News Abroad

Back to the (Mahdist) Future?

by Timothy R. Furnish

Timothy R. Furnish, Ph.D., is a recovering college professor and current writer, researcher and analyst specializing in Islamic history, sects, eschatology, ideology and Mahdism. He learned Arabic at taxpayers' expense while in the U.S. Army and, later, studied Farsi, Turkish and Ottoman while a doctoral student at Ohio State University. His first book was Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden and his second, due out in 2010, is The Caliphate: Threat or Opportunity? He maintains an HNN blog, Occidental Jihadist, as well as a website dedicated to covering Mahdism and Muslim eschatology: mahdiwatch.org.

Ayatollah Mohammed Bagher Kharrazi's recent call for a Greater Iran encompassing "the entire Middle East and Central Asia" has caused a veritable epidemic of Internet hyperventilating among the armchair alarmist eschatologists, many of whom are living proof that "a little learning is a dangerous thing." Allow me to correct some of the more glaring inaccuracies and provide a modicum of informed analysis:

1) The Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT enamored of (re)creating a caliphate.

The Caliphate—that historical redoubt of SUNNI Muslim institutional authority and power, from the Umayyads to the Ottomans—is the LAST thing that any ayatollah in Tehran or Qom wants. Rather, the Twelver Shi`is of Iran (as well as Iraq, Lebanon, and other concentrations throughout the region) look for the restoration of the Imamate—a ruling office inhabited by one of Muhammad's bloodline through his son-in-law, and cousin, Ali passed through the latter's sons. The Sunni caliphs were, rather, chosen by ijma` or "consensus" of the Sunni communal leadership. The import for any pan-Islamic geopolitical movement today is that there seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between Sunni caliphal dreams, which are based on some element of popular legitimacy, on the one hand, and Shi`i hopes for an imamate, on the other, which in its true form would require the return of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam and in his absence appears dependent on the continuation (and perhaps expansion, as Kharrazi implied) of clerical rule under the extant vilayet-i faqih. And both ayatollahocracy and Mahdiyah are, by definition, elitist and nondemocratic in the extreme.

2) Kharrazi is not so much a "hard-liner" or "extremist" as he is an irredentist.

Western journalists and analysts really should learn not to throw around terms like "hard-liner" and "extremist" in contexts where they are entirely inappropriate. (But of course that would require some actual in-depth knowledge of the relevant subject matter—but I digress.) Article after article commenting on this "Greater Iran" idea labels Kharrazi "radical," "extremist," "hard-liner," etc. He's actually an irredentist—that is, he looks backward into Iranian history and sees that in the past his country was much greater in size than it is today and supports re-uniting those long-sundered regions. Unlike many Arabs, Iranians are quite proud of their pre-Islamic civilization and the political empires it created, which were important on not just a regional but a world scale in ancient times. When Kharrazi speaks of an Iranian Islamic state "from Afghanistan to Israel" he probably has in mind the pre-Islamic Sassanian Empire for its rough borders.

The Sassian Empire lasted from the third century AD to the Islamic conquest in the mid-seventh century AD and was, in the time it existed, an inveterate foe of the Roman/Byzantine Empire. At certain times, Sassanian power even extended to the Mediterranean, as the empire sometimes managed to pry Syria and what is now Israel/Palestine away from Roman control. When Kharrazi dreams of Greater Iran from the Med to the Oxus, this is most likely his template.

(Some of my colleagues might argue Kharrazi has in mind the Abbasid Caliphate, 750-1258 AD, but there are significant problems adducing this state in this context: a) the Abbasid empire, while heavily Persian in origins and bureaucracy, was not Iranian per se; b) neither was it really ever Shi`i, early propaganda claims notwithstanding; and c) its geographical extent included North Africa, Egypt and the Arabian peninsula, putting it outside Kharrazi's described area and including too many Arabs at the expense of the states and groups to Iran's north and east who are ethno-linguistically closer to the Iranians, such as Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Afghans, et al. For these reasons I think the Sassanian state is more likely his model.)

3) Islamizing and eschatologizing geopolitics.

Kharrazi's irredentist nationalism is also heavily informed by his Twelver Shi`i beliefs, and while Iran and Iraq are the only majority-Twelver states, there are significant populations of Twelver (and Sevener, or Isma'ili) Shi`is "from Afghanistan to Israel."

As per my first point above, any pan-Islamic state centered on Iran would be better off trying to encompass as many Shi`is as possible, which a Med-to-Hindu-Kush strategy does rather well; furthermore, since said polity is envisioned as "a prelude to the reappearance" and, eventually, "the single global rule of the Mahdi" then the more Shi`is, the better (since Mahdist belief is more institutionalized, if not always more fervent, in Shi`ism than in Sunnism).

4) Shi`ism's "preferential option for the poor," which appeals to the Western Left.

Kharrazi's phrase that the "Islamic United States" will constitute "the global village of the oppressed" is easily missed, and when it is noted is passed off as a cynical attempt to garner support from Western liberals. But Shi`ism, especially in its view of the Mahdi who upon his return will serve as a global Robin Hood (taking from the mostakbaran, the "rich," and giving to the mostazafan, the "oppressed"), has a long tradition of supporting socioeconomic "justice," which has sharpened since the revolution there and been wielded by Khomeini and his successors—most notably, Ahmadinezhad—as a weapon against "arrogant powers" such as the U.S. and as a means of enlisting the support of leaders such as Hugo Chavez who buy into (either honestly or cynically) a global conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

Author's note: one of my clerical contacts in Iran has informed me that Ayatollah Kharrazi "is not highly influential in Iran's clerical hierarchy and his views do not represent those of the current government; that's why his comments were published in his newspaper and nowhere else. So there is no worry about his remarks...."