Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, student of Ayatollah Khomeini, is preparing for the coming of the hidden one, the expected one, the promised one, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who God has hidden away since the day he vanished from the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra. The same shrine bombed by terrorists on February 22, 2006, at 6:55 a.m. local time. Most all Iranians and well over half of all Iraqi believe in the messianic true heir of the prophet Muhammad. This is the historic challenge to the Shia Muslims to fight.
An article from The American Thinker about a month ago outlines the background necessary to understand the significance of the assault on the golden dome.
Ahmadinejad Awaits the Hidden Iman At the end of his speech at the United Nations in the fall of 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made an invocation to Allah to bring about the speedy reappearance of the Hidden Imam. … The IRI (Islamic Republic of Iran) is, in actuality, an eschatological construct based on a messianic figure known as the Hidden Imam. With the ongoing pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and the war against the United States, all in the name of the Hidden Imam, it suddenly seems more important to know something about this whole concept.A thousand years in the future, historians may look back and outline how in this narrow window of time, oil wealth and western technology aligned in a way that ignited the centuries of social and religious tensions within the Muslim Middle East.
Now unlike the Sunni caliph, the Shi’a Imam inherited from Muhammad not just his civil rule over the umma but also his prerogative of interpreting the Quran, his infallibility, and his sinlessness (that connotation of impeccability seems far lost today). The eleventh Imam, al-Hassan al-Askari, died in 874. He was succeeded by the twelfth Imam, the youthful Muhammad, who “disappeared” in 274/878 in the cave of the great mosque at Samarra without leaving progeny.
He is now known as the “expected one,” (al-Muntazar), the “promised one” (al-Mahdi”), or the “hidden one,” (al-Mustatir). The theology of the Hidden Imam is that Allah realized at last that the rightful successor to Muhammad was not going to be accepted by Islam at large so he had to be taken into hiding and kept there until he would re-appear to purify the umma and take the world for Islam.
Take Iran Seriously A Shiite scholar writes that among the many warning signs for the coming of the Mahdi, “a color will appear in the sky and spread to its horizons; a fire will appear for a long time in the east remaining in the air for three or seven days; the Arabs will throw off the reins and take possession of their land, throwing out the foreign authority…”It is also possible that history will show that wise leadership and the desire for peaceful lives in the populace will absorb the insult and back away from the violence. Bill Roggio lists the Signs the Civil War Has Started.
