“Wrong reasons” can’t lead to “right” conclusions, at least, according to Aristotle’s logic. So if Bush’s critics are wrong in their arguments, they must be necessarily erroneous in their deductions. But let’s put aside these poor and ignorant demagogues. For a scholar of mythologies, as I am, “Mahdi messianism” is the “messianic myth” that reappears in all great religions (the elements of messianism can be found even among Australian aboriginals and American Indians). Mahdi messianism has clearly Judaic and Christian elements. Political background of messianism in all versions is also obvious.
The article about “The Doctrine of Mahdism” (Iran Press Service) says: “It was only with Ahmadinejad’s presidency that this religious doctrine has become a political philosophy and taken a central place in politics. During the era of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of Iran’s Islamic regime, Mahdism remained outside the political realm. However, Khomeini’s era was nonetheless characterized by messianic fervour. The Iranians attributed messianic qualities to him, and conferred upon him the title of “Imam,” which until then had been reserved for the Twelve Imams”. Here we have a classical passage from living Messiah to dead Messiah or to messianic doctrine that must keep alive a decadent political regime.
No messianic doctrine or movement can have a lasting success without political support, i.e. to have influence it must be an official doctrine of State. Ibn Tumurt’s Mahdi messianism has been “very successful” not because of the interior force of his messianic doctrine, but because it has set up a terror’s system eliminating all dissidents. In the same sense you can speak of the “success” of communist or fascist totalitarian regimes. Mahdism in its present-day version is a simple political ideology, like “messianic” Marxism o “millenniarist” National Socialism. Its function is to provide an “ideological base” to spread the Iranian political hegemony. In this sense Iranian islamofascists are true heirs of Soviet communists that used Marxism-Leninism as ideological instrument of its Imperial politics presenting themselves as liberators of mankind.
To have an exact idea of Moqtadah al-Sadr’s “messianic” Mahdi army I would like to quote Michael Ledeen’s article: “The Iranians had fired him (al-Sadr), and they restructured the Mahdi Army into smaller, more autonomous groups. The recent violence came from the new units, headed by Iranian officers, agents, and recruits who, Tehran hoped, are not well known to Coalition and Iraqi military intelligence.” So messianic Mahdi movement is guided by Iranian secret agents and its followers are composed by professional thugs and common criminals. It is enough to have no illusion about the nature of this or other Muslim messianism.
I don’t speak here about immanent weakness of any messianism, political or religious. The messianic solution is a radical solution that wants a “new Heaven and a new Earth”, but heaven and earth remain always the same, and the solution gets as far as a star in another galaxy. So your “apocalyptical” vision of the explosive expansion of Mahdi messianism around the Islamic World seems doubtful. In any way in this concrete case we have messianism “made in Iran” by the Islamintern (new version of the Comintern (Communist International)).
