Ta'ziyah: The Great Casting Off

It is 1979, and the Muslim world is on edge: Ayatollah Khomeini returns in triumph to Iran on February 1, and ten months later the Mahdi, the Muslim messiah, is presented to the pilgrims in Makka as the promised restorer of faith and justice. Which ancient prophecy of Muhammad is about to be fulfilled: “A person will be sent at the beginning of every century to revive Islam” or “A man [the Mahdi] from among my progeny will rise and fill the land with justice and equity after it has been filled with injustice and corruption”? Was not the end of 1979, the beginning of the fifteenth Islamic century, just such a time? And when had Muslims ever been in more need of someone to end their centuries-long immersion in ignorance, intellectual stagnation, superstition, backwardness, oppression, immorality, and misrule? How would Iran and Saudi Arabia deal with the oil-induced flood of wealth and corruption now conquering them? Seeing their people’s religious and cultural worldviews being undermined by un-Islamic and even anti-Islamic ideas and practices, materialism and secularism, and countless foreign “experts,” two men with very different solutions launched a cosmic ta‘ziyah, a passion–morality play. And into the ensuing – and ongoing – upheaval stepped the innocent … and the not-so-innocent.