ISIL is not the first harbinger of doom with its apocalyptic manifesto, and it won’t be the last. Since the start of time, mankind has endured a plethora of ‘end of world’ predictions from various cults and religions.
In case you haven't been paying attention, life as we know it was due to have come to an apocalyptic end this morning.
That, at least, is the latest prediction from the doomsday wing of the Evangelical Christian movement in the United States, where TV pastor John Hagee, founder of the Cornerstone Church in Texas, has declared that September 28 will hold a “hugely significant event” for the world.
Hagee, author of the 2013 book Four Blood Moons: Something is About to Change, believes this morning's total lunar eclipse, the fourth in the past two years, presages a "coming new world order".
The reddish-orange colour of a Blood Moon eclipse is caused by sunlight refracting through the Earth’s atmosphere when it casts its shadow on a full Moon.
Hagee writes that each of the four Blood Moon eclipses has fallen on the Jewish Passover and Feast of Tabernacles in 2014 and 2015. This points to “dramatic events in the Middle East and, as a result, changes in the whole world”, he says in his book.
Signals have been sent, apparently, but “we haven’t been picking them up”.
Hagee is not the first to stake his reputation on an apocalyptic prediction and neither – sadly for his credibility – is he likely to be the last.
His is not even the only voice warning that Monday might not be the best day to buy season tickets.
Reports last week in the US media said Mormons had been clearing shops in Utah of supplies, including blankets, torches and freeze-dried food in anticipation of a biblically predicted earthquake, also to be triggered by this morning’s Blood Moon.
The panic prompted church leaders to reassure followers that while they should be “spiritually and physically prepared for life’s ups and downs”, it was important to “avoid being caught up in extreme efforts to anticipate catastrophic events”.
There is a long, embarrassing history of gullible folk heading for the hills on the advice of charismatic religious leaders, only to have to return, red-faced, when the anticipated end of the world failed to happen.
Curiously, such fundamental setbacks rarely spell the end of the fundamentalist sects that have endured them.
In the mid-19th century, US Baptist preacher William Miller convinced his many followers that Christ would return on October 22, 1844, an event to be followed shortly by a purification of the Earth by fire.
“The Great Disappointment”, as the no-show became known, resulted only in the sect revisiting its calculations and developing a new set of predictions, which members embraced with equal fervour. Perhaps the most notorious apocalyptic bungler of modern times was Harold Camping, a US evangelist who wrongly predicted the end of the world no fewer than 12 times.
His last stab was in 2011, when he named May 21 as the day of the “Rapture”, when all true believers would ascend to Heaven, leaving everyone else to face the flaming end of the world.
“The Bible guarantees it,” proclaimed Camping’s roadside hoardings.
Wrong again. On May 22 a sheepish Camping emerged to tell the smirking media outside his door that he was “flabbergasted”.
Undeterred, in 2012 apocalypse enthusiasts everywhere became excited about a supposed Mayan prophecy predicting that on December 21 that year life on Earth would be snuffed out in a collision with another planet.
On December 22, a clearly grumpy Nasa, which had been plagued for months beforehand by demands for answers from believers, issued the statement: “News flash: the world didn’t end but you’ve probably already figured that out for yourself.”
Last month, the space agency was once again obliged to respond to apocalyptic rumours, this time that a giant asteroid was on course to destroy much of the Americas at the end of this month.
“There is not one shred of evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth,” said Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa’s near-Earth object office.
“If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now.”
There is, says David Horrell, professor of New Testament studies at the University of Exeter, a psychological element underpinning persistent Evangelical enthusiasm for the end of the world.
“I suppose it’s one way of coping with fearfulness about all that’s going on in the world, to make sense of it as a sign of some grander plan in which you think you have a very positive stake.”
This leaves believers unlikely to question the predictions handed down to them, or to doubt the credibility of their self-anointed spiritual leaders.
“In these fundamentalist groups, the fact that somebody’s interpreting scripture and making meaning out of it is either denied or hidden,” says Prof Horrell.
“The rhetoric is all about the authoritative and infallible words of God contained in the Bible, which tell us everything we need to know.”
But while the predictions of Evangelical Christians may seem risible to those who do not share their beliefs, some Muslims are equally susceptible to apocalyptic conjecture. And in the current crisis in the Middle East, it is proving to be no laughing matter.
“A huge number of American Christians profess belief in the imminent end of the world and bodily rapture into the heavens,” says Graeme Wood, a former student of the American University in Cairo and a lecturer in political science at Yale.
“A puzzle for analysts is why, if they believe the world will end soon, they do not act accordingly?
“Why they don’t spend all their savings, or devote themselves utterly to God and wander the Earth, as Jesus suggested, in sackcloth and ashes.”
But in the case of ISIL, he says, “there is somewhat less of a puzzle”.
The organisation’s propaganda calls heavily on the apocalypse, “and sure enough, the supporters are doing things that are totally irrational except in the light of sincere apocalyptic belief”, he says.
In an analysis published in The Atlantic magazine in March, Mr Wood concluded that ISIL considered itself “a harbinger of, and headline player in, the imminent end of the world”.
A failure to grasp this led to “confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors” in countering it.
Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and inter-religious studies at the University of Edinburgh, says ISIL has found it “very easy to inspire and rally people” with its apocalyptic rhetoric.
As Mr Wood concluded that after interviewing ISIL recruiters, “the Islamic State awaits the ‘army of Rome’, whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse”.
It is “difficult to know whether ISIL actually believe it, or they are using it to propagate their own message”, says Prof Siddiqui.
But as for ISIL’s recruits from the West, “they clearly want to believe it and that’s the baffling thing”.
Prof Siddiqui says: “Why do people want to be lured by excess of sentiment rather than moderation?”
Partly “because most of our lives are lived in moderation or even mediocrity, and that kind of dramatic scenario is very alluring”.
“Maybe deep down, most don’t really believe that the armies of Islam are going to meet the armies of Rome, but just being part of that thinking means you’re on a big personal and group adventure.
“I don’t actually think most people know what they are getting in to, but they do know it’s radically different to the lives they are living and that’s what they want,” she says.
Without doubt, some Muslims are putting a great deal of thought and mathematics into when the apocalypse might happen.
After five years of labour, the End Times Research Centre, hosted by the popular website Discovering Islam, published an 2,785-page downloadable book that makes predictions and gives an insight into Islamic apocalyptic thinking. Eschewing astrology as haram, the anonymous researchers have reached a large number of conclusions by ascribing numerical values to Arabic letters and employing a tortuous “numerical analysis of the Quran, hadiths, Arabic words and historical events”.
They show their exhaustive workings-out in the book The End Times, the latest edition of which was released on September 22.
It includes a new chapter claiming to demonstrate that last Wednesday, September 23, was “one of the possible dates for the beginning of the End Times”.
The book avoids giving a precise date for the apocalypse, beyond concluding that: “We are living in the last few weeks of ordinary Worldly life and the End of Time is near and fast approaching.”
Whenever that might be.
