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'Divine mission' driving
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As Political analysts
point to the fact that
But listen carefully
to the utterances of Mr Ahmadinejad
- recently described by President George W Bush as an "odd man" -
and there is another dimension, a religious messianism
that, some suspect, is giving the Iranian leader a dangerous sense of divine
mission. In November, the
country was startled by a video showing Mr Ahmadinejad telling a cleric that he had felt the hand of
God entrancing world leaders as he delivered a speech to the UN General
Assembly last September. When an aircraft
crashed in Teheran last month, killing 108 people, Mr
Ahmadinejad promised an investigation. But he also
thanked the dead, saying: "What is important is that they have shown the
way to martyrdom which we must follow." The most remarkable
aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's
piety is his devotion to the Hidden Imam, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, and the president's belief that his
government must prepare the country for his return. One of the first
acts of Mr Ahmadinejad's
government was to donate about £10 million to the Jamkaran
mosque, a popular pilgrimage site where the pious come to drop messages to
the Hidden Imam into a holy well. All streams of Islam
believe in a divine saviour, known as the Mahdi, who will appear at the End of Days. A common rumour - denied by the government but widely believed -
is that Mr Ahmadinejad
and his cabinet have signed a "contract" pledging themselves to work for the return of the Mahdi and sent it to Jamkaran. He is said to have
gone into "occlusion" in the ninth century, at the age of five. His
return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war and bloodshed. After a
cataclysmic confrontation with evil and darkness, the Mahdi
will lead the world to an era of universal peace. This is similar to
the Christian vision of the Apocalypse. Indeed, the Hidden Imam is expected
to return in the company of Jesus. Mr Ahmadinejad
appears to believe that these events are close at hand and that ordinary
mortals can influence the divine timetable. The prospect of such
a man obtaining nuclear weapons is worrying. The unspoken question is this:
is Mr Ahmadinejad now
tempting a clash with the West because he feels safe in the belief of the imminent
return of the Hidden Imam? Worse, might he be trying to provoke chaos in the
hope of hastening his reappearance? The 49-year-old Mr Ahmadinejad, a former top
engineering student, member of the Revolutionary Guards and mayor of Teheran,
overturned Iranian politics after unexpectedly winning last June's
presidential elections. The main rift is no
longer between "reformists" and "hardliners", but between
the clerical establishment and Mr Ahmadinejad's brand of revolutionary populism and
superstition. Its most remarkable
manifestation came with Mr Ahmadinejad's
international debut, his speech to the United Nations. World leaders had
expected a conciliatory proposal to defuse the nuclear crisis after Teheran
had restarted another part of its nuclear programme
in August. Instead, they heard
the president speak in apocalyptic terms of The speech ended
with the messianic appeal to God to "hasten the emergence of your last
repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that
will fill this world with justice and peace". In a video
distributed by an Iranian web site in November, Mr Ahmadinejad described how one of his Iranian colleagues
had claimed to have seen a glow of light around the president as he began his
speech to the UN. "I felt it
myself too," Mr Ahmadinejad
recounts. "I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And
for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink…It's not an exaggeration,
because I was looking. "They were
astonished, as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened
their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic." Western officials
said the real reason for any open-eyed stares from delegates was that
"they couldn't believe what they were hearing from Ahmadinejad". Their sneaking
suspicion is that |