The Mohammunist Manifesto

The two ideologies doing battle against the modern West have a shared belief: It’s going to get a lot worse (often with their help) before it magically gets better.

Milli Sands | July 27, 2026

Marx’s theory of immiseration and Twelver Shia eschatology share a common structural feature: both teach that history moves forward only through a period of necessary, progressive worsening, after which a total redemptive inversion suddenly occurs. Everything else follows from that single shared manifesto.

“Redemptive inversion” is the common core. It means the existing order is not improved by degrees; it is completely reversed. Workers’ misery and Islam-defined injustice are inverted into their opposites; that is, Islam-defined perfect justice and workers’ liberation.

In Marxism, the accumulated suffering of the working class under capitalism is inverted into the classless society. In Twelver doctrine, the earth filled with Islam-defined oppression is inverted into the earth filled with Islam-defined justice by the Mahdi. In both systems, the night must first become extremely dark—violently dark—before the dawn can break.

Marx explains the mechanism of that prior darkening in economic terms. In Capital, he analyzes the rising “organic composition of capital”—the growing ratio of constant capital (machines and technology) to variable capital (living labor). As this ratio increases, relatively fewer workers are required. An industrial reserve army of the unemployed expands. That reserve army then “disciplines the working class”: it holds down wages, weakens bargaining power, and keeps workers insecure and fragmented.

The result is relative immiseration. Marx’s own formulation is precise: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour (sic), slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole.”

The classical Twelver sources describe a world engulfed in oppression, bloodshed, tyranny, and fitna (for extra credit, see here) immediately preceding the Mahdi’s appearance. They naturally express these conditions in the vocabulary of their own era rather than in terms of modern technology.

Today, however, no instrument is more capable of filling the earth with those conditions than nuclear weapons. A large-scale nuclear exchange would produce precisely the worldwide slaughter, famine, societal collapse, and pervasive disorder described in the traditions, but on a scale unimaginable to the authors of the classical texts.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s adherence to Twelver Shi’ism, combined with repeated Mahdist rhetoric from senior leaders, makes it reasonable to analyze its pursuit of offensive nuclear capability not merely as an exercise in conventional statecraft but also in light of the eschatological framework that has long informed elements of the regime’s ideological worldview. Modern nuclear weapons are therefore best understood not as a revision of Twelver doctrine but as the most powerful contemporary means by which the doctrine’s prophesied conditions could be realized.

The parallel is therefore clean and........

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