On January 1, 2017, a video went viral across Egyptian social media. The premise was simple: on new year's eve, a news reporter is filming a reportage, asking ordinary Egyptians what their hopes and expectations were for 2017. She approaches an elderly woman, one of Cairo’s countless street vendors, selling green herbs. The woman, whose face conveys disappointment and defeat, and whose appearance suggests a humble background, simply answers: en el-iyāmah tʾūm, the Egyptian colloquial for “[I wish] that the world ends”. While the woman’s affect and succinct clarity of her statement gained popularity for its comedic effect, it betrayed a sense of political despair and an eschatological orientation so certain of the hopelessness of this world, that it locates the hope for justice and redress exclusively in the afterlife. This orientation differs from mainstream approaches to Anthropocenic catastrophes which often privilege technologically-centered solutions and are driven by a crisis management ethos that often flattens responsibilities by holding all of humanity accountable to ecological disasters, reproducing the same inequalities that resulted in global harms in the first place. Moreover, it reminds us that, as Delf Rothe notes, such eschatological visions of the Anthropocene often hide the fact that for many, the End Times are already here (Rothe; 2020).
In this paper, I will consider how alternative orientations towards the eschaton, specifically from within the Islamic tradition, employ the concept of intention to produce new discursive practices and forge ethical communities seeking to redress global harms through a focus on the here and now as opposed to management approaches concerned with outcomes, probabilities, and risk analysis. I consider how this reconfigures what is counted as “urgent” in relation to present responsibilities rather than the mainstream quest to avert future catastrophe. I engage the work of several popular Muslim intellectuals based in Egypt, who over the past decade have attempted to reimagine pathways for social change in highly repressive political environments and under continuously worsening socio-economic conditions. I place these thinkers in conversation with prison abolitionists such as Miriam Kaba, who also employs the grammar of intention to address questions of organising and political practice. This comparative placement is productive despite divergent contexts precisely because both sets of practitioners grapple with the politics of time as the struggle against structural evil, be it the prison-industrial complex, economic exploitation, neo-colonial domination, or political tyranny. What brings these two groups together conceptually is the question of how to translate the structural critique of global harms and the concomitant desire to change the entire social configuration into practical actions that can be plotted and executed along a timeline. If the charge is to ‘change everything’, where and how, on what timeline and in whose lifetime, is the work of redress initiated and sustained?
Both groups grapple with a fundamental tension in their projects between a commitment to a total vision of reimagining and remaking society and the ethical demands that their fellow brothers and sisters make upon them in the current moment. Both abolitionist practitioners and Egyptian religious practitioners seek to fulfill the momentary rights of others in their communities through ordinary or mundane time whilst working towards the fundamental restructuring of communities and societies along an undefined future timeline. Oftentimes, however, the struggle along each timeline makes conflicting demands amongst practitioners, where, for example, it seems that efforts required for abolitionists to support their fellow incarcerated community members in mundane time contradict or detract from the more radical work involved in structural change. Moreover, both sets of practitioners grapple with the fundamental unknowability of the value and outcome of their momentary actions. For many in the Egyptian communities I analyse, the direct tangibility and immediacy of outcomes is necessary not only for strategising next moves, but has also become entangled with practitioners’ sense of religious and self worth. In other words, positive outcomes of immediate and tangible change have become indicators of the success of the simultaneous quest for religious piety (which ultimately leads to everlasting bliss in the after-life) and social transformation that brings about long-sought justice. Against these tensions, abolitionist and Egyptian intellectuals are leveraging the central Islamic concept of intention, which emphasises that believers are ultimately rewarded for their intentions and for carrying out actions with reasonable precaution, regardless of the potential failure or non-fruition of this effort. I trace how the discursive revisions surrounding intention allow these intellectuals to shift the locus of answers from finding the most efficient way to manage and evade crises, to a focus on the self and its relation to human/non-human others, thus interrogating and working against fundamental human tendencies that drive the desire for domination. Ultimately, whilst this vision retains a linear timeline culminating in the End, it disassociates the moral-spiritual value of the work done momentarily from the “successful” realisation of this work's expected or desired telos.
Consequently, I suggest this refocus on the present as the temporal site of building towards a future that is never to come (given the Islamic promise of total destruction) creates spaces for experimental ethical communities whose unburdening from predicting the rate of success of outcomes allows them to address issues that would have been otherwise sidelined under the crisis management/solutions approach. These issues include the question of hierarchy and egalitarianism in religious and political work and how not to reproduce amongst each other the same Global North-South inequalities, inequities, and saviour-complexes that have fuelled much of today’s persistent global harms. Moreover, I consider how such an orientation towards the self offers a skeptical alternative to mainstream views expecting to find solutions to planetary crises through more technological breakthroughs. Here, these communities are engaged in probing the human tendencies that, if left unchecked, can only be further accelerated through the real political and material power afforded by technological advancements. Finally, I explore the limits of these practices, and the ways in which they can be considered political, if the political is understood to be a process of conflict and deliberation geared towards generating solutions to common problems.
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.