Another text written before the Fatimids officially ascended to power, the Kitāb al-rushd wa-l- hidāya (Book of righteousness and true guidance), concerns the imminent reappearance of the Mahdī. Wladimir Ivanow wrote that ‘the work is full of the intense spirit of expectations of the Mahdī the promised messiah in the person of the last and seventh Nāṭiq.’ My discussion of the text illustrates some of the modalities of taʾwīl that help convey this intense mahdist spirit. Among these modalities, numerological correspondences figure prominently in creating a sense of mahdist expectation by correlating certain chapters of the Quran to the awaited mahdī.

The author of the text also uses numerical correspondences to re-signify various Quranic terms, which when properly deciphered, point to key figures in the Fatimid hierarchy. The hermeneutics of numerological correspondence are coupled with a theme that we witnessed in the last chapter: the re-signification of the end of time and its attributes as the mahdī and his arrival; this work thus creates, as in the Kitāb al-kashf, a powerful appeal to join and work for the true cause.

Numerical correspondences occur throughout the Kitāb al-rushd – a feature we find commonly in writings from this period and beyond. Here the most prominent numerical correspondence is the correlation between certain chapters of the Quran that correspond to Muḥammad and the following chapters that correspond to the mahdī. This correspondence results in a reading of the text that oscillates, symbolically, between the past and the awaited future, between Muḥammad and the awaited eschatological figure. For instance, our author writes that Sura 24 begins a new heptad of chapters; the sura after that, Surat al-Furqān (25), directly mentions Muḥammad. Our author counts six more suras after this, and states that the seventh, in this example Sura 32, refers to the mahdī. This reading of the Quran is then fused to the hermeneutic feature we witnessed earlier in the Kitāb al-kashf: the taʾwīl of various Quranic descriptions of the end of time, which now refer to the mahdī and his advent. These two interpretive mechanisms and others that we see throughout the text unveil symbolic references to the Fatimid mahdī, his hierarchy and the elect community that will be rewarded at the end of time.