The first comprehensive study of the idea of the Mahdi, or divinely guided messianic leader.

In this dissertation, I use primary and secondary sources to trace the development and transformation of the concept of Mahdi in Iran from the early 1900s to the late 1970s. I provide an alternative historiography of the Mahdi that has been missing from the Mahdist scholarly work arguing that there was a significant discursive shift regarding the Mahdi in Iranian religious writings from a distant figure in the early period to a revolutionary figure of future hope and justice in the late 1970s. In the early period, intellectual circles did not focus on the urgency of the Mahdi's arrival, content to maintain the Mahdi's distance. This changed in the early 1940s where the Mahdi took on a revolutionary aura and writings regarded his imminent arrival as critical for the revolutionary ethos to reach its logical conclusion in religious and political emancipation. In this dissertation, I argue that this discursive shift occurred due to a number of factors which caused contemporary Iranian society to question the idea that emancipation would come from the constitutional revolution. This shift also occurred due to rising divergences among intellectual circles including leftists, secularists, and nationalists whose criticisms of religion forced the religious figures out of their intellectual comfort zones. I am mainly focused on unpacking the nature of this factor by charting discursive treatments of the Mahdi through this period among these various intellectual milieus.

This book is a valuable contribution to the study of messianism and millenarianism in the history of Muslim Spain and pre-Modern Morocco presented in a broader framework of research on Muslim eschatological beliefs and Islamic ideas on legitimate power.

The topic of this book is vital to the understanding of contemporary developments in Iran and other areas of the Islamic world in which Shi'ism is a significant social and religious force. Islamic tradition in general speaks about the appearance of the Mahdi, or divinely guided messianic leader, from among the descendants of the prophet. In Shi'ism, belief in the Mahdi is the foundation on which the entire spiritual and temporal edifice rests. Sachedina's purpose is to examine this key belief in the Mahdi and the doctrinal evolution of the idea of the Mahdi in early Imamite sources. Sachedina compares the Judeo-Christian conception of Messiah and the Shi'ite conception of Mahdi and discusses the developing relationship between the Shi'ite Muslims and political regimes. His primary sources on the development of doctrinal ideas about the Mahdi are the works of early Imamite scholars who developed their ideas when they were in a minority position in the Islamic world. As the first comprehensive study of the idea of the Mahdi, Islamic Messianism provides a valuable guide to students in religious studies and Islamics as well as to students of Iranian history and politics.

Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions tells the story of the Nurbakhshiya, an Islamic messianic movement that originated in fifteenth-century central Asia and Iran and survives to the present in Pakistan and India. In the first full-length study of the sect, Shahzad Bashir illumines the significance of messianism as an Islamic religious paradigm and illustrates its centrality to any discussion of Islamic sectarianism. By tracing Nurbakhshi activity in the Middle East and central and southern Asia through more than five centuries, Bashir brings to view the continuities and disruptions within Islamic civilization across regions and over time. Bashir effectively captures the way Nurbakhshis have understood and debated the meaning of their tradition in various geographical and temporal contexts. Bashir provides a detailed biography of the movement's founder, Muhammad Nurbakhsh (d. 1464). Born to a Twelver Shi'i family, Nurbakhsh declared himself the mahdi, or the Muslim messiah, as an adept of the Kubravi Sufi order under the influence of the teachings of the great Sufi master Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240). Nurbakhsh's religious worldview, which Bashir treats in depth in this volume, offers a

Expectation of a redeemer is a widespread phenomenon across many civilizations. Classical Islamic traditions maintain that the mahdi will transform our world by making Islam the sole religion, and that he will do so in collaboration with Jesus, who will return as a Muslim and play a major role in this apocalyptic endeavour. While the messianic idea has been most often discussed in relation to Shi‘i Islam, it is highly important in the Sunni branch as well. In this groundbreaking work, Yohanan Friedmann explores its roots in Sunni Islam, and studies four major mahdi claimants – Ibn Tumart, Sayyid Muhammad Jawnpuri, Muhammad Ahmad and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad – who made a considerable impact in the regions where they emerged. Focusing on their religious thought, and relating it to classical Muslim ideas on the apocalypse, he examines their movements and considers their achievements, failures and legacies – including the ways in which they prefigured some radical Islamic groups of modern times.

This study of messianism and revolution examines an extremely rich though unexplored historical record on the rise of Islam and its sociopolitical revolutions from Muhammad’s constitutive revolution in Arabia to the Abbasid revolution in the East and the Fatimid and Almohad revolutions in North Africa and the Maghreb. Bringing the revolutions together in a comprehensive framework, Saïd Amir Arjomand uses sociological theory as well as the critical tools of modern historiography to argue that a volatile but recurring combination of apocalyptic motivation and revolutionary action was a driving force of historical change time and again. In addition to tracing these threads throughout 500 years of history, Arjomand also establishes how messianic beliefs were rooted in the earlier Judaic and Manichaean notions of apocalyptic transformation of the world. By bringing to light these linkages and factors not found in the dominant sources, this text offers a sweeping account of the long arc of Islamic history.