“I HAVE this question for you,” says Abu Ahmed, a businessman with a grey beard from Iraq's southern city of Basra. “Why did the British and foreign forces come to Iraq? Didn't Bush and Blair invade to stop the Mahdi from winning power?” ...
The businessman says the invasion was a deliberate attempt to cause so much chaos that the Mahdi's return would be hidden from the world's gaze. “America and Britain want to destroy Iraq and control it,” he says. “We see proof every day. Nothing has been built in four years. We've lost everything—our security, our jobs, our country.”
He blames the British, who have overseen Iraq's southern zone, and the Americans for sowing sectarian hatred. British soldiers defaced Sunni and Shia mosques at night, he says, in order to provoke clashes between the two groups. The Americans, he says, secretly brought al-Qaeda fighters into Iraq in containers and gave them money and weapons.
Source: The Economist
The title "Mahdi" literally means "the guided one" and is used to refer specifically to one who is "guided" by God. Such a person fulfills a messianic role in Sunni Islam but it has also been used among Sunnis to refer to those reforms who arise periodically in history to revive Islamic faith when it has grown weak. It is more popular, however, among Shi'ites for whom the Mahdi is to be sent by Allah to wage jihad against the enemies of Islam. Thus, any movement surrounding a Mahdi figure may exist for the specific purpose of revolution and reformation.
The most famous Mahid jihad against the West started as a reformist movement in 1881 around the figure of Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself Al Mahdi al Muntazar ("the awaited guide in the right path," usually seen as the Mahdi). This Mahdi first led a revolt against the Ottoman rulers in the Sudan and claimed to have been sent to prepare the way for the second coming of the Prophet Isa (Jesus) and the impending end of the world. In anticipation of Judgment Day, it was essential that the people return to a simple, rigorous, and even puritanical Islam.
Most Westerners learn about this revolt as being staged against western Christian rulers, probably because of how British general Charles George Gordon died in Khartoum in 1885 after a year-long siege by the Mahdi's forces. It is true that the Mahdi moved against western influences, but what most people miss is that his movement was originally aimed against the ostensibly Muslim rulers of Sudan. Like so many extremist movements in modern Islam, the Mahdi objected that the country's leaders were no longer "real" Muslims, and hence no longer had any right to rule. Thus he proclaimed a jihad against the Ottoman rulers of the time.
Westerners were drawn into the conflict partly because they were accused of supporting the apostate leaders as part of a deliberate effort to undermine and eventually destroy "real" Islam. This can be seen in how the Mahdi advocated eliminating various "un-Islamic" reforms which had taken hold in Sudan, for example the relative freedom accorded to women. The conspiracy fears expressed by the businessman quoted above sound very similar to the beliefs popular in Sudan at the time of the Mahdi: the West is undermining true Islam — and thus also God's plan for the world — by fostering false forms of Islam. It is up to true believers to unite, overthrow western imperialists and their un-Islamic puppets in order to establish truth, justice, and freedom under God.
Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like the conspiracy fears of conservative evangelicals and neoconservatives in America, too. Coincidence?
“Quick, we’d better stop these Westerners before they prevent our all-powerful God from doing what he wants.”
So much for faith in divine omnipotence.
*mutter mutter* crisis cult *mutter*
the brain has to be infected with feces to believe some of these prophesies.
Hey, do you know of any people who are not faked out about religious information? Are there online communities preparing for the return?