 1
June 2006
 As
Iran rushes towards confrontation with the world over its
nuclear programme, the question uppermost in the mind of
western leaders is "What is moving its President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad to such recklessness?"
Political analysts point to the fact that
Iran feels strong because of high oil prices, while
America has been weakened by the insurgency in Iraq.
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 last year, the world 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 $20 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 rumor - 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.
Iran's dominant "Twelver" sect believes
this will be Mohammed ibn Hasan, regarded as the 12th
Imam, or righteous descendant of the Prophet Mohammad.
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 Iran struggling against an evil West
that sought to promote "state terrorism", impose "the
logic of the dark ages" and divide the world into "light
and dark countries".
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 Iran's
president actually relishes a clash with the West in the
conviction that it would rekindle the spirit of the
Islamic revolution and - who knows - speed up the arrival
of the Hidden Imam.
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