Epistemology of Hadith about AL-Mahdi: Analytical Study of the Book "is Imam Mahdi's Discourse Real?"

Epistemology is a part of the Philosophy of Science which is tasked with discussing the sources, validity and authenticity of science. If applied in Hadith Science, epistemology can be used as a way to find out and obtain narrative sources of hadith texts about al-Mahdi, which is the focus of this research. For this reason, this research aims to explore the source, validity and authenticity of al-Mahdi's hadith. This type of research is qualitative with descriptive analysis of library objects. The main source in this research is Dadi Herdiansah's written work entitled Discourse of Imam Mahdi Realitakah?, a book that is widely read by people in Indonesia. The data collection technique used was direct observation of the book accompanied by a study of supporting literature. The research results found that hadith epistemology can be applied in studying hadith texts about al-Mahdi. In the hadiths about al-Mahdi contained in the book, it was found that there were six lines of sanad (links connecting to the text of the hadith) collected by six narrators or rawi (people who transferred or narrated hadiths to others) from among the friends of the Prophet, who indicated marfu' (relying on the Prophet) and mentioned the word "al-Mahdi" in the sentence text (matan) in the hadith. Then, in order to achieve the validity of the authenticity of the hadith, the author of the book used “a coherent theory” which then discovered that there were several hadith transmitters whose position was weak (dho'if) who contradicted other transmitters who were stronger so that the hadith that went through the weak transmission route became rejected.