the Mahdi, through whom Allah will support the religion and spread justice throughout the worlds.” (1)

In response to Shaykh Rashīd Ridā, it must be said that the reports concerning the Mahdi’s emergence are sound and mass-transmitted in meaning, as noted above when citing a selection of these hadiths and the scholars who expressly affirmed their soundness and mass transmission.

As for the claim that the two Shaykhs, al-Bukhārī and Muslim, gave no credence to any of the hadiths concerning the Mahdi, we say: The Sunnah was not recorded exclusively in the two Sahih collections. Rather, many other sound hadiths are found in the Sunan works, Musnad compilations, Muʿjam collections, and other hadith repositories.

Ibn Kathīr—may Allah have mercy on him—said: “Al-Bukhārī and Muslim did not undertake to include every hadith deemed sound. Indeed, they themselves deemed sound hadiths that are absent from their two books. Al-Tirmidhī and others, for example, report that al-Bukhārī deemed sound certain hadiths that are not found in his collection, but rather in the Sunan and other works.” (2)

As for the fact that many reports of Israelite origin entered the hadith corpus, and that some reports were fabricated by the Shi‘a and other partisan groups, this is true. However, the leading hadith scholars distinguished sound reports from all others. They compiled works on fabricated hadiths and on identifying weak reports, and established meticulous rules for evaluating narrators. Consequently, not a single proponent of religious innovation or liar remained without their exposing his true state. Thus Allah preserved the Sunnah from