A Saudi Prince's Recipe for Sectarian War: The Mahdi Special

President Donald Trump's first overseas tour--one that has included stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican--is being promoted as the centerpiece of a new strategy to marshal the Abrahamic faiths against extremism. As Trump’s national security advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster put it: “What President Trump is seeking is to unite peoples of all faiths around a common vision of peace, progress and prosperity.”

Saudi Arabia’s powerful deputy Crown Prince and defense minister, Mohammed bin Salman, may have another agenda. The controversial prince, “the most dangerous man in the world” according to Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, was singled out by the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, for destabilizing the Middle East with his proxy wars in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere in the region.

“The careful diplomatic stance of the older members of the Saudi royal family,” the BND warned, “has been replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention.”

On May 2, only a few weeks before Trump’s Riyadh summit with leaders from over 50 Muslim nations, the prince appeared on Saudi television to threaten pre-emptive strikes against Iran.

“We know we are a main target of Iran.” He said. “We won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia. Instead, we’ll work so the battle is in Iran.”

In bin Salman’s reading, a war with Iran is inevitable. To him, the crux of the Iran problem is religion: the Shi’a belief that the Mahdi, the last of the Twelve Imams, will emerge with Christ at the end of time to save the world from destruction.

“Their stance is that the Mahdi will come, and to create a fertile environment for the arrival of the awaited Mahdi, they need to take over the Islamic world.” Bin Salman protested.

"How do you have a dialogue with a regime built on an extremist ideology ... that they must control the land of Muslims and spread their Twelver Jaafari sect in the Muslim world."

Prince bin Salman is partially right. Under Article 5 of the Iranian constitution, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, does claim the title and right to lead all Muslims in the name of the Mahdi.

But what if bin Salman’s hypothesis about the Mahdi and Shi'a doctrine being the causal factor for war is wrong? Would a counterfactual demonstrating the eclipse of the Mahdi and the abandonment of Shi’a doctrine in Iran lead bin Salman to revise his decidedly anti-Shia worldview?

Had the Saudi royal joined the Muslim sovereigns and dignitaries gathered in Tehran in February 2016, on occasion of the 37th anniversary celebrations of Iran’s Islamic revolution, the counterfactual would have presented itself in the form of the Nation of Islam, an American sect headed by Minister Louis Farrakhan.

The Nation of Islam believe that “Allah (God) appeared in the person of Master W. Fard Muhammad on July 1930, and that he, Fard Muhammad, was the long-awaited Messiah of the Christians and the Mahdi of the Muslims.”

“In the True History of Master Fard Muhammad,” the Honorable Elijah Muhammad revered by the Nation of Islam as the true Messenger of Allah, taught that Fard Muhammad was superior in his knowledge to the Twelve Imams:

“The Twelve major Imams, as they are called in Islam, or in the Arab language, don’t have this one’s knowledge…They bow down to that One and give praise and honor to him.”

Returning from the holy city of Qum, Dr. Wesley Muhammad, one of Farrakhan’s companions on the trip, was equally blunt:

“But we didn’t go to Iran with Farrakhan to learn from their scholars about the Mahdi. We went to the Islamic Republic of Iran to introduce them to the living reality of the Mahdi that they hoped for all of their life. And Farrakhan did that.”

On March 1, 2016, The Final Call, the Nation’s newspaper, hammered away at the same point:

“In Iran, the Minister stood firm on the position that Master Fard Muhammad is the Great Mahdi, the powerful self-guided one prophesized to bring Islam back to its proper course and to sit down tyrants of the earth.”

If Prince bin Salman’s hypothesis about the Mahdi as the figure who drives Iranian foreign policy is correct, then he should be able to furnish some proof of the Islamic Republic disputing or refuting the Nation of Islam’s beliefs about their Mahdi before, during or after Farrakhan’s trip to Iran.

If devotion to the Mahdi makes the Iranian people members of an extremist Shi'a cult—the Twelver Jafaari sect—how does bin Salman explain the Nation of Islam anomaly? Why would Iran’s revolutionary establishment, the trustees of one Mahdi, extend an American sect that regards Fard Muhammad as the Great Mahdi all the courtesies reserved for Muslim sovereigns? And how is it that Farrakhan was granted an audience with Grand Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a notorious hardliner who heads the Council of Guardians, the body charged with guarding Iran’s theocracy by enforcing religious orthodoxy?

One would think that in a theocracy in which all power devolves and all policy emanates from the Mahdi, the eclipse of one Mahdi by another would be treated as apostasy, heresy and blasphemy. But can bin Salman point to a single member of the Council of Guardians calling for the Ayatollah Jannati to repent and resign as a matter of doctrine? Can he point to the supreme leader intervening, the judiciary objecting or the revolutionary guards protesting in the name of the Mahdi? Can bin Salman explain why learned clerics representing 55 million votes would elect Jannati as the chairman of the Assembly of Experts, the body that selects Iran’s next supreme leader?

With such a cascade of breaches in Shi'a doctrine, how can bin Salman, in good faith, insist that Iran is a Shi’a power? Why would he defend the fiction that the corrupt and criminal usurpers monopolizing the Iranian state in the name of religion are the pious descendants of the Prophet’s family and devout guardians of the Mahdi’s constitution? Why magnify the standing of Iran’s supreme leader—a minor cleric deputized as the Mahdi’s crown prince by less than 60 votes cast in 1989—by sanctifying him as a divinely ordained caliph whose malignant policies—massacres inside and outside Iran—reflect the beliefs and practices of a global Shi'a community of 150-200 million adherents?

Beyond Iran, has bin Salman considered the long term impact of his war against the Mahdi? How can the prince lead a 39 nation Islamic military alliance against terrorism when his bellicose and bumbling tirades against the Mahdi promise to invigorate the Taliban and destabilize Pakistan, a Sushi (Sunni and Shia mixed) nation-state that is the backbone of the alliance? And, having buried Saudi Arabia in hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, sending defense company valuations to all time highs at the price of turning the Yemen into a humanitarian nightmare, how will the prince command the loyalty of his subjects once he is forced to cut their subsidies? How does he expect Saudi society to endure a decade of austerity without al-Qaeda securing a foothold among disaffected youth, disenchanted oil workers, angry clerics and scheming royals? As a gesture of solidarity, would he sacrifice his subsidy—Serene, a $500 million yacht—to finance the cost of a single day of his war against the Mahdi? Must the House of Saud sink into sand, with America absorbing the shock, for the modernizing prince to recognize that his unbridled contempt for tradition and consensus poses a far greater risk than any bomb detonated by an extremist?

Fortunately, contrary to bin Salman’s assertions, the eclipse of the Mahdi in Shi'a Iran, if not in Saudi Arabia, is total. Iran does not qualify as a Shi’a theocracy, certainly not a theocracy guided by the light of the Mahdi the prince casts as the enemy of peace. The photograph of Ayatollah Jannati and Minister Farrakhan beaming behind tables laden with apples and oranges should puncture the myth bin Salman so mistakenly inflates to draw America and Sunni nations into a sectarian war against Iran.

What drives Iranian foreign policy is not the Mahdi. It is Machiavelli.