Aiming for Apocalypse
Much rests on whether Iran's leader is a shrewd nationalist or an end-times nut
At the bottom of a well in Jamkaran, Iran, lie tens of thousands of petitions addressed to a much-venerated figure in Shiite Islam called the 12th Imam. One recent addition to that pile would be of interest to the wider world. Written by the current president of Iran and signed by his entire cabinet, it might shed light on the mystical tendencies of a leader who has already succeeded in making an unstable region even more volatile, a man whom some are comparing to Hitler in his unbridled fanaticism.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the 49-year-old former mayor of Tehran who last summer defeated the moderate reformist cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is now widely known as a defiant booster of his nation's nuclear enrichment program. Thought to harbor dreams of an Iranian bomb, he thumbs his nose at the United States and the United Nations, denies the Holocaust, and announces that Israel will one day be "wiped from the map."
Messianic. All that would be troubling enough in itself, of course. But Iran's firebrand president also appears to be driven by a strongly messianic strain of his Shiite Muslim faith. Gauging the intentions of a politician who declares that his "revolution's main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi," is not easy. But if Ahmadinejad appears to fall somewhere on the narrow spectrum between a calculating religious nationalist and an apocalyptic nut, it may be one measure of a precarious time that such distinctions matter.
Clues to this seemingly humorless technocrat lie, not surprisingly, in the branch of the Islamic sect to which he and most Shiites subscribe. Called Twelver Shiism, this tradition holds that there were 12 legitimate successors (imams) to the prophet Muhammad, the last of whom did not die but went into hiding in the 10th century. The 12th Imam, who is also called the Mahdi, shall return in the Last Days to reign over a just world in which Islam is universally embraced. But here arises a point on which Twelvers differ: Will the Mahdi come back only after chaos has erupted and the apocalypse has begun, intervening just in time to save righteous believers from total destruction? Or will his followers have to pave the way for the Mahdi's return by building a just order themselves, thereby enticing him to come out of hiding? Where Ahmadinejad stands on these alternative scenarios may be crucial to understanding his behavior and intentions.
Those who fear an Armageddon-first fanatic clearly have reason for alarm. After delivering a speech at the United Nations last fall, an address full of references to the Mahdi's return, the Islamic republic's newly elected president claimed to have become surrounded by a mysterious "green light" that held all of his listeners in rapt, unblinking thrall. Weird as that was, Ahmadinejad's frequent assertions of national grandeur soar toward the delusional, as when he declared that Iran's "enemies should know that they are unable to even slightly hurt our nation."
Adding to the apocalypse-now interpretation, German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel in a recent New Republic article points to Ahmadinejad's glorification of martyrdom: "Is there an art that is more beautiful, more divine, more eternal than the art of the martyr's death?" the president asked in an early post-election interview. Princeton historian and Middle East specialist Bernard Lewis makes it clear where the president's religiously inspired end-times thinking might lead: "Ahmadinejad and his circle are in an apocalyptic mood," Lewis says. "The use of a nuclear weapon wouldn't bother them in the least."
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