يَا أَهْلَ الْكِتَابِ لَا تَغْلُوا فِي دِينِكُمْ وَلَا تَقُولُوا عَلَى اللَّهِ إِلَّا الْحَقَّ ۚ إِنَّمَا الْمَسِيحُ عِيسَى ابْنُ مَرْيَمَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ

“O People of the Book, do not go to excess in your religion, and do not say of God other than the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, is only the Messenger of God.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Nisa (the Chapter of the Women) #4, Verse 171

A Verse About People Who Loved a Prophet Too Much

I want you to notice what that verse is actually about.

It is the verse in the Qur’an that forbids religious excess.

If you have ever heard somebody quote a verse at you about going too far, it is very likely this one.

And look at what follows it.

It is not about a statue.

It is not about a stone.

It is not about people who hated God and wanted an idol instead.

It is about people who loved a prophet.

They loved Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return.

They loved him truly.

And the verse does not tell them to stop loving him.

Read it again and see what it actually forbids:

The prohibition is not on the affection.

The prohibition is on the claim.

That word — ghuluww — means to go past the limit of a thing.

Not to have a thing.

To go past it.

You can go past the limit of praise, of grief, of loyalty, of love.

And the Qur’an’s own example of it, chosen by God to teach us what the word means, is not a people who despised a prophet.

It is a people who could not stop raising one.

Now hold that, and let me ask you something, and I am not going to answer it yet.

Is that a verse about somebody else?

The Sentence That Has No Good Answer

Last week we went into other people’s houses and we read their books, and we found that everyone who ever took this question seriously attached a limit to it.

We did that honestly.

We refused the cheap points that were available to us, and we did not take a single one.

Tonight I have to do the harder half, and I am going to start by saying the thing that is said about us in the sharpest form I know how to say it.

Not a soft version.

Not a version I have already quietly beaten before you hear it.

Here it is.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because it is not stupid.

It is not a slogan.

A serious person can say that sentence and mean it.

And if the only answer we have is how dare you, then the person who said it will go home entirely unconvinced, and they will be right to.

And I will tell you why that objection has teeth, and it is not because the people making it are clever.

It is because a rule you cannot fail is not a rule.

Think about any actual standard you have ever been held to.

A speed limit.

A dose on a bottle.

The line on a form that says what you may and may not claim.

Every one of them has a case that breaks it.

That is what makes it a limit rather than a preference — you can point at the thing that would be over the line, and you can point at it before anybody has done it.

So when somebody asks this community where its line is, and the honest answer that comes back is well, it depends on the heart, they are not being unreasonable when they say:

I think they are wrong.

I am going to spend an hour showing you why they are wrong.

But they are not wrong because they are hostile, and if you leave here tonight thinking the only thing standing behind that question is malice, then I have wasted your evening.

So I am not going to answer it by being offended.

I am going to answer it by producing our limits.

And before I produce one, take the word — because it is not mine and it is not the objector’s.

The Qur’an has a term for a limit and it uses it constantly.

You will find it in the second chapter, Surah al-Baqarah, in the verse on the nights of the fast:

… تِلْكَ حُدُودُ اللَّهِ فَلَا تَقْرَبُوهَا …

“… Those are the limits of God, so do not come near them …”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 187

Here is what our own commentator says it means at its root.

أصل الحد هو المنع و إليه يرجع جميع استعمالاته و اشتقاقاته كحد السيف و حد الفجور و حد الدار و الحديد إلى غير ذلك

“The root of ḥadd is PREVENTION. Every use of it and every derivation returns to that: the ḥadd of a sword, the ḥadd of transgression, the ḥadd of a house, and ḥadīd — iron — and so on.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah #2, Verse 187

The edge of a blade.

The penalty that holds transgression back.

The boundary of a property.

And the word for iron.

That is the vocabulary God chose for a limit.

Not one word of it is soft, nothing in it moves, and nothing in it depends on how anybody feels.

So when somebody tells this community that its line is a mood — the Book they are holding us to has already answered them, and it answered them in metal.

And the Book does not leave the word abstract.

الطَّلَاقُ مَرَّتَانِ ۖ فَإِمْسَاكٌ بِمَعْرُوفٍ أَوْ تَسْرِيحٌ بِإِحْسَانٍ ۗ وَلَا يَحِلُّ لَكُمْ أَنْ تَأْخُذُوا مِمَّا آتَيْتُمُوهُنَّ شَيْئًا إِلَّا أَنْ يَخَافَا أَلَّا يُقِيمَا حُدُودَ اللَّهِ ۖ فَإِنْ خِفْتُمْ أَلَّا يُقِيمَا حُدُودَ اللَّهِ فَلَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْهِمَا فِيمَا افْتَدَتْ بِهِ ۗ تِلْكَ حُدُودُ اللَّهِ فَلَا تَعْتَدُوهَا ۚ وَمَنْ يَتَعَدَّ حُدُودَ اللَّهِ فَأُولَٰئِكَ هُمُ الظَّالِمُونَ

“Divorce is twice; then keep her honourably or release her with kindness. And it is not lawful for you to take back anything of what you have given them — unless the two of them fear that they will not keep within the limits of God. And if you fear that they will not keep within the limits of God, there is no blame on either of them in what she gives up to free herself. Those are the limits of God, so do not transgress them. And whoever transgresses the limits of God — those are the wrongdoers.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 229

Notice where God plants that phrase.

Not in a chapter on doctrine — in a marriage ending, among money and who keeps what.

A limit is not a thing you announce when you are feeling devotional.

It is a thing that holds when everything else has come apart.

And the word for the man who crosses — not mistaken, not unwise, but ẓālimūn, the wrongdoers — comes from the word we ended on last week,

So hold that against

We have the word, we have its root, and we have the name for the man who goes past it.

And one more thing, which settles the argument before it starts.

There is exactly one being in existence with no limit.

Not a scholar, not a saint, not an Imam.

One — and read what He does.

قُلْ لِمَنْ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۖ قُلْ لِلَّهِ ۚ كَتَبَ عَلَىٰ نَفْسِهِ الرَّحْمَةَ ۚ لَيَجْمَعَنَّكُمْ إِلَىٰ يَوْمِ الْقِيَامَةِ لَا رَيْبَ فِيهِ ۚ الَّذِينَ خَسِرُوا أَنْفُسَهُمْ فَهُمْ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ

“Say: to whom belongs what is in the heavens and the earth? Say: to God. He has written mercy upon Himself. He will surely gather you to the Day of Resurrection, in which there is no doubt. Those who have lost their own souls — they do not believe.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-An’am (the Chapter of the Cattle) #6, Verse 12

He owns everything in the heavens and the earth.

Nothing outside Him constrains Him, and nothing could.

And He put something in writing anyway, binding Himself, with nobody to enforce it.

So if the only unlimited being there is chose to bind Himself — then a community that says its Imams have no limit is not being generous to them.

It is saying something about them that God did not say about Himself.

And here is what I want you to watch for as I do.

Our limits are older than the objection.

They are sharper than anything the objector has ever proposed.

And — this is the part that costs us something, and it is the reason tonight is not a comfortable evening —

So let me give you the honest answer to the question in the title, and give it to you now rather than making you wait an hour for it.

Yes. It can.

It has — among people our Imams disowned.

We said so first.

Video of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Recap — What We Carry Forward

We are in The Architecture of Guidance, and this is the sixteenth part of it.

And inside it we are working through a smaller sequence called The House Beside the Grave.

Tonight is the eighth of those, and there are eleven.

Tonight is Wednesday the 30th of September 2026, and it is the 18th of Rabi al-Thani, of the year 1448.

What we carry forward is short.

From the seventy-fourth: the charge of idolatry, taken to its source and examined there, turns out never to have been a question about the oneness of God at all.

From the seventy-fifth, three things.

That every serious house which ever asked this question attached a limit to it.

That the adversary, when he described his own work, said he would sit on the straight path and not the crooked one — because there is no point ambushing a road nobody travels.

And a word we spent time on: zulm, which we are taught to hear as oppression, and which underneath means something simpler and stranger —

And there is one more sentence I left you with last week, and I left it deliberately, because it is tonight’s whole reason for existing.

If every system God gave can be corrupted — has ours been, at this particular point, and how would you know?

That is the night.

Three Corrections, One Afternoon

He Said It Himself, About Himself

I am going to start with one line, and it is not from a book of theology or a work of refutation.

It is from the collection of the sermons and letters and sayings of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him — Nahj al-Balagha, the Path of Eloquence, gathered about a thousand years ago by a scholar of Baghdad called Sayyed al-Radhi — who we met in session sixty-six, who went through everything that had come down and arranged it.

Saying number one hundred and seventeen.

It is one line long.

وَقَالَ (عليه السلام): هَلَكَ فِيَّ رَجُلَانِ مُحِبٌّ غَالٍ وَمُبْغِضٌ قَالٍ.

“Two men were destroyed on my account: one who loved me past the limit, and one who hated me past the limit.”

— Amir al-Mu’minin Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, gathered by Sayyed al-Radhi, Saying 117

Listen to which one he names first.

Not the enemy.

Not the one who fought him, not the one who cursed him from a pulpit, not the one who came at him with a sword at Siffin.

Those men exist and he knows exactly who they are.

He names the admirer first.

That word again, ghuluww, the same root as the verse we opened on.

The two words rhyme in the Arabic, which is why this line has been remembered for nearly fourteen centuries and why you will hear it quoted by people who have read nothing else.

Two ditches.

One road.

And the man in the middle of the road is telling you about both of them.

I want to be careful here, because there is a second version of this saying — the wording is slightly different, and in that one the second man is not a hater but a slanderer, somebody who makes things up.

وَقَالَ (عليه ‏السلام): يَهْلِكُ فِيَّ رَجُلاَنِ: مُحِبٌّ مُفْرِطٌ، وَبَاهِتٌ مُفْتَرٍ.

“Two men will be destroyed on my account: an excessive lover, and a slanderer who fabricates.”

— Amir al-Mu’minin Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, gathered by Sayyed al-Radhi, Saying 469

And the remarkable thing is that Sayyed al-Radhi, compiling the book, had both in front of him and said so on the page.

He did not quietly choose one and bury the other.

He wrote a note: this one is on the lines of that one.

قال السيد الرضي: وهذا مثل قوله (عليه ‏السلام): هَلَكَ فِيَّ رَجُلَانِ مُحِبٌّ غَالٍ ومُبْغِضٌ قَالٍ.

“Sayyed al-Radhi says: and this is like his saying, peace be upon him: two men were destroyed on my account — one who loved me past the limit, and one who hated me past the limit.”

— Sayyed al-Radhi, Nahj al-Balagha, his note after Saying 469

A thousand years ago, a man assembling one of our most famous books noticed he had two versions of a sentence and told his readers.

That is the house we are from.

Hold on to that, because later tonight it is going to matter.

And Then He Gives You the Road

Now the same man, on a different day, in a longer speech.

And the speech is addressed to the Khawarij.

I need to tell you who they were, in one sentence, because it changes everything about what you are about to hear.

The Khawarij were the faction that broke away from the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, and fought him — men of enormous religiosity, prayers all night, Qur’an memorised, and a certainty about their own correctness so total that they declared everybody outside their group an unbeliever.

They are the extreme on the far side.

They are the ones who went past the limit against him.

And he is standing in front of them.

And in the middle of telling them what they have done wrong, he says this:

وَسَيَهْلِكُ فِيَّ صِنْفَانِ: مُحِبٌّ مُفْرِطٌ يَذْهَبُ بِهِ الْحُبُّ إِلَى غَيْرِ الْحَقِّ، وَمُبْغِضٌ مُفْرِطٌ يَذْهَبُ بِهِ الْبُغْضُ إِلَى غَيْرِ الْحَقِّ، وَخَيْرُ النَّاسِ فِيَّ حَالاً النَّمَطُ الأَوْسَطُ فَالْزَمُوهُ، وَالْزَمُوا السَّوَادَ الاَعْظَم فَإِنَّ يَدَ اللهِ مَعَ الْجَمَاعَةِ، وَإِيَّاكُمْ وَالْفُرْقَةَ!

“Two classes will be destroyed on my account: an excessive lover, whose love carries him away from the truth, and an excessive hater, whose hatred carries him away from the truth. And the best of people in their standing toward me is the middle course — so hold fast to it; and hold to the great mass, for the hand of God is with the community; and beware of division!”

— Amir al-Mu’minin Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, gathered by Sayyed al-Radhi, Sermon 127, addressed to the Khawarij

He is saying this to the Khawarij — the men who had declared everybody outside their own ranks an unbeliever.

The great mass is everybody they had written off.

Do you see what he has done?

He is speaking to the people who hate him, and he warns them about the people who love him, and he uses exactly the same words for both.

Read the two clauses again.

Same verb.

Same destination.

He has not softened the one about his own supporters to make a point against his enemies, which is what every one of us would have done, and which is what politics is.

And notice what he has just told you about the nature of the fault.

He did not stop at too much.

He said the love carries you somewhere.

The problem is not only the size of the affection.

It is where it takes you, and the measure is al-haqq — the truth.

That is a far more useful thing to be told than steady on.

It means the question is not only

It is

— and the second is the one you can actually answer.

And then — and this is the part almost nobody quotes, because the rhyming line is more memorable — he gives you the road.

Two ditches, one road.

That has been the shape of this whole sub-series, and I want to be clear with you: it is not my framing.

I did not build it.

It is his, and it is in one sentence, and both ditches get the same verb and the road gets an imperative.

A Man Walks In to Check on Somebody Else

Now I want to take you into a house in Samarra, on one afternoon, in the middle of the third century after the Hijrah.

The record is in Kitab al-Ghayba — the Book of the Occultation — written by Shaykh al-Tusi, the man this entire sub-series is built around.

It is in his chapter on the evidence for the birth of the Master of the Age.

A man named Kamil ibn Ibrahim travels from Medina to see the eleventh Imam, Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace and blessings be upon him.

He has been sent.

He is a delegate.

And the book tells you who sent him — and this is the detail I want you to hold — he was sent by both sides.

By the ones who were making the Imams more than they are, and by the ones who were cutting them down below what they were.

And the two words the book uses are the two ditches, side by side in one line, before the story has even started.

وجه قوم من المفوضة والمقصرة كامل بن إبراهيم المدني إلى أبي محمد عليه السلام

“A people of the over-claimers and the under-claimers sent Kamil ibn Ibrahim al-Madani to Abu Muhammad, peace be upon him.”

— Abu Nu’aym Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Ansari, narrating; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216

One clause.

Both named.

Neither spared.

Two factions, at war with each other about the same house, and they pool their money and send one man between them to get a ruling.

So Kamil arrives with a question in his pocket.

It is not his question.

It is theirs.

But Kamil also has a question of his own — one nobody sent him with, one he has never said out loud to anybody, and one he has told himself he will ask.

Keep that in mind.

He is going to be corrected three times in one afternoon, and the question he came with is the last of the three.

The First Correction: Before He Has Even Sat Down

He is shown in.

And before a word of business is spoken, Kamil looks at the Imam and sees that he is wearing fine, soft clothing.

And a thought goes through him.

You know this thought.

He has been in the room for a matter of seconds and he has already made a judgement, on the evidence of his own eyes, about a man’s inner state.

And the Imam smiles at him.

Not a rebuke.

Not anger.

He smiles, and he pulls back his sleeve.

And underneath, against the skin, is coarse black haircloth.

Here is the whole of it, in the words Kamil used — his thought and the answer to it, together, because in the report they are barely a breath apart.

فقلت في نفسي:ولي الله وحجته يلبس الناعم من الثياب ويأمرنا نحن بمواساة الاخوان وينهانا عن لبس مثله!فقال متبسما: يا كامل، وحسر عن ذراعيه، فإذا مسح أسود خشن على جلده

“So I said within myself: the friend of God and His proof wears the soft of clothing, and commands us to share with our brothers, and forbids us from wearing the like of it! And he said, smiling: O Kamil — and he bared his forearms, and there was a coarse black haircloth against his skin.”

— Kamil ibn Ibrahim al-Madani, and Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216

And then the four words.

هذا لله وهذا لكم.

“This is for God, and this is for you.”

— Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216

That is the whole correction.

Four words in Arabic.

The man came to audit somebody else’s doctrine.

And the first thing that is taken away from him is his confidence about the thing he thought he could see with his own two eyes.

I am going to leave that there.

Do not let me tell you what to do with it.

The Second Correction: The Question He Never Asked

Now the unasked one.

Before he went in, Kamil had told himself — not aloud, to himself — that he would ask something like this:

Be honest about what that thought is.

It is not stupidity and it is not malice.

It is a man who holds correct positions and has come to the quiet conclusion that his correct positions are the door.

And a voice answers the question before it is spoken — from behind a curtain that the wind has just moved.

It is a child’s voice.

The report says he looked about four years old.

I am not going to hold back who he was, because this series does not do that: it is the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, and his own father will say so out loud before the afternoon is over.

جئت إلى ولي الله وحجته وبابه تسأله هل يدخل الجنة إلا من عرف معرفتك وقال بمقالتك؟ فقلت: إي والله. قال: إذن والله يقل داخلها.

“You came to the friend of God, His proof and His door, to ask him: does anyone enter the Garden except one who knows what you know and says what you say? I said: yes, by God. He said: then by God, few would enter it.”

— the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, from behind the curtain; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216

And then the voice tells him who does enter.

And it does not describe them the way you would expect a correction to describe them.

والله إنه ليدخلها قوم يقال لهم الحقية. قلت: يا سيدي ومن هم؟ قال: قوم من حبهم لعلي يحلفون بحقه ولا يدرون ما حقه وفضله

“By God, a people will enter it who are called al-Haqqiyya. I said: my master, and who are they? He said: a people who, out of their love for Ali, swear by his right — and do not know what his right is, nor his merit.”

— the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, from behind the curtain; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216

People who love the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him.

Who swear by his right.

And who could not tell you what his right actually is.

They are in.

People who love him, and swear by his right, and could not tell you what his right actually is.

They are in.

I want to be very careful with this, because it is the single most misusable sentence in tonight’s material and I am not going to hand it to you unguarded.

This is not

It cannot be, and I will show you why in ninety seconds, because the same voice is about to correct a doctrinal error using a verse of the Qur’an.

What it says is something narrower and much harder.

That is not an answer about doctrine.

That is an answer about you.

And it lands on a man who was, at that moment, quietly doing exactly what the two factions who sent him were doing at scale: using a position as a boundary fence, and standing inside it.

Remember the first saying I read you tonight.

Excessive love is in that sentence.

It is the first thing in it.

Nobody is telling you the love is the safe direction.

The love has to arrive somewhere true.

That is all.

And there is still a door.

The Third Correction: What He Actually Came to Ask

And only now — after his judgement of what he could see has been corrected, and after the question he never spoke has been answered — does the matter he was actually sent about get addressed.

وجئت تسأله عن مقالة المفوضة. كذبوا! بل قلوبنا أوعية لمشيئة الله، فإذا شاء شئنا، والله يقول:﴿وَمَا تَشَآؤُونَ إِلاَّ أَنْ يَشَآءَ اللهُ﴾.

“And you came to ask him about what the over-claimers say. They lied. Rather, our hearts are vessels for the will of God — when He wills, we will. And God says: ‘And you do not will except that God wills.’”

— the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, from behind the curtain; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216

Not

Not

And then look at what he does next, because this is the thing I most want you to take home from this report.

He does not settle it by authority.

He does not say because I say so, which he of all people could have said.

He grounds it in a verse.

وَمَا تَشَاءُونَ إِلَّا أَنْ يَشَاءَ اللَّهُ …

“And you do not will except that God wills …”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Insan (the Chapter of Man) #76, Verse 30

That is Surah al-Insan, the seventy-sixth chapter, verse thirty.

The man came to ask whether the Imams have independent power, and the Imam answers him out of the Book — the same Book the man has in his own house.

And then the wind drops, and the curtain goes back, and Kamil finds he cannot lift it again.

ثم رجع الستر إلى حالته فلم أستطع كشفه، فنظر إلي أبومحمد عليه السلام متبسما فقال: يا كامل، ما جلوسك وقد أنبأك بحاجتك الحجة من بعدي؟

“Then the curtain went back to how it had been, and I could not draw it aside. And Abu Muhammad, peace be upon him, looked at me, smiling, and said: O Kamil — why are you still sitting there? The Proof after me has already told you what you came for.”

— Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216

That is the father, naming his son, in a house the state had under watch.

And notice what he has just certified.

The answer that put the over-claimers in their place, and the answer that put a good man’s narrow door back to its proper width, did not come from the eleventh Imam.

They came from a four-year-old behind a curtain — and his father’s only comment is to ask the visitor why he is still sitting down.

So count them.

One man.

One afternoon.

Three corrections.

He was corrected about what he thought he saw, corrected about a thought he never spoke, and only then given the answer to the question he had travelled from Medina to ask.

And here is what I want you to notice about the order.

The question he was sent with — the doctrinal one, the one the two factions were fighting about — came last.

It was the least urgent thing in the room.

And Now the Hard Edge

I have given you a scene.

Now I owe you the ruling, because a scene can be explained away and a ruling cannot.

Imam al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him, the eighth of the Imams, was asked about this directly.

The record is in ʿUyun Akhbar al-Rida — the Sources of the Reports of al-Rida — a collection made by Shaykh al-Saduq, one of the great gatherers of our tradition, about a thousand years ago.

It is in the chapter on the proofs for the divine leaders and the rejection of the exaggerators.

And he answers in four words.

الْغُلَاةُ كُفَّارٌ وَالْمُفَوِّضَةُ مُشْرِكُونَ

“The exaggerators are disbelievers, and the over-claimers are associators.”

— Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Saduq, ʿUyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2, the chapter on the proofs for the divine leaders and the rejection of the exaggerators, report 4

I want you to hear what has just happened.

That word — shirk, associating something with God — is the word that is used at us.

It is the accusation.

It is the thing that is painted on us from a thousand pulpits and a hundred thousand videos:

And here is an Imam of our house, twelve hundred years before any of those videos existed, using that same word about our own people.

Not about outsiders.

Not about another community.

About men who claimed too much for him and for his fathers.

The accusation is not new to us.

The category is not new to us.

And we did not need to be told.

And he does not stop there.

The same report goes straight on, in the same breath, and it becomes a list — eleven things — and I am going to give you all eleven, because the force of this one is in how ordinary the first ten are.

مَنْ جَالَسَهُمْ أَوْ خَالَطَهُمْ أَوْ وَاكَلَهُمْ أَوْ شَارَبَهُمْ أَوْ وَاصَلَهُمْ أَوْ زَوَّجَهُمْ أَوْ تَزَوَّجَ إِلَيْهِمْ أَوْ أَمِنَهُمْ أَوِ ائْتَمَنَهُمْ عَلَى أَمَانَةٍ أَوْ صَدَّقَ حَدِيثَهُمْ أَوْ أَعَانَهُمْ بِشَطْرِ كَلِمَةٍ خَرَجَ مِنْ وَلايَةِ اللَّهِ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ وَوَلايَةِ الرَّسُولِ صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ وَوَلايَتِنَا أَهْلَ الْبَيْتِ

“Whoever sat with them, or mixed with them, or ate with them, or drank with them, or kept up ties with them, or married a woman to them, or took a wife from them, or trusted them, or left something in their keeping, or believed what they said, or helped them with half a word — he has gone out of the loyalty of God, mighty and majestic, and the loyalty of the Messenger, God bless him and his family, and out of our loyalty, the People of the House.”

— Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Saduq, ʿUyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2, the chapter on the proofs for the divine leaders and the rejection of the exaggerators, report 4

Go back over the first ten.

Sitting.

Mixing.

Eating.

Drinking.

Keeping up the relationship.

Marrying into them, or marrying them into you.

Trusting them.

Leaving something in their keeping.

Believing what they tell you.

That is not a list of crimes.

That is a list of ordinary life.

He is not describing how you join them.

He is describing how you get close enough to stop noticing.

And then the eleventh.

Half a word.

Not wrote a book defending them.

Not joined them.

Half a word of help.

And there is a second report, from the same chapter, and I am going to give you all of it, because the force of it is in the list and a list with things taken out of it is not a list.

It opens on the transmigration of souls, and then it turns to the exaggerators:

مَنْ قَالَ بِالتَّنَاسُخِ فَهُوَ كَافِرٌ ثُمَّ قَالَ: لَعَنَ اللَّهُ الْغُلاةَ أَلا كَانُوا مَجُوساً أَلا كَانُوا نَصَارَى أَلا كَانُوا قَدَرِيَّةً أَلا كَانُوا مُرْجِئَةً أَلا كَانُوا حَرُورِيَّةً ثُمَّ قَالَ‏ عَلَيْهِ السَّلامُ: لا تُقَاعِدُوهُمْ وَلا تُصَادِقُوهُمْ وَابْرَءُوا مِنْهُمْ بَرِئَ اللَّهُ مِنْهُمْ.

“Whoever holds to the transmigration of souls is a disbeliever. Then he said: May the mercy of God be distant from the exaggerators. Would that they had been Magians. Would that they had been Christians. Would that they had been Qadariyya. Would that they had been Murjiʼa. Would that they had been Haruriyya. Then he, peace be upon him, said: do not sit with them, and do not befriend them, and disavow them — God has disavowed them.”

— Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Saduq, ʿUyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2, the chapter on the proofs for the divine leaders and the rejection of the exaggerators, report 2, on the authority of al-Husayn ibn Khalid al-Sayrafi

Five.

Five other groups he would have preferred, and some of them are groups this tradition regards as being in serious error.

He is not saying those five are fine.

He is saying he would rather these men had belonged to any one of them than that they did what they did in his family’s name.

And I want you to notice the last of the five, because it closes a circle I opened at the beginning of tonight.

Haruriyya.

That is a name for the Khawarij — the faction we met earlier tonight, the ones who broke away and fought the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, and declared everybody outside their group an unbeliever.

So think about where we are.

The Commander of the Faithful stood in front of the Khawarij and warned them about the people who loved him too much.

And six generations later his descendant says he would rather the people who loved him too much had been Khawarij.

Each of them, facing one ditch, named the other.

That is not a community being soft on its own.

That is the opposite, and it is in our books, and nobody made us keep it.

That is our own house.

That is our own book.

That is an Imam whose name is on the door of a shrine that millions of us travel to every year.

Nobody came from outside and told us to write that down.

We wrote it.

We kept it.

We still read it.

And one more, and this one is not a ruling.

It is a warning, and it is about your children.

It is recorded by Allamah Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi in Bihar al-Anwar — the Oceans of Lights, the great encyclopaedia of our reports, gathered more than three hundred years ago — and it comes, through Shaykh al-Tusi, from Imam al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him.

And what the Imam says is this.

احْذَرُوا عَلَى شَبَابِكُمُ الْغُلَاةَ لَا يُفْسِدُوهُمْ، فَإِنَّ الْغُلَاةَ شَرُّ خَلْقِ اللَّهِ، يُصَغِّرُونَ عَظَمَةَ اللَّهِ وَيَدَّعُونَ الرُّبُوبِيَّةَ لِعِبَادِ اللَّهِ. وَاللَّهِ إِنَّ الْغُلَاةَ أَشَرُّ مِنَ الْيَهُودِ وَالنَّصَارَى وَالْمَجُوسِ وَالَّذِينَ أَشْرَكُوا — الْخَبَرَ

“Guard your young people against the exaggerators, so that they do not corrupt them. For the exaggerators are the worst of God’s creation: they make the greatness of God small, and they claim lordship for God’s servants. By God, the exaggerators are worse than the Jews and the Christians and the Magians and those who associate others with Him” — and the report goes on.

— Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, narrated by Fudayl ibn Yasar; Shaykh al-Tusi, al-Amali, carried by Allamah Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi in Bihar al-Anwar, volume 76, chapter 97, report 14

And that last word is not the Imam’s.

It is Allamah al-Majlisi’s own mark that he has stopped short and left the rest of it where he found it.

He is not hiding anything from you.

He is telling you there is more.

Sit with the first clause.

He is not worried about the scholar in the room who can see the argument coming.

He is worried about a nineteen-year-old who has just discovered how much he loves this family, and who has no measuring stick yet, and who is going to meet somebody online this week who will tell him that the love he feels is a starting point rather than a destination.

And look at the mechanism he names, because it is the same one we have been tracing all night:

Not

— nobody does that.

They shrink Him, quietly, by the size of what they attach to somebody else.

And you can see for yourself where the report goes next — a comparison of the same kind you have just heard from Imam al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him.

It is in front of you and I am not going to run that move twice in one evening.

You have the shape of it.

What I want from this one is the first four words, and they are a duty.

Guard your young people.

One more thing, and then I am done with this point.

There is a scholar of the last century, Ayatollah Murtadha Mutahhari, may God rest his pure soul — a thinker and teacher in Iran who was assassinated shortly after the revolution, and whose books are still, for many people, their first real introduction to Islamic thought.

He wrote a small book on exactly this, called

and it turns on the very saying I opened this point with.

And he makes one observation I want to leave with you.

The exaggerators were not random.

They did not scatter themselves evenly across history, attaching to whoever was nearest.

They clustered around him.

Because he was the kind of man about whom nobody could be neutral.

The pull was real.

What the Imam is warning you about is not the pull. It is what the pull can turn into if nothing is holding it.

Lessons for Our Time

Lesson One — A House That Polices Itself Does Not Need You to Police It

Look back at everything I have just read you.

Every single text was ours.

Our compiler.

Our Imams.

Our collections.

The book of the occultation written by the man this sub-series is built around.

The volume of reports about Imam al-Rida gathered by a scholar of Qom a thousand years ago.

Not one line of it came from an opponent, and not one line of it was extracted from us under pressure.

Nobody outside came and told us that excessive love was a danger.

We worked that out.

We wrote it down in the words you have just heard, disbelievers and associators, about the ones among us who claimed too much, and then — and this is the part that matters — we kept it in the books we still read.

We could have quietly lost those pages.

Traditions do that.

It is the easiest thing in the world to let an uncomfortable report fall out of the manuscripts over a few centuries.

We kept them.

So when somebody tells you that this community has no limits, you are not required to invent one on the spot to satisfy them.

You are required to know where they already are.

And now the honest half, because I am not going to give you only the comfortable side of this.

Writing a limit down is not the same as keeping it.

A rule that sits in a book that nobody applies is not a rule.

It is a museum piece.

And it is perfectly possible for a community to be extremely proud of a condemnation it wrote down in the tenth century while doing a milder version of it on a Thursday night.

I am not naming anybody.

I am not describing a group in this town or any other.

I am telling you what the shape of that failure looks like so that you can watch for it in the only place you are actually responsible for, which is yourself.

Lesson Two — There Are Two Ditches, and You Have Only Ever Been Warned About One

You have been warned about one edge of this road your whole life.

Do not go too far.

Do not say too much.

Be careful.

Now go back and look at what the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, actually did.

He named two edges.

He put them in the same sentence.

He gave them the same verb.

And then he told you where to stand.

And I want to be precise about the test he gave, because it is not the test we usually give each other.

The test is not only

On its own, nobody can answer that — ask yourself whether you love your mother too much and see how far you get.

It produces either guilt or defensiveness, and neither of those has ever made anybody more careful about anything.

And the second ditch is not something we invented tonight to balance a sentence.

There is a verse that forbids it outright, and it uses the same verb as the verse on the limits of God.

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تُحَرِّمُوا طَيِّبَاتِ مَا أَحَلَّ اللَّهُ لَكُمْ وَلَا تَعْتَدُوا ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يُحِبُّ الْمُعْتَدِينَ

“O you who believe: do not forbid the good things God has made lawful to you, and do not transgress. God does not love those who transgress.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verse 87

Not a lesser piety, not an excess of caution God quietly admires — the same word, i’tidā’, as crossing in the other direction:

… تِلْكَ حُدُودُ اللَّهِ فَلَا تَعْتَدُوهَا …

“… Those are the limits of God, so do not transgress them …”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 229

The line runs both ways.

It always did.

And our commentator carries the occasion of that verse, from Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him.

Three men made three vows.

One swore he would never sleep at night.

One swore he would never break his fast by day.

One swore he would never marry.

Not one of them was running from God.

Every one was trying to get closer, and thought he had found the way.

And the report names the three.

Bilal.

Uthman ibn Mazh’un.

And the first of the three named is the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him — it was he who swore he would never sleep at night.

نزلت هذه الآية في أمير المؤمنين(عليه السلام) و بلال و عثمان بن مظعون فأما أمير المؤمنين(عليه السلام)فحلف أن لا ينام بالليل أبدا، و أما بلال فإنه حلف أن لا يفطر بالنهار أبدا، و أما عثمان بن مظعون فإنه حلف أن لا ينكح أبدا.

“This verse came down concerning the Commander of the Faithful, peace be upon him, and Bilal, and Uthman ibn Mazh’un. As for the Commander of the Faithful, peace be upon him, he swore that he would never sleep at night; as for Bilal, he swore that he would never break his fast by day; and as for Uthman ibn Mazh’un, he swore that he would never marry.”

— Ali ibn Ibrahim al-Qummi, Tafsir al-Qummi, on the authority of Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him; carried by Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i in al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Ma’idah #5, Verses 87–89

So nobody in this room gets to file what follows under

The wife of the third man was asked why she looked so neglected.

She said:

And when word reached the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, he did not send a private note.

He called the congregation to prayer, waited until they had gathered, went up the pulpit, praised God, and said this.

ما بال أقوام يحرمون على أنفسهم الطيبات؟ ألا إني أنام بالليل و أنكح و أفطر بالنهار، فمن رغب عن سنتي فليس مني

“What is the matter with people who forbid themselves the good things? Truly I sleep at night, and I marry, and I break my fast by day — and whoever turns away from my way is not of me.”

— the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions; Ali ibn Ibrahim al-Qummi, Tafsir al-Qummi, on the authority of Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him; carried by Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i in al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Ma’idah #5, Verses 87–89

From the Messenger of God, from the pulpit — and it was not aimed at someone who drank, or stole, or abandoned the prayer.

It was said to everyone, about trying to be more religious than the religion.

And notice the garment, because it came up earlier tonight and I did not point at it then.

Coarse haircloth.

… فإنه قد ترهب و لبس المسوح و زهد في الدنيا.

“… for he has taken to monasticism, and put on coarse haircloth, and renounced the world.”

— the wife of Uthman ibn Mazh’un; Ali ibn Ibrahim al-Qummi, Tafsir al-Qummi, on the authority of Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him; carried by Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i in al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Ma’idah #5, Verses 87–89

The same cloth Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace and blessings be upon him, had against his skin when Kamil ibn Ibrahim walked in and judged him for the fine clothes on top of it.

فقال متبسما: يا كامل، وحسر عن ذراعيه، فإذا مسح أسود خشن على جلده، فقال: هذا لله وهذا لكم.

“And he said, smiling: O Kamil — and he bared his forearms, and there was a coarse black haircloth against his skin; and he said: This is for God, and this is for you.”

— Kamil ibn Ibrahim al-Madani, and Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216

Same cloth.

Two men.

Opposite verdicts.

Worn underneath, with this is for God and this is for you — a man inside the limit.

Worn instead of what God permitted, as a public renunciation — not of me, from the pulpit, to the whole congregation.

The cloth was never the point.

The Commander of the Faithful’s test is not what you wear, and not only how much you love.

It is this:

Because the love that carries you toward the truth and the love that carries you away from it feel exactly the same from the inside.

That is the whole problem.

Nobody has ever gone past the limit while feeling like a person who is going past the limit.

They felt like a person who loved correctly, and slightly more than the people around them, and they were rather pleased about it.

Only the destination tells them apart.

And one last thing, because I know what the word middle does to a room.

It does not mean love them a medium amount.

It does not mean hedge, or keep your enthusiasm in reserve, or be the person in the majlis who is too sophisticated to weep.

That is not moderation.

That is just a smaller version of the second ditch.

It is a road.

A road is a place you travel with everything you have.

It has ditches on both sides, and the reason you stay on it is not that you are being careful with your love.

It is that you would like to arrive.

Where the Line Actually Falls

Look Again at Who the Verse Is About

Come back to the verse we opened on.

يَا أَهْلَ الْكِتَابِ لَا تَغْلُوا فِي دِينِكُمْ وَلَا تَقُولُوا عَلَى اللَّهِ إِلَّا الْحَقَّ ۚ إِنَّمَا الْمَسِيحُ عِيسَى ابْنُ مَرْيَمَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ

“O People of the Book, do not go to excess in your religion, and do not say of God other than the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, is only the Messenger of God.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Nisa (the Chapter of the Women) #4, Verse 171

Last week we spent an entire evening inside that house.

We read their books.

We gave Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, the honour we owe him.

And there were half a dozen cheap points available to us over the course of that hour and we took none of them.

So I am not going to stand here tonight and ask you to look down on anybody.

I am asking you to look at a mechanism.

Here is a community that loved a prophet.

Genuinely loved him.

Nothing in the Qur’an suggests otherwise, and the verse does not accuse them of hating God or of wanting an idol.

They loved him, and the loving went past the limit, and what came out the other end was a claim about God that was not true.

That is the mechanism.

Love, then a claim, then a false claim about God.

And the only honest question a person can ask after watching that happen in somebody else’s house is whether the same mechanism has any purchase in ours.

Because a mechanism does not care whose house it is in.

One Author, One Book, Two Verdicts

Now I want to read you two passages, and they are from the same man, in the same work, about the same act.

The man is Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, may God rest his pure soul — a scholar and philosopher of Tabriz who taught for decades in Qom and died about forty-five years ago, and whose commentary on the Qur’an, al-Mizan, is the one this congregation has heard from almost every week of this sub-series.

Here he is on the second chapter, Surah al-Baqarah, on these two verses:

وَاسْتَعِينُوا بِالصَّبْرِ وَالصَّلَاةِ ۚ وَإِنَّهَا لَكَبِيرَةٌ إِلَّا عَلَى الْخَاشِعِينَ الَّذِينَ يَظُنُّونَ أَنَّهُمْ مُلَاقُو رَبِّهِمْ وَأَنَّهُمْ إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ

“And seek help through patience and prayer; and it is indeed hard, except for the humble — those who are certain that they will meet their Lord, and that to Him they will return.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verses 45 and 46

And here he is, drawing out what an Imam took from those verses — the ordinary things a believer legitimately does at a time of hardship:

قد استفاد(عليه السلام)استحباب الصوم و الصلاة عند نزول الملمات و الشدائد، و كذا التوسل بالنبي و الولي عندها، و هو تأويل الصوم و الصلاة برسول الله و أمير المؤمنين.

“He, peace be upon him, drew from it that fasting and prayer are recommended when calamities and hardships come down — and likewise, seeking a means through the Prophet and the friend of God at such times; and that is the inner reading of fasting and prayer as the Messenger of God and the Commander of the Faithful.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah #2, Verses 45 and 46

Asking through somebody.

Placed by him among the normal furniture of a believing life.

No caveat, no warning label, no defensive paragraph.

It sits in a list.

And hear his last clause properly, because it is the kind of line that gets clipped.

It is ta’wil, the inner reading of the verse, and it replaces nothing — he has just told you that the fasting and the prayer are recommended.

In hardship you also seek help through the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, and through the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him.

Now the third chapter, Surah Al Imran, on verses seventy-nine and eighty.

Same author.

Same commentary.

مَا كَانَ لِبَشَرٍ أَنْ يُؤْتِيَهُ اللَّهُ الْكِتَابَ وَالْحُكْمَ وَالنُّبُوَّةَ ثُمَّ يَقُولَ لِلنَّاسِ كُونُوا عِبَادًا لِي مِنْ دُونِ اللَّهِ وَلَٰكِنْ كُونُوا رَبَّانِيِّينَ بِمَا كُنْتُمْ تُعَلِّمُونَ الْكِتَابَ وَبِمَا كُنْتُمْ تَدْرُسُونَ وَلَا يَأْمُرَكُمْ أَنْ تَتَّخِذُوا الْمَلَائِكَةَ وَالنَّبِيِّينَ أَرْبَابًا ۗ أَيَأْمُرُكُمْ بِالْكُفْرِ بَعْدَ إِذْ أَنْتُمْ مُسْلِمُونَ

“It is not for any human being that God should give him the Book, and judgement, and prophethood, and that he should then say to people: be servants of mine, apart from God. Rather: be devoted to the Lord, by what you have been teaching of the Book and by what you have been studying. Nor would he command you to take the angels and the prophets as lords. Would he command you to disbelief, after you have submitted?”

— Qur’an, Surah Al Imran (the Chapter of the Family of Imran) #3, Verses 79 and 80

And here is what he says on them:

فرد عبادة من يعبد مع عبادته غيره حتى بعنوان التقرب و التوسل و الاستشفاع.

“So God rejected the worship of one who worships another alongside his worship of Him — even under the heading of drawing near, and seeking a means, and asking for intercession.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah Al Imran #3, Verses 79 and 80

Read those two passages one after the other and let the difficulty land properly, because I do not want to make this easier than it is.

The same man.

The same book.

The same word — tawassul, both times.

And in one place it is what believers do, and in the other it is worship of something other than God.

He is not contradicting himself.

He is doing something far more useful, and far more uncomfortable.

He is telling you that the act does not carry its own verdict.

And on that same page in Surah Al Imran, he is reading the formula the Qur’an puts in the mouths of the idolaters —

— and setting it beside the believer’s practice, and drawing the line between the two.

The pagan formula and the believer’s practice, in one breath, from one pen.

Two Men at the Same Grave

So here is what those two passages, put together, actually say.

Two men can stand at the same grave, on the same afternoon, and do the identical thing with their hands and their mouths — and for one of them it is worship, and for the other it is not.

And I know exactly what that sounds like.

It sounds like the objection I read you at the start of the evening.

But notice who said it.

That is not a defence lawyer for our community.

That is a commentator, writing a commentary, who was not answering anybody’s accusation.

He wrote that sentence because it is what the verse means, and he wrote the other one for the same reason.

And I want you to feel which direction this cuts.

An invisible line is not a licence.

An invisible line is harder.

It is a line you can cross without anyone seeing you do it, including yourself.

That is not a comfortable thing to be handed.

It is just true.

And the Limit Comes from the Book, Not from Me

Now I owe you something, because it is not enough to tell a congregation that a line is hard to see and then sit down.

That is a sermon that leaves people more anxious than it found them, and I have no interest in giving one.

So where is the line?

Not from me.

From the Qur’an.

In the tenth chapter, Surah Yunus, and in the thirty-ninth, Surah al-Zumar, God quotes the idolaters describing their own practice in their own words.

And what they say is not we hate God.

Nobody in the Qur’an says that.

What they say is: these are our intercessors with God.

وَيَعْبُدُونَ مِنْ دُونِ اللَّهِ مَا لَا يَضُرُّهُمْ وَلَا يَنْفَعُهُمْ وَيَقُولُونَ هَٰؤُلَاءِ شُفَعَاؤُنَا عِنْدَ اللَّهِ ۚ قُلْ أَتُنَبِّئُونَ اللَّهَ بِمَا لَا يَعْلَمُ فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَلَا فِي الْأَرْضِ ۚ سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ عَمَّا يُشْرِكُونَ

“And they worship, apart from God, what neither harms them nor benefits them, and they say: these are our intercessors with God. Say: would you inform God of something He does not know, in the heavens or on the earth? Glory be to Him, and exalted is He above what they associate with Him.”

— Qur’an, Surah Yunus (the Chapter of Jonah) #10, Verse 18

And:

أَلَا لِلَّهِ الدِّينُ الْخَالِصُ ۚ وَالَّذِينَ اتَّخَذُوا مِنْ دُونِهِ أَوْلِيَاءَ مَا نَعْبُدُهُمْ إِلَّا لِيُقَرِّبُونَا إِلَى اللَّهِ زُلْفَىٰ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَحْكُمُ بَيْنَهُمْ فِي مَا هُمْ فِيهِ يَخْتَلِفُونَ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَهْدِي مَنْ هُوَ كَاذِبٌ كَفَّارٌ

“Truly, to God belongs the sincere religion. And those who take protectors apart from Him — ‘we do not worship them except that they may bring us nearer to God in rank’ — God will judge between them in what they differ over. God does not guide one who is a liar, ungrateful.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Zumar (the Chapter of the Throngs) #39, Verse 3

Read that sentence as though you had never been told whose it is.

There is no denial of God in it anywhere.

God is named, God is the destination, and the entire stated purpose of the practice is to get closer to Him.

That is the theology of idolatry, in the Qur’an’s own quotation of it.

And it does not look like what you were taught idolatry looks like.

They are not denying God.

They have Him at the top.

They have simply built a structure underneath Him and put their confidence into it.

And I want to be honest with you about why that verse is uncomfortable rather than reassuring.

It is uncomfortable because the sentence is so reasonable.

If somebody said it to you at a dinner table you would not flinch.

You might even agree with it.

Now watch how God answers.

He does not say

That answer was available and He did not give it.

Intercession is in the Qur’an.

It is not in dispute.

What He says, in the twenty-first chapter, Surah al-Anbiya, is that it runs only for the one He is pleased with, and only by His command.

وَقَالُوا اتَّخَذَ الرَّحْمَٰنُ وَلَدًا ۗ سُبْحَانَهُ ۚ بَلْ عِبَادٌ مُكْرَمُونَ لَا يَسْبِقُونَهُ بِالْقَوْلِ وَهُمْ بِأَمْرِهِ يَعْمَلُونَ يَعْلَمُ مَا بَيْنَ أَيْدِيهِمْ وَمَا خَلْفَهُمْ وَلَا يَشْفَعُونَ إِلَّا لِمَنِ ارْتَضَىٰ وَهُمْ مِنْ خَشْيَتِهِ مُشْفِقُونَ

“And they say: the All-Merciful has taken offspring. Glory be to Him! Rather, they are honoured servants. They do not speak before He speaks, and they act by His command. He knows what is before them and what is behind them, and they do not intercede except for one He is pleased with, and they tremble in awe of Him.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Anbiya (the Chapter of the Prophets) #21, Verses 26 to 28

Read that twice, because it is the whole of tonight in one clause.

The limit is not on the asking.

The limit is on the granting.

You may ask.

Of course you may ask — you ask your mother to pray for you, you ask the man next to you in the majlis to remember you, and nobody has ever thought that was a theological crisis.

Asking somebody God loves to ask for you is asking.

What you may not do is treat the asking as though it had settled something.

As though a transaction had been completed.

As though the one you asked were now obliged, or able on his own, to deliver.

Because he is not the one who grants.

And neither are you.

That is a line a fourteen-year-old can hold, and it does not require anybody to look inside anybody’s heart.

And He Does Not Leave It with Them

One last thing in this point, and it is short, and it is the reason the rest of tonight is allowed to happen.

You could read the verse we opened on and conclude that it is a historical remark.

O People of the Book — so it is about them, it was about them then, and the file is closed.

Allamah Tabataba’i does not read it that way.

In his commentary on the eleventh chapter, Surah Hud, he takes that prohibition and applies it beyond the People of the Book — treating anyone who credits a prophet or a friend of God with knowledge or power in his own right as having fallen under the same word.

The verse he is reading has the Prophet Noah, peace and blessings be upon him, telling his people what he does not claim:

وَلَا أَقُولُ لَكُمْ عِنْدِي خَزَائِنُ اللَّهِ وَلَا أَعْلَمُ الْغَيْبَ وَلَا أَقُولُ إِنِّي مَلَكٌ وَلَا أَقُولُ لِلَّذِينَ تَزْدَرِي أَعْيُنُكُمْ لَنْ يُؤْتِيَهُمُ اللَّهُ خَيْرًا ۖ اللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ بِمَا فِي أَنْفُسِهِمْ ۖ إِنِّي إِذًا لَمِنَ الظَّالِمِينَ

“And I do not say to you that I hold the treasuries of God, and I do not know the unseen, and I do not say that I am an angel; nor do I say of those whom your eyes look down upon that God will never give them any good — God knows best what is in their souls — for then I would surely be among the wrongdoers.”

— Qur’an, Surah Hud (the Chapter of Prophet Hud)#11, Verse 31

And this is what he says on it:

فمن أثبت شيئا من العلم المكنون أو القدرة الغيبية أعني العلم من غير طريق الفكر و القدرة من غير مجراها العادي الطبيعي لغيره تعالى من أنبيائه و أوليائه كما وقع كثيرا في الأخبار و الآثار و نفى معه الأصالة و الاستقلال بأن يكون العلم و القدرة مثلا له تعالى و إنما ظهر ما ظهر منه بالتوسيط و وقع ما وقع منه بإفاضته وجوده فلا حجر عليه.

و من أثبت شيئا من ذلك على نحو الأصالة و الاستقلال طبق ما يثبته الفهم العامي و إن أسنده إلى الله سبحانه و فيض رحمته لم يخل من غلو و كان مشمولا لمثل قوله:«لا تغلوا في دينكم و لا تقولوا على الله إلا الحق:»النساء: - 171.

“So whoever affirms something of hidden knowledge or unseen power — I mean knowledge that does not come by way of thought, and power that does not run its ordinary, natural course — for other than Him, exalted is He, among His prophets and His friends, as occurs often in the reports and traditions, and denies along with it that it is theirs in their own right and independently, so that the knowledge and the power, for instance, belong to Him, exalted is He, and whatever of it appeared, appeared only through intermediation, and whatever of it occurred, occurred by His bestowing its existence — there is no objection against him.

And whoever affirms something of that as theirs in their own right and independently, the way the common understanding affirms it — even if he ascribes it to God, glorified is He, and to the outpouring of His mercy — is not free of excess, and falls under the like of His word: ‘Do not go to excess in your religion, and do not say of God other than the truth’ (Surah al-Nisa, 171).”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah Hud #11, Verses 25 to 35

So the verse we opened on is not a description of somebody else’s history.

It is a rule, and rules do not stop at a border.

Which means I am now permitted to do the thing I have been building towards all evening, and it is the last third of the night, and it is not about anybody else.

Lessons for Our Time

Lesson Three — The Gesture Is Not the Test

I want to give you something practical, because a great deal of what gets said about this subject is unusable.

The test is not

It is not whether you stood or sat, whether you touched the lattice or kept your hands at your sides, whether you wept or stayed dry, whether you went in a crowd of two million or alone on a Thursday afternoon in any town or city.

None of those is the test, because — as we have just read from a man nobody can accuse of being soft on this — the identical gesture goes either way.

The test is the grammar of the request.

Whose is it to give, and whose is it to grant?

And here is the form of words.

I want you to be able to say it, and I want it to be short enough that you could say it to a colleague at work without a preamble:

That is it.

That is the whole line, and you can carry it in one breath.

Now test it against the pagans in the verse.

These are our intercessors with God — said of what they worship, apart from God.

Not

A relationship that has been secured, a channel that has been opened, an outcome that is now in hand.

And test it against the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, standing at al-Baqi’ and greeting the dead — which we spent an evening on, three sessions ago, and which nobody has ever called idolatry.

كَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ (ص) يَخْرُجُ فِي مَلَإٍ مِنَ النَّاسِ مِنْ أَصْحَابِهِ كُلَّ عَشِيَّةِ خَمِيسٍ إِلَى بَقِيعِ الْمَدَنِيِّينَ فَيَقُولُ ثَلَاثاً- السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ يَا أَهْلَ الدِّيَارِ وَ ثَلَاثاً رَحِمَكُمُ اللَّهُ ثُمَّ يَلْتَفِتُ أَصْحَابَهُ وَ يَقُولُ هَؤُلَاءِ خَيْرٌ مِنْكُمْ فَيَقُولُونَ يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ وَ لِمَ آمَنُوا وَ آمَنَّا وَ جَاهَدُوا وَ جَاهَدْنَا فَيَقُولُ إِنَّ هَؤُلَاءِ آمَنُوا وَ لَمْ يَلْبِسُوا إِيمانَهُمْ بِظُلْمٍ وَ مَضَوْا عَلَى ذَلِكَ وَ أَنَا عَلَى ذَلِكَ شَهِيدٌ وَ أَنْتُمْ تَبْقَوْنَ بَعْدِي وَ لَا أَدْرِي مَا تُحْدِثُونَ بَعْدِي

“The Messenger of God, God bless him and his family, would go out, in a crowd of people from among his companions, every Thursday evening, to the Baqi’ of the people of Medina, and say three times: peace be upon you, O people of these dwellings; and three times: may God have mercy on you. Then he would turn to his companions and say: these are better than you. And they would say: O Messenger of God, why? They believed and we believed; they struggled and we struggled. And he would say: these believed, and did not dress their faith in wrongdoing, and they went on that — and to that I am a witness. And you remain after me, and I do not know what you will bring about after me.”

— the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions; narrated by Safwan al-Jammal, from Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him; Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, the chapter on the Merits of Visiting the Believers, sixth hadith

Everything after the greeting is what we sat with that evening — their account is closed, and ours is still open.

Tonight, look at the greeting.

The words in your mouth can be almost identical.

The grammar underneath them is not.

And I want to give you one more handle on this, because I think it is the most useful thing in tonight’s whole evening for ordinary life.

Ask what happens if the answer is no.

If you stand at a grave, and you ask, and what you asked for does not come — what then?

Does the relationship survive it?

Because if it does, you were asking.

And if it does not — if there is anger, or a sense of a bargain broken, or a quiet conclusion that the visit did not work and next time you will go somewhere it does — then something had been built that was never in the request you thought you were making.

Nobody can see that from outside.

Not the man questioning you, not the person next to you in the majlis, and not me.

You can see it.

That is not a loophole.

That is the most demanding form this could possibly take, and it is the one our own commentator handed us when he said the same act goes either way.

Lesson Four — Be Able to Say What You Are Not Doing

And now the harder one, and it is the answer to the objection I read you at the beginning.

The objection said we have no limits.

And I told you that we do, and I have spent an hour showing them to you.

But there is one half of that objection which is true, and I am not going to pretend it away.

If you ask somebody what their boundary is and they say well, it’s about the intention, and they cannot go one sentence further, then whatever is in their heart, what they have given you is not a boundary.

It is a way of ending the conversation.

So here is the discipline, and it is a discipline for you and not for them.

Be able to say what you are not doing.

Not

Not

which is the one sentence nobody on earth can check, including the person saying it.

Say the thing you would be wrong to say — out loud, in your own words — and then say that you do not say it.

Say that, and something has happened that did not happen before.

You have handed somebody a stick to hit you with.

You have described the exact failure that would count against you, and you have put it in their hand, and you have said:

And a person who does that is a person who can be corrected — which means, and this is the point, that they can also be trusted.

That is what a real limit looks like.

Not a shield.

A handle, offered to somebody else.

And I will tell you what it protects you from, and it is not the man on the internet.

It protects you from yourself in twenty years.

Because nobody goes past the limit in a single evening.

Nobody stands up one day and decides to attach to a servant of God something that belongs to God.

It is not a decision.

It is a drift, and a drift is only ever visible against something fixed.

A sentence you said out loud in front of people, ten years ago, about what you were not doing — that is something fixed.

That is the entire function of writing a limit down, and it is why our own house wrote theirs down in language so severe that we are still slightly embarrassed to read it aloud.

They were not describing their enemies.

They were leaving a mark on the wall for their own children to measure against.

We have spent the last stretch of this evening standing at a grave.

We have talked about the danger of handing the one in the grave a power to decide that belongs only to God.

But I told you earlier that a mechanism does not care whose house it is in.

And it does not care whether the one you raise too high was buried more than a thousand years ago, or is a scholar alive in our own time.

Because there is another way to go past the limit, and it does not need a grave at all.

The Turn, and It Is Aimed at Us

The Verse They Point At

There is a verse in the ninth chapter, Surah al-Tawbah, that gets used against this community more than almost any other.

اتَّخَذُوا أَحْبَارَهُمْ وَرُهْبَانَهُمْ أَرْبَابًا مِنْ دُونِ اللَّهِ وَالْمَسِيحَ ابْنَ مَرْيَمَ وَمَا أُمِرُوا إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُوا إِلَٰهًا وَاحِدًا ۖ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ ۚ سُبْحَانَهُ عَمَّا يُشْرِكُونَ

“They took their rabbis and their monks as lords apart from God — and the Messiah, son of Mary — when they were commanded only to worship one God. There is no god but He. Glory be to Him above what they associate with Him.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Tawbah (the Chapter of Repentance) #9, Verse 31

And here is the argument that comes with it, and I am going to state it at full strength, the way I did at the beginning, because a warning I soften is a warning you will correctly ignore.

Do not look away from that.

It is a serious argument, a great deal better than the one about shrines, and I have never once heard it answered properly in a majlis.

I am not going to answer it yet either.

First I want to read you what our own tradition says the verse actually means — because as I have done all night, our own authority goes first.

Our Own Commentator, First

Allamah Tabataba’i, on the fifth chapter, Surah al-Ma’idah, tells you how this verse was read, and by whom:

و قد فسر النبي(صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم)قوله تعالى في أهل الكتاب:«اتخذوا أحبارهم و رهبانهم أربابا من دون الله»أنهم اتبعوهم فيما يحلون و يحرمون لا أنهم سموهم أربابا.

“And the Prophet, God bless him and his family and grant them peace, explained His word about the People of the Book — ‘They took their rabbis and their monks as lords apart from God’ — to mean that they followed them in what they made lawful and unlawful — not that they called them lords.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Ma’idah #5, Verses 116 to 120

Stop there.

Nobody in that verse ever said the word.

Not one of them stood up and said this man is my lord.

If you had gone to them and accused them of it they would have been horrified, and they would have been sincere.

The lordship was not a title anybody claimed and it was not a title anybody conferred.

It was a pattern of obedience, and God looked at the pattern and named it for what it was, and the people inside the pattern had no idea.

And notice where that reading comes from.

It is not Allamah Tabataba’i’s invention, and he does not present it as one.

He gives it to the Prophet himself, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions.

And an Imam Said It Harder

And Imam al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, the sixth of the Imams, spoke on this same verse — and his word on it is the one I wish I could put on a wall.

It is recorded by Shaykh al-Kulayni — the compiler, the man who gathered the reports into the collection this tradition has leaned on ever since — in al-Kafi, the earliest of the four great collections.

And he placed it in the chapter on taqlid: on following another man’s opinion.

وَالله مَا صَامُوا لَهُمْ وَلا صَلَّوْا لَهُمْ وَلَكِنْ أَحَلُّوا لَهُمْ حَرَاماً وَحَرَّمُوا عَلَيْهِمْ حَلالاً فَاتَّبَعُوهُمْ.

“By God, they did not fast for them, and they did not pray to them. But they made lawful for them what was unlawful, and made unlawful for them what was lawful — and so they followed them.”

— Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, narrated by Abu Basir; Shaykh al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 1, the Book on Virtue of Knowledge, the chapter on Taqlid, third hadith

By God, he said — they did not fast for them, and they did not pray to them.

They followed them.

That is the whole distinction, and it is brutal, and it removes every comfortable exit.

Because you were about to reach for one.

You were about to say:

And an Imam of your own house has just told you that

They did not fast for a rabbi.

They did not pray to a monk.

They would have said, with total sincerity, exactly what you were about to say.

The Sentence This Whole Evening Was Built to Deliver

So here it is, and it is the sentence I have been walking towards for an hour.

Which means — and I want you to actually take this in, because it reverses the whole argument of the evening — the charge in that verse was never about shrines at all.

It was never about graves, or domes, or standing somewhere and greeting somebody.

It is about obedience.

And that lands on us.

Not on a community across town, not on somebody on the internet.

On a congregation that follows a marja’.

Let it land.

I am not going to catch it for you.

And Now the Words I Have Been Reading Past

Now go back to the verse and look at the four words I have been quoting without pressing them.

Not lords.

And that changes the accusation completely, because it means the fault was never obedience as such.

Obedience is everywhere.

You obey a doctor.

You obey the man who teaches you to drive.

Every functioning human life is full of obedience and none of it is idolatry.

An authority that answers to nobody above it.

A word that is the end of the matter.

Somebody whose because I said so is where the chain stops.

And now set beside it the words that this whole series stands on — a written instruction of the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, sent out through the second of his four deputies, about where the community was to turn:

وأما الحوادث الواقعة فارجعوا فيها إلى رواة حديثنا، فإنهم حجتي عليكم وأنا حجة الله (عليكم).

“As for the events that occur, refer in them to the narrators of our hadith; for they are my proof over you, and I am the proof of God (over you).”

— the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, in his written answer to Ishaq ibn Ya’qub, carried by Muhammad ibn Uthman al-Amri; Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the letters issued by the Master of the Age, report 247

Hear the possessive.

Not a proof.

Not the proof.

Not an authority standing on its own feet.

A proof that belongs to somebody else, held on behalf of somebody else, and answerable to somebody else.

And the same sentence names the next link itself:

That is a link in a chain.

The verse is describing a chain that stopped.

A Man Who Had a Real Command, and It Did Not Save Him

And now somebody in this room is thinking the obvious thing, and it is a fair thing, and I am not going to leave you with it.

There is a report carried in al-Mizan, in the commentary on the thirty-first chapter, Surah Luqman, and it is the best answer I have ever found to that question, because it does not answer it with a principle.

وَإِذْ قَالَ لُقْمَانُ لِابْنِهِ وَهُوَ يَعِظُهُ يَا بُنَيَّ لَا تُشْرِكْ بِاللَّهِ ۖ إِنَّ الشِّرْكَ لَظُلْمٌ عَظِيمٌ
وَوَصَّيْنَا الْإِنسَانَ بِوَالِدَيْهِ حَمَلَتْهُ أُمُّهُ وَهْنًا عَلَىٰ وَهْنٍ وَفِصَالُهُ فِي عَامَيْنِ أَنِ اشْكُرْ لِي وَلِوَالِدَيْكَ إِلَيَّ الْمَصِيرُ
وَإِن جَاهَدَاكَ عَلَىٰ أَن تُشْرِكَ بِي مَا لَيْسَ لَكَ بِهِ عِلْمٌ فَلَا تُطِعْهُمَا ۖ وَصَاحِبْهُمَا فِي الدُّنْيَا مَعْرُوفًا ۖ وَاتَّبِعْ سَبِيلَ مَنْ أَنَابَ إِلَيَّ ۚ ثُمَّ إِلَيَّ مَرْجِعُكُمْ فَأُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمْ تَعْمَلُونَ

When Luqman said to his son, as he advised him, “O my son, do not associate anything with God, for idolatry is a terrible wrong.”
We have entrusted the human being with the care of his parents. His mother carried him through hardship upon hardship, weaning him in two years. So give thanks to Me, and to your parents. To Me is the destination.
But if they strive to have you associate with Me something of which you have no knowledge, do not obey them. But keep them company in this life, in kindness, and follow the path of him who turns to Me. Then to Me is your return; and I will inform you of what you used to do.

— Qur’an, Surah Luqman (the Chapter of Luqman) #31, Verses 13, 14 and 15

It answers it with a man.

Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, meets a man who fought against him and against his father at Siffin. And he says to him — and I want you to hear how the question is put:

أَتَعْلَمُ أَنِّي أَحَبُّ أَهْلِ الأَرْضِ إِلَى أَهْلِ السَّمَاءِ وَتُقَاتِلُنِي وَأَبِي يَوْمَ صِفِّينَ؟ وَاللَّهِ إِنَّ أَبِي لَخَيْرٌ مِنِّي

“Do you know that I am the most beloved of the people of the earth to the people of heaven — and you fought me and my father on the day of Siffin? By God, my father is better than I am.”

— Imam Husayn ibn Ali, peace and blessings be upon him; carried by Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i in al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an on Surah Luqman #31, Verses 12 to 19, from al-Manaqib

And the man gives his defence.

And his defence is not a bad one.

He says this:

فاستعذر و قال إن النبي (صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم) قال لي: أطع أباك.

“He made his excuse, and said: the Prophet, God bless him and his family and grant them peace, said to me: obey your father.”

— the man, answering Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him; carried by Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i in al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an on Surah Luqman #31, Verses 12 to 19, from al-Manaqib

Sit with that for a moment.

Take his defence at its strongest.

Suppose the command was genuine — that he had not made it up, had not misremembered it, and had heard it from the Prophet himself, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions.

It still did not save him.

Here is the answer he is given, and it is three things in one breath:

أ ما سمعت قول الله عز و جل:«و إن جاهداك على أن تشرك بي ما ليس لك به علم فلا تطعهما»و قال رسول الله(صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم): إنما الطاعة بالمعروف، و قوله: لا طاعة لمخلوق في معصية الخالق

“Have you not heard the word of God: ‘And if the two of them strive to make you associate with Me that of which you have no knowledge, do not obey them’ — and the Messenger of God, God bless him and his family and grant them peace, said: obedience is only in what is right; and his word: there is no obedience to a creature in disobedience to the Creator.”

— Imam Husayn ibn Ali, peace and blessings be upon him; carried by Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i in al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an on Surah Luqman #31, Verses 12 to 19, from al-Manaqib

That sentence is also in Nahj al-Balagha, in the mouth of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, one line long, saying one hundred and sixty-five:

وَقَالَ (عليه ‏السلام): لَا طَاعَةَ لِمخْلُوقٍ فِي مَعْصِيَةِ الْخَالِقِ.

“There is no obedience to a creature in disobedience to the Creator.”

— Amir al-Mu’minin Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, gathered by Sayyed al-Radhi, Saying 165

This is not a sectarian position, and nobody coined it to win an argument.

It is the principle of the Prophet himself — and the Commander of the Faithful said it in the same words.

Now — the verse he quotes is about parents.

And it does not stop where the objection would like it to.

Read the rest of it:

… فَلَا تُطِعْهُمَا ۖ وَصَاحِبْهُمَا فِي الدُّنْيَا مَعْرُوفًا …

“… do not obey them — and keep their company in this world honourably …”

— Qur’an, Surah Luqman #31, Verse 15

Both halves.

One verse.

About the first human authority any of us ever knows.

Nobody in this room hears that verse and concludes

Nobody has ever heard it that way in the history of this religion.

Which is exactly why nobody should hear tonight as

And notice, finally, what the man’s failure actually was.

It was not ignorance.

He was not confused, he was not badly informed, he did not lack access to the sources.

He knew.

He was standing in front of the grandson of the Prophet, on a battlefield, and he knew.

What he had was deference.

So Here Is the Test, and It Is Two Questions

You cannot check your marja’s reasoning.

I am not going to pretend you can, and any scholar who tells you otherwise is flattering you.

So the test is not

It is two other questions, and a fourteen-year-old can answer both.

The first: can you tell me who he answers to?

Not whether you follow him.

Whether the chain goes anywhere above him.

If you can name what governs him — the Book, the transmitted word, the fact that his authority is held on behalf of somebody else and not owned — then you are not in the verse, whatever else is true of you.

And if the honest answer is

— then you are, and it does not matter how correct his rulings happen to be.

The second: there is one thing you do not follow him into, and you have known what it is since you were a child.

Not a subtle thing.

Not a point of law you would need training to see.

The plain, obvious, God-said-otherwise thing.

That is the only case the limit covers, and it is the only case you were ever equipped to judge.

And on the eighth night of Muharram this year I opened on a verse, and it belongs here.

وَلَا تَقْفُ مَا لَيْسَ لَكَ بِهِ عِلْمٌ ۚ إِنَّ السَّمْعَ وَالْبَصَرَ وَالْفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُولَٰئِكَ كَانَ عَنْهُ مَسْئُولًا

“And do not pursue that of which you have no knowledge. Indeed the hearing, the sight and the heart — about all of these one will be questioned.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Isra (the Chapter of the Night Journey) #17, Verse 36

Look at the phrase in the middle of it:

That is the same phrase as in the verse about the parents.

وَإِنْ جَاهَدَاكَ عَلَىٰ أَنْ تُشْرِكَ بِي مَا لَيْسَ لَكَ بِهِ عِلْمٌ فَلَا تُطِعْهُمَا ۖ وَصَاحِبْهُمَا فِي الدُّنْيَا مَعْرُوفًا ۖ وَاتَّبِعْ سَبِيلَ مَنْ أَنَابَ إِلَيَّ ۚ ثُمَّ إِلَيَّ مَرْجِعُكُمْ فَأُنَبِّئُكُمْ بِمَا كُنْتُمْ تَعْمَلُونَ

“And if the two of them strive to make you associate with Me that of which you have no knowledge, do not obey them in that — and keep their company in this world honourably, and follow the way of the one who turns back to Me. Then to Me is your return, and I will inform you of what you used to do.”

— Qur’an, Surah Luqman (the Chapter of Luqman) #31, Verse 15

Word for word.

One says:

The other says:

So put them together and they answer the question you started with.

— you would be answerable for your own hearing and your own sight and your own heart, and you do not get to hand them to anybody.

And this congregation already has the frame, because we spent a whole night of Muharram on it.

A counterfeit is never exposed by suspicion.

Suspicion catches nothing and exhausts everybody.

Lessons for Our Time

Lesson Five — A Scholar Is Not a Holy Man. And the Imam Never Asked You to Obey One.

I want to separate two things that this community runs together constantly, and the separation is the whole of tonight’s last third.

A scholar is not a holy man.

He is an educated one.

That is real and it is specific and it is worth a great deal — and inside the field he is educated in, he carries more responsibility than you do, not less, precisely because of that education.

Think about how obvious this is with a doctor.

Your doctor knows medicine.

Inside medicine his word carries weight and it should, and if he tells you to stop eating something you should probably stop.

And not one of us would conclude from any of that that he is closer to God than the man who cleans his surgery.

With a scholar, we draw that conclusion almost without thinking.

And I want to be fair about why, because it is not a foolish thought.

His sciences are not medicine.

They exist to bring a person nearer to God.

The hawza — the seminary — is not only study; it is tazkiyah, the refining of the self, and the serious ones give their lives to it as much as to the law.

The aspiration of the path is nearness to God, for the women who walk it as much as for the men.

And the Qur’an says what that learning is meant to produce.

وَمِنَ النَّاسِ وَالدَّوَابِّ وَالْأَنْعَامِ مُخْتَلِفٌ أَلْوَانُهُ كَذَٰلِكَ ۗ إِنَّمَا يَخْشَى اللَّهَ مِنْ عِبَادِهِ الْعُلَمَاءُ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَزِيزٌ غَفُورٌ

“And among people, and creatures, and cattle, there are likewise differing colours. It is only the scholars among His servants who fear God. Indeed God is Mighty, Forgiving.”

— Qur’an, Surah Fatir (the Chapter of the Originator) #35, Verse 28

But listen to whom the verse means.

Shaykh al-Kulayni records Imam al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, on this very verse:

يَعْنِي بِالْعُلَمَاءِ مَنْ صَدَّقَ فِعْلُهُ قَوْلَهُ وَمَنْ لَمْ يُصَدِّقْ فِعْلُهُ قَوْلَهُ فَلَيْسَ بِعَالِمٍ.

“By ‘the scholars’ He means the one whose deeds confirm his words. And the one whose deeds do not confirm his words is not a scholar.”

— Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, narrated by al-Harith ibn al-Mughirah al-Nasri; Shaykh al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 1, the Book on Virtue of Knowledge, the chapter on the Qualities of the Scholars, second hadith

Whatever he is wearing.

So nearness to God is the aspiration.

It is not a guarantee.

And it is not something you can see.

His learning, other scholars can test.

His conduct, you can watch for yourself.

Nobody can.

Very often, not even he can.

I have heard it with my own ears.

From Grand Ayatollah Shaykh Muhammad Taqi Bahjat — one of the great maraji’ of Qom in our time, and a teacher of the inner life — may God rest his pure soul:

From the martyred leader, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei, may God rest his pure soul, at his office, many years ago: the same.

And from Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani — the senior marja’ in Najaf — may God protect him, to my face:

That was not modesty for effect.

You could feel it when they said it.

They knew how much road was left, and that nobody walks it on a title.

If they did not take their own ending for granted, you do not get to take it for granted on their behalf.

And I am labouring this for a reason.

For generations we have been taught that the scholar is better than you because he is a scholar.

That one sentence is how, tragically, men have worn the garb of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, or only worn it, and done things even Abu Jahl — among the cruellest persecutors of the first Muslims in Mecca — would have shied away from, and been shielded by the very people they wronged.

The garb is not a verdict.

It never was.

And Imam Zayn al-Abidin, peace and blessings be upon him — the fourth Imam, the son of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, who survived Karbala as a young man too ill to fight — settled it in a document he wrote called Risalat al-Huquq, the Treatise of Rights.

It is exactly what it sounds like: a list of everybody who has a claim on you, and what the claim is.

And he settles this one by what he does not say.

Listen to what he asks of you toward the one who teaches you:

وأَمَّا حَقُّ سَائِسِكَ بالعِلْمِ التَّعْظِيمُ لَهُ والتَّوْقِيرُ لِمَجْلِسِهِ وَحُسْنُ الاسْتِمَاعِ إليهِ وَالإقْبَالُ عَلَيْه وأن لا ترفع عليه صوتك، ولا تجيب أحدا يسأله عن شئ حتى يكون هو الذي يجيب، ولا تحدث في مجلسه أحدا ولا تغتاب عنده أحدا وأن تدفع عنه إذا ذكر عندك بسوء وأن تستر عيوبه وتظهر مناقبه ولا تجالس له عدوا ولا تعادي له وليا فإذا فعلت ذلك شهدت لك ملائكة الله بأنك قصدته، وتعلمت علمه لله جل اسمه لا للناس.

“And as for the right of the one who has charge of you through knowledge: to magnify him, and honour his gathering, and listen well to him, and attend to him with devotion; and that you do not raise your voice at him, and do not answer anyone who asks him about something, so that he is the one who answers; and that you do not speak to anyone in his gathering, and do not speak ill of anyone in his presence; and that you defend him if he is spoken ill of in front of you, and conceal his faults and make his virtues plain; and that you do not sit with an enemy of his, nor show enmity to a friend of his. If you do that, the angels of God bear witness for you that you went straight to him, and learned his knowledge for God — whose name is exalted — and not for the people.”

— Imam Zayn al-Abidin, peace and blessings be upon him; Risalat al-Huquq, the Rights of Leaders, the right of the one who has charge of you through knowledge

That is an enormous amount.

Do not raise your voice at him.

Do not answer for him when somebody asks him a question.

Defend him when he is maligned.

Conceal his faults.

That is more deference than most of us actually give.

Now look at the very next right in the same list — the one about a man who has charge of you through ownership.

Same construction.

Same chapter.

One after the other.

And that one uses the word:

وأمَّا حَقُّ سَائِسِكَ بالمِلْكِ فأن تطيعه ولا تعصيه إلا فيما يسخط الله عز وجل فانه لا طاعة لمخلوق في معصية الخالق.

“And as for the right of the one who has charge of you through ownership: that you obey him and do not disobey him, except in what angers God, Mighty and Majestic — for there is no obedience to a creature in disobedience to the Creator.”

— Imam Zayn al-Abidin, peace and blessings be upon him; Risalat al-Huquq, the Rights of Leaders, the right of the one who has charge of you through ownership

There it is.

The word appears — and the limit arrives in the same sentence, attached, before you have finished the thought.

I want to be exact, because this is a contrast the text draws and not a prohibition it utters.

He described the relationship differently.

Look at what he asks for, and look at what he does not.

And listen to the clause he closes on — it is the last thing in the list and it tells you what the whole list was for:

The teacher is the route.

The knowledge is God’s.

And then the same treatise turns around and bills the scholar.

This is what he owes the people he teaches:

وأمَّا حَقُّ رَعِيَّتِكَ بالعِلْمِ فَأَنْ تَعْلَمَ أن الله عز وجل إنما جعلك قيما لهم فيما آتاك من العلم وفتح لك من خزائنه فان أحسنت في تعليم الناس، ولم تخرق بهم، ولم تضجر عليهم، زادك الله من فضله، وإن أنت منعت الناس علمك أو خرقت بهم عند طلبهم العلم منك كان حقا على الله عز وجل أن يسلبك العلم وبهاءه ويسقط من القلوب محلك.

“And as for the right of those in your charge through knowledge: it is that you know that God, Mighty and Majestic, made you a caretaker for them only in what He gave you of knowledge and opened to you of His treasuries. If you do well in teaching people, and are not harsh with them, and do not grow impatient with them, God will increase you from His bounty. But if you withhold your knowledge from people, or are harsh with them when they seek knowledge from you, it is incumbent upon God, Mighty and Majestic, to strip you of the knowledge and its splendour, and to make your place fall from people’s hearts.”

— Imam Zayn al-Abidin, peace and blessings be upon him; Risalat al-Huquq, the Rights of Subjects, the right of those in your charge through knowledge

And if he withholds it, or is harsh with the people who come to him for it, God strips the knowledge from him, and its splendour, and drops him out of people’s hearts.

More accountable.

Not less.

So let me say the misreading out loud, because if I do not, somebody will leave here with it.

Follow them.

Surah Luqman said of your parents:

Both halves are in the same verse and I am not going to hand you one without the other.

And one last thing, and it is the protection at both ends.

The verse about honour before God is in the forty-ninth chapter, Surah al-Hujurat.

يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقْنَاكُمْ مِنْ ذَكَرٍ وَأُنْثَىٰ وَجَعَلْنَاكُمْ شُعُوبًا وَقَبَائِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوا ۚ إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِنْدَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرٌ

“O people: We created you from a male and a female, and made you peoples and tribes so that you may know one another. The most honoured of you before God is the one of you most mindful of Him. God is Knowing, Aware.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Hujurat (the Chapter of the Chambers) #49, Verse 13

It ends on four words we usually skip:

God knows.

Which cuts both ways, and the second way is the one you were not expecting.

You do not get to decide that a man is holy.

And you do not get to decide that he is lost.

What he does, you can see.

Where he stands with God, you cannot.

You only get to refuse the one thing.

Lesson Six — Displacement, Again

Last week we opened a word and we did not spend it.

An authority put where it does not belong is the same fault as a love put where it does not belong.

It is the same word, at a different address.

That is all I am going to say about it tonight, because there is a door there that I promised you we would open properly, and this is not the night, and I am not going to half-open it on my way past.

The Close

I have given you a great deal tonight and most of it will go.

That is how sermons work and I have made my peace with it.

So let me leave you three sentences, and none of them is mine.

Every one of them was written down by our own house, and kept by our own house.

Three sentences, and then I will stop.

The first, from the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, about himself:

The second, from a commentator this congregation has heard from almost every week of this sub-series, about the act itself:

And the third, which he carries from the Prophet himself, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, about the thing the verse was actually describing:

Conclusion — Key Takeaways

Three things to take out of this room, and they are things to do rather than things to think.

The first. Keep going.

Nothing I said tonight told you to stop.

Not one sentence of it.

Go to the shrines, go to your parents’ graves on a Thursday, take the children, say the greeting out loud.

The verse we opened on did not tell a community to stop loving a prophet and I am not going to tell you to stop loving the Household.

That was never the correction and it has never once been the correction.

The second. Be able to say what you are not doing.

Out loud.

In your own words.

Short enough to say to somebody at work.

And then the harder half — name the thing you would be wrong to say, and say that you do not say it, and let somebody hold you to it.

And the third, and this one is not for sharing.

Ask yourself the first question of the test.

Answer it honestly, tonight, on your own.

And do not tell anybody what you concluded — not me, not the person next to you, not anybody.

This one is not a debate and it is not a test of somebody else.

It is a question about the shape of your own obedience, and the only person who benefits from your answer is you.

Eulogy — Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him

There was a letter, and it was an invitation, and it could not be refused.

The caliph al-Ma’mun wanted the eighth of the Imams, peace and blessings be upon him, brought from Medina to Khurasan — from the city of his grandfather to the far north-east of the empire, a journey of months.

And the Imam went.

He left the house he had lived in.

He left the mosque where the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, is buried.

And he travelled without his family.

I want you to hold that detail, because it is the one that tells you what everybody involved already understood.

A man summoned to be honoured takes his household with him.

A man who knows he is not coming back does not.

Think about the geography for a moment, because we say Medina to Khurasan as though it were a sentence rather than a long stretch of a man’s life.

It is the width of the world as it then was.

Out of Arabia, across Iraq, across the Iranian plateau, into the north-east of everything the Abbasids held.

Months of it.

Stages, and stops, and towns where the people came out to see him — and every one of those towns is a place where somebody still tells you, today, that he passed through.

And he was going away from the mosque where his grandfather is buried, and away from the graves of his fathers, and he knew he would not be laid beside any of them.

He was not being sent into exile.

That is the thing I keep coming back to.

Exile you can name.

Exile has a shape and the community knows what has been done to you.

He was being sent into promotion.

And when he arrived, he was not imprisoned.

He was elevated.

He was made heir apparent to the caliphate.

His name was struck on the coinage.

The black of the Abbasids was set aside for the green of his house.

He was given a station that no member of the Household had held since Karbala, and it was given to him publicly, generously, with every appearance of reverence.

Now put that beside what you heard tonight.

Because this is the man — the same man, in the same years — who was asked about people making excessive claims for his family and answered in four words that the exaggerators are disbelievers and the over-claimers are associators.

This is the man who listed eleven things that put somebody outside the loyalty of his house and ended the list with or helped them with half a word.

This is the man who asked that the mercy of God be distant from those people, and then said he would rather they had been any of five other groups, the Khawarij among them.

His whole life said it, in every way a life can say it:

And he was killed by a man who had made him more than he was.

Do you see it?

The honouring was the weapon.

Not a cell.

Not a chain.

A title, a coin, a robe, and a seat beside the throne — and a court full of people who found it much easier to destroy him with reverence than they would have found it with iron.

That is the shape of it, and I do not think this congregation has ever been told it.

And he knew.

He said so before it happened.

واللَّهِ مَا مِنَّا إِلا مَقْتُولٌ شَهِيدٌ.فَقِيلَ لَهُ فَمَنْ يَقْتُلُكَ يَا ابْنَ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ قَالَ شَرُّ خَلْقِ اللَّهِ فِي زَمَانِي يَقْتُلُنِي بِالسَّمِّ ثُمَّ يَدْفِنُنِي فِي دَارِ مَضِيعَةٍ وَبِلادِ غُرْبَةٍ

“By God, there is not one of us except that he is killed, a martyr. It was said to him: and who will kill you, O son of the Messenger of God? He said: the worst of God’s creation in my time. He will kill me with poison, and then he will bury me in a house of desolation and a land of estrangement.”

— Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Saduq, ʿUyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2, the chapter on the reward of visiting him, report 9, on the authority of Abu al-Salt al-Harawi

Ghurba is not simply abroad.

It is the condition of being a stranger — of being where your people are not, where nobody knows your face, where there is no one who would recognise the sound of your name.

And he is not describing a fear.

He is describing an outcome.

He said that sentence about himself, in advance, and then it happened exactly.

He died at Tus.

And he was buried in that house — and in the same room, already in the ground, was Harun al-Rashid. Al-Ma’mun’s own father.

The grandson of the Prophet, laid down beside the man whose son had summoned him.

That is the dar madi’a.

The house of desolation.

It was not a metaphor.

And now the part that this session, of all sessions, cannot pass over.

Because the report does not stop with the burial.

He keeps speaking, and what he says next is for whoever comes.

أَلا فَمَنْ زَارَنِي فِي غُرْبَتِي كَتَبَ اللَّهُ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ لَهُ أَجْرَ مِائَةِ أَلْفِ شَهِيدٍ وَمِائَةِ أَلْفِ صِدِّيقٍ وَمِائَةِ أَلْفِ حَاجٍّ وَمُعْتَمِرٍ وَمِائَةِ أَلْفِ مُجَاهِدٍ وَحُشِرَ فِي زُمْرَتِنَا وَجُعِلَ فِي الدَّرَجَاتِ الْعُلَى مِنَ الْجَنَّةِ رَفِيقَنَا

“Now — whoever visits me in my estrangement, God, Mighty and Majestic, writes for him the reward of a hundred thousand martyrs, a hundred thousand of the truthful, a hundred thousand who made the pilgrimage and the lesser pilgrimage, and a hundred thousand who strove in His way; and he is gathered in our company, and made our companion in the highest ranks of the Garden.”

— Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Saduq, ʿUyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2, the chapter on the reward of visiting him, report 9, on the authority of Abu al-Salt al-Harawi

He speaks to whoever will visit him.

We have spent eight weeks on what it is to go to a grave and greet somebody.

We have spent tonight on where the limit of that falls.

And here is a man who spent his life refusing to be raised above what he was, saying — knowing where he was going to be buried and how far it would be from anybody who loved him — whoever comes to me there.

He is not asking to be made more than he was.

He asked us not to do that, in four words and a list of eleven, and we read them tonight.

He does not want to be left alone.

And they come.

In their millions, every year — some on foot, some having sold things they could not afford to sell — to a city in the north-east of Iran that exists because he is under it.

He said a land of estrangement.

Twelve hundred years later, the land of estrangement is never empty.

Segue to the Maqtal

Tonight we sat in a house in Samarra and watched a man be corrected three times in one afternoon — a man sent by two factions who could not agree about the family they both claimed to serve.

The house was the eleventh Imam’s, Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace and blessings be upon him.

And what we did not say is what happened to the eleventh Imam afterwards.

He lived under a surveillance so complete that when he died, the community that had been arguing about how much to claim for him could not even agree that he had a son.

The ones who claimed too much and the ones who claimed too little failed him on the same afternoon, in the same house — and then failed him again at his grave.

Our maqtal tonight is for him.

And it is given in the voice of the one who would know: his son.

Maqtal (Lamentation) for the Sixteenth Session of the Architecture of Guidance

Supplication

In Your Name, O Lord of the Universes, of the Martyrs and the Truthful

O God, we ask You by the light You placed in the world before there was a world to place it in.

By Your prophets, peace and blessings be upon them — by Noah who was mocked while he built, by Abraham who was thrown into a fire and came out of it, by Moses who stood in front of a tyrant with nothing but a staff, by Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, who was raised to God and kept clear of what men said of him, and did not say it of himself.

By Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions.

By the fourteen — by Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her, and by every Imam from the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, to the one we are waiting for.

O God, we ask You tonight by the eighth of the Imams, Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him — who refused to be made more than he was, and was made more, and was killed for it, and was buried among strangers, and told us of the reward God writes for whoever would come.

O God, keep us on the road.

Not in the ditch of the ones who love past the limit, and not in the ditch of the ones whose hearts have gone cold.
Keep us on the middle course that Your friend commanded us to hold fast to, and let our love for his house carry us toward You and never away.

O God, make us people who can say what we are not doing.

Make us people who can be corrected.
Make us the kind who hear a hard thing and go quiet and think, rather than the kind who reach for a reply.
And keep us from ever becoming a people who obey a man where You have already spoken.

O God, have mercy on our dead, and on those who have no one left to visit them.

O God, we remember before You the martyred leader, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei, may You rest his pure soul — and we ask You to accept him, and to gather him with those he loved.

O God, protect and guide and lengthen the life of our Wali al-Faqih, Imam Sayyed Mujtaba Khamenei, may You protect him, and keep him firm on the straight path until the rising of the one we are waiting for.

O God, hasten the relief of Your friend and the son of Your friend — the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may You hasten his return.
Let us be among those he would be pleased to find here when he comes, and not among those he would have to correct.

And whatever we have said tonight that was true, it is from You; and whatever was wrong in it is from me, and I ask Your forgiveness for it.

Amen, O Lord Sustainer of the Universes

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful

And from Him alone is all ability and He has authority over all things.

شَرَعَ لَكُم مِّنَ الدِّينِ مَا وَصَّىٰ بِهِ نُوحًا وَالَّذِي أَوْحَيْنَا إِلَيْكَ وَمَا وَصَّيْنَا بِهِ إِبْرَاهِيمَ وَمُوسَىٰ وَعِيسَىٰ ۖ أَنْ أَقِيمُوا الدِّينَ وَلَا تَتَفَرَّقُوا فِيهِ

“He has ordained for you of the religion what He enjoined upon Noah, and that which We have revealed to you, and what We enjoined upon Abraham and Moses and Jesus — that you establish the religion and do not divide over it.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Shura (the Chapter of Consultation) #42, Verse 13

The Charge Is Older Than We Are

Last week we spent an hour answering a charge.

We took it seriously.

We did not wave it away.

We went to the verse the charge is built on, and we read what the commentators actually said about it, and we found that the charge does not survive contact with its own evidence.

Tonight I want to tell you something about that charge which I did not tell you last week.

It is older than Islam.

It is older than the Qur’an, older than the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, older than the Arabic language as a language of scripture.

Men were arguing about whether you may stand at a grave and speak, and what it means if you do, in houses that were not our house, in centuries before ours.

And here is the part that should interest us most.

They did not run from the question.

They wrote it down.

They wrote it into their books of law — not the answer only, but the question itself, in its sharpest form, with the objection standing up at full height and not cut down to size.

And they wrote down the answer they did not accept, and they kept the name of the man who gave it, so that anyone reading a thousand years later could see exactly what had been said and exactly who had said it.

That is what the people who faced this before us did.

And so should we.

What I Am Not Going to Say

Before I go any further I want to name something, because if I do not name it, someone in this room will reach for it, and they will be reaching for it with my material in their hand.

I am not going to stand here tonight and tell you that other people do this too, so it must be fine.

That is a bad argument.

You would be right not to accept it from me, and I would deserve it if you did not.

Everybody does it has never made one single thing lawful in the history of this religion.

If the practice were wrong, the fact that it is old and widespread would only make it an old and widespread wrong.

I will not offer you that, and if you hear it in my mouth tonight I want you to correct me.

So let me tell you what I am actually going to show you.

Three things.

The first — that the question is old.

Not our question, invented last century by people looking for something to argue about.

A serious, ancient question that serious, ancient people took seriously.

The second — that the houses which took it seriously all answered it the same way in one respect: they attached a limit.

Every one of them.

They did not say do whatever you like.

They said here is what this is, and here is what it is not, and here is the line.

And the third — and this one is aimed at us, so brace for it — that the warning which comes attached to all of this is not a warning about somebody else.

That is the night.

Video of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Recap — What We Carry Forward

We are in The Architecture of Guidance, and this is the fifteenth part of it.

And inside it we are working through a smaller sequence called The House Beside the Grave.

Tonight is the seventh of those, and there are eleven.

Tonight is Wednesday the 23rd of September 2026, and it is the 11th of Rabi al-Thani, of the year 1448.

What we carry forward is short.

From the seventy-third: the dead are not absent.

They know the visitor, and they take comfort in him — uns, the word we spent a night on, the warmth of company that keeps loneliness off.

From the seventy-fourth: the charge of idolatry, examined at its source, turns out never to have been about the oneness of God at all — and the commentator the objectors themselves rely on files the whole matter under the law of funerals, which is where you file a question about how you bury people, not a question about whom you worship.

And tonight, the third sentence.

We were not the first to ask.

The Question, As It Actually Arrives

I want to be honest with you about how this question reaches a person, because we have a habit in the seminary of answering questions in a form nobody ever asks them in.

Nobody walks up to you and says:

What happens is this.

You are standing at a shrine.

Or you are showing somebody a photograph of one.

And they look at it, and they look at you, and they say:

That is the question.

Five words, and underneath them a suspicion — that there is something here that has slipped, that the line between honouring and worshipping has gone soft, and that you have not noticed because you grew up inside it.

Now.

A question like that cannot be answered by how it feels to you.

It feels right to you.

Of course it does — you have been doing it since you were a child and your mother held your hand at the doorway.

And it feels wrong to the person asking, and it feels wrong to them for reasons that are not stupid.

Feelings are not an argument.

Not theirs, and not ours.

So how do you settle it?

You ask what follows.

You take the thing you believe, and you push it until it produces a consequence — until it makes a difference to what you would actually do, in a real case, on a real morning.

And then you look at the consequence and you ask whether you can live with it.

Hold onto that, because in about fifteen minutes I am going to show you a room full of men doing exactly that, and they were not Muslims, and they had never heard of us.

Why We Are About to Read Their Books

Now I have to stop and do something, because otherwise you will sit through the next half hour waiting for me to explain myself.

In a few minutes I am going to open the books of the Jewish tradition in front of you, and read from them, carefully and with respect.

And after that I am going to open the Gospel.

A Shia majlis.

On a Wednesday night.

Reading the Talmud.

You are entitled to ask me why.

So here is why, and it is not my reason.

It is three verses and a hadith, and none of them is obscure.

What Every Human Being Is Made Of

The first is a thing we have already spent a whole night on, so I will only put my hand on it as I pass.

The oldest covenant on earth.

The one God took from every soul before any of us had a body to break it with — Am I not your Lord? — and every soul said yes.

We gave an entire evening to that in the Shahada nights, and I am not going to re-open it now.

But I will give you the hadith, because this one says something the covenant alone does not.

Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, is asked about the fitrah — the original disposition God made every human being upon.

And he answers:

هِيَ الْإِسْلَامُ، فَطَرَهُمُ اللهُ حِينَ أَخَذَ مِيثَاقَهُمْ عَلَى التَّوْحِيدِ، قَالَ: أَلَسْتُ بِرَبِّكُمْ، وَفِيهِ الْمُؤْمِنُ وَالْكَافِرُ

“It is submission. God made them upon it when He took their covenant upon His oneness, saying: Am I not your Lord? — and in it is the believer and the disbeliever.”

— al-Kafi, Volume 2, the second hadith of the Book of Belief and Disbelief

Hear the last clause.

Not the believer only.

The disbeliever too — because the fitrah is not a reward for getting it right.

It is the material every human being is made out of, before anybody gets anything right or wrong.

So when I open their book in a moment, understand what I am doing.

I am not extending a courtesy to somebody outside.

I am reading what men made of the same substance as you made of the same question you have.

Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus — and You

The second is the verse I put at the door tonight.

شَرَعَ لَكُم مِّنَ الدِّينِ مَا وَصَّىٰ بِهِ نُوحًا وَالَّذِي أَوْحَيْنَا إِلَيْكَ وَمَا وَصَّيْنَا بِهِ إِبْرَاهِيمَ وَمُوسَىٰ وَعِيسَىٰ ۖ أَنْ أَقِيمُوا الدِّينَ وَلَا تَتَفَرَّقُوا فِيهِ

“He has ordained for you of the religion what He enjoined upon Noah, and that which We have revealed to you, and what We enjoined upon Abraham and Moses and Jesus — that you establish the religion and do not divide over it.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Shura (the Chapter of Consultation) #42, Verse 13

One religion.

Ordained.

Not four religions in a row, each replacing the last like a new edition of a book.

One thing, enjoined on Noah, enjoined on Abraham, enjoined on Moses, enjoined on Jesus, and enjoined on you —

If that verse is true, then when I find a man in another house asking my question with care, I am not finding a coincidence.

And How We Are Told to Differ

And the third is the one that tells us how to disagree.

وَلَا تُجَادِلُوا أَهْلَ الْكِتَابِ إِلَّا بِالَّتِي هِيَ أَحْسَنُ إِلَّا الَّذِينَ ظَلَمُوا مِنْهُمْ ۖ وَقُولُوا آمَنَّا بِالَّذِي أُنزِلَ إِلَيْنَا وَأُنزِلَ إِلَيْكُمْ وَإِلَٰهُنَا وَإِلَٰهُكُمْ وَاحِدٌ وَنَحْنُ لَهُ مُسْلِمُونَ

“And do not dispute with the People of the Book except in the way that is best — except those of them who do wrong. And say: we believe in what has been sent down to us and what has been sent down to you, and our God and your God is One, and to Him we are submitted.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ankabut (the Chapter of the Spider) #29, Verse 46

Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, in al-Mizan, tells us what the way that is best actually requires.

And I want you to listen to this, because he is not describing a mood.

He is describing a method.

وَالْمُجَادَلَةُ إِنَّمَا تَحْسُنُ إِذَا لَمْ تَتَضَمَّنْ إِغْلَاظاً وَطَعْناً وَإِهَانَةً… وَأَنْ يَقْتَرِبَ الْمُجَادِلُ مِنْ خَصْمِهِ وَيَدْنُوَ مِنْهُ حَتَّىٰ يَتَّفِقَا وَيَتَعَاضَدَا لِإِظْهَارِ الْحَقِّ مِنْ غَيْرِ لَجَاجٍ وَعِنَادٍ

“Disputation is only good when it contains no harshness, no slur, and no humiliation — and that the one disputing draws near to his opponent and comes close to him, until the two of them agree and support one another in bringing out the truth, without stubbornness or obstinacy.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Ankabut #29, Verse 46

That is what we are doing tonight.

Three houses’ books, opened side by side, to bring out one truth about standing at a grave.

And now the lock, and I want it said plainly so that nobody can walk out of here tonight with the wrong thing in their pocket.

I am not telling you the religions are the same.

We differ.

We differ on things that matter more than this, and we differ on them permanently, and I am not going to stand on this pulpit and pretend otherwise to make an evening go down smoothly.

Where the roads part, they part.

What I am telling you is that the differing is supposed to be honourable.

And that is not my opinion.

That is a command, with a verse behind it.

They Asked It, and Then They Tested It

Before I Read You a Word of It

Before I read you a word of it, let me tell you what it is, because most of us in this room have never been told.

The Torah is the Book.

That much most of us know — what they hold as the revelation given at Sinai.

The Talmud is the second thing.

And that is their word for it, not mine.

One of their own scholars asks the question directly — why is it called Mishnah? — and he answers: because it is the second, in relation to the Torah.

It is the written record of centuries of argument among their scholars about how to live what was revealed.

Not the revelation.

The working out of the revelation.

What does this actually require of a man on a Tuesday, in a field, with a neighbour, in a year of drought.

And here is the thing I want you to hold.

For a long time they held that it must not be written down at all.

That it had to live in the mouth.

Carried by men, from men.

That to put it on a page was to kill something in it.

And then they wrote that ruling down too — with the names of who said it, and who heard it from him, and who heard it from him.

Sit with that for a moment.

It Keeps the Argument It Rejected

And there is a second thing about this literature, and it is the thing that makes tonight possible.

It writes down the argument it rejected.

By name.

You open a page and you find two men disagreeing, and the book does not tidy it away.

It keeps the losing answer.

It keeps the name of the man who gave the losing answer.

It keeps his reasoning at full strength, so that a reader hundreds of years later can look at it and think — actually, I am not sure he was wrong.

Which means this.

You cannot hold that book up and say this is what they believe.

Because on the next line it says the opposite, and the book kept both.

A book that preserves the losing opinion is not a creed.

It is a record of an argument.

What I Told You on the Tenth Night of Muharram

Now I have to say something, and I want to say it in front of you rather than hope nobody remembers.

On the tenth night of Muharram, from this pulpit, I told you that there is material in that literature — in the Talmudic accounts and in what came after them — about Jesus, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, and about his mother, the blessed Saint Mary, peace and blessings be upon her, that we as Muslims find unspeakable.

That was true.

I do not take it back and I am not going to soften it tonight to make the next twenty minutes go down easier.

And it is also true that inside that same literature there are men asking our exact question, tonight’s question, with enormous care and enormous honesty.

Both of those are true at once.

And they are only able to be true at once because it is not a creed.

It is a library of arguments, and a library contains what its authors put in it, including the things you would not have put in it.

And We Would Not Survive That Test Either

And now the part that costs us something, because otherwise I am doing somebody a favour and I am not interested in doing anybody a favour tonight.

We have that kind of literature too.

Transmitted.

Argued over.

Graded and re-graded.

Full of reports that our own scholars examined and threw out, and full of reports that one scholar kept and the next scholar refused, and full of things that, if you went looking for them with bad intentions and a highlighter, you could hold up in front of a camera.

You cannot judge a tradition by the worst thing you can find in its secondary literature.

We know that.

We know it because we would not survive that test either.

So that is what the Talmud is.

Now let me show you what is in it.

Before I Open Their Book — Our Own

I am going to read you something from the Talmud in a moment.

Before I do, I want you to hear the same event from our own Qur’an, in our own language, so that when the other book opens you already know the ground you are standing on.

Moses, peace and blessings be upon him, brings his people to the edge of the holy land and tells them to go in.

يَا قَوْمِ ادْخُلُوا الْأَرْضَ الْمُقَدَّسَةَ الَّتِي كَتَبَ اللَّهُ لَكُمْ وَلَا تَرْتَدُّوا عَلَىٰ أَدْبَارِكُمْ فَتَنقَلِبُوا خَاسِرِينَ

قَالُوا يَا مُوسَىٰ إِنَّ فِيهَا قَوْمًا جَبَّارِينَ وَإِنَّا لَن نَّدْخُلَهَا حَتَّىٰ يَخْرُجُوا مِنْهَا فَإِن يَخْرُجُوا مِنْهَا فَإِنَّا دَاخِلُونَ

قَالَ رَجُلَانِ مِنَ الَّذِينَ يَخَافُونَ أَنْعَمَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِمَا ادْخُلُوا عَلَيْهِمُ الْبَابَ فَإِذَا دَخَلْتُمُوهُ فَإِنَّكُمْ غَالِبُونَ ۚ وَعَلَى اللَّهِ فَتَوَكَّلُوا إِن كُنتُم مُّؤْمِنِينَ

“O my people, enter the holy land which God has written for you, and do not turn back upon your heels, for then you will turn about as losers.

They said: O Moses, in it are a tyrannical people, and we will never enter it until they leave it. So if they leave it, then we will enter.

Two men among those who feared, upon whom God had bestowed favour, said: enter upon them by the gate — for when you have entered it, you will be the victors. And upon God put your trust, if you are believers.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verses 21, 22 and 23

So the two men are in our Book.

Not as a footnote.

God Himself describes them —

That is a testimonial.

Whoever these two are, the Qur’an has vouched for them.

And now, who were they?

Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i answers that in al-Mizan, and notice who he says agrees with him.

وَقَدْ ذَكَرَ الْمُعْظَمُ مِنْ مُفَسِّرِي الْفَرِيقَيْنِ: أَنَّ الرَّجُلَيْنِ هُمَا يُوشَعُ بْنُ نُونٍ وَكَالِبُ بْنُ يُوفَنَّا، وَهُمَا مِنْ نُقَبَاءِ بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ الِاثْنَيْ عَشَرَ

“And most of the commentators of the two schools have stated that the two men are Yusha’ ibn Nun and Kalib ibn Yufanna, and the two of them are among the twelve chiefs of the Children of Israel.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Ma’idah #5, Verse 23

Our scholars and theirs — meaning our Sunni brothers and ours — agree on the name of this man.

There is no dispute about it in our house at all.

Caleb, son of Jephunneh.

One of twelve chiefs.

One of two who did not go along with the rest.

Now hold that name, because in about ninety seconds a book that is not ours is going to tell you where he went.

A Man Peels Off from the Group

Twelve are sent ahead into the land.

Most come back and tell the people a story designed to frighten them out of obedience.

Two do not.

And the Talmud tells us where one of those two went, on that journey, when he separated himself from the rest of them.

ויעלו בנגב ויבא עד חברון ויבאו מבעי ליה אמר רבא מלמד שפירש כלב מעצת מרגלים והלך ונשתטח על קברי אבות אמר להן אבותי בקשו עלי רחמים שאנצל מעצת מרגלים

“’And they went up in the south, and he came to Hebron.’ — it should have said ‘and they came’! Rava said: this teaches that Caleb separated himself from the counsel of the spies, and he went and prostrated himself upon the graves of the fathers. He said to them: my fathers, seek mercy for me, that I may be saved from the counsel of the spies.”

— Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 34b

Hear what he does.

He leaves the group.

He walks to Hebron - what in Arabic is called al-Khalil, where the fathers are buried — Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, peace and blessings be upon them.

He goes down at the graves.

And he speaks to them.

He does not ask them for anything.

He asks them to ask.

And the man in the report is not a man in trouble with his faith.

He is the one who got it right.

He is the one who came back and told the truth when the others lied.

And Look Where It Comes From

Now I want you to notice how the Talmud arrives at this, because this is the part that should make you sit up.

It is not a story somebody remembered.

It is a grammar problem.

The verse says they went up in the south — plural, all of them, the whole group.

And then in the same breath it says and he came to Hebron.

Singular.

He came.

And the Talmud stops dead and says: it should have said and they came.

One letter.

A verb that changes number in the middle of a sentence, and everybody had read past it for generations, and somebody did not read past it.

Somebody stopped and said — wait.

Why does it go from they to he?

And out of that comes the whole report.

Now.

Where have you seen that before?

Last week, in this room, we stood on a verse about the standing place of Abraham, peace and blessings be upon him, and I asked you to notice a single preposition in it — the little word that makes the difference between taking the place itself and taking a place of prayer from it.

And I told you that the whole question turns on that one word, and that the commentator who reads carefully sees it and the one who reads fast does not.

That is the same method.

I am not telling you they are like us.

I am telling you something narrower and more interesting.

The method is the same method.

Men who take a revealed text seriously enough to slow down at a change of number — in Hebron and in Baghdad, in Hebrew and in Arabic, with no contact between them — end up doing the same thing, because the text is the kind of thing that rewards it.

And Then They Ask Our Question Out Loud

And now here is the passage I have been walking you toward all evening.

A fast day.

A public calamity — drought, plague, the things that make a community go out together and humble themselves.

And part of what they do on that day is that they go out to the cemetery.

And the Talmud asks why.

למה יוצאין לבית הקברות פליגי בה רבי לוי בר לחמא ורבי חמא בר חנינא חד אמר הרי אנו חשובין לפניך כמתים וחד אמר כדי שיבקשו מתים רחמים עלינו מאי ביניהו איכא ביניהו קברי גוים

“Why do they go to the cemetery? R. Levi b. Lahma and R. Hama b. Hanina differ as to the reason. The one maintains that it signifies: we are before Thee as dead. While according to the other it is in order that the departed ones should pray for mercy in our behalf. What practical difference is there? The difference arises with regard to non-Jewish cemeteries.”

— Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 16a, in the edition of Henry Malter

Let that sentence sit in the room for a second.

That is our question.

That is the four-word question the man at the shrine asks you, word for word, in another language, in another house, from men who had never heard of us and never would.

And I am not going to tell you how long ago it was said, and I want to explain why, because it matters.

I could give you a number.

There is a number available and it sounds impressive.

But the number would be attached to the date somebody thinks that book was finished, and the people who study these things for a living do not agree about when that book was finished, and if I lean my argument on their disagreement then the first person who wants to knock it over will knock it over, and he will be right, and the room will stop listening.

So I will not give you a date for the book.

I will give you the men.

They are named in the text.

Rabbi Levi bar Lahma and Rabbi Hama bar Hanina.

You can look them up.

They taught, they had students, they had teachers, and their dates are not a matter of dispute.

And both of them were dead and buried before the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, was born.

That is the claim.

It does not need a century number and it cannot be knocked over.

And Then — Listen — They Test It

Now watch what they do next, because this is the point of the whole point.

They have two answers on the table.

The first:

We come out to the graves to say something about ourselves.

Look at us, God — we are as good as these.

We are dust the same as this dust.

It is an act of humbling, and it is aimed at God, and the dead in it are scenery.

The second:

We come out to the graves because the people in them can ask, and we are asking them to ask.

Two completely different theologies of the same walk.

And the Talmud does not settle it by which one feels more pious.

It asks:

What would actually change?

Show me a case where the two answers give you different instructions.

And it finds one, immediately.

Follow it through.

If the reason is we are before Thee as dead — then any grave will do.

Dust is dust.

You can make that statement about yourself standing anywhere there are graves.

But if the reason is that the departed ones should pray for mercy in our behalf — then it matters enormously whose graves they are.

You do not go to the graves of people who would not be asking.

One question.

And now the two answers are no longer two moods.

They are two different sets of instructions for a real morning in a real place, and you can look at them and decide.

That Is Exactly What We Did Last Week

My dear brothers and sisters.

That is exactly what we did last week.

Last week I read you the Imam of the Shafi’is, al-Nawawi, on the question of building over a grave, and I showed you that he did not settle it by how it felt.

He asked what follows — whose land is it, is it endowed, is it public, what would the ruling be if the answer were yes.

He was not reading this.

He had never seen this page and would not have wanted to.

He arrived there by himself.

Because that is what happens when serious people take a question seriously.

They stop asking how it feels and they start asking what follows.

And It Reaches the Book of Law

And one last thing, and then I am done with this house.

This did not stay in the study hall.

It went into the code of law.

Not into a book of piety or a book of stories — into the book a man opens to find out what he is supposed to do.

ויש מקומות נוהגין לילך על הקברות ולהרבות שם בתחנות

“And there are places where the custom is to go to the graves, and to pray much there.”

— Rema, gloss on Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim 581:4

In a code of law.

As custom.

Recorded plainly, without apology and without embarrassment.

Somebody asked the question.

Somebody wrote the question down.

Somebody wrote down both answers, and the name of the man who gave the answer they did not take.

And somebody tested it against a real case.

And at the end of all of that it entered the law as a custom in some places.

That is a house that was not afraid of its own question.

Lessons for Our Time

The Ones Who Took It Seriously Always Attached a Limit

Here is the first thing to carry.

Every house that took this question seriously answered it with a limit attached.

Not one of them said:

Not one of them said:

They said — here is what this is, and here is what it is not, and here is where the line falls.

The Talmud’s line fell at whose graves you are standing at.

Al-Nawawi’s line fell at whose land you are building on.

Different houses, different lines, and every single one of them a line.

Now think about what that does to the objection.

Because the objection, when you strip it down, is an objection to carelessness.

It is the fear that somebody, somewhere, has stopped noticing the difference between honouring a man and worshipping him.

And that fear is not stupid.

I have said so before and I will say it again.

There are people who are careless about it, and some of them are ours.

But look at what the evidence actually shows.

Carefulness is the mark of every house that took this question seriously.

The carefulness is the tradition.

The carelessness is the departure from it.

So when somebody accuses you of carelessness, the answer is not to get loud.

The answer is to be careful — visibly, out loud, with your limits stated where people can hear them.

You do not answer a charge of carelessness by being offended.

You answer it by being careful.

A Question You Can Write Down Is a Question You Are Not Afraid Of

And here is the second, and it is smaller and it will stay with you longer.

A question you can write down is a question you are not afraid of.

We wrote ours down last week.

In front of you.

In its strongest form, with nothing filed off it, and I did not stand up here and pretend the objection was stupid, because it is not stupid.

And theirs is written down in their book too — and next to it, kept, is the answer they did not take.

With the name of the man who gave it, so that you can go and check whether he was right.

Think about what kind of confidence that takes.

To write down the argument against yourself.

To preserve it accurately.

To hand your grandchildren the sharpest version of the case you rejected, and trust them to look at it properly.

That is not the behaviour of people with something to hide.

Now turn it around.

The people in trouble are never the ones who write the question down.

The people in trouble are the ones who cannot let it be asked.

The ones who go quiet, or loud, or personal.

The ones who tell you the question itself is a sign of bad character — bad Akhlaq, so that nobody in the room has to hear the answer.

Watch for that.

In others, and — this is the one that matters — in yourself.

Because if you ever find that there is a question about your own religion that you would rather was not asked in front of you, that is not a sign that the question is dangerous.

That is a sign that you have not done the reading.

And Our Own Books Say It First

I Am Not About to Tell You What Christians Do

Let me be very clear about what is coming, because there is an easy misunderstanding available here and I want to close it before we start.

I am not about to tell you what Christians do.

I am not going to show you a practice in another community and invite you to feel better about ours.

That would be the same bad argument I refused at the start of the evening, dressed differently, and you would be right to catch me at it.

I am about to read you what is in our books.

Our narrations.

Our compilations.

The ones our own scholars transmitted and our own scholars argued about.

And what is in them is about a prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, whom we love and whom we are commanded to love, and about what God told him to do.

The Christian material comes at the end, and it comes as a footnote, not as evidence.

Everything that follows is ours.

God Tells a Prophet to Stand at a Grave

Shaykh al-Mufid records, in his Amali, a revelation from God to Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return.

Four instructions in one breath.

Listen to the company the fourth one keeps.

يَا عِيسَى، هَبْ لِي مِنْ عَيْنَيْكَ الدُّمُوعَ، وَمِنْ قَلْبِكَ الْخُشُوعَ، وَاكْحُلْ عَيْنَيْكَ بِمِيلِ الْحُزْنِ إِذَا ضَحِكَ الْبَطَّالُونَ، وَقُمْ عَلَىٰ قُبُورِ الْأَمْوَاتِ فَنَادِهِمْ بِالصَّوْتِ الرَّفِيعِ لَعَلَّكَ تَأْخُذُ مَوْعِظَتَكَ مِنْهُمْ، وَقُلْ: إِنِّي لَاحِقٌ بِهِمْ فِي اللَّاحِقِينَ

“O Jesus, make Me a gift of the tears of your eyes, and of the humility of your heart. And anoint your eyes with the kohl-stick of sorrow when the idle ones laugh. And stand at the graves of the dead and call to them with a raised voice — perhaps you will take your admonition from them. And say: I am joining them, among those who join.”

— Shaykh al-Mufid, al-Amali, on the authority of Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him

Notice what it is grouped with.

Tears.

Humility of the heart.

The kohl-stick of sorrow, drawn along the eye, while the idle ones are laughing.

And then — in the same list, in the same voice, as the fourth of four —

That is not a legal instruction.

Nobody legislates the tears of a man’s eyes.

This is the register of intimacy — of what God asks from someone He has drawn close.

Standing at a grave and calling out belongs, in God’s own ordering, with weeping and with humility and with refusing to laugh along with the idle.

Read the clause itself again, slowly, and hear what is actually being asked.

Not walk past them. Not glance. Stand.

Not think about them.

Not reflect upon them silently, in the privacy of your own heart, in a manner unlikely to attract comment.

And then speak to them directly, in the second person, about yourself:

Now.

Whatever standing at a grave and calling out is — it cannot be the thing the charge says it is.

Because God is the one giving the instruction, and He is giving it to a prophet, and He is not instructing a prophet to commit the one sin the whole of prophethood exists to abolish.

You do not have to take my word for the ruling. Just hold the two things side by side.

On the one side, a charge that says speaking at a grave is the beginning of idolatry.

On the other side, God telling a prophet to go and speak at a grave, out loud.

They cannot both be describing the same act.

And Now the Verse You Are About to Think Of

Now some of you — and I mean this as a compliment — some of you have already got a verse in your mouth.

I know which one.

Let us go and get it, because I am not going to leave it sitting in the room unsaid while I move on to something more comfortable.

وَمَا يَسْتَوِي الْأَعْمَىٰ وَالْبَصِيرُ

وَلَا الظُّلُمَاتُ وَلَا النُّورُ

وَلَا الظِّلُّ وَلَا الْحَرُورُ

وَمَا يَسْتَوِي الْأَحْيَاءُ وَلَا الْأَمْوَاتُ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يُسْمِعُ مَن يَشَاءُ ۖ وَمَا أَنتَ بِمُسْمِعٍ مَّن فِي الْقُبُورِ

“And the blind and the seeing are not equal.

Nor the depths of darkness and the light.

Nor the shade and the scorching heat.

And the living and the dead are not equal. Indeed, God causes to hear whom He wills — and you are not one who makes those in the graves hear.”

— Qur’an, Surah Fatir (the Chapter of the Originator) #35, Verses 19, 20, 21 and 22

That is the verse.

It is a real verse and it is put to us constantly, and the person putting it to us is usually not being dishonest.

They are reading what is in front of them.

So let us read what is in front of them properly — all of it, not the last clause on its own.

Look at the shape of the passage.

It is a list.

Four pairs, one after another, in a single breath.

Now — nobody in the history of this religion has ever read the first pair as a statement about eyesight.

Nobody has ever said that God is here comparing the visually impaired unfavourably with the sighted.

Every reader who has ever lived understands immediately that the blind means the one who will not see what is in front of him, and the seeing means the one who will.

Nobody reads the second pair as a remark about the hours of daylight.

Nobody reads the third pair as advice about standing in the shade.

Three similitudes.

And then, in the same list, in the same breath, in the same grammatical shape — the fourth.

And suddenly, we are told, this one is about actual corpses.

Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, in al-Mizan, says what a careful reader would say.

He reads the whole run as one run — the blind and the seeing, the darkness and the light, the shade and the heat, the living and the dead — as four similitudes for one thing: the believer and the one who has closed himself.

And on those in the graves he says:

وَالْمُرَادُ بِهِمُ الْكُفَّارُ الْمَطْبُوعُ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِهِمْ

“And what is meant by them is the disbelievers upon whose hearts a seal has been set.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah Fatir #35, Verse 22

They are the living — walking around, eating lunch, perfectly healthy — with something sealed over the heart, so that the message goes in at the ear and arrives nowhere.

And the verse is a consolation to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions.

It is God telling him: this is not your failure.

You cannot force it.

You are not the one who makes a man hear who has decided not to.

The verse is not about a cemetery.

It is about a man in the third row who has made up his mind.

At His Cousin’s Grave

And one more from our own books, and this one I have been waiting all evening to give you.

In al-Kafi, in Volume Three, in the Book of Funerals — the same book from which we took the first point of the seventy-third session — there is a report about Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, and I will give it to you whole, because the end of it is the part that matters and I do not want you hearing only the first half.

He goes to the grave of Yahya ibn Zakariyya — John the Baptist, peace and blessings be upon him.

His cousin.

إِنَّ عِيسَى ابْنَ مَرْيَمَ جَاءَ إِلَىٰ قَبْرِ يَحْيَى بْنِ زَكَرِيَّا وَكَانَ سَأَلَ رَبَّهُ أَنْ يُحْيِيَهُ لَهُ، فَدَعَاهُ فَأَجَابَهُ وَخَرَجَ إِلَيْهِ مِنَ الْقَبْرِ، فَقَالَ لَهُ: مَا تُرِيدُ مِنِّي؟ فَقَالَ لَهُ: أُرِيدُ أَنْ تُؤْنِسَنِي كَمَا كُنْتَ فِي الدُّنْيَا. فَقَالَ لَهُ: يَا عِيسَى، مَا سَكَنَتْ عَنِّي حَرَارَةُ الْمَوْتِ وَأَنْتَ تُرِيدُ أَنْ تُعِيدَنِي إِلَى الدُّنْيَا وَتَعُودَ عَلَيَّ حَرَارَةُ الْمَوْتِ؟ فَتَرَكَهُ فَعَادَ إِلَىٰ قَبْرِهِ

“Jesus son of Mary came to the grave of Yahya ibn Zakariyya, and he had asked his Lord to bring him to life for him. So he called him, and he answered him, and came out to him from the grave. He said to him: what do you want from me? He said to him: I want you to keep me company, as you used to in the world. He said to him: O Jesus — the heat of death has not yet settled away from me, and you want to return me to the world and have the heat of death come back upon me? So he left him, and he returned to his grave.”

— al-Kafi, Volume 3, the Book of Funerals

Now.

There is more in that than I can open tonight, so let me take only what belongs to this evening.

That is the word.

That is the word we spent a whole evening on — the warmth of company, the particular comfort of not being alone, the thing one person gives another simply by being there.

Two weeks ago we found it in a narration about what the dead receive from the living.

And here it is in the mouth of a prophet — asking for it in the other direction. At a grave. Out loud.

And then hear the answer, because the answer is not what a story invented to comfort us would have said.

He says no.

Not out of coldness.

He had loved him in the world and there is no suggestion he has stopped.

He says no because coming back would cost him something, and he has already paid it once, and he does not want to pay it again.

Think about what has to be true for that sentence to be sayable.

He is conscious.

He is present.

He can be called, and he can hear, and he can answer.

He remembers the world and what he was to this man in it.

And he has an interest of his own — something he wants and something he would rather avoid — which means he is not an object in somebody else’s story.

He is still a person.

I am not going to draw the conclusion for you.

Sit with it.

What the Angels Say, and Where the Prophet Said It

One more, and it is the only thing in this Point that is not from our own books — so before I give it to you, hear what our own books say about the same act.

There is a verse describing what the angels say when they come in upon the patient in the Garden.

سَلَامٌ عَلَيْكُم بِمَا صَبَرْتُمْ ۚ فَنِعْمَ عُقْبَى الدَّارِ

“Peace be upon you for what you endured — and how excellent is the final home.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ra’d (the Chapter of Thunder) #13, Verse 24

Now hear where those words were said on this earth.

وَبَلَغَنِي أَنَّ النَّبِيَّ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ كَانَ إِذَا أَتَى قُبُورَ الشُّهَدَاءِ قَالَ: السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ بِمَا صَبَرْتُمْ فَنِعْمَ عُقْبَى الدَّارِ

“And it has reached me that the Prophet, may God bless him and his family, when he came to the graves of the martyrs, would say: peace be upon you for what you endured, and how excellent is the final home.”

— Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, on the authority of Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him

Sit with the shape of that.

The greeting that the angels give in Paradise — the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, brought it out to a field outside Madina and said it to men in the ground.

Not about them.

To them.

In the words the angels use.

So going to the graves of people who were killed for refusing, and speaking to them, and keeping the place — that is not a thing we picked up from anybody.

It is in our Book and it is in our Prophet’s mouth.

And They Kept the Day

And now the one that is theirs, and I give it to you as theirs.

On the fifth night of Muharram I told you about Polycarp — the old bishop of Smyrna who would not say the words that would have saved him, and who was burned for it.

What I did not dwell on then, I will name now.

His people gathered his bones afterwards.

They described them as more valuable than jewels.

They buried them in a place they chose.

And they said that they would gather there, on the anniversary, in gladness, to remember the ones who had gone before and to prepare the ones who were coming.

An annual gathering.

At a tomb.

On a date.

Written down by the people who did it, without the slightest sense that they were doing anything that needed defending.

That is all.

I am not going to build on it.

I mention it only so you know that the pattern is not narrow.

Lessons for Our Time

God Told a Prophet to Stand at a Grave and Speak

The first is one sentence and it does not need my help.

God told a prophet to stand at a grave and speak out loud.

That is in our books.

Not in theirs — in ours.

Transmitted by our own compilers, in a collection our own scholars have used for a thousand years.

So whatever visiting is, it cannot be the thing the charge says it is.

I am not re-arguing the seventy-fourth session tonight.

We did that work and it stands.

I am adding one stone to it: that the practice the charge calls a novelty and a slide into idolatry turns out to be something God instructed a prophet to do, in plain language, with a raised voice.

And notice the company He put it in.

Tears.

Humility of the heart.

Sorrow drawn along the eye like kohl, while the idle are laughing.

And then — go and stand at the graves and call out.

That is where God filed it.

Not under law, and not under danger, and certainly not under the things a servant must be warned away from.

He filed it with the tears.

So when the charge comes — and it will come, and it will probably come from someone who means well — you now know something about the shape of the answer.

The answer is not how dare you.

The answer is not a list of scholars’ names delivered at speed.

And the answer is certainly not everyone does it, which I refused at the start of this evening and which I refuse again now.

The answer is:

Hold that lightly.

Do not become pleased with yourself about it — being right is the least interesting thing a person can be, and a man can be right about a grave and wrong about nearly everything else.

But hold it.

And the Verse They Quote at You Says the Opposite

And the second, and this one you will use.

The verse people quote at you says close to the opposite of what they think it says.

— and those in the graves, on the reading of Allamah Tabataba’i, are the sealed-hearted living.

The fourth of four similitudes in a single run, three of which nobody has ever taken literally.

Now.

When you say this to somebody, say it the way I have just said it.

Do not say it in triumph.

Do not say you have been misreading your own Qur’an — even if it is true, especially if it is true.

The moment a person feels humiliated, the argument is over and you have won nothing.

Say it the way you would want it said to you if you had been the one reading past it.

Name the commentator.

Give the reason.

Show them the four pairs and let them see it for themselves.

And then stop talking.

Because the argument that convinces is never the one you win.

It is the one they finish in their own head after you have gone home.

And there is one more thing in this, and it is bigger than the verse.

Ask yourself how the misreading happened.

Because it did not happen through malice, and it is important that you understand that, or you will handle the next person badly.

It happened because somebody took the last clause of a list and read it on its own.

That is all.

There was no conspiracy.

Four pairs in a single breath, and somebody quoted the fourth one, and once you have only the fourth one in front of you, the plain meaning of the words is exactly what they said it was.

Now — that is the most ordinary error in the world, and we make it constantly.

We do it with hadith.

We take the sentence that suits us and leave the sentence before it where it lies.

We do it with each other — we hear the fourth clause of what our brother said, the one that stung, and we build a whole opinion of him out of it while the three clauses that framed it go unremembered.

And we do it with ourselves.

A man will take one thing he did on one bad afternoon and read it as the summary of his life, when it was the fourth item in a list, and God has the whole list.

So when you correct somebody’s reading of this verse, correct the method, gently, not just the verse.

Say: look at the run.

Look at what it sits inside.

Because if they learn that — if they learn to read the list and not the clause — you have given them something far more valuable than a point about a cemetery.

You have given them a way of reading that will protect them from a hundred arguments you will never be there for.

The Turn, and It Is Aimed at Us

We Did Not Read You All of It

On the tenth night of Muharram, in this hall, we read the Seven Woes.

You will remember them.

The long sequence in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, turns on the religious establishment of his own community and says woe to you seven times over.

We read them because of what was done to him, and to his mother, and to those who followed him.

We did not read you all of them.

There are two verses in the middle of that sequence that I left where they were, because they did not belong to that night.

They belong to tonight.

And Again — Our Own Book First

Same discipline as Point 1.

Before I read you a word of the Gospel, hear the charge in our own Qur’an, in our own language, about the same community and the same conduct.

God is speaking to the Children of Israel, and He reminds them what they were given before He says what they did with it.

وَلَقَدْ آتَيْنَا مُوسَى الْكِتَابَ وَقَفَّيْنَا مِن بَعْدِهِ بِالرُّسُلِ ۖ وَآتَيْنَا عِيسَى ابْنَ مَرْيَمَ الْبَيِّنَاتِ وَأَيَّدْنَاهُ بِرُوحِ الْقُدُسِ ۗ أَفَكُلَّمَا جَاءَكُمْ رَسُولٌ بِمَا لَا تَهْوَىٰ أَنفُسُكُمُ اسْتَكْبَرْتُمْ فَفَرِيقًا كَذَّبْتُمْ وَفَرِيقًا تَقْتُلُونَ

“And We gave Moses the Book, and We followed him up with messengers after him. And We gave Jesus son of Mary the clear signs, and We supported him with the Holy Spirit. Is it then that every time a messenger came to you with what your souls did not desire, you grew arrogant — and a party you denied, and a party you kill?”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 87

That is our Book.

Not somebody else’s report of what they said about themselves — God’s own words, in the Qur’an we recite, about prophets sent and prophets killed.

So when I open the Gospel in a moment and you hear something that sounds hard, understand: you have already heard it.

We recite it.

It is on our own page and it has been for fourteen centuries.

And now hear the same charge in the mouth of the prophet it was made through.

What the Sixth Woe Actually Says

Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί, ὅτι οἰκοδομεῖτε τοὺς τάφους τῶν προφητῶν καὶ κοσμεῖτε τὰ μνημεῖα τῶν δικαίων, καὶ λέγετε· Εἰ ἤμεθα ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῶν πατέρων ἡμῶν, οὐκ ἂν ἤμεθα αὐτῶν κοινωνοὶ ἐν τῷ αἵματι τῶν προφητῶν· ὥστε μαρτυρεῖτε ἑαυτοῖς ὅτι υἱοί ἐστε τῶν φονευσάντων τοὺς προφήτας.

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.”

— The Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 23, Verses 29, 30 and 31

Now.

I want to do something careful here, and I want you to watch me do it, because this passage gets misused in both directions and I am not going to misuse it in either.

Read What He Is Actually Angry About

Here is what he does not say.

He does not say: stop building tombs for the prophets.

He does not say that building the tomb is the sin.

He does not say the sepulchre should come down.

He does not say the garnishing is idolatry, or that the money would be better spent, or that the righteous need no monument.

Go back and look.

The building is simply there.

It is described.

It is assumed.

It is the setting of the rebuke, not its object.

And I want you to feel how odd that is, given who is speaking.

This is a man who, three verses earlier, has just compared these same people to whited sepulchres — beautiful outside and full of dead men’s bones within.

He is not shy about tombs as an image.

He has just used one as an insult.

So if the building of tombs for prophets were itself the offence, this is the moment.

The image is already in his mouth.

Two more words and the sixth woe becomes woe to you, because you build.

He does not say it.

He says because you build the tombs of the prophets — and then keeps going, into a different clause entirely, and the sentence does not come to rest until it reaches something the builders are saying.

So what is he angry about?

He tells us, in the very next breath, and he is completely explicit.

That is the sin.

It is the sentence that comes out of the mouth while the hands are doing the building.

The tomb-builder standing at the tomb of a murdered prophet, telling himself and anyone listening that he would have been on the right side.

That had he been there, on that morning, when it actually cost something — he would have stood with the prophet and not with the men who killed him.

And Jesus, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, looks at that man and says:

And the Verb Is Our Word

And I want you to hear the word he uses, because it is our word.

ὥστε μαρτυρεῖτε ἑαυτοῖς ὅτι υἱοί ἐστε τῶν φονευσάντων τοὺς προφήτας.

“Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.”

— The Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 23, Verse 31

The word that the whole Shahada series was built on — the word that does not mean victim and never did, the word that means witness, and that comes to mean the one who paid for his testimony with his body.

You bear witness.

Against yourselves.

Think about where else we have met this shape.

When you stand at a shrine and recite a ziyarah, what is the form of the words?

It is not a request.

It is not, mostly, a petition.

Go and look at the text of the Ziyarah of Hani ibn Urwa, which we read together.

Ash-hadu.

I bear witness.

Three times over.

A ziyarah is a formula of testimony.

That is its grammar.

You go to the grave and you give evidence.

Go and read one slowly.

You will find the same verb again and again — that you established the prayer, that you gave the alms, that you commanded the good and forbade the evil.

Each clause opening on I bear witness.

That is not praise.

Praise is a different grammar.

Praise says how beautiful you were.

Testimony says this is what happened, and I am putting my name to it.

And a witness can be examined.

That is what a witness is for.

Nobody takes testimony and files it unread.

The whole point of giving evidence is that somebody is going to weigh it, and weigh you, and ask whether the man giving it is the kind of man whose word means anything.

So when you stand at that grave and say ash-hadu — you have entered yourself into the record.

And the Gospel here is saying exactly that, and then adding the part we would rather not hear: evidence can go either way.

The man who builds the tomb is testifying.

He cannot help it.

The building is a statement, in stone, and everybody can read it.

He has put his name to a claim about which side he is on.

The only question the Gospel asks is what his testimony actually establishes.

And It Was Not Us Who Drew This Parallel

Now.

I could stop here, and you could go home thinking that this was a Shia preacher who went looking in somebody else’s book for a clever verse about somebody else’s community.

So let me take that away from you, and let me take it away using the one voice in this tradition that nobody in this room is going to argue with.

At Mina, during the Hajj, before the caravan and before the road and before any of what we weep for in Muharram — Imam Husayn ibn Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, stood up in front of the scholars and the notables of the Muslim world, who had come from every city for the pilgrimage, and he gave them a diagnosis.

We gave a whole night to that sermon in the Shahada series and I am not going to give it again.

I want one thing from it tonight.

The way he opened.

He did not open with an argument.

He opened by reciting verses — and the choice of verses is the argument, and the second one is why I have kept this until the end of the evening.

The first was this.

لَوْلَا يَنْهَاهُمُ الرَّبَّانِيُّونَ وَالْأَحْبَارُ عَن قَوْلِهِمُ الْإِثْمَ وَأَكْلِهِمُ السُّحْتَ ۚ لَبِئْسَ مَا كَانُوا يَصْنَعُونَ

“Why do the rabbis and the scholars not forbid them from their sinful speech and their consuming of what is unlawful? How wretched is what they have been doing.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verse 63

A verse about the religious authorities of an earlier community, who saw what was being done in front of them and said nothing.

And he reads it out to the religious authorities of his community, sitting in front of him, in Arabic they understood perfectly.

Now the second.

لُعِنَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا مِن بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ عَلَىٰ لِسَانِ دَاوُودَ وَعِيسَى ابْنِ مَرْيَمَ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ بِمَا عَصَوا وَّكَانُوا يَعْتَدُونَ

كَانُوا لَا يَتَنَاهَوْنَ عَن مُّنكَرٍ فَعَلُوهُ ۚ لَبِئْسَ مَا كَانُوا يَفْعَلُونَ

“Cursed were those who disbelieved among the Children of Israel, by the tongue of David and of Jesus son of Mary. That was because they disobeyed and were transgressing.

They did not forbid one another from the wrong that they did. How wretched is what they were doing.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verses 78 and 79

Stop there.

My dear brothers and sisters — what do you think we have been reading for the last ten minutes?

The Qur’an tells us that Jesus, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, cursed a portion of his own community, and it tells us exactly what for:

And the Gospel of Matthew shows him doing it.

Seven times over.

And the sixth of those seven is the one I read you tonight — the men at the tombs of the murdered prophets, saying

The Qur’an reports the curse.

The Gospel preserves the words.

And Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, picks up the Qur’anic verse about it — and turns it on the scholars of the Muslims.

That is three layers, and I did not stack them.

He did.

What He Said to the Scholars in Front of Him

And then he says the sentence that I want you to carry out of this hall tonight.

وَأَنْتُمْ تَرَوْنَ عُهُودَ اللَّهِ مَنْقُوضَةً فَلَا تَفْزَعُونَ وَأَنْتُمْ لِبَعْضِ ذِمَمِ آبَائِكُمْ تَفْزَعُونَ وَذِمَّةُ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ مُحْتَقَرَةٌ

“And you see the covenants of God broken, and you are not alarmed — while for some of the covenants of your fathers you are alarmed. And the covenant of the Messenger of God, may God bless him and his family, is held in contempt.”

— Imam Husayn ibn Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, the Sermon at Mina; Tuhaf al-Uqul of al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Shu’bah al-Harrani

Do you hear where we started tonight?

We opened this evening on a covenant.

The oldest one.

The one taken from every soul before any of us had a body —

— and I told you it is what every human being is made out of, the believer and the disbeliever alike.

And here is the grandson of the Prophet, at Mina, telling the scholars of his community that they can watch that covenant broken in front of them and feel nothing, while a slight against their own family name would have them on their feet.

He did not think the warning was about somebody else.

And then he went to Karbala.

Lessons for Our Time

Ask Which One You Are

So the first lesson is the hardest one in the session, and I want it to land plainly.

The Gospel does not rebuke people for building the tombs.

It rebukes them for building tombs for prophets their own fathers killed — and then congratulating themselves at the graveside.

Now ask yourself the question, and ask it honestly, because nobody else in this room can hear your answer.

Because we build.

We build beautifully.

We spend money we do not have on tile-work and calligraphy and silver, and I am not going to stand here and say that is wrong, because I have spent the whole evening showing you it is not.

But the building is not the test.

The test is what you would have done on the morning.

Not what you feel when the noha is playing and the lights are low and everyone around you is weeping.

Anyone can feel that.

Feeling it costs you nothing and proves nothing, and the men in that verse felt it too — that is precisely why they were building.

The test is what you do on a Tuesday, when the person being wronged in front of you is nobody’s idea of a martyr, and standing up for them will cost you a friendship or a contract or your standing among people whose opinion you value.

That is the morning.

It comes to all of us, in small sizes, constantly.

And the honest truth is that most of us find out on that morning that we are not quite who we thought we were at the shrine.

And the Man Who Asked That Question Went to Karbala

The second is one clause, and then I will stop.

The man who asked that question of his own community asked it at Mina.

And then he went to Karbala.

I am not going to preach Karbala to you now.

We have a whole life for that, and we have the nights ahead.

I only want you to notice that he did not ask it and go home.

Every System God Gave Can Be Corrupted

And the third.

This is new, and it is the beginning of something rather than the end of it, so I am going to open the door and then close it again, and we will come back to it properly.

Everything I have shown you tonight has a shadow behind it, and the shadow is this:

Now — hear me carefully, because this sentence can be misheard in about four different ways.

That is not a slur against anybody’s religion.

It is not me saying their religion went wrong and ours did not.

It is Satan’s stated plan.

He announced it, out loud, at the beginning, and God recorded the announcement in the Book so that we would know.

قَالَ فَبِمَا أَغْوَيْتَنِي لَأَقْعُدَنَّ لَهُمْ صِرَاطَكَ الْمُسْتَقِيمَ

“He said: because You have let me go astray, I will surely sit in wait for them on Your straight path.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-A’raf (the Chapter of the Heights) #7, Verse 16

Look at where he says he will sit.

Not on the crooked path.

Not in the tavern and the casino and the places we have all agreed are dangerous.

He sits on the road that leads to God.

Because there is no point sitting anywhere else — the people he wants are the ones who are already walking.

You do not need to ambush a man who is not going anywhere.

So corruption, when it comes, does not come to people who have left the road.

It comes to people who are on it.

Who are praying.

Who are building.

Who are certain they are doing God’s work.

And it takes them a few degrees off, and then a few more, and they never once feel themselves turning.

Now — if that is true, how would you ever know?

You are not a scholar.

You cannot audit somebody’s theology.

Somebody stands in front of you with a beard and a turban and a thousand citations and tells you this is God’s command, and what exactly are you supposed to do with that?

God has given us a test that does not require a seminary.

إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَظْلِمُ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ ۖ وَإِن تَكُ حَسَنَةً يُضَاعِفْهَا وَيُؤْتِ مِن لَّدُنْهُ أَجْرًا عَظِيمًا

“Indeed, God does not wrong by the weight of an atom. And if there is a good deed, He multiplies it, and gives from Himself a great reward.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Nisa (the Chapter of Women) #4, Verse 40

Not by the weight of an atom.

Not a little, not in a good cause, not as a regrettable necessity, not for a greater outcome later.

So here is the test, and a child can apply it.

When a man oppresses, and tells you he is doing God’s work — you do not need to be a scholar to know.

God does not oppress.

The oppression is the answer.

Whatever else may be true about that man’s learning and his lineage and his following, the thing he is doing is not from God, because God does not do it.

And I want to leave you with what dhulm — oppression —actually is, because we have flattened it into a political word and it is not first a political word.

Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i defines it in one clause, and he does it while explaining a verse about the Day of Judgement — this Day, no soul will be wronged at all, and you will not be recompensed except for what you used to do.

وَلَا يُتَصَوَّرُ مَعَ ذَٰلِكَ ظُلْمٌ، لِأَنَّ الظُّلْمَ وَضْعُ الشَّيْءِ فِي غَيْرِ مَوْضِعِهِ، وَتَحْمِيلُ الْعَامِلِ عَمَلَهُ وَضْعُ الشَّيْءِ فِي مَوْضِعِهِ ضَرُورَةً

“And no wrong is conceivable along with that — because wrong is the putting of a thing somewhere other than its place, and the loading of the doer with his own deed is the putting of a thing in its place, necessarily.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah Ya-Sin #36, Verse 54

Hear both halves of that, because he has given us the whole thing in one breath.

Wrong is a thing put where it does not belong.

And justice — this is the half we never say — is a thing put where it does belong.

On that Day, each man is handed exactly his own deed and nothing else.

That is not God being lenient and it is not God being severe.

That is a thing arriving at its own place.

So dhulm is displacement.

That is all it is.

Which means it starts long before anyone has any power.

It is in the word you place where a different word belonged.

It is in the attention you give where it was not owed and withhold where it was.

It is nearer to sin than to politics, and it is why a man can be an oppressor in his own house before he has ever oppressed a nation.

That is the door.

I am closing it now, because it needs a night of its own and it is going to get one.

But keep it in the back of your mind for the rest of this series, and notice — please notice — that I have not named a single community tonight.

Because if this lesson does not obviously include us, then I have not finished teaching it.

The Close

So we have been in three houses tonight, and I want to put down what we found in each of them in as few words as I can.

The question is old.

Older than us, older than our Book, asked by men who had never heard of us and would not have recognised us.

The answers came with limits attached.

Every serious house that asked it attached one.

The carefulness is the tradition; the carelessness is the departure.

And the only people that the Book and the Gospel and the Talmud between them agree in warning are the ones who honour the dead beautifully and would not have stood beside them while they were alive.

That is the whole night.

Conclusion — Key Takeaways

Three things to take home, and I will not re-argue any of them.

The first.

You settle it by asking what follows from it.

The men in Ta’anit did that, al-Nawawi did that, and neither of them had ever heard of the other.

When somebody asks you why do you do that — the answer is not because it feels right to me.

The answer is: here is what I believe about it, here is what follows from what I believe, and here is the line I will not cross.

The second.

God instructed a prophet to stand at a grave and call out with a raised voice.

The verse quoted against us, read in its own run, turns out to be about the living.

We are not borrowing a defence from another house tonight — we are noticing that other houses arrived independently at something our own books already say.

And the third, which is the one I want you to be uncomfortable about on the way home.

The Gospel does not rebuke the building.

It rebukes the sentence said while building —

And the first man to turn that warning on his own community’s scholars was Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, at Mina, using a verse God had revealed about the scholars of an earlier people.

He did not think it was about somebody else.

Neither should we.

Eulogy — Yahya ibn Zakariyya (John the Baptist)

Two Boys, and Nobody Had Carried Either Name

An old man is praying in a chamber, alone, and asking God for something he has no business asking for at his age.

And God answers him.

يَا زَكَرِيَّا إِنَّا نُبَشِّرُكَ بِغُلَامٍ اسْمُهُ يَحْيَىٰ لَمْ نَجْعَل لَّهُ مِن قَبْلُ سَمِيًّا

“O Zechariah, We give you glad tidings of a boy whose name is Yahya (John). We have not made for him, before this, any namesake.”

— Qur’an, Surah Maryam (the Chapter of Mary) #19, Verse 7

Think about how strange that is to say about a baby.

God is announcing a child, to a father who has waited a lifetime, and the detail He chooses to give is that nobody has ever been called this before.

Of all the things that might be said about a boy — that he will be righteous, that he will be a prophet, that he will bring you joy, all of which God does say elsewhere — the first distinguishing mark given here is that the name is new.

Nobody had carried it.

He was the first thing of his kind.

And What Our Own House Kept About It

And now let me give you the narration that our own house has kept about that phrase, because Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, was asked about it and he did not answer about Yahya alone.

لَمْ يَجْعَلِ اللَّهُ لَهُ مِنْ قَبْلُ سَمِيًّا: الْحُسَيْنُ بْنُ عَلِيٍّ لَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ مِنْ قَبْلُ سَمِيًّا، وَيَحْيَى بْنُ زَكَرِيَّا لَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ مِنْ قَبْلُ سَمِيًّا، وَلَمْ تَبْكِ السَّمَاءُ إِلَّا عَلَيْهِمَا أَرْبَعِينَ صَبَاحاً. قَالَ: قُلْتُ: مَا بُكَاؤُهَا؟ قَالَ: كَانَتْ تَطْلُعُ حَمْرَاءَ وَتَغْرُبُ حَمْرَاءَ

“’God had not made for him, before this, any namesake’ — Husayn ibn Ali, there had been no namesake for him before; and Yahya ibn Zakariyya (John the son of Zechariah), there had been no namesake for him before. And the sky did not weep except for these two, for forty mornings. He said: I asked, what was its weeping? He said: it would rise red, and set red.”

— Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, the chapter on the weeping of the heavens and the earth

Two boys.

Separated by centuries and a language and a desert.

Neither of them had a name before he was given it, and neither of them has been repeated since in the way that matters.

And one sky, that had not wept before and would not weep again, wept for both.

I have nothing to add to that image and I am not going to try.

What He Was Given, and What It Cost Him

He was a boy, and God addressed him as a man.

يَا يَحْيَىٰ خُذِ الْكِتَابَ بِقُوَّةٍ ۖ وَآتَيْنَاهُ الْحُكْمَ صَبِيًّا

وَحَنَانًا مِّن لَّدُنَّا وَزَكَاةً ۖ وَكَانَ تَقِيًّا

وَبَرًّا بِوَالِدَيْهِ وَلَمْ يَكُن جَبَّارًا عَصِيًّا

“O Yahya (John), take the Book with strength. And We gave him judgement while yet a boy.

And tenderness from Us, and purity. And he was God-fearing.

And dutiful to his parents, and he was not a tyrant, disobedient.”

— Qur’an, Surah Maryam (the Chapter of Mary) #19, Verses 12, 13 and 14

And then, immediately, the word that undoes any picture you might have been forming of a hard man.

Tenderness from God, given to him as a gift, alongside the strength.

Not instead of it.

The same boy who was told to take the Book with strength was given tenderness out of God’s own presence, and was dutiful to his parents, and was not a tyrant.

Those are the two halves of a witness, and we do not often hold them together.

We can manage strength without tenderness — that is easy and there are a great many people doing it.

We can manage tenderness without strength — that is comfortable and there are more.

He was given both, as a child, and he carried both into a room with a king in it.

And That Is Why We Are Told to Go

وَسَلَامٌ عَلَيْهِ يَوْمَ وُلِدَ وَيَوْمَ يَمُوتُ وَيَوْمَ يُبْعَثُ حَيًّا

“And peace be upon him the day he was born, and the day he dies, and the day he is raised alive.”

— Qur’an, Surah Maryam (the Chapter of Mary) #19, Verse 15

Three days named.

And the middle one is named without being described.

God does not tell us here what happened on it.

He tells us only that peace is upon him on it — the same peace as on the day he was born, the same peace as on the day he will be raised.

I am going to leave that day where God left it, for a few more minutes.

But hear what the verse does.

It sends peace upon him.

Not about him.

Upon him — addressed, delivered, to a person, on a day.

And that is the whole of what we have been doing all evening.

That is what a man does when he stands at a grave and speaks.

He is not performing an emotion.

He is not decorating a building.

He is delivering something to somebody, in the second person, because he has been told that it arrives.

Caleb went to Hebron and said

Jesus, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, stood at his cousin’s grave and said

God told him to stand there and call out with a raised voice.

And the sky, which has wept for two men only, rose red and set red for forty mornings for a boy whose name nobody had carried.

That is why we are told to go.

Segue to the Maqtal

There is a man sitting in front of Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, and he has a question about going to a grave.

Not this grave.

Another one.

And the answer he gets will contain the name of the boy we have just been speaking about — because the Imam does not answer him about one man alone either.

Let us go and sit with them.

Maqtal (Lamentation) for the Fifteenth Session of the Architecture of Guidance

Supplication

In His Name, the Lord of the Martyrs and the Truthful

O God, send blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad.

O God, we thank You for the verse at the door tonight — that You ordained one religion, and enjoined it upon Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may You, our beloved Lord, hasten his return — and upon us.
And we ask You to make us worthy of standing in that line rather than merely claiming it.

O God, we ask You for the martyred leader, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei — may You rest his pure soul — that You raise his station, and gather him with those he loved, and accept from him what he gave.

O God, protect the living leader, Imam Sayyed Mujtaba Khamenei — may You protect him — and steady his hand, and put barakah in his years.

O God, we ask You for a careful tongue.
Keep us from the argument that wins and convinces nobody.
Keep us from the cleverness that leaves a person smaller than we found them.
And when we are wrong — and we will be wrong — let us be the kind of people who write the correction down next to the mistake, with our name on it.

O God, we ask You for the morning.
Not for the feeling at the shrine, which costs us nothing and which You did not ask us for.
For the Tuesday.
For the moment when somebody nobody will ever write about is being wronged in front of us and it will cost us something to say so.
Put us on the right side of that morning, O God, because we have stood at enough graves now to have run out of excuses.

O God, we ask You for everyone in this room who has honoured a dead person more easily than they could honour a living one.
Forgive us that.
It is most of us.

O God, hasten the relief of our master, the Imam of our Age — may our souls be his ransom — and let us be among those who serve him, and are witnesses at his side.

And until that day, let us be people who ask the question out loud, and write it down, and keep the answer we did not like beside it.

Amen, O Lord Sustainer of the Universes

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful

And from Him alone is all ability and He has authority over all things.

ذَٰلِكَ وَمَن يُعَظِّمْ حُرُمَاتِ اللَّهِ فَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَّهُ عِندَ رَبِّهِ ۗ وَأُحِلَّتْ لَكُمُ الْأَنْعَامُ إِلَّا مَا يُتْلَىٰ عَلَيْكُمْ ۖ فَاجْتَنِبُوا الرِّجْسَ مِنَ الْأَوْثَانِ وَاجْتَنِبُوا قَوْلَ الزُّورِ

حُنَفَاءَ لِلَّهِ غَيْرَ مُشْرِكِينَ بِهِ ۚ وَمَن يُشْرِكْ بِاللَّهِ فَكَأَنَّمَا خَرَّ مِنَ السَّمَاءِ فَتَخْطَفُهُ الطَّيْرُ أَوْ تَهْوِي بِهِ الرِّيحُ فِي مَكَانٍ سَحِيقٍ

ذَٰلِكَ وَمَن يُعَظِّمْ شَعَائِرَ اللَّهِ فَإِنَّهَا مِن تَقْوَى الْقُلُوبِ

“That — and whoever venerates the sanctities of God, it is better for him with his Lord. And the cattle have been made lawful to you, except what is recited to you. So shun the filth of idols, and shun false speech.

Upright towards God, not associating anything with Him. And whoever associates anything with God, it is as though he had fallen from the sky and the birds snatched him away, or the wind cast him down into a remote place.

That — and whoever venerates the signs of God, that is from the God-fearing of hearts.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Hajj (the Chapter of the Pilgrimage) #22, Verses 30, 31 and 32

Listen to the Order He Puts Them In

Three verses, one after the other, in the chapter of the Pilgrimage.

I want to read you nothing else for a moment.

I want you only to look at how they are arranged.

The first one opens with two words —

And then:

Veneration.

Holding something in honour because of what God has attached to it.

And before that verse is finished, He says:

Then the middle verse.

And then the image — and it is one of the most violent pictures in the whole Qur’an.

A man falls out of the sky.

The birds take him in the air.

Or the wind carries him off to somewhere remote and drops him.

That is what associating partners with God does to a person.

He is not corrected.

He is not warned.

He is snatched out of the air in pieces.

And then the third verse opens — and listen to it — with exactly the same two words as the first.

The same construction.

And the same verb: yu’azzim, he holds in honour.

And sitting in between them, wedged in the middle, is a man falling out of the sky.

Now. I am not going to tell you yet what any of that means.

We will spend an hour getting there properly.

I only want you to notice the arrangement, because the arrangement is doing something.

The Book has not laid out veneration and idolatry as two points on a single nervous scale, with a careful line drawn somewhere in the middle that you might accidentally step over.

It has put one on either side of the other.

It says venerate, then it shows you what shirk — polytheism — looks like, then it says venerate again — and it never once stops to reconcile the two or to reassure you that they are different things.

It does not seem to think they are the same kind of thing at all.

Hold that.

We are leaving it there for an hour, and we will come back to it.

What Is Said About You for Going

Last week we ended with an instruction.

We said: go.

We spent an evening on why people stand at graves, and what our own books say is happening when they do, and we ended by telling you that the going is not a weakness in you and it is not a failure of faith, and that you should go.

Tonight is the week you find out what is said about you for going.

Some of you have already had this said to your face.

By a cousin.

By somebody at work.

By a brother-in-law at a wedding who had found a video.

Some of you have read it in a comment under something you posted, from a stranger, phrased as unkindly as it is possible to phrase a thing.

And some of you did not have an answer.

You knew it was wrong.

You could feel that it was wrong.

But you could not say why it was wrong, and so you changed the subject, and then you thought about it in the car on the way home.

And I know how that conversation goes, because it is the same every time.

It does not go badly because you are wrong.

It goes badly because they have three sentences ready and you have none, and three ready sentences will beat an hour of being right every time.

So they say their piece, and you say that’s not what we do, and they say then why do you kiss it, and there is a pause, and somebody changes the subject, and everybody in the room privately decides that the one with the sentences won.

By the end of tonight you will have an answer, God willing.

I want to say one thing about the kind of answer it is going to be, because it governs everything that follows.

It is not going to be an argument you win.

It is going to be four texts — and three of the four come from outside our own tradition.

Two of them are in the books of the people making the objection.

And the point of having it is not so that you can use it on somebody.

The point is so that when it is said to you, you are not frightened, and you can answer kindly, and the person walks away having learned something instead of having been beaten.

That is the whole shape of the evening.

Let me now put the objection in front of you properly.

Video of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Recap — What We Carry Forward

We are in The Architecture of Guidance, and this is the 14th part of it.

And inside it we are working through a smaller sequence called The House Beside the Grave.

Tonight is the sixth of those, and there are eleven.

Eleven.

If you were counting ten, the count changed this week.

We found more in one of the subjects than would fit in an evening, and rather than rush it we gave it its own week.

You will have that week shortly, with His grace and His will.

Tonight is Wednesday the 16th of September 2026, and it is the 4th of Rabi al-Thani, of the year 1448.

What we carry forward is short.

We asked why a scholar would leave the capital of the Muslim world to live in a village.

We asked what happened when they burned his books, and what could not be burned.

We asked why Najaf — why that ground and no other.

And last week we asked why people go at all, and we found an answer in our own earliest collection:

And we ended on a phrase I want back in your hands tonight, because we are going to need it.

The Charge, Put Properly

The Objection, and I Am Not Going to Soften It

I am going to say the thing that is said about us.

I am going to say it in the strongest form I know, in the words the people who say it actually use, and I am not going to put a single soothing word around it.

I want you to hear it at full weight.

Because an objection that has been made gentle before it is answered has not been answered.

It has been avoided, and everybody in the room can tell.

Here it is.

You pray at graves.
You travel across the world to stand in front of a box of dead bones and you weep.
You have built domes over them and covered them in gold.
You kiss the metal.
You press your face against it.
You write letters and push them through the lattice.
You ask a dead man for a child, for a job, for a cure — things that only God gives.
You circle the tomb the way people circle the House of God.

You worship them.
That is the word they use — you worship them.
And you worship the grave itself: the stone, the marble, the silver, the shrine.
You have made a religion out of masonry.

And you did not invent this quietly in a corner.
You did it in the face of your own Prophet, peace be upon him, his family and righteous companions, who cursed those who took the graves of their prophets as places of prayer.
Who forbade the plastering of a grave and the building over it.
Who sent Ali himself — the man you love above every other companion — and commanded him: leave no raised grave without levelling it.

He told you not to do it.
He sent the one you follow to undo it wherever he found it.
And you have done it anyway, on a scale he could not have imagined, and you have called it love.

And the worst of it is that you have taught it to your children.
You take them at four years old and you lift them up so they can touch the silver, and you tell them to ask.
You have raised a generation who reach for a grave before they reach for God.

That is the charge.

And I want you to notice something about it before we go any further, because it will matter in about forty minutes.

That is not one accusation.

That is two, wearing the same coat.

One of them is:

You direct to a human being what belongs only to God.

The other is:

The object.

The stone.

The building.

The thing made by masons out of rock.

They are not the same claim.

They do not stand or fall together.

And by the end of tonight, one of them will have been answered by a scholar in the objector’s own school, and the other will have been answered by walking through a door.

But not yet.

First we read what the charge is built on, because it is built on something, and it is not built on nothing.

The Two Reports It Rests On

There are two narrations that carry almost the whole weight of this, and both of them are in Sahih Muslim, which is one of the two collections the Sunni tradition holds to be the soundest books it possesses.

The first is narrated from a man named Abu al-Hayyaj al-Asadi, who is reporting what he was sent to do — and he was sent by the Commander of the Faithful, Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him:

قَالَ لِي عَلِيُّ بْنُ أَبِي طَالِبٍ: أَلَا أَبْعَثُكَ عَلَىٰ مَا بَعَثَنِي عَلَيْهِ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ: أَنْ لَا تَدَعَ تِمْثَالًا إِلَّا طَمَسْتَهُ، وَلَا قَبْرًا مُشْرِفًا إِلَّا سَوَّيْتَهُ

“Ali ibn Abi Talib said to me: shall I not send you on the same errand that the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, sent me on? That you leave no image without effacing it, and no raised grave without levelling it.”

— Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, the Book of Funerals

And the second, from Jabir:

نَهَىٰ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ أَنْ يُجَصَّصَ الْقَبْرُ، وَأَنْ يُقْعَدَ عَلَيْهِ، وَأَنْ يُبْنَىٰ عَلَيْهِ

“The Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, forbade that a grave be plastered, or sat upon, or built over.”

— Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, the Book of Funerals

Those are real reports in a real book and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

One thing, said once, and then I am moving on.

The hadith that this objection leans on hardest — the one that is quoted at us most often, the one about levelling the raised grave — reaches the people who quote it through Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace be upon him.

That is all.

I am not going to make anything of it.

I only want it noted.

The Man Who Answers This Is Not One of Ours

Now, we could spend the evening on our own scholars explaining these two reports to us.

And that would be a comfortable hour, and it would convince nobody in the world who was not already convinced, and you would not be able to use a word of it on Thursday.

So we are going to do something else.

We are going to answer this the way you would want a serious charge answered against anybody — not by finding a friendly witness, but by going to the most hostile competent source available and reading what it actually says.

We are going to read the standard commentary on Sahih Muslim, written by a scholar of the Sunni tradition, on these exact pages, and we are going to let him tell us what these two reports mean.

His name is Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi.

He was a jurist of the Shafi’i school, from Damascus, in the seventh century of the hijrah — and in the seventy-three sessions of this series I have never once mentioned him, which tells you how far outside our usual conversation he stands.

Most of you know one thing he wrote.

If you have ever been handed a small green book of forty hadith in a study circle, that was him.

That book is the least of what he did.

What he is actually known for, among people who work in that tradition, is this: al-Minhaj, his commentary on Sahih Muslim.

When a Sunni scholar wants to know what a hadith in Muslim means, this is the book he reaches for.

It has been the standard for seven hundred years.

The copy we are reading tonight was printed in Cairo, at the Egyptian Press at al-Azhar, first edition, in the year 1347 of the hijrah.

And he does not begin by defending anything.

He begins somewhere else entirely, thirty pages earlier, and I want to take you there first — because once you have heard it, you cannot hear the rest the same way.

First — Which Daughter

Before I read you that page I have to stop for one minute, because of something I am about to say that would confuse half this room if I said it without warning.

The report is about a funeral.

A daughter of the Prophet, may God’s blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions, has died, and the women of the household are washing her body.

And if I say that sentence and go no further, some of you will immediately think of Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her — and you will be confused, and rightly, because she did not die before her father.

She outlived him.

So let me tell you which daughter it is.

And I do not have to work it out, because al-Nawawi tells us himself, on that same page — and he tells us that his own tradition argued about it:

وَأَمَّا بِنْتُ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ هَذِهِ الَّتِي غَسَّلَتْهَا فَهِيَ زَيْنَبُ رَضِيَ اللَّهُ عَنْهَا، هَكَذَا قَالَهُ الْجُمْهُورُ. قَالَ الْقَاضِي عِيَاضٌ: وَقَالَ بَعْضُ أَهْلِ السِّيَرِ أَنَّهَا أُمُّ كُلْثُومٍ، وَالصَّوَابُ زَيْنَبُ كَمَا صَرَّحَ بِهِ مُسْلِمٌ فِي رِوَايَتِهِ الَّتِي بَعْدَ هَذِهِ

“As for this daughter of the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, whom she washed — she is Zaynab, may God be pleased with her. This is what the majority said. Qadi Iyad said: and some of the biographers said that she was Umm Kulthum. And the correct view is Zaynab, as Muslim stated explicitly in the report that comes after this one.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 3

It is Zaynab.

Now, there is a difference between us and them here, and I would rather put it in front of you plainly than let you trip over it.

In their books, the Prophet had four daughters — Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum and Fatimah — and three of them died in his lifetime.

The position most of our scholars have held is that Sayyedah Fatimah, peace and blessings be upon her, is his daughter by birth, and that the other three were the children of Sayyedah Khadijah, peace and blessings be upon her, raised in the Prophet’s house and called his daughters in the ordinary Arabic of that time.

And that is not a strange way to speak, and the Qur’an itself does it.

When God lists the women a man may not marry, this is in the list:

وَرَبَائِبُكُمُ الَّاتِي فِي حُجُورِكُم مِّن نِّسَائِكُمُ الَّاتِي دَخَلْتُم بِهِنَّ

“And your stepdaughters who are in your care, from your wives to whom you have gone in.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Nisa (the Chapter of the Women) #4, Verse 23

The Book has a word for a child raised in your house who is not yours by birth, and it puts her in the list of those you may never marry — which is to say it treats her as family, in law, at the point where it costs something.

The relation is real and it is honoured.

Nobody in that century would have blinked at hearing them called his daughters.

Two things, and then we go back to the page.

The first is that this is not one tradition being careless and another being careful.

Look again at what we just read: their scholars could not agree whether it was Zaynab or Umm Kulthum.

Qadi Iyad records the disagreement and al-Nawawi settles it from the wording of the next report.

They are doing exactly what we do — working out who is who, from the texts, and disagreeing on the way.

And the second is that none of it touches the ruling.

Whoever she was, the Messenger of God took the cloth off his own body and gave it for her shroud, and al-Nawawi tells us why he did it.

That sentence survives the disagreement completely intact.

Which is the whole method of tonight, and now you have seen it done.

You can differ with a man about a fact, say so without heat, and still read his book honestly and take what is true in it.

Thirty-Three Pages Earlier, He Says the Strongest Thing in the Book

So: Zaynab has died.

The women are washing her body, and Umm Atiyya is among them.

And the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, his family and righteous companions, hands them something of his own to shroud her in — his own waist-wrapper, the cloth he wore.

Al-Nawawi stops on that, and asks what the wisdom in it was.

And here is his answer:

وَالْحِكْمَةُ فِي إِشْعَارِهَا بِهِ تَبْرِيكُهَا بِهِ، فَفِيهِ التَّبَرُّكُ بِآثَارِ الصَّالِحِينَ وَلِبَاسِهِمْ

“And the wisdom in wrapping her in it was seeking blessing for her through it — so in this there is the seeking of blessing through the relics of the righteous and their clothing.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 3

Sit with that for a second.

The word he uses is tabarruk.

It means to seek blessing through a thing because of what it has been near, or who it belonged to.

A cloth.

A place.

A trace.

Now look at what kind of sentence that is.

Everything we are about to read from him on pages 36 and 37 is going to be permissive —

That is a jurist ruling on the edges of behaviour.

This sentence is not that.

This sentence is positive.

He is not tolerating tabarruk.

He is not conceding it.

He is naming it as the wisdom that the Messenger of God was acting on when he handed over his own cloth for Zaynab’s shroud.

And the generalisation is his, not mine.

He does not say

He says

Plural.

As a category.

He has taken one act and stated the principle underneath it.

Now, I have to draw a line here, sharply, and then we move on.

What we have just read is tabarruk — seeking blessing through a thing associated with the righteous.

That is one question.

It is not tawassul — asking a person to intercede for you with God.

That is a different question, with different texts and different arguments, and it is not tonight’s.

I am not going to let the two of them slide into each other, because that is exactly how this conversation usually goes wrong, and it usually goes wrong on our side.

Tonight is the place.

Not the asking.

The asking has its own evening and it is coming, God willing.

A Hand’s Width of Earth

Now to the pages themselves.

Printed page 36, and the running head across the top of it reads

This is the page that comments on the report from Abu al-Hayyaj — the one about the raised grave.

Here is the question that hangs on it.

Because the way the objection uses it, a raised grave is a dome.

A shrine.

A building.

Something with a roof on it.

Here is al-Nawawi:

فِيهِ أَنَّ السُّنَّةَ أَنَّ الْقَبْرَ لَا يُرْفَعُ عَلَى الْأَرْضِ رَفْعًا كَثِيرًا وَلَا يُسَنَّمُ، بَلْ يُرْفَعُ نَحْوَ شِبْرٍ وَيُسَطَّحُ، وَهَذَا مَذْهَبُ الشَّافِعِيِّ وَمَنْ وَافَقَهُ. وَنَقَلَ الْقَاضِي عِيَاضٌ عَنْ أَكْثَرِ الْعُلَمَاءِ أَنَّ الْأَفْضَلَ عِنْدَهُمْ تَسْنِيمُهَا، وَهُوَ مَذْهَبُ مَالِكٍ

“In it is that the way of the Prophet is that the grave is not raised above the ground by a great raising, nor humped — rather it is raised about a hand-span and made flat. This is the position of al-Shafi’i and those who agreed with him. And Qadi Iyad related from most of the scholars that in their view the better thing is to hump it, and that is the position of Malik.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 36

A hand-span.

The whole dispute, in the hands of the man who wrote the standard commentary on this book, is about whether the earth over a grave should be raised the width of your hand and left flat on top, or heaped up into a hump.

That is the argument.

Inches of soil.

Flat or rounded.

And notice who is on which side.

Al-Shafi’i says flat.

Malik says humped.

And al-Nawawi reports, from Qadi Iyad, that most of the scholars were with Malik.

So the majority position, in the tradition the objection comes from, is the more raised grave.

I want to leave one phrase with you before we move on, and I am not going to do anything with it tonight for another forty minutes.

Look at what he actually wrote.

Just hold that.

We will come back for it.

And there is one more thing on this page, and it is a piece of ordinary care that the objection loses.

That report has two commands welded into one sentence —

— and they get quoted together as though they are one ruling about graves.

Al-Nawawi separates them.

On the first half he says simply:

فِيهِ الْأَمْرُ بِتَغْيِيرِ صُوَرِ ذَوَاتِ الْأَرْوَاحِ

“In it is the command to alter the images of ensouled beings.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 36

That is a ruling about making images of living creatures.

It is an entire separate discussion in Islamic law with its own literature.

It has nothing to do with graves at all; it simply happened to be in the same sentence because the Commander of the Faithful was sent to do two jobs on one journey.

Two rulings.

One sentence.

And al-Nawawi keeps them apart, because that is what a careful reader does.

Neither half carries the charge.

And Then Page Thirty-Seven, Where It Turns

The next page carries the report from Jabir — the plastering, the sitting, the building.

The running head reads

And here al-Nawawi gives us the rulings of his school, one by one.

I am going to read them and then I am going to ask you to look at the last one very carefully.

قَالَ أَصْحَابُنَا: تَجْصِيصُ الْقَبْرِ مَكْرُوهٌ، وَالْقُعُودُ عَلَيْهِ حَرَامٌ، وَكَذَا الِاسْتِنَادُ إِلَيْهِ وَالِاتِّكَاءُ عَلَيْهِ. وَأَمَّا الْبِنَاءُ عَلَيْهِ: فَإِنْ كَانَ فِي مِلْكِ الْبَانِي فَمَكْرُوهٌ، وَإِنْ كَانَ فِي مَقْبَرَةٍ مُسَبَّلَةٍ فَحَرَامٌ، نَصَّ عَلَيْهِ الشَّافِعِيُّ وَالْأَصْحَابُ

“Our companions said: plastering the grave is disliked, and sitting upon it is forbidden, and likewise leaning against it or reclining upon it. As for building over it — if it is on land the builder owns, it is disliked; and if it is in an endowed cemetery, it is forbidden. Al-Shafi’i and the companions stated this explicitly.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 37

Four rulings.

Let me lay them out.

1. Plastering a grave — disliked.

2. Sitting on a grave — forbidden.

3. Building over a grave, on land you own — disliked.

4. Building over a grave, in an endowed cemetery — forbidden.

Now.

The last one is the strong one.

It is the only forbidden in the list that touches building at all.

It is the one the whole objection needs.

So look at what it is made of.

A maqbara musabbala — an endowed cemetery — is a particular thing in Islamic law.

It is ground that has been given away in endowment — made waqf — for the common burial of the Muslims.

It belongs to everybody and to nobody.

It is set aside so that every person in the town who dies has somewhere to be put.

And you may not take a piece of it for yourself.

That is why building there is forbidden.

Not because of what you might do at the grave.

Not because of what is in your heart when you stand at it.

Because the ground is not yours, and putting a structure on it takes a share of something that was given to all the Muslims and fences it off for one family.

It is a ruling about property.

It is a question of endowment.

Read the whole passage again and look for the word shirk.

Look for idolatry.

Look for worship.

Look for any suggestion — any — that what is at stake here is the oneness of God.

It is not there.

It is not there because that is not the kind of ruling this is, and the man writing it knew exactly what kind of ruling it was.

There is one more line on that page, and honesty requires that I read it to you, because it is the strongest thing in the passage for the other side and I am not going to step over it:

قَالَ الشَّافِعِيُّ فِي الْأُمِّ: وَرَأَيْتُ الْأَئِمَّةَ بِمَكَّةَ يَأْمُرُونَ بِهَدْمِ مَا يُبْنَى

“Al-Shafi’i said in al-Umm: and I saw the authorities at Mecca ordering the demolition of what was built.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 37

There it is.

Structures were pulled down at Mecca, and al-Shafi’i saw it, and al-Nawawi records it approvingly in the middle of this passage.

And it sits exactly where the sentence before it put it: in the endowed cemetery, on ground that was not the builder’s to build on.

That is the honest shape of it, and you now have both edges of the thing in your hands.

Lessons for Our Time

The Charge Was Never About the Oneness of God, and Their Own Books Say So

Here is the first thing to carry out of this room.

You were told that this is a question about tawhid — monotheism.

That when you stand in front of that lattice in Mashhad or in Najaf you are doing something that touches the oneness of God — the one thing in this religion that cannot be touched.

And then we opened the standard commentary on one of the two books that tradition holds soundest, at the two pages where it deals with exactly these reports, and what did we find it arguing about?

How high the earth is heaped over a grave.

Whether the top of it should be flat or rounded.

Who owns the ground it sits in.

That is it.

That is the whole of it, on the page, in the hands of the man the tradition trusts most to tell it what its own hadith mean.

And I want to be careful here, because this is where it would be easy to score a point and I do not want to.

I am not saying al-Nawawi would approve of everything that is done at a shrine.

I have no idea what he would say about the dome at Karbala; he never saw it and he never wrote about it.

That is not the claim.

The claim is narrower and it is stronger for being narrow.

It is this: when the man who wrote the standard commentary on Sahih Muslim sat down with these two reports, he put them in the chapter on funeral law, and he discussed them under the headings of disliked and forbidden, and he reasoned about them using the law of endowments.

He did not put them anywhere near the oneness of God.

So when somebody tells you that this is a tawhid question, you are allowed to know — gently, and without any need to say it loudly — that their own tradition did not treat it as one.

And here is what that actually looks like on a Thursday, because a lesson you cannot use is not a lesson.

You do not say:

That is a name being thrown, and it will be met with another name, and you will both be there an hour later having thrown eleven names at each other.

You say something much smaller.

You say:

And you wait.

Because most people who say this have never been asked that question, and they will discover, in the middle of answering you, that they had assumed it meant a dome, and that nobody ever told them it meant that — they simply filled the gap in.

And if they want to know what the scholars of their own school said it meant, you can tell them: a hand’s width of earth, and an argument about whether the top of it is flat or rounded.

That is it.

That is the whole intervention.

You have not won anything and you have not humiliated anybody.

You have put one honest question into a place where there had only ever been a slogan, and you have left it there to do its work.

A Disagreement Is Not an Accusation

And here is the second thing, and it is the one I would most like you to take home.

Look again at what we read on page 36.

Al-Shafi’i held that the grave should be flat.

Malik held that it should be humped.

And most of the scholars, as Qadi Iyad reports it, were with Malik.

Two Imams of the Sunni tradition.

Founders of schools that hundreds of millions of Muslims follow to this day.

In open disagreement, in writing, about the shape of the earth over a dead man.

And here is what did not happen.

Neither of them called the other an idolater.

Neither of them said the other had left Islam, or was praying to stone, or had made a religion out of masonry.

They disagreed the way scholars disagree — in books, with evidence, for a century, in front of everybody — and then they went on being two Imams of the same religion.

Something happened between then and now.

And I want to be very careful about how I say the next part, because there is an easy version of it that I am not going to give you.

The easy version names somebody.

It picks a movement, or a century, or a country, and it puts the blame there, and everybody in this room feels a little better for ten seconds and a little worse for a week.

We are not doing that.

We have never done that here and we are not starting tonight.

I will say only this, and then I will stop.

Something happened between Malik and now.

And whatever it was, it did not happen in the books.

The books are still there.

You can read them.

The argument in them is about hand-spans and endowed ground, and it is conducted between men who never once suggested that the other one had left the religion.

What we are dealing with today is not in those books.

It came from somewhere else.

And you do not have to know where it came from, or name it, or fight about it, to know that it is not what you were handed by the tradition.

And I want to say one more thing, and it is for the people in this room who have been hurt by this — because some of you have, and not by strangers on the internet.

By family.

By somebody whose opinion mattered to you.

It would be very easy to carry this the wrong way.

To let it settle into a grievance you take out and turn over.

To become somebody who is always half-waiting for the next time it gets said, so you can be ready.

Do not do that.

It will cost you far more than it costs them.

The person who says this to you has almost always been handed it.

They did not sit down with the commentary on Sahih Muslim and reason their way to it over a winter.

Somebody gave it to them in three sentences, the same way somebody might have given it to you, and it felt like defending God, which is not a contemptible thing to want to do.

So when you answer — and you will now be able to answer — answer the way you would want to be answered if you were the one who had been handed the three sentences.

Which, on some other subject, in some other week, you almost certainly have been.

That is enough for one point.

Let us go to the Book.

What the Book Actually Does

Back to the Three Verses

Now we go back to where we started.

Earlier, I read you three verses from the chapter of the Pilgrimage and asked you to notice only the arrangement.

You have been carrying them.

Let me put the third one back in front of you, because now you have the charge in your hands and it will sound different.

ذَٰلِكَ وَمَن يُعَظِّمْ شَعَائِرَ اللَّهِ فَإِنَّهَا مِن تَقْوَى الْقُلُوبِ

“That — and whoever venerates the signs of God, that is from the God-fearing of hearts.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Hajj (the Chapter of the Pilgrimage) #22, Verse 32

Whoever venerates the signs of God.

Not

Not

Not

It is put to us as something good, in a sentence of praise, and it is not hedged.

So the first question is the obvious one.

What is a sign of God?

What a Sign Is

For this we go to al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an — the commentary of Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, a scholar of the last century whose reading of the Qur’an is the one this tradition has leaned on more than any other., and who we have cited from many times across these sessions.

Here is his definition:

الشَّعَائِرُ جَمْعُ شَعِيرَةٍ وَهِيَ الْعَلَامَةُ، وَشَعَائِرُ اللَّهِ الْأَعْلَامُ الَّتِي نَصَبَهَا اللَّهُ تَعَالَىٰ لِطَاعَتِهِ

“The signs are the plural of a sign, and a sign is a mark. And the signs of God are the markers that God, exalted is He, has set up for His obedience.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Hajj #22, Verse 32

A marker.

A thing set up so that you will know where you are and what you are doing.

And he immediately gives us an example, and he gives it from the Qur’an itself —

I want to be careful here, and I want to be careful in public, because there is a shortcut available at this point and I am not going to take it.

The shortcut is to say: a sign of God is any marker God sets up for His obedience, and therefore the places where His friends are buried are signs of God, and therefore venerating them is commanded by this verse.

I am not saying that, and I want to tell you exactly why, because the reason is better than the shortcut.

Allamah Tabataba’i does not read this verse that way himself.

When he comes to the question of what the signs of God refers to in this particular verse, he holds — on the reading of the Imams, peace and blessings be upon them — that it refers to the sacrificial animals of the pilgrimage.

And he mentions the general reading, the one that says it means every marker set up for obedience, and he sets it aside for this verse.

His words are that the context does not suit it.

So I will not put a reading into his mouth that he specifically declined to make.

What we have from him is a definition, and it is his.

And what we have from the Qur’an is an instance, and it is the Qur’an’s.

And we are going to work from those two, honestly, and see where they take us.

Because they take us somewhere, and we do not need to overstate a thing that is already strong.

Two Hills, and a Woman Looking for Water

So let us go to the instance the Book gives us.

The Safa and the Marwa.

They are two rocky rises at the edge of the sanctuary at Mecca.

Every one of you who has been for Hajj or for Umrah has walked between them, seven times, back and forth.

It is not optional.

It is part of the rite.

Here is Allamah Tabataba’i on that verse:

لَيْسَتِ الشَّعَائِرُ التَّكْوِينِيَّةَ، بَلْ هُمَا شَعِيرَتَانِ بِجَعْلِهِ تَعَالَىٰ إِيَّاهُمَا مَعْبَدَيْنِ يُعْبَدُ فِيهِمَا، فَهُمَا يُذَكِّرَانِ اللَّهَ سُبْحَانَهُ

“They are not signs by their created nature — rather they are two signs by God’s making them two places of worship in which He is worshipped, so that they call God, glory be to Him, to mind.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah #2, Verse 158

And then the phrase I want you to hold for the rest of the night:

فَلَا يَضُرُّكُمْ أَنْ تَعْبُدُوهُ فِيهِمَا

“So it does no harm to you that you worship Him in them.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah #2, Verse 158

Read that again, and look at the small words, because the small words are the whole argument.

Not

There is a pronoun there and it does not point at the hills.

And there is a preposition there and it puts you inside a place rather than in front of an object.

You worship God in the place.

You do not worship the place.

That is the answer to one half of tonight’s charge, and it did not come from us.

It came from a commentary on a verse about two hills in Mecca that has nothing to do with graves at all.

Now — and this is the question I think is the honest one — what made those two hills into signs?

They are rocks.

There is nothing in the geology.

God did not build them differently from the ridge next to them.

What happened there is that a woman was left in a valley with a baby and no water, and she ran.

Seven times, back and forth, up one rise and down and up the other, looking for anything.

She was not performing a rite.

She was a mother in a desert who was about to watch her son die.

And God took that — that particular half hour of one woman’s desperation — and He held it so dear that He wrote it into the pilgrimage, and made every believer who comes to His House walk the path her feet made, for as long as the House stands.

That is what makes a stone a sign.

It is not the stone.

It was never the stone.

It is what was done there, and who did it, and what God thought of them for doing it.

And I have to put the limit next to it, in the same breath, because otherwise I am doing the very thing I have spent an hour objecting to.

A sign is a sign because God appointed it.

He appointed those two hills.

We do not get to appoint anything.

Nobody in this room, and nobody in any room, has the authority to look at a place and decide that it has become a sign of God.

That is not ours.

So I am not going to stand here and tell you that a shrine is one of the signs of God.

I am not going to use that word of it, and you should not either, and if you hear somebody using it you can tell them gently that they have overreached.

What I am telling you is something different and I think it is stronger.

I am telling you that the mechanism is the same.

That when God makes something honoured, the honour never sits in the material.

It sits in the connection.

And that a man who cannot see how veneration works when he is walking between the Safa and the Marwa has not understood his own Hajj.

The Titles We Give Our Own Scholars

And while we are standing on what makes a sign a sign, let me deal with something you have every right to ask about, because it is the same mechanism and it is sitting in plain view.

We call our senior scholars Ayatullah.

We call others Hujjat al-Islam.

And somebody has said to you, or somebody will:

Let me answer that the honest way first.

Nobody did.

No Imam handed anybody those words.

They are not in al-Kafi and they are not in Man La Yahduruh al-Faqih.

They grew up in the seminaries, centuries afterwards.

The first man our histories record being called Ayatullah is Allamah al-Hilli, the jurist of Hilla, who died in the year 726 of the Hijrah — some seven centuries after the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions.

These titles are ours.

We made them. I am not going to stand here and pretend they came down from heaven.

But look at what we made them out of.

اللَّهُمَّ ارْحَمْ خُلَفَائِي — ثَلَاثَ مَرَّاتٍ — قِيلَ لَهُ: وَمَنْ خُلَفَاؤُكَ؟ قَالَ: الَّذِينَ يَأْتُونَ مِنْ بَعْدِي وَيَرْوُونَ أَحَادِيثِي وَسُنَّتِي فَيُعَلِّمُونَهَا النَّاسَ مِنْ بَعْدِي

“O God, have mercy on my successors — three times. It was said to him: and who are your successors? He said: those who come after me, and narrate my hadith and my sunnah, and teach it to the people after me.”

— the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions; Shaykh al-Saduq, Uyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2, hadith 94

And when they asked him who those were, he did not say

and he did not say

He said:

Not what they are.

What runs through them.

And last week we read the letter the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, sent to Ishaq ibn Ya’qub.

He said the narrators of our hadith are his proof upon us — and that he himself is the proof of God.

Two possessives, one sentence apart, and the whole architecture is in them.

Which is why the title says what it says.

Listen to it properly.

Not a proof of God.

That rung has names on it already and the tradition has never once let anybody climb to it.

Every time you use that title you are putting a man one step down and pointing at the step above him.

Which sounds enormous, until you remember what the word means.

A sign is a marker.

And every one of us is a sign of God; that is not a rank, it is what it means to have been created at all.

The title is not a claim that God appointed him.

It is a claim about what the man is for.

And a marker that points at itself is a broken marker.

It is the same mechanism you have just heard on two hills outside Mecca.

The honour never sits in the material.

It sits in what runs through.

And I will tell you where Allamah al-Hilli is buried.

He is inside the shrine of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, at Najaf.

The first man we ever called a sign of God is lying inside one of the buildings we are on trial for tonight.

He Did Not Say Pray There

There is one more verse in this chapter of the argument and it is the sharpest sentence in the whole evening.

It is about the standing place of Abraham, peace and blessings be upon him, at the House.

وَاتَّخِذُوا مِن مَّقَامِ إِبْرَاهِيمَ مُصَلًّى

“And take, from the standing place of Abraham, a place of prayer.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 125

Now watch what Allamah Tabataba’i does with the grammar of that.

لَمْ يَقُلْ: وَصَلُّوا فِي مَقَامِ إِبْرَاهِيمَ، بَلْ قَالَ: وَاتَّخِذُوا مِنْ مَقَامِ إِبْرَاهِيمَ مُصَلًّى، فَلَمْ يُعَلِّقِ الْأَمْرَ بِالصَّلَاةِ فِي الْمَقَامِ، بَلْ عَلَّقَ عَلَىٰ اتِّخَاذِ الْمُصَلَّىٰ مِنْهُ

“He did not say: and pray at the standing place of Abraham. Rather He said: and take, from the standing place of Abraham, a place of prayer. So He did not attach the command to praying at the standing place; He attached it to making a place of prayer out of it.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah #2, Verse 125

Do you see the difference?

It is one preposition and it changes everything.

If God had said

then the standing place would be the thing you are facing.

The object of the exercise.

You would be there for it.

He did not say that.

He said: take it, and make of it a musalla — a place where prayer happens.

The place is not what you are facing.

The place is where you are standing while you face God.

That is the difference between an idol and an address, and it is the whole of the difference, and the Qur’an drew it with a preposition in a verse about a footprint in a stone.

Remember that.

I am going to ask you to look at something later and I want this sentence in your pocket when you do.

The Cave, and the Two Parties

And now the verse I have been waiting all night to read you, because it is the only verse in the Qur’an that is directly about what to do with a burial place — and the polarity in it is the exact reverse of everything you were told.

You know the story of the companions of the cave.

Young men who fled a tyrant and took shelter in a cave, and God put them to sleep for three hundred years, and then woke them.

And the people of the city found them — and the finding was a sign, because a man who has seen the dead come back does not argue about the resurrection any more.

And then they died, properly this time, in the cave.

And the people standing outside had a decision to make about the bodies.

فَقَالُوا ابْنُوا عَلَيْهِم بُنْيَانًا ۖ رَّبُّهُمْ أَعْلَمُ بِهِمْ ۚ قَالَ الَّذِينَ غَلَبُوا عَلَىٰ أَمْرِهِمْ لَنَتَّخِذَنَّ عَلَيْهِم مَّسْجِدًا

“And they said: build over them a structure — their Lord knows best about them. Those who prevailed in the matter said: we shall certainly take over them a place of prayer.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Kahf (the Chapter of the Cave) #18, Verse 21

Two proposals.

Two parties.

And the verse does not tell you who is who.

Allamah Tabataba’i does, and he tells you how he knows.

الْقَائِلُونَ هُمُ الْمُشْرِكُونَ مِنَ الْقَوْمِ بِدَلِيلِ قَوْلِهِ بَعْدَهُ: قَالَ الَّذِينَ غَلَبُوا عَلَىٰ أَمْرِهِمْ

“The ones speaking are the idolaters among the people — by the evidence of His saying afterwards: those who prevailed in the matter said.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Kahf #18, Verse 21

The first party — the ones who say build over them a structure — are the idolaters.

He does not guess at that.

He says by the evidence of, and points at the wording of the very next clause.

Now.

Before you hear the second proposal, I want you to know what the first one actually is.

Because when I first read this verse I assumed, as I think most people do, that

— meant putting up a monument.

A tomb.

Something grand.

It does not mean that.

Here is what it means:

وَالْمُرَادُ بِبِنَاءِ الْبُنْيَانِ عَلَيْهِمْ أَنْ يُضْرَبَ عَلَيْهِمْ مَا يُجْعَلُونَ بِهِ وَرَاءَهُ وَيُسْتَرُونَ عَنِ النَّاسِ فَلَا يَطَّلِعَ عَلَيْهِمْ مُطَّلِعٌ مِنْهُمْ

“What is meant by building a structure over them is that something be raised over them by which they are put behind it and screened away from people, so that no one of them may look upon them.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Kahf #18, Verse 21

It is a wall.

They are not proposing to honour these men.

They are proposing to seal them up.

To put something across the mouth of that cave so that nobody can see in and nobody can get to them.

And Allamah Tabataba’i gives their sentence in full, with the part the verse compresses:

ابْنُوا عَلَيْهِمْ بُنْيَانًا وَاتْرُكُوهُمْ عَلَىٰ حَالِهِمْ يَنْقَطِعُ عَنْهُمُ النَّاسُ

“Build over them a structure and leave them as they are — let people be cut off from them.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Kahf #18, Verse 21

That is the proposal of the idolaters.

Wall them up.

Make them unreachable.

Let nobody come.

And here is the other party:

وَقَالَ الْمُوَحِّدُونَ: أَمْرُهُمْ ظَاهِرٌ وَآيَتُهُمْ بَيِّنَةٌ، وَلَنَتَّخِذَنَّ عَلَيْهِمْ مَسْجِدًا يُعْبَدُ فِيهِ اللَّهُ وَيَبْقَىٰ بِبَقَائِهِ ذِكْرُهُمْ

“And the people of God’s oneness said: their affair is plain and their sign is clear — and we shall certainly take over them a place of prayer, in which God is worshipped, and by its remaining their memory remains.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Kahf #18, Verse 21

You have heard that construction before tonight.

Forty minutes ago, about two hills at Mecca:

The same shape, in a different commentary on a different verse about a different place.

The building is where God is worshipped.

The men lying in it are not.

And Allamah Tabataba’i says the context supports reading the second speech as a refutation of the first.

These are not two groups agreeing on a plan.

One says

and the other says

And then he gives his evidence for who the second group are, and it is a single word choice, which is exactly the kind of argument we have been doing all evening.

وَمِنَ الشَّاهِدِ عَلَيْهِ التَّعْبِيرُ عَمَّا اتَّخَذُوهُ بِالْمَسْجِدِ دُونَ الْمَعْبَدِ، فَإِنَّ الْمَسْجِدَ فِي عُرْفِ الْقُرْآنِ هُوَ الْمَحَلُّ الْمُتَّخَذُ لِذِكْرِ اللَّهِ وَالسُّجُودِ لَهُ

“And among the evidence for it is the describing of what they took as a masjid rather than as a temple — for the masjid, in the usage of the Qur’an, is the place taken for the remembrance of God and prostration to Him.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Kahf #18, Verse 21

Not a temple.

A place of prostration.

And he proves what masjid means in the Qur’an’s own usage by quoting another verse —

— and that verse is from the chapter of the Pilgrimage, verse forty.

I am going to leave that where it lies.

Now, there is a reply that always comes at this point and I would rather meet it than have somebody meet me with it afterwards.

The reply is:

And the answer is the word.

If the Qur’an were merely reporting, it would have used the word they would have used.

It says masjid.

In the Book’s own vocabulary that is a place where God is remembered and prostrated to — and it is the word the Book chose to describe what the people of God’s oneness built over a grave.

One more thing, and then we move, and this one is a matter of honesty about how much weight this verse can carry.

Allamah Tabataba’i says of this verse, in so many words, that it is one of the battlegrounds of the commentators’ opinions.

He says the combinations of readings run into the thousands, and that he has indicated the ones that suit the context.

So I am not going to tell you that what I have just read you is the settled meaning of this verse, because he does not say that and I am not going to improve on him.

What I will tell you is exactly what he did.

He identified the two parties from the wording and told us what his evidence was.

He said the context supports it.

And he said plainly that the verse as a whole is contested.

That is what an honest man does with a difficult verse, and it is more useful to you than a certainty would have been.

Because when somebody tells you this verse means the opposite, you will not be knocked over.

You will know that the verse is argued about, and you will know what the strongest reading is and who held it and why.

And Now the Sentence That Explains Everything

We are nearly at the end of Point Two, and I want to give you the piece of machinery underneath all of it.

It is in the same commentary, on our own verse, on the last three words of it:

حَقِيقَةُ التَّقْوَىٰ أَمْرٌ مَعْنَوِيٌّ يَرْجِعُ إِلَى الْقُلُوبِ، وَلَيْسَتْ هِيَ جَسَدَ الْأَعْمَالِ، فَإِنَّهَا مُشْتَرَكَةٌ بَيْنَ الطَّاعَةِ وَالْمَعْصِيَةِ — كَالْمَسِّ فِي النِّكَاحِ وَالزِّنَا، وَإِزْهَاقِ الرُّوحِ فِي الْقَتْلِ قِصَاصًا أَوْ ظُلْمًا، وَالصَّلَاةِ الْمَأْتِيِّ بِهَا قُرْبَةً أَوْ رِيَاءً

“The reality of God-fearing is an inward matter that goes back to the hearts. It is not the body of the actions — for the body of the actions is shared between obedience and disobedience: like the touch, in marriage and in fornication; and the taking of the soul, in a killing that is justice and in one that is wrong; and the prayer performed to draw near to God and the prayer performed to be seen.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Hajj #22, Verse 32

Three examples.

Not one of them is about a grave.

The same touch, between the same two people, is a lawful marriage or it is fornication, and you cannot tell which by watching.

The same act of taking a life is a just execution or it is murder, and the blade does not know the difference.

The same prayer, the same words, the same movements, performed by a man who wants God, or performed by a man who wants to be seen praying — and if you filmed both you could not tell them apart.

The body of the act is shared.

What separates them is not in the act at all.

It is inside.

So when somebody stands in front of you and says:

— they are making a claim about the body of an act.

And the Qur’an has just told you, in the very verse that commands veneration, that the body of an act does not settle anything.

It never did.

It cannot.

The difference was never in the stone.

And Our Own Book Drew the Line First

One last text, and it is ours, and I am giving it to you because it constrains us and not only them.

In al-Kafi — the earliest of the great collections of our narrations — there is a chapter called Visiting of the Graves.

We read from it last week.

Here is the second report in it.

A man named Sama’a asks the Imam a question:

سَأَلْتُهُ عَنْ زِيَارَةِ الْقُبُورِ وَبِنَاءِ الْمَسَاجِدِ فِيهَا، فَقَالَ: أَمَّا زِيَارَةُ الْقُبُورِ فَلَا بَأْسَ بِهَا، وَلَا تُبْنَىٰ عِنْدَهَا الْمَسَاجِدُ

“I asked him about visiting the graves, and about building mosques in them. He said: as for visiting the graves, there is no harm in it. And mosques are not to be built at them.”

— Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 3, the Book on Dying People, the chapter on Visiting of the Graves, second hadith

There it is, in our own earliest collection, in the same chapter that tells us to go.

Visiting — no harm in it.

Building mosques at them — no.

Now look carefully at what he is being asked, because it matters and it is easy to miss.

He is not asked about a grave.

He is asked about the graves, plural, and about building mosques in them.

He is asking about a burial ground.

And where was al-Nawawi’s one firm prohibition, an hour ago?

In an endowed cemetery.

The common burial ground of the Muslims.

Two traditions.

Two books that owe each other nothing.

The same question, about the same place, and very nearly the same answer.

And neither of them — neither of them — puts it anywhere near the oneness of God.

I am going to stop there and not push it further, because there is a further step available and it would not be honest.

Whether a building that has one honoured grave inside it falls under this report is a question of jurisprudence.

It is argued properly, by people qualified to argue it, using tools I am not going to pretend to deploy from the pulpit on a Wednesday evening.

What I will say is what the report says.

Our own book draws a limit.

It is not a licence for everything, and anybody who tells you our tradition has never drawn a line here has not opened it.

Lessons for Our Time

Veneration Is Commanded, and the Measure of It Is Inside You

The verse does not say

It does not say

It says

— and then it tells you where the value of that is:

Not from the correctness of the object.

Not from the architecture.

Not from how much marble.

From the hearts.

Which means two things at once, and you have to hold both or you have only understood half of it.

It means nobody can look at you and convict you.

They cannot see the thing that the verse says is decisive.

When a man tells you that what you are doing is idolatry, he is telling you something about an action he can see, and the Book has just told you that what he can see is not where the answer lives.

And it means nobody can acquit you either — including you.

Because if the measure is in the heart, then the question

is a real question, and it is yours, and it does not get answered by winning an argument with a cousin.

What Makes a Place a Sign Is What Was Done There, and Who Did It

Every one of you who has been on Hajj has walked between two hills because a woman ran there.

Think about that the next time this is put to you.

Nobody has ever accused you of worshipping a hill.

Nobody stands at the Safa and worries that they have gone too far.

And yet by any test the objection uses — you go to a specific place, you perform a specific act there, and you do it because of a human being who was there long ago — the Safa and the Marwa are the harder case, not the easier one.

The difference is that God appointed that one, and everybody knows it, and so nobody is frightened of it.

Which tells you that the fear is not really about the act.

And We Do Not Get to Manufacture Signs

And now the limit, and I want to say it before anybody says it to me.

God appoints a sign.

We do not.

There is no ceremony by which a community decides that a place has become holy.

There is no amount of love, or history, or number of visitors, that converts a piece of ground into something God has marked.

The Safa and the Marwa are signs because He said so, in a Book, in words we can all read.

So when you defend what we do, defend it accurately.

Do not reach for the biggest word available.

Do not tell somebody that a shrine is one of the signs of God, because you cannot show them that, and the moment they ask you to, you will have handed them the argument.

Say the true thing, which is smaller and which holds:

You do not need to claim more than that.

And a claim you cannot support is worse than no claim at all, because it will be the only part of the conversation anybody remembers.

And one more thing, because I have been careful tonight and you are entitled to know that I have been.

Allamah Tabataba’i, whose commentary we read from an hour ago, is strict on this: a sign is a sign because God made it one.

Shaheed Mutahhari, who studied under him and whose name most of you know, reads it more widely than I have read it tonight.

And where exactly that line falls is a live discussion, among people far better equipped to have it than me.

So do not hear me saying the question is closed.

It is not.

What I have handed you is the claim you can defend at a wedding when somebody puts a phone in front of you — and that is a smaller thing than the whole of what our scholars have said about it.

We will do that properly, God willing, when we come to what a hawza actually is, and what stands behind a scholar.

What We Actually Built

We have spent an hour in books.

Now let us stop arguing and just open the door and look at the thing.

Describe It. Do Not Defend It.

I want to walk you through one of these buildings, and I am not going to defend anything while I do it.

I am only going to tell you what is there.

You have been in one.

Check what I say against what you remember.

You come in through a gate, and you take your shoes off, and you are in a courtyard.

It is very large.

There are people sitting on the floor of it in every direction.

Some of them are reading.

Some of them are asleep.

There are families who have come a long way and are eating out of a bag.

Off the courtyard there are rooms.

In one direction there are washrooms, and a place to do your wudu — ablution.

In another there is somewhere for travellers to sleep, because people arrive at two in the morning with nowhere to go and nobody is turned out.

There is a kitchen.

In some of them the kitchen is enormous and it feeds tens of thousands of people a day and it does not ask anybody for money.

There is, more often than not, a school.

Rooms where students sit on the floor in a half circle in front of a teacher with a book open.

In the larger ones this is not a room, it is a seminary, and it has been running for centuries.

And there is a prayer hall.

Or several.

Enormous ones, with carpet the whole way across and lines marked in the weave, and at the appointed time they fill up, shoulder to shoulder, ten thousand deep, and everybody stands.

And somewhere inside all of that, off to one side, in a chamber with a doorway you have to look for, there is a lattice with a grave inside it.

That is the building.

Now, here is the sentence, and it is the only argument I am going to make in this section, and it takes four seconds to say:

Every one of them.

The ten thousand in the hall.

The families in the courtyard.

The students in the seminary when the call goes.

The woman at the lattice with her hands on the metal — when the prayer begins she turns, like everybody else, towards the same city everybody else turns towards.

Nobody in that building is facing the grave.

The charge was architectural.

And the answer is architectural, and it is available to anybody who walks in through the gate: these are not tombs with a prayer hall attached.

They are prayer halls with a grave in them.

Which is the sentence I read you forty minutes ago about the standing place of Abraham.

That is what that verse looks like when somebody builds it out of stone.

And it is the same everywhere.

The resting place of the late leader, Imam Khomeini, may God rest his pure soul, outside Tehran — there is a mosque in it, and a small seminary, and lodging for pilgrims, and above all an enormous hall for prayer.

In Mashhad, Imam al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him, and a great many of the companions of the Household, peace and blessings be upon them, around him, and at Dar al-Zikr the martyred leader, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei, may God rest his pure soul, and those who were martyred alongside him.

Every one of them is a place people come to pray.

And Now I Want to Ask You Something

Here is a question, and I would like you to actually answer it in your head before I go on.

How many of you have been to Mashhad?

Good.

Keep your hand up for one more.

Can you tell me where Harun al-Rashid is buried?

Because he is buried in that building.

He is under the same roof you walked around under.

He is, in fact, a few feet away from the grave you travelled to see.

Harun al-Rashid was the caliph of the Muslims.

He ruled from the Atlantic to the edge of India.

He was, by any reckoning, the wealthiest and most powerful man alive in his century.

And that ground was his family’s ground before it was anything else — he was buried there first.

The Imam was brought to him, not the other way round.

So the two of them are lying side by side.

Same soil.

Same roof.

Same marble over the top of both.

And twenty million people a year come through that building, and almost none of them could tell you within fifty feet where the caliph is.

Why?

If this were about the building, Harun would be getting it.

He has the better claim.

He got there first, it was his land, and he had more money to spend on a tomb than the Imam’s family had ever seen.

If what draws people is masonry, then the masonry is right there and it is his.

Nobody goes.

And Our Own Books Set That Up on Purpose

Now I want to show you something, because what I have just said to you is not a clever observation that occurred to me.

Our own books put the caliph in that sentence deliberately, twelve hundred years ago, and I do not think they did it by accident.

There is a report in Uyun Akhbar al-Rida — a collection assembled by Shaykh al-Saduq, one of the great gatherers of our narrations in the fourth century, devoted entirely to the reports about the eighth Imam.

In it, the Imam’s father — Imam Musa ibn Ja’far, peace and blessings be upon him — says this, years before any of it happened:

إِنَّ ابْنِي عَلِيًّا مَقْتُولٌ بِالسُّمِّ ظُلْمًا، وَمَدْفُونٌ إِلَىٰ جَنْبِ هَارُونَ بِطُوسَ، مَنْ زَارَهُ كَمَنْ زَارَ رَسُولَ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ

“My son Ali will be killed by poison, wrongfully, and buried beside Harun at Tus. Whoever visits him is like one who has visited the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him and his family.”

— Imam Musa ibn Ja’far, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Saduq, Uyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2

Read the two halves of that against each other.

And then, in the same breath, without a pause:

The neighbour is named.

And then the visiting is named.

In one sentence.

Whoever preserved that report was not filling in geography.

He was putting two men in the same ground in front of you and telling you in advance which one would be visited — and leaving you to notice, twelve centuries later, when you are standing in that building yourself, that he was right.

And there is another report in the same collection, and this one I love, and I am going to give it to you as a gift rather than as an argument.

A man is standing near Imam al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him, at Mina — or at Arafat, the narrator is not certain — during the Hajj. And the Imam is looking across at Harun.

And he says:

أَنَا وَهَارُونُ هَكَذَا — وَضَمَّ بَيْنَ إِصْبَعَيْهِ

“I and Harun are like this — and he put his two fingers together.”

— Imam al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Saduq, Uyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2

And the man who heard it says:

Two fingers, pressed together, in the middle of the Hajj, with the caliph in view.

So: same soil, same roof, same marble, same century.

Two men.

One of them is visited by twenty million people a year and the other one cannot be found.

The difference is not the dome.

It was never going to be the dome.

Ultimately, it is God who is the differentiator.

That is the whole of it.

One of those two men spent his life in the direction of God, and God let people know it, and they came.

The other one had everything a man can have and nothing that God valued, and the building does not help him at all.

And the Prophet Carried the Stone Himself

Now I want to close Point Three with a report from Sunan Abu Dawud — one of the six collections the Sunni tradition relies on, and a book that has been in their hands since the third century of the hijrah.

And I want to start with the title Abu Dawud himself gave the chapter, because it tells you what he thought it was about before you read a word of the report.

He called it:

That is the chapter heading, in their book, written by the man who assembled it.

And here is the report.

Uthman ibn Mazh’un has died.

He was one of the earliest Muslims, one of the ones who went to Abyssinia, and the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, loved him.

He is buried.

And then this happens:

فَأَمَرَ النَّبِيُّ رَجُلًا أَنْ يَأْتِيَهُ بِحَجَرٍ فَلَمْ يَسْتَطِعْ حَمْلَهُ، فَقَامَ إِلَيْهَا رَسُولُ اللَّهِ وَحَسَرَ عَنْ ذِرَاعَيْهِ — كَأَنِّي أَنْظُرُ إِلَىٰ بَيَاضِ ذِرَاعَيْ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ حِينَ حَسَرَ عَنْهُمَا — ثُمَّ حَمَلَهَا فَوَضَعَهَا عِنْدَ رَأْسِهِ، وَقَالَ: أَتَعَلَّمُ بِهَا قَبْرَ أَخِي، وَأَدْفِنُ إِلَيْهِ مَنْ مَاتَ مِنْ أَهْلِي

“So the Prophet ordered a man to bring him a rock, but he was not able to carry it. So the Messenger of God rose to it and pushed back his sleeves — it is as though I can see the whiteness of the forearms of the Messenger of God when he pushed them back — then he carried it and set it down at his head, and he said: by it I mark the grave of my brother, and I shall bury beside him whoever of my family dies.”

— Abu Dawud, al-Sunan, the Book of Funerals, hadith 3206

Slow down with me.

He did not order it done.

He asked a man to fetch a stone, and the man went, and the man could not lift it.

And so the Messenger of God — in the sixth decade of his life, for a man he had just called his brother — got up, pushed his sleeves back up his arms, and carried the stone himself.

And look at what the man who reported it remembered.

He did not remember the ruling.

He did not come away with a principle about grave markers.

He came away with:

Fourteen hundred years, and that is the detail that survives.

A man watching his Prophet lift a rock.

And then the sentence.

Now remember what I asked you to hold an hour ago, on page 36of al-Nawawi.

I told you I would come back for it.

Here it is.

He wrote:

About a hand-span, and made flat.

So when the report says

it cannot mean erase it, because the same passage, in the same sentence, says the grave is raised.

It means level the top of it.

Flatten the hump.

That is all it has ever meant.

Nobody in the classical tradition ever said let a grave sink into the ground and vanish.

The Prophet marked one with a rock he carried himself.

And I will give you the last word on this from the people who printed that book, because it is their footnote and not mine.

The edition we are reading is a modern one, published by a press that would not agree with much of what is in this room.

Underneath that report, they wrote this:

Read both sentences.

I am not going to read you the first and skip the second.

The first one concedes the headstone.

Completely, and without argument, in their own edition, underneath their own hadith.

And the second one tells you where the live disagreement actually is.

It is about what you may write on the stone.

Whether an inscription is allowed.

Whether you may put a flag up.

That is the argument.

Engraving.

It is not idolatry.

It is not the oneness of God.

It is a question about lettering, and there are scholars on both sides of it, and it has been argued politely for a very long time by people who did not accuse each other of leaving the religion.

The Stone Is for the Living

There is a second half of the Prophet’s sentence and I have not touched it yet.

Here it is again:

Why does he want it marked?

So that he can find it again.

So that when somebody else he loves dies, he can bring them here, and put them next to Uthman, and they will be together.

The stone is not for Uthman.

Uthman has gone to his Lord, and last week we spent an evening on what our books say he receives there, and none of it depends on a rock.

The stone is for the people who are still here.

And you have heard this in a harder form tonight and you may not have noticed.

In the eulogy that is coming I am going to tell you about a man in Kufa with minutes to live who was permitted three last requests.

He spent one of them on a debt.

He spent one of them trying to save his cousin’s life.

And he spent one of them on this:

He did not need it.

He was minutes from his Lord.

He asked because somebody was going to come looking.

A grave is an address.

Go and stand in Wadi al-Salam, outside Kufa, and look at it — one of the largest burial grounds anywhere on earth, and it goes to the horizon in every direction and then keeps going.

Or Behesht-e Zahra outside Tehran.

Or the cemeteries here where some of you have people.

Fields of headstones, as far as you can see.

Not one of them is a place of prayer.

Nobody prays towards them.

Nobody circles them.

There is no dome over any of them and nobody has ever suggested there should be.

Every single one of them is an address.

And I want to finish Point Three by finishing something we started last week, because we left it half-said and I have been aware of it for seven days.

Last week I told you there is solace for the one in the grave.

That was the whole evening —

— and it is true and our books say it plainly.

What I did not say is the other half, and some of you needed the other half more than you needed the first one.

There is solace for the one standing over it too.

That is not a lesser thing.

That is not the sentimental part that we allow you because you are grieving and we do not want to be unkind.

The Messenger of God marked a grave so his family could be laid beside a man they loved.

That is not a concession to human weakness.

That is a prophet building for the living, with his own arms, on the day of a burial.

So if you go because you cannot bear not to go — that is not a failure in you.

If you go and you find that something in you settles that had not settled in months — that is not a trick your mind is playing.

It is what the marker was for.

Lessons for Our Time

The Answer to You Built a Temple Is to Open the Door

Here is the first thing to carry home from Point Three, and it is the easiest thing you will ever be asked to do in an argument.

Invite them.

When somebody tells you that we have built temples to the dead, you do not need a text for the first move.

You say: have you been?

And when they say no — and they will nearly always say no — you say: go.

Go to Mashhad, or to Karbala, or to Kazimayn, or to Samarra, or to Najaf, or to Qom, and walk in through the gate, and look at what is actually in front of you.

Because the thing they are describing is not there.

There is no altar.

There is nothing anybody bows to.

There is a courtyard full of exhausted families, and a kitchen, and a school, and an enormous hall where several thousand people stand in lines facing Makkah five times a day.

And I want to say the honest version of this, because it cuts both ways and it should.

Do not take my description on trust either.

I have told you what is in that building.

I believe every word of it and you can check every word of it.

But the lesson is not

The lesson is: when somebody describes a place to you, and you have the means to go and look at the place, go and look at the place.

That applies to their description.

And it applies to mine.

And If It Were the Building, the Caliph Would Be Getting It

And here is the last one, and it is the whole evening in a sentence.

Harun al-Rashid is in that room.

He has the marble.

He has the dome over him — the same dome.

He got there first and it was his family’s ground.

Twelve hundred years of pilgrims have walked past him, most of them within a few feet, and almost none of them knew he was there and none of them came for him.

So whatever it is that brings twenty million people a year to that building, it is demonstrably not the building.

And that is not an argument I have constructed.

It is a fact about a floor plan, and anybody can go and check it, including the person who is accusing you.

Which brings us back to where we began, and to the three verses I read you at the start, and to the man falling out of the sky.

The same act is worship, or it is idolatry.

The identical touch is a marriage or it is a sin.

The identical prayer is devotion or it is display.

The identical dome stands over a caliph nobody visits and over a man twenty million people come to see.

The difference was never in the stone.

It was never going to be in the stone.

And the people who told you it was have been looking in the one place the Qur’an told them, in the verse that commands veneration, they would not find it.

The Close

I want to give you three sentences to take out of this room, and not one of them is mine.

The first is from the chapter of the Pilgrimage, and it is the verse we opened on:

The second is from a commentary on two hills at Mecca, and it is six words long, and every one of them is load-bearing:

And the third is from a man standing at a graveside in Medina with his sleeves pushed back and a rock in his arms:

That is the evening.

A command to venerate.

A pronoun that tells you who is being worshipped and a preposition that tells you where you are standing.

And a prophet, marking a grave, so that the people who loved a man could find him again.

If you remember nothing else, remember that none of the three is a defence.

Not one of them is arguing with anybody.

They are a verse, a definition and a report, and they were all sitting there, in books that anybody can open, the whole time this was being said about us.

Conclusion — Key Takeaways

So let me put in your hands what you came for, and then three things to do with it.

The charge was that this is a question about the oneness of God.

And we went to the standard commentary on Sahih Muslim — written by a scholar of the tradition the charge comes from — and we found the whole matter filed under funeral law and endowment law, discussed in terms of disliked and forbidden, argued over in hand-spans of earth.

Al-Shafi’i said flat.

Malik said humped.

Most of the scholars were with Malik.

And neither of them ever suggested the other had left the religion over it.

Then the Book.

A verse that commands veneration, with the severest image of shirk in the whole chapter sitting between two halves of it.

A commentary that says of two hills in Mecca:

A verse about the standing place of Abraham that attaches the command not to the place but to making a place of prayer out of it.

And the one verse in the Qur’an that is directly about what to do with a burial place — where the ones who wanted the dead walled off and forgotten are named as the idolaters, and the ones who said

are named as the people of God’s oneness.

And then a building.

Which turns out, when you walk into it, to be a mosque with a grave in it and ten thousand people facing Makkah.

With a caliph under the same dome that nobody has come for in twelve hundred years.

Three things to do.

Know the answer well enough to give it kindly.

That is the whole point of having spent this hour.

Not so you can win.

So that when it is put to you, you are not frightened, and you do not get angry, and the person in front of you leaves knowing something they did not know.

If you use tonight to humiliate somebody at a wedding, you have taken four texts and made them into a weapon, and I would rather you had never heard them.

Keep the limit our own books set.

We read it tonight and it constrains us.

Do not defend more than is ours to defend.

Do not call a shrine a sign of God.

Do not claim ground is holy because we love it.

When somebody finds the overreach — and they will look for it — let them find that we had already marked it ourselves.

And when you go, go as someone whose heart God can see.

Because that is the one thing in this entire evening that nobody else can check, and the verse says it is the only thing that counts.

Not the distance travelled.

Not the tears.

Not how long you stood there.

What was in you while you stood.

Eulogy

There is a man buried in Kufa tonight, and there is a ziyarah written for him, and people stand at his grave and say it.

I want to tell you how he got there.

The Man Who Opened His Door

His name was Hani ibn Urwa.

He was the chief of a great tribe, Madhhij, and he was old, and he had been a companion of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, in his youth.

When the Imam’s envoy came to Kufa to take the pledge of the people — Muslim ibn Aqil, the son of the Prophet’s uncle’s son, sent ahead to see whether the city meant what its letters had said — Hani ibn Urwa opened his house to him and hid him in it.

That is the whole of what he did.

He gave a man a room.

The governor found out.

And Hani was brought to the palace and struck across the face with a cane, so hard that it split his forehead and the blood ran down into his beard, and then he was taken away and held.

And the word went out into the city:

So his tribe came.

Armed, and in numbers, and they surrounded the governor’s palace, and they were not going away.

The Judge at the Gate

And the governor sent out a judge.

He was the judge of Kufa, Shurayh, and I am going to name him once, now, and then not again — because it is not the name that matters here, it is what the office was for.

He had been a good judge.

That is not a mitigation, it is the mechanism.

He was believed because he was worth believing.

A man who had spent thirty years giving honest rulings is a man whose word a crowd will accept, and that was precisely why he was the one sent out.

They took him in to see Hani first.

And Hani, bleeding, said to him:

Ten men.

That is what he was asking for.

And then the judge walked out of the cell, through the gate, and stood in front of the crowd — on foot, with the governor’s own bodyguard at his elbow.

I want you to hold that detail, because it changes what kind of story this is.

He was not a free man in that moment.

There was a soldier standing next to him whose job it was to be standing next to him.

And here is what he said to them.

The governor heard about your concern for your chief. He sent me in to see him and to come out and tell you his condition. I have seen him. He is alive. The report you have had of his death is false.

— as Reyshahri gives it, from Tarikh al-Tabari, Volume 5, page 364, and Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh, Volume 2, page 538

Now.

Every word of that was true.

Hani was alive.

The report of his death was false.

The judge had gone in, and he had seen him, and he came out and reported exactly what he had seen, and there is not one syllable in it that a court could call a lie.

And the crowd praised God, and dispersed, and went home.

The chronicle that carries this — Ayatullah Muhammad Muhammadi Reyshahri, in his collected chronicles of the martyrdom — describes what the judge did in one phrase, and I have not been able to put it down since I read it.

He says the judge went out to them

He did not lie.

He told the truth and stopped.

And he left out a man asking for ten men.

And I want to say what this is, because Ayatollah Reyshahri names it himself and it is not my reading.

He describes the method plainly:

The governor did not send a soldier out to that crowd.

A soldier would have been shouted down and possibly torn apart.

He sent the man the people believed.

The credibility was the instrument.

That is what it was for.

And that is why a scholar’s trustworthiness is not his own private property to spend as he likes.

It was built out of other people’s trust, and it can be picked up by somebody else and used, and on that afternoon it was worth more to the governor of Kufa than a hundred armed men.

And What They Did With the Bodies

Muslim ibn Aqil was killed a short time later, on the roof of the palace.

Before he died he was allowed to make his will, and he called for a man from the governor’s own circle who happened to be his distant relative, and he asked for three things.

He had seven hundred dirhams of debt in that city — pay it.

Send someone to warn the Imam to turn back.

And:

وَانْظُرْ جُثَّتِي فَاطْلُبْهَا مِنِ ابْنِ زِيَادٍ فَوَارِهَا

“And look for my body, and ask Ibn Ziyad for it, and cover it.”

— as Ayatollah Reyshahri gives it, from al-Baladhuri, Ansab al-Ashraf, Volume 2, page 339

Minutes from his Lord.

Three requests permitted.

And one of them is spent asking somebody to put him in the ground.

And the request went to the governor.

And here is what the governor said back — and he uses the same word for a body that Muslim had used, in the same conversation:

وَأَمَّا جُثَّتُهُ فَإِنَّا لَا نُشَفِّعُكَ فِيهَا، لِأَنَّهُ قَدْ جَهَدَ أَنْ يُهْلِكَنَا. ثُمَّ قَالَ: وَمَا نَصْنَعُ بِجُثَّتِهِ بَعْدَ قَتْلِنَا إِيَّاهُ؟

“As for his body, we will not grant your intercession in it, because he strove to destroy us. Then he said: and what would we do with his body, after we have killed him?”

— as Ayatollah Reyshahri gives it, from al-Baladhuri, Ansab al-Ashraf, Volume 2, page 339

Sit with that question a moment, because you have heard it before tonight in another accent.

It is over.

It is finished.

There is nothing there.

It is meat.

What could you possibly want with it.

And Hani ibn Urwa was killed a short time after that, and his body was not buried either.

It was dragged through the streets of Kufa to the rubbish tip at the edge of the city — the place where the sweepings went — and hung up there.

Now I want to make one observation about that, and only one, and then I am going to leave it alone.

A man who genuinely believed that a grave is nothing would simply have buried him.

It is cheaper.

It is quieter.

It takes two men and an afternoon and nobody ever comes.

He did not do that.

He had the body dragged across a city and put on a midden where everybody could see it, and he did that on purpose, at some effort, because he understood exactly what a grave becomes and he was determined that this man would not have one.

That is all I am going to say about it.

What He Said, and What Is Said to Him

Hani ibn Urwa was taken out to the sheep market with his hands tied.

He called out to his tribe, asking whether there was not one man of Madhhij for him that day, and nobody came.

He got his hands loose and asked whether there was a stick, a knife, a stone, a bone, anything a man could defend himself with, and there was not.

They tied him again, tighter, and told him to stretch out his neck — and he told them he would not be generous with his neck and would not help them to kill him.

And a slave of the governor’s struck him with a sword, and the blow did nothing.

And in the moment between the first blow and the second, this is what he said:

إِلَى اللَّهِ الْمَعَادُ، اللَّهُمَّ إِلَىٰ رَحْمَتِكَ وَرِضْوَانِكَ، اللَّهُمَّ اجْعَلْ هَذَا الْيَوْمَ كَفَّارَةً لِذُنُوبِي، فَإِنِّي إِنَّمَا تَعَصَّبْتُ لِابْنِ بِنْتِ نَبِيِّكَ

“To God is the return. O God — to Your mercy and to Your good pleasure. O God, make this day an expiation for my sins. For I took my stand only for the son of the daughter of Your Prophet.”

— as Ayatollah Reyshahri gives it, from Ibn A’tham, al-Futuh, Volume 5, page 61

Look at the last thing he says.

The word he uses for taking a stand is the word for tribal partisanship — the thing the Qur’an condemns, the thing the Prophet came to break.

They would have used it against him.

And he picks the word up himself, on the block, and hands it back with the only object attached to it that redeems it.

He asked for two things as he died.

Mercy, and God’s good pleasure.

Now.

There is a grave in Kufa, joined to the great mosque, a little way north of where they buried Muslim ibn Aqil.

And there is a ziyarah for it, and it is in the book that every one of you has on a shelf at home, and people have been going there and saying it for a very long time.

And it opens like this:

السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكَ أَيُّهَا الْعَبْدُ الصَّالِحُ النَّاصِحُ لِلَّهِ وَلِرَسُولِهِ

“Peace be upon you, O righteous servant — the one who gave sincere counsel to God and to His Messenger.”

— the Ziyarah of Hani ibn Urwah, Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi, Mafatih al-Jinan

That is what they call him.

And the word runs through the whole of it — it comes back twice more before the ziyarah is finished.

And then this:

أَشْهَدُ أَنَّكَ لَقِيتَ اللَّهَ وَهُوَ رَاضٍ عَنْكَ بِمَا فَعَلْتَ وَنَصَحْتَ

“I bear witness that you met God and He was pleased with you, for what you did and for the counsel you gave.”

— the Ziyarah of Hani ibn Urwah, Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi, Mafatih al-Jinan

And near the end:

فَرَحِمَكَ اللَّهُ وَرَضِيَ عَنْكَ

“So may God have mercy on you, and be pleased with you.”

— the Ziyarah of Hani ibn Urwah, Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi, Mafatih al-Jinan

He asked for two things as the sword came down.

And for fourteen hundred years, the people who stand at his grave have given him those two things, in that order.

I am not going to tell you that the ziyarah was written to answer his last words.

Those are ordinary words of prayer and they are said over a great many people.

I will only tell you the true thing, which is enough on its own:

And that is what there is to say to the governor of Kufa.

He asked what you would do with a body after you had killed the man.

This is what you do with it.

You find it.

You cover it.

You mark the place.

And then for fourteen centuries people come and stand there and tell him that he was heard.

Segue to the Maqtal

There were two of them in that city that week.

One of them is buried where people can find him and one of them was thrown from a roof.

And there was a young man on a road somewhere between Mecca and Kufa who did not yet know that either of them was dead.

Let us go to him.

Maqtal (Lamentation) for the Fourteenth Session of the Architecture of Guidance

Supplication

In His Name, the Lord of the Martyrs and the Truthful

O God, send blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad.

O God, we ask You for the martyred leader, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei — may You rest his pure soul — that You raise his station, and gather him with those he loved, and accept from him what he gave.

O God, protect the living leader, Imam Sayyed Mujtaba Khamenei — may You protect him — and steady his hand, and put barakah in his years.

O God, we ask You for the ones who are asked for something true and say it, and are asked to stop, and do not stop.

Make us of them.
And if we cannot be of them, do not let us be the other thing.

O God, we ask You for everyone in this room who has somebody in the ground they cannot get to.
The ones whose people are buried in another country.
The ones who have not been able to go for years.
The ones who were not there when it happened and have not forgiven themselves for it.

Let it reach them anyway.

O God, we ask You to keep our answers kind.
Give us the words when they are needed, and keep the sharpness out of them, and let nobody walk away from us smaller than they came.

O God, hasten the relief of our master, the Imam of our Age — may our souls be his ransom — and let us be among those who see him.

And until that day, let us be people who know what we are doing when we stand at a grave, and who could say so gently if anybody asked.

Amen, O Lord Sustainer of the Universes

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful

And from Him alone is all ability and He has authority over all things.

ذَٰلِكَ الْكِتَابُ لَا رَيْبَ ۛ فِيهِ ۛ هُدًى لِّلْمُتَّقِينَ

الَّذِينَ يُؤْمِنُونَ بِالْغَيْبِ وَيُقِيمُونَ الصَّلَاةَ وَمِمَّا رَزَقْنَاهُمْ يُنفِقُونَ

“That is the Book, in which there is no doubt, a guidance for the God-fearing.

Those who believe in the unseen, and establish the prayer, and spend out of what We have provided them.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verses 2 and 3

The First Thing on the List

That is the third verse of al-Baqarah, the Cow — the second chapter of the Qur’an, and its longest.

Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, may God rest his pure soul — a scholar of the last century whose commentary on the Qur’an is the one this tradition has leaned on more than any other — opens his treatment of this chapter by telling us something about how it arrived:

لَمَّا كَانَتِ السُّورَةُ نَازِلَةً نُجُوماً لَمْ يَجْمَعْهَا غَرَضٌ وَاحِدٌ

“Since the chapter came down in instalments, no single purpose gathers it.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2

It did not come down in one sitting.

It arrived in pieces, over years.

So when we take a verse from it, we are taking one instalment out of a long conversation.

And this instalment is a list.

The Book is a guidance for the God-fearing — and then God tells us what a God-fearing person looks like, and He begins the list.

Look at what He puts first.

Not the prayer.

Not the giving.

Those are on the list, and they come second and third.

The first thing on the list is this:

Before you stand for anything.

Before you give anything away.

There is a prior thing, and everything after it stands on top of it — that you take seriously what is real when you cannot see it.

Now. I want you to hold that verse for the next hour, because tonight we are going to do something very ordinary with it.

We are going to talk about people standing at graves.

Nobody Can Tell You Why

People go.

They have always gone.

They go on a Thursday, or on the anniversary, or on a morning when something has gone wrong and they cannot say what.

They tidy the stone.

They pull up whatever has grown there.

They sit down on the ground next to it and they talk — sometimes out loud, mostly not.

And here is the thing I want to put in front of you before we open a single book.

Ask them why, and almost nobody can tell you.

You will get:

You will get:

You will get:

Those are not answers.

Those are a person telling you honestly that they do not have one.

And there is a harder half to this, and I would rather say it than pretend it is not in the room.

There is a way of explaining the whole thing that costs you nothing to believe.

It goes like this: the visit is for the living.

It is grief doing its work.

The stone is a focus, the journey is a ritual, the talking is a way of processing a loss — and none of it goes anywhere, because there is nobody there to receive it.

That explanation is available to every one of us.

Some of you have used it.

Some of you have had it used on you.

So the question for tonight is not should we go.

Everybody goes.

The question is whether anything is happening when we do.

Video of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Recap — What We Carry Forward

We have been in this sub-series for four weeks and we are in the fifth.

We asked why a scholar would leave the capital of the Muslim world and go and live in a village.

We asked what happened to the books when they burned them, and what could not be burned.

And last week we asked why Najaf — why that ground, of all the ground there is.

We found that the grave was hidden on purpose.

That it was given back to the community one man at a time, over a lifetime, by people who turned up.

And that the ground itself was chosen.

Hold on to that last one.

We are going back to it tonight, and it is going to look different when we get there.

One other thing, and then we begin.

Some of you sat with us at Arbaeen and heard a whole night on Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari — the companion who walked to that grave forty days after the killing.

I am not going to tell you that story again.

I am going to lean on it once, later, and you will know exactly where you are.

They Take Comfort in You

Two Men Thought This Needed a Chapter

Here is the first thing, and it is not a hadith.

It is a fact about a bookshelf.

Shaykh al-Kulayni — the man who gathered al-Kafi and who we visited in Session Sixty-Three, the earliest of the great collections of our narrations, put together in the tenth century — has a chapter in it called:

Ibn Qulawayh — a scholar of Qom from the same century, who wrote a book called Kamil al-Ziyarat, an entire collection about visitation and nothing else — has a chapter in it called:

Two men.

Two cities.

Two books that do not depend on each other.

And both of them stopped and said:

That is worth a moment before we read a word of what is inside them.

Whatever this practice is, it was not an accident of custom that the scholars tolerated.

It was a subject.

Somebody sat down and gathered what was said about it.

Now let us open one.

The First Hadith in the Chapter

Al-Kafi opens the chapter with this.

Imam al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, on visiting the graves:

إِنَّهُمْ يَأْنَسُونَ بِكُمْ فَإِذَا غِبْتُمْ عَنْهُمُ اسْتَوْحَشُوا

“They take comfort in you; and when you are absent from them, they are left desolate.”

— Shaykh al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 3, the Book on Dying People, the chapter on Visiting of the Graves, first hadith

Eight words in the Arabic.

And notice what they do.

I asked you a question ten minutes ago — is anything happening when we go — and the very first line of the chapter answers it by turning it round.

You were asking whether the visit does anything for you.

He is telling you what it does for them.

The word he uses is ya’nasun.

It comes from uns — company, intimacy, the ease of being with someone.

It is the opposite of being alone in a room.

And the word at the other end, istawhashu, is its exact opposite: to be left in desolation, the way a place feels when everyone has gone.

They take comfort in you. And when you stay away, they feel it.

I want to be careful here, because this is the hinge of the whole evening and I do not want to decorate it. He does not say the visit is good for your character. He does not say it is a healthy way to grieve. Both of those things may well be true and neither of them is what he said.

He said: they take comfort in you.

The Word Has a Prayer of Its Own

Before we leave that second word, I want to show you one thing, because I think it settles the question of whether any of this is a figure of speech.

The fear of being left somewhere on your own.

There is a prayer in our tradition named after that word.

It is called Salat al-Wahshah — the prayer of the desolation.

It is also called the prayer of the night of burial.

And it carries a third name, which is the one I want you to keep hold of:

You pray it on the first night.

The night they go into the ground.

And I am not going to describe it to you in my own words, because you should see where it comes from.

This is the ruling itself, as it stands in the book:

وَهِيَ رَكْعَتَانِ يَقْرَأُ فِي الْأُولَى بَعْدَ الْحَمْدِ آيَةَ الْكُرْسِيِّ إِلَى ﴿هُمْ فِيهَا خَالِدُونَ﴾ وَفِي الثَّانِيَةِ بَعْدَ الْحَمْدِ سُورَةَ الْقَدْرِ عَشْرَ مَرَّاتٍ، وَيَقُولُ بَعْدَ السَّلَامِ: اللَّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلَى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ وَابْعَثْ ثَوَابَهَا إِلَى قَبْرِ فُلَانٍ

“It is two units. In the first, after the opening chapter, he recites the Verse of the Throne, up to ‘they will abide in it forever’; and in the second, after the opening chapter, the Chapter of Ordainment ten times. And he says after the salutation: O God, send blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad, and send the reward of it to the grave of so-and-so.”

— Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Kazim al-Yazdi, may God rest his pure soul, the jurist of Najaf, in al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, the manual of law our seminary students still work through, in the chapter on the prayer of the night of burial

That is not out of a book of devotions.

That is out of a book of law.

Now let me walk you through it, because every piece of it is doing something.

Two units, like any other prayer.

In the first, after the opening chapter, the Verse of the Throne — and notice the ruling did not stop there.

It said up to they will abide in it forever.

اللَّهُ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ الْحَيُّ الْقَيُّومُ ۚ لَا تَأْخُذُهُ سِنَةٌ وَلَا نَوْمٌ ۚ لَّهُ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَمَا فِي الْأَرْضِ ۗ مَن ذَا الَّذِي يَشْفَعُ عِندَهُ إِلَّا بِإِذْنِهِ ۚ يَعْلَمُ مَا بَيْنَ أَيْدِيهِمْ وَمَا خَلْفَهُمْ ۖ وَلَا يُحِيطُونَ بِشَيْءٍ مِّنْ عِلْمِهِ إِلَّا بِمَا شَاءَ ۚ وَسِعَ كُرْسِيُّهُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضَ ۖ وَلَا يَئُودُهُ حِفْظُهُمَا ۚ وَهُوَ الْعَلِيُّ الْعَظِيمُ

لَا إِكْرَاهَ فِي الدِّينِ ۖ قَد تَّبَيَّنَ الرُّشْدُ مِنَ الْغَيِّ ۚ فَمَن يَكْفُرْ بِالطَّاغُوتِ وَيُؤْمِن بِاللَّهِ فَقَدِ اسْتَمْسَكَ بِالْعُرْوَةِ الْوُثْقَىٰ لَا انفِصَامَ لَهَا ۗ وَاللَّهُ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌ

اللَّهُ وَلِيُّ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا يُخْرِجُهُم مِّنَ الظُّلُمَاتِ إِلَى النُّورِ ۖ وَالَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا أَوْلِيَاؤُهُمُ الطَّاغُوتُ يُخْرِجُونَهُم مِّنَ النُّورِ إِلَى الظُّلُمَاتِ ۗ أُولَٰئِكَ أَصْحَابُ النَّارِ ۖ هُمْ فِيهَا خَالِدُونَ

“God! There is no god except He, the Living, the Everlasting. Neither slumber overtakes Him, nor sleep. To Him belongs everything in the heavens and everything on earth. Who is he that can intercede with Him except with His permission? He knows what is before them, and what is behind them; and they cannot grasp any of His knowledge, except as He wills. His Throne extends over the heavens and the earth, and their preservation does not burden Him. He is the Most High, the Great.

There is no compulsion in religion. Right guidance has become clear from error. So whoever rejects false gods and believes in God has taken hold of the most trustworthy handhold, one that never breaks. And God is Hearing, Knowing.

God is the Guardian of those who believe. He brings them out of darkness into the light. And those who disbelieve — their guardians are the false gods, bringing them out of the light into darkness. Those are the companions of the Fire; they will abide in it forever.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verses 255 to 257

Now, before we go on — some of you have just counted.

And some of you reading this later will count too, and think: hold on.

The Verse of the Throne is one verse.

It ends at He is the Most High, the Great.

Why are we still going?

Good question, and it deserves a straight answer, because there is no argument here to have.

The Verse of the Throne is one verse.

That is not their position and this is not ours — it is the same position.

Allamah Tabataba’i says so in al-Mizan, and notice who he says already knew it:

تَسْمِيَةُ هَذِهِ الْآيَةِ بِآيَةِ الْكُرْسِيِّ مِمَّا قَدِ اشْتَهَرَتْ فِي صَدْرِ الْإِسْلَامِ حَتَّى فِي زَمَانِ حَيَاةِ النَّبِيِّ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ وَسَلَّمَ حَتَّى فِي لِسَانِهِ كَمَا تُفِيدُهُ الرِّوَايَاتُ الْمَنْقُولَةُ عَنْهُ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ وَسَلَّمَ وَعَنْ أَئِمَّةِ أَهْلِ الْبَيْتِ عَلَيْهِمُ السَّلَامُ وَعَنِ الصَّحَابَةِ

“The naming of this verse as the Verse of the Throne was something already well known in the earliest period of Islam — even in the lifetime of the Prophet, may God bless him and his family, and even upon his own tongue, as the reports transmitted from him, may God bless him and his family, and from the Imams of the People of the House, peace be upon them, and from the Companions, make clear.”

— Allamah Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 255

One of them.

And carrying that name in the Prophet’s own lifetime, on his own tongue — reported from him, from the Imams of his household, and from the Companions.

So what are the other two doing here?

The prayer does not say read the Verse of the Throne.

It says read the Verse of the Throne and keep going — as far as they will abide in it forever.

That is an instruction about how much to recite on this particular night.

It was never a claim about where the verse ends.

So if you were taught it is one verse, you were taught correctly.

And if you have recited the three of them all your life, you were taught correctly too.

You were given a recitation, not a different Qur’an.

In the second, after the opening chapter, the Chapter of Ordainment, ten times.

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ
إِنَّا أَنزَلْنَاهُ فِي لَيْلَةِ الْقَدْرِ
وَمَا أَدْرَاكَ مَا لَيْلَةُ الْقَدْرِ
لَيْلَةُ الْقَدْرِ خَيْرٌ مِّنْ أَلْفِ شَهْرٍ
تَنَزَّلُ الْمَلَائِكَةُ وَالرُّوحُ فِيهَا بِإِذْنِ رَبِّهِم مِّن كُلِّ أَمْرٍ
سَلَامٌ هِيَ حَتَّىٰ مَطْلَعِ الْفَجْرِ

In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Especially Merciful
“Indeed We sent it down on the Night of Ordainment.
And what will show you what is the Night of Ordainment?
The Night of Ordainment is better than a thousand months.
In it the angels and the Spirit descend, by the leave of their Lord, with every command.
It is peaceful until the rising of the dawn.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Qadr (the Chapter of Ordainment) #97, Verses 1 to 5

And when you have finished and given the salutation, you say this, and you put their name into it.

It was in the ruling you just heard; I want it on its own so that you leave here with it:

اللَّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلَى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ وَابْعَثْ ثَوَابَهَا إِلَى قَبْرِ فُلَانٍ

“O God, send Your blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad, and send the reward of this to the grave of so-and-so.”

— Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Kazim al-Yazdi, may God rest his pure soul, al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, the chapter on the prayer of the night of burial

Now hold it against the hadith we have just read.

He said they are left in desolation.

And there is a prayer sitting underneath that word, for the one night when it is at its worst.

I want to be careful about where that prayer comes from, because it matters more than the prayer does.

A jurist does not make rulings.

He finds them.

He has no authority to legislate and he would be the first man in the room to tell you so — that authority is God’s, and it reaches us through His Messenger and through the Imams of his household, and through nobody else at all.

So when Ayatollah Sayyed al-Yazdi writes this prayer into a book of law, he is not issuing it.

He is passing it on.

And this is what he is passing on.

Sayyed Ibn Tawus carries it in Falah al-Sa’il, from Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman, from the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and righteous companions:

لَا يَأْتِي عَلَى الْمَيِّتِ سَاعَةٌ أَشَدُّ مِنْ أَوَّلِ لَيْلَةٍ فَارْحَمُوا مَوْتَاكُمْ بِالصَّدَقَةِ

“No hour comes upon the dead harder than the first night. So show mercy to your dead with charity.”

— Sayyed Ibn Tawus, Falah al-Sa’il, from Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman, from the Messenger of God

Stop there for a second, because I nearly walked past it.

The first instruction is not the prayer.

It is charity.

Give something on their behalf.

And the prayer is what the report offers to the one who cannot find the means.

Now, I know what some of us will do with that, because I would be tempted to do it myself.

We will hear if you cannot find the means and think: well, I can.

I will send something.

That is my part done.

So let me shut that door before anybody walks through it.

Somebody asked Imam al-Sadiq straight out whether a person can pray on behalf of someone who has died.

نَعَمْ حَتَّى إِنَّهُ لَيَكُونُ فِي ضِيقٍ فَيُوَسِّعُ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ ذَلِكَ الضِّيقَ ثُمَّ يُؤْتَى فَيُقَالُ لَهُ خُفِّفَ عَنْكَ هَذَا الضِّيقُ بِصَلَاةِ فُلَانٍ أَخِيكَ عَنْكَ

“Yes. So much so that he may be in a tightness, and God widens that tightness for him. Then he is come to, and it is said to him: this tightness was lightened for you by the prayer of so-and-so, your brother, on your behalf.”

— Shaykh al-Saduq, Man la Yahduruhu al-Faqih, Volume 1, hadith 554, from Umar ibn Yazid

Hear the end of that again.

Somebody is in a difficulty you cannot see, in a place you cannot reach, and it eases — and they are told your name.

And in the same hadith, the Imam says this:

إِنَّ الْمَيِّتَ لَيَفْرَحُ بِالتَّرَحُّمِ عَلَيْهِ وَالاِسْتِغْفَارِ لَهُ كَمَا يَفْرَحُ الْحَيُّ بِالْهَدِيَّةِ تُهْدَى إِلَيْهِ

“The dead one rejoices at mercy being sought for him, and forgiveness being asked for him, just as the living rejoices at a gift given to him.”

— Shaykh al-Saduq, Man la Yahduruhu al-Faqih, Volume 1, hadith 554

So the prayer is not the poor man’s substitute for a gift.

In a hadith about praying for the dead, the word the Imam reaches for is hadiyyah — a gift, of the kind a living person is glad to receive.

It is the same word that gives this prayer its third name.

And a few lines later, in the same chapter, he sets out what actually reaches a person in the grave:

يَدْخُلُ عَلَى الْمَيِّتِ فِي قَبْرِهِ الصَّلَاةُ وَالصَّوْمُ وَالْحَجُّ وَالصَّدَقَةُ وَالْبِرُّ وَالدُّعَاءُ وَيُكْتَبُ أَجْرُهُ لِلَّذِي يَفْعَلُهُ وَلِلْمَيِّتِ

“Prayer, and fasting, and pilgrimage, and charity, and righteousness, and supplication enter upon the dead in his grave — and the reward of it is written for the one who does it, and for the dead.”

— Shaykh al-Saduq, Man la Yahduruhu al-Faqih, Volume 1, hadith 557

Look at that list.

Charity is on it.

So is the prayer.

They are not alternatives to one another.

They are one list, and every item on it goes in.

And read the last clause again, because it is not how giving normally works.

Give a man a gift and you have less than you had.

This one is written for him and for you.

Nothing left your hands.

So give the charity.

And pray the two units.

The report offers the prayer to the one who cannot find the means.

It does not withdraw it from the one who can.

That is why the third name for it is the gift prayer.

Not because it is what you send when you can afford nothing better — but because a gift is what the Imam called it.

Two Formulas, and What a Jurist Is For

Now I have to show you the next line of that report, because if I do not, one of you will find it on your own and think we hid it.

It goes straight on and gives you the prayer.

And it is not the same prayer we just read out of the law book.

فَإِنْ لَمْ تَجِدُوا فَلْيُصَلِّ أَحَدُكُمْ رَكْعَتَيْنِ يَقْرَأُ فِي الْأُولَى بِفَاتِحَةِ الْكِتَابِ مَرَّةً وَقُلْ هُوَ اللَّهُ أَحَدٌ مَرَّتَيْنِ وَفِي الثَّانِيَةِ فَاتِحَةَ الْكِتَابِ مَرَّةً وَأَلْهَاكُمُ التَّكَاثُرُ عَشْرَ مَرَّاتٍ وَيُسَلِّمُ وَيَقُولُ اللَّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلَى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ وَابْعَثْ ثَوَابَهَا إِلَى قَبْرِ ذَلِكَ الْمَيِّتِ فُلَانِ ابْنِ فُلَانٍ

“And if you cannot find the means, then let one of you pray two units. He recites in the first the Opening of the Book once, and ‘Say: He is God, One’ twice; and in the second the Opening of the Book once, and ‘Rivalry in worldly increase distracted you’ ten times. Then he gives the salutation and says: O God, send blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad, and send the reward of it to the grave of that deceased one, so-and-so son of so-and-so.”

— Sayyed Ibn Tawus, Falah al-Sa’il, from Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman, from the Messenger of God

So look at what we have.

The law book: the Verse of the Throne — Ayat al-Kursi, and the Chapter of Ordainment — Surah al-Qadr — ten times.

The report: the Chapter of Sincerity — Surah al-Ikhlas — twice, and the Chapter of Rivalry — Surah al-Takathur — ten times.

Two units either way.

Two different sets of chapters.

So what is that about?

And I want to stay with that question, because the answer to it is worth more to you than the prayer is.

Somebody has to sit with those reports.

Not one of them — all of them.

Every book that carries them, and the chains they come through, and the men in those chains, and what else those men narrated and whether they were trusted; the wording, and whether it carries the sense it appears to carry; what the Qur’an says around it; and what every other ruling in that area already requires.

There is an entire science for doing that properly — usul al-fiqh, the principles by which a ruling is derived — and it takes a lifetime to learn and another lifetime to use.

And at the end of that, the man who has done that work says: this one.

He has not invented anything.

He has weighed what he was given, and told you which way it comes down.

And here is the part I do not think many of us have ever had said to us plainly.

When you act on his ruling, the correctness of it is not on you.

It is on him.

You are a mukallaf — a person under obligation — and your obligation is discharged by following a qualified man properly.

His is not discharged so easily.

Which leaves one question, and it is the only one that really matters.

Who stands behind him?

وَأَمَّا الْحَوَادِثُ الْوَاقِعَةُ فَارْجِعُوا فِيهَا إِلَى رُوَاةِ حَدِيثِنَا فَإِنَّهُمْ حُجَّتِي عَلَيْكُمْ وَأَنَا حُجَّةُ اللَّهِ عَلَيْهِمْ

“As for the newly occurring events, refer regarding them to the narrators of our hadith, for they are my proof upon you, and I am the proof of God upon them.”

— Shaykh al-Saduq, Kamal al-Din wa Tamam al-Ni’mah, Volume 2, Chapter 45, hadith four; from the letter of the Imam of our Age to Ishaq ibn Ya’qub

Read the chain of that sentence backwards and you will see what you are standing in.

God.

Then the Imam, who is God’s proof over the scholars.

Then the scholars, who are the Imam’s proof over you.

Then you.

It is not a committee.

It is not a guess.

It is not a man in Najaf or Qom deciding what he feels about a hadith on a Tuesday.

And that letter is not incidental to us.

We opened Session Sixty-Three - When the Light Was Hidden with it, and we spent the whole of the following week on the scholar in Baghdad who received letters from the same hand.

If you have not heard those two, go back to them, because that sentence is the reason the words marja’ and mujtahid mean anything at all.

Now come back to where we started, and notice what has not moved.

Two reports.

Two formulas.

And underneath both of them, one fact that neither of them disturbs:

Whichever chapters you are told to recite, you stand up on the hardest night there is, and you send them something.

The difference is in the measures.

The point was never in the measures.

And look at what the prayer is actually made of.

You are not there.

You cannot be there.

It is the middle of the night, they are in the ground, the earth has gone back over them, and there is nothing left that you can do with your hands.

So you stand up in your own house.

And you pray two units.

And you send it to them.

And you do it on the night the Messenger of God said is the hardest one there is.

You do not give a night a prayer of its own if the word is only a figure of speech.

He Went Every Week

Now, if that is what the visit is, you would expect to find it in the life of the man who is our example — the one we are all trying to follow.

You do.

كَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ (ص) يَخْرُجُ فِي مَلَإٍ مِنَ النَّاسِ مِنْ أَصْحَابِهِ كُلَّ عَشِيَّةِ خَمِيسٍ إِلَى بَقِيعِ الْمَدَنِيِّينَ فَيَقُولُ ثَلَاثاً — السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ يَا أَهْلَ الدِّيَارِ — وَثَلَاثاً — رَحِمَكُمُ اللَّهُ — ثُمَّ يَلْتَفِتُ أَصْحَابَهُ وَيَقُولُ هَؤُلَاءِ خَيْرٌ مِنْكُمْ فَيَقُولُونَ يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ وَلِمَ آمَنُوا وَآمَنَّا وَجَاهَدُوا وَجَاهَدْنَا فَيَقُولُ إِنَّ هَؤُلَاءِ آمَنُوا وَلَمْ يَلْبِسُوا إِيمَانَهُمْ بِظُلْمٍ وَمَضَوْا عَلَى ذَلِكَ وَأَنَا عَلَى ذَلِكَ شَهِيدٌ وَأَنْتُمْ تَبْقَوْنَ بَعْدِي وَلَا أَدْرِي مَا تُحْدِثُونَ بَعْدِي

“The Messenger of God would go out, in a crowd of people from among his companions, every Thursday evening, to the Baqi’ of the people of Madinah. And he would say three times: peace be upon you, O people of these dwellings. And three times: may God have mercy on you.

Then he would turn to his companions and say: these are better than you.

And they would say: O Messenger of God, why? They believed and we believed. They struggled and we struggled.

And he would say: these believed, and did not dress their faith in wrongdoing, and they went on that — and to that I am a witness. And you remain after me, and I do not know what you will bring about after me.”

— Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, the chapter on the Merits of Visiting the Believers, sixth hadith, from Safwan al-Jammal

Every Thursday evening.

Not on an anniversary.

Not when somebody died.

Every week, on the same evening, out with a crowd of his companions, to the graveyard of the people of Madinah.

And then he turns round and says a sentence to the living that I would like you to sit with.

And when they push back — reasonably, I think — with we believed as they believed, we fought as they fought, he does not soften it.

He explains it.

They finished.

They came through with their faith not mixed up with wrongdoing, and they went out on that, and I saw it.

That is the difference.

Not that they were better people.

That their account is closed and yours is open.

Every Thursday, he walked out to be reminded of it.

And His Daughter Did the Same, Twice a Week

عَاشَتْ فَاطِمَةُ بَعْدَ أَبِيهَا خَمْسَةً وَسَبْعِينَ يَوْماً لَمْ تُرَ كَاشِرَةً وَلَا ضَاحِكَةً تَأْتِي قُبُورَ الشُّهَدَاءِ فِي كُلِّ جُمْعَةٍ مَرَّتَيْنِ الْإِثْنَيْنِ وَالْخَمِيسَ فَتَقُولُ هَاهُنَا كَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ هَاهُنَا كَانَ الْمُشْرِكُونَ

“(Sayyedah) Fatimah lived after her father for seventy-five days. She was never seen smiling, and never seen laughing. She would come to the graves of the martyrs twice every week — on Mondays and on Thursdays — and she would say: here stood the Messenger of God. Here stood the polytheists.”

— Shaykh al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 3, the chapter on Visiting of the Graves, third hadith

Seventy-five days.

Never seen smiling.

Twice a week.

And then that last line, which I would ask you not to walk past.

She is at Uhud.

She is standing on the ground where they buried the men who were killed there, and her father is dead, and she has seventy-five days left.

And what she does is point.

She is not only visiting.

She is keeping the account of the day straight, out loud, at the place where it happened.

She is saying: this is where he was.

That is where they were.

Do not let anyone tell you it was otherwise.

That is what the visit is for her.

It is testimony.

And the reason I put her next to her father and not somewhere else in the evening is this: she is not inventing a practice.

He went out on Thursdays.

She goes out on Mondays and Thursdays.

She went because he went.

And the Same Ground, in Our Own Time

She goes to the graves of the martyrs.

So did a man of our own century, and he was asked once what it did to him.

The martyred leader of the Islamic Resistance, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, may God rest his pure soul:

مِنْ أَعْظَمِ مَا يُؤَثِّرُ فِي نَفْسِي زِيَارَةُ مَقَابِرِ الشُّهَدَاءِ ، وَكَأَنَّ الشُّهَدَاءَ يُقَدِّمُونَ لَكَ رِسَالَةً ، وَلِسَانُ الْحَالِ وَإِنْ لَمْ يَكُنْ لِسَانَ الْمَقَالِ يَقُولُ : يَا أَيُّهَا الْمُتَبَقُّونَ

“Among the things that affect me most is visiting the cemeteries of the martyrs. It is as though the martyrs put a message to you — and the tongue of their state, though it is not the tongue of speech, says: O you who remain behind.”

— Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, from a speech on Martyrs’ Day, Beirut

He stops there.

I am going to stop there too.

So What Do You Actually Do

Let us be practical, because a principle you cannot act on tonight is a principle you will have forgotten by Friday.

Three things.

The first is that you stand, and you greet.

السَّلَامُ عَلَى أَهْلِ الدِّيَارِ مِنَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَالْمُسْلِمِينَ رَحِمَ اللَّهُ الْمُسْتَقْدِمِينَ مِنَّا وَالْمُسْتَأْخِرِينَ وَإِنَّا إِنْ شَاءَ اللَّهُ بِكُمْ لَاحِقُونَ

“Peace be upon the people of these dwellings, from among the believers and the Muslims. May God have mercy upon those of us who have gone ahead, and those who are to come after. And we, if God wills, are joining you.”

— Shaykh al-Saduq, Man la Yahduruhu al-Faqih, Volume 1, hadith 533, from Jarrah al-Mada’ini

I want to show you where you are standing in that sentence.

Not them and us.

One line of people.

Some of them are further along it than you are, and some of them have not been born.

And you are asking for mercy on the whole line, from inside it.

And some of you are going to recognise that shape, because we spent three sessions on it this summer.

مِنَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ رِجَالٌ صَدَقُوا مَا عَاهَدُوا اللَّهَ عَلَيْهِ ۖ فَمِنْهُم مَّن قَضَىٰ نَحْبَهُ وَمِنْهُم مَّن يَنتَظِرُ ۖ وَمَا بَدَّلُوا تَبْدِيلًا

“Among the believers are men who have been true to their covenant with God. Among them are those who have fulfilled their pledge — and among them are those who are still waiting. And they have never changed in the least.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ahzab (the Chapter of the Confederates) #33, Verse 23

That is the verse we opened The Unbroken Chain with, on the night we spoke about the martyrdom of our leader, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei, may God rest his pure soul.

It was the verse his own account put out to the world on the day he was taken. It was his farewell.

And look at what it does.

It puts the believers into two groups, and it does not rank them.

One covenant.

Two positions on the same road.

And nobody in either group has changed by so much as a degree.

Now go back to the greeting.

It is the same sentence.

Every time you stand at a graveyard and say those words, you are saying his farewell verse — except that you are saying it in the second person, out loud, to the people it is about.

And if you want to hear that verse properly opened, go back to The Unbroken Chain, and then to The Unbroken Testimony and The Unbroken Trust .

We gave it three nights.

I am not going to give it a fourth tonight.

I am only pointing out that it has been standing behind this greeting the whole time, and none of us noticed.

The second thing is smaller and I like it very much.

A companion asked Imam al-Sadiq how he should put his hand on the graves of the believers.

And the Imam did not describe it.

He turned to face the qibla, pointed at the ground, and put his hand on it.

That is the whole hadith.

He showed him.

And the third thing is that none of this is obscure, and you do not need me for it.

Open Mafatih al-Jinan — the book of supplications most of you have on a shelf at home — at the chapter of visitations, and there is a section called the visitation of the graves of the believers.

It is all in there.

The greeting.

The hand on the grave, facing the qibla.

And a note from Sayyed Ibn Tawus, a scholar of Baghdad from eight hundred years ago, that when you intend to visit the people of faith, it is fitting that it be on a Thursday.

A Thursday.

He is telling you, in a prayer book, to do what the Messenger of God did every week.

And there is one more thing in that section, from the same scholar.

It is the sentence he tells you to say once your hand is on the grave.

اللَّهُمَّ ارْحَمْ غُرْبَتَهُ وَصِلْ وَحْدَتَهُ وَآنِسْ وَحْشَتَهُ وَآمِنْ رَوْعَتَهُ وَأَسْكِنْ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ رَحْمَتِكَ رَحْمَةً يَسْتَغْنِي بِهَا عَنْ رَحْمَةِ مَنْ سِوَاكَ وَأَلْحِقْهُ بِمَنْ كَانَ يَتَوَلَّاهُ

“O God, have mercy upon his being far from home. Attend to his being alone. Be company for his desolation. Make him safe from his terror. Settle upon him a mercy from Yourself by which he needs the mercy of no one besides You. And join him to the one he gave his loyalty to.”

— Sayyed Ibn Tawus, Misbah al-Za’ir, carried in Mafatih al-Jinan, in the chapter of visitations, the section on the visitation of the graves of the believers

Some of you will have caught that already.

Anis is from uns — the same root as ya’nasun, the word Imam al-Sadiq used at the top of the chapter.

Wahshatah is from wahshah — the same root as istawhashu, the word at the other end of the very same sentence.

Both of them.

Both words out of the first hadith of the chapter, sitting in the supplication you say at the graveside.

In the same clause.

One of them asking God to cancel the other.

The hadith named the problem.

The prayer book puts the answer in your mouth and your hand on the ground while you say it.

Lessons for Our Time

The Going Is Not for You

Every instinct you have says the visit is grief management.

That it is a thing the living do for themselves, and the dead are the occasion for it rather than the point of it.

The first hadith in the chapter says the opposite.

And a scholar of our own era reached for the very same word, answering a question of law.

The great scholar and teacher, Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Fadhlullah, may God rest his pure soul, was asked whether the dead wait for the people they love. He wrote:

أَنَّ الْمَيِّتَ يَأْنَسُ وَيُسَرُّ بِزَائِرِهِ حَالَ مَوْتِهِ ، كَمَا كَانَ يُسَرُّ بِزِيَارَتِهِ لَهُ حَالَ حَيَاتِهِ

“That the dead one takes comfort in his visitor and is gladdened by him in his death, just as he used to be gladdened by his visit in life.”

— Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Fadhlullah, in answer to a question on visiting the dead

That is the whole thing, and it is very plain.

You know how to do this already.

You have an uncle you visit.

You know what it is to knock on a door and be glad you came and gladder that he was glad.

Nothing about that has changed.

The address has changed.

You go to his home.

You speak to him.

You pray for him.

And because he has gone on ahead of you, you ask him to speak for you.

Go. And the Two Ways This Goes Wrong

So go.

Go regularly, take the children, and do not wait for a death to make it an occasion.

And now I have to be careful with a word, because I am about to hand you one that can be turned against the thing I am asking for.

The problem with that word is that in ordinary English a habit is precisely a thing that runs without you.

Ask a smoker.

Half the time he does not notice that he is smoking.

That is what a habit does — it takes the act, and it removes the person from it.

And we say this about the prayers as though it were a compliment.

They should not be.

A prayer you perform while you are somewhere else has had the one thing taken out of it that made it a prayer.

So let me give you the correction from the same man who gave us the last one.

Writing on the chapter of al-Takathur — the chapter about being distracted by piling things up — Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Fadhlullah begins:

زِيَارَةُ الْقُبُورِ لَيْسَتْ مُجَرَّدَ عَادَةٍ اجْتِمَاعِيَّةٍ ، بَلْ هِيَ عِلَاجٌ رُوحِيٌّ يَكْسِرُ فِينَا صَنَمِيَّةَ الدُّنْيَا ، وَيُذَكِّرُنَا بِأَنَّ كُلَّ مَا نَتَصَارَعُ عَلَيْهِ هُوَ زَائِلٌ ، وَأَنَّ الْمَوْقِفَ الْحَقِيقِيَّ أَمَامَ اللَّهِ

“Visiting graves is not merely a social custom. It is a spiritual remedy that shatters within us the idol-making of this world, and reminds us that everything we struggle over is passing away, and that the real standing is before God.”

— Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Fadhlullah, Min Wahy al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Takathur #102, Verse 2

And the Arabic word he refuses there — ‘ada — is the word for a custom and the word for a habit, both.

He denies it before we can misuse it.

So here is the test, and it is not the one you would expect.

The test is not whether you can do it without thinking.

The test is whether you feel it when you don’t.

A habit you drop is a habit you forget.

This is the other kind.

The kind whose absence unsettles you.

And there is a second way this goes wrong, and it is the opposite fault.

Not thoughtless — inflated.

In that same answer about the dead waiting for us, having just told us that they take comfort in the visitor, he adds:

وَلَكِنْ لَمْ يَرِدْ فِي الْأَخْبَارِ مَا يُفِيدُ اسْتِحْبَابَ زِيَارَةِ الْقُبُورِ يَوْمَ الْعِيدِ بِخُصُوصِهِ

“But nothing has come in the reports that establishes the recommendation of visiting the graves on the day of Eid specifically.”

— Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Fadhlullah, in the same answer on visiting the dead

Read that twice.

He has just told you the dead are gladdened by you.

And in the next breath he tells you that the thing half of us assume is recommended is not established.

He affirms it, and he refuses to inflate it, in one answer.