ʿUbayd Allāh al-Mahdī

…news of al-Shīʿī’s success reached ʿUbayd ʿAllāh al-Mahdī, the leader of the Ismāʿīlīs, at his headquarters at Salamiyya, ʿUbayd disguised himself as a merchant and traveled toward northwest Africa. He was captured and jailed by the Khārijī emir of Sijilmāssa but was then rescued by al-Shīʿī in August 909. In…

…a Sijilmassa prison his imam, ʿUbayd Allāh, who declared himself the mahdī, using a multivalent word that could have quite different meanings for different constituencies. Some Muslims applied mahdī to any justice-restoring divinely guided figure; others, including many Jamāʿī-Sunnis, to the apocalyptic figure expected to usher in the millennium before…

…of the Ismāʿīliyyah in Salamyah, ʿUbayd Allāh Saʿid, entered Raqqādah in January 910.