As the Prophet says...

As the Prophet says: “The Earth was gathered for me, and the Eastern and Western parts of it were offered to me. And soon the Kingdom of my Community ( Umma) will recover all of them.”[^4] Regarding this verse, Imam Baqir asserts that these righteous servants are the of the Mahdi at the End of Time.

To confirm these statements, there is a tradition that both the Shi’ites and the Sunnites report as emanating from the Prophet: “Even if there remains only a day on the Earth, God will prolong it until He will bring forth a pious man from my progeny so that he will fill the earth with justice and equity as it was filled with oppression and tyranny.”[^5] After having reported that the verse concerns the Mahdi , Shaykh Tabarsi mentions a tradition which denies the Mahdi and gives his own opinion.

He writes that, in his work al-Ba’th wa an-Nushur, Imam Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Husayn Bayhaki cites several traditions in this regard; his grandson ‘Abdullah ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad also reported all of these in the year 517 AH, but the tradition reported from Abu ‘Abdullah Hafez from Muhammad ibn Khaled from Aban ibn Saleh from Hasan from Anas ibn Malek, claiming that the Prophet said: ‘The people are living in difficulty and miserliness ....

and Mahdi is no one but ‘Isa ibn Maryam’[^6] is first of all a tradition reported only by Muhammad ibn Khaled, and secondly both the latter and Abu ‘Abdullah Hafez are unknown.

Finally, declared Tabarsi, there is also disagreement in the Isnad or the transmissional chain of the Hadith : once Muhammad ibn Khaled reports the tradition from Aban ibn Saleh from Hasan from Anas from the Prophet, and once he reports the tradition from Aban ibn Abi ‘Ayyash (who can be omitted) from Hasan from the Prophet, and this chain of transmission is broken.

Tabarsi finally confirms his position, saying: “The traditions which clearly concern the reappearance of the Mahdi have a more trustworthy chain of narration. In these same traditions, it is reported that the Mahdi is from the Prophet’s progeny. Among them, there is one that Bayhaki’s grandson reports in his work from Abu Ali Rudbary, from Abu Bakr ibn Das, from Abu Dawud Sajestani.....