Qiyama as Rebellion, Taqiyya as Hypercamouflage: The Political Theology of Reza Negarestani

Abstract An examination of the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s development of political theology. Considered within the context of his involvement with a strand of contemporary philosophical thinking known as speculative realism, it examines Negarestani’s use of Islamic referents in Cyclonopedia, a multi-layered frame story belonging to the genre of theory fiction, and in more technical-philosophical treatises. Focusing on his deployment of dissenting interpretations of the notions of taqiyya (concealment, dissimulation) and qiyama (resurrection), the resulting spatiotemporal implications are assessed by putting Negarestani in conversation with classical and contemporary Islamic and non-Muslim thinkers, theologians, and philosophers.


Introduction
Fitting in what Jean Baudrillard called "theory fiction", Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials has been described as "at once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire". 2 Structured as a multi-layered frame story, Cyclonopedia provides a narrative for transporting the theoretical carriers and for mobilizing the fictionalized version of a philosophical project, resonating within which the earth is conceived of as a "degenerate wholeness and twisted sentience" (Negarestani, 2008, pp. 16-17). Following its publication in 2008, Negarestani's hallucinatory exploration of the "nexuses between numeracy, Tellurian dynamics, warmachines and petropolitics, models for grasping war-as-a-machine and monotheistic apocalypticism, all in connection with the Middle East" (15) attained a kind of cult status in circles of accelerationists, speculative materialists and realists. 3 As a scholar of Islam specializing in the intellectual history of the contemporary Muslim world, my interest in Cyclonopedia was triggered by the author's use of Islamic referents, tropes and motifs. Here I will concentrate on the notions of qiyama (resurrection) and taqiyya (concealment, dissimulation), which are further unpacked in some of Negarestani's auxiliary writings of a more technical-philosophical nature. They feed into a "Theology of dissipation and extinction" that bears a family resemblance with the naturalized eschatologies of the solar catastrophe elaborated by Jean-François Lyotard in The Inhuman (Lyotard 1991), and in Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound (Brassier 2007), where the annihilation of the sun features as a cosmic inscription of the Freudian death drive (Thanatos, Todestrieb) (Kersten, 2020). Negarestani's idiosyncratic reinterpretations of qiyama and taqiyya resemble the alternative use of religious (specifically Christian) motifs and tropes found in the writings of continental European philosophers, such as Giorgio Agamben and Gianni Vattimo, as well as the American-Iranian sociologist of knowledge and historian of Islam Hamid Dabashi. 4 The latter's elaborations also proceed via circuitous detours, twists, and umwege characteristic of Negarestani's way of thinking (Negarestani, 2011a, pp. 191-192). 5

Taqiyya: From Concealment and Dissimulation to Hypercamouflage
Noting the conventional understanding of tqiyya as concealing or dissimulation of one's true belief and activities in order to avoid the dangers of confrontation and conflict, Negarestani's reformulation of this traditionally Shiʿa means of survival in the face of Sunni repression into a "modern evasive tactic, and a militant strategy highly conscious of its own offensive complexity," demonstrates how Cyclonopedia can be read as a political samizdat (Negarestani, 2008, p. 123). Transformed by contemporary violent Islamists into a duplicitous and lethal stratagem, this confounding of the linear distinction between civilian and combatants is traced through multiple layers of narrative to "the Persian occultsaboteur, prophet of heresy-engineering, and State-Guerrilla rebel Abdallah ibn Maimun, who founded the sect of Batiniyya (Ahl-i-Batin or the crowd of within) from which Hasan-i-Sabah's Hashshashins and the majority of regional insurgencies originated" (p. 125).
This alternative use of taqiyya is also at the center of "The Militarization of Peace," Reza Negarestani's contribution to the first volume of Collapse (Negarestani, 2006). Here he explores the terror instilled by those exponents of violent Islamism, whom he calls Takfiris (but renames Jihadis in Cyclonopedia). They distort the original doctrine of concealment or dissimulation by turning it into a weapon that dismantles the battlefield as the theater of operation for conventional warfare and selects civilians as its primary targets. This trend not simply endangers civilians worldwide but poses a threat to human life in its most basic, abstract sense; reducing it to what Agamben has called bare life (Agamben, 1998). As an example, Negarestani introduces Abd al-Salam Faraj, the chief ideologue behind al-Jamaʿa al-Islamiyya, the Sunni Islamist organization responsible for the assassination of the Egyptian President Sadat: Faraj's book adds a new twist to the tactics of heretical religious extremists [ … ] [his] take on Taqiyya departs entirely from what in the dawn of Islam originated as a defensive or protective inclination, an evasive tactic. In The Absent Obligation, 6 Taqiyya is reconstituted as a type of strategic simulation or dissimulation, in the name of a hostile politics of offence. However, both in its traditional form and in this new weaponized form, Taqiyya is strongly bound to the notion of survival.
Negarestani argues that this transformation consists in changing a hiding tactic or form of deception into an act of "Islamic hypercamouflage" (Negarestani, 2006, p. 86). With this the takfiri-jihadi seeks "the highest degree of participation with infidels"; no longer dissimulating and distancing himself from a society characterized by unbelief, but actually blending into the crowd, "moving and behaving like a true, unfaithful civilian" (Negarestani, 2006, pp. 61-62).
In line with its function as a political samizdat, in Cyclonopedia, Negarestani presents taqiyya as a tool of political subversion: "In an ironic twist, the Jihadi under Taqiyya gives a voice to the voiceless (the civilian, that is)" (Negarestani, 2008, p. 127). However, for civilians, this Islamist perversion of taqiyya has dramatic consequences. Shifting the battlefield to the homeland also shifts government attention and its instruments of surveillance and policing away from outside forces toward the domestic sphere. No longer trusting the general populace, governments turn on their own citizens; "curtailing their rights, confining them to economic, social and political quarantine to isolate or even purge the disease and its potential hosts at the same time" (Negarestani, 2006, p. 62).
Another consequence of pulling warfare out of the battlefield is that, in terms of space definition, there are no longer any identifiable frontlines. Just as Abdallah ibn Maimun prepared the ground for the tenth-century Fatimid conquests in North Africa, establishing a counter caliphate opposed to the Abbasids in Baghdad and their conventional methods of warfare, also the modern-day distortions of taqiyya trigger what Ibn Maimun is said to have called "White War"an "abode of unbounded war [ … ] at once the white of thick impenetrable fog and the color of peace" (Negarestani, 2008, p. 126). Negarestani employs taqiyya and White War to rethink the use of space by the monotheism-petropolitics nexus operating in the Middle East that is at the center of his project, and in which its contemporary Takfiri-Jihadi deployment features as a tool for the desertification of warfare: "For Jihad, the desert lies at the end of an oil pipeline" (Negarestani, 2008, p. 19).
As a modern-day imitation of the prophet's departure from Mecca to live in a "purified desert purged from any manifestation of idolatry," also the present-day reformulation Takfir wa Hijra in the name of violent Islamism "enunciates a new vision of desert and desertification" (Negarestani, 2006, p. 67). In Cyclonopedia's narration this is unpacked as follows: Monotheism in its ultimate scenario is a call for the Desertthe monopolistic abode of the Divine. In the end, everything must be leveled to fulfil the omnipresence and oneness of the Divine. So that for radical Jihadis, the desert is an ideal battlefield; to desertify the earth is to make the earth ready for change in the name of the Divine monopoly, as opposed to terrestrial idols. In line with Wahhabi and Taliban Jihadis, for whom every erected thing, so the speak, every verticality, is a manifest idol, the desert, as militant horizontality, is the promised land of the Divine (Negarestani, 2006, p. 18).
Emblematic of this aspect of Negarestani's Theology of Dissipation and Extinction is Saudi Arabia, where militarization manifests itself, on the one hand, in the semi-sedentarization of the nomads by the state, but also in a renomadization of the Wahhabi kingdom, from where it spilled over into the wider Persian Gulf region, the Middle East, and beyond (Negarestani, 2008, p. 57). 7 Written in the wake of 9/11 and the state of anarchy to which countries like Afghanistan and Iraq were reduced following the US-led invasions of 2001 and 2003, in "The Militarization of Peace," Negarestani explains how the Takfiris counter the American military war machine. Relying on the principle of megadeath, that is to say, establishing air supremacy through shock-and-awe overkill using a combination of hightech aircraft, smart bombs and drones, Takfiri-Jihadis responded by turning taqiyya into a "dieback machinery" (Negarestani, 2006, p. 64). A term borrowed from botany, it turns camouflage into an effective logistical plane that kills the tree inside out, beginning with the leaves (civilians) and branchlets (small organizational structures). Such twisted reinterpretations of taqiyya "confound and twist all diagrams and maps which allow a civilian to be distinguished from a terrorist" (Negarestani, 2006, p. 66). With what we have learned since the emergence of the phenomenon Daesh/IS, Negarestani's accounts in "The Militarization of Peace" and Cyclonopedia appear eerily prophetic, while at the same time remaining reminiscent of the idiom employed by Paul Virilio in Desert Screen (Virilio, 2005). In this account of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Virilio not only speaks of the state of "total war" and "total peace," described in an earlier book entitled Speed and Politics, but also of a concomitant "disequilibrium of terror" and "deterrence of 'the strong by the weak'" (Virilio, 2006, p. 36) due to the opening up a second front by the '"lost children' of Muslim migration" (p. 25)prefiguring, in turn, the 9/11 attacks and subsequent atrocities in Brussels, London, Madrid, and Paris.
The contours of this alternative spatiality are brought into further relief by contrasting them to the notions of the war machine and nomad thought developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (2004), in a section called "Treatise on Nomadology -The War Machine". 8 In the latter, war machines are external to state boundaries, but the takfiri-jihadi use of taqiyya in the writings of Negarestani not only collapses such spatial distinctions, it also "unbalances the entire conventional dynamics between war machines [ … ] as the processes which fabricate the very machinery and space of war" (Negarestani, 2006, p. 63).
In "The Militarization of Peace", Negarestani presents his critique of Deleuze and Guattari's war machine as part of logical and mereotopological digressions and excursions that fall outside the present scope. But, because the Deleuzian-Guattarian model of the war machine as an invention of the desert nomads of antiquity does not correspond easily with the contemporary takfiri-Jihadi variant, Negarestani criticism is continued in Cyclonopedia. First of all: In contrast to the classical Islamic examples employed by Deleuze and Guattari, the contemporary version includes as one of its stimulating components the Abrahamic or monotheistic escalation of war into "an object, ormore exactlya product." Secondly, in contrast to the capitalism-schizophrenia nexus of A Thousand Plateaus, "it consummates the technocapitalist oecumenon through synthesis with Islamic monotheistic enthusiasm (subtracting the supposed potential for 'secularization' as an Abrahamic teleology)" (Negarestani, 2008, p. 16).
But in the end, also Negarestani's reinterpretation of the war machine has a Khaldunian ring to it: In the course of millennia of relentless eroding of Middle Eastern state defenses by nomadic war machines, the latter have been continuously converted into state forces, until the arrival of the next wave of nomads. 9 However, the takfiri-jihadi use of Islamic hypercamouflage is "maliciously diffusive" (Negarestani, 2006, p. 87). Territorial occupation is neither a goal nor a tactic. It is also not about hidden dwelling, or about replacing this or that entity. Instead, the takfiri-jihadi connection with the environment is one of complete overlap. The militarization of peace in the title of Negarestani's contribution refers to a collective survival of both terrorists and civilians, in which the latter are exposed to the interminable threat of being weaponized against themselves and against the immunity of the system itself. It comes with an unchecked spread of the contagion of war filling the very horizon of survival of life as such, whereby "auto-phagic overreaction looms as the only logical solution for the system" (Negarestani, 2006, p. 89).

Qiyama: Apocalypse as the Ultimate Rebellion
What Negarestani's elaboration of taqiyya does for thinking about space, his reconceptualization of qiyama does for his reflections on time. If the alternative use of taqiyya establishes Cyclonopedia as a political samizdat, Negarestani's exegetical liberties with qiyama turn it into a speculative theologybecause, as he observed himself: "To do rigorous theology is to perforate the Divine corpus with heresies" (Negarestani, 2008, p. 82). Qiyama may not feature as prominently in Cyclonopedia as taqiyya, but Negarestani had already begun shooting holes in Islamic orthodoxy with an earlier text entitled "Islamic Exotericism," in which qiyama (here rendered in the transcription of the Persian variant, ghiamat) takes pride of place.
Subtitled "Apocalypse in the Wake of Refractory Impossibility", Negarestani's investigation of ghiamat proceeds in a circuitous wayvia a detour in which the Islamic equivalent of apocalypticism is contrasted with its Judeo-Christian counterpartin order to demonstrate that, "unlike other strains of monotheism, Islam cannot be said to include the idea of an apocalypse in the sense in which we usually understand this word" (Negarestani, 2007, p. 273). Central to the argument for what is actually the incommensurability of the Qur'anic notion of ghiamat and the Biblical apocalypse is the absence in the Qur'an of a notion of time (zaman), which can be compared to that of chronos in the Bible. Instead, waqt (in Persian: vaght), the Arabic term used in the Qur'an for addressing events such as ghiamat, has a connotation of "whereness", in the sense of pointing to an "unchronological now" (p. 308).
Furthermore, the incompatibility between the Christian and Islamic conceptualizations of apocalypticism also revolves around different understandings of what it means to return and reunite with God. Negarestani coins this in terms of the distinction made by al-Farabi between latent or passive impossibility and active or unfailing impossibility respectively. Because of its belief in a triune God coinhabiting the same space as humankind, the Christian doctrine of the Apocalypse and the return to God adheres to latent impossibility, that is to say, a temporary lack of mutual affordance. Negarestani invokes Nicholas of Cusa's De Possest, where he claims it is argued that the relationship between possibilities and actualizations of God and man respectively can be seen in terms of either an economy of capacity and ability or of reciprocal affordance. However, whereas: The Christian apotheosis promises a final unity with the God through a transcendental participation or methexis [ … .] with the Son [ … ] Islam openly rejects such a theologically relieving covenant. Man can never be unified with Allah and Allah will never be revealed to Man; the knowledge of Allah can be obtained neither through the affirmative desire or cataphasis nor the logic of negativity and emphatic negation of apophasis. In more precise terms, in Islam, unity with the Divine is eventuated neither on the ontological nor on the epistemological level. The son can never return to the father since there is no son and no father; there is only Allah, external to all beings and their surrounding outside (Negarestani, 2007, pp. 290-291). Because of this absolute externality of God, al-Farabi has qualified "the plane on which Allah pervades everything in Islam" as one of "active and unfailing impossibility" (p. 286). This brings about not only a different conception of space but also of temporality, precluding an understanding of the apocalypse as a chronological moment or as a possibility of (re)union with God.
Due to this radical understanding of divine transcendence, also revelation in Islam is understood differently from the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is not the revelation of God, but a revelation from God. Therefore, "Islamic apocalypticism is not a contemplating process", but one of surrender or submission (Islam) to "the imperceptible Will (Hoda) of the im-posse-ible (Allah)." This process of leading humankind to God is then "suddenly disrupted by Qiyamah (Ghiamat) which is wrongly translated as Apocalypse" (p. 293). In his further exploration of the different understandings of revelation, Negarestani switches from medieval philosophy and theology to the modern, invoking the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling and contemporary Shiʿa clerics-cumphilosophers, such as the Ayatollahs Tabatabaʿi and Motahhari, as well as the Sunni religious scholar and reformer of al-Azhar, Shaykh Mahmud Shaltut (which he spells Shaltoot).
Citing Schelling's definition of revelation as "that which exists … only in order to see if I can get from it to the divinity", Negarestani judges it not only as rendered obsolete in Muslim interpretations of the Apocalypse, in terms of Islamic doctrine the assumption of a promise on the part of the divine to expose itself to humanity is considered heretical, or worse, an act of apostacy amounting even to kufr, or unbelief. He goes on to point to the Iranian religious scholar Motahari (usually spelled as Motahhari), who "once suggested that the glory of Allah bursts forth at the exact moment when Man realizes that nothing of Allah can be revealed to him" (Negarestani, 2007, p. 301). Also, the Ayatollah Allameh Tabatabaʿi argued that "the Quran wholly withdraws from the diametric concealing/disclosing revelation of other monotheistic Books" showing "a radical cynicism (or even hatred) for the facsimile by twisting the very foundations of monotheism as expressed in the Bible or Torah" (pp. 302-303).
Instances of an Islamic revelatory apocalypse or "even seeing Allah in Ghiamat" are only found in particular Sunni accounts, attributed to controversial mystics, such as al-Hallaj, or by drawing on questionable Hadith. Modern-day Sunni scholars, such as the reformist Shaykh al-Azhar Mahmud Shaltut was opposed to such classical Islamic theological expos es smacking of Judeo-Christian eschatology, and at odds with any "explicit reference (nas-e sarih) to the Quran [which] is prior to everything" (304).
So, according to Islamic interpretations of apocalypticism in line with scripture, neither is the apocalypse a manifestation of the Absolute nor can humans reach the Absolute. Rather, the Islamic apocalypse is actually conceived as the very disruption of a transcendental process toward an Absolute. Instead, it is a moment (vaght) "highlighting the absolute externality of God as the Imperceptible or irreducible exteriority -'The secret of God is eternally ungraspable by Man' [ … ]" (Negarestani, 2007, p. 296). In this interpretation, Ghiamat liberates humanity "not by joining the divine but through a disillusionment from his own being, a disillusionment made possible by the externality of God, not the quiddity of his externality" (p. 298).
Negarestani goes on to explain that because of the radical externality of God, also the Qur'an speaks in terms of utter inaccessibility of God and not of a concealed secret. Picking up on this, Islamic scholars speak of a "limitless generosity of this externality", which makes Being possible from humanity (p. 296). To qualify this, Negarestani introduces what he calls "refractory impossibility" ( featuring in the subtitle). Accordingly, both Islamic theological reasoning and the Qur'an itself assert that the ultimate divine gift of revelation is not epistemological; it is not to satisfy the human desire to know God. If that were so, in line with what is in effect a theology of dissipation and extinction, Negarestani avows it would turn human Beings not only into an "epistemological inferno" but also lead to "ontological eradication" (p. 297).
Instead, the unfolding of Allah's externality simultaneously affirms refractory impossibility and denies the possibility of an apocalyptio (unveiling) of either a divine or human content. In Negarestani's estimation, "ghiamat does not mean apokalupsis (involving the process of lifting the veil). Rather it heralds Ghiam or rebellion, which is connected to Sura al-Takvir (overthrowing)" (p. 302). In contrast to the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels: This deviation from the familiar path culminates in the nomenclatural system usually associated with the Last Day; Ghiamat (Ultimate rebellion, Insurgency, Standing to respect, Awakening in the sense of disillusionment) becomes the substitute for all other names in Apocalyptic literatures which frequently suggest revelation (Negarestani, 2007, p. 303).
Twisting the translation of ghiamat from resurrection into insurgency, Negarestani characterizes the way in which Islamic commentators have depicted the return to God as a "brutal and glorious encounter of Man with what is radically external yet closest to him", thus grasping "the Unrevealable [in its] full-fledged horror" (Negarestani, 2007, p. 299). This realization that, due to its radical externality, the divine is unknowable, renders mysticism or contemplative theology into a hopelessly romantic and in the end otiose exercise. In Negarestani's interpretation, then, "Islamic Ghiamat manifests enlightenment, under the holocaustic luminosity of radical outside, and the present human possibility of both ontological and epistemological potentialities, in the wake of refractory impossibility." (p. 297).

By way of Conclusion
In the final section of "Islamic Exotericism", entitled "In Islam, chronology is a heresy", Negarestani dissects the "sinister imminence" (p. 307) inherent to ghiamat on account of the absence of temporal modes. Here his examination of Islamic Apocalypticism converges with his earlier discussed account of takfiri-jihadi terror, which both feed into the speculative theology of Cyclonopedia that betrays an affinity with the solar catastrophe of Lyotard and Brassier's cosmic death drive.
In contrast to Christian conceptualizations of the externality of God, which posits the outside in terms of a distance, and with that the prospect of destination, a passage from al-Farabi's passive impossibility to possibility articulated in patiently waiting, hope and even the provocation of negative despair associated with the notion of time as chronos: Islamic imminence, spread over the epidemic Now, has no such bond of expectation, patience or waiting [ … ] it is entirely based on furious participations [ … ] fueled by a refractory impossibility [ … ] moved by the loss of promise of the Revelation and the eternal externality of Allah (Negarestani, 2007, p. 310) Instead, Islamic apocalypticism situates vaght as an unchronological here and now on: "a plane along which chronologics [sic!] shrinks to momentary particles taking viral and swarming forms to spread through this spatial Now (or irrevocable imminence). Islamic Ghiamat is the vertigo of moments" (p. 310). Translating the spatiotemporal incommensurability of Islamic ghiamat with its conventional understandings of the Apocalypse to the War on Terror (which was at the center of his "The Militarization of Peace"), Negarestani concludes that its fin de si ecle scenarios are due to the mismatch of Islamic and western chronologics. Instead of facing a clash of civilizations, the West is engaging in a "radical Time-War", confronting an "opponent which only exists as a desert leveled of all idols or transcendental abominations to Allah." (p. 311). In "Islamic Exotericism" too, Negarestani invokes the image of the desert, using it again to criticize Deleuze and Guattari: Ghiamat is a vast desert where Man finds that he can never reach (possess, afford) the Absolute [ … ] Islamic Apocalypse occurs where (not when) Man grasps the utter externability of God to himself.
[ … ] In Islamic Apocalypse all movements which give rise to the Absolute [ … ] abruptly cease to process.
Before such an impossibility, the Deleuzian escapism to the Outside is an aesthetic movement based either on the idealism of reaching the Impossible (the active im-possess-able) or on becoming open to an absolute openness (Negarestani, 2007, pp. 293-294).
In Negarestani's reasoning, the horizon of Deleuze and Guattari's openness remains circumscribed by a policy of survivalism directed toward a destination, leading to the question: "Is escapism on the plane of 'being open' therefore a reformation of Atonement, its reinvention in another territory?" (p. 295). The Deleuzian-Guattarian conceptualization of the war machine remains inexorably indebted to Christian notions of the apocalypse. By contrast, the Islamic variant looms in the desert, collapsing the space-time continuum, corroding history: "On the Islamic front, the Ghiamat-apocalypse is always already-there and the entities of the pax islamica are already desert-nomads of this contagious Now" (p. 311). While stepping into the 1991 Gulf War discourses of Virilioand Baudrillard (1995) who sketched prospects of disequilibrium of terror and the apocalyptic disparity of an asymmetric exercise of domination rather than an act of war, Negarestani proceeds with his own speculative realist scenario for the future of the war on terror feeding into a political theology of dissipation and extinction.