relies on celestial and agricultural imagery to convey a sense of continuity in
the cycle of life and death, an essential feature of any enduring socio-religious
scenario of the End. In any given situation, the millennialists tend to engage
or the consensus of the Muslim 'ulama. By denying altogether the apoca-
by implausible preconditions. This is indeed the rationale behind the prohibi-
3
Introduction
obvious precaution against the millenarian textual subversion and urge for
temporality.
To temporalize the prophecies and other scriptural evidence, whether literal
or allegorical, the millennialists have employed various strategies to make their
evidence announce the anticipated End and the events preceding it. The act
of prognosticating the End necessitates a preoccupation with time reckoning
and calendaric. Equally common is the wide usage of the occult sciences,
especially numerology and esoteric knowledge of the letters. To the chiliastic
adept, sacred dates and deadlines encoded in the verses of any given scripture,
and in the sayings of prophets and saints (as well as in non-textual evidence),
were mysteries urgently awaiting decipherment. Indeed, the whole material
world, with its seasonal changes and natural and human calamities, was seen
as a text which is to be read with esoteric methods mastered by millennialists
through rigorous study, mortification, intuition, dreams and mystical ex-
periences.
The alternative reality which emerged out of the temporalizing endeavours,
beneath the apparent reality accepted and enshrined by authoritative exegeses,
was particularly apt for cyclical reckoning. Both centennial and millennial,
these cyclical courses were based on conventional calendaric and its variants.
More often they were calculated from primal dates in a sacred text. Sacred
chronology, especially in creation narratives, was favoured or even more
specific dates such as those present in the Book of Daniel, the assumed date
for the birth of Jesus, the
Hijra
of the Islamic Prophet, or the assumed
Occultation of the Twelfth Imam in Shi'ism. In particular the notion of
millennium, and its correlation to the events of the End, held a firm grip
over the apocalyptic calendaric in all Western religions. As a unit of time
reckoning, a millennium is a Babylonian invention. But it was probably in the
Zoroastrian tradition of Iran that the millennium (
hazarag
) first earned an
apocalyptic significance. It connoted the duration of a
,
-year cycle in the
finite battle between the forces of good and evil, a cyclical struggle which
shapes the entire human history and will eventually end in the triumph of the
Lord Wisdom and his associates over Ahriman. The events of the End
therefore came to be linked in Zoroastrianism, as in the Hebrew tradition,
and later in other apocalyptic literature of the Middle East, with
,
-year
periods, which were either explicitly or implicitly cyclical or, as in the
conventional Christian apocalyptics, a one-time occurrence leading to an
irrevocable End. Respectively, the centennial turns, as decimal denominations
of the millennium, were often associated with temporary lapses of order. The
spirit of decadence that had fallen upon humanity was to be rejuvenated with
the turn of a new century. The Islamic notion of the ‘renovator of the
beginning of the century’ (i.e. of the
Hijra
calendar) and perhaps even the