Talk:Mahdi

message: "According to the Ahmaddiya movement, one of the signs which will indicate the emergence of al-Mahdi will be that in the month of Ramadan prior to his emergence two eclipses will occur, one of the sun and one of the moon, both being visible from the Middle East and Arabia. These signs are said to have been visible right after the claim of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad to be the Promised Messiah and Mahdi, and are supposed to happen again during Ramadan AH 1426 (roughly October 2005 CE). These claims are disputed by many non-Ahmadi Muslims." (My recent attempt toward an NPOV here.)
It seems to me (a non-Muslim) that we should try to include "variant" positions on the Mahdi in
Wikipedia, as different doctrines concerning the Messiah are addressed in that article. I think
too that maybe the layout of this article should be changed, adding a "non-Sunni and non-Shia"
section that the Ahmadi claims would be fit into. (Am I correct that the Ahmadiyya are generally
thought of as being neither Sunni nor Shi'ite?) 
To further the general appearance of coherence as well, I would also remove the next sentence 
("The title has been claimed by various individuals in history[...]") to the "People who saw themselves as Mahdi" section and rework that. 
Or maybe it'd be better to note that "The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has other doctrines and predictions concerning the Mahdi" and for that off into another article entirely (something
like "The Mahdi in the Ahmadi tradition")? Maybe the hypertextish nature of Wikipedia can be
employed to good advantage here too?
I put the Ahmaddiyah view of the Mahdi in it's own section.  The Ahmadiyya movement is a very small one among worldwide Muslims, but if you want to include their view of the mahdi, I do not think there is a problem with it.  However, it should be seperate from the Sunni view as most Sunnis do not view the Ahmadiyya movement as a Muslim one.  Thus, I have created a new section for it within the article, and removed the NPOV notice.
DigiBullet 20:41, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does this rewording of the Ahmadi claims help the NPOV any? 

message: Edited and expanded the Shia content in the section Mahdi#Historical_development. Among other things, the new edits addressed the following issues:
* This subsection should be about what distinguishes the Mahdi in Shia from Sunni beliefs, namely, occultation and raj'a (return). The other aspects are common to Shia and Sunni and were already discussed earlier in the same section. This is also how Madelung approaches the topic in his Brill article. 
* In this subsection, "introduced" was replaced with "spread" to match the source. 
* Nowhere the source says that the Mahdi was modeled on Ibn al-Hanafiyya as implied by "became dissociated from its historical figure, Muhammad al-Hanafiyya" in the Wikipedia article. Instead, on p. 531, the source says that Ibn al-Hanafiyya was an early instance of the idea of occultation in Shia.
* "The Mahdi became synonymous with the 'hidden Imam'" is not in the source. The source doesn't discuss the identification of the Mahdi and the twelfth Imam, which is, for instance, covered by Modarressi in his Crisis and Consolidation. 
* The sentence "In fact, the concept of the "hidden Imam" was attributed to several Imams in turn" is incompletely quoted from the source. The source says that "It is unquestionable that the idea of the hidden Imam was projected upon several Imams in turn, but it could take definite shape only around the person of the twelfth, with whom the pleroma of the Imamate is fulfilled." That there are various Mahdis in Shia has already been discussed just above and this incomplete sentence is redundant. Albertatiran (talk) 08:48, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edits to [[Mahdi#Historical_development]]