Besides the veneration of the Alids, orthodox Islâm has adopted another Shîitic element, the expectation of the Mahdî, which we have just mentioned. Most Sunnites expect that at the end of the world there will come from the House of Mohammed a successor to him, guided by Allah, who will maintain the revealed law as faithfully as the first four khalîfs did according to the idealized history, and who will succeed with God's help in making Islâm victorious over the whole world. That the chiliastic kingdom of the Mahdî must in the end be destroyed by Anti-Christ, in order that Jesus may be able once more to re-establish the holy order before the Resurrection, was a necessary consequence of the amalgamation of the political expectations formed under Shî'itic influence, with eschatological conceptions formerly borrowed by Islâm from Christianity. The orthodox Mahdî differs from that of the Shî'ah in many ways. He is not an _imâm_ returning after centuries of disappearance, but a descendant of Mohammed, coming into the world in the ordinary way to fulfill the ideal of the Khalifate. He does not re-establish the legitimate line of successors of the Prophet; but he renews the glorious tradition of the Khalifate, which after the first thirty years was dragged into the general deterioration, common to all human things. The prophecies concerning his appearance are sometimes of an equally supernatural kind as those of the Shîites, so that the period of his coming has passed more and more from the political sphere to which it originally belonged, into that of eschatology. Yet, naturally, it is easier for a popular leader to make himself regarded as the orthodox Mahdî than to play the part of the returned _imâm_. Mohammedan rulers have had more trouble than they cared for with candidates for the dignity of the Mahdî; and it is not surprising that in official Turkish circles there is a tendency to simplify the Messianic expectation by giving the fullest weight to this traditional saying of Mohammed "There is no mahdî but Jesus," seeing that Jesus must come from the clouds, whereas other mahdîs may arise from human society.