Reviewing and Criticizing the Views of Joel Richardson in the Field of Mahdism

There are differences and similarities between the views of various religions and schools in regard with the “End Times” and the “Savior”. The scholars of each religion with the reference to all accepted sources in their own religion try to explain the religious views in this regard, and sometimes in the cases of dispute, they look at the other religions in relation to the salvation at the end of the time with a faultfinding proscription. In recent years, a flow of thought is formed amongst a group of Protestant Christians, which tries to prove a severe conflict between Islam and Christianity with regard to the event of the apocalypse and the appearance of the Savior. Among the leaders of this view is “Joel Richardson”, who has given a reasonable shape to this conflict by presenting his theory of “Islamic Antichrist” and his theory is widely welcome by some religious Christians. This article for the first step reviews Richardson’s thought background and the scenes behind the proposal and consolidation of his theory, assesses and evaluates his references to the religious sources of Christianity and Islam and his claims in this regard. Among the other subjects raised in this article are presenting the methodological and substantive faults of Richardson’s remarks, mentioning the positive and negative aspects of his research and verifying and inter-and-outer religiously criticizing his opinions specially his theory of Islamic Antichrist. The method used in this article is library-software and is written with a descriptive-analytic approach.