His master's angry voice

[Nagishkaw 510]

Shortly after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected Iran's fifth post-revolutionary president in July 2005, he convened a cabinet meeting for an urgent discussion of one of the issues closest to his heart - the return of the 12th imam. All streams of Islam believe in a divine savior, known as the mahdi, who will appear at the end of days. For many Shi'a Muslims, the 12th imam, Muhammad ibn Hassan, a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, who went into occlusion in the ninth century at the age of nine, is the main object of their faith.

Devotion to the 12th imam is particularly prevalent in Iran where the majority of the population are known as "Twelvers." It is an article of faith for Iranian Shi'a that the return of the hidden imam, as he is also known, will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war and bloodshed and then lead the world to an era of universal peace.

From the moment he assumed the presidency, Ahmadinejad, who is a dedicated adherent to the cult of the 12th imam, wanted to make sure that everything was ready for the return. At one of his first cabinet meetings, Ahmadinejad told his newly-appointed ministers, "We have to turn Iran into a modern and divine country to be the model for all nations, and which will serve as the basis for the return of the 12th imam." One minister helpfully suggested the government should undertake a program of hotel expansion to accommodate all the visitors that would flock to Iran when the mahdi finally returned.

Several months later, while on a tour of the provinces, Ahmadinejad made the outlandish suggestion that the Western powers were so concerned about the mahdi's possible return that they were scouring the world trying to find him, to prevent him returning to Iran and establishing justice on earth. He even made a reference to the 12th imam in his Christmas Day broadcast to Britain on Channel 4.

Ahmadinejad's eccentric devotion to the hidden imam would be of only passing interest were it not aligned to some of the other extreme views he has expressed since becoming president. For at about the same time that he was urging his government to lay the groundwork for the return of the messiah, he was also expressing other, more hard-line opinions. When he became president, Ahmadinejad was almost unknown outside Iran. But his uncompromising adherence to the principles of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolution, and his inflammatory views about the West and Israel, were soon exposed for the entire world to see.

At a conference held in Teheran shortly after his election titled "The World Without Zionism," Ahmadinejad declared that Israel was a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the face of the earth." The comments immediately provoked an international uproar, but Ahmadinejad defended himself by insisting he had merely been quoting the words of Khomeini, the founder of Iran's Islamic revolution. "As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

Ahmadinejad's strict adherence to the memory and legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder and spiritual guardian of Iran's Islamic revolution, is central to understanding the mind-set of one of the world's most controversial leaders, and one who will quickly find himself at the forefront of the security priorities of US President Barack Obama's administration. Ahmadinejad was an obscure and unimportant student when Khomeini launched his bloody and epoch-defining revolution in Teheran 30 years ago. But his entire presidency has been devoted to upholding the fundamental principles of the ayatollah's inheritance, whether it involves exporting the Islamic revolution throughout the Muslim world to places like Gaza or pursuing the development of a nuclear weapons arsenal. Combined with his inflammatory rhetoric and the deep antipathy that Ahmadinejad and the hard-line conservative clerics who maintain him in power feel towards the West, it is hardly surprising that he has earned the unwelcome sobriquet of being the most dangerous man on the planet.

To understand what makes Ahmadinejad tick you have to go back to the earliest days of Iran's Islamic revolution in February 1979 when the future president was an enthusiastic, but largely irrelevant, cheerleader for Khomeini's radical agenda. When the revolution was launched in earnest following Khomeini's triumphant return from exile in Paris to Teheran on February 1, Ahmadinejad was a student at Teheran's University of Science and Technology, where he studied development engineering, later specializing in traffic management.

After the revolution, Ahmadinejad was a founder member of a militant student group called "Strengthen the Unity," which was dedicated to upholding the deeply conservative Islamic agenda of Khomeini's revolution, including the return of Shari'a. It was this group that, later in 1979, was responsible for occupying the American embassy and holding the 52 staff hostage for more than a year. After Ahmadinejad became president, five former American hostages surfaced to claim that he had been involved in the embassy takeover, although a comprehensive investigation conducted by the CIA was unable to verify their claim. He was, though, one of the central players in the group of student activists responsible for taking over the embassy, a fact that has since been confirmed by senior Iranian government officials who said he worked as a liaison officer between the student occupiers and Khomeini's office.

For the poor peasant boy born in the desert town of Aradan in 1956, the experience had a profound effect. In his lowly capacity as the students' liaison officer, Ahmadinejad was nevertheless able to meet Khomeini several times. The ayatollah made a deep and lasting impression on the young Islamic activist. Like many young revolutionaries, Ahmadinejad regarded Khomeini as his political mentor as well as his religious leader. Ahmadinejad's active involvement in student politics also meant that he met many of the other key figures in the Islamic revolution, notably Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini as the country's supreme leader after his death, and the future president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, whom Khomeini had nominated as his interlocutors with the students.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...icle%2FShowFull