Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The Shi`i Imam al-Mahdi will pray in Hebrew

Reported to us Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Saeed al Uqdah who said: It was narrated to us from Ali ibn al-Hasan al-Taymali who narrated to us from al-Hasan and Muhammad the sons of Ali ibnu Yusuf, from Sa’daan ibn Muslim, from Rajaal, from al-Mufadhaal ibn Umar from Abu Abdullah (Ja`far al-Sadiq, the sixth Shi`i Imam) that:

“When the Imam Mahdi calls out, he will pray to God in Hebrew.” (al-Numayni, Kitab Al-Ghayba)

4 comments:

  1. It actually says he will pray to God using God's Hebrew name.

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  2. There are numerous ahadith in Kitab al-Ghayba to this effect. There are ones saying he will pray using the Hebrew name, there are ones talking about four-part Hebrew name, and ones talking about a 72 letter name used in magical formulas that not only the Mahdi will use, but that Muhammad al-Baqir and others of the Ahl al-Bayt used. Fascinating stuff.

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  3. There are also hadiths in the early sources saying that he will have the body of an Isrealite. But how do you interpret these traditions?

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  4. Israelites were very distinct groups of people. There was no Israelite ethnicity, and today there is not Jewish ethnicity (nor was there in the time of the Ahl al-Bayt). What this hadith is a likely result of is generations of oral tradition passed down that the Mahdi would be from a family background of Jews. It became prejudicially impolite to say "the body of a Jew", so we should not be surprised to find "body of an Israelite." But even then, "body of a Jew" raises the question of what this could possibly mean, when Jews have as many body types as there are in existence. The essence of such a claim would seem to trace back to saying that his ancestors were Jews, which is precisely what i argue elsewhere the Ahl al-Bayt were; both in Jewish practice as Jews (which there is immense evidence for), and in the sense of Khadijah's family almost certainly being Jewish; whether the result of massive giyurim common under the Himyarite Kingdom, or from a family that fled to the Hijaz. i have evidence presented in an eBook "From Qumran to the Qur'an" that many of the Diaspora Essenes were located in Transjordan at least, and even deeper in Arabia, by the late second to third centuries CE.

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