Life of Ahmad — Page 231
as CLAIMS TO BE THE MESSIAH as 231 'There is no doubt that in the chain of the narrators of most of the traditions there are persons who were careless, of bad memory, weak or of feeble judgment and had other faults. . . These weak and faulty traditions, taken collectively, bear evidence to the truth of the fact that the Mahdi shall appear in the latter days, though there are very few of them that are pure. ' On page 384 he says: 'All the traditions that relate to the appearance of the Mahdi, the events, the occurrences, the dangers and the conquests of time, etc. , only show the truth of his appearance, in whatever way it may be'. The Ency. of Islam says: 'But it is plain, too, that the doctrine of the Mahdi arose late and was not generally received. . . The later, therefore, we go and the more popular are our sources, the more fixed do we find the belief in the eschatological Mahdi. The more, too, the Muslim masses have felt themselves approved and humiliated, either by their own rulers or by non-Muslims, the more fervent has been their longing for this ultimate restorer of the true Islam and conqueror of the whole world for Islam. ' Eliminating all such wishful thinking and brushing aside all later accretions to the prophecy, one is compelled to conclude in the light of facts that the