Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 271
taken in 1979 in the Iranian Revolution. This time there was a more
particular focus. The Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1989) was universally
recognized as a spokesman of the Imam, and by enthusiasts even as
the Imam himself, returned at last to “fill the world with justice and
righteousness,” or, if not the world, at least the new Islamic Republic
of Iran.
The Mahdi
From somewhere in that same terrain of hopes and disappointment
the Sunnis found their own explanation of an End Time savior.
He is called al-mahdi, or the Divinely Guided One. “Mahdi”
did not begin its career as an eschatological epithet; indeed, any
number of prominent figures in early Islam were so characterized
for their saintliness or upright conduct, and one Abbasid caliph—
the Umayyads went by their ordinary names but the Abbasids
much preferred throne-titles to mere names—assumed al-Mahdi
as his throne-name, and another al-Hadi, or “the Divinely Guiding
One,” without any notable eschatological implication. The first
association of that characterization with the End Time was apparently
connected with Jesus, whom the Muslims expected to return
not merely to succumb to the mortal necessity of death—his tomb
is prepared next to Muhammad’s at Medina—but, much as the
Christians believed, to initiate the final stage in the history of the
cosmos. In the Muslim version of that scenario, al-mahdi was simply
a characterization of the Jesus of the parousia. But Jesus was a
mythic personality and, as noted, pious and disappointed Muslims
of the mid–eighth century required more concrete and more immediate
relief. A Mahdi-prince was projected into the immediate present,
a historical rather than an eschatological messiah, to right
present wrongs and to inaugurate a more authentic Islam.
Sunnis, like the Shiites, placed their hopes in the Abbasids, the
first for relief, the second for fulfillment. Both were disappointed,
and while the Shiites had their own candidates standing in the
wings in the person of the Alid Imams, the Sunnis had none. There