Mahdi al-Abbasi, the Third self-styled caliph of the usurper Abbasid regime

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On 23rd of the Islamic month of Moharram in 169 AH, Mahdi al-Abbasi, the 3rd self-styled caliph of the usurper Abbasid regime, died a miserable death at the age of 44 after a reign of 11 years, when the horse he was riding during a deer-hunt in Masabzaan in the Dinavar area of Kalhor in what is now Kermanshah Province of Iran (bordering Iraq), hurled him on a wall of a dilapidated structure and trampled him. Of dark complexion, and born to \"Shikla\", a Negroid concubine of the tyrant Mansur Dawaniqi, he was known as \"at-Tinnin\" (or the Dragon).
He was deliberately named \"Mahdi\" by his father in a bid to distract attention from the Infallible Ahl al-Bayt and to mislead Muslims, in view of the famous hadith of Prophet Mohammad (SAWA) that the Last of his rightful successors who will fill the earth with justice, would rise as \"Mahdi al-Qa\'em\" to end oppression on earth.
An open drunkard who spent most of his time in the pleasures of the flesh in violation of the tenets of Islam, he was not just fond of music and songstresses, but universalized music in the Islamic realm. He bore an unabated hatred towards the Prophet\'s progeny. When he found that Mansur had stored in a house, tagged bodies of Imam Hasan al-Mujtaba\'s (AS) descendants killed by the regime, he ordered these bodies to be buried in a mass grave over which a market was built to remove any trace of them.
Like the Omayyad tyrant, Mu\'awiyya Ibn Abu Sufyan, he spent huge sums of money on hadith forgery to try to negate from public minds the God-given right of leadership of the Ahl al-Bayt. The term \"Ahl as-Sunnah\", coined by Mansur, was promoted to brainwash the neo-Muslim community, while the followers of the Ahl al-Bayt were persecuted as \"Rawafedh\" (Rejectors), despite the fact that the Prophet had explicitly used the word \"Shi\'ite\" in praise of the true followers of his divinely-appointed successor, Imam Ali (AS). At least twice, he imprisoned the Prophet\'s 7th Infallible Heir, Imam Musa al-Kazem (AS).
So great was his fear among the people that many \"Sadaat\" (plural of Seyyed), in order to avoid imprisonment and possible death, used to live incognito by concealing their identity, such as Eisa, a son of Zayd the Martyr – the son Imam Zain al-Abedin (AS) – who revealed his genealogy to his wife and children only on his deathbed. Mahdi al-Abbasi was succeeded by his son Musa al-Hadi, who, during his brief rule of a year and a few months, perpetrated the Fakh Tragedy – the most gruesome massacre of the Prophet\'s progeny after the heartrending Tragedy of Karbala.