A little diligence makes for a long post, 1: Kahlili

[ by Charles Cameron — first part of a post on misreading Mahdism in Iran ]

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book credit: amazon -- Mahdist graphic credit: Tim Furnish / MahdiWatch

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Our blog friend Pundita has been relying on Reza Kahlili, the pseudonymous Iranian author of A Time to Betray: The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent Inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran, quite a bit recently, pointing to his recent discussion with John Batchelor and some reports of his on World Net Daily.

There are a number of people whose views on the religious issues surrounding an Iranian nuclear weapons program interest me — I leave other aspects of the problem to others better informed than I — some because they have insight, some because they have megaphones, and so on.

I’m not the person you’d want to ask whether Reza Kahlili was a CIA source, whether he was trusted, and if so, on what issues – issues which might range from troop movements to popular opinion of the IRG rank and file to theology and apocalyptic, a range that no single source is likely to be omnicompetent in – but WND is a media source I’ve followed off and on for a dozen years, it’s strongly associated with one of the strands of recent Christian apocalyptic with its own messianic take on Islam and Mahdism, and it isn’t necessarily a source I’d trust without verification…

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So I did some checking of my own on Reza Kahlili, and found that he, or more likely some ghost writer employed to write his book for him (along with his publisher’s copy editor), simply doesn’t know what a hadith is. A hadith is a statement attributed to the Prophet (or in the Shi’a case, one of the infallible Imams who succeeded him) and passed down through an authoritative train of transmission (isnad). For a practicing Muslim, the corpus of hadith is second only to the Qur’an, and knowing what a hadith is is like knowing what the Epistles are for a practicing Christian: basic. For a theologically nuanced scholar from Qom or Najaf, it’s kindergarten.

Kahlili gets the use of the word “hadith” right early on in his book, but when he starts talking about the return of the Twelfth Imam or Mahdi he writes (p. 334.):

Like others who think as he does, Ahmadinejad believes that many of the signs of Mahdi’s return have emerged. Known as hadiths, these signs include the invasion of Afghanistan, the bloodshed in Iraq, and the global economic meltdown. According to prophecy, the hadiths will grow increasingly furious as Mahdi’s return comes closer, including “persecution and injustice” engulfing the earth, “chaos and famine,” and “many wars.” The hadiths predict that “many will be killed and the rest will suffer hunger and lawlessness.” People like Ahmadinejad so completely believed that these conditions would hasten the return of the twelfth Imam that they were willing to foment universal war, chaos, and famine to bring it about.

That’s at best very sloppy writing — the signs are known as ayat (as are the verses of the Quran), and the Quran states (28.59):

Nor was thy Lord the one to destroy a population until He had sent to its centre a messenger, rehearsing to them Our Signs; nor are We going to destroy a population except when its members practise iniquity.

Some translators actually render what this translation calls “signs” as “verses”.

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