About That Mahdi

The article at the Telegraph linked in my previous post about the Mahdi Army contains a bit of a whitewash in the following lines:

After a cataclysmic confrontation with evil and darkness, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace.

This is similar to the Christian vision of the Apocalypse. Indeed, the Hidden Imam is expected to return in the company of Jesus.

It's not exactly like the Christian Apocalypse, and the image of Jesus in this islamic myth is rather twisted.

In their view, Jesus will come to kill the Jews, and even the very trees and stones will cry out "Muslim! There is Jew hiding behind me! Kill him!"

That is mainstream islamic belief, deeply rooted in their theology.

And I find comparing that to Christianity not just offensive, but stupid.

I think the journalists who write about these things imagine themselves too intelligent to believe in any religion, and just lump it all together as equivalently silly hokum. But there really are distinctions.

For example, from a Palestinian sermon translated by Memri,

"The Jews await the false Jewish messiah, while we await, with Allah's help… the Mahdi and Jesus, peace be upon him. Jesus's pure hands will murder the false Jewish messiah. Where? In the city of Lod, in Palestine. Palestine will be, as it was in the past, a graveyard for the invaders – just as it was a graveyard for the Tatars and to the Crusader invaders, [and for the invaders] of the old and new colonialism…"

"A reliable Hadith [tradition] says: 'The Jews will fight you, but you will be set to rule over them.' What could be more beautiful than this tradition? 'The Jews will fight you' – that is, the Jews have begun to fight us. 'You will be set to rule over them' – Who will set the Muslim to rule over the Jew? Allah… Until the Jew hides behind the rock and the tree."

"But the rock and tree will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, a Jew hides behind me, come and kill him.' Except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews."

"We believe in this Hadith. We are convinced also that this Hadith heralds the spread of Islam and its rule over all the land…"

The Hadith in question can be found at this University of Southern California site. It's Book 41, "The Book Pertaining to the Turmoil and Portents of the Last Hour (Kitab Al-Fitan wa Ashrat As-Sa`ah)", Chapter 16, numbers 6981 through 6985. Here is Number 6985:

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

Is Ahmadinejad trying to bring about the last hour?

Verse 6950 explains,

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The world would not come to an end until a day would come to the people on which the murderer would not know as to why he has killed and the slain would not know as to why he has been murdered. It would be said: Why would It happen? To which he replied: It would be because of general massacre and bloodshed. And the slaughterers and the slain would be in Fire, and in the narration of Ibn Aban, the name of Abu Isma'il has been mentioned.