The Mahdi must be named Mohammed and be a direct descendant. Doesn't that leave out Osama -- or does he have an unused middle name? Dajjal, tell me your fascination with the Mahdi - do you have new insights?
As a matter of fact, OBL (like most Arabs -- or Spaniards, for that matter) has a whole bunch of middle names, and Muhammed just happens to be one of them. There was a news report that post 9/11, "in his edicts and official correspondence, he no longer signs his name as Osama bin Laden but as Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden."
See Is Osama the Mahdi?
If you've read my FR homepage you know that many Muslims are now interpretting the ahadith allegorically. If "the Dajjal" can be an allegory for the West, then "the Mahdi" can be an allegory for the jihadists collectively. It also provides an easy way to deal with that "direct descendant" prophecy.
Dajjal, tell me your fascination with the Mahdi - do you have new insights
About two weeks after 9/11 I read a short article about the Signs of Qiyama and the Mahdi, and it shook me up. Since the 1980s I had made a hobby of collecting Illuminati / New World Order / Conspiracy "exposes" plus Second Coming literature, and I saw immediately the power that the End-Time hadith could have on a Muslim's mind.
I think that millennialism is at the heart of the jihad. It frustrates me to no end that for a few years it was ignored completely, and now for the last year the topic has been treated as though Ahmadinejad is the only Muslim in the whole world who believes these are the Last Days.
So I bang my drum at FreeRepublic, but so far I don't think many people have noticed.