Ahmadinejad's eccentric devotion to the Hidden Imam would be of only passing interest were it not aligned to some of the other extreme views he has expressed since becoming president. For at about the same time that he was urging his government to lay the groundwork for the return of the messiah, he was also expressing other, more hardline opinions. When he became president, Ahmadinejad was almost unknown outside Iran. But his uncompromising adherence to the principles of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolution, and his inflammatory views about the West and Israel, were soon exposed for the entire world to see. At a conference held in Tehran shortly after his election titled "The World Without Zionism", Ahmadinejad declared that Israel was a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the face of the earth". The comments immediately provoked an international uproar, but Ahmadinejad defended himself by insisting he had merely been quoting the words of Khomeini, the founder of Iran's Islamic revolution. "As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

Ahmadinejad's strict adherence to the memory and legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder and spiritual guardian of Iran's Islamic revolution, is central to understanding the mindset of one of the world's most controversial leaders, and one who will quickly find himself at the forefront of the security priorities of US President Barack Obama's administration. Ahmadinejad was an obscure and unimportant student when Khomeini launched his bloody and epoch-defining revolution in Tehran 30 years ago. But his entire presidency has been devoted to upholding the fundamental principles of the ayatollah's inheritance, whether it involves exporting the Islamic revolution throughout the Muslim world to places like Gaza or pursuing the development of a nuclear weapons arsenal. Combined with his inflammatory rhetoric and the deep antipathy that Ahmadinejad and the hardline conservative clerics who maintain him in power feel towards the West, it is hardly surprising that he had earned the unwelcome sobriquet of being the most dangerous man on the planet.

To understand what makes Ahmadinejad tick you have to go back to the earliest days of Iran's Islamic revolution in February 1979 when the future president was an enthusiastic, but largely irrelevant, cheerleader for Khomeini's radical agenda. When the revolution was launched in earnest following Khomeini's triumphant return from exile in Paris to Tehran on 1 February, Ahmadinejad was a student at Tehran's University of Science and Technology, where he studied development engineering, later specialising in traffic management.