Publication

This paper examines the Islamic fundamentalist apocalyptic imagination as it is built upon and shaped by distinctive readings and reconstructions of history. The author explores the link between the violence perpetrated by religious extremists and their apocalyptic visions of time and time beyond time. He argues that the fundamentalists' apocalyptic imagination is shaped by a construction of the past that attempts to cast a long record of humiliation, persecution and exile of the true believers as a necessary prelude for the decisive intervention of God and the final vanquishing of the apostates.