Image: Qal’at Salah al-Din, Latakia Governorate, Syria. Picture taken by author in December 2004.

The catastrophe is unending: at every scale and each site. Even aside from the desolation of Gaza and the siege of Aleppo (although of course there as well), evil is embedded into modern forms of life: through the deep desire for recognition, through the need to survive at any cost.

Benjamin, famously: that things go on like this is the catastrophe.

Elsewhere I have suggested that discrete forms of loss (abandonment, interruption, ruin) are figures for the life of the umma. Likewise, when ‘Umar, a Salafi scholar exiled to Amman, recalled the caliphate to me in 2018, when he told me the tireless advocacy of Rashid Rida for the renewal of the caliphate is “the awareness we need today,” he was not simply lamenting the demise of a political institution tasked with maintaining the integrity of the symbolic order of dar al-islam. Nor, as the Syrian regime was brutally reconquering the south of the country, was he merely pointing to a past event in order that it be properly understood through historical contextualization. In locating us ‘after the caliphate,’ rather, he described the political-theological abyss that separates us from justice. He insisted on the possibility of the latter, despite the racial and ecological states of the earth and the coloniality of the secular world. He cut through the cacophony of geopolitics and historicism in search of an eschatological dimension. This perspective demands determination, patience, submission.

The Quran asks: Or did you suppose that you would enter the Garden without there having come to you the like of that which came to those who passed away before you? Misfortune and hardship befell them, and they were so shaken that the Messenger and those who believed with him said, ‘When will God’s help come?’ Yea, surely God’s help is near (Q. 2:214).

God’s help is near—but it is not here. Not yet.

‘Umar explained: “For this world is not bountiful as the infidel thinks it is, that disbeliever who is in pursuit of his appetites and subservient to them. This is not the world of reward. (…) This is a test, all of it, an affliction to gauge our obedience, our response to the divine decrees of poverty and hunger and loss.” ‘Umar described the Syrian war as a divine ordeal (fitna)—not, as did other friends and interlocutors, as an occasion for divine disclosure, for the distribution of good and evil, or for a necessary sacrifice. Rather he implied it was a scourge whose brute violence convenes a different temporality of revolutionary struggle which is not translatable into the time of either law or politics. Instead such struggle is ceaseless, with no termination point, where the divine ordeal is both the spur to change and its measure. It corrects the relationship of form to meaning and rectifies the priority of communal and personal obligations. It distinctively refracts history, spatially relating the war to earlier episodes of the same struggle (analepsis) while projecting a necessary victory into the distant future (prolepsis). The preternatural struggle between truth and falsehood reverberates from Abraham and his idolatrous people, to Moses before Pharaoh and his armies, to Muhammad with Abu Jahl and the Qurayshite notables, to Harun al-Rashid facing the Byzantines and Saladin facing the Crusaders, to most recently the Palestinian intifada. It is not merely the result of contemporary events; rather it has successive ancient iterations, as narrated by the Quran and expounded by the generous Lord through its bearers, as a vision and reminder for those who remember and as guidance and counsel for the godwary.

Blanchot, enigmatically: “Why the necessity of a just finish? Why can we not bear, why do we not desire that which is without end? The messianic hope—hope which is dread as well—is inevitable when history appears politically only as an arbitrary hubbub, a process deprived of meaning or direction. But if political thinking becomes messianic in its turn, this confusion, which removes the seriousness from the search for reason (intelligibility) in history—and also from the requirement of messianic thought (the realization of morality)—simply attests to a time so frightful, so dangerous, that any recourse appears justified: can one maintain any distance at all when Auschwitz happens? How is it possible to say: Auschwitz has happened?” (143).

In Blanchot’s vocabulary, ‘Umar affirms the messianic task of discerning “history” and “morality.” At the same time, this task risks overtaking “political thinking” as well, so long as this thinking is confident about its own claim (to the Garden, to the just finish, to sovereignty). They were so shaken that the Messenger and those who believed with him said, ‘When will God’s help come?’ Instead, for God’s help to be near (though not here), you must be vulnerable—open to being shaken, as in an earthquake—and refuse the lure of sovereign indivisibility. The risk of this messianic task is irreducible, meaning that the theologico-political question of the victory of god (nasr-allah) retains an intimate and ultimately undecidable relation to the violence of history.

No perspective, no end, to Auschwitz as to Aleppo and Gaza and more: the world is made flat. In flight from its spiralling brutality, you take recourse and alibi where you can: claiming a justified distance, relieved to have escaped unscathed. Because you have not escaped unscathed: and that too is the disaster.