In the Name of God the Merciful,

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

As a humble student of comparative theology, on this auspicious occasion it gives me a great pleasure to share with you certain rudimentary ideas I have developed by reflecting on the religion I was born into, namely, Shiite Islam. Today, as the Shiites of Iraq seek to chart a new political path for their future, as Iran continues to grapple with the dialectical tensions of theocracy and democracy, and, indeed, as the whole Shiite global community struggles for a respectful spot on the stage of world history, fundamental questions about the relevance and importance of Shiite theology remain.

Since the beginning, Shiism as a movement of thought has been inextricably linked with the ideas of suffering and hope. Not long ago, in the West in particular, Shiism was typically viewed as a relatively small and unimportant sect of Islam, whereas today it is increasingly seen as a major influence in international affairs. During the past few decades, parallel to the political developments in the world of Shiism there has been a corresponding resurgence in Shiite studies.

Yet, although Shiism is now a topic of major political and scholarly discussions, as a form of theology it has been relatively neglected. Persistent ignorance of Shiite theology, particularly in the West, has resulted in snap judgments which more often than not present ideological labels attached to Shiism such as “militant,” “theocratic,” “radical,” and the like. Case in point, Francis Fukuyama in his “end of history” thesis concedes that Shiite Islam is resistant to the modernizing impulse of liberal democracy, which Fukuyama considers as the inevitable telos of world history. Implicit in the Hegelian discourse of Fukuyama is the conviction that either (Shiite) Islam adapts to the normative values of modern world, by “de-ideologizing” itself, or is destined to “retreat into oriental ease and repose,” to paraphrase Hegel.

But, of what this much-cherished “de-ideologization” of Shiism consist of? Is it by embracing a Protestantist modality of action celebrated nowadays as “Shiite reformation?” Is it by imposing the fiat of strict secularism, that is, strict de-coupling of Shiism and politics? Or is it by the pursuit of a neo-traditional fiqh-e pooya (dynamic jurisprudence)? Looking at the spectrum of interpretations, there are as many answers or ‘schools of thought,’ i.e., modernist, post-modernist, etc., as there are intellectual paradigms. Does this mean that Shiism has been helplessly caught in the maelstrom of an inter-paradigmatic dialogue? I certainly hope not.

My intention today is not to resuscitate the main contours of this dialogue and outline where it should be headed, as neither time nor the scope of my own concentration of studies would permit such an endeavor. Rather, my aim is to address a central question about Shiism that, ordinarily, should be a focus of this lively debate or dialogue and yet, somehow, it is not, for perfectly understandable reasons. And that is the question of Shiite theology or, to be more precise, the Shiite eschatology and its connection to theology. The complex, or one may even say convoluted, nature of this question is the primary reason for its relative absence on the agenda of contemporary discourses on Shiism; the latter by and large display a seeming resignation to the more readily accessible dimension of political beliefs or worldviews often focusing on the development of “early Shiism.”

In the vast field of Imamology, as a cornerstone of Shiite theology, Mahdism embodies the central axis of this theology, covering the most important doctrines of Islam: theodicy, eschatology, cosmology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, Creation, and political theology. These doctrines are embodied in the philosophical and theological method (eschatology, apocalyptic motif), epistemological presupposition (resurrection and history), and anthropological implication (hope) of Mahdism. With Mahdism as the center of its system, Shiism assumes a future-oriented eschatology continually speaking the language of hope, expressing God’s self-involvement in history. Based on divine intervention, Mahdi’s indwelling nature in history, or at least the part of history known as ‘Great Occultation’, creatively addresses the issue of theodicy from the perspective of divine suffering, for it is suffering in the exile of occultation mixed with hope in close proximity to a process history that defines and re-defines an eschatological community of people in the spirit of renewal and resurrection. Historically, this process has manifested itself in various shapes and forms, including a perpetual discursive quest to confirm the authenticity of "“historical Mahdi,” notwithstanding the thread of continuity stretching centuries from Sheikh Mofid, to Ibn al-Arabi, to Golpayegani.

Theologically, however, the domain of “historical Mahdi” is not as important as the domain of “theological Mahdi,” i.e., the messianic, chilliastic, utopian, and apocalyptic visions (or visionary elements) we all connect with the Mahdist belief. And, sadly, it is precisely this domain that is seriously neglected, disjointed from critical theological reflection and often woefully mis-associated with the empirical or historical Mahdist or (post) Mahdist social movements, thus misconstruing the theological autonomy of Mahdist thought with its supposed political manifestations or ramifications.

Guarding against such abuses of the Mahdist belief (system) is impossible without a prior refinement of theological and philosophical methods. It requires, in fact, constructing a theological system that speaks not in the language of “Greek logos,” but in the language of “promise,” that begins with a discussion of contingency, and works towards the reappearance, bearing little or no resemblance to the Christian doctrines of crucifixion and the resurrection. The content of Mahdist “promise” unfolds in man’s journey with God, in the anticipatory hope of the coming reality of the “expected Savior,” in whom is sustained the faith in the end of human suffering and the celebration and fulfillment of justice.

Here, the gap between the Mahdist concept of promise and Christian doctrine of resurrection need to be elaborated upon. In the resurrection of Christ, “the intensification of the promise finds its approach to the eschatological in the negation of death,” in other words, even death cannot set limits to the promise of God to human beings (for salvation). This is in contrast to the Jewish concept of promise that “finds its eschaton in the promise of Yahweh’s lordship over all people.” By comparison, the Mahdist promise presents itself as the epiphany of the eternal present in the world, which can be understood only as part and parcel of a transcendent subjectivity that asserts the self-concealment of Mahdi as a divine matter of “self-revelation.” In other words, God can be known through Mahdi’s absence and the awareness of his indwelling on earth, an awareness which builds the altars of his belief system in the heart of the believer, the individual.

Thus the entwinement of Mahdism and Creation, for it is God’s creative work that extends the Savior from the realm of reality to the realm of eternity, without being bogged down in Christology’s radical separation of death and life, what Moltmann calls the “revelation of the opposite.” The Mahdist “event,” namely, both the minor and the major occultation, is a single activity of God that orients toward the eschatological consummation of all things. Therefore, the premise of occultation and the promise of reappearance give the Shiite theological form the definitive character – History as eschatology, giving history a progressive nature. The ultimate self-disclosure of Mahdi is the moment of eschaton that overcomes the qualitative difference between time and eternity, i.e., an “eternal now” that addresses the transcendence of humanity, the not yet actualized existential nature of humanity, for what Mahdi’s hidden-ness reveals is faith, and the connection between divine self-revelation and faith, for what God has revealed in Mahdi, is a missionary enterprise using history as an open stage setting out toward the promised future.

It is on this foundation that the “realized” or “half-realized” Mahdi reduces its dialectic of time and end of time to the contingency of historical time, whereas Mahdi’s withdrawal is a question of being-in-time that represents the eclipse of time as a category of created reality. There is an ontological division here, between the being that is in time and yet outside of it, transported by divine intervention into the temporal vehicle of the eschatological promise, paralleling historical time and conjoining with it only at the climax of history, namely divine eschatology.

This is precisely where one may find striking resemblance between the Mahdi “event” and the Christ “event,” in the sense that both convey future-embeddedness of the present, where each stage of time points forward to the final completion of time in divine glory, even the apocalyptic moment which envelopes the eschatological promise, as an aeon of a new creation.

On the other hand, Mahdi’s invisible co-habitation with man during the occultation is a theological act that gives space a new ontological concept, i.e., in addition to the ecological concept of space, Mahdism gives us a platform to conceive of a post-Leibnizian object in hyper-space, simultaneously addressing the cosmological question whether matter-space-time form a single origin, namely the Creator. This is because, contrary to so many simplistic interpretations of Mahdism, the occultation is more than the problem of visibility or immortality, but rather a negation of negation that traverses the finite space, by virtue of being outside the dualism of time and space, while fulfilling the divine eschatology that reveals the mutual glorification of the Creator and the Imam created in time and yet existing in an eternal time. For in Mahdism, the final end, the eschaton, is a new beginning, envisioned by hope, captured by faith, consummated by history, but in the unique way of an internal development of history that constantly raises the Savior beyond the ontological contingency of time and space.

Simultaneously, Mahdism as Islamic eschatology-as-apocalypticism provides a rich source of an Islamic post-anthropocentric epistemology, in so far as the apocalyptic motif is inscribed in an eco-eschatological wisdom whereby the foreseeing of man’s destruction of nature and, indeed, his own species, becomes a tool for self-restraint following the divine duty (amr) for “measured” or “balanced” existence. The potential failure of man in this duty is eternally inscribed in the Mahdist occultationist wisdom of Islam, predicated on the assumption of man’s imperfection and the continuing battle with the forces of wickedness and amorality, i.e., Dajjal.

But, again, it would be a pure error to reduce Mahdism to the contours of a liberation praxis, which reduces the theological meaning of apocalypse, the suffering of hidden-ness and the hope of reappearance, to social (in) justice. The parousia, the delayed appearance of Mahdi is expressed in the limits of the consummation of time and space. Apocalyptic chaos, anticipated as prior to the end of occultation time, raises the issues of theodicy and the problem of evil, which can be read backward to the present time as a moment in the process of self-actualization of God, in which God is affecting the world, in part by placing the Expected Savior at the cradle of a hyper-space interfaced with the finite space, and also affected by the world, whose inhabitants by using the compass of eschatology shape and reshape the telos of history.

Consequently, strictly speaking Mahdism puts Shiism in a perpetual state of motion, giving it a built-in mechanism for self-overhaul, by virtue of the fact that in the Imam’s absence no one can close the gate of ijtihad, in contrast to Sunism, or declare special custodianship of the kernel of Mahdism. Those who follow this path, be it Sufi, Babi, or any other derivative, reduce the meta-historical existence of Mahdi to the form of existential crisis, presenting us with a version of history as essentially totally revealed. But, the meaning of Mahdi’s parousia is contained in the ‘not yet,’ as aptly recognized in Shariati’s “creative wait,” even though Sharitai himself commits the existential reductionism of deducing the totality of Mahdism from its social content. The Mahdist “not yet” elan is, then, rather nullified even by the mildest pretext of direct connectionality by his self-declared disciples, for the mere assumption of direct connection breaks into the structural component of its eschatology, its duplex structure built in time and space on one floor and on a separate dimension on the other. Their (half) realized eschatology brings the moment of self-actualization of God to a premature closure, in fact halting the march of history toward the eschaton. The self-appointed “pinnacles” of the divine manifestations of Mahdism then turn out committing a major theological error, overlooking that the reappearance of hidden Imam is the synthesis of promise and expectation that stands in dialectical contradiction to actual, real time, fulfillment. The occultation and divine hope in the end of history are two sides of the same eschatological event. They point back to the promises of final reappearance of the savior that can only be understood as the continuation of God’s self-manifestation and self-involving nature in the relation with the world, especially with humanity. In making Mahdi hidden from the people, God limits their knowledge of him, entrusting them with the moral commitment to faithfulness in the promise of salvation. In the eschatological sense, Mahdism is actually about the transcendent self-revelation of God. Revelation as occultation-promised-to-turn to reappearance is actually about the fulfillment of God’s promise, wherein history finds its goal in Mahdi’s lordship over all, the eschatological consummation.

About the author:
Kaveh Afrasiabi is the founder of Global Interfaith Peace. His works on theology have appeared in Harvard Theological Review, Hamdard Islamicus, Echo of Islam, and Telos, among others. He is the author of several book chapters on Islam and ecology, e.g., by Harvard University Press, Wadsworth, Chicago University Press, etc.