Originally posted by RiotComing
reply to post by Mad_Hatter & jamie83

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With all respect to your posts, this report has nothing to do with Obama specifically, so I'd rather this thread was kept on topic within the context I'm trying to bring to it.

The Hidden Imam is, according to Islamic tradition, due to reappear after a period in which the Muslims suffer great persecution and calamity. Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, said that the Mahdi "will fill the earth will equity and justice as it was filled with oppression and tyrannyS" (Sunan Abu Dawud, book 36, no. 4272). The Mahdi will not appear until that oppression and tyranny have for Muslims reached levels unparalleled in human history: as Muhammad also says: "It will be a calamity which, in severity, shall be unprecedented. It will be so violent that the earth with injustice and corruption will shrivel for its inhabitants" (Ibn Hajar, al-Sawa'iq al-muharriqa, p. 161).

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Ahmadinejad is calculating that he can hasten the coming of the Imam Mahdi by bringing about an increase of what he would regard as oppression of the Muslims - "oppression" that would in reality be a defensive response to an Iranian attack.

Ahmadinejad, by contrast, shares with Trotsky an apocalyptic world outlook. He favors direct action in pursuit of a permanent Islamic revolution that will pave the way for the return of the Hidden Imam, pave it with blood, sweat and tears. Indeed he'd like to speed things up, as you point out, and implicitly he hopes to achieve this by twisting the arm of the Almighty - no less so than the cloners of red heifers and would-be re-builders of the Temple hope to do as a means of speeding up the Rupture. The fact that he is more sincere in his beliefs and more earnest in his endeavors than the kleptocrats of the House of Saud are in theirs, is alarming but unsurprising. He is a visionary; they are Machiavellian cynics.