Mahdi

Mahdi is the title reserved for the future savior of the Muslim community. The name means “divinely guided person.” Muslims believe that the Mahdi, as God's caliph, will launch a revolution to deliver people from tyranny and oppression in order to usher an era of justice and equity on earth at the “End of Time,” prior to the final resurrection and judgment. Messianism is a salient feature of Islamic salvation history. Major compilations of Muslim traditions, both Sunnī and Shi'a, have long sections dealing with the final days of the world, foretelling the apocalyptic signs that will appear before the Mahdi launches the restorative justice. Messianic expectations were part of the early Muslim belief in Prophet Muhammad being the “apostle of the End of Time” (nabi akhir alzaman). This was the source of the doctrine about the universal mission with which Prophet Muhammad was commissioned to usher humanity toward an ideal global community. The Qur'anic preoccupation with the impending Day of Judgment and the Signs of the Hour, which announced cosmic disorder and a period of terror and fear preceding the Final Days, points to the millennialism announcing a future utopian age of joy, peace, and justice, especially one created through revolution, under the descendant of the Prophet, al-Mahdi.

The responsibility to create an ideal public order that carried within itself the revolutionary challenge to any inimical order that might hamper its realization was historically assumed by the prophet Muhammad himself when he established the first Muslim polity in Medina in 622 CE. The decisive connection between the divine investiture and the political mission of creating an Islamic world order is the integral facet of the idea of Mahdi. Hence, the Mahdi, through his investiture as Prophet Muhammad's successor and God's caliph, is awaited by all Muslims to implement the divinely ordained public order on earth.

Historical and sociological factors in the first century, following the Prophet's death in 632 CE, were instrumental in heightening the messianic expectations in the Muslim community, especially among those who were persecuted as Shi'a—partisans of ‘Ali (d. 661), the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, and sympathizers of his claim to the caliphate. The idea of a perfect leader, the divinely guided, continued to be emphasized more specifically among the religious-minded Muslims in general and among the Shi'i in particular. The outbreak of the civil wars and the perturbed condition that followed greatly contributed to the notion of the messianic savior whose function was, first, to redress the wrongs committed against the downtrodden and establish justice—by which the Shi'i meant abolition of the caliphate of the oppressors and return to a pure Islam—and, second, to achieve the conversion of the world to Islam. Among the various factions of the Shi'i, disagreement on the identification of the Mahdi was one of the chief factors separating each sect. Shi'i hope for justice was an expression of radical social protest. The expectation meant not merely a hope for the future but a revaluation of present social and historical life. Every generation found reason to believe that it was likely that the Mahdi would appear in its own time and test the faithful by summoning them to launch the great social transformation themselves under his command, with the promise of divine help when it would be needed. Hence, belief in the Mahdi became the source of heretical and even combative tendencies among the Shi'i. Their revolutionary insurrections were feared and severely crushed by the ruling authorities for their potentially destructive and chaotic repercussions.

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