Supplement to Messianic Al-Mahdi Imam Previous Blog
December 5, 2005
Response to the previous Blog has caused me to include the following extract from www.globalsecurity.org/military.
BEGIN EXTRACT
Al-Mahdi Army / Active Religious Seminary / Al-Sadr’s Group
Hujjat al-Islam Muqtada al-Sadr
says that the Mahdi would soon return, in Iraq.
This rumor, touching the core of Shi’i faith and eschatology, is being spread by Sadr’s preachers. In the Shia tradition,
the Mahdi is the 12th Imam, who is in occultation.
Muktada al-Sadr says the Americans were aware of the impending reappearance, and that the Americans invaded Iraq to seize and kill the Mahdi. His supporters chant Sadr’s name at rallies to imply that he is the “son of the Mahdi.” Sadr has stated that the army “belongs to the Mahdi” as an explanation of why he cannot disband it, as has been required of other private militias. Although the reappearance of the Mahdi central to Shia thought, it is unusual to ra
ise claims of the imminence of this event, and other Shiite clerics have avoided the messianic ecstasy that such claims can induce.
One Iraqi Shi’a religious family which opposed working with the US-led occupation [and trying to get control from the al-Hakim family] is the al-Sadr family, which calls itself “The Active Religious Seminary”. Until recently it was headed by Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who
was assassinated along with two of his sons by presumed agents of Hussein in Al-Najaf in 1999.
The loyalty of many
of his supporters passed to another son, Hojatoleslam Muqtada al-Sadr, a mid-level cleric about 30 years of age.
Unlike his father, Muqtada had little formal religious standing to interpret the Koran, and relied for religious authority on an Iran-based Iraqi exiled cleric, Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri, who was a student of Bakir al-Sadr.
Muqtada al-Sadr formed the Jama’at al-Sadr al-Thani (Association of the Second al-Sadr) as the key organization of the al-Sadr family network.
END EXTRACT