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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Mahdi in the Quran According to Shi‘ite Quran Commentators Chapter 3: Mahdi in classical and modern Shi’ite tafsir Shi’ite Messianism and all that concerns the Mahdi have, of course, been studied in a number of works, but this chapter focuses on the Qur’anic verses reported as concerning the Mahdi and their interpretation according to classical and modern Shi’ite commentators.

Although only a few mufassirin are mentioned in this research, three regularly refer to their predecessors and their opinions, therefore we will report on these in the translation we will give of their tafsir. Under each verse, we will only give the opinions and commentaries of the mufassirin as far as they concern the Mahdi , and not their commentary in its entirety, while we will give the relevant verses of the Qur’an and some of the traditions concerning the Mahdi in the footnotes in Arabic.

Subsequently, in the conclusion, we will attempt to compare the manner in which classical and modern mufassirin - experts in different fields of Islamic thought - view the Mahdi in their tafsir of the same few verses that we will use in this research.

As part of our research in this third chapter, we first studied separately, within three different Tafsir works, the Tafsir Majma’ al-Bayan, the Tafsir al-Mizan , and the Tafsir Makhzan al-‘Irfan dar ‘Ulum-e Qur’an (Kanz al-‘Irfan), examining each one of the 120 verses from the Qur’an which are believed to have been revealed for the Mahdi according to Seyyed Hashim al-Bahrani (d.1107 AH/1695 AD), a prominent Shi’ite scholar and mufassir , who relied upon the Shi’ite traditional reports.[^1] Results of our research show that: • In his Majma’ al-Bayan, Shaykh Tabarsi has interpreted as concerning the Mahdi only nine verses from among the 120 verses reported by al-Bahrani.

These nine are the following: • In his Tafsir al-Mizan, Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i has also interpreted nine verses and eight of them are the same as those interpreted by Shaykh Tabarsi, although he gives a broader meaning to the verses of the Qur’an [2: 3] , [21: 105] and [24: 55] .