Sanjay Subhramaniyam's Political Scatology

Sanjay Subhramainiyam, in a paper titled 'Politics of Eschatology' argues that-

the particularity of the ‘eschatological moment’ that emerges from the latter half of the fifeenth century is that it is conjunctural and very widely connected, embracing a number of different and quite dispersed polities and societies.

To the extent that a historical events is 'conjunctural'- i.e. arises out of 'a combination, as of events or circumstances'- it lacks 'particularity' or 'path dependence'. It can't be the case that autochthony arises out of exogenous shocks. Haecceity can't be the product of the operation of Universals. Particularity can't emerge from that which is factorizable as conjunctural. Sanju has written high falutin' nonsense.

Furthermore there was not one single post Fifteenth Century 'eschatological moment' which was more 'widely connected' than what went before. Thus stuff which happened at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions had far wider connections than stuff that happened a thousand years later at the time of Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri whom few Indians have heard of, let alone Persians or Turks or Arabs. 

Sanju believes otherwise. Yet, when he turns on the TV, he will hear about various warring Islamic sects whose origin is in the seventh century but nothing about the sect founded by some Indian dude in the fifteenth century.

He writes

In this respect, (the sixteenth century) differs both from far earlier episodic eschatological events that have been carefully enumerated and described by other historians, and from the phenomena that Adas and others have studied for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further, I will argue that in respect of this earlier moment, it is not in the least necessary to present eschatology as antinomian in character, or representing some form of ‘popular resistance’ to the dominant, and progressist, rationality of a modernizing state.

There were no such states at that period.  The fact is, the stuff Sanju thinks important, wasn't important at all.  It was some random shit, is all. The fact that the same sort of random shit happens wherever you look for it only means you like looking for random shit. It doesn't mean that random shit aint random and not shit.

On the contrary, the very social location of the most powerful eschatological currents was itself a source of deep struggle and continued controversy.Indeed, looking to the latter half of the fifeenth century, the historian has an embarrassment of points of departure, especially from the perspective of politics. One of these is 1494–95 CE, the beginning of the tenth century of the lunar Hegiran calendar observed by most Muslims. Amongst a host of important figures who were seized by the importance of this moment was the northern Indian personage of  Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri (1443–1505), 

Why is Sanju pretending that the sect founded by this guy had any historical significance, or that it had 'widespread' ramifications? The one famous Mahdi- in Nineteenth Century Sudan- was from a different Sufi order. The answer is Sanju is ignorant of Islam. He simply has a bee in his bonnet of a secular sort and, because he is writing for non-Muslims- indeed for ignorant Occidentals- he feels he can get away with writing any nonsense he likes.

Since Sanju is a South Indian Hindu, if he really believed there was an eschatological moment 'from the banks of the Tagus to the Ganges', he'd have to give a Hindu example. A non-Hindu could pretend that Guru Nanak or Sadasiva Nayaka or some other such figure was actually doing 'eschatological politics'. But if a Hindu did that he would be laughed at. His granny would tell him to stop being so silly. Hindus have reincarnation, not a Day of Wrath followed by bodily resurrection. 

I suppose it could be argued that Sanju is a closet Hindutvadi and that he is writing this shite to revenge himself on stupid White peeps wot rite shite about us. If this is the case, however, he is severely remiss in not mentioning Saussure at least once in every couple of paragraphs. As Rajiv Malhotra has shown, Hindutva intellectuals must observe this practice, because Saussure sound like soo-soo which is like totally hilarious.

It would appear therefore that political eschatology took a powerful and significant form in the Islamic world in the sixteenth century, transcending the divide between Sunnis (like the Mughals) and Shi’as (like the Safavids), and also drawing on support across both elite and popular sections of society.

This is silly. Muslims wanted to be good Muslims because they genuinely adored the Prophet and his Message of Salvation. In the same way that some Protestant Monarchs were attracted to Catholicism- some, like James II even converting- and vice versa- so too in the Islamic world, some Sunnis were (and are) 'tafzili' simply because they are attracted to the Divine Personality and teachings of Hazrat Ali. Most Shias fully reject 'ghullat' antinomianism and discourage abuse of leading Sahiban. No doubt, there was a 'political' aspect to Sectarian strife. Some hoped to gain materially but there were also sincere people who wished to live according to their Faith. It may be that they were taken advantage of by charlatans- but this does not alter the fact that Religion offers something which nothing else can replace for a lot of ordinary people.

Wars are costly. Revolutions involve risks and rewards. Only if the economic conditions are suitable will 'ideology' be able to pay for itself by attaching itself, parasite fashion, to one or the other. As for people who spend their time gassing on about 'ideology'- they can only earn a living as pedagogues in shite University Departments.

Of course, it is perfectly possible that a monarch, or a dictator, goes quietly crazy and fucks up big time. But the same result is achieved by incompetence, complacency or stupidity. This is mere noise which cancels itself out or which crashes a system which would have crashed anyway.

It seems Sanju has a peculiar definition of eschatology such that most of us unthinkingly subscribe to it in moments of frustration or grief.

That Philip took his eschatology rather seriously can be gauged from numerous examples in his private correspondence. In late 1574, on receiving news of serious military reverses, he wrote to his secretary: ‘If this is not the end of the world, I think we must be very close to it; and, please God, let it be the end of the whole world, and not just the end of Christendom.’

The problem here is that quite ordinary people say doomsday is at hand when they lose money or suddenly can't get an erection or their piles play up.  This does not mean the participate in any 'millenarian conjucture' willy-nilly or, in the case of the fair sex, wholly without a willy.

Philip thus participated  fully, if willy-nilly, in the ‘millenarian conjuncture’ of thesixteenth century which I have suggested elsewhere ran at the very least from the banks of the Tagus to those of the Ganges.

Phillip also participated fully in the non-millenarian conjecture which ran from the banks of the Thames to the banks of Wall Street. This is because he didn't really believe the end of days was at hand. Instead, when not writing shite to his secretary, he acted as though the world would last for many more generations. That's why he didn't halt work on the El Escorial- or suggest that cheaper materials be used because the thing would not remain standing very long.

In turn, this construction has proven a hard pill to swallow for nationalist Iberian historians of even the late twentieth century, whor emain determined to prove that the empires that the Portuguese and Spaniards created were not a form of  démesure, or outrageous excess, as Serge Gruzinski has recently posited,

Those Empires made money. Outrageous excess wastes money. This Gruzinski dude is a moron.

but rather ‘strictly organized, without eschatological agitation, and in the context of the recruitment of soldiers and missionaries controlled by military and ecclesiastical authorities’.

This is the correct view. That's why large swathes of the Globe still speaks Spanish or Portuguese. Had the Spanish conquistadors run around like headless chickens screeching 'The End of Days is upon us!' and shitting themselves copiously, they may have increased their eligibility for Chairs in History at UCLA but they would have had no impact on History.

For such authors, eschatology inevitably leads to ‘panic movements’, and thus to ‘irrationality’, itself incompatible for them with the very notion of the political ideology of a state.

Talk of eschatology- outside a Religious context- leads to silliness. These guys are right. States have to mobilize resources in a more or less incentive compatible manner. Neither 'Ideology' nor 'Eschatology' nor 'Socioproctology'  help it to do so. In the short term, a nutter may rise to the top and screw up royally, but in the medium to long term his lunatic antics cause only a small and temporary hysteresis effect.

There is more than a fair part of anachronism,and even ‘state-worship’ here.

As opposed to the stupidity and 'eschatology worship' in Sanju's screed.

But as a careful examination of the history of sixteenth-century Iberia shows abundantly, the behaviour of rulers and states was such that Dom Sebastião’s foolhardy (and ultimately suicidal) plan to invade the Maghreb in the1570s seems only somewhat odd, rather than a great deviation from some overall pattern of Machiavellian calculation.

There was a 'discovery' process. Few knew Dom Sebastiao's project was doomed. It was quite possible that the deposed Sultan retained the loyalty of the majority of his people and that his usurping Uncle had only been propped up by the Ottomans as a bargaining chip.  The Battle of Alcader was by no means a walkover. The Portuguese were unlucky and their young Prince, it is true, had more valour than cunning. But, he was not motivated by 'eschatology'. An Ottoman client state in Morocco was a clear and present danger to Portugal. The invitation to invade, given by the deposed Prince, was a never to be repeated opportunity. The thing was a gamble and it failed, but it did not represent millenarian lunacy.

Sanju mentions the case of David Reuveni, a Jew whose Messianic claims have nothing to do with 'Eschatological Politics' being simply the scream of pain of a persecuted Religion, though, no doubt, some charlatanry may have been involved. What cannot be gainsaid is that Jewish Messianism has had great spiritual fruits and that the persecution the Jews suffered is now repented by the heirs and descendants of their tormentors.

Sanju thinks

The example of Reuveni once more shows the close ties between different eschatological movements in the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, and how they could in effect seed off one another.

This is nonsense. The Jewish religion features a Messiah who will reverse the diaspora and rebuild Solomon's Temple. Christianity has no such figure. There is no cross-pollination or 'seeding' here at all. Islam has a notion of a Mahdi but it also has a notion of a Caliph. Neither Christianity nor Judaism have anything similar. What the history of sixteenth, or any other century, shows is that Religions have strong defenses against incorporating foreign 'genetic' material.

This notion, of a sort of ‘Mediterranean apocalypse’ of the sixteenth century, was first developed by the Ottomanist Cornell Fleischer, and it helps distinguish this extended moment to an extent from what came both before and after.

Fleischer is about as reliable a guide to the Turkish Civilization as Wendy Doniger is to Hindu Civilization. This 'Meditteranean apocalypse' is  as much a thing as--- the 'Da Vinci Code'.  The fact is, for purely geopolitical reasons, there was bound to be rivalry between the Holy Roman Empire and one based in Byzantium for the title of Universal Emperor. This meant military and political competition of a wholly pragmatic sort. No doubt, some charlatans and mystagogues might gain some marginal currency in courtly circles but that has always been the case. The reason nobody previously noticed any of the shite Fleischer fastens on to, is because the fashion for 'inter-disciplinarity' between shite Departments is relatively recent but has already proved wholly worthless.

The fact is, the people who understood the history of a period best were the guys who gained wealth and power during that period, or- at the least- their advisers or executives.

Nobody in the sixteenth century was saying 'eschatology matters'. They were saying money matters, ships matter, soldiers matter. There may be brief episodes of stupidity or lunacy but that is noise, not signal.

Sanju says-

Theorists of politics in relation to cultural phenomena remain rather divided as to the correct portrayal of the long- term trajectory  of political eschatology.

What he doesn't say is that theorists of politics are cretins. Political eschatology has no long term trajectory. It is fundamentally foolish and quickly disappears.

An extreme view which must be addressed briefly is that of historians who – while usually standing on the sidelines of the discussion

because they don't fancy hurling their feces at each other

– insist that the existing historiography on the subject can simply be dismissed because

it is shite which makes

 ‘indiscriminate and baseless use of the concepts that have circulated – ideology, idea, project, messianism, millenarianism, empire/imperialism – without defining their nature and historical contours’.

 It would thus seem illegitimate to these writers, as a matter of principle, to treat the movements of  Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri,

which had zero effect

Shah Isma‘il,

who had a big effect coz he was the hereditary head of a large, militarily very accomplished, essentially tribal confederation. It would have succeeded even if it had little Religious content. What was important about it, is that it represented a 'have not' Turkoman rebellion which could appeal to Iranian people and consolidate their separate identity on a Religious basis in a manner which had been foreshadowed very much earlier.

There is no similarity between Jaunpuri and the Shah. Nor is there any resemblance between Shabbatai Zevi and Sebastianism. The former is either the Jewish Messiah or a charlatan. The latter is a romantic, Nationalist, movement.

Shabbatai Zvi and Sebastianism together even if concrete connections (and not merely family resemblances) between them can be established.

Concrete connections? Then Osama bin Laden is 'concretely connected' to Barrack Obama. There is more than a 'family resemblance' between them. They are different sides of the same 'eschatological coin'. It is no coincidence that Obama lost the leadership of the Free World within 5 years of his killing Osama. If you count the number of Nicaraguan Public Holidays between Osama's death and Obama's ejection from the White House you will find the number of the beast if you are a shithead whose head is really full of shit and you think Sanju's Political Scatology represents utile scholarship.