Summary Article: The Sacred and the Representation of the Sacred: Mahdism in the Minds of the Islamic Western World
Sayed Khaled Sisawi Al-Jaza’eri, Ph. D.
Those studies that encounter argumentative religiously and humanistically sacred topics demand a specific type of research methodology, ranging from objective investigation of the problems of the study, to inductive readings of historical evidences, to constructive analysis of those evidences.
This study seeks to investigate a critical topic that has been dominating the minds of the masses of the Islamic Westerners, depending on anthropological and historical sources that encounter Mahdism and its socio-cultural dimensions in the minds and imagination of the masses.
The Islamic Westerners depended greatly on their imagination inheritance, concerning Mahdism, in applying this concept on their political, social, and religious lives. This paper deals with the problem that some anthropological studies claim that this concept has been taken from different myths and superstitions.
