This week I am reading Dr. Latifa Al-Shaalan's newly published book, The Stranger: A Study of Juhaymanist Mahdism. It seeks to answer a single question: what drove the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Makkah on the first day of the Hijri year 1400, in November 1979? The author's hypothesis is that the personality of its mastermind, Juhayman al-Otaybi provides the answer. The question is thereby reframed: what drove Juhayman to form the group that carried out the operation? Drawing on her training as a psychologist, the author examines the possible motives against their historical context and the available literature, and she concludes that the strongest force behind the movement was a search for a meaning in life that had not been on offer. At its heart lay a sense of estrangement from the surrounding world, expressed in the group's belief that the world was passing through the stage the religious tradition calls "the end of times." The term does not only refer to a time as such but also a state: corruption prevails and the righteous become a small band of strangers. That condition is the natural social prelude to the appearance of "the awaited Mahdi," who, as we know, was the center of the story in which Juhayman was the protagonist.
One of my bad habits is reading books out of order. I may start with the conclusion and then return to the introduction, begin with a chapter whose title has piqued my curiosity, or read a single chapter and leave the rest. I mention this to explain why I began The Stranger roughly in the middle: I wanted to understand the theoretical foundation on which Al-Shaalan built her argument before turning to its applications. It was there that I first encountered the field of existential psychology on which the author relies, and in particular the work of the American psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, which offers one of the most prominent alternatives to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic school.
As I began reading, a question posed by another thinker, Edward Carr, kept returning to my mind. It concerns the nature of history: what is history, why do we write it, how does one become a historian, and what distinguishes an account of an event from the writing of its history?
Some readers may have assumed that The Stranger documents the story of the Grand Mosque seizure, since much of what local writers have produced has gone no further than that. Al-Shaalan, however, takes the subject a step further, as I have noted, by asking why it happened.
According to Professor Carr, history cannot be sound without an answer to that question. History is not merely an account of what happened, however well documented, but its explanation: it traces the course along which the motives of the act in question took shape, even where those motives were absent from the scene itself. Understanding the causes and conditions that preceded an event is essential to understanding history as experience, that is, to answering the question of when such an event might recur.
If it was good, how can we make it repeatable? If it was bad, how can we prevent it from recurring? The lessons of history derive from this point, not from merely knowing the parties to the story and being familiar with how it is told.
Al-Shaalan has presented one side of the story: psychological estrangement as a catalyst of crisis. She stopped there, it seemed to me. She treated the driving factor, estrangement, as a given, and did not attempt to dig beneath it with questions such as: why did this particular group feel estranged, and why did that feeling lead it to death anxiety, which in turn led it to adopt Mahdism as a means of discharging that anxiety?
The psychological analysis of the event is Dr. Latifa Al-Shaalan's answer to the question of why it happened. Seen from that angle, it is a contribution to writing the history of the event, and therefore the history of the country. Other researchers will address other questions, and in this way what we call history takes shape. History is not written by one person, nor is it completed at one time. Each piece of writing is a line, set beside other lines until the page is full.
