There are all kinds of rumors floating around, with some substance being added daily by the regime itself, that Khamenei is possibly going to be formally declared the Imam Zaman, Qa’im and Mahdi soon. Given the industry of prophecies about the Imam Zaman and his appearance that the Twelver Shi’a clerical class has built their careers upon over the centuries, I am just curious how the regime plans at explaining such a scenario to its own constituency and the general community.
My suspicion is that as a desperate act of self-preservation the pro-apocalyptic faction of the powers that be in the regime will in fact do this very thing: that in 2010 we could very well see Khamenei suddenly declare himself, or be declared, the Islamic Messiah. Note that all the Shi’ite prophecies foreshadow a global apocalyptic war with the appearance of the Mahdi. To justify any imminent military confrontation with the West, one could see the Islamic regime indeed venturing into such risky messianic business as a last ditch maneuver at self-preservation.
But here’s the thing: if Khamenei is declared or declares himself, effectively Khamenei and the regime would be endorsing a course of action their establishment once condemned in the Babis and Siyyid Ali Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab, over a hundred and sixty-five (165) almost one-hundred and sixty-six years (166) ago. Besides this, such a course of action in its inevitable aftermath of defeat would eviscerate, topple and destroy once and for good the establishment of Twelver Shi’ism from within. That would be all She wrote for institutional Twelver Shi’ism!
In the year 1164 CE one of the successors of Hasan-i-Sabbah, known to posterity as Hassan II ‘ala dhikrihi salam (upon his mention be peace), from the mountain fortress of Alamut declared the opening of the era of the Qiyamat and inner truth, and the suspension of the religious obligations of the shar’ia. His doctrine of the Qiyamat especially emphasized that all must realize the Imam-of-their-own-being. Much of these ideas already existed in some cryptic form within the sayings of the Ahl al-Bayt Imams. But what this Nizari Isma’ili Imam of Alamut did was to take such concepts in their latent forms and bring them into explicit articulation. What the doctrine of the Imam-of-ones-being essentially expresses in an Islamic context is the same idea found within the famous Zen Buddhist koan, “If you meet the Buddha on the side of the road, kill him!” Recently on another forum while debating a recently born again Christian, I ended the conversation with them by advising,
Find the Jesus-of-your-Being by reading the Bible of the Macrocosm that is the Book of Nature/Creation (liber mundi) reflecting the Eternal Temple of Christ which is your soul itself!
Perhaps the weapon to end the regime of Dajjal/Zahhak in Iran as it begins to assert its core heresy against the Truth more and more, is rather than looking for any external Messiah to come and save the day for us from the Antichrist and his minions, is to find the inner Messiah of our own souls and each one be the Imam Zaman/Christ that will defeat the external Dajjal/Zahhak! Perhaps the true inner meaning of the Second Coming is about this very thing.
Stay tuned because things are about to become quite cosmically/comedically interesting…
