Imagining the End: Visions of
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) and the warner’ (Q. :
). Muhammad’s closure of the apocalyptic perspective and containment of messianic expectation was inconclusive, however. With the Messiah being identified with the historic Jesus and Islam’s self-image as ‘realized Mes- sianism’, there remained a void for a distinctively Islamic saviour figure at the end of time. Within half a century of Muhammad’s death, the position was filled by the figures of the Qa'im and the Mahdi. (Although the saviour figure of the Islamic political Messianism was variously conceived as the Qa'im and/or the Mahdi, as the latter term is more general and better known, I will refer to it as Mahdism.) Later commentators accordingly modified the picture of the Second Coming to accommodate the celebration of Islam. After slaying the Antichrist ( dajjal ), Jesus kills the swine and breaks the crosses, destroys churches and synagogues, but confirms the Muslim prayer leader and prays behind him. 46 The Muslim prayer leader of the end of time is generally identified as the Mahdi. 47 Incidentally, the name of the Muslim Antichrist figure, Dajjal, is a loan word from the Syriac daggal (liar). The prototype of Dajjal, 48 who is now the Antichrist and Anti-Mahdi in one, is most probably the Essene ‘man of lies’ who was the opponent of the Zadokite ‘Teacher of Righteousness.’ 49 This significant detail points to the commingling of Christian and Essene influences on pristine Islamic apocalypticism. The Second Civil War ( –
) marked the true birth of the messianic figure of the Mahdi. The term mahdi , meaning the ‘rightly-guided one’, was first used in a messianic sense during the rebellion of Mukhtar in Kufa in
on behalf of a son of 'Ali, Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya. Its novel messianic connotation probably came from two distinct groups of his supporters who became known as the Kaysaniyya: southern Arabian tribes, and Persian and Mesopotamian clients ( mawali ) who were new converts to Islam. Meanwhile, another prototype of the Mahdi emerged from a different area of the three- sided civil war. The dispersal in the desert in of an army sent by the Umayyad Caliph Yazid against the anti-Caliph 'Abdallah b. al-Zubayr upon hearing the news of the Caliph’s death generated what may be the first ex eventu prophecy about an unnamed restorer of faith who was later taken to be the Mahdi. Two notable historical features of the event – the pledge of allegiance by the people of Mecca between the Rukn and the Maqim, and the swallowing up (
) of an army in the desert [between Mecca and Medina] – were absorbed into the apocalyptic literature. 50 In the course of time, these details agglutinated to the image of the Mahdi. Despite the failure of Mukhtar’s rebellion, the Kaysaniyya affirmed that 114 Judaism, Christianity and Islam they ‘hoped for a revolution (
) that would culminate in the Resurrection before the Hour’. 51 When Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya died in the year , the Kaysaniyya maintained that he was in concealment or occultation ( ghayba ) in the Radwa mountains and would return as the Mahdi and the Qa'im. The Kaysani poet, Kuthayyar (d.
), hailed him as ‘He is the Mahdi Ka'b the brother/fellow of the Ahbar had told us about’, and affirmed that ‘he is vanished in the Radwa, not to be seen for a while, and with him is honey and water’.
52 When Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya’s son, Abu Hashim, who had succeeded him, died childless in
– , some of his followers maintained that he was, like his father, the Mahdi and was alive in concealment in the Rawa mountains. The Kaysaniyya also spread the idea of raj'a , return of the dead, especially the Imams, with the help of such Qur'anic precedents as the resuscitation of the Companions of the Cave and the owner of the ass, be he Jeremiah or Ezra. Furthermore, it is very probably in connection with the expectation of the return of this Mahdi from occultation that the term Yüklə 4,01 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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