A Study of the Narrations of Return in the Heritage of the First Century of the Twelfth Century

Return is a special Shiite belief according to which some righteous people will be resurrected after death to help the Promised Mehdi (PBUH) and also a group of evildoers will return to life to be punished and avenged for their injustices. In contrast to the Sunnis, who have claimed that this belief has no basis in Islam, the Shiites believe that this issue has been raised not only in the prophetic narrations, but also in the Qur’anic verses. The narrations received from the Prophet and the Imams are the most important Shiite documents in this regard, and even the verses are interpreted with the help of narrations. He considers this news to be frequent and considers it necessary to defend it by reading the belief in return. The colorful role of narrations in this regard led us to examine their documents and implications. But the large volume of these narrations on the one hand and the small space on the other hand, caused us to be satisfied with the oldest of them, that is, the surviving narrations from the first century. For this purpose, we collected not only the narrations of the Prophet and the first four Imams; Rather, we have collected the narrations that the later Imams have narrated from the Prophet and these four Imams, and as a result, they can be considered as part of the heritage of the first century, and we have evaluated their rijali and content. Based on the rijali criteria, we have placed the collected narrations in several correct and good categories, including the negligent, including the weak, including the unknown, including the weak and the unknown, and the messages. After reviewing, it became clear that despite the large number of narrations narrated from the first century, only a few of them are undamaged, and a very small number of them are acceptable after evaluating the meaning and content. It should be noted that this dissertation only deals with the narrations of the first century. Most of the narrations on the immediate return of the Imams of the second and third centuries, which are outside the scope of this dissertation. Therefore, no complete conclusion should be drawn from these few sheets; Rather, this article deals with only a small part of this great issue, and naturally the general result is obtained when the direct narrations of the Imams of the next two centuries are also examined.