The Imami jurists do not know the path of the Ahl al-Bayt, neither in fundamentals nor in branches, except by conjecture
The jurists do not know the path of the Ahl al-Bayt—its fundamentals and its branches—except conjecturally. And whoever does not know cannot be a “path.” Moreover, the Ahl al-Bayt never deputized anyone to act on their behalf, and the Law (the Sharīʿa) has indicated nothing except the obligation to follow the Ahl al-Bayt. So whoever goes beyond the Law to follow the followers (Shiʿa) of the Ahl al-Bayt has gone beyond the Law; and whoever abandons decisive proofs for probabilistic ones—that is his lot!
The question was, and it is divided into two parts:
First part: Are the Akhbārīs among the Imāmīs the only ones who have weakened the reports that instruct people to refer to jurists—as a bequest of the Twelfth [Imām] during the period of occultation—or have the Uṣūlīs also weakened those reports? For the consequence is serious: it would mean that those jurists truly volunteered, on their own initiative, to act as deputies for the Absent [Imām], installed themselves in the place of the Ahl al-Bayt without the Ahl al-Bayt’s consent, and appointed themselves as authorities over the servants of God in the thought of the Ahl al-Bayt without an appointing authority—along with taking the khums and the Imām’s share, establishing a state in the name of the Imām, and exercising ijtihād in the reports and jurisprudence of their Imāms. This is among the gravest acts of presumption against God, His Messenger, and his Household—may God’s blessings be upon them.
Second part: Is the disagreement among jurists truly limited to matters of ijtihād, or does it extend to the foundational principles themselves?
With regard to the first part:
The Akhbārīs were not alone in weakening the reports by which the Imāmīs argue for the obligation to refer to jurists, or upon which they relied in granting the jurist the rank of deputation on behalf of the Imām. Rather, the Uṣūlīs also shared this position. Accordingly, presuming authority on behalf of the Absent [Imām], assuming the station of representation, undertaking the role of deputation, and even granting the right to exercise ijtihād and to reconcile ambiguous and conflicting reports—all of this lacks any proof they can stand upon. Nor is there proof binding the community to refer to them as deputies or authorities speaking in the name of the Ahl al-Bayt. Thus, there has been no present Ahl al-Bayt for twelve centuries, and there are no jurists with legitimate authority to assume the role of deriving rulings from them during the period of occultation—except by their own self-appointment. Whoever is in such a position has overstepped the Law, which commands adherence to the very Ahl al-Bayt themselves, and has instead followed opinion, whim, and personal preference by following men who are merely followers of the Ahl al-Bayt.
Among those Uṣūlīs who weakened the reports commanding recourse to jurists during the occultation as a bequest of the Twelfth [Imām] are the following:
- Sayyid Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Ḥakīm, the Uṣūlī, states that all of them are weak:
“Yes, a general implication may be derived from the noble signed letter (tawqīʿ): ‘As for the events that occur, refer regarding them to the transmitters of our traditions, for they are my proof over you, and I am God’s proof.’ And likewise what is reported in al-Iḥtijāj: ‘As for whoever among the jurists safeguards himself, preserves his religion, opposes his desires, and obeys the command of his Master, then the common people may follow him.’ And what is reported from Abū al-Ḥasan, peace be upon them: ‘Rely in your religion upon every elder among those devoted to us, long-standing in our affair.’
However, one may object to the first on the grounds that the referral to transmitters is for receiving the narration from them, not for receiving the rulings they have derived from it. Moreover, there is objection to all of them due to weakness of chain—especially the latter two—and the lack of clarity that their weakness is remedied by the practice of the companions or their presumed agreement on the ruling, given the strong possibility that they relied on other proofs. Therefore, there is no room to depend upon them for deriving general applicability.” - Sayyid al-Khuʾī, the Uṣūlī, says regarding the report of Tafsīr al-ʿAskarī:
“Then discussion of the concept of taqlīd hardly yields any juristic consequence, except perhaps in vows, since it does not appear in any of the narrations. Yes, it does appear in a report in al-Iḥtijāj: ‘As for whoever among the jurists… then the common people may follow him,’ but it is a mursal report and not fit to be relied upon.” - Al-Khuʾī also states:
“The narration is weak in chain, because the tafsīr attributed to al-ʿAskarī—peace be upon him—has not been established through a reliable route, and its chain contains a number of unknown transmitters.” - And al-Khuʾī says concerning the signed letter (tawqīʿ):
“As for ‘the events that occur, refer regarding them to the transmitters of our traditions…’—it is deficient both in chain and in indication. As for the chain, due to the unknown status of Ibn ʿIṣām and likewise Isḥāq b. Yaʿqūb; and as for the indication, due to the ambiguity of what is meant by ‘the events that occur,’ for several meanings are possible.” - Regarding the report from Tafsīr al-ʿAskarī, Sayyid al-Khomeini, the Uṣūlī, says:
“In sum, the context of the narration concerns speculative taqlīd, of which some forms may be repudiated and others commanded to be acted upon; committing oneself to the permissibility of taqlīd in fundamentals, or in some of them, is—as you see—untenable. Thus, the narration, with its weakness of chain and confusion of text, is not fit to constitute proof.” - And regarding the signed letter commanding recourse to the transmitters of traditions, al-Khomeini says:
“Interpreting it as proof for the authority of the transmitted reports via them is contrary to the apparent meaning. Moreover—besides the weakness of the tawqīʿ’s chain—the beginning of it has not reached us.” - Al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī, while speaking on the foundations of the Uṣūlīs (not the Akhbārīs) and what those foundations entail according to their own principles, says:
“Furthermore, this ḥadīth is not permissible—according to the Uṣūlīs—to rely upon in fundamentals or in branches, because it is a solitary, mursal report, speculative in chain and text, weak in their view, and opposed by what is mutawātir and definitive in chain and indication. Moreover, it may be interpreted as taqiyya.”
Yes—indeed! All of these figures are either Uṣūlīs or are speaking on the basis of Uṣūlī principles. What is astonishing after this is that even those who may authenticate this report still take the khums from the wealth of the Imāmī Shiʿa—despite the report concerning the Twelfth [Imām] exempting them from it. This is part of the same report:
“As for the events that occur, refer regarding them to the transmitters of our traditions, for they are my proof over you, and I am God’s proof over you… As for those who handle our wealth, whoever deems lawful any part of it and consumes it, he is only consuming fire. And as for the khums, it has been permitted to our Shiʿa until the time of the appearance of our affair, so that their births may be pure and not corrupted.”
So reflect upon that audacity toward people’s wealth for decades—or centuries! And is the Twelfth [Imām] truly satisfied with their deputizing themselves on his behalf and taking the wealth of his subjects in his name?
– If it is said: Have you not overlooked the reports from before the Occultation in which the Imams urged people to ask the jurists?
– We reply: All reports from before the Occultation are not our subject here, due to the decisive difference between the two contexts. The reports from before the Occultation concern present Imams, and jurists who were commanded to issue verdicts by narration, and forbidden to issue verdicts by opinion or ijtihād, or regarding matters they did not know to be the actual statements of their Imams. Moreover, they were able to reach the present Imams, and to send messengers to them to ask and seek clarification. Even if we were, in principle, to authenticate the reports from before the Occultation—though a number of them are weak—we are speaking at the strongest possible level of argument.
There is no equivalence whatsoever between that situation and the jurists after the Occultation. For the Twelfth [Imam] did not validly assign them to ijtihād and issuing legal rulings, nor to deputize on his behalf after the deputies (the envoys); otherwise, the institution of deputation would not have ceased. Nor did he authorize them to establish a state in his stead, nor to seize religious dues, nor to permit themselves to become the very embodiment of the thought of the Ahl al-Bayt and their doctrine within the community—especially when they operate only on conjecture, indeed on mere illusion.
Nor are the two situations comparable, because the jurists after the Occultation do not know the words of their Imams except conjecturally and with laxity; hence they differed among themselves in a gross and extreme manner in both fundamentals and branches, to the point that some declared others misguided. Their turmoil over the number of days in the month of Ramadan and their mutual recriminations are but one example of this. As for their principles and foundations, these are known to the informed observer, while they are ignored by the partisan or the one deceived. Moreover, the jurists after the Occultation have had no path to the Absent [Imam] for twelve centuries by which to present their views, ask questions, or seek correctness when confusion arises.
Therefore, only one ignorant of the principles of his own companions, and unaware of how issues are properly handled, would equate the reports from before the Occultation with those after it—such as one who seeks to multiply reports when he finds that the Twelfth [Imam] cut off deputation, did not obligate the community to refer to jurists, and did not obligate jurists to install themselves in the place of the Ahl al-Bayt in exposition. And what exposition is this?! Exposition of matters that they themselves are certainly ignorant of with respect to the statements and beliefs of the Ahl al-Bayt. You will encounter evidence of their disagreements and turmoil.
Furthermore, if the return is to the narrations themselves rather than to the jurists, that constitutes an even greater rupture, for it is the darkest of transmitted legacies—such that no investigator can derive the reported teachings from them without those teachings being contradicted by other reports.
As with regard for the second part:
Its answer is that whoever reduces the disagreement among jurists to merely ijtihād-based differences is undoubtedly deluded, lacking proper attainment, or engaging in deception. There is no remaining principle, discipline, jurisprudence, or material of ijtihād in which they have not differed—so much so that an observer from within their own heritage does not know with certainty what the actual position of the Ahl al-Bayt is. This is the state of the disagreements among the jurists who claim to be deputies of the Twelfth [Imam]. The jurists themselves did not know the principles or jurisprudence of their Imams so as to guide others to them. One who lacks access to the Ahl al-Bayt except through his own opinion and reasoning cannot guide to them with certainty.
How then, when you know that among them there occurred mutual accusations of misguidance, judgments of ritual impurity against one another, cual, curses, severing of communal prayer between them, and even the writing of works refuting and overturning one another—while all of them speak in the name of the narrations of the Twelve?! Meanwhile, the Twelfth of the Ahl al-Bayt is absent, exercising no clarifying role among them, no function, and no manifest effect of guidance or infallibility—for twelve centuries.
We will demonstrate to you that their disagreement is not confined to ijtihād-based matters, and we will convey this in the words of both the Uṣūlīs and the Akhbārīs alike. As for the Akhbārīs, the Uṣūlīs are unable to nullify them, for the Akhbārīs advance the same claim as the Uṣūlīs: adherence to the narrations of the fathers of the Twelfth and to their guidance—and that misguidance does not apply to them as Akhbārīs, but rather applies to the Uṣūlīs.
At that point, there remain no reports from the fathers of the Twelfth that yield knowledge except that they have differed over them; no jurists except that they have differed in understanding them or in authenticating or weakening them; and no present Ahl al-Bayt. What then remains is the ḥadīth of al-Thaqalayn, obligating the community to hold fast to the Ahl al-Bayt—not to jurists in such a condition. And jurists in such a condition, lacking any legitimate authority to delve into the sciences of the Ahl al-Bayt, nonetheless elevate one belief, principle, or ruling and diminish another, presenting it to the community as though it were the statement of the Ahl al-Bayt. You will then see that the matter of disagreement goes beyond the divide of Uṣūlism and Akhbārism altogether.
Disagreement of Imami jurists and the alleged deputies of the Mahdi in the fundamentals of religion (creed):
Al-Waḥīd al-Bihbahānī says:
“In sum, it appears that the early scholars were also divided in theological (uṣūlī) matters. Something might be considered by some of them to be corrupt, disbelief, extremism (ghulūw), delegation (tafwīḍ), compulsion (jabr), anthropomorphism (tashbīh), or the like, while for others it was something that must be believed—or neither this nor that.”
[Kulliyyāt fī ʿIlm al-Rijāl, p. 430]
Shaykh al-Mamqānī said:
“Indeed, most of what is today counted among the necessities of the school concerning the attributes of the Imams—peace be upon them—was regarded in earlier times as extremism (ghulūw).”
[Tanqīḥ al-Maqāl fī Aḥwāl al-Rijāl, 2/305]
And he also says:
“As we have pointed out in the twenty-fifth note, it is clear that the early scholars used to regard as extremism and exaggeration many things that we today count as necessities of the Shiʿi doctrine regarding their Imams—peace be upon them.”
[Tanqīḥ al-Maqāl, 2/377]
Al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā, giving eyewitness testimony and speaking from within the Qummī works themselves—and the Qummīs are pillars and mainstays of Imāmī thought and ḥadīth—says:
“Indeed, all the Qummīs, without exception, except Abū Jaʿfar b. Bābawayh—may God have mercy on him—were, until recently, anthropomorphists and determinists; and their books and writings testify to that and speak of it.”
[Rasāʾil al-Murtaḍā, 3/310]
Disagreement of Imami jurists and the alleged deputies of the Mahdi in the principles of jurisprudence (foundations of legal rulings):
Sayyid Baḥr al-ʿUlūm said:
“The disagreement of jurists in the foundations of rulings does not necessitate disregarding their opinions, because they—both early and later—have differed in the principles upon which subsidiary rulings are built, such as their disagreement over solitary reports (khabar al-wāḥid), istiṣḥāb, implications (mafāhīm), and other issues of legal theory, to the extent that we do not find two of them agreeing in all the issues of uṣūl.”
[al-Fawāʾid al-Rijāliyya, 3/222]
Disagreement of Imami jurists and the alleged deputies of the Mahdi in legal rulings (fiqh):
Shaykh al-Ṭūsī, mentioning that there is virtually nothing in which the community has not differed, says:
“Among the things that also indicate the permissibility of acting upon the reports we have mentioned is the disagreement that has appeared among the rightly guided faction as a result of acting upon them. For I found them holding divergent schools in legal rulings: one issues a verdict that his companion does not, across all chapters of jurisprudence—from purity to the chapters of blood-money—acts of worship, rulings, transactions, inheritances, and others. Examples include their disagreement over counting [the days] and sighting in fasting; their disagreement over whether pronouncing three divorces counts as one or not; their disagreement in matters of purity and the amount of water that is not rendered impure by anything, including their disagreement over the measure of the kurr; their disagreement over using fresh water for wiping the head and feet; their disagreement over the maximum duration of post-natal bleeding; their disagreement over the number of phrases in the call to prayer and the iqāma; and other disagreements throughout the chapters of jurisprudence—so much so that no chapter is free from issues in which I found the scholars of the community differing, or issuing divergent verdicts.”
[ʿUddat al-Uṣūl, 1/136]
Al-Fayḍ al-Kāshānī, speaking about the disagreement among his own associates, says:
“All of that became a cause for the great increase of disagreement among them [that is, among the jurists and scholars of the Imāmīs], its continual growth night and day, and the expansion of its scope across eras and ages—until it reached the point that you see them differing in a single issue with twenty opinions, or thirty, or more. Indeed, if I wished, I could say: there is no subsidiary issue left in which they have not differed, or differed in some of its aspects.”
[al-Wāfī, 1/16]
Disagreement of Shiʿi jurists and the alleged deputies of the Mahdi concerning the reports of legal rulings (and the weakness of most of them):
The leading Uṣūlī, al-Waḥīd al-Bihbahānī, says that only a tenth of a tenth of their jurisprudence from the Ahl al-Bayt has come through a sound chain:
“There is no doubt about the invalidity of the objection, for it would entail closing the door to establishing jurisprudence altogether. For there is no doubt that nine-tenths of a tenth of jurisprudence has not come through a sound report; and even that portion which has come through a sound report does not escape numerous defects—whether in chain, in text, in indication, or due to contradiction with another sound report, or with the Qurʾān, or with consensus, or other factors—as we have pointed out in the Fawāʾid.”
[al-Fawāʾid al-Ḥāʾiriyya, p. 488]
Disagreement of Shiʿi jurists and the alleged deputies of the Mahdi concerning the Qurʾān itself (incomplete or complete):
Shaykh Yūsuf al-Baḥrānī said:
“As for the reports indicating what we have chosen regarding the occurrence of alteration and omission, among them are those narrated in al-Kāfī… I say: it is not hidden what there is in these reports of explicit indication and clear expression of what we have chosen and the clarity of what we have said. And if criticism were to be admitted against these reports—despite their abundance and wide circulation—then criticism could likewise be admitted against the reports of the religious law in their entirety, as is not hidden; for the principles are one, as are the chains, the transmitters, the teachers, and the narrators.”
[al-Durar al-Najafiyya min al-Muqtaṭafāt al-Yūsufiyya, 4/72–84]
Shaykh al-Majlisī said:
“It is not hidden that this report—and many other authentic reports—are explicit regarding the deficiency of the Qurʾān and its alteration. In my view, the reports in this chapter are mutawātir in meaning, and discarding all of them would necessitate removing reliance on reports altogether. Rather, it seems to me that the reports in this chapter are no less than the reports of the Imamate—so how do they establish that [doctrine] by report?”
[Mirʾāt al-ʿUqūl, 12/525]
Disagreement of Imami jurists and the alleged deputies of the Mahdi in ḥadīth and its terminology (the principles governing reports—authentication and weakening):
- Shaykh Yūsuf al-Baḥrānī says:
“You are well aware that we are in distress because of the very foundation of this terminology, which is closer to corruption than to rectification. For what it entails—if its adherents were consistent with it—is the corruption of the Sharīʿa, and it could even lead to grievous innovations. That is because when what is ‘weak’ by their terminology—especially when the ‘reliable’ (muwaththaq) is added to it, as practiced in al-Madārik—is not a legal proof but rather falsehood and fabrication, while what remains of the ‘sound’ and ‘good’ does not suffice them except for a small portion of rulings, then to whom do they refer for the remaining legal rulings—especially their foundations, and the virtues of the Imams, their infallibility, the exposition of their merits and miracles, and the like? If you examine Uṣūl al-Kāfī and similar works, you will find that most—or the majority—of it falls into this very category that they have discarded. Hence you see a number of them, due to the constriction of the matter, departing from their own terminology in many places and cloaking themselves with unsound excuses. If this is the case with the very foundation of this terminology, then what of the terminology of the author of al-Muntaqā and his restricting ‘sound’ to what he specified? This is nothing but manifest heedlessness. The obligation is either to accept these reports as our righteous early scholars did, or else it is a different religion and another Sharīʿa—deficient and incomplete—due to the absence of proof for many of its rulings. And I do not see them committing to either of the two, though there is no third option between them. This, by God’s praise, is clear to every fair observer who is neither obstinate nor contentious.”
[Ṭarāʾif al-Maqāl by al-Burūjirdī, 3/395]
- You also know that the most prominent books of the Imāmīs and their relied-upon authorities are the Four Books, the books of the three Muḥammads: al-Kāfī by Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī; Man Lā Yaḥḍuruhu al-Faqīh by Ibn Bābawayh Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Qummī (Shaykh al-Ṣadūq); and Tahdhīb al-Aḥkām and al-Istibṣār by Shaykh al-Ṭūsī Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan. These were judged sound by them and by a group of Imāmī scholars, and were relied upon by the Uṣūlīs. Yet al-ʿAllāma al-Burūjirdī, describing the so-called sound reports therein, says:
“The claim of the Muḥammads that everything in their books is sound is untenable—especially when one observes that they included weak reports in them, indeed more of them. Perhaps the truly sound and reliable reports included in those books are like a white hair on a black cow. We have exhaustively examined this in our responses to the Akhbārīs in the treatise on the probativity of conjecture, and in my work al-Jāmiʿ li’l-Maqāṣid.”
[Ṭarāʾif al-Maqāl, 2/308]
Does not the researcher—while the Ahl al-Bayt are absent—see how the path of certainty or even confidence regarding fundamentals and jurisprudence has become blocked, if this is the state of the books of the early scholars and their rulings? They were the closest to the age of direct perception, the nearest to the early sources and ancient compilations, and possessed the highest chains of transmission. So where does one place his religion on a path in which certainty and confidence toward reaching the Ahl al-Bayt are obstructed? Indeed, this has been reflected even among the early Imāmī jurists, as Shaykh al-Ṭūsī explicitly stated regarding the reality of their disagreements—as I cited from him earlier.
Conclusion
Has God—exalted is He, God forbid—failed to preserve His religion through the Ahl al-Bayt as He informed us, such that these disputing figures—differing in fundamentals, branches, and even concerning the Book of God—become the rulers over the community, the Book, and the Ahl al-Bayt through their selections and interpretations? If you say “through an infallible,” then produce him present with his miracle. And if we say “through the Ahl al-Bayt,” consisting of those for whom disagreement is possible, along with a consensus in their comprehensive fundamentals and branches while differing in ijtihād-based matters—then we follow an Ahl al-Bayt we can point to, present and not absent.
If God’s religion is to be entrusted to Shiʿi figures in such a state, then no jurist can declare another jurist mistaken except that the latter sees himself as more entitled to represent the Ahl al-Bayt than the former. When he—peace and blessings be upon him and his family—said: “As long as you hold fast to them, you will never go astray after me: the Book of God and my Ahl al-Bayt,” he did not say: “and the followers of my Ahl al-Bayt.” Whoever takes his religion from those in such a condition has chosen for himself what he has chosen; yet certainly he will remain lost, unable to reach certainty in fundamentals or branches—beginning with those darkened reports.
It is not said: “It suffices that we follow the Twelve.” For this fragility in the Imāmī intellectual system—founded upon a darkened hadith corpus—is what established the report of the Twelve, and it is what proved from within itself that, in the period before the Occultation, the jurists did not know this Twelver report fabricated after the Occultation. Nor is it known that the Ahl al-Bayt authenticated for these jurists and transmitters their methodology or their Twelver reports—neither during the Occultation, nor regarding infallibility. All of that remains mere claim and circularity.
For the assertion that it suffices to follow the reports of the fathers of the Twelfth despite juristic disagreement presupposes the establishment of the reports of these jurists and transmitters from the fathers of the Mahdi. Yet these jurists are themselves divided and unsettled in their evidentiary methodologies—both in transmission and in principles. Thus understand that, as a legally responsible person, you are devoid of reliable reports from the fathers of the Twelfth that yield certainty—except by being deceived by sheer abundance of reports. And such abundance would oblige you to affirm alteration and deficiency of the Qurʾān, for those are reports as well—comparable, as al-Majlisī the expert says, to the reports of the Imamate in their implications of explicit designation and the like. At that point, you as a responsible believer would be left without a Qurʾān, just as you have already been left without a present Ahl al-Bayt and without reliable reports.
If it is said: “Then agree that the purport of the ḥadīth of al-Thaqalayn is the infallibility of each individual of the Ahl al-Bayt.” We reply: Who said that the jurists and companions of the Imams agreed upon that? The Qummīs and the Iskāfīs held otherwise; and most of the companions of the Imāmī Imams in their times did not believe in the infallibility of their Imams. This entails that there were no explicit designations. Hence al-Shahīd al-Thānī says, describing that majority:
“It is not far-fetched to suffice with the latter, judging by what appears from the state of their transmitters and their Shiʿi contemporaries in the reports from them—peace be upon them—for many of them did not believe in their infallibility due to its obscurity to them. Rather, they believed them to be righteous scholars. This is known to whoever traces their biographies and reports; and in the book of Abū ʿAmr al-Kashshī—may God have mercy on him—there are passages clearly indicating this, despite the well-known fact from their conduct—peace be upon them—with such people that they judged them to be believers, indeed upright.”
[Ḥaqāʾiq al-Īmān, p. 150]
So leave aside the Mufīdī position that Shaykh al-Mufīd selected as the doctrine of the Imāmīs from the views of extremist Rāfiḍīs in the time of the Imams and from the fabrications of extremists, and then made it the doctrine of today’s Imāmīs.
If it is said: “But reason necessitates the existence of an infallible.” We reply: That is your sectarian reason. And I demonstrate that it is sectarian reason by noting that for twelve centuries you have been empty of the very purposes of infallibility in the Ahl al-Bayt that would return benefit to the community. Reason does not necessitate an infallible in every age unless there is a real, concrete role for which divine wisdom would require him—in our case, benefiting the community—otherwise it would be purposeless. How can your reason affirm the fruit of that infallibility in the state of the absent one, given the condition of his followers and jurists—who are the most divided and darkened in transmitted heritage—while at the same time they exceed others by claiming the existence of an infallible in the age? That is more astonishing still, given their state and their disagreements.
Yes! When a legally responsible person (the mukallaf) understands this, and emerges from the illusion that the existence of an infallible is obligatory—and that such an obligation has no real instance in the domain of consistent, concrete rational necessity, nor any fruit that would validate the cause of such an alleged rational obligation—while the reports on the matter are weak due to the weakness of that hadith heritage and that intellectual methodology founded upon contradictory, subjective understandings, all of which claim to represent the standards of the descendants of al-Ḥusayn (peace be upon them); then, when the mukallaf comprehends this and knows that God is exalted above obligating the community to cling to an Ahl al-Bayt whose condition is such, and to jurists who volunteer themselves as deputies on their behalf, and to a fragmented intellectual methodology that produces foundational and juristic rupture—then that mukallaf will be able to understand other theories held by the rest of the Muslims, such as the Zaydīs and others.
But as long as infallibility and occultation stand before his eyes with such conjectural—indeed illusory—supports, how could he understand otherwise? For he has reduced the religion and the ḥadīth of al-Thaqalayn to mere existence, infallibility, and occultation, and did not realize that the religion and the ḥadīth of al-Thaqalayn aim to obligate the community to hold fast—with certainty—to the very Ahl al-Bayt themselves: present, not absent; known in belief and practice; established within the community, fulfilling the duties of the Imamate, and sought by whoever seeks them.
“The earth is never without an Imam, so that if the believers add something, he corrects them, and if they omit something, he completes it for them.”
[Uṣūl al-Kāfī, 1/178]
And:
“Does the earth ever lack a living, manifest scholar from among you, to whom people can turn in their lawful and unlawful matters?” He replied: “O Abū Yūsuf! No. Indeed, that is clear in the Book of God, the Exalted.” He said: ‘O you who believe, be patient and persevere … and remain stationed with your Imam…’
[Baṣāʾir al-Darajāt, p. 507]
Otherwise, it would amount to imposing an obligation beyond capacity. It suffices for anyone examining this epistemic rupture to read the encyclopedic Biḥār al-Anwār, printed in more than one hundred volumes, and then observe that Shaykh Āṣif Muḥsinī—one of the jurists of the second, absent Twelfth—states that less than five percent of it is authentic, due to the contradictions in its reports and doctrines. Add to this the doctrine of taqiyya within that Imāmī intellectual system, whose foundation implies deliberate misdirection by the Ahl al-Bayt toward the community—while they are supposed to be the revealers of the words of God and His Messenger.
Whoever frees himself from all of this becomes liberated from constraints and more capable of understanding the positions of non-Imāmīs. Without that, he will remain captive to his illusions; his illusion will never be repaired, no matter what, and he will continue to imagine that he is following the reports of the fathers of the Twelfth—while those reports have in fact emerged from the crucible of jurists whose methodologies and principles are internally contradictory. He will continue to imagine that he is following rational proof for the necessity of an infallible for the community, even though the community has no definitive path to that infallible, nor to the knowledge of his forefathers.
Then he contradicts his own rational judgment by claiming that God Himself—out of wisdom—concealed that Imam whose existence is supposedly obligatory upon God as an infallible for the sake of the community! This is absurdity itself. Far exalted is God above that. Rather, this arises from weak rational premises produced by the reports of extremists and that dark hadith legacy.
And God is the One whose help is sought.
May God grant you success.
O God, send blessings and peace upon Muḥammad and upon the family of Muḥammad.
Translation of Ustadh Kadhim Al Zaydi (May Allah reward him)