The Role of Narrative Changes in the Transformation of Some Teachings of Mahdism

The abundance of hadiths related to Mahdism, compared to many other subjects and topics, is impressive and worthy of attention. The narration of these narratives in various periods, despite the insistence and orders of the Fourteen Infallibles, on the accurate narration of the narratives, sometimes due to some factors including personal motivations, environmental factors and the phenomenon of deviant sects, have undergone some changes in the document and the text of the hadiths. These transformations have been mainly in the form of narration of meaning, Tas-hif (a change that takes place on the alphabets either in the document or text like a mistake in the change among the alphabets or the dots), distortion, scansion and the like. The two key questions in this article are - how much of the existing narratives are definitely the words of the Fourteen Infallibles? And how much the possible changes in the narrative have played a role in the formation and transformation of the teachings of Mahdism? It seems that although these changes in the document and the text of the hadiths did not lead to much change in the content of many narratives, some of the existing teachings were the result of some changes. The findings of this study can have a significant role in determining the amount of documentary and textual changes in the narratives and measuring their relationship with the content changes in the existing teachings of Mahdavi and provide the context for valuable and essential discussions in the scientific study of these changes.