Everyday Apocalypse in Iraq - 142 dead on Tuesday.

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From Juan Cole:
Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Everyday Apocalypse in Iraq
War of the Mosques
142 Dead on Tuesday


142 persons were killed or found dead on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning two Sunni mosques in towns south of Baghdad were blown up.

On Tuesday, a huge truck bomb in Baghdad blew up a Shiite mosque dedicated to an important religious figure and killed 87 persons, wounding 214. This site was dedicated to Muhammad bin Uthman bin Sa`id al-`Amri, the second of at least four Deputies (wakil) who Shiites believe acted as intermediaries between the Hidden Twelfth Imam and believers during his first or "minor" Disappearance. Shiites believe that the Prophet Muhammad should have been succeeded by his close family and descendants. The 12th Imam, a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, they say, went into hiding as a small child in 874 AD after the death of his father, Hasan al-Askari, who had been put under house arrest by the Abbasid Caliphate. During the "minor disappearance" the Twelfth Imam was said to send letters to the Shiite community, and for many years sent them, they say, through Muhammad b. Uthman.

Many Iraqi Shiites, poor, bewildered, under siege by multiple political and military forces, have become millenarians and believe that the hidden Twelfth Imam will now come back any day as the Mahdi, the apocalyptic Guided One, who will restore the world to justice in preparation for the Judgment Day.

The Sunni Arab guerrillas know that this millenarian hope and fervor sustains many Shiites and that they are touchy about it. That is why they have twice bombed the shrine at Samarra, dedicated to the father and grandfather of the Imam Mahdi, and now have hit in such a powerful and gruesome way the mosque-shrine of the Imam Mahdi's second Deputy. (A traditionalist account of the Deputies of the Imam can be found here).

Hope for the coming of the promised one is all most Shiites have left, and the desecration of sacred sites associated with the Mahdi (analogous to the return of Christ for Christians) is especially likely to set off reprisal attacks against Sunnis. Since the guerrilla strategy in Iraq is to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war as a way of making the country ungovernable and forcing the Americans out, attacks on symbols of the Twelfth Imam are especially effective.

One unfortunate side effect of this shrine-destruction strategy is that the shrines are revered in Iran, as well, and President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is a millenarian especially devoted to the cult of the Twelfth Imam. Sentiments of the Iranian public are also being stirred by these attacks (not to mention Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Shiites in Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, who increasingly blame the US for the desecrations). Religious politics is politics, and the US is being wrongfooted in a major way here.


More:
http://www.juancole.com/

Just what we need- more "end of the world-ers". Of course, if one makes life on Earth a living hell then saying F**k-all, let's go to a better place becomes attractive.....