The chapter
Before the darkness of the Dajjal, a dawn. The Prophet ﷺ promised: "If only one day of this world remained, Allah would lengthen that day until He sent in it a man from me, or from the people of my house, whose name agrees with my name and whose father's name agrees with my father's name; he will fill the earth with fairness and justice as it was filled with oppression and wrong."
His portrait in the authentic sunan is precise and sober. He is of the family of the Prophet ﷺ, of the line of Fatimah: "the Mahdi is of my household, of the sons of Fatimah." His name: Muhammad ibn Abdillah. He does not descend from the sky and he works no required miracle; he is a man whom Allah rectifies in a single night, the tradition's phrase for a heart set right and a matter arranged. He rules seven years: "and the earth will be filled with justice"; wealth is distributed without counting: "In the last of my ummah there will be a caliph who scoops wealth by the handful and does not number it."
The scholars fixed his doctrinal weight carefully, and the Codex reproduces their honesty: he is not named in Bukhari and Muslim by the title "Mahdi," but his description there is unmistakable: "your imam from among you" behind whom Isa ibn Maryam prays; and the hadith of the khasf, in Sahih Muslim from Umm Salamah: an army will march against a man taking refuge at the House, "and when they are at a bayda', an open plain of the earth, the earth will swallow them, their first and their last," a pursuer's army ending like Pharaoh's, mid-stride. Named narrations fill the sunan of Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, and Ibn Majah with chains the muhaddithun graded to soundness; belief in the Mahdi is the settled position of Ahl as-Sunnah, held without hysteria, and without the centuries of pretenders the hadith of the thirty dajjals predicted as its counterfeit shadow.
The order of the end: under his banner the believers unite; the great battles (al-malahim) unfold; and while the Muslims prepare for prayer at dawn in Damascus, the son of Maryam descends, and the Mahdi, ruler of the earth's last just state, steps back from his own mihrab to offer the imamate to the prophet. Isa declines the prayer: "No, you lead; Allah has honored this ummah: none shall lead it but its own." The last empire of justice ends its first morning with a king who tried to give away his place. That is the measure of the man, and the Codex's answer to every false mahdi who reached for a throne instead.