Waiting for the Mahdi
Nidhal Chamekh, De quoi rêvent les martyrs 2. Dessin n°7, 2012
More than a decade after the Arab revolutions, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has experienced a multitude of severe crises. Instead of a democratic change, the MENA region has been through an autocratic transition, which in turn led to phenomena such as political and religious violence, exile, or political stagnation. Whether religiously inspired or secular, the variety of ideologies that have taken shape during this sequence gradually lost most of their attractiveness. As my previous research has shown, disaffection towards established politics resulted in the emergence of other forms of contestation, often based on promises of upcoming eschatological times. At the heart of major challenges to the region’s stability, these new entanglements of politics and religions call for a radical questioning of religious aspirations within marginalized communities. Expanding upon my earlier work into the study of religious aspirations in marginalized communities in Morocco, France, and Syria, my next research project will delve into messianic hopes, as they materialize in the context of the region’s multi-layered crisis.
