Eschatologies of Intention: The Temporality of Struggles Against Structural Evil

If Islamic eschatology invariably predicts the total destruction of the earth, what room does Islamic ethics afford the religious responsibility to presently prevent and mitigate harm? Putting contemporary popular Muslim intellectuals in Egypt with American prison abolitionists, I investigate how non-mainstream eschatological visions of inevitable human-led destruction create communities of ethical practices that shift the focus of political action away from futurity-oriented outcomes to the socio-political demands of the present moment. I consider how the cross-cutting grammar of intention in the work of Egyptian Islamists and US prison abolitionists relocates the temporal struggle against structural evil(s), which decouples the inevitability of finitude from fixed teleologies by accepting the likelihood of the failure, disruption, and incompletion of redress efforts. I consider the potential this move affords for experimentation in democratic, egalitarian, and self-critical ethical communities that do not reproduce the epistemological and political hierarchies of mainstream technological solutions to ecological crises.