Word: mahdy
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...their veranda. Within an hour their guests had taken up all the parking spaces in a three block radius, and a speaker attached to an immense sound system began congratulating everyone on the Twelfth Imam's birthday. The voice launched into an excited sermon, detailing how God concealed the Mahdi -- the last in a line of Shi`ite imams descended from the Prophet Mohammad -- and would only bring him back at the end of time to bestow justice to mankind. Soon you couldn't even hear the phone ring in my apartment. I began text messaging my friends that...
...chairs were filled with men, so the female members of the household were either invited to an all-women's Twelfth Imam birthday party, or confined to the house. I couldn't see the speaker, but his voice transfixed the all-male assembly, rising to extol the Mahdi's virtues (immortal, pure)."He may even be among us right here right now, in this very gathering!" he exclaimed, looking about exaggeratedly. The idea that the Twelfth Imam could be present, either invisibly or in the bodily guise of an ordinary guest seated on a folding chair, led the assembly...
...Iranians have celebrated the Twelfth Imam's birthday for centuries, but it was only after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that the holiday was celebrated by draping Tehran in tinsel and colored lights, much like a Western city during Christmas. The government honors the Mahdi's birthday with more fanfare than it treats other arguably more prominent Muslim holidays. This year, out on a short trip for groceries, I ate Mahdi birthday cookies on one street, and was offered a cold fruit drink at a nearby square. The result of this government-nurtured devotion to the Mahdi has transformed the piety...
...About 65 miles south of Tehran, there lies Jamkaran, a tiny, run-down mosque which in the past 20 years has been designated as the spot the Mahdi went into concealment. Pious Iranians, with government help, have transformed the site into a massive devotional center for the Mahdi, and on weekends tens of thousands of Iranian pilgrims peer down the well where legend says he is hiding. Some visitors claim to have seen the Mahdi there, and report things he allegedly said to them. More commonly, people write him letters asking for blessing, and drop them down the well...
...President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad adores the Twelfth Imam, and has dedicated much of his public speeches to pleading for his return, and expounding on the importance of preparing for it. He invokes the Mahdi so frequently, is so suggestive of his own divine guidance, that the ordinary, devout Iranian could be easily made to think the two enjoy a special connection. These religious tendencies irritate many clerics in Iran's theological center, Qom, and serious religious scholars, who feel the president is using the Mahdi mythology to expand his own power, and in the process conflating the Mahdi's attributes with...