ABSTRACT
The Shi’a, the minority most persecuted and loathed by Sunni Islam, has also constituted a separate and independent model of Spring, which stems from its messianic and ever-expecting salvation and change, upon the impending return to earth of the Hidden Imam (see details in Chapter 4 about the caliphate). Namely, in contrast with the four prevailing schools of law in the sunna, which are fixed and immutable since their salvador was the Prophet Muhammed, the Seal of the Prophets—meaning that the ideal utopia happened in the past, from which we can only keep distancing ourselves—the Shi’ite hope is placed in the return of the Hidden Imam in some indefinite future, in order to produce prosperity, justice, and happiness for all humanity. The great luminaries of the sunna, which constitutes about 90 percent of all the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, usually counsel their followers to submit to the rule under which they live, even if it is not satisfactory to their religious taste, for a bad ruler is always superior to chaos, since in disorder no Islam at all can function. The Shi’ite scholars, on the contrary, have always been rebellious, especially when they were not in power. This restlessness, which has always been tinged with messianic and utopian elements, has lent to the Shi’a the characteristics that we today identify in the Islamic Spring. Therefore, the Islamic Revolution that we witnessed in 1978–9 in Iran, which was intended for exportation—indicating its universal and messianic import—must be seen as the precursor of the Islamic Spring, because it professed the exact goal that the current Spring proclaims today: to remove the present illegitimate tyrant and establish in his stead a just Islamic order (the Islamic parties in Turkey, Egypt, Morocco all have this element of justice in their very names), which will precipitate the coming of the Imam Mandi (the Guiding Imam, coterminus with the Hidden Imam). The fact that this dream did not yet come to fruition in 226Tehran does not reflect negatively on the missed and unfulfilled utopia; this is the nature of what Max Weber called the “routinization of the charisma;’ or what others usually name “the deed that distorts and corrupts the ideal;’ or what revolutionaries have elected to express in the dichotomies of “theory and practice,” “doctrine and praxis;’ “ideology and organization,” or the “wings of vision vs. the feet of reality.”
