Sunnis do not really have a Mahdi at all, this is a purely Shia aspect put into place by the Safavid dynasty rulers of Iran some 300 years or so ago. To create a religious opposition to the Sunni Ottoman Empire that was threatening them.
The Sunnis do not really have Imams in the form of “saints” as they are in the Shia religion. Perhaps the best way to describe the difference is to point to the Sunnis as the Christian Catholics and the Shia as the Protestants.
Within both there are cliques and splinter groups.
Clearly there were descendants of Mohammad that the Shia have termed as the Imams one through 12. However the 11th Imam never had a child so the 12th Imam or the Mehdi is cosnidered by many to be fabrication.
There appears to have perhaps been a sickly infant that died but to keep up the appearance of an heir to the 11th, there was a room where the 12th Imam (child) was kept (though nobody ever saw him). Food was taken into that room on a regular basis till the first “disappearance” called the ‘gheibat soghra’ or little disappearance.
Later. when the 12th Imam had “been around” for some 12-years, came the “gheibat Kobra” or the “big disappearance”, where he reportedly went into th eJamkaran well in Iran to avoid capture and death and never reappeared- after which it was announced that the 12th Imam, the Mehdi was gone and would reappear after 1,000 years.
The British used this reappearance belief to create the Bahai religion in the late 1800’s to divide and break up a solid clerical resistance/opposition to them in Iran.
They announced that the founder of the Bahai religion “Baab” was the 12th Imam returned to earth and paid mullahs and others to become adherants, successfully breaking up the increasingly united mullah block.
To put it mildly, the 12th Imam is a fabriacted myth that the Hojatieh sect of Islam, now in charge of Iran under Ahmadi-Nejad and ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi.
As I mentioned previously Ahmadi-Nejad gave instructions that an empty place should always be set at all “sofreh” ceremonies, literally tablecloth, which people would throw to feed the poor or friends as a condition of a vow or prayer request for something.
At first everyone thought it was to honor the Supreme Ruler, Ali Khamenei but the latter discovered it was meant as a place at the table for the 12th Imam and called Ahmadi-Nejad in to tell him to stop the nonsense, saying that Khomeini had also forbidden worship of the 12th Imam.
Ahmadi-Nejad’s response in the ante-chamber was “does he really think I am HIS president? I am the 12th Imam’s president. and at another time, ridiculed the Supreme Ruler Ali Khamenei as thinking the latter was ruling Iran when in reality it is the 12th Imam who rules
This should provide a general sketch of what this is all about.
cheers
thanks for all that, you’ve covered the shia 12th imam mahdi story well, as I knew you would, I understand that the sunni do not have saints - but there is a sunni tradition that came from mohammad himself, (plagiarized from the Hebrew Messiah no doubt,) that a Mehdi would come from mohammad’s family, his name would be mohammad and he would rule the entire world.
There have been several who have claimed to be the ‘mahdi’, one such met his end in Iraq quite recently. But the one that stands out is the period of mahdi rule in East Africa, and I take that to have been sunni, not shia:
http://www.pbase.com/perrona/image/86057566
Mahdist Revolt
Main article: Mahdist War
Egyptian mismanagement eventually led to a revolt led by religious leader Muhammad ibn Abdalla, the self-proclaimed Mahdi (Guided One), who sought to purify Islam in Sudan. He led a nationalist revolt against Egyptian/British rule culminating in the fall of Khartoum and the death of the British General Charles George Gordon in 1885. The revolt was successful and Egypt and the British abandoned Sudan, and the resulting state was a theocratic Mahdist state.
From ‘The White Nile’ - The Moslem Revolt:
Mohammed Ahmed Ibn el-Sayyid Abdullah, the Mahdi, follows the true tradition of the warrior-priests of Islam. Like a sandstorm in the desert he appears, suddenly and inexplicably out of nowhere, and by some strange process of attraction generates an ever-increasing force as he goes along. Confused accounts were given of his origins: some said he came from a family of boat-builders on the Nile, others that he was the son of a poor religious teacher, others again that he was the descendand of a line of sheikhs. It was generally accepted, however, that he was born in the Dongola province in the North Sudan in 1844 (which would make him 37 years of age at this time), and that quite early in life he had achieved a local reputation for great sanctity and for a gift of oratory that was quite exceptional. His effects, it seemed, were obtained by an extra-ordinary personal magnetism.
“There was a strange splendour in his presence, an overwhelming passion in the torrent of his speech.’
He was a man possessed. Mohammed had promised that one of his descendants would one day appear and reanimate the faith, and Abdullah now declared, with an unshakable conviction, that he himself was that man...
Mohammed Ahmed Ibn el-Sayyid Abdullah’s bio sounds an awful lot like...Mohammed Baraka Hussein Obama.
I hadn’t known that about the Bahai. And I’m pretty sure they would object to the insinuation that the founder was a British agent of change. They have a very beautifully landscaped temple near Tel Aviv, btw.
Thanks for the ping!
Bookmark & BUMP!
Thanks,
BR
I agree that the Mahdi is a Persian invention, but it was done to make ArabIslam more palatable to Iranis. Why haven’t Iranis thrown off this yoke and returned to Zoroastrianism is beyond me
This is very interesting. I had actually been working on a graphic about the Mehdi or Mahdi, but after reading your explanation it sounds like it would be incorrect to portray Obama as that, right?