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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?

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.

You're right about the power the End-Time hadith has on uneducated, young Muslims. Muslims in the ME are fed the line that their "birthright" for lack of a better word - to rule the world has been taken from them by the West and Israel.

At no point do they consider the possibility their culture's backward 14th century ideas are the cause of their problems. Sometimes they'll go as far as to believe it might have something to do with corrupt leaders "stealing" their share of the oil - but that's about as far as introspection gets.

In debate, Japan can be mentioned - a county with NO natural resources. No oil, no iron, no aluminum, no gold, no nothing. Yet, Japan's an economic powerhouse. Then ask, "why?".

But I'm getting off subject... I'm with you on the Mahdi thing - it's going to get bigger as the frustration level rises and it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the Mahdi did not exist, they would create him.