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

The belief in an awaited saviour who will bring peace and justice to the whole world is universal. However, the characteristics, identity, and nature of such a person is often disputed. The Mahdi and Islamic Messianism is comprised of three essays which explore these issues systematically, and conclude that the awaited universal saviour or 'The Mahdi' is none other than the 12th Imam of the Shia, the son of Imam Hasan al-Askari (AS), and that Islamic Messianism in its most perfect form is that which has been taught to us by the Holy Prophet and his Purified and Infallible Household. The first essay outlines the theological and rational foundations for belief in the Mahdi and Mahdism as expounded upon by Ayatollah Mutahhari. The second essay focuses on a critical and in-depth analysis of the scriptural proofs of the identity and nature of the Mahdi. The final essay collates all the primary hadith sources from Sunni scholarship that discuss the details of the rank, station, attributes and character of the Imām al-Mahdī. The Mahdi and Islamic Messianism lays the foundations of an unshakable belief in the Imam of our era, and is recommended for anyone who wishes to attain to certain knowledge of their Imam.

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.

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.

The Shi'a Islam Doctrinal Series is an attempt at a comprehensive treatment of Shi'a Islam from an emic or inside perspective from within Shi'a Islam itself, as opposed to the perspective of orientalism, or of comparative religion, or sociology, or some other branch of the humanities with its modern Western perspectives, all of which are philosophical approaches (in the sense that they have philosophical rather than religious underpinnings and bearings) and therefore do not, strictly speaking, deal with the religion itself as it is understood by the clerisy of its practitioners, but do so from a perspective and ideological framework that is alien and indeed antithetical and at times hostile to it. There is a severe dearth of source material which the English-speaking reader can rely on to provide him or her with the proper understanding of Shi'a Islam based on the self-understanding of the religion itself. The Shi'a Islam Doctrinal Series (as well as other series) of the Lion of Najaf Publications hopes to do its part in filling the lacunae that exist, thereby firstly providing Moslems who have emigrated to or have been born outside of the Islamic heartland with reliable material for them to gain a better understanding of their religion; and secondly, to provide non-Moslems who are interested in learning more about Islam, and about Shi'a Islam in particular, with first-hand and dependable resources which are sourced from the heart of Islamic civilization. The Preface of the present book, Mahdism (Islamic Messianism and the Belief in The Coming of the Universal Savior) discusses how the teachings of the Twelve Imams are the essence of Mahdism. Chapter One provides proofs of the Belief in Mahdism with an excursus on the bewilderment of Sonnite scholarship in the face of hadith reports concerning the Mahdi. Chapter Two discusses the specific attributes of the definition of Mahdism from the perspective of the Ahl al-Bayt. These include topics such as the covert birth of the Imam al-Mahdi and his investiture to the imamate during his childhood, as well as his occultation and the longevity of his life. And finally, Chapter Three discusses the value of the belief in the Shi'a conception of Mahdism.

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

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.