Ten Years' Captivation with the Mahdi's Camps: Essays on Muslim Eschatology, 2005-2015 by Timothy Furnish

Author:Timothy Furnish [Furnish, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

May 10, 2011: Usama bin Ladin: The New Vanished Imam?

The original vanished Imam is, of course, Muhammad al-Mahdi, the 12th descendant of Islam's founder through the line of Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law–who will, according to Twelver Shi`is, sooner or later return to usher in a global Imamate. Heretofore the most famous modern vanished imam had been Musa al-Sadr, the influential Lebanese Shi`i cleric who "disappeared" on a trip to Libya in 1978–and who, according to some sources, was still alive, albeit imprisoned, well into al-Qadhafi’s reign. (This fascinating story is detailed in Fouad Ajami's 1986 book The Vanished Imam: Musa al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon.) But now the world's most famous Sunni jihadist may himself be achieving vanished imam status. While normally a Twelver Shi`i doctrine, there is historical precedent for an occulted (Arabic ghayb[i], "absent, hidden, concealed, invisible") leader in Sunnism: in 1821 an Indian Sunni mujahid, Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi, "disappeared" fighting against infidels (British Christians and Indian Sikhs) and his followers never admitted he was dead; rather, they chose to cling to the belief that Barelwi was about to return and lead their jihad against the unbelievers. This belief in a vanished, but undead, Sunni imam played no small part in inspiring a jihad that lasted for many years.

Now another event has reinforced my view that Ibn Ladin is being invested with the mantle of a vanished imam. During last Friday's prayers at al-Nur mosque in Cairo, Salafis and their ilk, led by Shaykh Hafiz Salamah, held a funeral service for Usama bin Ladin in which he was confirmed as a shahid ("Martyr") and wherein salat al-gha'ib were performed–literally "prayers for the absent"–but gha'ib also means "hidden, concealed, invisible, unseen" and is in fact a word derived from the same Arabic root as the aforementioned ghayb. Furthermore, this prayer service transmogrified into a pro-UBL-as-the-"Emir of Jihad" pep rally, replete with cries of "Death to America" and, as the mob marched to the U.S. embassy to protest his "assassination," ones of "Bush [is a] terrorist.” Well, at least the Egyptians are willing to give our former President some credit for taking out Ibn Ladin (unlike the American media or the Obama Administration).

Bottom-line: for eschatologically-minded Muslims–in this case, Sunni–Ibn Ladin may be merely dead, but sans a body there's no proof he's really, most sincerely dead. And, as such, he will continue to inspire jihadism and anti-Americanism and, very likely, attacks against Coptic Christians in Egypt and probably against Christians in other majority-Islamic nations. The angst at our killing of Ibn Ladin among too many Muslims, especially in a fairly Westernized and "moderate" Islamic nation like Egypt, demonstrates that his form of violent jihad was, and still is, far more popular in the Muslim street than most analysts are willing to admit.

April 6, 2011: Iran’s New Mahdism Da`wah Video: Letting Slip the Jinns of Jihad.

Recently the Islamic Republic of Iran put out a video entitled "The Coming Is Upon Us," wherein current events and personalities are explicated in terms of

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