All this and more can sound extraordinarily speciɹc in
the modern Middle East. Iranians threw oʃ the reins of
foreign control in the revolution of 1979–80, ɹrst taking
hostage and then expelling the Americans who had
shored up the Shah’s regime. Fire dropped from the sky
in the form of American bombardment of Baghdad
during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and false mahdis
waged bloody sectarian battles against one another in
the vacuum of power created by the invasion. The great
conɻict in Syria is easily seen as that against Israel,
whose territory was once part of the Muslim province of
Syria.
So when Khomeini took such a strong anti-American
stance and framed his stranglehold on power by
announcing that he was the representative of the Mahdi
and thus carrying out the Mahdi’s will, it was only a
matter of time until rumors spread that he was in fact
the Mahdi himself, returned to the world. There is no
knowing how the rumors began—such is the nature of
rumor—but it seems reasonable to suppose that they had
some guidance from interested parties. Since Kho meini
had already been hailed as “the heir of Hussein” and
“the Hussein of our time,” it was not such a great leap
from the third to the twelfth Imam. Indeed, Khomeini
would take the title Imam, as though he were the natural
successor to the twelve, and though he never conɹrmed
the rumors, he never quite denied them either. They
subsided only with his death in 1989, when he was