Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

270 t CHAPTER TEN
case of Muhammad but persisted in the case of Ali; and second,
what can be called in a general fashion “messianic expectation.”
Messiahs are born of despair, in particular a despair that political
processes, or even, more generally, historical processes, can never
achieve the desired end. In the Muslim case, it was likely engendered
by the failure of the Abbasid Revolution to restore one of the
“People of the House,” always understood as uniquely the Alid
branch of the Prophet’s house, to the Imamate. The Abbasids, having
unseated the Umayyads, declined to yield the Imamate to an
Alid, and the Shiites took their disappointed hopes to another
place. The Hidden Imam had gone, concealed in another dimension
and so safe from the Abbasid authorities. But he will one day
return as Messiah to restore the true Islamic dispensation.
The expected return of Jesus, who underwent his own concealment
when he was taken up, glorified but unmistakably in a physical
condition, from the slopes of Olivet to his Father in heaven
(Acts 1:6–14), was postponed within one generation of Christians
from the immediate future to the indefinite future. This transformation
of expectation may have occurred even more quickly
among the Shiites. By the ninth and tenth centuries, hope for an
imminent restoration of an Alid as the head of the umma had all
but disappeared in Shiite circles. The believers settled in for the
long haul toward the eschaton, and those who were impatient
enough to start counting down the days and years to the End
Time, and so the return of the Imam, were warned to refrain from
such dangerous exercises.
Note: Impatience sometimes triumphed, however. Though concealed,
the Hidden Imam, or Imam of the Ages, as he was also called, provides
ongoing direction to the Shiite community, as we have already
seen. More than counsel, his somewhat more direct intervention has
been spectacularly invoked—and was believed to have occurred—at
two moments in modern Shiite history. The first was in the Iranian
Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911 when the Shiite ulama announced
that opposition to the new constitution was tantamount to
taking up arms against the Hidden Imam. The same recourse was