Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Jesus, Tupac, the 12th Imam and the apocalypse.

Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Jesus, Tupac, and the Apocalypse. Quite the five-aside football team.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rather in character eulogy of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez yesterday in which the wee man insinuated that Chavez will return alongside Jesus at the end of time to battle the forces of evil did much to ire those within the Shia clerical hierarchy.

However it got BeirutStateofMind thinking: both about Islamic eschatology and our own fantasies regarding the end of time.

In Islamic eschatological tradition at the end of time it is held that Jesus will appear alongside the Mahdi  to defeat the forces of evil manifest in the figure of the Dajjal (anti-Christ).

Shia theology is inherently more apocalyptic than its Sunni counterpart, centrally due to the concept of the “ghrayba” (occultation). Within the 12er branch of the Shia faith (that professed by the Iranian clerical regime, and Hezbollah and Amal in Lebanon) it is believed that the 12^th Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi (aka. The Mahdi), born in 869, did not die but was hidden by God on earth in 941 to return on the Day of Judgement. He could, in theory, return at any time.

The potential immediacy of the apocalypse within Shia theology has been exploited for political means, in order to rouse armies and popular opposition on numerous occasions since the 12th Imam's dissapearance. In the modern era Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini notably played upon the symbolism of the ghrayba in the build up to the 1979 Iranian revolution during his exile in France and in the immediate aftermath, following his triumphant return to Iran.

In Lebanon Imam Musa Sadr is often associated with the figure of the 12^th Imam, due to his role in the development of Amal, and later Hezbollah movements, and the mystery and lack of closure concerning his disappearance in Libya during a diplomatic visit in 1978.

BeirutStateofMind gets down with eschatology. 

In our own working of Shia theology Musa Sadr is in fact the 12^th Imam, awaiting the apocalypse in splendid isolation on a nice desert island somewhere perhaps sitting alongside Tupac who many more-conspiracy-minded hip-hop heads believe to be in his own state of occultation. Mainly, they play back-gammon to pass the time.