Mahdi
The Mahdi (Arabic: ٱلْمَهْدِيّ, romanized: al-Mahdī, lit. 'the Guided') is a messianic figure in Islamic belief. He is comparable to the Christian concept of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the Jewish concept of Mashiach ben David and the Zoroastrian concept of the Saoshyant. The Mahdi is said to be a descendant of Muhammad and is believed to appear at the End of Times, shortly before Jesus returns (in Islamic belief), to rid the world of evil and injustice.
The Mahdi is mentioned in several compilations of hadith, but absent from the Quran and the two most-revered Sunni hadith collections (Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim). As such, he plays only a marginal role in Sunni Islam, and some Sunni theologians have rejected the concept of the Mahdi altogether. However, the Mahdi plays a significant role among Twelver Shias, who believe that the Mahdi is Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi—the twelfth Imam and son of the eleventh Imam Hasan al-Askari (d. 874)—who is said to be in occultation (ghayba) by divine will.
The idea of the Mahdi seems to have been popularized during the religious and political unrest in the first and second centuries of Islam. Some of the first references to the Mahdi appear in the late 7th century, when the revolutionary Mukhtar al-Thaqafi declared Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya—a son of Caliph Ali (r. 656–661)—to be the Mahdi. Although the concept of a Mahdi is not an essential doctrine in Islam, it is popular among many Muslims. Over time, there have been a vast number of Mahdi claimants, including Muhammad Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, and others.
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