Word: twelfths
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...Many Happy Returns, Twelfth Imam! The Mahdi, an imam who happens to be Ahmadinejad's favorite, has become the object of frenzied and government-nurtured worship
...frontyard, unfurling a Koranic banner from their second-story balcony, and arranging dozens of chairs around 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...
...With my party off and the din rising, I resigned myself to sitting on the balcony and spying on the neighbor's festivities. The buffet tent and the 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...
...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...
...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...