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Daniel Pipes gets it right, as usual.

Mahdeviant sounds more appropriate to me.

The Mahdi is comming! The Mahdi is comming! And he knows if you have been naughty or nice!

"Watch out, the Mahdi is coming."

Whereas "it never became an essential part of Sunni religious doctrine," continues the encyclopedia, "Belief in the coming of the Mahdi of the Family of the Prophet became a central aspect of the faith in radical Shi'ism," where it is also known as the return of the Twelfth Imam.

Mr. Pipes (and his encyclopedia) get this very, very wrong. Over the last few decades, there has been tremendous crossover of mahdi beliefs into Sunni doctrine. The Sunnis identify him as a restorer to the Caliphate, not the 12th Shi'ite Imam. And the hadith are interpretted so that the Sunni branch destroys the Dajjal and conquers the rest of the world.

Mr. Pipes should read Prof. David Cook's recent book, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, which deals exclusively with recent Sunni literature about the mahdi and the dajjal.

So the situation is not that Ahmadinejad is some lone End-Time believer who will soon have a nuclear weapon. The situation is that millions of Muslims, Sunni and Shi'ite, beleive these are the End-Times and that their hadith infallibly predict their victory over the United States and her allies.

The Muslim world is deluged with "infallible proofs" from the hadith that the downtrodden Muslim culture will very soon overthrow Western Civilization. Under the Mahdi, there will be a short era of worldwide peace under shar'ia law, and then Allah will wrap everything up and the trumpets will sound for Judgment Day.

Since they are preaching that there is literally NO FUTURE, why not strap on a dynamite belt and walk up to a group of American soldiers?

See my FR homepage and the links there for more info on Muslim apocalyptic beliefs.