still have a corporate identity and will someday be reunited in the Holy Land with descendants of their southern kinfolk, namely, the Jews. In this passage, God promises that “my servant David” will be king over the whole community. A belief in a large body of ethnic Israelites surviving in some remote land is attested much later by the Jewish historian Josephus. Their existence has continued to be a tenet of Orthodox Judaism.
Some Christians have not been content to leave the matter indefinite. They have tried to locate and identify the lost Israelites, who, it must be presumed, wandered beyond the bounds of the Assyrian Empire. The underlying idea is that God’s covenant was with all twelve tribes, and since his promises cannot be canceled, the northerners must exist somewhere. They have been found, with the aid of tenuous linguistic and historical clues, in Afghanistan and Japan and even America.
The British-Israel theory pressed such scriptural arguments further. It was foreshadowed by Richard Brothers (1757–1824), but the main development came long after his time. Exponents drew attention to prophecies of the Chosen People enjoying visible divine favor, power, and greatness. That could not be said of the Jews, who, when the theory was taking shape, did not even have a homeland. God’s promises must therefore have been fulfilled in the other branch of the Chosen People. These promises fitted Britain when its empire was flourishing, so the British had to be the long-lost northern Israelites.
To confirm the equation, ingenious speculations traced the Lost Tribes, by various routes, to northwestern Europe and the British Isles. For instance, Assyrian inscriptions called the northern Israelites the people of Omri, after one of their best-known kings. The name could have been modified into “Khumri,” and this could have been the origin of “Cimmerian” (applied in antiquity to a nation in southern Russia, doubtless Israel on the march) and “Cymry” (applied to the Welsh, doubtless part of Israel in its new country). A more direct argument was that the word British sounded like the Hebrew b’rit ish, meaning “covenant man.” Legendary genealogies were invoked to link British royalty with King David. British-Israel theory was strongly Protestant and stressed, as proof of the British people’s “chosen” character, their break with the pope, their translation of the Bible, and their distribution of it through their overseas possessions.
For a time, in spite of so much that was fanciful, the prophecies seemed to be working and pointing to a glorious future. One result of World War I was that Britain took over Palestine and sponsored the Zionist program of Jewish settlement. The two branches of the Chosen People were being brought together in the Holy Land, just as Ezekiel had foretold. The heyday of the British-Israel theory was in the 1920s and 1930s. Early in 1936, the accession of King Edward VIII, known to his intimates as David, fulfilled the word of God about “my servant David.” Soon, perhaps, Ezekiel’s next chapter would also be fulfilled. This predicted an invasion of the Holy Land by the evil northern ruler “Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal”—surely a reference to Soviet Russia, Gog being Stalin, Meshech and Tubal being Moscow and Tobolsk. Some British-Israel advocates, with support from Pyramidology, expected an event of crucial importance in September 1936. Nothing particular happened. Shortly afterward, King Edward abdicated. Soviet Russia became otherwise engaged. In the next few decades, British rule in Palestine ended, and so did the empire itself. Everything had fallen apart, and the prophetic texts that supposedly established Britain’s Israelite character were no longer relevant.
See also
Ezekiel; Pyramidology
Further Reading
Ashe, Geoffrey. Mythology of the British Isles. London: Methuen, 1990.
Cavendish, Richard, ed. Man, Myth and Magic. London: BPC Publishing, 1970–1972. Article “Lost Tribes of Israel.”
Sargent, H. N. The Marvels of Bible Prophecy. London: Covenant Publishing, 1938.
Todd, Ruthven. Tracks in the Snow. London: The Grey Walls Press, 1946.
Brahan Seer, The (sixteenth century)
Scottish prophet located rather indefinitely in the Highlands and the Scottish Islands. His name is given as Coinneach Odhar, in Gaelic, or as Dun Kenneth. His powers are said to have come from his scrying stone, a gift of the fairy-folk. When he first looked into this, just before a meal, it showed him that the food was poisoned.
He may be identifiable with a man of his name who was arrested for witchcraft in 1577, on the estates of the earl of Seaforth. Tradition connects the Seer’s most famous prophecy and his death with the Seaforth family. When the earl was away, allegedly on business, the Seer told the countess that her husband was visiting another woman. She had him put to death: he was correct, but his knowledge must have come by unhallowed means and, in any case, he had no right to talk to her like that. He found time to retort by predicting that the last of the Seaforths would be deaf and dumb and his sons would die before him. This happened during the lifetime of Sir Walter Scott. The original prophecy may, of course, have been invented or improved retrospectively.
The same applies with greater force to other prophecies attributed to the Brahan Seer. He is supposed to have foretold the battle of Culloden in 1746, when Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was defeated. He is even supposed to have foretold railways.
See also
Peden, Alexander; Scrying; Thomas the Rhymer
Further Reading
Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. London: Readers Digest Association, 1973.
Wallechinsky, David, Amy Wallace, and Irving Wallace and others. The Book of Predictions. New York: William Morrow, 1980.
Blake, William
Blake, William
(1757–1827)
English poet and artist, prophet of a highly individual apocalypse.
Blake spent most of his life in London as a professional engraver and book illustrator. He was familiar with the doctrines of the scientist and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, and his thinking owed something to several contemporary eccentrics, among them Richard Brothers, the pioneer British-Israelite, John Varley, one of the few active astrologers at that time, and Owen Pughe, a follower of Joanna Southcott—especially Pughe, who had unusual notions about British antiquity, druids, and related matters. Blake, however, ranged far beyond any of these influences. His well-known lyrical poems constitute only a fraction of his output. In a series of Prophetic Books, with which much of his artistic work is associated, he built up a complex mythology of the human condition.
He saw himself as a prophet in the biblical sense, though, for him, divinity inhered in humanity and not in a transcendent God. The exact nature of his inspiration is uncertain: he may have had visionary experiences in a “hypnagogic” state between waking and sleep and developed these afterward in writing. The finished product, however arrived at, is in unrhymed verse, which, in his later work, is barely distinguishable from prose. His “prophesying” is mainly in the old sense of inspired utterance, not prediction. However, it leads up to an apocalyptic climax that is regarded as future.
The Prophetic Books are extremely difficult. It has been said that their meaning is not so much “what they say” as “what you arrive at for yourself by a sustained effort to understand them,” aided, of course, by commentators who have made the same effort and reached a degree of consensus. The central idea is that the human race was formerly united, wise, and creative. Then came a fall (not the biblical Fall), and humanity became divided, inwardly as well as outwardly, declining from its ancient heights into error, disorganization, spiritual blindness, and constriction. Hence false religions, false ideologies, wars, persecutions, and other evils. But the creative imagination, which has never ceased to manifest itself in art and literature, will eventually triumph, bringing a rebirth. Vision and unity will be recovered, all that was lost will be reinstated, the pristine integrity will return.Blake invents a group of symbolic characters, some of whom represent aspects of human nature. In his vast final work, Jerusalem (not the short poem often called so), composed during the period from 1804 to 1820, he brings his mythology to a focus in the figure of Albion. Albion is the earliest name of Britain. Blake’s Albion stands for Britain but also for humanity as a whole. This identification depends on one of the unorthodox theories current in his time—that Britain was the original fountainhead of all wisdom and culture, worldwide. Humanity, in everything that matters, derives from Britain; therefore, Britain, personified under its ancient name Albion, can stand for humanity.
In Blake’s primordial past, Albion becomes self-alienated from the divine vision. He sinks into a deathlike sleep, and that is the fall. But he will wake up, and that will be the rebirth, ushering in a new era of exuberant freedom, creativity, and illumination. After the multiple obscurities of Jerusalem, Blake describes Albion’s awakening in a passage that is unexpectedly simple and moving.
Blake is a patriot, though in a semimystical style of his own, rejecting most of the paraphernalia of conventional patriotism. His Albion is more than a literary construct. He naturally takes a deep interest in Britain’s history and legends and even in Britain’s topography; he mentions numerous places. His most ambitious painting, taking hints from Pughe, was called The Ancient Britons. This is lost, but a long accompanying note survives. In it, Blake says: “The stories of Arthur are the acts of Albion, applied to a prince of the fifth century.” Arthur, the glorious king who passed away but will return, is an image in a particular time and place of the great overarching theme that Albion’s life span embodies.
Blake’s myth of long-lost glory, decline, and apocalyptic rebirth is his own expression of a persistent syndrome, as it may be called, that is expressed also in the glory, the passing, and the return of Arthur. The motif of reinstating a past golden age has inspired actual historical movements of reform and revolution. Thus, Christian Reformers in the sixteenth century appealed to the purity of the primitive Church and claimed to be disinterring it from corruption; French revolutionaries under Rousseau’s influence theorized about a free and equal ancient society that could reassert itself when tyrannies were destroyed; Gandhi aimed to revive a long-ago ideal India of village communes and saints and sages, by ending the foreign domination that had suppressed it. The return of Arthur mythifies, in a British setting, a way of looking at things that has had profound effects. Blake universalizes this in Albion’s awakening.
See also
Arthur, King; British-Israel Theory; Southcott, Joanna
Further Reading
Ashe, Geoffrey. Camelot and the Vision of Albion. London: Heinemann, 1971, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971.
Todd, Ruthven. Tracks in the Snow. London: The Grey Walls Press, 1946.
Antichrist; Apocalypse; End of the World; Isaiah; Jesus Christ; John the Baptist; Micah; Revelation; Second Isaiah; Simeon and Anna
The Church broke away from its Jewish origins in the latter part of the first century a.d., when it was virtually defunct in Jerusalem and survived elsewhere mainly as a network of Gentile groups created by the missions of Paul and others. It was still far from having an agreed documentation. Christians, however, inherited the Jewish Bible—to be known presently as the Old Testament—and while some extremists wanted to drop it, the consensus was in favor of keeping it as sacred Scripture. After all, Christ had endorsed it and quoted from it. Christians believed, however, that he had indicated a new way of understanding it, and especially of understanding its prophecies.
Many of these, they held, should be read as foreshadowing him. With that clue in mind, they began finding fresh significance in various prophetic texts. This process can be seen in the First Gospel, which bears the name of Matthew. In support of the belief that Jesus’ mother was a virgin and he had no human father, the author says the miracle is foretold in Isaiah 7:14: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” Isaiah was probably referring to the birth of a royal heir in his own time, not to anything miraculous; the Hebrew word translated “virgin” does not necessarily mean that. Yet in a context of divine inspiration, it is fair to detect a secondary sense beyond the obvious one, and the name Emmanuel (meaning “God with us”) may be thought to hint at such a sense.
Matthew, or whoever the author was, asserts an Old Testament confirmation of Jesus’ status in Micah 5:2, where a messianic figure is to be born in Bethlehem. He also asserts an Old Testament forecast of his entry into Jerusalem in Zechariah 9:9, about Zion’s king coming to her mounted on an ass. He finds foreshadowings in texts that were not originally prophetic at all, such as Zechariah 11:13, which refers to thirty pieces of silver, the sum paid to Judas. The Fourth Gospel finds similar anticipations of the crucifixion, as in Psalm 22:18: “They divided my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots.” This discovery of symbols or “types” in Jewish Scripture went much further, as in the Letter to the Hebrews, where many episodes in the history of Israel are given fresh meanings and made to point in a new direction.
According to Saint Augustine in the fifth century, such anticipations of Christ, extracted from Jewish Scripture, were effective in making converts. When the essential Christian message is once accepted, these texts may indeed be seen as corroborative, yet scarcely as predictive. No one would have taken them thus at the time of writing.Granted, they are not prophecy invented after the event, but they are prophecy recognized after the event, when they were fulfilled; not before. The most impressive case is the citation in the New Testament (two or three times, though with surprisingly little emphasis) of the “Servant Song” in Isaiah 52:13–53:12. In this, the prophet known as Second Isaiah tells a story that is genuinely hard to account for except in terms of Christian beliefs about Jesus, and he tells it over 500 years before Jesus lived and before those beliefs took shape.
Prophecies by the Christians themselves were concerned with the Second Coming of Christ, the overthrow of the powers of evil, and the End of the World. They were based on reputed sayings of Jesus. In the Gospels, he speaks of the Kingdom—the community of believers, in which God will reign—and its imminent manifestation and ultimate glory. He makes no commitment as to duration: he hints at an undefined future, perhaps a long one, and warns that the day and hour of the End are known only to his heavenly Father. However, some of his sayings, as presented in the Gospels, are given a context suggesting that the End is close and is, in fact, to be within the lifetime of “this generation.”
Wishful thinking or textual confusion may have affected the record. It certainly appears that many Christians did expect an early return of Christ in visible majesty. The second letter of Paul to his Thessalonian converts (its authenticity has been questioned, but the point is irrelevant) reveals that some of them not only thought that the Lord would return soon but that he might even have returned already and were giving up work and the ordinary business of life in that belief: were dropping out, in fact. Paul condemns this behavior, and, in doing so, makes an important contribution to Christian prophecy. He says a diabolic archenemy must appear first, who will afflict and divide the Church until Christ actually does return and destroy him. This is the beginning of the concept of Antichrist, who acquires a settled place in the Christian scheme of things.
The New Testament has one complete and famous prophetic book, the Apocalypse or Revelation by a Jewish Christian named John, traditionally the apostle. It was written, at least in its present form, during the closing decade of the first century. John still seems to be hoping for an early End, but he has touches that imply otherwise. One is a description of the Church in the future as “a great multitude… from every nation,” presupposing many years of worldwide evangelism and growth yet to come.
Revelation belongs to an established genre of Jewish apocalyptic prophecy, but it has a complexity of structure and a richness of imagery that surpass the surviving Jewish examples. At the start, Christ comes to the author in a vision and tells him that he will see “what is and what is to take place hereafter.” This promise has led many commentators to interpret the entire book as a preview of history (or at least the history of those parts of the world that the commentators think important) for many years ahead, sometimes as far as the twentieth century. Such speculation has been encouraged by what look like cryptographic clues in the text. In general, it is misguided. For instance, while chapters 8 and 9, depicting plagues and other disasters, foreshadow divine judgments on the pagan world, they are mythic rather than literal. They cannot be credibly related to anything that actually happened.
In chapters 13 and 17, however, John does symbolize recognizable realities—the anti-Christian Roman Empire, in the guise of a satanically sponsored Beast, and its world-exploiting capital, in the guise of the “harlot” Babylon. He alludes to emperors living in his own time, Nero certainly, Domitian probably. Given these factual references, it is not too fanciful to probe further, and these chapters do have a predictive element and even arguable fulfillments. John foretells a of Christians immensely more ruthless and widespread than any inflicted hitherto, with a religious aspect of its own; and such a persecution happened in the early fourth century a.d. and not before. He also foretells the ruin of “Babylon,” the city of Rome, by forces generated within the empire itself; and this happened when Rome was sacked by barbarians whom the empire had tried to absorb, in the fifth century and not before.
Revelation looks beyond to the Second Coming, a final conflict, and a thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth. Some Christians took this literally, saying that the Second Coming would bring a kind of Utopia, even a Utopia of material well-being. This “millenarian” opinion failed to meet with ecclesiastical approval, and the thousand-year reign was given a symbolic meaning, but the more down-to-earth reading of John’s prophecy never quite expired.
See also
Antichrist; Apocalypse; End of the World; Isaiah; Jesus Christ; John the Baptist; Micah; Revelation; Second Isaiah; Simeon and Anna
Further Reading
Ashe, Geoffrey. The Book of Prophecy. London: Blandford, 1999.
Brown R. E., J. A. Fitzmyer, and R. E. Murphy, eds. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990.
Swete, Henry Barclay. The Apocalypse of St. John. London: Macmillan, 1907.
Biblical Prophecy (1)—Israelite and Jewish
Prophecy in the Jewish Bible—the Old Testament, in Christian parlance—takes several forms and shows a unique progress. At all stages, it is attributed to Yahweh, the Lord, the God of Israel. References to techniques such as Gentile soothsayers might use are few and mostly disapproving. Joseph in Genesis is not counted as a prophet, yet even he, when he interprets dreams and foretells what will happen to the dreamers, disclaims any notion that he does it by his own wisdom: “Do not interpretations belong to God?” Other early scriptural figures are called prophets in a general way, as being divinely inspired. However, when the Israelites are established in the Promised Land, full-time prophecy appears as a vocation. The term for a prophet in this sense is nabi, probably meaning “someone who is called.”
Most of Israel’s prophets, but not all, were male. Some were freelances; others combined in groups or guilds. They wore garments of skin and played musical instruments—flutes, lyres, harps, tambourines; they might be described as Yahweh’s minstrels. As such, they had a shamanic quality. They could invoke the Lord’s spirit, and when it blew upon them, they danced or rolled on the ground in ecstasy and saw visions. In that condition, they might utter oracular chants, which were revered as divine messages. The ecstasy could be infectious: Israel’s first king, Saul, is twice seized with it. Yahweh could even take possession of non-Israelites, as in the story of the seer Balaam, who is hired to curse the Israelites and can only bless them. Nabi prophets were respected and could live on gifts and hospitality.Their supposedly inspired advice was seldom unacceptable to those who consulted them, and insofar as they made predictions, these were apt to be in the encouraging manner of modern fortune-tellers. But in the account of Ahab, who ruled the northern Israelites during the ninth century b.c., a new style is beginning to emerge. There is a distinction between prophecy spoken to oblige patrons and prophecy that tells the truth, however unwelcome. Elijah denounces Ahab’s flagrant injustice and his attempts, under the influence of his foreign queen Jezebel, to replace Yahweh worship with Baal worship. He foretells a long drought as a sign of God’s displeasure, and it happens. Later in the reign, another prophet, Micaiah, also begins to sound a new note. Ahab plans an expedition to recapture the city of Ramoth Gilead from the Syrians. He assembles a body of nabi prophets who assure him, in chorus, that the Lord will deliver the city into his hands. But Micaiah contradicts them. He describes a vision in which the Lord authorized a “lying spirit” to enter into Ahab’s prophets and lure him to destruction. Ahab refuses to listen, takes his army to Ramoth-gilead, and falls in battle.
The activities of these men—especially Elijah, who is one of the outstanding biblical figures—opened the way for a succession of prophets whose revelations were written down and became part of Scripture. The greatest of these was Isaiah, who flourished in the eighth century b.c. There is no parallel outside Israel, either to this kind of prophecy itself or to the literary power of some of its productions. A prophet was “called” when the word of the Lord came to him unbidden. He might see visions and dream dreams. But the point of his experiences was that they made sense, often with a radical message. These prophets were deeply and eloquently critical of the irresponsible luxury of the rich and the reduction of Israel’s religion to official ceremonies, sometimes with pagan contaminations. Showing nostalgia for the simpler way of earlier times, they proclaimed that justice and mercy and charity were more acceptable to the Lord than rituals and sacrifices.
A pervasive theme was that Yahweh loved his people, but they were estranged from him by their own perverseness. It was largely because of the prophets’ foreshadowings of divine judgment that the word prophecy began to acquire its predictive meaning. One idea that developed was that the Chosen People were not an indivisible bloc, secure in God’s favor. Many might fall away (the northern tribes did and were conquered and uprooted by the Assyrians); but the divine blessing could be inherited by a faithful remnant, who would never be deserted or permanently dispossessed of the Promised Land. The prophet Jeremiah foretold, correctly, that his people would be deported to Babylon, but he also foretold that after a penitential exile, the survivors who remained faithful would be allowed to go back to Zion. This happened in 539 b.c., when the Persian king Cyrus conquered the Babylonian Empire and gave the captives permission to return. They and their descendants became the Jews, a name derived from Judahite, applying to the principal Israelite group centered on Jerusalem and its Temple.
Prophecy was much less conspicuous in the restored community. However, it reappeared in a fresh guise as a response to persecution at the hands of the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes. It was now more a matter of speculation by authors who might profess to be inspired and to be continuators of biblical tradition, but had little of the spontaneity of the nabi or of prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jewish hopes of a final deliverance and triumph were expressed in forecasts of a spectacular divine intervention and in predictions of the Messiah, a king of the line of David who would be the Jews’ leader and final deliverer, reigning in Zion.
Roman conquest stimulated such hopes. They had to be abandoned for the foreseeable future when two anti-Roman revolts were crushed, the second and conclusive one in a.d. 135. Jerusalem was largely destroyed with its Temple, and the Jews were scattered through the Roman world and beyond. However, the expectation of the Messiah was never extinguished, though most rabbis discouraged guesswork about him. The prophetic hope of a return to the Promised Land was kept alive through many centuries of dispersal and suffering. Its fulfillment through modern Zionism, against all rational probability and enormous odds, has impressed many as an extraordinary case of successful prophecy, even though some Orthodox Jews opposed the Zionist movement on the ground that Israel’s reconstitution was to be the work of the Messiah alone and must not be anticipated by human agency.
See also
Daniel; Ezekiel; Isaiah; Jeremiah; Jonah; Messiah; Micah; Promised Land; Second Isaiah
Further Reading
Ashe, Geoffrey. The Land and the Book. London: Collins, 1965.
Lindblom, J. Prophecy in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962.
Besant, Annie
Besant, Annie
(1847–1933)
English Theosophist who caused a stir by predicting the advent of a new Messiah.
Originally Annie Wood, she married an Anglican clergyman, Frank Besant. Though soon separated from him, she continued to use her married name. She went through three major conversions, throwing herself with zeal and ability into each successive cause. First, with the freethinker Charles Bradlaugh, she campaigned for atheism and birth control. Then, she joined Bernard Shaw and others in launching the Fabian Society, a body aiming at a gradual transition to Socialism. Finally, she was won over to Theosophy by Madame Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine. In 1907, she became president of the Theosophical Society. She accepted Blavatsky’s claims about mysterious “Masters” who taught her telepathically and secretly influenced the world’s destinies. According to Besant, there was a whole hierarchy of superior beings who met periodically in Shambhala, a northern holy place of Buddhist mythology, with a king called the King of the World; she made astral contact with him to seek his guidance.
In spite of the strangeness of her ideas, she was a person of powerful charisma and, in some ways, unusual practical wisdom. Under her leadership, the main body of the society held together through scandals and feuds. Deeply impressed by the affinities between Theosophical doctrines and Hinduism, she spent a long time in India developing them and played an effective though strictly constitutional part in the movement for Indian self-rule.
She was interested in the Hindu concept of avatars, incarnations of the Supreme God Vishnu. In the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu, in the form of Krishna, says: “Whenever and wherever duty decays and unrighteousness prospers, I shall be born in successive ages to destroy evil-doers and re-establish the reign of the moral law.” Thinking on similar lines, though in terms of her own ideology, Besant believed that an entity whom she called the World Teacher took human form at long intervals. He had appeared as Buddha and Christ, and he was now to appear again. At the end of 1908, she claimed to have had a revelation of this approaching event, and in the following year, she began publicly proclaiming it.
About this time, a Hindu Theosophist named Narayaniah came to live and work at the Theosophical headquarters at Adyar, near Madras. A widower, he brought four sons with him, together with other relatives. One of his sons, Jiddu Krishnamurti, was then thirteen years old. Early in 1909, several men and boys in the Adyar community used to go to the beach together and swim. They were sometimes joined by Besant’s principal colleague, C. W. Leadbeater. The first time he saw Krishnamurti, who happened to be with the party that day, he singled him out as spiritually exceptional. In the ensuing months, he made surprising discoveries about the boy’s past incarnations. Toward the end of the year, instructed by the invisible Hierarchy, Annie Besant accepted that Krishnamurti was the destined human vehicle of the World Teacher.
She adopted him legally, after difficulties with his father, and prepared him for messiahship. A special organization was formed, the Order of the Star in the East. Not all Theosophists were compliant: this was the occasion of Rudolf Steiner’s break with the society. In 1921, however, a Dutch supporter gave the order the use of Castle Eerde, a large house near Ommen in Holland. International Star Camps were held in the grounds, at which Krishnamurti made appearances. A vision in 1922 convinced him, for the moment, that he indeed had the messianic role that was assigned to him. He traveled giving lectures. Well-known people who showed interest in the ideas he promoted included the conductor Leopold Stokowski and the former suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst. From December 1925, a change in Krishnamurti’s voice and style during his talks convinced many of his hearers that the higher being was taking possession of him. He visited the United States with much publicity and lived for a while at Ojai in California.
During the next few years, Annie Besant was busy with political activities on behalf of India, and Krishnamurti seemed less amenable. He had grown tired of being manipulated, and he laid more and more stress on the importance of people using their own judgment and not relying on his or anyone’s. At Eerde in July 1929, with notable integrity, he dissolved the order and virtually abdicated. Annie Besant never recovered. Her last prophecy, also unsuccessful, was that India would achieve self-rule before her death.
A remarkable thing in this tragicomedy was that when Leadbeater intuitively picked out a young, rather frail boy with nothing obviously special about him, his insight was—after a fashion—correct. After the abdication, Krishnamurti did go on to become a public philosopher in his own style, delivering lectures, writing books, and impressing well-known persons, Aldous Huxley among them. He mentally blocked out his Theosophical career and became unwilling to talk about it, even speaking of a kind of selective amnesia. He lived until 1986.
See also
Shambhala; Theosophy
Further Reading
Nethercot, Arthur H. The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.
Benson, Robert Hugh
Benson, Robert Hugh
(1871–1914)
English Catholic convert, author of two fantasies picturing two opposite futures for the Church.
Benson came from a distinguished literary family. Ordained as an Anglican clergyman, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1903 and spent the last years of his life in Rome. He wrote several novels.
Lord of the World (1907), set in the twenty-first century, is reminiscent of A Short Story of the Antichrist by Vladimir Solovyev. Its chief character, Julian Felsenburgh—seen only through the eyes of others—is, in fact, an Antichrist figure, though Benson never actually calls him so. An enigmatic genius, he achieves supreme power and establishes a worldwide regime of peace and welfare, or so it appears. He founds an enlightened Religion of Humanity to replace all existing ones. His success is overwhelming, but the regime’s true nature gradually becomes visible. His supporters are led step by step to rationalize and support appalling actions in the name of enlightenment. Rome, with its pope, is independent; Felsenburgh alleges a conspiracy by the dwindling Catholic body and destroys the city by aerial bombardment. He is hailed as divine, whereupon nonconformity to the Religion of Humanity is made a crime, and dissenters are liquidated. In the final episode, a small surviving Catholic center is condemned to destruction and doomed, humanly speaking—though, as it turns out, Benson gives the story a final twist.
Many of Benson’s readers found Lord of the World depressing. In 1911, he produced a companion novel, The Dawn of All, imagining an opposite process, with the Church growing greater and greater. Strictly speaking, this is a dream or reverie rather than a prognostication. A priest who has abandoned his faith falls into a coma and wakes up—or thinks he has woken up—to find that he is Monsignor Masterman in a Church that dominates society. His memory is gone, and he has to piece together what has happened in the inferred interval. The chronology is inconsistent, perhaps on purpose: in one passage, he is told that the year is 1973, elsewhere, he is in the twenty-first century.
He learns that the Church has triumphed because of ideological and political changes. Several sciences, notably psychology, have been seen to vindicate its teachings and have given it new respectability, so that the intelligentsia who used to be opposed are now mostly believers. Concurrently with this, a reaction against Socialism has opened the way for what amounts to a high-quality clerical regime in most countries and a revival of monarchy. Only Germany is holding out. Masterman is impressed by the popularity and competence of the new order but deeply shocked when someone is put to death for a very mild heresy. He admires the pope for his courage in facing German revolutionaries who have killed his envoys. In the end, however, even a sympathetic reader may have reservations, and Benson implies that he is raising issues rather than offering a forecast of possibilities.
See also
Solovyev, Vladimir
Bellamy, Edward
Bellamy, Edward
(1850–1898)
American novelist, author of Looking Backward, a Utopia offered to the public as a serious proposal.
Looking Backward, 2000–1887—to give it its full title—was the indirect inspiration of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, as a hostile retort by a writer of very different outlook, who reacted against it. Bellamy’s book is not exactly a prophecy itself or even a prediction; it is a social program in fictional disguise. He means it. He originally put his Utopia in the year 3000, then changed the date to 2000, on a more optimistic assessment of the time that would be needed to realize it.
He presents it through an imagined character, Julian West, a Bostonian who wakes from a trance in the year 2000 and learns that the United States has been transformed by adopting a Religion of Solidarity, with sweeping practical results. The Nation is now absolute and supreme. In its economic aspect, it is a single colossal corporation that owns everything and employs everybody. Its citizens, male and female, are compulsorily enrolled to do all the work in an “industrial army” under military discipline, from which the government itself is recruited; the president, elected on a restricted franchise, is the general-in-chief.
Each year, the gross national product is added up, a surplus is calculated, and everybody receives a share of it. These shares are all equal, an arrangement that is justified by the assumption that the workers do their best, and “doing one’s best” is the same for all and allows no gradations. (Those who don’t are put in jail.) It follows that there are no financial incentives and no financial inequalities.
This, however, means very little because there is no money. Shopping is done by filling out a form in a “sample-store” where goods are on view and paying with a credit card on which one’s national share is debited by the value of the purchase. The goods are promptly delivered from a warehouse to the purchaser’s home through electric “tubes”; Bellamy has great faith in technology. The whole annual allowance must be spent. Anything left over at the end of the year is confiscated by the Nation. So there is no incentive to save, but, then, nobody wants to save when the Nation provides housing, universal education, and complete social security.
Public kitchens and laundries take care of cooking and washing, and everybody eats at communal dining houses. Cultural needs are satisfied by such measures as playing music over the telephone. West, the observer from the past, comments revealingly that this is “the limit of human felicity.”
At the time, many found Bellamy’s Utopia attractive, probably in reaction against the uglier aspects of unbridled capitalism. It had some influence on economic thinking, and in the United States, it inspired short-lived political initiatives. Though Bellamy was contemptuous of left-wing labor organization, some Socialists approved. After a century’s experience of totalitarianism in practice, his program may be less alluring.
See also
Morris, William
Further Reading
Carey, John, ed. The Faber Book of Utopias. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
Barton, Elizabeth
Barton, Elizabeth
(1506–1534)
English nun called the “Holy Maid of Kent” whose prophecies caused trouble in the reign of Henry VIII.
She attracted notice by her response to divisive changes in England that Henry had launched. He wanted to end his marriage to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, who had borne a daughter but no surviving son who could be his heir. Furthermore, he had fallen in love with someone else, Anne Boleyn. He believed that there were grounds for annulment of the marriage, but the pope had to rule on this, and negotiations dragged on for years with no decision. At last, Henry acted independently to resolve his marital problem, going beyond it in the process: he broke away from Rome and declared himself to be the head of the Church in England. None of this was done without arousing antagonism. Meanwhile, the Reformation was advancing on the continent. Henry was never inclined toward Protestantism himself, but it was gradually making converts among his subjects, and its progress, together with economic and social factors, was adding to the public uncertainty.
This situation produced a flurry of freelance prophecy. It was apt to be hostile to the king. He would be deposed, he would die in his sins, his kingdom would be afflicted with wars and plagues. Several of the doomsayers were women. During the past century or so, women mystics and visionaries had begun to be heard more often. Elizabeth Barton was one. In 1525, when she was a domestic servant in Kent, she had a long illness and exhibited what some thought to be supernatural gifts. A monk named Edward Bocking, from a Benedictine community in Canterbury, was impressed by her and accepted her claim to be inspired by the Virgin Mary. The next year, her disease was miraculously cured, as people supposed, and she entered a convent in Canterbury under Bocking’s spiritual direction.
Elizabeth had visions and went into trances, sometimes lying on the floor, thrashing about, and uttering strange things. Bocking took some of these to be revelations and wrote a book about her. Others wrote pamphlets. Her sayings, when intelligible, upheld the Church’s doctrines and authority so firmly as to be, by implication, critical of the king. A belief in her sanctity and miracle working spread widely, winning friends and supporters in several religious houses, notably Syon Abbey, which had a tradition of feminine devotion. The fame of the Holy Maid of Kent reached the court; Henry himself granted her an audience, possibly in the hope of persuading her to stay within bounds. Presently, however, she began to denounce his attempts to discard his wife. She even wrote to the pope, urging him not to cooperate, and foretold that if Henry married Anne he would reign only another month. This was a dangerous matter, but some of his critics took her seriously and made her prophecies known. Prominent men who had misgivings about his policy listened to her, including Thomas More, the lord chancellor, and John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester. After reflection, More became cautious, Fisher not so cautious, but both were impartially beheaded for refusing to accept royal supremacy in the Church.
Before that, Barton’s prophetic career had come to an end. She was arrested and charged with treason. Under interrogation, she virtually recanted, asserting that she had been prompted and used by opponents of the king’s proceedings. There was some truth in this, but it is likely that she was not totally fraudulent. She really had produced “inspired” sayings, which conservative elements could exploit but did not invent or put in her mouth.
On April 20, 1534, together with Bocking, she was hanged. In England this was an unusual method of execution for a woman convicted of treason. Later, it became the normal treatment for women who were found guilty of witchcraft. That, however, was not a relevant issue here; a satirist called Barton a witch, but only as a term of abuse. The contemporary seer famous as “Mother Shipton,” who may have been a witch in a more serious sense, is reputed to have supported Henry and thus kept out of trouble. But in any case, Mother Shipton is very probably fictitious. There is no reliable evidence that she existed.
Further Reading
Watt, Diana. Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997.
Bahais
Adherents of a religion of nineteenth-century origin that prophesies a nonsectarian, cosmopolitan future.
The Bahai faith is based on a revelation that occurred in two stages. In 1844, Mirza Ali Mohammed, a young resident of Shiraz in the southwest of Persia (now Iran), declared himself to be a manifestation of God. He assumed the title of Bab—Arabic for “gate”—and predicted a further manifestation yet to come, when someone greater than himself would usher in a new era. This future leader would be called Baha-Ullah, Splendor of God.
“Bab” was a recognized title in the Shiite division of Islam, and this one attracted a large following, helped by his descent from the Prophet Muhammad through both parents. He opposed polygamy and the slave trade. Orthodox Muslim divines were hostile, and the movement had to endure persecution. The Bab was imprisoned, then sentenced to be executed. On July 9, 1850, being about thirty years old, he confronted a firing squad. He was suspended by ropes, and the volley of bullets only severed the ropes, so that he fell unharmed. The officer in charge refused to repeat the order, but a subordinate did so, and this time, the Bab died. His remains were later transferred to Mount Carmel, near Haifa in Israel.
The new leader whom the Bab had foretold, Baha-Ullah, duly made his appearance. Aristocratic in his family background, he was named Mirza Hussain Ali. He embraced the Bab’s teachings. During a fresh wave of suppression, he was exiled to Baghdad, then in the Turkish empire, and in 1863, at the age of forty-six, he declared himself to be the prophesied Baha-Ullah. The garden where he made this announcement became a sacred place in the Bahai religion that grew from it. Trouble with the Turkish authorities led eventually to Baha-Ullah’s imprisonment at Acre, where he died in 1892.
He had put his essential doctrines on record. According to the Bahai theology, God is unknowable, but he communicates with humanity through manifestations adapted to the context in which they occur. These have included the founders of several other major religions—Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. Baha-Ullah is the manifestation for the present age.
Since the religious founders have all been manifestations of the One God, who is the God of all humanity, there is really only one religion, which they taught in forms suitable to their time; differences have arisen through later misinterpretation. The coming of Baha-Ullah is a sign that the human race has matured to a point where social and ideological unity can be realized. This unity is confidently predicted. The outgoing Bahai mission that spread to various countries was largely the work of Baha-Ullah’s son Abdul-Baha (1844–1921).
Bahais recognize that the great step forward will not simply happen. They must work for it. They aim at the abolition of all forms of prejudice, whether based on race, nationality, class, or creed. This will pave the way to the “World Order of Baha-Ullah.” Men and women will be equal and there will be equal educational opportunities for all children. There will be a world currency and a universal language, both perhaps auxiliary to existing ones rather than replacing them.
The Bahai faith has no clergy. Its adherents seek to influence others by exemplary conduct. They meet in “spiritual assemblies” that are subordinated to a “Universal House of Justice” in an imposing domed building on the side of Mount Carmel, where the Bab’s remains are enshrined.
Further Reading
Cavendish, Richard, ed. Man, Myth and Magic. London: BPC Publishing, 1970–1972. Article “Bahais.”
Bacon, Francis
Bacon, Francis
(1561–1626)
English statesman, essayist, and writer on scientific method.
Bacon is remembered for his groundbreaking discussions of systematic experiment, observation, and induction in works such as The Advancement of Learning. He is also unfortunately remembered for corruption in office, leading to his dismissal from the royal service. Nevertheless, his place in the history of science remains secure.
His Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral presents fifty-eight essays that cover a wide range of topics; some, such as “Friendship,” being of a general kind, and others, such as “Gardens,” being particular. The thirty-fifth essay is “Of Prophecies.” Bacon explains that he is not talking of biblical prophecies, which are in a class by themselves. He quotes several from classical literature, such as a passage in which the dramatist Seneca foretells that the bonds of the ocean will be loosed, the whole world will be opened up, and new worlds will be discovered—a prophecy, one might think, of the discovery of America. Most of Bacon’s more recent examples are concerned with royalty. He recalls the English king Henry VI as foretelling the reign of a boy who unexpectedly became Henry VII. He mentions, interestingly, the prophecy of the death of the French king Henri II from a wound sustained in a tournament, a prophecy that made Nostradamus famous, though Bacon quotes a different source.
As a child, he says, he heard the prophecy
When hempe is spun
England’s done.
“Hempe” was taken to refer to the initials of five successive monarchs—Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, her consort Philip, and Elizabeth I. After them, it was feared, disaster would befall England. It did not happen. What did happen was that Elizabeth was succeeded by James Stuart, who united the crowns of England and Scotland, so that the realm was known as Britain, and in that sense only, England was done.
Bacon is thoroughly dismissive. Prophecies of the kind he is talking about “ought all to be despised.” Despised, but not simply ignored, because they can do harm among the credulous, and governments should take note of them and consider censorship. What is it that gives them their undeserved credence? First, selectivity. People notice them when they are fulfilled, or seem to be, and forget any number of similar ones that are not. This covers the case of dreams that supposedly come true. Secondly, a prophecy may echo a known conjecture, and when this is eventually fulfilled—more or less—it may be seen in retrospect as more exact than it was. When Seneca wrote about new worlds beyond the ocean, Greek authors had already speculated along those lines (Plato, for instance, in his account of Atlantis), and Seneca was not really doing any more; the application of his words to America was a product of later geography. Thirdly, many alleged prophecies cannot be documented as having been made before the happenings they are alleged to predict. They were made up afterwards.Most of this criticism is sensible. Pseudo prophecy after the event is all too familiar. The concoction of bogus sayings by Merlin is notorious. Seneca perhaps deserves better than Bacon allows. The argument from selectivity is more dubious. It does not dispose, for instance, of the anticipations of the Titanic disaster by Morgan Robertson and others. Moreover, while a prophecy picked out as successful may be only one among many that are not successful, that one may be so accurate and specific that it makes the notion of chance difficult to sustain. In the classic case of Nostradamus, it is true that only a few of his quatrains are clearly predictive, but each contains several interlocking forecasts with unique details—even personal names—that rule out ambiguity. These quatrains, some of which compress as many as five or six connected forecasts into four lines, are too complex to explain as mere lucky hits among hundreds that are not lucky.
Bacon does not discuss astrology in this essay. Elsewhere, he describes it as “pretending to discover that correspondence or concatenation which is between the superior globe and the inferior.” He is thinking of the traditional system, with Earth at the center of the universe and everything else circling around it. He admits that in his own time astrology is “full of fictions,” but he suggests that it might be given a rational basis in observed physical laws. If so, it could supply foreshadowings of natural phenomena, wars, revolutions, and other great events and indicate favorable times for various undertakings.
See also
Merlin; Nostradamus; Seneca, Lucius Annaeus
Augustine, Saint
Christian philosopher and theologian whose views on prophecy established certain norms of interpretation.Augustine was born in what is now Tunisia, at that time part of the Roman Empire. He taught in Rome, studied Neoplatonic philosophy, was converted to Christianity in 386, and returned to Africa, where he became a bishop. His immense literary output molded the thinking of the Church ever afterwards. Best known of his works are the Confessions, an autobiographical account of his life and thought, and The City of God, a vast survey of history, the role of Christian revelation, and its teachings about the destiny of humanity.In The City of God, like other fathers of the Church, Augustine maintains that the Old Testament foreshadows the New and only makes complete sense when read retrospectively from a Christian standpoint. In particular, many of the Old Testament prophecies were really about Christianity, even though they could not have been understood in that sense when they were written. They were divinely inspired, and their meaning has been decipherable since the coming of Christ; Augustine claims that they have been instrumental in making many converts. Other prophecies, likewise inspired, are in the New Testament itself, notably in its last book, the Revelation or Apocalypse attributed to Saint John.
But what about prophecies unrelated to Christianity, by astrologers, for instance? If they are not inspired by God, does their fulfillment, when it happens, put a query over the Christian monopoly? Augustine regards them as illusory and worse than illusory even when they are right—especially when they are right. He attacks astrology as a technique, stressing such rational objections as the difficulty raised by twins, who have the same horoscope at birth but may go on to have very different lives. However, he looks deeper than that. He acknowledges that astrologers sometimes score, but he has a reason for rejecting their claims and advising Christians to mistrust them. This reason has wider applications.
According to Augustine, successful prophecy that is not of divine origin is diabolic, the work of “demons” or evil spirits. These beings can look ahead, if in a rather hit-or-miss way: “The demons… have much more knowledge of the future than men can have, by their greater acquaintance with certain signs which are hidden from us; sometimes they also foretell their own intentions. It is true that they are often deceived, while the angels are never deceived.” Human foreknowledge may be simply intelligent anticipation, but when it is more than that, it may be coming from “unclean demons” who are making use of their own foreknowledge to lead others astray. In the case of astrology, they mislead mortals by creating a bogus impression of validity. “When astrologers give replies that are often surprisingly true, they are inspired, in some mysterious way, by spirits, but spirits of evil, whose concern is to instil and confirm in men’s minds those false and baneful notions about ‘astral destiny.’ These true predictions do not come from any skill in the notation and inspection of horoscopes; that is a spurious art.”
Unhallowed prophecy, which may be plausible and even correct, but is communicated by evil beings for evil ends, reappears as a theme in the witch mania of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a prominent motif in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
See also
Astrology; Macbeth; Prophecy, Theories of; Thomas Aquinas, Saint; Witchcraft
Further Reading
Augustine, Saint. The
Atlantis
Island-continent that is reputed to have sunk beneath the Atlantic Ocean and that some expect to reappear.
Atlantis is widely assumed to have been real, but almost everything said about it derives ultimately from one author, the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428–348 b.c.), who was not a historian. He cites an alleged Egyptian tradition handed down for 9,000 years. Atlantis was a landmass occupying a large part of the ocean west of Gibraltar. Its rulers were descended from gods, and it was a realm of great splendor, where justice and wisdom flourished. The Atlanteans had colonies in Europe and Africa and in a continent on the far side of the ocean (it is tempting to see a reference to America here, but that idea must be treated with extreme caution). Eventually, the divine element in the rulers decayed, and they embarked on wars of conquest. Their conduct brought retribution from Zeus, the chief god. The free men of Athens drove back their army, and Atlantis vanished in a single day and night of earthquake and flood.As it stands, Plato’s story is impossibly dated and geologically incredible. His main purpose was probably to create a myth showing the superiority of small, well-ordered states over aggressive empires. However, his fertile imagination carried the conception too far: he said too much about Atlantis, and made it too interesting. Though few in classical times took it literally, attempts were made in the Age of Discovery to relate it to America. Authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tried to prove that it was real and more or less as described.
The first such study was by Ignatius Donnelly in his book Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, published in 1882. Others have followed. The favorite line of argument is that cultural similarities on both sides of the Atlantic imply a common source between them. Thus, Mexico has pyramids and Egypt has pyramids, so there must have been Atlantean pyramid builders who traveled in both directions founding ancient civilizations. But independent invention is perfectly possible, and Mexico and Egypt are too far apart in time to have had a common origin. “Proofs” based on parallels in myth and religion are no more effective.
It has been argued that although Plato was writing fiction, he used traditions of real ancient civilizations and natural disasters, somewhere else altogether—in the Aegean area, maybe. It has also been argued that he did know of land across the Atlantic, discovered by unrecorded voyagers: nothing on the scale of his mythic conception but real as far as it went. A serious case has been made out for the West Indies.
Whatever may be thought of Plato’s sources, the idea that his Atlantis not only existed but may rise again is due chiefly to its inclusion in the schema of world history taught by the Theosophical Society. Madame Blavatsky, the founder, produced a book called Isis Unveiled in 1877. In this, she mentioned Atlantis and was perhaps the first to hit on the argument from cultural and mythological parallels between the Old World and the New, though it was left to Donnelly to develop it. In 1888, she brought out The Secret Doctrine. Donnelly’s book had appeared in the interval, and she cited him with approval but laid more stress on her own claims to knowledge drawn from occult revelations and mysterious manuscripts. She expounded a panorama of history covering millions of years and tracing humanity’s evolution through a series of “root-races.” Atlantis was the home of the fourth root-race, very tall and highly civilized. As Donnelly had conjectured, they were the founders of several civilizations known to ordinary history. Atlantis, however, sank. After Madame Blavatsky’s death an “astral clairvoyant,” William Scott-Elliot, pursued the story of Atlantis and also that of Lemuria, another Theosophical sunken land.
For enthusiasts, Atlantis is apt to be a kind of Utopia with golden-age qualities, the home of an advanced society with knowledge and powers of magic that have been lost. One legacy of Theosophy, whether recognized or not, is a belief in huge changes of the earth’s surface over geologically short periods of time, allowing an expectation that the process will continue and lost lands will resurface. Fantasies of this sort have encouraged notions of the future reappearance of Atlantis itself, a hope akin to the return of King Arthur and similar prophetic motifs.
This may take the modified form of a rebirth of Atlantean Ancient Wisdom, rather than a physical reemergence. On occult or paranormal grounds, caches of Atlantean secrets are said to have been preserved for posterity. Edgar Cayce, the American “Sleeping Prophet,” asserted on the basis of a trance-revelation that the history of Atlantis was in a hidden underground chamber or hall of records near the Sphinx in Egypt, which would come to light sooner or later. He even gave directions, though not very convincingly. Colin Amery and others enlarged on his ideas, suggesting that the hall of records had more in it than he envisaged and likewise predicting its rediscovery.
However, some visionaries have foretold a literal rebirth of Atlantis, partly or wholly. One who did so in a fairly restrained way was Cayce himself. Others have ventured further. H. C. Randall-Stevens foretold, on the authority of an “Osirian” group, that the lost land will rise above the ocean in 2014. At that time, a cache of its Ancient Wisdom will be disclosed, as Amery and the rest have indicated, but in the Great Pyramid.
See also
Cayce, Edgar; Lemuria; Sphinx; Theosophy
Further Reading
Amery, Colin. New Atlantis: the Secret of the Sphinx. London and New York: Regency Press, 1976.
Ashe, Geoffrey. Atlantis: Lost Lands, Ancient Wisdom. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.
Bramwell, James. Lost Atlantis. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1937.
Bro, Harmon Hartzell. Edgar Cayce. Wellingborough, England: The Aquarian Press, 1990.
Collins, Andrew. Gateway to Atlantis. London: Headline, 2000.
Astrology
The art of judging the influence of planets and stars on human beings—in the past, in the present, and, by extrapolation, in the future.
India and China have had astrological systems for a long time. These are highly developed, and regarded with respect. The Western version has its ancestry in Babylonia, where astronomers were listing constellations and prominent stars in the second millennium b.c. With the passage of time, they came to distinguish seven “planets,” counting the five true ones visible without telescopes plus the Sun and Moon—in other words, the seven bodies that were not fixed like stars. All seven were associated with divine beings. They were seen to travel through sections of the sky that astronomers defined by twelve constellations, the signs of the Zodiac.
In the sixth century b.c., Babylonians developed a theory that these celestial orbs influenced the world below. Greek advances in astronomy presently refined the possibilities, and the Western form of astrology took shape. Earth was located at the center of the universe, with seven transparent spheres rotating around it, one outside another, each carrying a planet. The Moon’s was nearest to Earth; concentrically outside it, in order, came the spheres carrying Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Outside Saturn’s sphere was a larger one bearing the stars, and outside that was an even larger one that imparted motion inward to all the others. The planets exerted influence on the world at the center, and, in their varying relations to the Zodiac and each other, were “interpreters” of destiny. As in Babylonia, deities were associated with them. “Mercury,” “Venus” and the rest are the Roman names of the divinities that were assigned to these planets by classical astrologers because they were thought to be the appropriate ones. The fifth planet’s influence, for example, tended towards strength, assertiveness, and anger, so it was taken to be the planet of the war god Mars.
Astronomically, the system is no longer viable, and astrologers are quite aware of the fact. But they still tacitly assume it, in its essentials, as a kind of operating fiction, its use justified by results. In practice—supposedly—it does work. A horoscope can be drawn up on the basis of the planets’ positions at someone’s birth. The most important is the Sun, which is in Aries (the Ram) during part of March and part of April, then in Taurus (the Bull) during the rest of April and part of May, and so on. The date of birth determines the person’s Sun-sign or birth-sign: Aries, for instance, if the Sun was in that portion of the sky at the time, Taurus if it was in the next portion, and so on. The Sun-sign is said to have a crucial bearing on the personality.
Complex calculations about the positions of the other six planets—sometimes, today, computerized—can be expressed on a birth-chart, and add further insights into the individual’s character and destiny. On the basis of the inferred destiny and perhaps also of the planets’ foreseeable positions at some future time, events yet to come can be predicted; or, at any rate, probabilities—the celestial bodies, to quote an astrologer,“influence but do not compel.” Auspicious and inauspicious days can be identified in advance for some important action. The technique is not confined to individuals. It can be applied to cities, states, institutions, or whatever, preferably at the time of their foundation, the equivalent of birth. Projections into the future can be made similarly. A horoscope of the city of Liverpool, in England, is said to have shown that it will become the capital of England in the twenty-third century—an extreme case but not inconsistent with the logic of the system.To revert to history, Romans were hesitant about embracing this production of Greek cleverness, but early in the Christian era, it was growing popular at high social levels, and the casting of a horoscope at a child’s birth was becoming customary. An astrologer named Thrasyllus was an adviser to the emperor Tiberius. When some of his predictions failed, Tiberius lost patience and was about to push him off a cliff, but he managed to make a good one just in time.
After the Roman Empire became officially Christian in the fourth century, astrology began to be frowned upon. Augustine, the most influential of the Church fathers, offered rational arguments against it and argued that even when astrologers got predictions right, this was probably due to inspiration by evil spirits. For a long time, it was in disfavor. However, it began to come back in the early Middle Ages as a quasi-scientific technique. Planets could no longer be gods, but in some mysterious way, they might still play a part in earthly affairs. Scholars in the Church kept it off the list of forbidden arts, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, the leading medieval philosopher, allowed it a strictly limited validity. Its practitioners worked freely, though they stressed character reading and medical diagnosis rather then prediction. It became very popular in the sixteenth-century Renaissance. John Dee, in England, was allowed to draw up horoscopes for royalty and to set a date for Elizabeth I’s coronation. Nostradamus, in France, published hundreds of prophecies, some of them remarkable, though for him, astrology seems to have been subordinate to another method of forecasting that remains obscure.
The waning of Earth-centered astronomy was naturally adverse to astrology, and it declined again, but it never expired, and eventually, it began to recover. It could be rationalized, as it still can, by the argument that it reads the heavens as they appear to be, and no astronomical proof of what they actually are can make any difference. Its Western revival had its origin in Theosophy. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the movement, endorsed it in her book Isis Unveiled, published in 1877. One of her followers, writing under the name Alan Leo, was its first popularizer and produced a handbook entitled Astrology for All. In England, France, and the United States, interest gradually revived. However, it was only in Germany that astrology became a serious field of study, thanks partly to another Theosophist, Hugo Vollrath. The suffdrings of Germans in the great inflation of 1923–1924 and in the ensuing years of mass unemployment contributed to a longing for a doctrine that would make sense of events and perhaps foreshadow a better time ahead. An Astrological Congress in Munich was the first of a series. Germans of academic standing tried to make astrology an authentic system.
During this interwar period, astrology also enjoyed a vogue on radio and in newspapers. Exponents in English-speaking countries, such as Evangeline Adams and R. H. Naylor, made forecasts on topics of public interest. However, their occasional successes were outweighed by numerous failures. Later in the twentieth century, while astrology of a sort still flourished in the press, it was more cautious and largely confined to minihoroscopes for the day (or week or month) giving vague advice to readers born under each sign and avoiding specific detail about the future. In 1967, a well-informed writer on astrology, Ellic Howe, pronounced, in the light of his own negative findings, that prediction was its “Achilles’ heel.”
The astrology of a more responsible kind that continues to be practiced is concerned chiefly with character and destiny. Howe’s adverse verdict on prediction might be allowed to stand if it were not for an exceptional case history, that of Germany under the Nazi regime, from 1933 on. Seemingly, the activities of Vollrath and other enthusiasts showed predictive results that cannot be dismissed. Someone had cast the horoscope of the German republic on the basis of the date of its proclamation in 1918, and several attempts had been made to cast Hitler’s. There is evidence—some of it indisputable, some of it circumstantial but good—for correct long-range forecasts of Hitler’s career and the fortunes of Germany in World War II and its aftermath. Hitler, it was foretold, would be triumphant at first, and Germany would be victorious for two years, but in 1941, the tide would begin to turn. There would be major disasters in 1943 and a cataclysmic end, including the Führer’s downfall, in 1945, though a recovery would be under way after three years of peace. All of this was right. Hitler did not believe in astrology, but his awareness of its prediction for 1941 as a threat to morale was shown by a clampdown on astrologers in June of that year.
The German successes raise a problem. Can astrology predict after all? If so, how to make sense of these facts? Whatever astrologers may say in defense of their art, it remains the case that the universe is not what it looks like from below. They have done their best to fit in the three planets added to the traditional seven, but much more is involved than that. The crystal spheres and their resident deities have gone. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, together with the three latecomers, are barren globes moving through a void at vast distances from Earth and from each other. Medieval astronomy recognized greater distances than is commonly thought, but came nowhere near the remoteness of the stars, which are not only remote but in spatial relationships to each other that have nothing to do with the Zodiac: its constellations would disappear for an observer from a different vantage point.
An astrologer today might speak of correlations or synchronisms rather than influences. If such a claim were borne out by results, it would deserve to be investigated, but results are lacking. The German phenomenon may be thought to hint at some quite separate factor. The same could be said of the rare but documented triumphs of character reading by horoscope (or ostensibly by horoscope), such as one recorded at the University of Freiburg, where an astrologer named Walter Boer diagnosed the problems of a juvenile delinquent unknown to him in virtually the same way as a team of psychologists. Ellic Howe, who draws attention to this case, takes the view that such successes are not really produced by the subject’s birth-chart as such but by a kind of intuition making use of it, which few would-be astrologers are capable of. Jung, as is well known, took an interest in astrology, but he used patients’ horoscopes chiefly as therapeutic aids rather than sources of information.
One quasi-astrological finding has stood up to scrutiny, often very hostile. In 1955, a French statistician, Michel Gauquelin, proved that a significant number of people with certain abilities were born when certain planets were either just clearing the horizon or at the apex of their passage across the sky. Many outstanding athletes, for instance, were born when Mars was either rising or “culminating.” Jupiter seemed to be connected with famous actors in the same way. The ironic fact is that Gauquelin’s correlations are totally unrelated to traditional astrology, for which he found no support whatever.
See also
Adams, Evangeline; Hanussen, Erik Jan; Krafft, Karl Ernst; Nazi Germany; Newspaper Astrology; Theosophy
Further Reading
Ashe, Geoffrey. The Book of Prophecy. London: Blandford, 1999.
———. Dawn behind the Dawn. New York: Henry Holt, 1992.
Campion, Nicholas, and Steve Eddy. The New Astrology. London: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Cavendish, Richard, ed. Man, Myth and Magic. London: BPC Publishing, 1970–1972. Article “Astrology.”
Howe, Ellic. Urania’s Children. London: William Kimber, 1967.
