the church, and to reform education to be more
relevant in the Industrial Age. A similar debate
arose in the Middle East. In Iran during the 19th
century, this resulted in the opening of secular
profession schools, and, by the 20th century, Ira-
nian madrasa students became an isolated yet still
influential minority. The Ottomans reformed their
institutions of higher learning before reforming
the madrasa system for elementary students. In
1924 Ataturk’s government in tUrkey eliminated
the madrasa system in favor of secular education;
however, Islamic education was reinstated in the
late 1940s. In the second half of the 19th century
in Egypt, Muslim Egyptians began to attend secu-
lar schools, and a movement arose in the late 19th
to the early 20th century to modernize al-Azhar.
Madrasa education, although replaced to a
great degree by the rise of systems of modern
education, still exists all over the Muslim world.
Fazlur Rahman notes that in contemporary Paki-
stan, madrasas teaching traditional interpretations
of Islam flourish mainly in the countryside. He also
argues that the more any given region in the Mus-
lim world was affected by Western colonialism, the
stronger the hold is in that region of traditional
madrasa-style learning by the religious elite.
See also aligarh; deoband; kuttab; Ulama;
zay tUna mosqUe.
Sophia PandyaFurther reading: Michael M. J. Fischer, Iran: From
Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980); Fazlur Rahman, Islam
and Modernity: Translation of an Intellectual Tradition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Charles
Michael Stanton, Higher Learning in Islam: The Classical
Period, a.d. 700–1300 (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Little-
field Publishers, 1990).
Mahdi
Meaning “one who is rightly guided” in Arabic,
the Mahdi is a messianic figure who, according to
some Muslims, will return at the end of time to
restore Islam to its original perfection.
Although the word Mahdi does not occur in
the qUran, it was used from the earliest days of
Islam as an honorific title: the prophet mUham-
mad was called the Mahdi, as was his son-in-law
Ali, and his grandson al-hUsayn. However, it was
not until the revolt led in the name of Ali’s third
son, Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya, against the
Umayyad caliphate (661–750 c.e.) that the term
Mahdi began to refer to an expected ruler who
would usher in JUdgment day.
Although eventually crushed, Ibn al-Hanafiyya’s
movement was instrumental in shaping the image
of the expected Mahdi. Indeed, when his followers
began insisting that their leader was not dead but
rather hiding in a transcendent realm from which he
would one day return to fill the world with JUstice,
they initiated a doctrine that eventually became
one of the central tenets of Shiism: the occultation
(ghayba) and return (rajaa) of the Mahdi.
The doctrine of occultation and return was
developed even further after the sudden death of
Ismail ibn Jaafar (d. 762), who had originally been
designated the seventh Imam. When Ismail was
replaced by his younger brother, Musa al-Kazim, a
small group of Shiis calling themselves the Ismai-
lis refused to accept the new Imam and instead
claimed that Ismail was alive and in occultation as
the Hidden Imam, another term for the Mahdi. For
the majority of Shiis, however, the line of Imams
continued through Musa until the 12th Imam,
Muhammad ibn al-Hasan (also known as mUham-
mad al-mahdi), who himself went into final occul-
tation in 941 c.e. as the Mahdi. Thus, by the
middle of the 10th century, a complex apocalyptic
theology concerning the Mahdi’s second coming
had become firmly entrenched in Shii theology.
As the doctrine of the Mahdi developed in
Shiism, the dominant Sunni law schools began
to distance themselves from the idea, partly in an
attempt to discourage what was becoming both
a politically and a socially disruptive theology.
And yet, to this day there exists a vigorous debateMahdi 447 J