Messianic Claimants Arrested in Morocco, Egypt

Worshippers at a mosque in Marrakech, Morocco arrested a man who claimed during a Friday sermon to be the Mahdi – a messianic figure in Islam – and brought him to the local police, the website Rue 20 reported. The man, in his 50s, said he had come to save the congregation members and called on them to believe in and worship him. This follows a case in Egypt, where authorities arrested a man, named as Mohammed Habash, who wrote on social media that he was the Mahdi and “walked at God’s command and received instructions from Him,” but that “the helpers of the Dajjal” – an Islamic figure similar to the Antichrist in Christianity – were stopping him from spreading Islam. The Egyptian state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram reported that the authorities detained Habash in the town of Qutour in Gharbiyah province north of Cairo for “spreading false beliefs about the Islamic religion, and claiming that he was the promised Mahdi on social media.”