Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 269
Shiite Messianism
Early on in Shiism, supporters of the cause of Ali’s family pinned
their hopes for a restoration chiefly on two branches of his descendants.
One was the line of Muhammad ibn al-Hanifiyya (“son of
the Hanifite woman”), the offspring of Ali and one of his tribal
wives, and the other was either Hasan or Husayn, the sons of Ali’s
union with Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. Though the Shiite
claims did not achieve their original goal of putting an Alid on the
caliphal throne, the Alid connection that passed, by a kind of political
sleight of hand, from Ibn al-Hanifiyya’s son Muhammad to the
first of the Abbasids bolstered the latter’s claims to legitimacy as
head of the umma. But for all that, it was rather the scions of the
Ali-Fatima line who came to rule the Shiite roost, not in the sense
that they ever wielded actual political power but insofar as they
controlled and shaped the movement called Shiism in both its Ismaili
and its Imami varieties.
But the shadowy Ibn al-Hanifiyya was more than a pretender to
political power: he appears to have been among the earliest in Islam
to be regarded as the Mahdi, a figure believed to be the divinely
appointed individual who would preside over the final triumph
of Islam. Behind him stood perhaps the prototype of Ali
himself, whom many of his followers believed would one day return
to guide the community. Indeed, some of Ali’s followers denied
that he had died at all. Whatever the metaphysics that stood
behind this belief—early on the notion current in Shiite extremist
groups was that Ali was in some manner divine—was the conviction
that the Imam, eventually, the last Imam, would return to his
community spread among Shiites of all shades of belief.
Whether dead or disappeared, the reappearance of the Shiite
Imam was a return from another dimension of one who had once
been alive. The sentiment is parallel to the post-Exilic Jewish (and
eventually Islamic) beliefs about Elijah or Enoch. The growth
among Shiites of the conviction that the last Imam, whether the
seventh or the twelfth, had gone into concealment and would one
day return is the plausible result of two factors: a first, denial of the
death of a revered leader, which was apparently squelched in the